Let’s face it, Mario doesn’t make much sense. He’s an Italian plumber living in a fantasy mushroom world which is populated by living toadstools and constantly under attack from a turtle dragon. Fans usually excuse this psychedelic setting out of an appreciation for the series’ gameplay and an exhau
Sage Solitaire’s True Grit mode brings the intensity of Diablo’s Hardcore mode to smartphones Is Solitaire not tense enough for you? Try Sage Solitaire’s new Vegas mode. Every game counts in Sage Solitaire’s latest update Know when to stop or get kicked out of the casino in Sage Solitaire’s True
Believe it or not, Brooklyn existed before the days of beard wax, tasting menus, and lazy trendpiece shorthand. Brooklyn 1776, which launches for iOS next week, is about those earlier days. Much earlier. August 1776 was not a calm time in American history. George Washington (maybe you’ve heard of h
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Else Heart.Break() (PC, Mac, Linux) BY Erik Svedang Life kinda sucks until you find out you can hack the world. That’s been the through line of a lot of cyberpunk and hacker fiction over the
The American dream and The Swindle. Winners and losers in Donald Trump’s America. Videogames reinforce the American Dream: that hard work eventually equals success
Knossu‘s wall textures sizzle as if they’ve been half-cooked on a frying pan. It’s like someone went nuts with the spray paint tool in Microsoft Paint and the most garish colors they could find. Have you ever bitten into something that was way too sour? Imagine that vigorous and unbearable taste car
Tomorrow Corporation already showed an aptitude for making players do small, seemingly innocent tasks that fuel a nightmarish machine with Little Inferno. In Little Inferno, you must solve destructive puzzles by burning an unlikely array of objects to unlock more objects to be burned in their Little
With new album Yume, ambient electronica musician Helios seems to recall the beauty of lazing underneath a sun-crested sky. The music soothes by letting high notes drift out to a gold horizon. It seems to lift off from the soft fringes of grass and get carried out on a hot puff of wind. More precise
There is, as your tinfoil hat-wearing friends are likely to tell you, no shortage of conspiracy surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy. There are the claims about the second shooter or someone on the grassy knoll. There are shadowy figures in conspiracy lore like “dark complected man,” “ba
You’d think videogames and magical realism would’ve found each other by now, but the pairing is still a tragically rare sight. Kentucky Route Zero is one of the few games I can name that embraces elements of magical realism without evolving into full-blown fantasy, but another project called Memoran
I’ve only ever met people who love or hate Pathologic. The strange Russian game about a diseased town (to put it simply) won several awards, but English-speaking players criticized it for its poor translation. Its recently crowdfunded remake aims to solve this issue, among other things, but Ice-Pick
Even on the best of days, defusing a bomb is a difficult task. Can there ever really be a “best day” that involves defusing a bomb? Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes is not interested in simplifying this task. Developed by Ottawa’s Steel Crate Games, it layers wrinkle upon wrinkle, making the task of
The world outside Allison Road’s iconic house setting is even stranger and more dangerous than what’s previously been revealed. New concept art for the upcoming horror game shows off an eerie forest setting, a moss-covered wood in the shadow of a looming mountain and overlooking a grey lake. In one
