“The more you play, the more you know me.” This is the line that hammers out, a single word at a time, every time you open up Alex Camilleri’s autobiographical game album Memoir En Code. It strikes me as an odd objective for a creator to imply to their audience. But, as I think about it, I realize t
Did you know that there’s an entire platformer hidden beneath your desktop? Alright, it isn’t there right now. But if you go ahead and download Simon Milfred’s game Omni there will be. It brings a delightful twist to the windows that we use to peer into software and the internet on our PCs. The idea
[This article contains spoilers for NieR and Drakengard] The reveal of NieR: Automata‘s full title and the first proper story details this week was significant for two reasons: 1) Holy shit, more NieR, and this time it’s about machines?!, and 2) We discovered it’s based on a Japanese stage play call
The intersection of jazz and grotesque virtual people needn’t exist. But it does—it’s too late to stop it now. The two distant subjects don’t meet anywhere else (to my knowledge) except on Swedish jazz student Simon Fransen’s YouTube channel. He has brought them together through common interest to a
If you’ve ever moved house you should be familiar with the peculiar act of emptying familiar spaces. In doing this myself, I’ve come to realize that memories not only lie within the objects we own but also the walls and floors we have them occupy. The difference is that we have to leave those memori
Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, the Italian movie stars known for three decades of action-comedy, always deserved a videogame. A classic Spencer and Hill scenario is a mass brawl, the pair squaring off against a jittering hive of incompetent opponents, each punch over-exaggerated in gesture and sound
A lot is going on at The Chinese Room at the moment. Perhaps not as much as before Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture was released, or necessarily more than any other studio out there, but what is going on is being documented in surprisingly personal and honest blogs. This is going to start off grim an
Tale of Tales has revealed what its “non-game art project” Cathedral-in-the-Clouds is all about by launching a Kickstarter to fund it. The idea is to create a cathedral that you can enter through a virtual reality headset and then, from there, admire a series of dioramas located within its radiating
“You know all this shit,” shouts Conan O’Brien, “but you don’t know who our second president was!” This outburst happened during Conan’s early look at Super Smash Bros. last year. He’s amazed that his partner for the video, Aaron Blair, knows who all of the 50-plus characters in the game are, but do
Knossu‘s wall textures sizzle as if they’ve been half-cooked on a frying pan. It’s like someone went nuts with the spray paint tool in Microsoft Paint and the most garish colors they could find. Have you ever bitten into something that was way too sour? Imagine that vigorous and unbearable taste car
With new album Yume, ambient electronica musician Helios seems to recall the beauty of lazing underneath a sun-crested sky. The music soothes by letting high notes drift out to a gold horizon. It seems to lift off from the soft fringes of grass and get carried out on a hot puff of wind. More precise
This cat is out of place. But maybe all cats are out of place. The one in Psychic Cat is probably no more suited to its environment than, say, my cat Smudge who fell through the roof of the greenhouse last year. The temptation was to call Smudge a klutz at the time (and let’s be fair, Smudge, you ar
Would you trust ustwo to help you relax and let out all your stress? In a way, if you’ve played through Monument Valley, you already have. I can’t speak for you but I watched my mum play that game through in one session and she was visibly chilled the hell out. I heard her deep sighs of relief and s
Overland has the look of something you could feasibly prod. It comes across as a series of cartoon-coated dioramas that are made to be admired up close. This is no accident. As designer Adam Saltsman explains in a new video about Overland, by having “clear, obvious visuals composed on a single scree
Glitch art is wonderful. It has the potential to be beautiful and horrifying. The best is often both at the same time. It’s got so popular now that most of us can appreciate glitch art on a visual level. But when it comes to talking about it, well, we don’t really have a clue. There isn’t an establi
As an escape from its arid deserts and flustered robot politics, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain offers Mother Base—an offshore plant near the Seychelles, a place to chill out between missions, where you can overlook the surrounding view of the ocean blue. Even so, it is still made of refined s
Have you ever seen one of those gross “girly” beauty games? They’re getting pretty extreme these days. It used to be that you gave a princess a pleasant makeover: some blusher, a layer of foundation, perhaps a new lippy. But now you can pull Snow White’s teeth out, shave Barbie’s beard (I kid you no
