Over the weekend, Willy Chyr encountered a rare and beautiful demon inside the code for his upcoming spatial puzzler Relativity. Beyond being a mere bug, this unknown corruption has emerged from a new shader Chyr was toying around with while creating a series of conceptual screenshots he deemed the
There was a trilogy of Blair Witch games back in the early 2000s but they missed the point. The 1999 movie worked because it blurred the line between reality and horror. Before the film even came out, the low-key website detailed the fake legend itself and presented its actors as real documentary ma
My mum used to flick the bag of slug pellets upwards so that they rained upon my brother’s grave with great spread. Each flick of the wrist sent hard blue balls of chemical into the air and I’d watch them descend over the soil. Some caught in the petals of the carnations. This taught me that slugs w
Sonic is a gross island. His fans sit atop his belly and cast lines out into the vast pools of the internet, reeling in fetishes you’ve never heard of. The result is Sonic fan art: trashy Microsoft Paint sketches, dodgy amateur photoshops, and more creepy porn cross-overs than should ever be possibl
We’re used to the first-person shooter being a series of gunshots executed through bared teeth. Bang, bang, momentarily duck behind cover to heal, bang bang. That’s the usual rhythm. They’re shooting galleries that throw bodies of various intelligence and armor at us to shoot. There’s little thought
Have you read The Grapes of Wrath? If you’ve been through the American school system you probably just hissed through your teeth at the sight of its title. For bringing up those aching memories, I apologize. But if you did study it, you’ll be familiar with how John Steinbeck structured the chapters
Think of all the words that an eagle typically conjures: mighty, inspiring, soaring, majestic. The eagle in Gathering Sky is none of these. I don’t think I’m going beyond myself to say that, frankly, it’s a bit of a shit. I know we shouldn’t wish an excruciating death on any of Earth’s creatures—esp
The world of speedrunning is a mad, mad, mad one. It’s playing a videogame obsessively to the point that you know it inside-out. A speedrunner will put hundreds of hours into a videogame, if not thousands, all in order to learn the shortest routes, and also to discover any way of breaking it to thei
There’s a giant skull fella leering out of the darkness towards a pale light in the new Dark Souls III trailer. As it has no flesh, you can’t tell if the facial expression it might pull as the torch-bearing knight walks up to it would be a sneer of anger, or a less hostile and quizzical one. All we
The dark, cutting lines and enormous Nihei-inspired megastructures of last year’s NaissanceE gouged open a hole. It hit a crest among those using videogames to explore an idea: one that combined wordless, inky concrete cities with abstruse glyph puzzles, all bearing a byzantine approach to structuri
I’m the owl guy. When my webcam pops on during Google Talk or Skype chats what you’ll see is a miniature china owl looking over my shoulder from atop the fireplace. It does not hoot but sometimes I hear it. Directly behind me, at the other end of the room, is a cushion with an owl embroidered onto i
From the melting clock to the overgrown green apples, the paint-chipped fingerprints of René Magritte and the flamboyant moustache of Salvador Dali are all over the topsy-turvy dreamscapes of Back to Bed. This puzzle game about escorting a somnambulist named Bob back to his duvet using the physical
French artist Philip Ob Rey’s latest project pitches sculptures “skeletonned with VHS film-rolls” against the grey skies of Iceland. His series of black-and-white photos and accompanying short films share haunting visions of a post-human world. It’s one in which primordial giants have arisen, tangle
If you’re a driver (that is, you drive a car) then you’ve probably been caught up in a phantom traffic jam at least once. These are the types of traffic jam that have no obvious cause. No one has crashed and the police are nowhere in sight. So what happened? Our own human imperfections, that’s what
Mason Lindroth has been building up to Hylics for over a year. It’s his biggest project to date, and along the way he’s been breaking off bits of it here and there, releasing them as smaller games. If you’re familiar with his work, you can recognize the ambulant skulls—coppery brain cases hoisted on
Spider: Rite of the Shrouded Moon has a title that would probably be accepted as part of the Castlevania series (which includes Legacy of Darkness, Circle of the Moon, and Curse of Darkness for starters). This is probably not a mistake. Consider that Rite of the Shrouded Moon, as often with Castleva
If you’ve never read Ernest Hemingway’s 1952 novel The Old Man and the Sea there is now an abridged version in which you arm wrestle a marlin. It’s a videogame with the superb title of The Old Man Club, which not only refers back to the novel’s title, but may also allude to a critique of those who h
Header image: Poster for 1976 theatrical re-release of Moby Dick. /// After Captain Ahab’s whaling ship, the Pequod, has been destroyed by the white whale he’s been hunting across the globe in the final scenes of Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick, he says the following: “Towards thee I roll
“It’s about divorce,” reads Gary Butterfield’s blunt description of his short-story-turned-videogame Early Frost Warning. You know it’s going to be a glum playthrough, but 10 minutes in and you’re thinking: c’mon Horace, a broken boy in your bed and now your face is all red and balding? Sheesh, man,
It’s not easy to jump out of a plane, y’know? I will do it for the first time in approximately two weeks from 7,000 feet in the air. I might be shitting myself. But worse is all the prep up until that moment—about 30 seconds of freefall—as it’s a lot of hassle. I’ve had to join the British Parachute
This is a complete coincidence, but a year ago—to this exact day—I reached into my gut to pull out feelings I’d forced to exist down there for a long time. Today, I’m doing the same, as I wrote about Fragments of Him then, and I’m doing the same now. It’s a first-person drama that explores how a guy
With his latest EP, Paths We Take, internet weird-house and software artist Brian returns us to his distinctive realm of ordinary life turned bizarre. It’s an EP of four songs, each one describing a chapter in a story that follows two people and their life together as it unfolds. “They meet, fall in
