The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for walking around your home, looking for somewhere to install the home security camera you got for your birthday, and realising a) how few unused surfaces actually exist in this space and b) it was pretty stupid to ask for a home security camera when you knew full well its only purpose would be keeping an eye on the cat while you’re out. And she’s the cat equivalent of a human octogenarian. What, exactly, is she going to do, that might warrant establishing a surveillance state in your own living room? And seriously, how is there not a single inch of unused shelf?

Better, it sounds like, to have a seat and reason quality articles. Go on, while no-one’s watching.

First we have J.M. Henson for Unwinnable, on how Resident Evil VII’s Madhouse mode goes above and beyond the usual difficulty uptick tricks to inject some horror back into repeated plays.

The difficulty exploits the expectations that come with playing a horror game through a second time. Some things are the same, merely more difficult, but those become the breathers that allow for new, sharper scares. Both Jack and Marguerite are faster and more aggressive. Molded bloom from new spots and ensure that we have to be on our toes. Ammo is scarcer, which means you have to pick your battles even more astutely. You have to inhabit Ethan more fully, as a scared little guy who might run around monsters and double back instead of standing his ground every last time. To stand a chance, you have to get savvy quick.

Over at Polygon, Patricia Hernandez investigates “Steam’s most most prolific hater.” I wouldn’t normally condone the wafting of oxygen towards souls this blackened, but as the piece notes, they do cut a darkly fascinating figure.

If an LLM is in the picture somewhere, it hasn’t sanded out the inexplicable fixations that are evident throughout Obey the Fist’s reviews. There’s an irrationality at the core of Obey the Fist’s vendetta that cannot be explained by anything other than human folly. And the more flawed Obey the Fist appears, the harder it is to look away.

Here’s professional fighting game man Patrick Miller on what makes a “forever game.”

When I look for a game that can be played forever, this is the kind of thing I look for to keep a game fresh. The subtle interplay between different axes of mastery allows strong players to disagree about how to play the game. Modern fighting games have largely left this behind in service of creating more consumable, sellable experiences; a fighting game is about this but not that, everyone who’s playing agrees, and anyone who doesn’t like it can go play a game that is about that instead.

Grayson Morley runs and plays games and has a blog about both, so they seem like the right person to discuss what running and the Dragon Quest VII Reimagined demo have in common.

I’m a recent Dragon Quest convert. I finally got around to playing (and beating!) XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age back in 2024. I really adored that game, so much so that when I was sick for a week in early 2025, quarantined in the guest room, I impulse purchased III: HD-2D Remake and spent countless feverish hours beating up Slimes and their ilk. There is something so elementally pleasing about the repetition of this series, which has been likened by others (I want to say Into the Aether?) to a calming bedtime story. It is that, but because the focus of this blog is running, I’d like to offer another metaphor: Dragon Quest games are like training blocks.

William Hughes of The AV Club revisits Fallout: New Vegas. Oooooh, timely.

It’s the kind of commentary and satire you can only engage in, as a player, because New Vegas is interested in operating at scale, in showing conflicts not just between characters, but between the civilizations they represent. It’s a story about societies colliding, which, turns out, you can only do if you don’t depict each and every one of them as being nuked back to the Stone Age.

GamesRadar’s Andy Brown eats drywall in Drywall Eating Simulator.

Crunch. With a click, her bedroom wall gives way. Chunks of drywall tumble down, and it leaves a hole big enough to climb through, I fastidiously munch the bits of wall that have fallen to the floor. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. The noise is cathartic – but unlike the sprinkling of water in Stardew Valley or rustle of paper in Pentiment, it doesn’t appeal to the part of my brain that likes to read books and watch my dog play. This is a noise designed for running your tongue over your teeth and imagining the plaster crumbling between them, and how much better it would make you feel, and oh wouldn’t it be so good to eat drywall for real.

I played Far Far West the other day and it made me think of the film Wild West West, which made me think of Neil Cicierega’s Wow Wow, which made me think of what to put as music this week. See you tomorrow.