Lewis Gordon

@lewisgordon

Culture on computers, mostly | ✍ The Verge, FT, The Ringer, The Nation, ArtReview, Eurogamer, The Guardian, Vulture | ✉️ lewisjohngordon~at~gmail~dot~com | he/him

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Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· 24d

What to say about this except, 'It fucking rips'? Kushner delivers the most insanely readable meditation on the hopes and ills of the 20th century: modernism, revolutions, sports cars, rubber production, bullshit art scenes.

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· 25d

Virtuosic and maddening in basically equal measure without the emotional wallop of No One Is Talking About This (obviously, there's no repeating that). Spent the last few pages thinking about how i maybe prefer lockwood's posts to this book's prose (sorry patricia if u ever read this)

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· 26d

thinking about how a fantasy of control is at the heart of an experience that video game companies have long marketed to players, and how that same fantasy appears to be at the centre of Unity and Luckey's pitches to military departments artreview.com/how-videogam...

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· 29d

So you end up with a game that is both eerie and, in its own extremely gentle way, barbed, but also soporific. Which is kind of fitting for the AI-controlled world it presents. www.theguardian.com/games/2026/j...

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jul 13

hearing about the hot new extraction shooter/misery simulator Hunger for the first time thanks to @rogue.site. good lord, it sounds excellent: an unremittingly bleak good-bad time with tons of intentional friction and gorgeous visuals www.rogue.site/editorials/h...

"For me, the first hurdle came as soon as I loaded up the game. Movement is slow and even the sprinting speed is on par with what I could do in real life if I was carrying a rifle and a sword and a backpack full of cheap wine rather than the superhuman speeds of Call of Duty or Marathon. When I came across my first enemy, a simple shambling zombie that lurched towards me, I pulled up my pistol and… nothing. It wasn’t loaded. Loading a firearm in Hunger isn’t as simple as ejecting a magazine and slapping a new one in — this is a flintlock pistol, so the process involves opening up the barrel, pouring some gunpowder in, closing it up, putting a bit more gunpowder in the end of the barrel, dropping a single shot in, pulling out a ramrod, shoving that down the barrel, placing the ramrod back in its little holder, and then pulling back the hammer. That’s all for one single shot. If you miss, you need to do it all over again. While a zombie is trying to rip your face off."

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jul 9

One of the more insightful things I've read about the wretched Microsoft/Xbox layoffs is this graf from a blog by Jon Kimmich. For Microsoft, Xbox was always a means to an end, and it will remain that way, until the division no longer serves a larger purpose. gamesbeat.com/microsoft-xb...

"Xbox did not come into being because Microsoft wanted to dabble in consumer electronics. It was born out of strategic necessity. The concern was that another company could use the living room as a wedge into Microsoft’s dominance in the home office. If Sony, AOL, cable companies, or some other consumer platform became the place where families networked, communicated, bought media, and eventually worked, Windows’ centrality could erode. Xbox was Microsoft planting a flag in the living room before someone else turned it into the next platform layer."

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jul 6

me this morn

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jul 4

Speaking of Mann and America (see last repost), Ebert really stepped up to the plate in his review of The Last of the Mohicans. It ends with an all-timer kicker (in my humble opinion), a perfect, almost horror-flecked appendage to the movie itself www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-...

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jul 1

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jun 23

WiLD, too

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jun 23

no contest

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jun 17

current Next Fest demo haul. what else is on your radar?

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jun 17

Also, it's interesting to think of job sims as the reality TV of video games: easily replicable formats; cheaper to produce; seemingly insatiable audience appetites. One of them is even a riff on Storage Wars! www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/a...

"One popular YouTuber known as Skoottie plays work-oriented games with completionist zeal. (“I Played 100% of a Game About Raking Leaves” is the title of one video.) He said that the genre satisfied curiosity by giving players a flavor of niche professions in the manner of reality TV shows like “Storage Wars.” In fact, one of his favorite games seems to take direct inspiration from that show: Storage Hunter Simulator allows the player to embark on a rags-to-riches journey by bidding on abandoned units.

The comparison is instructive: Netflix has pivoted toward reality TV in recent years, in part because it is relatively cheap to make. Like many of those shows, there is a format to work sim games that is easily replicable: the light crafting mechanics and progression grind, the filling of cash registers and shelves, the demands of trash disposal."

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jun 17

A few thoughts: these games reflect wider culture that has become obsessed with hustle, wealth, conspicuous consumption, and performative labour in recent years. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/a...

"Hustle is inextricable from the rise of work sim games, where every interaction is focused on the goal of accumulation. It is akin to the boom in finance-focused content elsewhere. Videos of “grindset” influencers are now ubiquitous on short-form video platforms, and the “boom boom” fashion trend is a throwback to the conspicuous consumerism of the 1980s."

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jun 16

🚨 Rare actual good news 🚨 Odd Meter, maker of the brilliant and bonkers nun adventure Indika, is hiring a bunch of roles for what it calls a "story-driven souls-like action game." It's set in in a "dark Orwellian world inhabited by anthropomorphic animals." hh.odd-meter.com/apply.php?ke...

Text from link: "A story-driven third-person adventure game with Sekiro-like combat set in a dark Orwellian world inhabited by anthropomorphic animals. In a realistic yet grotesque cast-iron-punk setting of the 17th–18th centuries."

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jun 12

Alan Wake 2 works because its metatextual floridity is grounded by the most straightforwardly emotional storytelling Remedy has ever done (and, of course, the actual gameplay rips). A studio operating at the peak of its powers. www.vulture.com/article/alan...

It’s not just the survival horror action that ensures Alan Wake 2 remains grounded but a handful of pivotal characters, chief among them Wake’s wife, Alice, who is shown to be grieving for her missing husband. She begins processing his presumed death through her own photography until, eventually, we learn that “Alice’s work had consumed the apartment, her whole life.” These scenes, relayed via live-action footage, are some of the most poignant and shocking in the game — a heavily weighted counterpoint to the high weirdness found elsewhere. In melding the honest and personal with winking metatextual flourishes, including details from Lake’s own life, Alan Wake 2 feels in conversation with Everything Everywhere All at Once, a movie that its co-director Daniel Kwan described as searching for a “version of post-postmodernism … metamodernism.” Like that movie, Alan Wake 2 contains multitudes: It is an eerie, grotesque, and frightening interdimensional scramble across time, genre, tone, and emotion; so too is it a moving portrait of loss.

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jun 12

Will we ever see a wildler swing by a blockbuster? Probably not, I fear. Alan Wake 2 is a game to cherish and pore over: I loved writing about it for @vulture.com. www.vulture.com/article/alan...

“Earth is a cyclical song,” says one character, which, in a game of pulpy, hard-boiled dialogue and meta-reflexive quips, stands out for its unadorned beauty. There’s a sincerity in that line that gets to the core of Alan Wake 2, a game that, more than any other I can think of, interrogates the idea of fiction in terms of its transcendent and malignant possibilities echoing through the generations. It does so not just through the words of its protagonists or the images of the game world but through expressive, complicated mechanics. With these ingredients, Remedy and creative director Lake have crafted a dense, unsettling work of horror, one that fundamentally embraces video games as a form. The woods of Alan Wake 2 are not harmonious but discordant; they don’t sing but wail; they are worth losing yourself to.

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jun 11

also, take that PC music daily.bandcamp.com/features/deb...

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jun 4

Really enjoyed this one: it's funny, sharp, and, in the end, really quite moving. Lolled at the #relatable phone stuff, shed a tear at the beautifully wrought parental observations. And those sentences are the stuff one dreams of producing -- total clarity.

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jun 3

also get into resonances between backrooms and exit 8, characters looking in rather than out, a retreat into space rather than confrontation artreview.com/the-life-and...

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Jun 3

which is to say, i'm not sure this iteration of backrooms or liminal spaces more broadly is fit for purpose for wherever the hell we are right now. the anxiety it purports to reflect is rendered in strangely anodyne terms, and the mid-2020s are anything but anodyne artreview.com/the-life-and...

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· May 25

Was not expecting to get bodied like this by the new Lerner book. He's writing about ASMR unboxing videos, but it kind of equally applies to video games 🫪

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· May 21

Sarah has bars feeld.co/magazine/ple...

Text from linked article: "The song he played was by the electronic musician called Burial. Possibly “song” is not the right word. It lasted thirteen minutes, during which time I re-experienced my entire life: bus rides, ice skating, Satie on the piano, a dream where I couldn’t stop running, hiding in the coat closet, pages from my diary on fire, the cold lake at night, at the hospital saying it was an accident. Snow started falling before my eyes, although it was July and I was wearing a slip dress. When it was over I felt electrically shocked."

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· May 13

Hit the "gotta treat myself on my birthday" stage of life, hence...

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· May 7

Maquette is another one (which I reviewed for Waypoint many moons ago). Similar Garden State/500 Days of Summer vibes -- terribly annoying. They kind of embody that very teenage boy thing (I should know) of mistaking hip references for actual insight. www.vice.com/en/article/m...

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· May 4

Tore through this in a handful of days I think having seen @carolynmichelle.bsky.social recommend it. Obvs indebted to Ellroy, and you don't quite get that same sense of knotty verisimilitude, of a world that is inscrutably complex. But what a grim, gripping romp through modern LA nonetheless.

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Apr 27

hell yeah. this is what I was referring to in my review for @theverge.com, nicely captured by Stephen. orbs rule. www.theverge.com/entertainmen...

Text from linked piece: "The game largely nails this balance, though its most arresting moments remain the deadliest. I’ve had battles with hordes of foes who seem to occupy every inch of space from the floor to the sky, raining down polyrhythmic volleys of orbs. If Arjun stands still, he is toast, so you keep him moving — bobbing and weaving, ducking and diving through spirograph-like configurations of immaterial light to find the constantly repositioning pockets of safety."

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Apr 24

The radiant, gleaming colour choice also speaks to a game that is ablaze with light in a broader sense. It's good shit -- love what Saros did to my eyeballs. www.theverge.com/entertainmen...

From linked text: "It’s a fittingly blingy aesthetic for this time when gaming has scarcely been a more gilded activity (seriously, have you seen how much a PlayStation 5 costs these days?). Yet this incidental resonance aside, the resplendent gold-tinted presentation speaks to a game where every frame feels ablaze with magnificent light. Saros is, among other things, a third-person bullet-hell shooter. This means that it is often throwing hundreds, if not thousands, of slow- and fast-moving projectiles toward you at any single moment. Some of these projectiles are golden; others are red and blue; all of them illuminate cavernous 3D arenas while you unload your own supernatural bullets into the ether. The result is mesmerizing, a kind of divinely spectacular fireworks display."

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Apr 24

I open my review of Saros with a remark about how golden it is, as if "touched by King Midas." But that committed colour choice goes such a long way to giving the game a unique visual identity, despite it otherwise drawing on a lot of v. familiar references. www.theverge.com/entertainmen...

Lewis Gordon@lewisgordon· Apr 24

For me, a bonafide difficult games noob, Saros is nicely balanced. But I can imagine bullet-hell aficionados longing for an even more hardcore experience (which, tbf, they can get by setting various modifiers). www.theverge.com/entertainmen...