Games

Shortcuts: January 2026

The Barista CollectiveLeave a comment

Considering how much we watch, read, listen to and play in any given month, it’s almost a bit sad that we only write about a fraction of these. So, starting this month, we’re trying a new monthly format: on the last Wednesday of each month, we will release a few shortcuts: quick impressions of films, series, books, albums, games, or any other damn fine cups of culture that we’ve enjoyed this month, whether they are new or we only just got around to them now.

So, with no further ado, here are our first Shortcuts. Enjoy!

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The Five Stages of Backlog Anxiety

MattLeave a comment

There was a point in my mid-40s where I realised: I have so many games purchased on Steam, I will not live to play all of them, at least not unless I start going through them one by one… and not unless I stop buying a single additional game.

And, looking at my collection of films on physical media? The same may be true. I have a bit more of a fighting chance: my library of games on Steam is in part so large because once a game I’m even just mildly interested in is on sale for US$10 or less, I tend to buy it. Films still cost more, especially those highly addictive Criterion releases I can’t seem to do without. Still: I buy films at a higher rate than I watch the films I’ve bought. The same is definitely true for books.

And, frankly: when I realised the extent to which my backlog would survive me? I felt an unsettling sense of vertigo. (And, embarrassingly, I briefly hoped that by the time I’m old, there’d be a way to upload my consciousness into the cloud, where I would then spend eternity working off my backlog.)

This is fine.
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They create worlds: the melodies of Silksong

MattLeave a comment

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

In 2017, a small Australian studio called Team Cherry released Hollow Knight. The game, an action adventure set in a world of insects, was well received by gamers and critics, and its reputation grew over the following years, as much for its challenging gameplay as for its melancholy world and atmosphere. Over time, Team Cherry aded to the game in various ways game – but the main expansion they originally promised, which was to feature Hornet, one of the game’s characters that starts off as an antagonist only to become an ally of the player character, proved too ambitious. As a result, Team Cherry announced in 2019 that Hornet’s adventures could not be contained in an add-on of the original Hollow Knight but instead required their own game: Hollow Knight: Silksong.

It would take another six years until Silksong came out.

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That was the year that was: 2025

MattLeave a comment

Let’s be honest: it’s no big secret that 2025 was a shitty year in many ways, so much so that at times, as if we’d woken up in an episode of Black Mirror, it felt like reality itself had installed a doomscrolling plugin. You no longer have to take out our phone or tablet: just walk around with open eyes and the rest will take care of itself.

And yet: not everything is bad. Whenever I hear or read someone going on about how culture, originality, cinema and TV are dead, I can’t help but roll my eyes – because there is so much out there that is pretty damn good: fresh, engaging, challenging, riveting.

See exhibit A:

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Itsy bitsy spider women and giant policemen

MattLeave a comment

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

Vengeance is a dish best served over many episodes: in this week’s Six Damn Fine Degrees, Melanie writes about the rather dark familial goings-on in the Chinese historical drama The Glory.

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Is this the real life? Knit’s Island (2023)

MattLeave a comment

So many video games are about escapism – but this doesn’t mean that the worlds we escape into when we play are necessarily better worlds than the one we inhabit. No, when we pick up that controller, we often find ourselves in situations that are brutal, life-or-death: warfare, disaster, the apocalypse. It’s therefore not surprising that perhaps the most common player interaction in games is killing – or its flip side, dying. Obviously, though, that’s partly beside the point: in a virtual world, death means very little, whether you’re the one doing the dying or the one who’s killing. One Nazi, zombie, mutant less – or, if it’s the Nazi, zombie or mutant who won that particular fight, you reload and get another chance at killing rather than being killed. The worlds we escape to may not be better than ours, but they’re exciting, and the reversibility of death is obviously a plus.

But is this all these worlds can be: places where we either kill or die, over and over?

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I’ll be in my trailer… watching trailers: Ae you trying to seduce me?

MattLeave a comment

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

How do the films we watch as children affect our taste as adults? And what if we don’t really watch children’s films when we’re growing up, but instead our parents take us to see Amadeus or The Last Emperor? Matt has a thought or two on these questions.

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They create worlds: This game belongs in a museum!

MattLeave a comment

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

There are a number of films that have been immensely influential on video games. Their thumbprints can be found all over gaming. An obvious example of this is Aliens; even beyond actual adaptations of the IP, you find the trope of space marines fighting insectoid xeno creepy-crawlies on hostile planets again and again – and sometimes, ironically, it’s the literal, licensed Aliens spin-offs that are among the games worst at replicating the Aliens playbook, more so than the games that are basically Aliens with the registration number filed off.

Another one of the clear inspirations for many games are the Indiana Jones films. It’s a perfect match, really: Indy makes for an appealing character type that gamers would want to play, there’s the appeal of mysterious legends and foreboding ruins, and the films are even structured in ways that lend themselves to being translated into the gaming medium: find artefact A, which opens door B, behind which there’s puzzle C, and so on, leading to legendary MacGuffin Z. Cue end credits.

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They create worlds: Game over, man! Game over!

MattLeave a comment

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

In the 1980s and 1990s, video game adaptations of films and TV series were a staple of gaming – or, more precisely, they were a staple of bad gaming. Especially in the ’80s, a video game adaptation usually didn’t look, sound or play much like the movie it was adapting, other than a tinny, chiptune rendition of the main theme. (Sometimes we got lucky, as with Ghostbusters, which would shout a scratchy sampled “Ghostbusters!” and laugh maniacally at the player in the same scratchy voice.) And the gameplay? It’d just be a basic take on a genre that was easily imitated: the side-scrolling shoot’em up or the platformer. Those pixels looking faintly like a human being? They’re Arnold Schwarzenegger killing bad guys. That blocky car-looking thing? That’s your Ferrari Testarossa, you’re Sonny Crockett, and the other cars you’re pursuing in a crude top-down depiction of a city supposed to be Miami, they’re the drug dealers you’re trying to catch. ‘Drive’ your ‘car’ into their ‘cars’ and your score goes up. You’re living the life of a screen hero.

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They create worlds: Walkabout Mini Golf

Matt2 Comments

One of the things that video games can do magnificently is create worlds. These posts are an occasional exploration of games that I love because of where they take me.

When I started getting into Virtual Reality with the release of the first consumer-grade Oculus Rift in 2016, the kind of games I was expecting I’d eventually play in VR were ones where I’d sit in the cockpit of a spaceship, plane or racing car, or where I’d run around exploring mysteries and fighting or evading enemies. I expected games that were pretty much like what I’d been playing on PC for decades, just more immersive, more focused on the experience of being there, in the virtual world.

What I didn’t expect: that some of my favourite VR experiences by far would be hanging out with friends and trying to get a small ball to go in a smaller hole.

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