What we've been playing - "I simply didn't know if a first-person shooter could work as a Soulslike"

Penguin Colony is probably the best pisstake of Lovecraft and Lovecraftian horror I've played. It's the best because it places Lovecraft's universe at a creaturely remove, amplifying its absurdity without having to drop any punchlines. Entering a ravaged polar campsite, I advance among burning tents and uniformed corpses to a pioneer seated on a crate, who is busily sawing his own face off. Ice and snow shrill overhead and Lenval Brown's narration rumbles in my bones, speaking of eldritch relics and unquenchable ambitions, of "queer creatures" and inexplicable deaths, of madness and glory, of "scientific explanations" and empires from other dimensions. I consider all this, and say: Fnaaarp. Another man standing at the top of a pile of sandbags catches my attention. I waddle up to him and his head explodes, emitting a gory spark that resolves into the word "sex". I regard the body gravely and say: urk urk urk. Then I flop on my belly and slither out of camp, chasing the whistling wires of the wind. For I am a penguin. These creatures, their flags, their words and their elder gods mean little to me.

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Rebecca is a scientist-turned-storyteller and professional ghostwriter who enjoys forgetting common English words and making up her own in their stead. She's probably stuck between two basically-the-same dialogue options in a Larian game as you read this (there's so much at stake, obviously!!!). Rebecca currently lives with two gigantic puppies, a toddler consistently LARPing as Lara Croft, and her Halo-playing husband in Detroit, MI. You can find her past work at Zelda Universe and Verily Magazine. How much do you need your teeth, really?

There are simulators where you drive buses, farm corn, buy a zoo and manage fictional Twitch streamers. With the vibe coding epidemic, there’ll likely be even more in years to come. As expansive and particular as the genre has become, few really step up to the plate to exhaust themselves on the larger, societal consequences of your in-game side hustle. Car Park Capital, a new satirical parking lot simulator, asks how far you’re willing to go to build the world’s most successful parking space. And whether you’re willing to dismantle society to do it. I’ve joked that the lockdown-era overexposure to social media seemingly split people into camps of new age medicine nationalists and folks who could describe differences between the Haunted Mansion rides. I imagine the reason behind Robert Moses memes existing at all boils down to Defunctland, a popular YouTube channel that positioned the mid-century car-loving urban planner as the arch-enemy to amusement parks across America. This dynamic is at the forefront of Car Park Capital, a game that resembles RollerCoaster Tycoon and was picked up by the tycoon tycoons themselves, MicroProse.