A Light in Chorus looks like flying out of a major airport at night as the sources of light that dot the runway recede to tiny speckled plots and soon millions of stars are strangely delineating the arteries of the city from the black. Except this game transpires in an ethereal forest that has mytho
The song is called “Radiation Therapy” by a noisecore artist going by the name of Wolfshirt. (Googling produced no additional information other than this superlative entry on Urban Dictionary: Wolf shirts generally possess an almost magnetic effect on women; who as if under a spell, cannot quench th
I’ve been sick with flu for the past week, and occasionally subject to fever dreams, the half-waking, half-sleeping kind. One was of cockroaches outside the window conspiring telepathically to invade the house. So I had to pinch myself when I got the email for the Kickstarter project Dancers of War,
In first-person shooters, we call them aimbots—little modifications to the code that give your shot a superhumanly unfair advantage. But in real-life, we just call them scary. Designed by hunting enthusiasts (who else?) at Sandia National Laboratories, a defense contractor that makes lethal weaponr
Seems obvious, but apparently not. In an interview with the Nikkei, translated by the good people at Siliconera, Square president Yosuke Matsuda admits, “We weren’t able to see this clearly up until now, but fans of JRPGs are really spread around the world.” He seems genuinely baffled at how title
Shelter, our favorite game of last year about one adorable sacrificial mama badger, is getting a part 2. As you can see in the new teaser and classy, origami-inspired concept art, Might and Delight is giving our heroine of the first game a reprieve. In her steed is another carnivorous matriarch: a
Yes, it sounded hypothetically cool when we read about it in cyberpunk pulps, but it turns out that android go-go dancers are terrifying as hell. Take this rump-shaking atrocity, a life-size animatronic woman that is smeared in dirt, wears a thong and a bird mask, and might be modeled after Lady Gag
There are so many ways a videogame adaptation of the movie My Girl could go wrong, and My Girl: The Movie: The Video Game capitalizes on every single one of them, starting with the unwieldy name. Yes, this is one of those jokey platformers like The Great Gatsby whose punchline in its entirety is tha
There are plenty of valid reasons to throw our hands up and abandon game reviews. For starters, we’re living in a day and age of early access and perpetual updates where games like Minecraft exist in unfinished states. On top of that, it is practically guaranteed that no two players will ever have t
Monopoly is, factually speaking, a bad game. But now the boardgame about greedy banking is trying to set things right after all those yawn-inducing living room snooze-fests, which doubtlessly soured millions of Americans to the pastime of boardgaming before they reached the age of consent. Hasbro, t
The impression one gets from a steady diet of FPS’s is that everyone is a hero, which is ridiculous and borders on propaganda and doesn’t take into account the far greater number of civilians whose lives become sleepless nightmares. Well, until now. The point of This War of Mine, a horrific, surviv
The reaction to the news of Facebook buying Oculus Rift could be classified as reactionary, as reactions tend to be. But according to Rift founder Palmer Luckey, there are some very good reasons to be enthused about the buyout. Talking with the Reddit community, Luckey explained how the move will on
This is not the polar caps are melting post. Presumably, somewhere in the fine print, something about this business transaction makes sense. Facebook has laid on the table 2 billion dollars in cash and stock options to purchase the crowdfunded virtual reality headset maker outright. Now before we g
The interesting thing about SightLine is how it fucks with your sense of perception in manifold head-trippy ways: it’s like psychosis without actual psychosis, beautiful-looking and equally terrifying. For one, it’s played in virtual reality, and that’s always a bit unnerving. But it’s also one of t
In the pantheon of great goat games—yes, I find it as hard to believe that this is a thing as you, but it’s true—Escape Goat sits at the high altar, alongside Jeff Minter’s GoatUp and the more sim-y Goat Simulator. The trinity has remained in perfect equilibrium for months, but with its sequel, Esca
We generally think of cheating at games as a capital offense, worthy of server bans, account suspensions, and having your opponent quickly and decisively press the reset button. But it’s not as cut and dry as you may think. In last week’s PBS Game/Show, Jamin examines the various types of cheaters a
Cheerleaders splattered with the blood of the undead. Light sabers suggestive of masturbation. The “gigolo mini-game.” These grindhouse-y, Freudian, sexually twisted themes are the kind of stunts Goichi Suda, popularly known as Suda51, and his studio Grasshopper Manufacture, are known for. But now t
This is something we’ve known forever, but the creator of Gone Home drove the point home and perhaps put the nail in the coffin. Talking today about narrative design, Gaynor made a subtle, but piercing call. In particular he was lamenting the fact that people who don’t play games but wanted to play
At an event like Game Developers Conference, it’s easy to get your various incarnations of reality scrambled. Virtual reality has a bigger presence than ever this year, and there’s always augmented reality looming, but there are also the non-categorizable forms: projects that blur the boundaries bet
It’s mid-March, and that can only mean one thing: a flurry of other non-related contests using brackets in imitation of March Madness. T.GIF animation tourney, held March 22 through April 7, is one such tournament, and it’s amazing for a couple of reasons. One, because the name T.GIF hadn’t been tak
We’ve talked about X-Com creator Julian Gollop’s wizardry tactics game Chaos Reborn before, but we’re going to talk about it again because it hit Kickstarter yesterday, and because we never pass up an opportunity to talk about wizards. Well, actually, we do. Under normal circumstances, we can take
The artist and engineer Theo Jansen is famous for constructing strange, skeletal, self-propelled, kinetic sculptures that scurry eerily down the beaches of the Netherlands. He’s a guy we like to keep our eye(s) on because his work infuses architecture and artistry, much like games do. But now his wa
