Sometimes I just need to unwind. For that, I play a game called Stardew Valley. The setting is lovely and romanticizes living simply, growing your own food and raising animals, which is a far cry from what my life is like now. Sometimes, urban life becomes tiring, and i like to retreat to something nicer and less crowded.

So, you’ve beaten the Wall of Flesh. Now what? You pick up the 8 gold coins, the healing potions and the pwnhammer and head up to the surface. You feel triumphant in your victory over the underworld menace. And then you get killed right away.

Have you every played Minecraft and felt like it was missing something? I have. And it’s not because I’m extra picky with games that don’t have an overarching plot or high-end graphics - sometime a game can have the same idea but execute it much better. You’ve probably already guessed which game I’m talking about, seeing as the title is pasted above in big grassy letters: Terraria.

Merry Christmas everybody, and Happy Holidays if you don’t celebrate. A whole lot of people took off work today to celebrate with their family and friends, which made me think of all the work that’d be waiting for them when they returned to their jobs. We are, unfortunately, living in a society that determines our worth by how hard we work and how much money we make.

There are a lot of thankless jobs out there, like janitorial work. Even in the world of science fiction, janitors are swept under the rug (no pun intended). They never really get the appreciation they deserve.

Here’s a short little review of a game that honestly would’ve been one of my favorites had it existed in middle school: Agar.io

I went through a stint of playing nothing but browser games for a good two years, starting in fifth grade. I usually found a few fun ones and would stick with those, and rarely I would try to expand my horizons with a good click of the “random game” button on whatever site I found myself on. I played a lot of games on the Disney Channel website, including those Kim Possible: a Sitch in Time games (which a lot of other people probably loved as well).

Usually I’m pretty hesitant to put in a good word for sequels, especially for horror games. I know I’ve given praise to Dead Space 2 and Resident Evil 7, but those two are quite the exception to my stubbornly enacted rule. And I’m not going to break that rule today, either – The Evil Within 2 has some qualities that other people value but I dislike, such as side quests and dialogue trees. But I won’t ramble on about the things I don’t like. The holidays are incoming, so I’ll be nice.

I really, really enjoy the environment design in The Evil Within 2. The design choices made are similar enough to correlate to the first installment, but are unique enough to have its own voice and vibe.

Let’s get something out of the way before I give The Evil Within its praise. There are a couple things about this game that really bother me.

The black bars, top and bottom. I understand where the idea came from, but it just doesn’t work. Designer Shinji Mikami felt the need to make his game more cinematic, which meant adding the widescreen mode to mimic the effect you get at the movies. And while this is true, moviemaking methods don’t always cleanly adapt to video games even with frequent cutscenes. The most irritating part of the black bars is how they obscure items lying on the ground.

In the grand scheme of things, The Evil Within did something very cool – it created a messed-up world where an egomaniac controlled what existed and what would die. The concrete and rebar became rust and rubble. But when you get down to it, there’s no real method to the abundance of madness.