Sometimes Sundays are only for bringing together video game criticism and journalism. I’m trying to cast a wider net when it’s my turn to deliver the Papers, because I imagine you’ve probably been reading about video games all week and would appreciate, say, 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 at hand. So please accept a boatload of the best Duke Nukem mitherings, oracular visual novels, sociable space sims, and “search action” games.
To mark the site’s 10th anniversary, Bullet Points Monthly word writers Ed Smith, Reid McCarter, Astrid Anne Rose and Yussef Cole hosted a roundtable discussion on the state of the shooter in 2026featuring contributions from legendary men 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 choose this passage of David’s entrance only in the manner of a cornered moron throwing a grenade over a chest-high wall in a vain effort to keep the glare at bay.
The story of where most gunfire reigns in 2026 games owes a lot to Duke Nukem Forever, a 2011 game that no one has thought much about since maybe we, a few merry Bullet Points Monthly writers, danced with it in 2019. DNF is in the soul of shooters today, because it was an expensive buoy warning that the old ways couldn’t last and why they had to start to do something new. Whether the new waters seems ambitious enough to those paying attention is another question (who thinks or evaluates such things and is honest with themselves?) – DNF built Xanadu, then handed us all an eviction notice. The strange lesson learned, no one would have predicted: “Hey, what if development hell was actually a feature and we were making games with no end in sight?”
For ConsequencesJay Castello investigates the maddening trial of getting a game with sexual content on Steam, focusing on Meredith Gran’s Perfect Tides, Heather Flowers’ 500 Finger Fillet, and Future? No thanks!
These three examples are part of a seemingly growing trend of surveillance on Steam, which goes hand in hand with crackdowns elsewhere, such as the UK’s Online Safety Act requiring sites to verify that users are over 18 to access certain features and media, and threats made by payment processors over adult content on sites like itch.io. Or another example: Flowers reports having to offer a bloodless version of the demo for 500 Finger Fillet so that YouTubers aren’t disrupted by the content systems on that platform when uploading gameplay. Affected developers describe frustration and fear, as well as a potential chilling effect on what will be achieved in the future.
Listen! A fight and a distant cry. It could only be Jank.cool’s raging seagulls, emerging from their abandoned shipping container off the coast of Bournemouth. See how they beat and cajole for our bycatch (they’re doing a subscription drive – get involved if you want to know more about Alice Bell, Nic Reuben, Sin Vega and Brendan Caldwell). Tarnation! The wretched flying rats have taken over Hannah Nicklin, former RPS psychogeographer and creative director of Saltsea Chronicles studio Die Gute Fabrik. Here is Hannah with an essay comparing three texts – The visual novel Eliza by Zachtronics, The Mechanic and the Luddite by Jathan Sadowski and Multiple People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke.
In the non-fiction book The Mechanic and the Luddite, author Jathan Sadwoski also gives us some helpful ghosts. He begins by defining the term “miasma” – the toxic cloud of capitalist technoculture that permeates our daily lives. Sadowski traces how digital technology is used to produce and reproduce capital at the expense of us all. Harms are inherent in big tech’s culture of “innovation”, people as data are a resource for extraction and exploitation, and the harmful principles of “rentier capitalism” traditionally applied to real estate have been adopted within tech as “such and such 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 mere extensions of machines, while forcing people to become more mechanical in the way they work and live.”
For Historical Gaming NetworkWill Butler writes about the relationship between gender and nationality in marketing, community organizing, and criticism.
In recent years, the popularity of the “roguelike” and “metroidvania” genres has seen discourse communities scrambling to canonize new, “improved” versions of these oft-derided categories. The term “Search Action” has since gained popularity to dethrone the “Metroidvania” label. This partly aligns with the Japanese term to describe both Metroid and Castlevania: “tansaku-gata akushon” meaning “exploration-based action” (Nintendo 1986). It also serves to disassociate each new addition to the “Vania” genre from these well-canonized game series; decenter the dominant ideals around the history of games which are characterized by a certain number of “legendary” and influential games. The move toward “Search Action” also speaks to a desire to realign game types with their countries of origin. In the case of Metroid and Castlevania, that would be Japan. What we will discuss today is the impact of national identity on the construction of video game genres.
For Eugene Gamer, Matt Wales written about No Man’s Sky’s Galactic Hub projecta vibrant player research community scattered across the galaxies, which has survived 10 years of updates.
Tharakis, for example, is a system-wide colony focused on building dystopian cities, while the residents of Logisto build factories that benefit other players in the Hub. The Lobrid Conclave is a stretch of frozen ruins, and the Coalition of Dissonant Worlds focuses on PvP. There are ungoverned settlements: the beautiful lakeside community of Adtown, for example, the cooking colony of Aedesian, Lofticries and its luxurious waterfront homes, the exclusive settlement of Hecate, and the “micro-colony” of Old Sabeck, which challenges players to get creative with its obligatory 2×2 cuboid constructions.
This hold is full to bursting. The sea becomes dark and mysterious. It’s time to go home humming one or the other Moon Cave by Gorillaz Or Edge of Seventeen by Stevie Nicks. Have a great Sunday!
