Before I declare Humanity a new member of the videogames-as-art canon, I should confess that I know embarrassingly little about art. My mum is an artist, yet I somehow developed no vocabulary for the subject—I spent the time I should’ve been writing about this brilliant videogame trying to decide if it was futurist, or constructivist, or minimalist.
Did you know there’s a post-minimalism? I should try my hand at being a post-postminimalist writer and turn in an empty page next time I’m on a deadline. But that wouldn’t be fair to Humanity, which I’ve been playing nightly for the last couple of weeks. Perhaps this is a more useful aesthetic reference point: Humanity is an early 2000s physics tech demo turned into a proper game. It unabashedly pairs philosophical musings on life and war with block-pushing puzzles, like a more aloof Katamari Damacy.
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Special Report- Stacked Deck - Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big.
Monster Train, a deckbuilding roguelike that firmly entrenched itself as the crown prince to the kingly Slay the Spire back in 2020, was the kind of smash success you might call Champagne Big. Four years later, its successor Inkbound’s launch from Early Access was looking more like Sandwich Big.I’m not just saying that because of the mountain of lamb and eggplants I ate while meeting with developer Shiny Shoe over lunch, to feel out what the aftermath of releasing a game looks like in 2024. I mean, have I thought about that sandwich every day since? Yes. But also, the indie team talked frankly about the struggle of luring Monster Train’s audience on board for its next game.
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