Issue 09: The New Kill Screen

The New Kill Screen

KENTUCKY ROUTE ZERO’S LONG DISAPPEARING ACT, LILY ZONE’S CRYPT WORLDS, DAVID OREILLY’S EVERYTHING, THE BROKEN GAME OF AMERICAN ELECTIONS, AND A HISTORY OF THE WORLD AS AN OPEN-WORLD GAME.

Editor's Letter: Welcome to the New Kill Screen

Kill Screen relaunches in print with a love letter to strange games, the passionate people who make them and the players who find them.

Our Saddest Gaming Moments

Four Kill Screen staffers on the games that broke their hearts.

Important Moments in Videogame Journalism

A brief and not entirely reliable history of the games press, from cave walls to Nintendo Power.

Columns

Exit Flatland

How isometric projection gave videogames a third dimension, centuries after painters found it first.

Next Level Narrative

Edge of Tomorrow builds an entire movie out of the restart, the most videogame idea of all.

Two Adults Talking

Firewatch lets two adults talk the way people actually talk, and that is rarer in games than it should be.

Inventory

Illustration of a pink-haired figure peering into an old viewer as a beam of striped color pours out, on a bright blue ground

Cathode Ray Missionaries

The strange appeal of scanlines on old TVs.

Illustration of a helmeted soldier holding a rifle and a game controller, a red JOIN patch on his chest

The New Recruit

What does it mean when the National Guard uses Call of Duty to find new soldiers?

A Good Old-Fashioned Roman Barbecue

Here’s to one of the PS2’s most enduringly strange epics.

Colorful illustration of small figures leaping between tall yellow and teal doorways

The Philosophy of Choice

What the existentialists can teach us about living with too many choices.

That Fleshy Substance

The infectious influence of Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski is all over games, and he never knew it.

Facts About Animals Killed in Resident Evil

The player kills many animals throughout Capcom’s long-running Resident Evil series. The following is a collection of facts about these animals.

A Wild, Wild Place

Uncovering the dreamy allure of the Pacific Northwest.

Emergents

Kitty Horrorshow

The former practicing witch builds haunted, hostile worlds that treat you as a trespasser.

Ivan Notaros

The Serbian designer makes games out of whatever has captured him, from space shuttles to the Yugoslav Wars.

Features

The three members of Cardboard Computer sitting on a park bench under spring trees

Disappearing Act

Kentucky Route Zero is a game of many mysteries, perhaps none greater than what the hell is taking its creators so long

Lily Zone sitting on a patterned green couch in a sunlit living room

The Descent

Chaotic and joyous, the games of Lily Zone are sewn from her life’s rough fabric

Cosmic Joker

David OReilly’s new game Everything allows you to embody anything in its absurdist universe

Ink illustration of a row of voting booths beneath a banner reading Polling Station

The Broken Game of American Elections

Pundits love to claim that politics is “not a game,” even though, structurally, it is. What could the two fields learn from each other?

The Design of Videogame Doors

A visual essay on the portals and posterns of games, from Doom and Portal to the looping hallway of P.T.

Red Dead Redemption

On Open-World Games and History

Random Access Memory

Illustration of two hands cradling a glowing cube that holds a tiny game landscape

Random Access Memory: It's Dangerous to Go Alone

A beige phone cord, a well-worn player’s guide and a friend stuck somewhere short of Level 2 in The Legend of Zelda.