Death is a Whale
Exploring how games tell stories through structure, theme, and mechanics. Hundreds of essays from Assassin's Creed to QUBE and XCOM (and some stuff that's not games too).
- Created by James Tregonning
- Located in Australia
- January 2016
- Free
Recent posts
June 24, 2026
Death Stranding is a 2019 adventure game from Kojima Productions. Starring Norman Reedus in the role of Sam Porter Bridges, Death Stranding is a game about navigating difficult terrain. Typically games have a reasonably frictionless interaction between the player-character and the ground – a hill…
June 17, 2026
Hozy is a 2026 game developed by Come On Studio and published by tinyBuild. It’s a cozy furniture arranging game: you pull stuff out of boxes and set up your house. It’s part of the broader genre of cozy games, so-called, where there are no timers or points or strict win/loss conditions. These…
June 10, 2026
Part of the point of the epic is that it’s so much work to get through. The Count of Monte Cristo takes place across twenty-three years and about 1200 pages, and those 1200 pages convey the idea of the years. At base, the epic is an example of how form interacts with content. A truncated epic…
