No Escape

Hey y’all, this is kinda-sorta like a crosspost with No Escape‘s Patreon Subscribers (which you might consider joining if you like the rest of this article, js). Last week I shared an update with them about the direction I wanted to take No Escape, and I’ve been trying to figure out a good, solid way to provide the same information here without just copy-pasting what I said over there. The TL;DR of the rest of this post is: I’m switching up how I approach No Escape next year, starting with what kind of game gets covered and ending with how we’re hoping to cover it.

First of all, thank you for sticking around this year. I know 2025 isn’t over and there’s still always a chance for things to get worse, but I appreciate all of the ways y’all showed up for us as we went through a genuinely rough transitional period. Whether you shared or commented on an article, or helped us out on Ko-Fi, Patreon or GoFundMe, or just simply read stuff that we wrote, words cannot describe what it means for me that y’all are here for us.

Since No Escape started in 2019, I’ve always operated on kind of a “play what you want, write about what you want” attitude when it came to the site’s “content strategy”—itself a thing I put in quotes because it’s kind of silly to call it a content strategy when it more closely resembled a personal blog’s whims. Whether a game was AAA or indie, on console, PC or mobile didn’t matter to me, as long as it was something that genuinely interested me. For a lot of that time I used two services as my free game provider: Apple Arcade and Xbox Game Pass. I don’t think I need to explain why having an essentially-free all-you-can-eat buffet of new and classic titles to pick from each week benefitted me early on, before I had anything resembling a PR rolodex.

I was also, for a large part of No Escape‘s history, ensconced in Live Service Hell. I spent thousands upon thousands of hours in Destiny 2 and Final Fantasy XIV. Instead of checking out interesting shit on Itch.io, I threw myself against the wall of games like Call of Duty and The Finals. I tried being critical of these games but time and again found myself subjected to a kind of spiritual capitulation—”They’re fine,” I would say. “They’re just… fine.”

To use a tech metaphor badly, 2025 has forced a kind of factory reset on me. Since January we’ve published only three reviews: Final Fantasy XVI, Citizen Sleeper: Starward Vector, and Despelote, the last of which was written by the inimitable Nicanor Gordon. Why? To start, I simply haven’t had the time—between dealing with my mother’s funeral, grieving, cleaning and moving house, and working on my first book, playing video games has simply become less of a personal priority for me this year. Beyond that, of course, there’s the state of the world—it’s kind of hard to focus on video games when you’re watching the dismantling of the liberal state and an attempted domestic ethnic cleansing under “the largest deportation force in American history” happen simultaneously. Then there’s the practical stuff: “the economy is bad and I’m broke,” “Xbox – including Game Pass and subsidiary studios – is on the BDS list,” “I don’t want to spend 40-80 hours in a game just grinding.” All of these things—and many others I haven’t mentioned—have contributed to an understanding that I’ve gotta change the way we do things here.

So without any further fanfare, here it is:

We’re done covering AAA games.

The only exception to this is the Children of Lightning series, which remains ongoing and is something we genuinely want to finish. Beyond that, I just… There’s no incentives for us to keep covering these games, you know? When we take stock of the AAA gamespace, nothing is set to come out that has our minds racing. We’re not excited by the prospect of another hyperrealistic action-adventure game set in a generic fantasy or sci-fi or military setting. We’ve said all we want to say about games like Destiny and Call of Duty, and to be honest, we feel like the well has run dry in that respect, generally.

But the other fact of the matter is that there will always be a place for AAA games in the discourse. Every other media outlet covers them religiously. Like, you’re never going to miss an update about Grand Theft Auto VI for as long as you live. There will always be someone ready to cover the blockbusters. But there is a marked paucity of coverage for smaller games, including indie titles. Something like 18,000 games got pushed onto Steam last year, according to Bloomberg, and barely 1,400 of them made any kind of impression at all (with only about 260 of those titles being rated positively by 90% or more players). How many of those games – even just the 260 most-positively-rated ones – got coverage in the games media?

I saw a dev complaining about this a couple of weeks ago, and while there was some shit he said that I very much didn’t agree with, I can empathize with the frustration of doing everything you can to make and market a good video game—doing everything right—only to watch your shit get passed by at every opportunity. It also sucks to be a part of a media machine that barely operates at the levels it once did—something like 4,000 writers have left games media altogether since 2023, a mass exodus borne out of the fact that there are no jobs left and barely any freelancing gigs to speak of. I’ve personally watched writers come and go, the work unable to sustain them in a world that is getting harder and more expensive to live in every day. It fucking sucks, and it all contributes to this content direction shift. We’re done covering games made by corporations that don’t give even a fraction of a shit about whether the market can sustain their business practices, who cower in front of right wing shit mobs yet can’t be fucked to promote a healthy media culture, and who have no sense of responsibility to anything but shareholders—not the environment, not their audiences, not their employees.

But if we’re not covering AAA games, what’s left to cover?

The sky is the limit. If there were 18,000 games that got pushed to Steam in 2024 alone, and if there are however many untold thousands of games on Itch.io and similar independent game distribution services, the better question is “what ISN’T there left to cover?” AAA game coverage is a narrow snapshot of an impossibly large field, a cultural industry that encompasses everything from enthusiastic individuals working on nights and weekends to make their dream game to seasoned studios of veteran designers. And of course there’s plenty of slop to reckon with, but that’s a “same shit different day” kind of thing.

No Escape wants to contribute to a better culture of coverage and criticism, one that prioritizes independent artistic works over an endless slew of sequels and remakes foisted on us by corporations that wouldn’t realistically piss on any of us if we were on fire. We also want to help build a community of people who don’t only love video games but who recognize them as one part of a healthy cultural diet—one fleshed out by music, movies, books, television, modern art, sports and so on—and who know that a healthy commitment to the arts is a healthy commitment to our broader culture writ large. And while the title of this post suggests that we’re going to start working towards this vision in 2026, No Escape‘s new era of indie-only coverage begins now. In the coming days and weeks, expect to see reviews for games like Consume Me, Easy Delivery Co., Omega Point and Is This Seat Taken, among others.

We can’t do this alone. Expect to see more frequent collaborations between No Escape and our comrades at DEEP HELL and Kritiqal, as well as work with new friends and peers. We will also be seeking more contributors to write about indie games and more with us as 2026 gets underway. We want to try to knit together a community of critics who are committed to the broad project of coming to grips with independent art, and in so doing, create a more robust ecosystem for criticism to thrive in.

Here’s why I’m making this pitch here, to you:

No Escape is reader-supported, and none of this is possible without that support.

Honestly this is about as simple as I could put it. I spent a good portion of 2025, amidst all the personal stress and sadness, getting my ass beat by every story of games media woe. For a long time I languished in the uncertainty that I’d be able to do anything to help in this situation. But even though this year I’ve only posted about half of what I normally post, y’all still showed up at about the same rate as years past with double the stuff to read. After six and a half years I’m now confident I have a stable readership base, which is 1) really fucking cool and 2) necessary for our goals.

In order for us to tackle 2026 with the kind of fervor we want—cover more games! hire more contributors! collaborate more with our friends and peers! hell, even do stuff like bring back No Escape Magazine and the No Escape Podcast, we need your support now more than ever. For just $3 a month, a subscription to the No Escape patreon will get you early access to everything we publish direct to your inbox up to 24 hours before anyone else gets a chance to see it as well as an invite to the No Escape discord server, where you can hang out with other writers and readers and talk about games and other media in a chill environment. This is real material support: if we can double our current subscriber base, we can double our effectiveness, hiring more people to write, covering production costs for a podcast and magazine, being able to afford games when it’s not possible to get codes, and so on.

Go to https://patreon.com/noescapevg to subscribe for just $3/month!

We want to bring a different media environment into being in 2026. Help us do that!

Thanks,

Kaile