All your real-life Gwent fantasies are coming true

Among the countless hours I spent playing CD Projekt RED’s sprawling open-world adventure The Witcher 3 (2015), too many of those were spent playing Gwent. Whether it was battling against random merchants or innkeepers, or challenging the best players of Novigrad in an effort to win a coveted card o

The next game from the creators of LIMBO goes full-on George Orwell

It’s been six years since black-and-white sidescroller LIMBO (2010) came out. It might not feel that long—it doesn’t to me—due to it having lingered with an almost ghostly presence over the world of videogames. Small or large, it didn’t matter, many games have since adapted LIMBO‘s foggy chiaroscuro

Listen, Battlefield 1 owes nothing to history

The title might say it all: Battlefield 1’s choice of numeral suggests a process of looking backward, of turning to the past to find a way forward. In its appearance at the EA Play event yesterday, Battlefield 1 demonstrated this in what was a comprehensive display of force: British Mark IV tanks ch

Live the life of a lonely introvert in a hikikimori simulator

The blinds are drawn. A tiny sliver of light manages to brighten up the room, casting a jagged shadow against the wall that trickles down the length of your bed. A brightly colored poster and several polaroids decorate the walls. A casual guitar riff plays softly in the background, accompanied by th

A man and his mecha fall in love in Titanfall 2

Though a thin game in terms of what it offered overall, Respawn Entertainment’s Titanfall (2014) was a well-balanced, quick-paced multiplayer shooter in a time where run-of-the-mill Call of Dutys and Battlefields ruled, with not much else to spare. But one of the largest grievances from fans of Tita

Sympathy for the Spoon-Collector in The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine

“I like rusty spoons” whispers Salad Fingers, in his bizarre quavering voice, those ovular eyes pointed in precisely the opposite direction from each other. “I must find the perfect spoon.” Pleasingly creepy and unhinged, David Firth’s crudely-made web series appears, at this distance of a decade, a

At E3, FIFA 17 concedes that soccer is boring

Soccer clubs are fundamentally in the content business. Their prime offering is a match—90ish minutes of action delivered once or twice a week—but they have to fill in around the edges. This is how it came to pass that clubs started releasing exclusive video content through their own online portals—

Overwatch and the pleasure of transmedia narratives

Before Winston, a glasses-clad gorilla scientist, was leaping across maps to crush his enemies in the chaotic multiplayer battles of Overwatch, he was merely a young ape with big aspirations and an affinity for peanut butter. But you wouldn’t know that from merely playing the game. You’ll find no ca

Weekend Reading: Rage in the Cage

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

The Witness swaps polygons for pixels in its NES demake

For all its naturalistic beauty, one of the more interesting lines to come out of reviews for The Witness when it dropped earlier this year was that it didn’t actually need to be in 3D. Creator Jonathan Blow and his team may have spent eight years crafting the game world’s intricate details, but con

Want to weed through a suspect’s phone? There’s a game for that

A few days ago, a terrorist attack devastated a major city. Officials don’t have a body count for you but it’s bad. Do you really need to know the exact number? Would that change anything for you? Anyhow, officials now want to find out how this happened and prevent future attacks. That is the openin

New book lets you play your way through Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been adapted to numerous genres and mediums since the 18th century and finally we might have an adaptation to rival Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film, Romeo + Juliet. The classic story has now been adapted into a choose-your-own-adventure book by Ryan North, aptly titled Ro

Cuphead programmer’s side project is inspired by Canada’s long winters

One of the people behind the upcoming Cuphead has begun work on his next game, a Canadian winter inspired open-world adventure RPG called Winternight. A game developer out of Ottawa, Tony Coculuzzi is working to create an indie RPG in the spirit of Morrowind (2002) or Ultima Underworld (1992). While

OmniBus can’t stop, won’t stop

Beating one of the levels in OmniBus means driving over a ramp, bonking the head off a statue, and careening into a set of bowling pins before turning right-side up to drive straight into the endless blue ocean. I take no responsibility for that last part. After you beat any of the game’s levels you

Speed dating sim lets you find the burly wrestler of your dreams

Before the dating app Tinder swept the modern dating scene, one of the only examples of gamified wooing was the absurd activity of speed dating. In speed dating, you’re given a limited amount of time to get to know another person, before a klaxon sounds and the next desperate individual shuffles in

Star Wars Rebellion breaks the canon … and itself

Fantasy Flight’s space opera tactics game Star Wars: Rebellion is a seemingly brilliant mashup of Star Wars canon. Classic elements from the original Star Wars trilogy are here—Hidden Rebel Base! A Death Star! Han Solo frozen in carbonite! A reconstructed Death Star!—but inventively recombined. Rath

V R 2 asks how much faith you’re willing to put in game makers

The town of Marfa is a repository of modern art and little else in the middle of the Texan high desert. “Whether you aim to remember history or forget it,” reads the first line of the welcome message on its website, a blockish, primitive piece of Internet. That is not the most promising of taglines,

Adventure game is made out of actual Renaissance-era artwork

Four Last Things is the type of game I want to leave open on the title screen for hours, just to stare at and appreciate. But that would be the sin of sloth, friend. Still… Alright, alright, I’ll move on. Created in two weeks for Game Jolt’s adventure game game jam #advjam2016, Four Last Things is a

Explore a feminist literary classic in videogame form

Many people are familiar with the late 19th century short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. A piece of early feminist and classic American literature, it is a semi-autobiographical captivity narrative about a woman whose “treatment” of her “hysteria” (a non-existent illn

The problem with Brutalist web design

Brutalism, because words no longer have meaning, is apparently a big trend in web design. It is, one gathers, a reference to somewhat austere webpages that are not overloaded with fancy baubles and trinkets. In other words, what we are seeing is not Victorian web design. But what about it is Brutali

New VR game lets you walk around inside a Van Gogh painting

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. THE NIGHT CAFE (PC) BY BORROWED LIGHT STUDIOS The point of going to a museum is to gain a more tactile understanding of a piece of art. Being in front of a picture allows you to see the minute

Watch_Dogs 2, this time with actual dogs

If there was anything missing from the underwhelming Watch_Dogs (2014), it was actual dogs. Luckily, bright and early Wednesday morning, Ubisoft hosted an unbearably long livestream cataloguing the details of its hardly-anticipated sequel, Watch_Dogs 2 (most of which was appropriately leaked—via pre

The Pac-Man

David Race is the best Pac-Man (1980) player in the world but would never admit that. Sure, you could watch his hand move the joystick like a professional driver downshifting around a corner. Or stand there dumbstruck as he tells you where the enemies will move seconds before they do so. “Keep your

Islid lets you enter that curious half-asleep state while fully awake

Unnatural shapes, swirling colors, inexplicable lights, droning music, and a world that is constantly changing in texture and size: welcome to the hypnagogic state. You’ve been here before, probably. And, if I can let you in on a secret, I’m just about there right now. It may sound ridiculous, but e

Photo series shows how GTA V’s bleakness mirrors everyday life

As technology advances and our lives grow more and more digital, the barrier between our physical world and the virtual one grows increasingly blurred. As videogame graphics venture further into the dark lands of the uncanny valley, it seems only consequential that a photographer would eventually ut