Borderlands 3: On Family – Death is a Whale
Borderlands 3 is a game that’s attracted a lot of controversy – for a bunch of different reasons. There was controversy when the CEO of Gearbox, the game’s developer, had a fight …| Death is a Whale
Borderlands 3 is a game that’s attracted a lot of controversy – for a bunch of different reasons. There was controversy when the CEO of Gearbox, the game’s developer, had a fight …| Death is a Whale
3 posts published by James Tregonning during October 2025| Death is a Whale
Ways of Seeing is a 1972 art documentary by the maverick art theorist John Berger. A four-part series broadcasted by the BBC, Berger’s Ways of Seeing was one of the earliest articulations of the concept of the male gaze, and includes a groundbreaking analysis of wealth in oil painting, where Berger argues that part of […]| Death is a Whale
I have mixed feelings about Borderlands 4. Apparently I’m not the only one – at time of writing (26 Sept 2025), the game has 63% positive reviews on Steam, giving it an overall rating o…| Death is a Whale
So itch.io had a bundle a while back, called the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. It took place during the height of the BLM protests in the States, and all the proceeds went to the NAACP an…| Death is a Whale
3 posts published by James Tregonning during July 2024| Death is a Whale
4 posts published by James Tregonning during September 2025| Death is a Whale
Having talked about medical dramas, autism, and the hellscape depths of capitalism, we turn now to a simpler question: is there a piss kink in Paradise Rot? Paradise Rot is a 2009 short novel by Norweigan musician and novelist Jenny Hval. Translated into English in 2018, it follows a young Norweigan student starting university in […]| Death is a Whale
Note: ‘Encounters with Autism’ is an essay that’s been sitting in my drawer for a couple of years. It’s formatted and styled slightly different to my normal practice here, b…| 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
Content note – discussion of suicide, drug use, workplace violence, mass shootings, probably some other grim emergency room material The Pitt is a 2025 TV medical drama set in a fictional ER in Pittsburgh. It won three Emmys the other night, partly for being very well acted and well written, with great characters, but also […]| Death is a Whale
The thing about these recent Star Wars games is that they’re unified by a very specific visual aesthetic. They have all of their crossover characters, of course, all the people linking togeth…| Death is a Whale
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
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
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 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
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
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
