Gareth Damian Martin
ArtReview
United Kingdom
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Past articles by Gareth:
The Boschian Horror of ‘Elden Ring’
The videogame, helmed by director Hidetaka Miyazaki (with worldbuilding by George R.R. Martin) taps into a history of pulp and religious art → Read More
Jett: The Far Shore’s Space Exploration Pushes the Ambient Possibilities of Videogames
The interstellar adventure plays beautifully with the vastness of the cosmos, while struggling against the confines of its toy-like alien planet → Read More
How repetition defines the masterful world of Echo
Echo is an indie stealth game that uses repetition to uncanny and brilliant effect → Read More
The secrets of Dishonored 2's mongrel city
I first noticed it in the windows: their subtle, curving mullions that rise and fall like waves. Those curves lend a romantic lightness to the architecture they are set into. You might not notice them when you first set foot in Dishonored 2’s Karnaca, but you’ll surely feel them. Like a thousand other details that litter the streets of this imagined city, Karnaca’s arches, windows, and alcoves… → Read More
El Hijo could be the spaghetti-western of your dreams
A man in black, little more than an extension of the flat shadow of the umbrella he carries, rides across an open desert. On his saddle sits a naked boy—a wide brimmed hat his only protection against the burning sun. The pair stop at a post, a marker, and the man places the boy on the sand. “You are seven today. You are a man now,” he tells his son. “Bury your first toy and the portrait of your… → Read More
Knotting into Dishonored's decaying city
Heterotopias is a series of visual investigations into virtual spaces performed by artist and writer Gareth Damian Martin. /// There is no such thing as a total vision of a city. Statistics, guidebooks, politicians, newspapers, tourists, maps, and surveys like to suggest otherwise, but theirs is a constricted world, an incomplete image. Those of us who live in cities know very well of their… → Read More
Destiny: Rise of Iron has learned nothing
I was at E3 when Destiny was first shown to the world in 2013. I remember being shepherded into a theater, the outside marked with huge printed artwork, among a group of whispering journalists. In that theater, we would be taken through the opening to the game: the wall, the breach, the first areas of the Cosmodrome. The person demonstrating the game spawned at what I now know—after hundreds of… → Read More
Dear Esther: Landmark Edition is a delicate, embalmed object
Heterotopias is a series of visual investigations into virtual spaces performed by artist and writer Gareth Damian Martin. /// Videogames have always had something of a preference for islands. These closed spaces, limited by a shoreline, are the perfect conceit for creating an enclosed simulation—an isolated section of “reality” split off from the world. Despite this, thematically, games rarely… → Read More
Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is a treasure among the trash
There is a sense, in videogames particularly, that the greatest science fiction is that with the budget to match its ideas. Most sci-fi games seem engaged in a kind of arms race, a process of trying to out-tech and out-spectacle each other with increasing elaborate retellings of the “save the galaxy” narrative. Yet, in many ways this is the realm of the blockbuster, not of science fiction as a… → Read More
Hitman's accent problem finally finds a solution (sorta)
Hitman, in most ways, has been going from strength to strength. The episodic murder simulator has seemingly found its form, with the space between each episode giving players plenty of time to experiment with its techniques and locations, finding increasingly outrageous kills and bizarre events. We’ve had “accidents” caused by launching a fire extinguisher at a Parisian balcony, setting up a… → Read More
The Psygnosis generator will remind you how great game box art can be
Videogame box art is in a pretty awful state. This isn’t really news to anyone; it’s been like that for a while. In fact, since the days of the second generation of the 3D era, box art has been on a steady decline. That’s a long time, so long that you might have even forgotten what good box art looks like. Perhaps you don’t mind DOOM’s painfully generic marine, or Call of Duty’s yearly scraping… → Read More
One last tour of Destiny's Cosmodrome
Heterotopias is a series of visual investigations into virtual spaces performed by writer and artist Gareth Damian Martin. /// There’s a set of stairs in my childhood house that I still climb like I was eight years old. It’s not something I do on purpose; it’s something ingrained, so that the moment I step on the first step my hands come instinctively down and I scramble up the carpeted ledges… → Read More
My experience as a virtual war photographer in Battlefield 1
Heterotopias is a series of visual investigations into virtual spaces performed by writer and artist Gareth Damian Martin. /// What makes a battlefield different from any other place? Our towns, cities, fields, and parks are all potential battlefields, with lines of sight, choke-points, defensible terrain and no man’s land, all waiting to be activated. But how do you design a battlefield,… → Read More
The disjointed Prague of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Heterotopias is a series of visual investigations into virtual spaces performed by writer and artist Gareth Damian Martin. /// To me, Prague has always felt like a city uniquely in communion with the past and future versions of itself. I remember my first visit, a local friend taking me to the once mysterious, now legendary Cross Club: an amorphous labyrinth of scrap metal occupying the lower… → Read More
Let Inflorescence City Vol. 2 flower before your eyes
What is a city? It’s a question we rarely consider: that word, city, being such a useful label for the dense, multi-layered, contradictory, opaque, ever-changing, utopic, perverse, magical, and mundane piles of decaying masonry where most of the world’s population spend their lives. A city can be a landscape, or a home, but it can also be an instrument, played by a multitude, a fiction… → Read More
Heterotopias: The domestic disorder of Uncharted 4
Heterotopias is a series of visual investigations into virtual spaces performed by writer and artist Gareth Damian Martin. /// There’s an unlikely thread of domesticity that runs through the heart of Uncharted 4, alongside the exoticism of its adventuring and the breezy violence of its combat. On three separate occasions the game puts us in a house, and asks us about its occupants, casting the… → Read More
No Man's Sky is a theater of processes
I remember making a mental note when I read that Sean Murray’s “favorite thing” in No Man’s Sky were the space station windows. On two separate occasions, he even went so far as to take people directly to the same window, as if it was one of the prime features of the game. “I’m going to show you the stupidest thing,” explained Murray to IGN, “A videogame window,” quickly adding “but it’s… → Read More
An ode to Roadhog is an ode to ugliness
He may look like a figurine from the inevitable Disney Infinity Mad Max playset, but in live action he would be Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler (2008). He huffs his corpulent form across Overwatch’s maps like a chain-smoking asthmatic, grunting like a boar with its head stuck in the plastic feed bin. At age four Roadhog’s mother called him in for dinner. When he didn’t respond she came storming… → Read More
How to understand No Man’s Sky
No Man’s Sky is out. You’ll have to forgive me, but that feels like something worth saying. Not because the game is the second coming, or because it is “the last game” we’ll ever need, but because, even after all this time, it remains a game built in service of a tantalizing idea. When Sean Murray spoke to Kill Screen’s Jamin Warren earlier this year he put it simply: “the emotion that we wanted… → Read More
Don't care about the new Prey? That's a mistake
Everyone seems to be a bit confused. Prey, the non-numbered reboot of the single game series Prey, (2006) has nothing to do with its own franchise. “Prey is not a sequel, it’s not a remake, it has no tie with the original,” confirmed director Raphael Colantonio, a week or so ago, in a video called “What is Prey?”. The video itself even has a miasma of confusion around it, with most commenters… → Read More