Sometimes, Sundays are only for rounding up videogame criticism and journalism. I try to cast a wider net when my turn comes to deliver the Papers, because I figure you’ve probably been reading about videogames all week, and would appreciate e.g. an essay on the mating habits of snails or the top 7 most elaborate UFO conspiracies, but this Sunday, there are no snails or UFOs within easy dredge. So instead, please accept a boatload of finest mitherings on Duke Nukem, oracular visual novels, sociable space sims, and ‘search action’ games.
To mark the site’s 10th birthday, Bullet Points Monthly wordslingers Ed Smith, Reid McCarter, Astrid Anne Rose, and Yussef Cole have put together a roundtable feature on the state of the shooter in 2026, with contributions from legendary guns-for-hire Kaile Hultner, Autumn Wright, Nick Capozzoli, Cameron Kunzelman, Lewis Gordon, Grace Benfell, Joshua Calixto, Zack Kotzer, and David Wolinsky. Everything in there is worth reading. I pick out this passage from David’s entry only in the manner of a cornered goon lobbing a grenade over a chest-high wall in a futile effort to keep the brilliance at bay.
The story of where most gunfire reigns in 2026 gaming owes a lot to Duke Nukem Forever, a 2011 game nobody has thought about much since maybe us merry few Bullet Points Monthly writers danced with it in 2019. DNF is in the lifeblood of shooters today, because it was a costly buoy warning that the old ways could not last, and why they needed to start doing something new. Whether the new waters feel sufficiently ambitious for those paying attention is another matter (who even thinks about or evaluates such things, and is being honest with themselves?)—DNF built Xanadu, then handed us all an eviction notice. The weird lesson learned, nobody would have predicted: “Hey, what if development hell is actually a feature, and we make games with no end in sight?”
For Aftermath, Jay Castello investigates the maddening trial of getting a game with sexual content on Steam, focussing on Meredith Gran’s Perfect Tides, Heather Flowers’ 500 Finger Fillet, and Molleindustria’s Future? No Thanks!
All three of these examples are part of a seemingly increasing trend of scrutiny on Steam, which goes in tandem with crackdowns elsewhere, like the Online Safety Act in the UK requiring sites to verify that users are over 18 to access certain features and media, and the threats made by payment processors about adult content on sites like itch.io. Or another example: Flowers reports having to offer a blood-free version of the demo for 500 Finger Fillet so that YouTubers don’t get dinged by content systems on that platform when uploading gameplay. The affected developers describe frustration and fear, as well as a potential chilling effect on what gets made in the future.
Hark! A distant scuffling and squawking. It can only be the rampageous seagulls of Jank.cool, emerging from their abandoned shipping container off the coast of Bournemouth. See how they flutter and wheedle for our bycatch (they are doing a subscription drive – get involved if you want to read more Alice Bell, Nic Reuben, Sin Vega, and Brendan Caldwell). Tarnation! The miserable flying rats have seized ahold of Hannah Nicklin, former RPS psychogeographer and creative director of Saltsea Chronicles studio Die Gute Fabrik. Here’s Hannah with an essay comparing three texts – Zachtronics visual novel Eliza, Jathan Sadowski’s The Mechanic and the Luddite, and Calvin Kasulke’s Several People Are Typing.
In the non-fiction work The Mechanic and the Luddite, author Jathan Sadwoski also offers us helpful ghosts. He starts by defining that term ‘miasma’ – the toxic cloud of capitalist technoculture that pervades our daily lives. Sadowski traces how digital technology is used to produce and reproduce capital at the expense of, well, all of us. Harms are built into big tech’s culture of ‘innovation’, people-as-data are a resource for extraction and exploitation, and the harmful principles of ‘rentier capitalism’ that traditionally applied to real estate have been adopted within tech as ‘such-and-such as a service’. And of course, Sadowski’s text traces the latest form of technocultural exploitation: AI. He describes how AI allows capital to “[further objectify] workers as being merely extensions of machines, while also forcing people to become more mechanical in how they work and live.”
For Historical Games Network, Will Butler writes about the relationship between genre and nationality in marketing, community organisation, and criticism.
In recent years, the popularity of the ‘roguelike’ and ‘metroidvania’ genre has seen discourse communities scrambling to canonise new, ‘improved’ versions of these often derided categories. The term ‘Search Action’ has since grown in popularity to dethrone the ‘Metroidvania’ label. This is in part to align with the Japanese term to describe both Metroid and Castlevania: ‘tansaku-gata akushon’ meaning ‘exploration-based action’ (Nintendo 1986). It also serves the purpose of uncoupling every new addition to the ‘Vania genre from these well-canonised series of games; decentering dominant ideals around games history that are characterised by a number of ‘legendary’, influential games. The move toward ‘Search Action’ also speaks to a desire to realign types of game with their country of origin. In the case of Metroid and Castlevania, this would be Japan. What we will be discussing today, is the impact of national identity on the construction of videogame genres.
For Eugene Gamer, Matt Wales writes about No Man’s Sky’s Galactic Hub Project, a spirited player research community scattered across galaxies, which has outlasted 10 years of updates.
Tharakis, for instance, is a system-wide colony focused on dystopian city builds, while Logisto’s inhabitants build factories that are beneficial to other Hub players. The Lobrid Conclave is a sprawl of frozen ruins, and the Coalition of Dissonant Worlds has a focus on PvP. There are ungoverned colonies: the beautiful lakeside community of Adtown, for example, the cooking colony of Aedesian, Lofticries and its luxuriant waterfront homes, the permadeath-exclusive colony of Hecate, and the “micro-colony” of Old Sabeck, which challenges players to get creative with its mandatory 2×2 cuboid builds.
This hold is full to bursting. The sea grows dim and mysterious. Time to sail home while humming along to either Moon Cave by Gorillaz or Edge of Seventeen by Stevie Nicks. Have a good Sunday!