The gaudy, meme-filled Dark Souls II mod that the internet loves to hate
Meme Souls in full-swing.
Chris Priestman
The Stanley Parable creator announces The Beginner’s Guide for October 1st
Whatever it was that Davey Wreden put out after The Stanley Parable it was bound to be met with critical and expecting eyes. You can’t make a game that deconstructs the notion of player choice with such gall and humor and avoid having your next creation heavily examined by everyone that plays it. Su
Fire Dance With Me turns Twin Peaks into an everlasting jive
Of the many peculiar clues that the dwarf in the Black Lodge gives Agent Cooper throughout Twin Peaks, dancing is one of them. Not just any dance, an awkward 1940s-style jazz step with a machine-like sway and disjointed rhythm, all of it operating from the elbows and shoulders as if his arms had min
You can play this psychedelic forest game with a moss controller
If nature was able to make a videogame I think it would be Alea. And it’s not just because it’s a twee, musical hike through a “psychedelic forest.” Nor is it due to its two graphics options: “Shrub” and “Tree.” I say that because you can play it with a moss controller. Like, actual moss, those gree
Turning Spaceteam into a card game that doesn’t suck
It’s hard for me to imagine Spaceteam as a card game. My burning memory of it is playing it over a table of half-eaten sushi somewhere in France. A bunch of us were sat around in a square, smartphones trembling in our hands, frantically shouting at each other as loud as hungry ravens. How any of us
Surprise! Simogo’s new "quiet" videogame isn’t what you’d expect
SPL-T isn’t what you’d expect from Simogo. Sure, the studio has certainly delved into puzzles before. You could even say puzzles are a staple of Simogo’s house style as some of its best games included particularly memorable ones: Beat Sneak Bandit, DEVICE 6, and Year Walk especially. But the Swedish
Direct the frazzled dream worlds inside forgotten video cassettes
The lure of VHS.
Scrub a hunk down in this gay shower room fantasy
Don’t keep him waiting.
Watch 11 hours of cats being adorable to celebrate the best cat game on the planet
We don’t need an excuse to talk about cats here. Cats are a pretty big deal. We have a “cats” tag and it’s probably the most valuable thing we’ve got. That is, before we set-up our sister site Kitten Screen and take over th– okay, that’s not actually happening (it is in my dreams), but a “Kitten Scr
After six years of teasing, The Witness will finally come out on January 26th
Even the release date for The Witness is puzzling at first. It pops up at the end of the announcement trailer like this: “0126 • 2016.” It took a good 10 seconds for my brain to realize it said January 26th 2016. We have another four months to wait for it. We’ve already waited six years since Jonat
Chesh is the drunken, rule-breaking sister of Chess
What would happen if Chess could get drunk? Would the knight fall off their horse? Would the queen take a fancy to one of the pawns? Would the rook go diagonally? This is what the slur-titled Chesh looks to explore. It’s the next game from Damian Sommer, who has already mixed up the choose-your-own-
Manifold Garden turns magnificent architecture into an endless playground
William Chyr has changed the name of the videogame he’s been working on for the past two years or so. What was once known as “Relativity” is now known as Manifold Garden. And, blimey, you can see why this new title was chosen upon seeing the latest screens from the game. It really does appear as a s
Nioh, or the difficulty of making a videogame that honors Akira Kurosawa
Can Nioh succeed where Seven Samurai 20XX failed?
The rhythm game genre is about to get a whole lot darker
You were lured in by the sight of a skeleton astronaut, weren’t you? Or is that just me? The idea of an astronaut left to rot in space grips me as one of the horrors of the future. At the moment, as far as public records show, there are no dead people floating around in space. But we have to suppose
Life’s problems are given a beautiful mystique in WEAVE
Problems are no longer immaterial in Nadav Tenenbaum’s “abstract journey” WEAVE. They rise up silently from the seas as huge spheres of ebony, blocking out the sun. Or they take up all your living space as unconquerable Sisyphean boulders. Problems cannot be ignored and they will find you. This is w
Make friends and hack reality when Else Heart.Break() drops on September 24th
Else Heart.Break() makes me want to smoke cigarettes. It’s not that I don’t value my health. It’s that being a smoker seems to be the easiest way to people’s hearts in the game. If you smoke, you can say “yes” when strangers ask if you have either a) a lighter, or b) a smoke. With that icebreaker a
To catch ’em all in Pokémon GO you’ll need to explore the world around you
Pokémon GO is a videogame that—get this—sees Pokémon invading “the real world.” Yep, you don’t have to sit in a stuffy room by yourself staring at a grey and green screen of mere inches in size to play Pokémon any longer, as I did for hours as a child. You can go outside and find a Pikachu poking it
The sequel to dys4ia explores the failure of empathy games
Despite being about “the experience and aftermath of getting hit by a car,” you’ll probably expect Anna Anthropy’s latest autobiographical game, titled Ohmygod Are You Alright?, to take the subject lightly at first. Get a little further into it, however, and you may understand why Anna says that “yo
An Aphex Twin tribute morphs the virtual body into horrifying shapes
Richard D. James (better known as Aphex Twin) has often seen his songs associated with disturbing, warped bodies. In the early ’90s, the label he co-founded and that produced his music, Rephlex Records, described his style as “braindance.” Pitchfork‘s Paul Cooper wrote about this terminology in 2002
Classic film noir is turned into adorable dioramas in this videogame
The city at night, only smaller.
Glitchspace switches intimidation from its programming puzzles to its architecture
Using a programming gun to solve environmental puzzles is one of those ideas that works great in theory more than it does in practice. That’s what Space Budgie discovered upon releasing the first alpha build of Glitchspace last year, at least. Yes, despite the positive reception from early critics a
A Twitter bot turns old Sierra games into beautiful glitches
There’s a narrator who routinely mutters random, bewildering sentences to Adam Mathes on his Twitter feed. He’s fine with it. He put the narrator there himself. It’s actually somewhat of a comfort. This narrator exists under the Twitter handle @quest_ebooks but started out life in Sierra Entertainme
The transgressive politics of a monster dress-up game
You know who I’ve always admired? Divine. She was only a stage persona, a high-camp drag queen and music act, but one that challenged notions of beauty and decency while entertaining the hell out of you. I first came across Divine in John Waters’s cult classic midnight movie Pink Flamingos (you may
The terrifying comedy of Mario glitches
A conversation with the main who distorts and defiles your favorite childhood game.
Painters Guild lets you play with history to discover how the Mona Lisa came to be
Even people who don’t give a shit about art are aware of the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. If you think you’re an exception then let me destroy that notion for you. Heard of the Mona Lisa? Statue of David? How about The Creation of Adam? If you have (and, yes, you definitely have) then yo