I get why someone might not love Eraserhead: it is largely without dialogue or plot and it costars an embalmed cow fetus. I can even concede that Eraserhead may not be David Lynch’s “best” movie, as his thematic and formal skillset came into greater focus in the following decade, and he somehow loop
According to researchers, the year 2031 will bring with it a shift in the economy that might render this country unrecognizable. They’re calling it the “inheritance bubble,” a product of ultra-wealthy baby boomers leaving behind sizable chunks (over 35% of America’s total net worth) for their childr
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Prune (iOS) BY Polyculture Whether your thumbs are green or usually poised over a joystick, Prune will have something for you. As the virtual botanist/god of the universe, it’s up to you to h
From the melting clock to the overgrown green apples, the paint-chipped fingerprints of René Magritte and the flamboyant moustache of Salvador Dali are all over the topsy-turvy dreamscapes of Back to Bed. This puzzle game about escorting a somnambulist named Bob back to his duvet using the physical
“Football is a simple game,” the onetime England striker and fulltime milquetoast TV personality Gary Lineker once explained. “Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.” Alternately, football is an incredibly complicated tactical exercise at the end of which
French artist Philip Ob Rey’s latest project pitches sculptures “skeletonned with VHS film-rolls” against the grey skies of Iceland. His series of black-and-white photos and accompanying short films share haunting visions of a post-human world. It’s one in which primordial giants have arisen, tangle
Fran Bow has been in production for three years but only now has it got its first official trailer. Oh, and a release date of August 27th. Before you get to watching that trailer, a warning: it is not for the faint of heart. The game is about Fran Bow, a young girl struggling with seeing her own par
There is a vocal contingent of the Kill Screen staff that does not like to even put their eyes upon Dropsy. They will not speak his name. The big, doughy clown, who stars in an upcoming, eponymous point-and-click adventure game, straddles an uncomfortable line of realistic heft and cartoonish, Gumby
Like relationships themselves, representing the struggles of love in a digital format can be difficult. Andrew Morrish does just that in his newest game, Tough Love Machine.Tough Love Machine offers up a simple premise: unite two hearts. Like so many puzzle games before it, in execution this becomes
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was the first time I saw something resembling a digital frame. The technological magic of his “Picture Picture” device looked like an ordinary painting in a garishly gilt frame until Mister Rogers wanted to show viewers a video. “Hello,” it would sometimes greet him, befo
There’s something creepy about radios. They’re an iconic device in the Silent Hill series, which used them to mark the presence of nearby monsters with an eerie, warped static. Horror movies like to possess them to play spooky old-timey tunes at unexpected times, or convey cryptic warnings to unsusp
If you’re a driver (that is, you drive a car) then you’ve probably been caught up in a phantom traffic jam at least once. These are the types of traffic jam that have no obvious cause. No one has crashed and the police are nowhere in sight. So what happened? Our own human imperfections, that’s what
One day, your mobile phone, that precious device that connects you with the outside world and on which you may even be reading this sentence, will die. Its death may come in the middle of the night after years of declining performance. It is also possible that your phone will suddenly pass away afte
“She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable—this interminable life.” – Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway Sometimes, a vi
For a game with the word “quiet” in the title, Quiet as a Stone is alive with sound, and some incredibly pleasing ones too. There’s the hum of wind and water, the noise of nature uninterrupted, then the clatter of rocks and clay pots shattering as the player interferes with the landscape, and finall
File this one under “nexus of things about which only Clay gives a shit”: Drake vomited out three dope tracks over the weekend, one of which (“Cha Cha”) is a slinky, seven-minute ode to a romance gone sour. Its backing track may sound familiar to Mario completists; it’s the stage-select music from S
