Airport luggage gallops, potted trees ride escalators, and soda cans cyclone in Carl Burton’s first videogame ISLANDS, released today for PC and iOS. It’s a “surreal trip through the mundane,” concerned with those transitory urban locations that lie between destinations. Its subtitle, “Non-Places,”
Ah, it’s so good when this happens. What am I on about? Oh, you know, nine independent game makers decided to get together and make a game each, then package them all under the title Ambient Mixtape 16. The idea was for all of them to use the same tools and format—a First Person Camera controller ma
Videogames have a history of being terrible at depicting young girls. The problem is usually that the designers want you to care about them, to want to safeguard them, but try to engineer that in the most obnoxious way. Either they’re being used as zombie bait like Sherry in Resident Evil 2 (1998),
Four years ago, Spanish duo Jose A. Gutiérrez and Miguel Vallés were still at university but had dreams of creating their own videogame. They were naive back then: Gutiérrez had spent years drawing and doing a Fine Art degree but had never done animation before, while Vallés was studying Software En
Amanita Design has teased its next game after this year’s brilliant adventure, Samorost 3. It’s called Chuchel and is being created by the team that made bucolic tree-friends adventure Botanicula (2012), including director Jaromír Plachý and the Czech band Dva, who have provided the music. It’s due
Videogame GIFs are one of my favorite things on the internet. Retro game nostalgia less so, but that hasn’t stopped me enjoying the NES game-inspired GIFs that are being showcased on Back to Bits. The website launched today and is a curated animation project created by Washington-based artist Jerry
Anyone should be able to play Circles regardless of age, language, and their experience with videogames. It’s a game that has mastered the art of communicating abstract ideas to players in as minimal a way as possible. A designer’s wet dream, no doubt. At the heart of its success is tying everything
Game maker and web artist Nathalie Lawhead announced that she’s making an interactive zine earlier this week, under the working title “Everything is going to be OK.” It’s about being hopelessly optimistic while everything is breaking around you. “It’s a cathartic dump of my past experiences mostly a
1979 Revolution is a game about the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79. It came out back in April this year and, two weeks later, the Iranian government announced its plans to ban it. Specifically, Iran’s National Foundation for Computer Games (NFCG) planned to ban any website or individuals selling the
RŌA is best seen rather than described. But, as I have to use words, I’ll say that my first impressions of it were that it looks like someone turned datamoshing into a videogame (if you don’t know what datamoshing is, there’s a whole site dedicated to it). Colors belch into each other across the scr
Visiontrick Media has revealed that its “fourth-person” puzzle adventure Pavilion is getting eye-tracking controls. The studio teamed up with eye-tracking specialist company Tobii to develop a way for the game to be played solely with your gaze—no keyboard or mouse needed. This is, obviously, a big
Three years on and people are still finding new ways to look at Grand Theft Auto V (2013). This time its French digital artist Hugo Arcier who has reinterpreted the game’s world without a population. He calls it GHOST CITY—a video installation that was first shown at his exhibition “Fantômes numériq
Tobias Zarges wants to experiment with the videogame form and its capacity to be art. This comes natural to him as a student of fine art, design, and music at Kunsthochschule Kassel in Germany. To this end, he’s working with programmer Moritz Eberl on Close, an upcoming game about exploration and ex
One of the hardest things to achieve in life is balance, yet it is utterly essential. A balanced diet, a balanced economy, a balanced environment—these are all things that we, as a species, know that we should strive towards. It’s what Even the Ocean is all about—a narrative platformer that will be
If you could shout “Heyooooo” into Firewatch‘s virtual rendition of the Wyoming wilderness then you would now be able to travel to everywhere the call echoed. That’s on account of an update that has rolled out for all the versions of the game—PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One—that introduces a free-ro
Based in the small town of Qatif, Saudi Arabia—”on the shores of the Arabian Gulf”—Light Studio is a team of five women who are currently making their first videogame. Leading the team as director, writer, and programmer is Fatimah Aldubaisi. The rest of the team all works on the game’s art and anim
Clément Duquesne has made a bunch of impressive games and digital toys using procedural generation, but one of his latest is particularly striking. Called Accurate Coastlines, it lets you scroll your mousewheel to zoom infinitely inwards on the shores of an unspecified island. You can target your cu
Sethian is a game that positions you as an archaeologist of the future tasked with learning an alien language. You do this so you can investigate the disappearances of people on the planet Sethian—where the language originates. Learning a whole other language might sound pretty imposing, but the cre
If you’re being overwhelmed by all the presidential election noise today you might be looking for a temporary escape to another world. Small Radios Big Televisions should prove an adequate host. Out for Windows and PlayStation 4 as of yesterday, Small Radios Big Televisions doesn’t have just one wor
In the case of digital games, the software acts as the variable, it changing to provide more difficulty as the player progresses. The controller and its input systems never change. This may be an obvious bit of analysis but it’s the observation that forms the basis of a project by Swiss multimedia d
Neko Atsume (2014), the beloved cat game for smartphones, is being turned into a live-action movie. Meow indeed. That means it’ll feature real cats—proper little fluffballs that deserve all the strokes—so perhaps it stands a chance at being the best videogame-to-movie adaptation (not that it would t
Montreal-based programmer Brie Code has set up a new studio called Tru Luv Media that aims to make videogames with the help of people who don’t like videogames. The reason being that she wants her friends and people like them to care about games. These are people for who videogames do not resonate a
Chirag Chopra, the founder of New Delhi-based game studio Lucid Labs, got interested in finding out more about Asperger syndrome after watching a few movies about it, including Fly Away (2011) and A Brilliant Young Mind (2014). After doing research into the subject, Chopra decided that he wanted to
It’s only right that sci-fi point-and-clicker Samorost 3 gets a physical version. It’s a game that emphasizes tactility through its biological textures: from the gnarled knots of a planet made of tree bark to the soft sprigs of moss on one of its greener planets. The “Samorost 3 Cosmic Box” addresse
The students that made Quur say it’s a game about the impact of violence. But it’s not full of blood sloshing around the dirty concrete of some decrepit virtual city. Quur has the look of a game so innocent that you’d think it doesn’t even know what violence is outside of a kid stealing its lunch mo
