I grew up with JRPGs, but not in the sense that most people grow up with them. My mom always played them, and I always sat perched, cross-legged in our quaint apartment, happily petting our cat and watching her exciting journeys unfold. Mostly, it was the Final Fantasy games, but sometimes we’d fit
Interactive fiction has seen a resurgence in the past few years. From Chris Klimas’s freeware hypertext software Twine, to the visual novel Python engine Ren’Py, branching narrative stories are more popular than ever in videogames. But most interactive fiction games rely on written text, usually thr
Slayaway Camp is a puzzle game about massacring hapless teenagers, and, perhaps fittingly, it comes from a place of aggression. “After a decade [of] making gems go clink and pegs go… Peggle at PopCap,” said Jason Kapalka, one of the founders of PopCap, and now returning to independence with Blue Wiz
At first glance, civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson’s choice to collaborate in the creation of a Twitter bot seems like a strange move. After all, his 536,000 Twitter followers aren’t going anywhere, and bots lack the personal touch and capacity for individual engagement that’s made Mckesson’s Twi
No Man’s Sky is out. You’ll have to forgive me, but that feels like something worth saying. Not because the game is the second coming, or because it is “the last game” we’ll ever need, but because, even after all this time, it remains a game built in service of a tantalizing idea. When Sean Murray s
What happens when Johnny goes to work? What happens when he buys the red dress or makes love to his fiancée Lisa? If you’ve ever wanted to know, there is an answer: The Room (2003), the best worst movie of all time, now has an adventure game adaptation. A 2D adventure game, The Room Tribute “is a to
The Codex Silenda is a set of intricate wooden puzzles that quickly reached its funding goal on Kickstarter many times over. It’s the kind of object you’d expect to be hand-carved by a slightly eccentric artisan, but it’s laser-cut, and one of the reward tiers gets you the pieces, which you would th
The conference floor was full of astronauts, engineers, and students. Bodies quickly filed past each other to find an open seat. My team of 4th graders waited impatiently to sit. Before I could join my fellow classmates, a hand reached out to guide me to a new seat, away from the others. Instead of
Herald’s narrative revolves largely around one question: How does your cultural heritage influence your identity? For many—including the point-and-click period drama’s protagonist, Devan Rensburg—it’s a complicated question, made even more complicated by the world’s history of colonialism. The “viol
Kaveh Waddell over at The Atlantic had the opportunity to interview the Pittsburgh-based designers working on a game that takes place in the infamous prison site of Camp Bucca, known for incubating a group of fighters who would later go on to form ISIS. According to the five designers (who remain an
Everyone seems to be a bit confused. Prey, the non-numbered reboot of the single-game “series” Prey (2006), has nothing to do with its own franchise. “Prey is not a sequel, it’s not a remake, it has no tie with the original,” confirmed director Raphael Colantonio, a week or so ago, in a video called
Rainy Day, a recent interactive narrative by Thais Weiller, is a quick and impactful glimpse of the paralyzing power of anxiety. It was born out of creative frustration when she moved from a design role to production, where she often stayed quiet about her own creative ideas so as not to disrupt the
I’m not from New York, but even I know to avoid the 5. The largest rapid transit system in the world, New York City’s Subway links Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx to rush in workers from across the Tri-State area. Over 54 percent of New York’s citizens use the subway exclusively to commut
A pan-pan is a distress signal; it’s not as serious as a mayday call—your life is not likely in immediate danger—but, uh, something’s definitely wrong with your aircraft. It’s customary to call it out three times. Pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan. In Spelkraft and Might and Delight’s Pan-Pan, your ice crea
How’d dungeons get so big, anyway? Before fantasy games, dungeons were modest medieval cells or imprisonment-themed sex rooms. But in today’s post-D&D RPGs the dungeon might as well be the cornerstone of the universe. Any tough mazey place becomes a dungeon: labyrinths, catacombs, mines, caves, mans
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
Needless to say, this article is NSFW. /// This is a difficult question to ask, so I’m just going to go ahead and get right to the meat of it. Have you ever been playing Pong (1972) and wished that, instead of the rigid paddles, you could get something a little more floppy in your hands? Schlong cou
From It Follows (2015) to Netflix’s Stranger Things, the themes and style of ’80s horror are slowly but surely making a comeback. So perhaps it’s no surprise that such inspirations are appearing among games as well, with the once-colossal genre of slasher movies influencing titles like Lakeview Cabi
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. The multiplayer game Push Me Pull You builds a sense of community with the help of a bizarre but goofy premise. In a world populated by strange two-headed “sports monsters,” players must face off against each other in a friendly game of ball
In the music he writes for the Mountain Goats, John Darnielle tells intensely specific stories. One song describes a breakfast of boiled peanuts the morning a parther leaves for good. Another, from the band’s most recent album, Beat the Champ (2015), mournfully describes a wrestling match in which t
In Tibetan Buddhism, the space between death and rebirth is called bardo, a liminal period containing six—or four, depending on the source or scholar—different states, experienced in phases from birth to death to rebirth. This “limbo” is a journey in multiple senses, both to a spiritual conclusion a
If there’s one thing that Disc Room shares with Vlambeer’s games—the studio for which creator Jan Willem Nijman works under when he’s not toiling away on other projects—it’s the ability to get all the action packed into a single GIF. That and screenshake. Of course it has screenshake. Disc Room is a
Three years after it was initially announced at E3 2013, No Man’s Sky has officially gone gold. Few games in recent memory have created so much buzz. The near-infinite universe that No Man’s Sky offers is plenty reason to be excited but the way Hello Games is creating that universe using procedural
Japanese folklore is a pretty common inspiration when it comes to storytelling in videogames. From Clover Studio’s Ōkami (2006) to ZUN’s iconic Touhou Project, Japan’s mythological spirits and creatures provide a familiar backdrop for Japanese game makers to tell their own, new stories to their audi
The last time we saw Card Thief, its creators were in the midst of building a stealth-based approach to card games that has more in common with Thief (1998) than, well, cards. Long story short, Card Thief uses the statistics typical of both card and tabletop games to simulate the effects of light, t
