We all sat around in hushed anticipation, our hearts racing for our first glimpse at Rockstar Games’s official foray into the current generation of consoles. We could hardly wait, our noses nearly touching our screens we leaned in so close, as if to not miss a single polygon. And then it started, an
If you were listening, you could hear most of the internet gasp at the exact same moment. After two days of obvious teases, Rockstar Games has officially announced the long-rumored sequel to Red Dead Redemption (2010). And it’s called Red Dead Redemption 2. Who’d have thought? All we know about Red
Originally scheduled to release on October 13, it appears the team at Drool decided to say, “To Hell with schedules,” and release Thumper a few days early for PlayStation VR, PlayStation 4, itch.io and Steam. For the uninitiated, Thumper is an insane “rhythm violence” game that puts players in contr
There’s an attractive quality to the crime stories of the first two Mafia games. Two protagonists down on their luck—Tommy Angelo in the first and Vito Scaletta in the second—find success through a life of crime, wanting nothing more than to rise through the ranks, to be wealthy, to be a “Made Man.”
Slayer Shock is an effort to make a tense, smart vampire survival game, but it ends up feeling more like a B-movie version of a classic genre. It’s not offensively bad or anything like that—it has a worse fate. It is bland. In the wake of a vampire epidemic, Slayer Shock tasks you with wandering a p
Red Barrels Studio decided to suddenly release a demo for its upcoming survival-horror game Outlast 2 yesterday. It’s available now, for free, via Steam and the Xbox One and PlayStation Stores. And it’s scary as shit. Outlast 2—as you might have guessed by the name—is the sequel to the relatively su
If you mixed MTV’s Jackass series with Bob Guccione’s Caligula (1980) film, and sprinkled a healthy dose of Super Meat Boy (2010) on top, there’s a good chance the result may be developer HakJak’s upcoming game Guts and Glory. Recently launched on Kickstarter, Guts and Glory asks its players to do o
Grants submitted by CD Projekt S.A., the head company of developer CD Projekt Red and GOG.com, have surfaced online, giving some insight into the prospective scope of its upcoming game, Cyberpunk 2077. That’s the next game from the people who made The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, if you didn’t know, aka Ki
Today, I sat alone in my house on my phone, catching, stamping, and releasing virtual paper airplanes with over 150,000 people from all over the world. I was alone, but I felt part of such a large, positive community. Created by Active Theory in celebration of Peace Day at Google’s I/O 2016 conferen
Even the best poker players are playing a game of chance. That’s exactly how it feels to play Landfall Games’ upcoming Clustertruck. No matter how good I thought I was getting at it, no matter how well I had done in the prior level, something unexpected would come along and put me in my place. Part
An alleged 2006 pitch for a Silent Hill game has shown up online. Created by Climax Los Angeles—also responsible for Silent Hill: Origins (2008) and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (2009)—the game was originally planned as a PlayStation 3 exclusive title. The pitch was uploaded by the YouTube channe
The easiest way to describe Streamer is to say it’s a sublime trip through an infinite lake, where a floating avatar traverses endlessly through a colorful landscape. But, it’s a little deeper than that. A collaboration between electronic artist and co-founder of Driftless Recordings Joel Ford (or A
“Did you ever write your name on game cartridges?” That question greets you at the top of the Museum of the Preowned Games Collections’s (MPGC) homepage. It is, at first, a bizarre ask of an adult, complacent with their belongings that rarely leave the house or pocket. But its meant to bring back me
Milan-based studio Santa Ragione has revealed its game Wheels of Aurelia will be out in full this month on September 20th for PC. It’ll cost $9.99. That price includes the game’s full soundtrack, comprising four songs written, composed, and performed in the style of Italian 70s music. The game is al
The Bunker is coming out this month, bringing with it what looks to be a fresh take on the full-motion video (FMV) game genre. It’s a psychological horror game that will have you assume the role of John, a boy born in a government bunker “the day the bombs fell,” July 3, 1986. Three decades later, a
After nearly 10 years of work, D-Pad Studio recently announced at PAX West that its action-platformer Owlboy is releasing on November 1. Owlboy began life back in 2007 as an attempt by pixel artist Simon Andersen to show that 2D could still be better than 3D, and it quickly gathered the attention of
Resident Evil 7 looks really gross. But, judging by the amount of work going into it, that may be the best compliment it can be given. Speaking at the 2016 Computer Entertainment Developers Conference, people from Capcom working on Resident Evil 7 showed off some of the ways they’re using photogra
It all began with a phone number hidden within Oxenfree’s in-game radio stations, or “anomalies.” When called, it played the song “Beacon Beach,” by artist scntfc, the composer behind the game’s soundtrack. Well, so what? Go back and listen again and you’ll find lines of morse code in the song, with
Simplify This Horse is, on the surface, a simple browser game made as a promotional tool to hype up the Swiss band Extrafish’s upcoming album, Simplify This Fish. That is, until its layers are pulled back, and what’s exposed is a game that’s obtuse, weird, and fascinating. Extrafish is a balkan-dada
Of all the collaborations that the disco and electronic composer Giorgio Moroder has participated in (collaborations that include the likes of Janet Jackson and David Bowie), a joint project with Osaka-based game studio Project Atom to make an Astro Boy digital collectible card game might be the mos
Pokémon don’t have internal organs. At least, that’s what Miles Peyton—a Fine Arts and Computer Science student at Carnegie Mellon—found out when he pulled the skin back on different character models from Pokémon X and Pokémon Y (2013) exposing “skin balloons without flesh or internal organs.” Peyto
Adrienne Shaw, an assistant professor in Temple University’s Department of Media Studies and Production, has been working on LGBTQ issues in videogames for over a decade now. But there was an assumption she made about the field that led her down her most recent path. Every time she would talk about
With as little hyperbole as possible, Oneachanchan is one of the coolest, craziest fighting games ever seen. Created by manga artist “daromeon,” known for his Kengan Ashua series (2012), Oneachanchan has been in development in one way or another for nine years. “I started drawing the sprites back in
Chinese studio Dotoyou recently released its game Koi on the PlayStation 4, making it the first game from its native country to be released on the PlayStation 4 in the West. Koi stars a koi fish facing dangers beneath the surface of its resident lotus pond, such as predator fish and spiked barriers.
In All Walls Must Fall, an upcoming isometric action game from newish studio inbetweengames, the Cold War never ended. It’s 2089 and Berlin is still caught in the midst of political powerhouses threatening to push the button. But in inbetweengames’s alternate timeline, the factions of the Cold War h
