Keith Stuart

Frome

Video Games Correspondent at The Guardian

Author of Boy Made of Blocks, Frequency of Us, Love is a Curse. Video games correspondent for The Guardian. Not posting here anymore, rarely checking DMs

Articles

‘You were among your people’: Nintendo Switch 2 launch revives the midnight release

4 days ago | hccegalitarian.com | Keith Stuart

There was a time when certain shops would resemble nightclubs at about midnight: a long queue of excitable people, some of them perhaps too young to be out that late, discussing the excitement that awaits inside. The sight of throngs of gamers looking to get their hands on the latest hardware when the clock strikes 12 is growing increasingly rare.
‘You were among your people’: Nintendo Switch 2 launch revives the midnight release

6 days ago | theguardian.com | Keith Stuart

There was a time when certain shops would resemble nightclubs at about midnight: a long queue of excitable people, some of them perhaps too young to be out that late, discussing the excitement that awaits inside. The sight of throngs of gamers looking to get their hands on the latest hardware when the clock strikes 12 is growing increasingly rare.
Violent and lewd! Not Grand Theft Auto, Shakespeare’s Macbeth

1 week ago | theguardian.com | Keith Stuart

Last week, the Guardian spoke to the team behind Lili, a video game retelling of Macbeth, shown at the Cannes film festival. The headline quote from the piece was “Shakespeare would be writing for games today”, which I have heard many times, and does make a lot of sense.
the 12 greatest homes in video game history

2 weeks ago | ca.finance.yahoo.com | Christian Donlan |Keith Stuart

This year’s surprise hit Blue Prince is a proper video game wonder. It’s an architectural puzzler in which you explore a transforming mansion left to you by an eccentric relative. The place is filled with secrets, and whenever you reach a door you get to pick the room on the other side from a handful of options. The whole game is a rumination on houses and how we live in them. Nostalgic and melancholic, it feels designed to make us look harder at what surrounds us.
Unreal estate: the 12 greatest homes in video game history

2 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Christian Donlan |Keith Stuart

Mount Holly, Blue PrinceThis year’s surprise hit Blue Prince is a proper video game wonder. It’s an architectural puzzler in which you explore a transforming mansion left to you by an eccentric relative. The place is filled with secrets, and whenever you reach a door you get to pick the room on the other side from a handful of options. The whole game is a rumination on houses and how we live in them. Nostalgic and melancholic, it feels designed to make us look harder at what surrounds us.
Farm Simulator: 16bit Edition review - the simple joy of ploughing your own furrow

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Keith Stuart

When I got my first job in games journalism 30 years ago, I arrived just too late to review games for my favourite ever console: the Sega Mega Drive. Although a few titles were still being released for the machine in 1995, the games magazine world had moved on and all anyone wanted to read about were the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn. It was a bitter blow.
Despelote review - a beautiful, utterly transportive game of football fandom

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Keith Stuart

Video games have been simulating football since the 1970s, but they have rarely ever thought about simulating fandom. You can play a whole international tournament in the Fifa titles, but what they never show is the way the competition seeps into the everyday lives of supporters, how whole towns are overtaken, how a World Cup can become a national obsession.
GTA6 gets it on: can the notoriously cynical action series finally find time for romance?

4 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Keith Stuart

Something new is coming to the Grand Theft Auto universe next year. I don’t mean super-high-definition visuals, or previously unexplored areas of Rockstar’s take on the US. This time it’s something much more profound. If you’ve seen the newly released second trailer from GTA6 – somewhat cruelly released just days after we discovered the game won’t be out until next May – then you might know what I mean. The brand new thing is romance.
When video games journalism eats itself, we all lose out | Keith Stuart

1 month ago | theguardian.com | Keith Stuart

Last week was a bad one for video games journalism. Two key contributors to the veteran site Giant Bomb, Jeff Grubb and Mike Minotti, have announced their departure after a recent podcast was taken down. The 888th episode of the Giant Bombcast reportedly featured a section lampooning new brand guidelines issued to staff and is no longer available online.
Drop Duchy review - a sprawling challenge disguised as a block-dropping puzzler

1 month ago | theguardian.com | Keith Stuart

The indie video game scene is currently dominated by two unassailable genre titans: the rogue-like and the deck-builder. The first is a type of action adventure in which players explore procedurally generated landscapes, where they battle enemies, level up and then die – whereupon they start all over again from scratch. The latter is about building decks of collectible cards (think Pokémon or Magic: The Gathering, but digital) and fighting with them.