Setting the Stakes, with Ezra Szanton

Everybody's Talking At Once

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 175.

Ezra Szanton painstakingly platforms his way over to talk about To The Flame, the first in his new studio’s forthcoming kinda-trilogy of horror games. He also talks about how to effective horror, what makes a game interesting to watch as well as play, and some of the potentially-actually-pretty-intereting applications for so-called AI.

You can find Ezra’s games on his Itch.io page.
You can also follow Ezra on Cohost, Mastadon, Twitter, and Bluesky.
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• Ezra’s Guide to Magic and Otherwise Significant Objects has Ezra’s name on it in part because of Bennet Foddy and Zach Gage’s 2019 GDC talk, “Put Your Name on Your Game, a Talk by Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage.”

• Here’s my piece on the hypothetical No Berlin Roguelike, as well as my Babycastles talk about masocore platformers, and about how Celeste fits into that tradition and also my article about the history of asking machines to lie to us.

• Be Honest is indeed featured in Tiny Mass Games, which you can hear more about in our talk with Matt Brelsford. We should note that Ezra also worked with recent guest Ryan Canuel, who himself is currently working with other recent guest Ichiro Lambe.

• Here’s the SCP Wiki (which is intensely creepy, as discussed), as well as a great video essay on why VHS is such a great format for horror.

• And here’s Ezra’s appearance on Party of One.

• Ezra’s studio co-founder is Fergus Ferguson, with whom he also collaborated on Radio Tower.

• Here’s Edward Ongweso Jr. arguing for the outright abolition of venture capital.

• And worst of all, here are Snolf and Snolf 0.

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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Prom” by The Spookfish.

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