Over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about how game mechanics can communicate a game’s theme. We talked about it with Signs of the Sojourner, where the game mechanic of joining d…| Death is a Whale
This week we’re looking at The Novelist, a 2013 game about lots of sad feelings. Bit of a mood shift from Call of Duty, although – well. If you’re not familiar, The Novelist is ab…| Death is a Whale
I kinda want to spend some time over the next while just analysing little individual moments from games – taking a scene and ‘reading’ it, and running some of the implicit themes …| Death is a Whale
I’ve just finished last year’s Prey, which, well, yeah, is pretty fucking good. We’re going to talk about the final twist at the end, so if you haven’t played it and yo…| Death is a Whale
1 post published by James Tregonning during September 2025| Death is a Whale
Back in the 2010s there was a rash of daughters in games. The generation of developers from the turn of the century were getting older, went the rationale, and having kids of their own, who emerged…| Death is a Whale
2 posts published by James Tregonning during August 2025| Death is a Whale
I dont know if people particularly remember this, but Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel was a weird, slightly hateful game. Developed by 2K Australia in 2014, the game is set on the moon of Elpis between the events of Borderlands 1 and 2. It featured moon monsters, space lasers, low gravity, and all the characters were Australian. […]| Death is a Whale
There’s an Iain Banks novel, I think possibly The Bridge, with a line that goes something like “Her breasts were a pair of ( )s.” It’s some tortured postmodern thing about d…| Death is a Whale
It’s funny to look back, ten years on, and realise I’m still just doing the stuff I was trained to do at university. It’s essentially just close reading – I like to pick up a game and look at one facet or another. It’s not a strict rule, but it’s pretty clearly my bread and […]| Death is a Whale
Dying Light 2 is the second game in Techland’s zombie parkour series. Released in 2022, it follows a formula set by the first Dying Light in 2015 and Dead Island in 2011: it’s a game ab…| Death is a Whale
I’ve been on a bit of a board game bender this year. I touched on this implicitly back in March, when we were talking about Magic: The Gathering (Constructing the Player in MtG), but – …| Death is a Whale
In 1962, Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn published his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The novel focused on life in the gulag, of which Solzhenitsyn had first-hand experi…| Death is a Whale
Right: last week we talked about The Novelist, and how it makes you kinda fight against really common human constraints like not having enough time or emotional energy. I suggested that it was real…| Death is a Whale
One of the things that I love about video games is the potential for synergy between gameplay and theme. The free-running of Assassin’s Creed relates to the ideas of freedom and pol…| Death is a Whale
There’s a recent series of author biographies by Wiley called ‘The Life of the Author‘. They’ve got eight volumes out so far, with another on F. Scott Fitzgerald coming in December this year, and lately I’ve been reading their volume on Milton. The Life of the Author: John Milton (2021), by Richard Bradford, is split […]| Death is a Whale
South of the Circle is a 2022 narrative game from State of Play, the team behind Lumino City and Kami. It’s about the relationship between two academics, Peter and Clara, in 1960s Cambridge, and deals with themes of feminism and nuclear disarmament in the context of the Cold War. The game plays in two parts. […]| Death is a Whale
There’s this thing where sidescroller video games all seem to be about some sickness at the heart of the world. Many of them portray a good and beautiful world invaded by a parasitic rot. In …| Death is a Whale
If you’re a regular, you might know that over the past couple years, I’ve been working on a special project about the Horus Heresy, a long-running science fiction series set in the worl…| Death is a Whale
I read this essay a little while back about how it’s difficult to find good art. Everything now is sequels or reboots, the argument ran, and there’s just not much else out there. I made…| Death is a Whale
As long as we’re at something of a loose end, I’m picking over a few books that I’d intended to read previously – mostly leftovers from the first phase. One example is Sermo…| Death is a Whale
I feel like I always start to get a little uneasy this time of year. Winter’s setting in, and I’m not really motivated to do anything. I have a few little things floating around, essays…| Death is a Whale
The Horus Heresy is a science fiction series set in the world of Warhammer 40,000. It is sixty-four volumes long, with nineteen different authors contributing over a period of eighteen years. IR…| Death is a Whale
G.K. Chesterton is an early 20th century journalist and writer. He was a Catholic with a newspaper column that he ran for thirty years, and – he’s also very annoying. Back in March I wrote a piece about Elden Ring where I talked about how quotable he is. He’s known for a very particular style […]| Death is a Whale
I’ve recently finished reading the Horus Heresy, a 64-book series set in the world of the tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000. In reflecting on the series, and the theme of scale, I’ve wr…| Death is a Whale
Deathfire is the thirty-second book in the Horus Heresy series. Originally published in 2015 by Nick Kyme, Deathfire follows the exploits of the shattered Salamander legion, as they cart their dead…| Death is a Whale
In Gav Thorpe’s The First Wall, there’s an ongoing debate about whether religion is bad for you. On one side is Euphrati Keeler, incipient mystic and star of the rising cult of the God-…| Death is a Whale
As we work towards the end of the Horus Heresy project, I have a couple larger essays underway in the background. This wasn’t meant to be one of them; I was doing some research over the weeke…| Death is a Whale
A couple days ago, on August 30, the New Yorker published a piece titled ‘Why So Many People Are Going “No Contact” with Their Parents’, by Anna Russell. I clicked on it, be…| Death is a Whale
My writing has been disrupted these past few months. I like to be very regular – one essay on religion, one on video games, alternating weeks. I’ve been doing that since 2022. But this …| Death is a Whale
Having finished Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia, which we were talking about recently, I found an early response from Jay Spencer Green in the now defunct Irish Left Review (visible through th…| Death is a Whale
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a twentieth-century German pastor and theologian, executed under the Nazi regime for his association with the 20 July plot to kill Hitler. He’s a martyr of the church,…| Death is a Whale
Chris Franklin is a video game critic who runs the YouTube channel Errant Signal, a mid-sized channel with 174,000 subscribers that’s been operating since 2012. Among other things, he’s…| Death is a Whale
Clive James was an Australian poet and media critic who made his name writing television criticism for The Observer. He – how do you describe Clive James? – he was a wonderful stylist w…| Death is a Whale
A bit of an irregular essay this week. I’ve been working on some Horus Heresy stuff, but there’s nothing ready to publish yet – it’s the big flagship essay, to go out when I…| Death is a Whale
