grace

@gracemachine

Writer, critic, co-editor @tier-review.com

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grace@gracemachine· Jun 11

This Date Everything update came across my steam tl and it kind of startled me how even the game's plastic edges got sanded down... We have to remove one character being mean to others because it made some people uncomfortable...

Updated Content Aware Descriptions: Based on player feedback, each existing Content Aware has additional detail and updated language

Subtitles for Songs and Musical Pieces for Hearing-Impaired: Miranda, Bodhi, and Keyes will display lyrics and descriptions during their most musical moments

Curt and Rod Player Pronouns: We brought Davied and Jacquis into the studio for new lines that address the player with correct pronouns

Daisuke/Gaia Interaction: We brought Daisuke (Tsuji) into the studio for special Traveller dialogue with Gaia!

Community Sourced Sensitivity Feedback: Thank you so much for enabling us to provide a better and more inclusive experience across a whole manner of interactions with more player-focused options:

Eddie has an additional line that remembers if the player doesn’t drink alcohol

Players no longer have to be mean to Barry to win Bathsheba’s affection

Players can confidently say that they already know about ‘shade’ with Curt and Rod, skipping the concept’s tutorial

Player is able to more confidently say where Travellers are from with Gaia (info found in Date-a-Dex)

More sensitive player choices in general for Farya, Arma, I, Ronaldini, Freddy, Mitchell, Maggie, Scandalabra, Stefan, Stepford, Teddy, and Zoey

Removal of negative references to multiple personalities in Lyric

grace@gracemachine· Apr 9

If you send us a particularly good email, we'll pass it along to our good friend Leon Kennedy.

A screenshot from Resident Evil: Code Veronica, showing Claire Redfield standing in front of a desk with a desktop computer, various files, and a typewriter. Text on the bottom of the screen reads "The e-mail to Leon has already been sent."

grace@gracemachine· Mar 22

This one was so fun to write, partially because you can just describe what happens and make the argument. RE4 is full of little moments like this.

The Resident Evil series is celebrating its 30-year anniversary today, March 22, 2025. Below, we look at the way the series subversively blends thirst traps with horrific thrills.

Leon Kennedy is tied up. The henchmen of cult leader Osmund Saddler have injected him with Las Plagas--an ancient, zombifying parasite. His hands are cuffed to a chain, at the other end of which is Kennedy's sometimes-ally Luis Sera. They work together to get free. There is a rhythm between them as they pull on the chain. Their muscles are taut, they trade grunts like drumbeats. For now, their bodies are triumphant. Yet, in just a few short hours, Luis will be dead and Leon will be coughing up blood, while Las Plagas takes more and more hold of him. This is just one moment across Resident Evil's 30-year history, but it is far from a unique one. The franchise puts its stars in constant peril. Because that peril is so fixated on the body and its permeability, it often has an erotic dimension. It's easy to limit this to the games' casts of femme fatales and women-in-peril, but it is the men, especially Leon Kennedy, who bear the brunt of it in practice. One of the series' sincere pleasures is watching beautiful people, but especially beautiful men, get hurt.

grace@gracemachine· Mar 4

We are recording @thesaferoom.bsky.social on Corpse Party today! Please send queries to questions@spookygame.club!!!

Cover art for corpse party’s 2021 remake

grace@gracemachine· Feb 25

Making an argument like this REQUIRES that you do close reading. You have to discuss the brass tacks of how something is shot/how it plays in order to ground this claim in the work you are discussing. This trades only in vibes and the broadest facts about the work.

Requiem can be placed within a long lineage of great Japanese art that deals with post-war trauma through science-fiction. Despite the fact that it’s set in a fictional American city, Resident Evil has always evoked the specters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (released 54 years after the tragedies) famously ends with an American bomb streaking through the sky like a comet and landing right in the center of Raccoon City. It explodes in a fury of blinding white light. Buildings blast apart and zombies are vaporized in an instant as a tower of flame engulfs the city block by block. It’s played as a “cool girls don’t look at explosions” escape sequence, but it’s a deeply unnerving scene removed from the game’s B-movie corniness. It’s not far off from the real-world accounts of Hibakusha, who experienced Japan’s bombings as children.

grace@gracemachine· Aug 7

Betting this is the first time Rayne Fisher-Quann has been linked to on GameSpot, but would be pleased to be proven wrong.

It is easier than ever to find upsetting material and to extrapolate that upset to a fundamental societal ill. When the personal is political, everything is public. In her essay, "west elm caleb and the feminist panopticon," Rayne Fisher-Quann discusses the urge to hold ordinary individuals uniquely responsible for societal woes. She writes, "the crucifixion of these individuals is ultimately a system of smoke and mirrors that obfuscates true systemic change while providing us with enough satisfaction to stop aiming higher." Though the work of Collective Shout takes place in a different context, it is driven by a similar impulse. Most generously, Collective Shout chases the cultural and consumptive symptoms of patriarchal violence while doing little to stop its material harms or to aid victims. Founder Melinda Tankard-Reist's own ties to religious, right-wing politics bear this out. When you cannot address causes, you are left fighting battles that don't matter.

grace@gracemachine· Jul 2

Hey all, my friend Sibyl recently moved to Chicago and almost immediately was laid off. She just landed a new gig, but it doesn't start until later this month and her unemployment payments have been very inconsistent. Could use some money for groceries etc. Her venmo is @/Sibyl-Gonzales-17

Grace and Sibye on a couch playing Guilty Gear.

grace@gracemachine· Jan 5

We are recording our episode on Pathologic 2 for @thesaferoom.bsky.social this evening! Send questions about staying awake by eating lemons, beating hearts under the earth, and talking to corpses to questions@spookygame.club

A screenshot from Pathologic 2, which depicts a figure in a skin tight black suit with a white theater mask pointing down a street.

grace@gracemachine· Dec 25

grace@gracemachine· Nov 2

Combat in Silent Hill 2 is not about danger or dodging, or any of the regular video game feelings. It’s aesthetic, whether it is intended to be or not. Most of the enemies (outside of iconic antagonist Pyramid Head and a couple of other bosses) are choked feminine forms, suffocating forever. Some are sickly figures trapped in bed frames. In every killing, James recreates the game’s primary trauma: His murder of his sickly wife Mary over and over again. (For a deeper analysis of this, please check out Astrid Anne Rose’s essay “Nurse With Wound.“) That ambiguity is baked into the game’s design, where, outside of boss fights, you don’t actually need to fight anything. There is a question of how much Silent Hill‘s monsters actually mean harm. The enemies don’t seem to appear to Laura, a little girl who also knew Mary, who moves through Silent Hill with total ease. Or perhaps they simply do not hurt her.

grace@gracemachine· Oct 18

I'm still really proud of this piece about Hellblade II's cinematography. bulletpointsmonthly.com/2024/07/01/a...

Long takes in videogames, in contrast, are fucking endless. Many end only upon player death or opening a menu. Others feel almost comical in their avoidance of a simple cut. Even films that are famous for using the technique, like Children of Men, rely on the tension of the long take that will at one point shatter. In the videogame mode, these images slide off of you. Because the camera cannot simply cut, it is always moving. We have to track away from a close up to a wide shot or whip-pan between two faces to approximate shot-reverse-shot. There is no promise that it will ever sit still, much less that it will ever hard cut. There is no rhythm to it and thus no art.

grace@gracemachine· Mar 30

In the first new essay for the Killing Our Gods book, I write about my past devotional understanding of Mass Effect, my current paranoid one, and bridging the span between them. graceinthemachine.com/2024/03/18/i...

In fact, I understood Mass Effect primarily as a religious allegory. Shepard as a divine child, the inevitable conflict of flesh and blood beings vs. robots a kind of original sin. The reapers, true to their name, come to cleanse us of our simple imperfection. They make us Gods, but not as we are. They chop us up, use our blood, profane material for divine ends. Mass Effect's final choice, between control, synthesis, or destruction is a choice of salvations, even approaches to sin. We can control or curb it, attempt to eradicate it entirely, or integrate it with hope that sin itself is part of the divine plan.

grace@gracemachine· Nov 30

Today!!! We are recording The Safe Room’s episode on Alan Wake 2. Please write in to questions@spookygame.club (or reply to this post) with your questions about loops, spirals, and other things of that nature. (Please tag spoilers on here ty)

Alan Wake on stage with bright red and blue lights. He’s wearing dark shades that could never save the day.

grace@gracemachine· Oct 21

National Writers Union is trying to support media workers who have been retaliated against. Please share, especially if you know someone directly affected.