Earlier this year the Evilstick made the rounds: a small pink wand bought for a dollar in Dayton, Ohio, which contained a horrifying image of a demon-child slicing her wrist inside. (Snopes has since verified it, so it has to be true.) My favorite part of that story was the reaction of the store’s o
This sprawling polygonal blot is the work of the architecture firm RAAAF and the visual artist Barbara Visser, and, while it sort of looks like a laser-tag course or the Aggro Crag or something, it is in fact a vision of a healthier, happier future. We all know that sitting down all day is unhealthy
The Japanese company Yawahada specializes in adorable, artisanal marshmallows, but they veer from the norm, coming in flavors like chocolatey tiramisu, cheese tarts, baked apple, and so on. As if wrenched from Kirby’s most kawaii dreams, they also make little marshmallows shaped liked cats, which in
Well this is probably the best thing you’re going to see all day. Remember Battlebots? This is why Battlebots sucked. A group of 31 people got together in Japan recently for Hebocon: The Robot Contest for Dummies. The sumo-like matches pitted one crappy machine against another to see which could sta
“Scanline screenshot thread. Because 240p is all the p’s I need.” Thus begins NeoGAFfer Peltz’s thread devoted to capturing pre-HD games using pre-HD equipment. Now at 6 pages and over 250 posts, scanning through is a coffee-break-long crash course in the ongoing defetishization of high-definition e
Like everyone else, I liked True Detective. But I loved it for awhile there, namely the first four episodes: the relentless, pitch-black tenor, the delirious, psychedelic colors, and the subtlety of its New Orleans neo-voodoo noir. It pretty much hit that big episode-four tracking shot—which, in the
Submerged explores a vaguely serene, post-apocalyptic world that is, well, submerged, thanks to global warming, melting icecaps, and poorly constructed window air conditioner units. We’ve been tracking it for awhile, through screenshots and Vines, and now the Australian studio Uppercut Games has rel
Brothers Tim and Adrien Soret produced The Last Night for a cyberpunk game jam earlier this year, and it immediately turned heads. Brief, allusive, and massively confident, the game pulls from the most visually assertive visions of cyberpunk (Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell) and tells a story of th
Digital artist Dave Fothergill has created a cheery glimpse into hell this Monday morning. Utilizing the 3D animation software Maya, he’s created a video of what happens when a crowd breaks out into a run, the only issue being that there is an enormous metal propeller in their way. You can guess wha
I sometimes fear that Basehead’s Play With Toys is lost to time. Originally released in 1992, the record got a lot of acclaim and little else: an immaculately low-key live-instrument take on hip-hop, with songs that seemed to have ambled into existence. On the microphone, Michael Ivey split the diff
In his first proper release since last year’s titanic cyber-roguelike 868-Hack (which made our top ten games of 2013), Michael Brough aims for something weirdly sedate. The aesthetic remains defiantly his—glitchy, esoteric, and weirdly lithe—but the movements now are not excruciatingly economic or a
Two years ago, Hamish Todd was diligently working on a puzzle-shooter called Music of the Spheres. Inspired in equal parts by Castlevania, Everyday Shooter, and the geometric beauties of Islamic art, the game was quiet, almost still, and, according to Todd, its reception was equally quiet. “Aside fr
There’s a house down the street from me that doesn’t make sense. I live in a totally normal neighborhood in Chicago—lotta old Ukrainian people, plus a bar with tattooed dudes who like hockey—but someone just uprooted a full corner and plopped this enormous obsidian mansion in the middle of it. The w
Destiny was a beautiful game. I do not use the term lightly. In every tiny little way possible, the game was maximized for audio-visual spectacle. One of its most sumptuous details, though, was its attention on hair—which is not visible in the campaign, or in multiplayer, or on the pause screen, but
Well, this is … unexpected. Just yesterday I wrote about the influx of absurdly, lushly animated dark-fantasy pixel-art games, and here comes Children of Morta, which is like the apotheosis of the form. Its two-minute trailer starts with something I’ve not really seen before: a landscape which seems
Look, I think No Man’s Sky looks great. I do. But I’m also a bit flabbergasted by it: I have never seen a game capture the popular imagination the way that one has. It comes up unbidden in most casual conversations I have with people about videogames. A big part of this, of course, is potential: the
Rain World is part of an explosion over the past few years of games that express, through their pixel art, a very personal sort of fantasy. Along with Hyper Light Drifter, Witchmarsh, The Deer God, and Titan Souls, it sees pixel art not as cute but as ready for subversion, and an excuse to lavishly
A Night at the Roculus lets you slide a $350 virtual reality headset on and recreate that head-knocking Chris Kattan joke from mid-90s Saturday Night Live. It counts your “nods” and “pecks” as you jerk your head to the beat of the immortally corny track “What Is Love” by Haddaway. As Chris Kattan, e
We’ve traversed these blocky fields before—in Proteus, of course, and Minecraft, but also Eidolon, even The Long Dark. Still, the new procedurally generated world from Ed Curtis-Sivess holds allure: you can see the world being drawn, the horizon just a stone’s throw away, for one. We move from brigh
If you thought Monument Valley was a little too not-first-person, have I got a game for you. The utterly batshit Tri takes that game’s perspective-exploding non-reality and lets you run through it, creating triangles (get it) to move from platform to dreamlike platform. If you want to see it in acti
What is this? This is a solar-powered hourglass and it is also what God’s apartment looks like. The Argentinian designer Santiago Muros Cortes unveiled this futuristic alpha and omega as part of a competition to design an engine that would power 1,000 homes in Copenhagen. It won, because how do you
