Giovanni Colantonio
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Writing For
Digital Trends 
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“Elden Ring: Nightreign is a thrilling co-op game kneecapped by archaic online integration.”
“To a T's well-intentioned story about inclusivity misses key nuances about disability.”
“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown makes turn-based tactics feel as fast-paced as a John Wick brawl.”
Just a few missions into Doom: The Dark Ages, I felt like I’d reached the apex of action games. There I was behind the controls of an enormous Atlan mech, eclipsing the kind of battleground that felt enormous to me moments before. The sky above me was scorched. Buildings turned to ruins under my feet. One by one, an army of demonic kaiju ate my metallic fists. How can it get any bigger and badder than this?
To make it in today’s cutthroat world, sometimes it feels like you have to be a taker to survive. It’s a ruthless mentality that makes the rich richer, crooked politicians more powerful, and countries more bloodthirsty. They take, take, and take until there’s nothing left for the rest of us, hoarding money, eliminating jobs, and destroying homes in the name of self preservation. Perhaps that’s what makes your typical video game so appealing. In something like Red Dead Redemption 2, players get to live out a true power fantasy: one where a world is theirs to take. Animals exist to be skinned, plants to be plucked, and corpses to be looted. Even in games where we’re meant to be the “good guy,” we’re often embodying the world of the worst. We become natural disasters that ravage worlds until we choose to stop playing.
How is a person expected to do a job with no resources? That’s the question that intergalactic insurance agent Nina Pasadena comes up against in Skin Deep, a miniature immersive sim from Blendo. Pasadena is tasked with protecting spaceships full of cats from pirates, but her corporate overlords haven’t given her much to work with. Banana peels, boxes of black pepper, and soap all become improvisational weapons because there’s not much else to work with. Can’t a girl at least get a gun?
When you grow up in a small town, punk rock isn’t just music: It’s a lifeline. Fuzzed out guitars blaring out of garages become the soundtrack of rebellion. It’s the music that the cops tell you to turn down, that your parents can’t stand, that your politicians try to demonize. It is loud. It is antagonistic. And in Lost Records: Bloom and Rage, it is freedom.
Some games are finely-tuned sports cars. Others are total lemons. Rusty Rabbit is neither; it’s a pile of scraps.
Night after night of frustration and euphoria have all led me to this moment. There’s no action, but my heart is racing. I feel like I’m about to emerge from a cocoon. There is another face beneath my own, another brain bulging inside my own.