If there is a hell for electric toasters—or humans, for that matter— it is obviously an artisanal toast bar, the kind of place where artisanal butter comes with sea salt on the side lest you find yourself unable to control the salinity of your bread topping. Andrew Wang’s Lullaby for an Electric Toa
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. SYLVIO (PC, MAC) BY APOSTROPHE Were you someone who watched The Conjuring and wished you could be a badass ghost hunter like the Warrens? Well, they made a horror game for you (and your poor
Just as photographs generally look good with a black and white filter, no matter the subject matter, it’s become increasingly apparent to me that stripping a game of its textures almost always produces a cool effect. One of the artists working on The Witness seems to agree—she was able to produce th
With his latest EP, Paths We Take, internet weird-house and software artist Brian returns us to his distinctive realm of ordinary life turned bizarre. It’s an EP of four songs, each one describing a chapter in a story that follows two people and their life together as it unfolds. “They meet, fall in
Alphabear is a fun little mobile game. Combining word search puzzles with Neko Atsume’s pet collection mechanic, it draws you in with such adorable characters as Pirate Bear and Golfing Bear, who each possess their own set of unique bear powers—along with a themed outfit, of course. Designed by Bren
While it wasn’t a horror game, the utter abandonment of the house in Gone Home made every turn around every corner feel like an imminent encounter with the supernatural. It was only in the material possessions of that house’s residents that any sign of life was even evident. Take that format and thr
Welcome to life after Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, where every music game feels incomplete without J.K. Simmons’ Fletcher yelling, “are you rushing or are you dragging?” While Whiplash does not yet exist in game form, at least there’s Clapping Music, which may induce similar levels of angst in player
It took 15 years for the Pokémon series to start looking inwardly at itself and question its own ethics. By then, it comprised videogames, anime, trading cards, toys, a whole damn franchise that might—it just might—have advocated slavery and/or animal blood sports. This isn’t meant to be one of thos
Jack Torrance. Loving father. Adoring husband. Friendly handyman. Driven absolutely psychotic by either a supreme and enduring boredom or the whispers of murderous ghosts (you decide!). What happened Jack? At the start of The Shining he’s all smiles and strolls as he accepts the position of janitor
Fairytales, for all their other virtues, tend to be pretty easy games to hack. All you have to do before you get started on your journey/quest/trek is ensure you’ve memorized the Three Essential Pro-tips for Surviving a Fairytale: If you either a) encounter three magical creatures/witches/beings, or
The world is an infinite musical instrument. This is the prevailing idea across the interactive documentary Soundhunters. And it doesn’t mean in the way as I understood it in my college days, drumming out beats onto desk corners with my fingers; it’s less deliberate than that. The idea is to listen
“The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly,
Speed, the 1994 film in which Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, and assorted extras hurtled around Los Angeles in a public transit bus, was a fun movie about absolutely nothing. With that in mind, here is OmniBus, an arcade-style game currently being developed by Chicago’s The Buddy Cops that takes Spee
