Chris Priestman

Nintendo Switch lets you take games anywhere

Nintendo has finally unveiled its next big console. Codenamed Nintendo NX, today the Mario-faced company revealed the Nintendo Switch with a proper three-and-a-half minute trailer. The “Switch” name refers to the console’s dual purpose. Where there was once a time when Nintendo had separate handheld

Artist uses videogame to create an “endlessly mutating death labyrinth”

The wonderful opportunity of videogames for an architect is that they allow for the creation of structures impossible to realize in the physical realm. Sure, for many years, pen and paper has offered the same deal, but not quite. Software lends itself to a virtual space that can be freely explored f

Figment will turn dream spaces into an interactive playground

At last, several months after first revealing concept art and screenshots for its dreampunk game Figment, Danish studio Bedtime Digital has more to show. It comes in the form of a three-minute long video, which features not only the game in action for the first time, but also lead designer Jonas Byr

Data rot: Death and dying in the virtual age

This is a preview of an article you can read on our new website dedicated to virtual reality, Versions. Illustration by Gareth Damian Martin /// “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to reproaches and everlasting abhorrence” (Daniel 12:

Samorost 3’s fairy tale of microbiology is now on iPhone

Samorost 3 is a game that cares about the tiniest organisms on the planet. It’s made of them: curious bugs that harvest moss, fungi blown up to the size of three-story houses, tree knots as gargantuan as an abyss. It seems fitting then, that Samorost 3 is now available on iPhone and iPad; smaller sc

Get ready to suffer in Agony’s depraved vision of hell

Who do you think was the first person to start wrecking shit in Hell? It couldn’t have always been a nightmare ditch fraught with furious anger and the scabbed lamentations of sinners. Someone must have made like Saturn in Goya’s famous oil painting and started to devour all their children or someth

The brilliant clumsiness of Grow Up

There’s a blinking emoticon of a robot waving its arms around. It has the kind of joy that should be reserved for kids at a birthday party, not a loading screen. Once the bar is filled the robot appears again—now in full 3D, a red shell like a Lego brick—but this time it’s animated like a drunk who’

A new autobiographical game that will be set in and around Doom II

I’ve never met JP LeBreton but I know him because he knows the original Doom series. He wrote what is probably the most insightful design analysis of the game back in 2010; before he became a level designer for BioShock (2007) he learned the craft with Doom‘s level editor (and then demade his BioSho

Disappointed by No Man’s Sky? Here are 10 cheap alternates

Given the mixed reaction to No Man’s Sky—we love it, others not so much—plus the fact that you have to lay down $60 on it in one go (not to mention the troubles with the PC version), perhaps you’re hesitant to buy in. Or, perhaps you’ve played it and have been disappointed by it. That’s fine. But th

Who you kidding? McCree is Overwatch’s true shooter

We love Overwatch. So we assembled 22 of our best writers and set them to work—a writer to jump into the skin (or robotic shell) of each character. The result is 22 odes. You can use the “Overwatch odes” tag to leaf through them all, or use the handy list at the bottom of this post. /// Legends of g

A videogame tribute to growing up around the Yugoslav Wars

Ivan Notaros appears in Issue 9 of Kill Screen’s print magazine. It launches on August 8th, but you can get 10 percent off before that date with the discount code RELAUNCH. /// Ivan Notaros is constantly flooded with new game ideas. It’s the result of endlessly tinkering with videogame physics and a

New documentary hopes the “indie” game invasion of Japan is a good thing

One of the first things that Anne Ferrero says to me is that her new documentary isn’t “Indie Game: The Movie [2012] in Japan.” She tells me this as she’s aware that many people will assume that to be the case. But it’s not just a matter of a director looking to ensure that her potential audience is

Orbyss brings the beauty of ribbon gymnastics to your phone

Super Hexagon (2012) has you think in hexagons, Orbyss in circles. Repeat that: Orbyss. Circles. Don’t stop there, either. You should chant this to yourself quietly—or just in your head—as you play Orbyss. You’re gonna need to. Circles, circles, circles. Loops, loops, loops. For if you don’t drill t

How Tumblr is shaping the next generation of teenagers

It feels inappropriate to talk about a post-Brexit “fallout,” but the results of June 23rd’s referendum in the UK—in which 52 percent of the voting population urged for us to leave the EU—have pushed the term into usage. The fallout isn’t nuclear, as most writers adopting the term mean to imply, but

The hell of finishing a game and having nothing else to do

My grandmother cannot be seen. She is in the room but hardly visible—consumed by the beige. Her gradual decline into camouflage was incidental; the result of years spent sunk in her yellowed sofa, watching afternoon quiz shows and staining the walls with a million cigarettes. “Nan?!” I call out into

The dream behind Abzû’s alluring underwater world

The “dream” of scuba diving is separated by the actual, body-in-water act by one significant detail: there is no equipment. To scuba dive, you must submerge with a wetsuit, mask, flippers, then there’s the air cylinder, compass, line cutter, and dive light. There’s more too and it all bears down upo

Dive into ABZÛ’s beautiful ocean world on August 2nd

ABZÛ has pinks, it has blues, it has greens, it has oranges. It has whales, jellyfish, angler fish, and dolphins. And all of it is going to flourish on your PlayStation 4 or PC on August 2nd. I can’t frickin’ wait.  This is a game especially for those who, like me, have a penchant for underwater lev

God of War is the new daddy in town

Upon seeing the new Norse mythology reboot of God of War at Sony’s E3 2016 press conference last night, I was ready to declare Kratos the new God of Phwoarr. I changed my mind pretty quick. Just because Kratos has a beard now doesn’t automatically put him up there with the lumbersexual appeal of Hot

Let the tears flow: The Last Guardian is coming out this October

I already want to cry. No, it’s not that The Last Guardian has a proper release date of October 25th now—which, you know, at last, it’s been 11 years since Shadow of the Colossus (2005) for crying out loud. It’s that the first minute or so of the game’s E3 trailer features the many whines and sobs o

The next game from the creators of LIMBO goes full-on George Orwell

It’s been six years since black-and-white sidescroller LIMBO (2010) came out. It might not feel that long—it doesn’t to me—due to it having lingered with an almost ghostly presence over the world of videogames. Small or large, it didn’t matter, many games have since adapted LIMBO‘s foggy chiaroscuro

Phew, No Man’s Sky has been delayed to August

It’s been tense leading up to the arrival of No Man’s Sky, especially if you follow the game’s lead programmer Sean Murray as he occasionally lifts his head from the milieu of computer code to make appearances around the net. “Anyone been to sleep yet?” asks one of his latest tweets. You can see the

It’s time to confront the uncanny potential of virtual architecture

A room enclosed on all sides sits naked in grayspace. Inside is a trunk, a bed, a tube, a radiator, a light, and little else. A sharp sound swells and suddenly the room snaps out of place. Now it is upside-down. You can’t even enter through the open doorway, barely able to peer inside through the wi

The English melancholia of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

This article is part of our lead-up to Kill Screen Festival where Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture artist Alex Grahame will be speaking. /// “These are the dark November days when the English hang themselves!” – Voltaire /// The English are known for a number of bred-in-the-bone traits but chief amon

Deidia, a love letter to broken games and abandonware

When Barch released DEIOS back in 2014 there was something immediately off about it. It proposed that you were a man. It proposed that this man assembled guns from hundreds of possible parts. It proposed that with one of these guns this man would shoot gods until they were dead. But all the guns wer