Cartridge

Media critic, restaurant enthusiast, local neighborhood friend, DJ, and image artist. I am fascinated by the ways artists express themselves through images, and in particular video game design. 

Note: Cartridge is my pen name and I am trans. Some author credits in these pieces may use my previous names "Rosy" and "Waverly". 

E-mail me at hotelbones@gmail.com

Follow me on Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/cartr...

Paste Magazine •

Wildermyth Rethinks the Stories We Tell in RPGs

It had been 30 in-world years that I watched Fawn travel with her troupe, The Walkers of the Candle, in my most recent Wildermyth campaign. In that time, she rarely stepped into the spotlight, giving space for her comrades to shine. While the group did not have a leader, Tymlow the warrior had made it clear that she could get any job done without much help at all. Meanwhile Fen and Gail, the two remaining members from the original group, had discovered their own existential meaning between trave...
Polygon •

Neocities celebrates ‘the old internet,’ offering relief from 24/7 social feeds

Gaming has never been more connected and social than in 2022. With the press of a button, you can record footage to post online almost instantly. Streaming keeps growing due to the pandemic and barriers to entry changing. Hop on to Discord and you can start chatting with friends about a new update or a meme going around your servers. For many, gaming has become a hobby delivered via a constant connection. For others, the modern internet is so busy and chaotic that they’ve been looking to the old...
Inverse •

Indie dev Nadia Nova talks building a community through erotica

The protagonist pulls on the hair of their lover, Addie.Their crotches press together and they kiss. They rip off each other’s clothes and moan loudly to drown out the noise just outside their elongated isolation quarters — the sounds of screams at the end of the world.This is Nadia Nova’s most recent game, 2021’s doomsday dreamgirl. It follows two new lovers isolated together amid the end of the world. Nova has been a prominent developer of queer independent games for the past half-decade now,...
Paste Magazine •

Humankind Cares Less about Humans than Systems and Empire

Humankind, a new 4X strategy game in the style of Civilization, makes its appeal to the player as not just a historian, but a historical imaginary. It looks at all the complexities of world history and says, “look, we managed to capture the vast amount of elements in the world to see what you do with it.” And the systems are incredibly complex and dense. So much so that after 40 hours, I still don’t really know how everything works in the game. Yet in that complexity the game reveals much more a...
The Indie Game Website •

The Indie Game Website May Newsletter - The Indie Game Website

May brings us another three indie games to delve into—and the final installment of this indie games newsletter. Coincidentally, it’s also the best one yet. Find out what our columnists are playing this month:

In my own experience as a trans woman, there is a recurring oblivion that appears in the space that a stolen womanhood should exist. There is not only a gap of knowledge, but a substitution with the cisnormative logics I was forcibly taught, taking its place. It ebbs, flows, and weaves its...
Paste Magazine •

Hades: Persephone the Runaway

Atop the many levels of the Underworld; beyond the dark caves of Tartarus, the flaming pits of Asphodel, and the ghostly glories of Elysium’s halls, a garden grows. Barley, cabbage, corn, lemons, tomatoes and countless other plants thrive, changing by the season and leaving by the basketful. A small cottage, covered with moss and streams of ivy, rests among them. Here is where Persephone thrives.Persephone never really knew peace most of her life. Instead she was always contending for the egos o...
Paste Magazine •

Rethinking Videogame's Relationship to Cinema with the Forgotten Aconcagua

About a third of the way through Aconcagua, a PlayStation game from 2000, four plane crash survivors are trapped on the Argentinian mountainside between pillars of rock and helicopter gunfire. The camera cuts to a frontal shot of a bodyguard thought to be incapacitated from the crash shooting, then to a government soldier being killed with a camera angle below, positioning the soldier in frame with the helicopter. The camera cuts behind the bodyguard firing at the helicopter, then to red sparks...
The Indie Game Website •

Emily Is Away

As the clock hits 6 PM, my computer screen is almost entirely filled with the whitest of white lights that burns my eyes. Two-fifths of the centre screen is filled with a small, almost static news feed. Blue names list their new relationship status, or what they are planning to do for the day. A bar at the bottom of my screen pops, and my eyes hone in on a tiny box containing a message.

“I hereby declare a poke war!”

I feel a crunching sensation in the back of my head. I can’t place it exactly...