Car games are typically shiny and chrome—vehicles dedicated to portraying their brands in the best possible showroom lights. They focus almost entirely on the image of the car you see in ads: sleek and stylish, fast, an Americanized ideal of the freedom of the open road. You rarely see them the way
Something is off in a flat in South London. It’s not necessarily in the vegetables growing rot on the kitchen counter, or the new Guillermo Del Toro-inspired roomie, or the soft sounds of banging that seem to radiate through paper-thin walls. It might be a combination of those traits, the malaise of
No Man’s Sky has been knocked by players since its release for false promises—advertisements featuring fighting factions, developer interviews that discuss rare occasions where players can meet on distant planets (which has seemingly been disproven), and more. As a result, Sean Murray—the public fac
The Trojan War is a comedy and a tragedy, a series of deaths that history will remember by its errors rather its feats. When they teach the Trojan War, they talk about a beautiful woman whose face was enough for an armada to be launched and a large wooden horse that defeated an impregnable city. Whe
The age of the video rental store is at a close. Blockbusters are the stuff of “remember when” photo essays and ghost towns; a blue and yellow sign of the times. Even independent stores that have long demanded patronage are closing their doors, murdered by Redbox and Netflix. It is in this climate t
11 bit Studios, the creators of This War of Mine (2014), has announced its latest game: Frostpunk. 11 bit Studios have been fairly mum about the contents of the game (or even how it will play out exactly), and aside from the announcement trailer, a tagline—“Frostpunk takes on what society is capable
How does a videogame introduce story to the player? Better yet, how does a game invoke emotion in the constrained physical world space of a game? We’ve seen it done in ham-fisted fashion: see the much maligned “Press F to Pay Your Respects” from Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, or consider the tradit
Warning: the content of the video included is NSFW and contains references to sexual violence. /// At the start of Paul Verhoeven’s latest film Elle, a woman is violently raped. The rest of the story is about how that woman, a French videogame executive played by Isabelle Huppert, deals with her rel
If you’ve been waiting to play Finji’s new game Overland, but didn’t make it into the limited First Access Program, then good news: Overland is now open to the public. Overland is a tactical survival game in the vein of XCOM but with far more adorable dogs and heartache. The game has you balancing a
The adventure game most likely to puzzle your eyeballs with a noir-inspired pixel odyssey—Jazzpunk—is coming to PS4 on September 20th. The trailer for the PS4 release is weird in that quintessentially Jazzpunk way; a combination of live-action shenanigans, a smidge of gameplay, and a dash of constru
Chocolate milk cowboys. Velociraptor billionaires. Unicorn butt cops. Bigfoot pirates. These creations are the basis for the works of erotic novelist Chuck Tingle. “The Tingler”—the name Chuck gives to his erotic books—are also the foundation for the newest game from Depression Quest (2013) creator
A product of 90s club-kid culture, Rez is getting a fancy re-release for PlayStation 4 and PSVR this fall. If you didn’t know, the 2001 music shooter is a bit of a cult classic, mostly among those who enjoy the rhythm and graphics that permeate its stylized game world. Like a psychoacoustic trip? Th
Prepare for one of the most famous deck of cards to hit a felted table near you: retailer AreaWare is releasing an IRL deck of playing cards patterned after the Solitaire decks from Windows 3. Designed in partnership with the deck’s original designer Susan Kare, the Solitaire cards feature the iconi
There’s a certain amount of nostalgia contained within arcades. Their dark interiors lit by bright lights, a cacophony of sound and the steady hum of people talking punctuated by laughter. At their best and worst, arcades are remembered as being sticky, hot spaces where communities came together. Th
Chris Wade is a night owl. He typically won’t start doing his contract work for other games (Manifold Garden and Battle Chef Brigade, among others) and on developer tools until 1 or 2AM, when the rest of the world is asleep. But if Chris Wade wasn’t a night owl, maybe there’s a chance Sausage Sports
We love Overwatch. So we assembled 22 of our best writers and set them to work—a writer to jump into the skin (or robotic shell) of each character. The result is 22 odes. You can use the “Overwatch odes” tag to leaf through them all, or use the handy list at the bottom of this post. /// If you were
Sex slavery is a difficult topic to discuss, and one that can be challenging to turn into a videogame. Inflatable Reality, a team of experimental game developers led by Brian Schrank, has attempted to do just that with a set of four games chronicling the experience of a Cambodian sex slave. Known as
What happens when Johnny goes to work? What happens when he buys the red dress or makes love to his fiancée Lisa? If you’ve ever wanted to know, there is an answer: The Room (2003), the best worst movie of all time, now has an adventure game adaptation. A 2D adventure game, The Room Tribute “is a to
The progress of computer graphics often seems like a long race towards photo-realism and precise, natural movements meant to mimic the world as we see it. But there are projects that seek to show the world as we feel it, and when an artist has that in mind, you end up with works similar to Nikita Di
Producer and DJ Sir Pixalot has rediscovered what is perhaps the first “grime” instrumental piece in the boss track from the 1994 SNES game Wolverine: Adamantium Rage. Grime is a genre of music that finds its origins in East-London from the early 2000s. The birth of the genre can be found in some r
“In the crowd of a subway station, commuters stand on the platform of an impersonal world, in a situation that may well stand as epitome of modern high-tech civilisation.” This is what Nico Antwerp had to say about the inspiration behind “music for jostling commuters,” a 2:32 track set for release l
There’s a mountain near my house where I grew up and it was a regular exercise for teenagers to climb up it as the sun fell, and then race back down chasing the light. Since it was a small peak, and since I lived in the foothills of the Appalachians, it seemed like a bent grandfather to the craggy p
Two fighters behind a curtain of pea green. A bobsled dives into a sea of broken pixels, tumbling into a geode-like fractured structure far removed from the icy-whiteness of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002. The frenetic golden glory of Fantastic Dizzy (1991). These and more make up the
Clocker, recently Greenlit by the Steam community, is a quiet journey through time-shaping mechanics. In fact, it combines two elements of time manipulation—the ability to stop and to start the resource. But this is no SUPERHOT. The story follows two characters, a watchmaker named John and his daugh
