The original Blade Runner is a film without heroes, but to me, the most sympathetic characters have always been the four rogue replicants that Rick Deckard hunts down and kills over the course of the […]
Author Archives: Carolyn Petit
Facing the Darkness Within: The Importance of Acting in Observer and Hellblade
Acting matters, but some acting matters more than others. The 2013 film Locke, for instance, takes place entirely in a single car, being driven by a single man, played by Tom Hardy. His performance absolutely […]
Tacoma Review: Found in Space
Perhaps more than anything else, Tacoma is proof that a decent story, brilliantly told (which Tacoma is) is far better than a brilliant story, decently told. The follow-up to their debut masterpiece, Gone Home, Tacoma […]
Pyre Review: The Fires of Freedom
Games almost always want us to feel like a great deal is at stake. Our hero’s life, or the outcome of a war, or maybe the fate of the universe. But few games succeed at […]
Contained in Our Moments: Ignorance and Love in Nier: Automata and The Witcher 3
PLEASE NOTE: This piece discusses the ending of Nier: Automata in extreme detail. I finally finished The Witcher 3, that beast of a game. I have plenty of gripes with it. It egregiously sensationalizes […]
Building a Human Universe: The Ambitious Vision of Beyond Good & Evil 2
I wouldn’t have been surprised if the demo I saw for Beyond Good & Evil 2 had reminded me of the open-world adventure of Breath of the Wild, or of The Witcher 3’s efforts to […]
Gender Breakdown of Games Featured at E3 2017
For the past two years, we’ve produced gender breakdowns of the games showcased at the major press conferences of E3, the game industry’s biggest annual event. We do this not because we believe that every […]
Wonder Woman: The Hero We Need in a Film That Falls Short
After seeing Wonder Woman last Friday and having a chat on Facebook Live to share our immediate impressions, Anita and I exchanged emails this weekend to discuss the film in more detail once we’d had […]
Children of the Earth: The Limits of Link and the Promise of Aloy
Link and Aloy, the heroes of 2017’s two biggest and best open-world action-adventure games thus far, are both born of the world to save the world. In Breath of the Wild, Link emerges into the vastness […]
What Lies Beneath: On the Love and Anger of Night in the Woods
To one degree or another, we’re shaped by the places we come from. Mae Borowski, the twenty-year-old college dropout hero of Night in the Woods, doesn’t know how deeply her hometown of Possum Springs has […]
Hall of Mirrors: Facing Patriarchy in the Media, Facing Ourselves
John Wick is “a man of focus,” as another character describes him early in John Wick: Chapter 2. Once he sets his mind on a singular task, you don’t want to come between him and […]
Leaping Across the Spaces Between Us: On Relationships in Final Fantasy XV and The Last Guardian
As the people here grow colder I turn to my computer And spend my evenings with it Like a friend I was loading a new program I had ordered from a magazine (Are you lonely, […]