Playlist: The Metroidvania goes to Ancient Greece

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. APOTHEON (PC)  BY ALIENTRAP   Apotheon uses the geometric constraints of a Greek sculpture to explore the limits of beauty and glory. It’s beautiful, sensuous, and deadly, which isn’t surprisi

Höme Improvisåtion: if IKEA made videogames

No no, it’s not official, but it does look like a group of game designers may have managed to capture the infernally infuriating experience of putting together IKEA flatpack furniture in virtual reality. Höme Improvisåtion as the game is called (complete with appropriate Scandinavian accents) is app

Descend into a murderer’s tortured conscious in The Guilt and the Shadow

The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.”  ? Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray Guilt is a complex emotion that revea

How To Escape

Exploring the potential of the screen, the page and the ceiling.

Tokyo 1923 conveys one of Japan’s worst natural disasters

In reading Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa’s memories of the Great Kant? earthquake of 1923, there appear two images more striking than the rest. The first one is the bloated corpses that lapped up against the bank of Sumidagawa River: a dirty red assemblage of death that made Kurosawa’s knees

Plug & Play exposes the hopelessness of digital communication

Swiss animator Michael Frei has a strange fascination with fingers. “What I especially like about hands is their expressiveness,” he told Director’s Notes back in 2013. It makes sense: he’s an animator, he uses his hands a lot, to create, to mold, to make actual the visions inside his head. And so d

Why one police department is using the "All Your Base" meme

In 2003, seven young men were arrested by police in Sturgis, Michigan for posting signs of the now-ubiquitous videogame meme, “All your base are belong to us,” all across town. At the time, local residents interpreted the prank in light of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the Sturgis Police Ch

Papetura offers a delightful world of animated paper

Papetura sure is made out of paper. In the game’s opening shot alone there are sheets of it: curled into pulsing fingers like ocean waves or quilted grass, twee spiraling silhouettes proffering the shape of local flora. Devoid of every color but white, and with only these paper shapes suggesting the