Jeremy Winslow
Freelance Critic and Reporter
A dogged and passionate writer dedicated to efficiency and veracity. There are stories to tell, and I aim to tell as many of them as possible.
PROJECTS
www.polygon.com
Ruiner review
Reikon Games/Devolver Digital
Ruiner asks a difficult question: Are you the ruiner or the ruined?
In the year 2091, everything is drenched in crimson — both blood and neon lights. In every corner of the desolate city swarms the broken, exploited, forgotten, tossed aside by Heaven, a megacorporation looking to score big off cheap labor — not unlike that of replicants from Blade Runner. Now more robotic than human, you are instructed to infiltrate and terminate Heaven by completing a simple tas...
theestablishment.co
Dear Black Men: If You Want Long Hair, Have Long Hair
Embracing the hair I always wanted took confronting society’s rigid expectations for Black men.
he clippers jolted to life, buzzing like a swarm of bees, waiting to shred through my short afro. “Hey, P, it’s time to cut them naps,” my brother yelled from the bathroom. Crying profusely, I sauntered to the bathroom, staggering, reluctant to get my hair cut. I plopped onto the chair and peered through salty rivulets of tears as black sheep wool fell from my head. “Why do I always have to get my ...
www.polygon.com
The darker the skin, the harder the game: How South Park pretended to care about race
Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s South Park is no stranger to social commentary, and Ubisoft’s upcoming RPG South Park: The Fractured But Whole wants to be an interactive version of the show that uses video game tropes as another way to help the jokes land.
The game’s difficulty slider changes the color of your skin, for instance. The lighter the complexion, the easier the game. The darker the complexion, the harder the game. If you want a greater challenge, you have to play as a black character....
pastemagazine.com
Pyre's Flame Sputters Out Quickly
With Pyre Supergiant Games, the studio behind 2011’s Bastion and 2014’s Transistor, seems to play with the central conflict of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Citizens of the game’s Commonwealth who participate in forbidden acts are eternally exiled. Pyre tells the tale of the exiled looking for redemption, a way out of everlasting banishment. While it has the capacity to tell a heartwarming—or heart-wrenching, depending on your point of view—story, it flounders in both setup and progression. ...
pastemagazine.com
Doomfist Is a Disappointing and Frustrating Jumble of Stereotypes
Regardless of how we perceive characters, black stereotypes extensively permeate media. From the Black Dude Dies First to the Black and Nerdy to the Sassy Black Woman, and everything in between, on-screen portrayals of black characters lean heavily on tropes that have been ingrained in media since its birth. Abhorrently disgusting and inherently wrong, these spurious portrayals paint black people in ways that are not reflective of the population. It’s discrimination feigned as fiction that wa...
pastemagazine.com
Nex Machina Is Particle Effects Galore And Little Else
In 1981, an ambitious 26 year old programmer burst onto the burgeoning game development scene with side-scrolling, shoot ‘em up arcade game called Defender. Just a year later, the same programmer, California-born Eugene Jarvis, launched 2D shoot ‘em up, Robotron: 2084. And in the early ‘90s, Jarvis—not Tony Stark’s British AI—released cult classic, twin-stick shooter, Smash TV. It was these three games that inspired developer Housemarque to craft its latest sci-fi, back-to-basics shooter, Nex...
gamespot.com
Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days Review
Quentin Tarantino made a name for himself back in the early 1990s with the release of Reservoir Dogs, but the recently released Reservoir Dogs: Bloody Days doesn't come close to reaching the same heights. It amounts to nothing more than a predictable twin-stick shooter that fails to live up to its own potential, let alone the film's, in any appreciable way.
There's no narrative to Bloody Days--no character development to create emotional resonance. The game at large isn't concerned with varie...
gamespot.com
Matterfall Review
Matterfall is another game in developer Housemarque's particle-effect-heavy catalog. Drenched in neon and engulfed in a thumping techno soundtrack, it posits itself as a game for those interested in tackling challenging side-scrolling action and chasing high scores. And while the intense action and pulsating score make Matterfall a thrill to watch, a sloppy combination of mechanics and a few crucial oversights leave this game both disappointing and frustrating to play. Save for a few moments ...
wethenerdy.com
An Analog Trip – Small Radios Big Televisions Review | We The Nerdy
Fire Face Corporation understands the teetering of emotions captive elicits and crafts a beautifully mesmerizing game about the oscillation between the analog and the digital; however, Small Radios Big Televisions is both compelling and disappointing in the same breadth, and this dissonance is palpable throughout its short runtime.
wethenerdy.com
On Repeat Like A Broken Record – Tales of Berseria Review | We The Nerdy
Velvet Crowe, Berseria‘s scantily-clad-revenge-seeking protagonist, is as one-dimensional as protagonists come, and though Bandai Namco attempt to humanize her toward the latter third of the game, teen angst and heavy black eyeliner only goes so far before you start to wonder when she’ll ever grow the hell up. (Thank God most of us have grown out of this phase. Most of us.)
wethenerdy.com
The Bases Are Loaded – Fences Review | We The Nerdy
Denzel Washington captures that grit, that raw emotion of a play perfectly in his rendition of August Wilson’s Fences, even if the film still feels like a play.
wethenerdy.com
A Hollow Fragment Of Its Source Material – Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization Review | We The Nerdy
While tantalizing as a thought, the anime began to drag, and the games continued to reinforce the same narrative told in season one of the anime, never bold enough to venture to new territory. Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization, unfortunately, is just that: a hollow fragment of an otherwise excellent series that needs to be more daring in its idea. (A criticism of both the anime and the myriad of games to come out.)
gamespot.com
Pinstripe Review - GameSpot
Though the presentation of these themes is tantalizingly sinister at times, the ultimate impact of confronting them is dulled by pervasive storytelling issues and tedious mechanics, making this less an examination of heartbreak and more a tale of monotony.
pastemagazine.com
In Little Nightmares, The Prey Becomes The Predator - Paste Games
Tarsier Studios’ Little Nightmares presents us with the third circle of Hell, wrapped into a Tim Burton-esque package comparable to PlayDead’s Limbo or Inside. In Little Nightmares, these nightmares are grotesque and terrifying.
pastemagazine.com
Mr. Shifty's Power Fantasies Are Palpable But Fleeting - Paste Games
Though Mr. Shifty makes its influences unabashedly apparent, it blends the two so cleverly that is both tantalizing and addictive in a weird, perverse, lemme-punch-one-more-guy-out-the-window kind of way.The result feeds upon our instinctual desire for rabid, frenetic violence.