Further cementing herself as an architecture goddess, Kitty Horrorshow has publicly released a collection of three games and a flash-fiction story called Haunted Cities. These were all projects originally made as exclusive rewards for those backing her on Patreon for $5 a month, the deal being that
It’s very likely that I fucked a building last night. Now, hold up, I don’t know if I did. We hooked up and then I’m not sure what happened. Unfortunately, the erotic architecture dating sim Tectr doesn’t go beyond depicting your conversation with hot local masonry on a Tinder-style app, and into th
Back in 2013, Lady Gaga quit smoking by employing the “Abramovic Method” during a three-day retreat in New York. It led to this extraordinary (and NSFW) video, in which Gaga is seen chanting into an empty room, stood blindfolded in a river to feel the rain drops against her skin, and getting intimat
Zak Ayles isn’t budging. Sure, he’s released the first footage of his upcoming game Lioness at last, but it’s warped and degraded to the point that you have to squint your eyes and rewind it a few times to make any sense of it. In fact, it seems as if Ayles has transmitted the footage to a CRT monit
Dedicated to grandmas everywhere, Lieve Oma (translated from the Dutch as “Dear Grandma”) is a game that speaks to the way we come to associate places in the world with the loved ones we once shared them with. Creator Florian Veltman has now released it on itch.io after having spent the past few mon
Tokyo 42 is cyberpunk in all but look. Its future vision of Japan’s bustling capital city has none of the dead skies and drug-addled misery of William Gibson’s Chiba City, nor the clustered smokestacks and commercial traffic of Blade Runner‘s (1982) Los Angeles. Yet, it’s a game that has you running
Iranian game maker Mahdi Bahrami is the kind of person who answers a question with more questions. I don’t think he can stop himself. “What will happen if I add a short line to one of the tiles in a mosque?” he asks me. “If we take into account the tiling rules of the mosque, what would the whole wa
Julian Palacios, the Milan-based creator of Cartas, describes it as being “a short narrative game about the journey of a man adrift.” It is, in fact, more specific than that, it being bookended by letters written by immigrants who traveled to Argentina at the end of the 19th century. The game seems
We’re at a time when artificial intelligence is not only mimicking human behavior but surpassing it. The common story now is one of a previously human-exclusive activity—usually labor or a sport—being performed better by a machine programmed to perfect it. That’s why it might feel like we’re on the
There is a wild deer wandering the paved streets of San Andreas, the fictional city of Grand Theft Auto V (2013), freely roaming the 100 square miles of gangland and beaches. By “wild” I don’t mean that this creature is merely not of civilized society—a wild beast—I mean that it doesn’t fit in with
The puzzle island of The Witness, released back in January, contains a theater in which you can unlock and watch movie clips. Among the documentaries and interviews about science progression and spiritual awakening is the last 10 minutes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983). Since it’s been disco
It is Saturday night, February 27th, and I am trapped in a submarine. Moments ago I was dancing on my tip-toes across the sidewalk, oddly gallant amid the bitter air of the Bristol harborside. Now there’s a tall man in a yellow jacket bent-double in the corner, sick from weeks of tinned peaches—I tr
Oh, it’s coming. Kentucky Route Zero Act IV currently sits out-of-sight—somewhere among the hot haze of a distant horizon—but, rest assured, it is heading this way. No, we don’t have a release date still, but there is yet another teaser to polish with your eyeballs. Last time, we had only an image.
Pixel art has produced a new trick from up its jagged sleeve—responsive pixel art. Or, as inventive web designer Marcus Blättermann calls it: “resolution-independent pixel illustrations.” Yes, it’s a bit of a mouthful, but don’t worry, interacting with it for the first time should empty your gob as
Thumper is so fast. Like, holy shit, not even my eyes can keep up with whatever’s going on in the new trailer—how are my thumbs supposed to? This trailer, as you can watch below, is one minute of totally uninterrupted footage of Thumper at its more advanced stages. It’s like pushing your face up aga
Everything is coming exclusively to PlayStation 4 in the near-ish future. Er, that is, Everything, the next game by David O’Reilly. Not, you know, everything. It’s a simple idea with a huge scope: you can embody and play as everything that you see in the game’s universe. Damien DiFede, the game’s pr
The concept of a “game album” is hardly new but Davide A. Fiandra’s effort has a more specific goal: to capture good “record flow.” Titled Absolute Silence, Fiandre’s game album is a series of lo-fi and abstract experiences. Many of them do have a musical component but it’s supposed to be the mechan
If you were to rap your knuckles across Death’s wooden door you might expect a black hooded cloak wielding a scythe to welcome you in. This is the most well-known image of Death over here in the contemporary west. But the personification of our greatest fear has a rich history and comes in many form
Ned Kelly is prime videogame material. A man who commanded a gang, set-up a hideout in the Australian bush, and donned iconic homemade steel armor in his final showdown with the police. The bushranger and his tale lends itself to being fastened to the hallmarks of any violent, open-world game. In fa
BalanCity, due out this summer, touches upon one of the major difficulties with constructing a city, one that videogames often miss out: fighting against uneven foundations. The concept of the game is deliriously absurd—mount a mass of buildings atop a seesaw—earning the creators the right to summar
For Sam Rosenthal, the best part of building a house out of cards is the pile it leaves after it falls. “The cards remain intact amidst the disorder, waiting for an architect to make them stand again,” he tells The Verge. It’s in this that Rosenthal sees a metaphor, one that corresponds to his life
In a new interview with FACT, producer Tony Donson says, “I feel that maybe I’m the only producer within the contemporary music platform that’s using that sound chip.” He’s speaking of the Yamaha YM2612, the chip found in the Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive) from back in the early ’90s, and so when it i
That NORTH is about the current climate surrounding mass immigration is about as obvious as a sledgehammer to the face. It’s coated in 80s synth-pop sci-fi as if to cover it up but there’s no denying it. You are a person in an overwhelmingly foreign city. You must learn the customs of this new cultu
What’s the opposite of a pinball purist? Whatever it is, that’s me. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t mind pinball as a physical table game. It’s the translation to videogames that often bores me. The effort made is usually to simulate the table experience as accurately as possible. Yawn. This is a videog
Pausing during conversation can be terrifying. The ask is that you listen to your partner in speech, taking in everything they have to say, and then let you both wallow in a considered silence for a few seconds before your reply. It’s said that the person you’re speaking to will hardly notice that y
