Category Archives: Art Reviews and Articles

[Game: Hades, Supergiant Games, 2020]
Ode on a Grecian Burn:

How Hades Shores Up Minor Weaknesses of Supergiant Games’ Earlier Releases

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Introduction:

Each of the first three titles created by Supergiant Games excels in some obvious way over their other offerings. Pyre contains their most imaginative fantasy world, and some of their best original characters. Transistor has the studio’s most innovative and unique core gameplay system, as well as their best soundtrack. And Bastion’s stellar implementation of dynamic narration and avoidance of the later games’ reliance on text boxes and paragraph-long info dumps make it so it’s still unmatched in their repertoire in terms of the successful integration of most story material into the actual moment-to-moment gameplay.

With that list in mind, it’s not immediately clear what Hades offers to make me say the following: it’s Supergiant’s best creation overall. That lack of clarity comes from the fact that it’s not any one single exceptional strength of the game that far outstrips the other titles—but instead the way that Hades echoes their strengths while addressing noteworthy weaknesses of each of their earlier games. Thus, in addition to sharing the high level of quality in art, music, gameplay, polish, and so on possessed by all of the team’s work, it is also the case that, in the few ways in which their earlier games stumbled, Hades dashes ahead.

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[Game: Hades, Supergiant Games, 2020]
Ode on a Grecian Burn:

How Hades Shores Up Minor Weaknesses of Supergiant Games’ Earlier Releases

 was last modified: October 19th, 2023 by Daniel Podgorski

[Game: Demon’s Souls, FromSoftware, 2009]
Slayer of Reason:

A Thorough Epistemological Philosophical Analysis of FromSoftware’s Demon’s Souls

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Introduction:

From the immersive maturity of its mechanical and narrative details, to the unparalleled sense of consideration for consequences that it fosters among players, to the sheer number of genuinely unique and refreshing design risks that it takes—Demon’s Souls is as much a captivating revelation today as it was upon release. Yet, as with each of the later Miyazaki-led FromSoft games that follow in its footsteps (in fact, perhaps moreso than any of its descendants), Demon’s Souls poses numerous difficulties for analysis.

It shares the cryptic approach to storytelling and the elements of nonlinearity that crop up in all of FromSoftware’s recent works, but that’s not all. In addition, it is a game which changes from player to player and session to session in a non-random fashion. Enemy placements, enemy statistics, NPC interactions, and even the availability of a few small regions of the levels all depend to some degree on the circumstances in which the player succeeds or fails.

You will not be surprised to hear me claim, however, that the odd structure and content of Demon’s Souls nevertheless do coalesce into a coherent reading. In the interest of pursuing that reading, our primary ally will be the field of epistemology. In a nutshell, epistemology is the study of knowledge—which includes such topics as belief, truth, justification, and skepticism. Armed with tools from that and related fields of philosophy, we will explore the following interpretation: Demon’s Souls offers a discussion of the limits of human knowledge, and how people believe and act given such limits. That might sound strange or overly vague—but in the sections ahead I intend to provide specificity and support for it, through careful attention to both the game itself and the relevant philosophy.

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[Game: Demon’s Souls, FromSoftware, 2009]
Slayer of Reason:

A Thorough Epistemological Philosophical Analysis of FromSoftware’s Demon’s Souls

 was last modified: April 28th, 2025 by Daniel Podgorski

[Topics: Critical Idealism, Empiricism, Metaphysics, Rationalism]
Controlled Demolition:

How Immanuel Kant Rescued the Field of Metaphysics by Tearing it Down

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Immanuel Kant Sketch by M.R.P. - metaphysics

Caricature Sketch by M.R.P.

Introduction:

In popular discourse, the word ‘metaphysics’ is used derisively to refer to baseless mysticism. But that’s not how philosophers use the word. In philosophy, metaphysics stands alongside topics like epistemology, ethics, and logic as a major branch of the field. Put simply, for philosophers, the word ‘metaphysics’ refers to the field that concerns itself with the nature of being. Accordingly, this field asks extremely fundamental questions, like: At the lowest level, what is there in reality? What constitutes the identity of a singular thing? And how and when does one thing ever become a different thing?

Given such important and fundamental subject matter, it may surprise you to hear Immanuel Kant’s account of the state of metaphysics toward the end of the Enlightenment: “All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay. That this time is come for metaphysics appears from the state into which it has fallen among all learned nations” (Kant Prolegomena 998).

In these words, and others like them, Kant mounts an attack on the metaphysical philosophy of both his contemporaries and of the centuries leading up to his lifetime. He felt that the field amounted to little more than a highly formalized version of what the word ‘metaphysics’ conjures among laypeople today: baseless mysticism. It was baseless, he felt, because it amounted to nothing but coherent guesswork (i.e. as long as folks kept their systems consistent, they were entirely unfalsifiable); and it was mystical, he felt, because it was completely disconnected from the actual grounds of all knowledge (i.e. it was not pertinent to our actual experiences in life, our possible experiences in life, nor the conditions that make experience in general possible).

But despite these glaring flaws he identified, Kant felt the field was not entirely beyond salvaging, and he himself made a concerted effort toward clearing away the centuries of mistakes in order to provide a new and firm ground from which to build anew.

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[Topics: Critical Idealism, Empiricism, Metaphysics, Rationalism]
Controlled Demolition:

How Immanuel Kant Rescued the Field of Metaphysics by Tearing it Down

 was last modified: March 8th, 2024 by Daniel Podgorski

[Game: What Remains of Edith Finch, Giant Sparrow, 2017]
Dissecting Finches:

A Critical Analysis of the Mechanics of the Unique Artistic Game What Remains of Edith Finch

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Introduction:

This is a critical look at the mechanics of What Remains of Edith Finch. Now, probably, if you have only passing familiarity with the award-winning game in question, to that sentiment you respond: “Isn’t it just a walking simulator? Is this just going to be an article complaining about the game’s genre? Wouldn’t it make more sense to discuss the story?” And the short answer to all three of those questions is just, “No.”

In more detail, my answers are:

First, while the frame narrative of What Remains does indeed bear the trappings of the projects that are (usually derisively) called ‘walking sims,’ much of the substance of the game lies in a series of levels or minigames that pair with subplots of the story. It plays out like an anthology of tiny games. And it’s mostly the gameplay within those minigames that I want to discuss here.

Second, even if the frame narrative was all there is, I have no particular issue with the concept of so-called ‘walking sims.’ They’re done no particular favor by being categorized as ‘games’ . . . but in the wider world of interactive art, it’s natural that something came along to fill the gap between, on the one hand, audiobooks, fiction podcasts, and linear visual novels, and, on the other hand, narrative-heavy games with minor puzzle gameplay like Finding Paradise, Oneshot, and Firewatch.

And third, to say that it makes more sense to discuss the story than the gameplay is to imply that there is a sharp dividing line between those two things. I deny that there is such a divide. I believe What Remains of Edith Finch does a great job of interweaving gameplay and narrative—so great sometimes that there are segments of this game that I consider to be among the tiny-but-growing list of instances of games reaching the level of artistic excellence that is routinely found in older forms of art. But unfortunately, such moments (which I would not hesitate to say are brilliant), are in the minority within the game. And that’s true despite the writing of the game being truly solid and high-quality from start to finish. So that’s what I want to talk about now.

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[Game: What Remains of Edith Finch, Giant Sparrow, 2017]
Dissecting Finches:

A Critical Analysis of the Mechanics of the Unique Artistic Game What Remains of Edith Finch

 was last modified: March 1st, 2023 by Daniel Podgorski

[Topics: Critical Idealism, Phenomenology, Speculative Realism]
The World According to Headphones:

A Defense of Immanuel Kant against Recent Criticism by Speculative Realists

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Immanuel Kant, painting by Jean-Marc Nattier - anthropocentrism, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology

Immanuel Kant by Jean-Marc Nattier

Introduction:

There has been a recent trend in philosophy, particularly by some working under various flavors of speculative realism (such as objected-oriented ontology and speculative materialism) to accuse Kantian metaphysics of problematic anthropocentrism—meaning the undue privileging of humans or humanity. These accusations seem to result from a belief that Immanuel Kant’s intervention in philosophy amounted to an expansion of the powers of the human mind, placing it in charge of the category of reality. That is, however, not what Kant did.

Nor does Kant ‘privilege’ humans as subjects while ‘degrading’ non-humans as objects. After all, in his terminology all subjects are objects to each other—and to the extent that something apparently inanimate could be construed as a subject (perhaps through the metaphor of a physical reference frame, or through some notion of panpsychism), all humans are objects to it.

Speculative realists speak disapprovingly of what they call the ‘correlationism’ that pervades Kant, as Kant observes that we will only ever have access to our representations of (and the relationship between) reality and our mind, without ever having direct unmediated ‘external’ access to either. Somehow speculative realists interpret this sharp limitation and restriction that Kant places on the scope of human knowledge as instead being an empowering or even ‘reifying’ of human knowledge.

Now, I could list and flatly deny such claims for a while longer. But that doesn’t seem very productive. So, instead, I’d like to take a step back and mount a proper defense against such ideas. I’ll do this by using this article to explain (in the broadest and most accessible strokes I can) what the low-level insights of Kantian philosophy actually involve.

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[Topics: Critical Idealism, Phenomenology, Speculative Realism]
The World According to Headphones:

A Defense of Immanuel Kant against Recent Criticism by Speculative Realists

 was last modified: March 24th, 2023 by Daniel Podgorski