Alone With You is an adventure game that focuses on relationships—particularly, relationships with four fellow colonists. (Four fellow colonists who are actually dead, and appearing as holograms.) As the last member of an ill-fated space colony, the player is desperately trying to escape the planet.
If you want to grow up to be a conservator—someone whose job it is to ensure a museum’s art is protected against the ravages of time—it involves a huge amount of schooling and preparation. Aside from art history, conservators learn chemistry to manage the precise makeup of clays or pigments used in
The Trojan War was a great story, but I’ve always thought the parts with Achilles were lame. I never liked the way the nigh-invincible demigod was ankle-cheesed out of contention by a camper with a bow and arrow. Also, Hector was my favorite character, and we all know how that turned out. Even thoug
Clocker, recently Greenlit by the Steam community, is a quiet journey through time-shaping mechanics. In fact, it combines two elements of time manipulation—the ability to stop and to start the resource. But this is no SUPERHOT. The story follows two characters, a watchmaker named John and his daugh
Sometime around the moment Barack Obama won Iowa, a little cartoon light bulb lit up above the heads of some 10,000 or so campaign managers and associated staff nationwide. The light bulb was duly followed by a thought bubble containing the words “young people also vote, sometimes.” Since then, ever
Yvvy, the designer of the upcoming Easy Level Life, knows you can’t “win” against police brutality. “The closest thing to a win condition where police brutality is concerned, is simply not being the wrong skin color,” they told me. “The game is the same way.” Easy Level Life popped up on Twitter on
This American presidential election is deadly serious. Even if one party’s candidate appears to have emerged from a Ronco countertop rotisserie, and his ideas might as well have come from there too, the whole thing is too ugly and scary to really be a joke. The Republican National Convention, howeve
During the spring of 2014, a cloud-bearded pappy and his blushing daughter went on a quest to connect dots in dangerous places. A puzzle game with pleasant, sojourn aesthetics, TwoDots took players to volcanic peaks and icy depths, battling lava and thawing matching dabs of color. Some good stuff to
In 2005, following the public outrage over the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the research group Gallup organized a survey to gauge Americans’ attitudes towards the “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by intelligence services in the War on Terror. When presented with descr
After recent disclosures about potential Federal Trade Commission (FTC) violations within the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) community, Valve has come out with a statement about the matter, dismissing their involvement in the gambling sites as well as putting those sites on notice that the
Ken Wong, lead designer and illusory art wizard of Monument Valley (2014), is creating a brand new world: not fantastic architecture this time, but three desks in Melbourne, Australia. He’s starting an independent studio called Mountains along with producer Kamina Vincent and programmer Sam Crisp, a
Unless you have been living under a stack of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Collector’s Edition boxes for the past year and a half, you’ve probably heard that a six-foot-tall, pasty, third-grade-vocabularied sack of racist bile and vitriol, ensconced in an expensive suit and a greasy toupee, has a s
Goichi Suda, or Suda 51 as he is often known, can be a hard person to pin down. His work, especially in recent years, has been accepted into videogame culture as “crazy” or “weird,” identified as flippant stories filled with self-referential non-sequiturs and mulched manga plotlines. “Oh it’s just c
If a dystopian novel was written about the world that we live in right now, what would it look like? Chilean game maker Camila Gormaz wants to explore that in her upcoming game Long Gone Days. Unlike dead-Earth dystopias, where human society has overreached to such an extent that what remains of our
At its core, one could shave down a detective story to three basic questions: who, why, and how. Who was the victim, who was the perpetrator? Why and how they did commit the crime? From Sam Barlow’s FMV mystery in Her Story (2015) and Cole Phelps’ investigations across the seedy streets of 1940s Los
Zero Time Dilemma wants to know how it feels to kill someone. To take someone’s life, whether it’s to ensure your own survival, or someone else’s. What it’s like to be driven mad when you end up in a situation like its protagonists—trapped in an underground shelter, where initiating six acquaintance
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. GIRAFFES VOLLEYBALL CHAMPIONSHIP 2016 (Windows, Mac) BY SANDWICH PUISSANT The problem with many sports is that they’re taken too seriously. Competition is king in the land of sports. It drives
As far as violent crime rates go, South Korea is relatively tame when compared to most of its contemporaries. As detailed in a crime and safety report conducted by the U.S. Department of State Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC) last year, with the majority of crimes amounting to persistent lo
You should probably take a seat before you watch Mattis Dovier‘s Inside. Just get your head straight, y’know, couple of deep breaths, because Dovier’s animated short is a hugely discomfiting, bleak take on the relationship between people and technology. It spreads like a plague: our monotone narrato
Yesterday, Blizzard published patch notes for a major Overwatch update they’ve been rolling out across their public test servers. The developer reveals a host of significant changes coming to the game’s competitive mode, not least of which involves limiting character selection to no more than one of
As the news coverage of Brexit rolls along the focus has inevitably, and somewhat depressingly, shifted to the fallout of the main parties involved. The Conservative party faced a swift and anti-climactic leadership battle following David Cameron’s resignation, and the Labour party is still in turmo
Katabasis, a term describing a hero’s descent into the underworld, is seen often in Greek myth. Odysseus spoke to spirits during his voyage and was frightened by the looming depths. Hermes rescued Persephone from her unwilling marriage to the god of death, granting her half of every year above groun
Like many people, I’ve wondered what a naked Danny Devito would look like riding a bear as if he were a world-class rodeo rider. It’s human nature. But not many—in fact, only one person—has made it into reality, and he goes by the name punchesbears. Naked Danny DeVito Power Rodeo 2 (also known as si
At first glance, there would seem to be nothing more tangible than a landscape. An arrangement of physical objects, spread out before you, traversable, understandable, concrete in every sense. Yet when you start to think of a specific landscape, things start to cloud. What is a landscape if not the
One of the most appealing aspects of Overwatch is its colorful cast of characters, which in total represent a mix of global demographics. Among them are the rebellious Brazilian outlaw DJ Lucio, the meticulous Indian architect Symmetra, stout Russian bodybuilder Zarya, dedicated jetpack trooper Phar
