Static Lagoon is a game you play with your butt. It’s not as crude as that makes it sound. But it is as capricious as a game of Simon Says. “Sit,” its suave black font commands. And so you do. “Stand and keep standing” it then demands. Moments later: “Sit” appears once again. And then, much to the l
When Jamaican artist Robert Morrison Jnr. talks about waiting he is really talking about faith. It’s not necessarily a religious practice that he refers to either, more of a universal concept, a feature of the human condition. “I think our faith is constantly tested in our daily lives,” Morrison say
The novelty of Crypt of the NecroDancer is that it spins the cruelty of the roguelike into a beat-matching formula. You have to hop across the grid-based dungeons and attack the beasts that get in your way to a rhythm. Looking at it now, Crypt of the NecroDancer is probably the friendliest way to in
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Mel Croucher’s Deus Ex Machina is how unremarkable it is. Although, that’s not quite true. Created way back in 1984, it’s among the first videogames to give rise to the “is it a game?” debate, while its author asserted its position as a piece of art and an “inte
Ian Sundstrom has managed the impossible. At least, in my mind he has. He has found a connection between painting and turn-based strategy. My mental landscape positions these two concepts at polar opposites: painting is joyous and expressive, while turn-based strategy is stern and composed. One is a
If you’re not a DJ then there has probably been a time in your life when you’ve wanted to be one. What I’ve always loved about the craft is the gesticulations. Specifically, how the fingers are concentrated on spinning a concentric web of vinyl. The DJ operates machinery as a pilot would command a p
The modern American teenager has enjoyed a spurt of attention in the videogame space as of late. Gone Home was about coming to terms with queer love when young, Life Is Strange combines high school drama with time-travelling, and both Night in the Woods and Oxenfree promise an endearing adventure wi
What does a videogame sound like? That’s the question Pippin Barr has been trialing as of late. It might seem absurd at first—we know what games sound like, don’t we?—but he doesn’t refer to diegetic sounds or sound effects that go towards making a convincing world. What he is interested in is the i
If you were to rifle through the annals of videogame history you’d never guess that Africa is the second largest continent on the planet. There’s a distinct lack of African stories, characters, and art represented in the medium. Which is a shame when you consider how rich Africa is with history, lan
Header photo by Horatiu Roman. /// The farm is set into a dead-end valley. It has walls composed of old grey stonework, a single tractor, sometimes there are lambs. There isn’t much else, except the endless grey beard of the sky above, its ubiquity matched only by the hay-swathed terrain below it. H
Hac (pronounced “Hajj”) is a videogame about the worst parts of driving. Washing the mud out of the grill; changing the battery; losing the keys in the space between the door and your seat; packing suitcases and sleeping bags into a trunk that’s way too small. More than anything else, it’s concerned
You may remember that the US Senate intelligence committee released a report on secret CIA torture practices last year. It spanned hundreds of pages and concerned the seven years after the 9/11 terror attacks. The felling of the World Trade Center, and the Bush-era invasion of Iraq, was presumably u
“The vision, in a nutshell, is to let players experience different types of loneliness. But all in a playful way,” says Cornelia Geppert of Jo-Mei Games. And that’s about all I could get out of her at this point. It’s not a lot, but it hardly matters once you’ve seen what Geppert and her team have d
We seem to be in the year prior to the blade falling on the future of virtual reality once again. Either it will tumble back into its pit as it did in the late ’90s, or we’ll see it soar from the cusp it has been riding for the past couple of years and into our everyday lives. There’s too much ridin
Taphophobia, the fear of being buried alive, is described as being “irrational.” It’s not. An irrational fear is being scared of being shot into orbit while sleeping, or crocodiles crawling down your chimney—the likelihood of either happening is super slim. But you could be buried alive tonight or t
“Deep breath.” /// Swedish pair Simon Flesser and Magnus Gardebäck, the two personalities that form Simogo, have proven their talent in producing air-sucking audiences. Year Walk was a creepy folk-thriller that you gasped along to. DEVICE 6 used text as a path to weave a tale of regular staccato; yo
SEAQUEST1992 might be the most vaporwave game ever made. This isn’t only due to its deliberate similarities to 1992’s action-adventure Ecco the Dolphin—which has since lent its namesake to vaporwave’s iconic ’80s-pop mixtape Eccojams—it’s a smorgasbord of the movement’s entire characteristics. It’s
