# ‘CTRL: Essays on Video Games’ Finds the Feelings Hiding Behind the Save Files

By Rafiqul Islam Rabbi · Gaming · Published Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:25:45 GMT · Updated Sun, 02 Aug 2026 20:25:45 GMT
Source: The Current Tribune — https://currenttribune.com/article/ctrl-essays-on-video-games-review

CTRL: Essays on Video Games is the rare games book that isn’t trying to rank anything, explain the metaverse, or justify your hobby to a skeptical uncle. It’s about the messy, complicated ways games get under your skin — and why the glow of a CRT or the hum of a handheld can end up shaping your entire life.

Edited by Dean Fee and published by Lilliput Press, CTRL is an anthology of 14 essays from novelists, poets, and game designers, each circling a simple question: what happens when you take video games seriously as emotional experiences? The answers range from joyful to brutal, often in the space of a few pages, and that swing is exactly what makes the collection hit so hard.

## CTRL: Essays on Video Games is a love letter and a warning

The focus keyword is right in the title, but CTRL: Essays on Video Games is less a neat thesis on “games are art” and more a chorus of people working through what games have done to them. Fee has pulled together a lineup that spans career writers and industry insiders, and that mix keeps the book from ever settling into one register.

Some essays orbit a single game like a sun. Others skip through a lifetime of titles in a kind of autobiographical speedrun. What connects them isn’t the specific cartridges or discs mentioned, but the way those games become anchors: for childhood in Ireland, for a precarious career in game production, for political anger, for grief.

That emotional range is the book’s biggest strength. These writers are willing to admit that games have made them kinder, crueller, more patient, more obsessive. They don’t treat games as a neutral pastime; they treat them as a force.

## Irish childhoods, save points, and Final Fantasy IX

The collection opens with John Patrick McHugh’s account of a schoolboy obsession with Final Fantasy IX, and it lands like a gut punch if you ever lost weeks to a single RPG. McHugh captures the physicality of it — hearing lingering melodies in bed, head “fried” after hours in what he describes as something close to a trance.

What makes his piece stand out isn’t nostalgia for turn-based battles, though. It’s the honesty about the uglier parts of adolescence: the pettiness, the cruelty, the way a fantasy world can be both an escape from that and a space where you rehearse those same dynamics.

McHugh’s perspective from County Cork isn’t just scene-setting. It taps into something that quietly runs through CTRL as a whole: a distinctly Irish lens on gaming culture. Consoles and home computers in rural towns, imported stories filtered through local realities, kids negotiating who gets the controller in cramped living rooms. The details are specific, but the feeling — that sense of games as a soundtrack to growing up — is universal if you’ve ever had a memory branded with a startup screen.

## From Jet Set Willy to Superhot: a life told in levels

Rob Doyle’s contribution stretches the timeline. He maps his life from Jet Set Willy to Superhot, using those two very different games as bookends for a lifelong relationship with interactive worlds. The shift from the blocky austerity of early home-computer platformers to the hyper-stylised violence of a modern indie shooter makes his essay feel like a fast-forward tour through gaming history, told from one person’s seat on the sofa.

Instead of treating games like milestones on an industry timeline, Doyle uses them as mirrors. The primitive chaos of a game like Jet Set Willy reflects childhood discovery and frustration; the clinical minimalism of Superhot lands in an adulthood that’s more anxious, more self-aware, and more aware of the machinery of both games and life. It’s less “remember this old game?” and more “look at who I was when I played this.”

## Inside the machine: making games amid upheaval

CTRL isn’t just about players staring at screens; it also looks at the people tasked with actually shipping those experiences. Úna-Minh Kavanagh’s essay shifts the perspective into the production trenches, beginning with a break into the industry via an Irish-language localisation for the viral hit Among Us.

From there, she sketches a picture of game development that anyone who’s followed industry news over the past few years will recognize: incredible upheaval, constant uncertainty, and a career path that can turn on a single cancelled project or studio shake-up. It’s not a dry post-mortem or a behind-the-scenes puff piece. It’s about the emotional whiplash of investing yourself in a medium that is always one market wobble away from swallowing your job.

What’s powerful here is how Kavanagh ties this volatility back to the games themselves. The same titles that once offered stability and escape as a player become sources of stress, pride, and heartbreak as a producer. CTRL keeps circling this idea: that games are not just media we consume, but workplaces and cultural artifacts that press on real people.

![Living room gaming setup with books including CTRL: Essays on Video Games](/media/2026/08/ctrl-essays-on-video-games-review-inline.webp)
*CTRL: Essays on Video Games sits comfortably next to the consoles it’s trying to understand.*

## Housing crises, 16-bit ghosts, and Mega Dreoilín

That pressure spills into Donal Fullam’s chronicle of developing Mega Dreoilín, a 2024 game built to look and feel like a lost 16-bit Mega Drive classic while carrying a very present-day rage. On the surface, it’s a retro-styled platformer; underneath, it’s wired to Ireland’s housing crisis.

Fullam’s essay digs into both the mechanics and the ethos behind the project. The retro visuals and tight controls are a deliberate lure, a familiar wrapper for a story about precarity and systemic failure. Where so much writing about nostalgia stops at “remember how good these games looked?”, he’s more interested in what happens when you smuggle a political scream into something that feels like an after-school cartridge.

If you’ve played your share of throwback indies, this is the kind of piece that makes you rethink what they’re doing. Mega Dreoilín isn’t presented as a clever gimmick, but as an argument: that games can carry the weight of a housing crisis and still be fun to play. CTRL keeps returning to this tension, showing how games can be both comfort food and a medium for protest.

## Gaming memories without the apology tour

One of the most refreshing things about CTRL: Essays on Video Games is what it doesn’t bother with. There’s no time wasted trying to “defend” games to a skeptical cultural establishment or begging to sit at the Big Art Table. These writers assume games matter; the interesting question is how.

That leads to some brutally honest moments. People write openly about addiction-like spirals, about relationships strained by long sessions, about the ways online play can enable both community and cruelty. Others write about games as language teachers, grief counselors, or the first place they ever saw a version of themselves on-screen.

The anthology format helps here. Where a single-author book might feel obliged to land on a clear verdict about whether games are ultimately good or bad for us, CTRL is happy to stay messy. One essay frames a game as a lifeline; the next raises questions about what it cost.

## Who is CTRL for?

This isn’t a reference manual or a coffee-table compendium of box art. CTRL is aimed squarely at people who grew up with games and are now far enough away from those first consoles to start asking what they actually did to them.

If your formative years involved obsessing over a single disc, wrestling for turn order on a shared machine, or saving up pocket money for a cartridge you then played to death, there’s something here that will ring uncomfortably true. The specific touchstones — Final Fantasy IX, Jet Set Willy, Mega Dreoilín, Among Us — may not all match your own back catalogue, but the emotional beats almost certainly will.

At the same time, CTRL works as a primer for anyone on the outside trying to understand why games matter so much to people who grew up with them. Parents, partners, or critics who still see gaming as a trivial hobby will find, in these essays, stories about identity, work, politics, and memory that just happen to have controllers in them.

## How CTRL fits into the growing canon of games writing

There’s been a slow but noticeable rise in smart, literary writing about games over the last decade, moving beyond walkthroughs and reviews into memoir and criticism. CTRL: Essays on Video Games slides neatly into that emerging canon, but its focus on Irish voices and on the intersection of everyday life and play gives it a distinct flavor.

Instead of approaching games as an industry to be covered or a problem to be solved, this anthology treats them as a texture in modern life — like music, or TV, or the internet itself. It’s a book as interested in how a loading screen feels when you’re 13 and lonely as it is in any grand theory of interactivity.

The result is something that feels surprisingly accessible. You don’t need to have played every game mentioned to follow what’s going on; the essays are written to stand on their own as stories first and as commentary second. That makes CTRL a strong recommendation not just for critics and developers, but for anyone who’s ever had a save file that meant more than it probably should have.

## Final Verdict

CTRL: Essays on Video Games is an affecting, uneven-in-the-best-way anthology that understands gaming as a full-contact sport for the heart and mind. Dean Fee’s curation pulls together voices that are willing to be vulnerable about the highs and lows of a medium too often discussed purely in terms of sales charts and frame rates.

If you’re looking for a broad survey of gaming history, this isn’t that book. What you get instead is more valuable: a set of intensely personal, sharply written essays that trace how games have shaped childhoods, careers, politics, and inner lives. Whether you grew up in front of a CRT in County Cork or on a hand-me-down handheld halfway around the world, CTRL will likely sound like someone finally putting your own half-remembered loading screens into words.