fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
After working a long day, when I'm mentally spent, without the capacity to read or write or watch any of the million backlogged entries in my Netflix queue, my preferred method for unwinding has long been to put on an album that I love and plow through some comfort gaming. I'm all here for new [...]
For several minutes I sat on my couch thinking about the story I had just experienced, letting Jeff Russo's gorgeous, looping soundtrack envelop me. I had spent the last two hours playing through the entirety of What Remains of Edith Finch, the highly decorated 2017 release from developer Giant Sparrow, and all I wanted was [...]
Animal Crossing: New Horizons holds the weird title of being the game of the COVID-19 pandemic. With charming characters, incredibly low stakes and no baseline of gaming skill required, New Horizons is a perfect way for nearly everyone to pass the time during the seemingly endless confinement of social distancing. More than its captivating score [...]
The kitchen was on fire. As a wheelchair-bound raccoon struggled to extinguish the flames, a teal shark chopped a potato, an eyepatch-wearing pirate furiously scrubbed dishes and a clumsy narwhal fell off a bridge to his (temporary) death, taking an order of fish and chips with him to an ironically watery grave. All told, a [...]
Simone de Rochefort's wonderful essay about playing Stardew Valley as Ernest Hemingway offers exactly the type of unique insight that makes me love reading video game criticism while also offering exactly the type of weird cross-genre mashup that I often attempt. (I also fall squarely into the overlapping portion of the Venn diagram of people [...]
Spoiler Alert! This post discusses key plot points of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. In the middle act of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Greez—a squat, four-armed pilot who functions as the game's primary comedic relief—sits down with Cal Kestis, the player character, and has a serious conversation. In the moments leading up to that [...]
During a recent episode of Kotaku Splitscreen, the concept of gaming origin stories was discussed, the general idea being that every gamer can point to a singular gaming experience that convinced them that video games were a worthy use of their time. Co-host Maddy Myers made the important distinction that this experience doesn't have to [...]
Warning: This post includes spoilers for Subsurface Circular. Subsurface Circular is a text-based adventure game, which is a fancy way of saying that it's an interactive short story. The player's perspective is that of a robot detective who lives on one of the subway loops that service the underground community of robots (called Teks in [...]
Final Fantasy VII's story is bonkers: A genetically engineered super-soldier overthrows the corporation that acts as a de facto world government and then, believing that he has a divine right to rule, summons a meteor to strike the planet so that he can merge with the energy of all living things, becoming a god. But [...]
Assassin's Creed Odyssey is a game almost exclusively about violence. The game's narrative, so far as I've experienced it, is about the violence that the player commits as an adult after being victimized by a terrible instance of violence as a child. Considering all that, the fact that I've quickly come to love Odyssey is [...]
Songs & Stories 