One can only sympathize with Scott Cawthon. Once a struggling game-maker, he seems concerned that, just as unexpectedly as it arrived, his recent success might disappear. So he’s been working it while it’s hot—inside two years, he’s put out six different Five Nights at Freddy’s games. But 2, 3, and
In 1986, Metroid was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Since then, Hirokazu Tanaka, Metroid’s composer, has been revered for helping create the game’s iconic, eerie atmosphere. To up Metroid’s creeping feeling of loneliness some 30 years later, composer Luminist is rerecording the game
Those who’ve devoted their lives to the Cartasian Discipline in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (2008) are subject to rote memorization when they’ve broken the rules of their society. The book in which they’re to memorize from is filled with illogical nonsense, like nursery rhymes that don’t quite rhyme—a
Two moments stick out from Gears of War 4. In one, a geyser of blood shoots from the exoskeleton of an enormous, crablike Corpser as the Hammer of Dawn—a satellite-guided laser—rains a beam of molten death down upon it. Fountains of gore flow from the creature like a waterfall while serious, beefy d
While we at Kill Screen love to bring you our own crop of game critique and perspective, there are many articles on games, technology, and art around the web that are worth reading and sharing. So that is why this weekly reading list exists, bringing light to some of the articles that have captured
Things have been looking up for Pac-Man lately. Pac-Man 256 made a huge splash on phones last year, and the gluttonous pie chart recently showed up in several collaborations with Google, including map mods and playable Doodles. There was that dreadful Adam Sandler movie too, which, quality aside, di
You’re taking a walk in Central Park. The sun is shining down on you, a stark contrast to the cool autumn wind that tickles the back of your neck. It’s a reminder that change is coming. As you stroll past the row of chess tables, you see two elderly men hunched over and glaring at each other with an
Something is off in a flat in South London. It’s not necessarily in the vegetables growing rot on the kitchen counter, or the new Guillermo Del Toro-inspired roomie, or the soft sounds of banging that seem to radiate through paper-thin walls. It might be a combination of those traits, the malaise of
Based on the 1973 film by Michael Crichton of the same name, HBO’s Westworld has taken the original’s hackneyed premise of a couple tourists escaping from the Delos Corporation’s various time-focused theme parks (Medieval World, West World, and Roman World), and shifted it into a refined look at wha
There are hundreds of dog breeds, originating from different parts of the world, big and small, hairy and bald. However, I think we can all agree that pugs are one of the cutest dog breeds out there, right? Don’t answer that, as the Phoenix-based studio SpaceBeagles will back me up on this: the team
I struggle every Halloween to decide on a costume. I’ve dressed up as all the basics: a black cat, a vampire, a witch—twice. But Beglitched may have saved me the hassle this year. It has introduced to me a whole new concept: a cyberpink computer witch. Now, the title computer witch itself would be c
That Dragon, Cancer was released back in January this year, shortly after my father’s cancer diagnosis. My first real brush with cancer, I clung to the game for guidance. That Dragon, Cancer didn’t necessarily tell me what to expect, but helped steer me through the things I needed to feel. I wished
I’ve been playing Yo-Kai Watch 2: Bony Spirits every night since I got it. Why Bony Spirits and not Fleshy Souls (the alternative version of the same game)? Because skeletons are cooler, I guess. At least, that’s my reasoning. Yo-Kai Watch 2 comes only a year after the series’s first localization re
In the strata of books about videogames, I offer the following overly simplistic codification: 1. Books about a specific game or game developer 2. Books about a specific period of time in the history of games 3. Books about how videogames are art, dammit And then there’s Ian Bogost’s new book Play A
Plenty of games have toyed with the convention of going inside paintings—Oblivion (2006), Super Mario 64 (1996), and Dark Souls (2011) to name a few. But only a handful of games have been made with the sole purpose of perusing artwork from the inside out. IMPRESSIONISTa, a new exploration game from
A number of things define Gears of War. There’s the chainsaw-equipped assault rifle used to saw murderous reptile men in half, the constant rhythmic challenge of timing a supercharged gun reload, and, of course, the brick shithouse soldiers that players control throughout. These are all constants in
Heat waves rose from the concrete streets of central Philly as I left my office at 1pm to join a protest in the streets. I melted as I walked the two miles down Broad Street from City Hall towards Temple University. The in-between space transitioned to ghetto territory—an uncharted war zone where pe
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Burly Men At Sea (Windows, Mac, iOS) BY BRAIN&BRAIN Burly Men at Sea takes joy in the simple things in life. As the titular three burly men, you explore everything from a sleepy seaside villag
Until yesterday, Elon Musk didn’t follow any women on Twitter. Plenty of men, plenty of companies, but not a single woman. This was originally pointed out by Motherboard, which prompted Musk—aka, the man trying to send the first humans to Mars—to make his 55th follow Caity Weaver of GQ Magazine. He
Sometimes you have to make sacrifices. In publisher Kitfox Games’s upcoming The Shrouded Isle, those sacrifices are lives. It’s a cult village management game to be released in February 2017 by design lead Jongwoo Kim, writer Tanya Short, and artist Erica Lahaie. The Shrouded Isle is meant as a haun
Slayer Shock is an effort to make a tense, smart vampire survival game, but it ends up feeling more like a B-movie version of a classic genre. It’s not offensively bad or anything like that—it has a worse fate. It is bland. In the wake of a vampire epidemic, Slayer Shock tasks you with wandering a p
Ana and Jakob are hunched over and bickering by the fire, as usual. You try and ignore them and throw some crumpled up newspaper into the pit. The fire laps up the paper, hungry for more. As you stare into the flames, their arguing becomes harder to to tune out. Everyone is tired and hungry and stre
The kidnapped girlfriend is a well-worn trope, sure. But Queer Quest: All in a Gay’s Work is an upcoming game that takes this cliché and does something fresh with it, exploring not only how it affects the main character, but the community at large. In the Kickstarter description for Queer Quest, it
Red Barrels Studio decided to suddenly release a demo for its upcoming survival-horror game Outlast 2 yesterday. It’s available now, for free, via Steam and the Xbox One and PlayStation Stores. And it’s scary as shit. Outlast 2—as you might have guessed by the name—is the sequel to the relatively su
I was at E3 when Destiny was first shown to the world in 2013. I remember being shepherded into a theater, the outside marked with huge printed artwork, among a group of whispering journalists. In that theater, we would be taken through the opening to the game: the wall, the breach, the first areas
