The Contender is a tabletop game that combines the rhetoric of political campaigns and the mechanics of Cards Against Humanity, all of which raises a thorny interpretive question: Would tonight’s second Republican presidential debate be improved if it were replaced by a televised game of The Contend
What Remains of Edith Finch is rooted in Japanese horror as much as it is Lovecraftian. That’s why Giant Sparrow, the team behind the game, is pretty happy with its localized title over in Japan: ????????????????? or, translated back to English, What Happened at the Strange Estate of the Finch Famil
You were lured in by the sight of a skeleton astronaut, weren’t you? Or is that just me? The idea of an astronaut left to rot in space grips me as one of the horrors of the future. At the moment, as far as public records show, there are no dead people floating around in space. But we have to suppose
We expect our surgeons to have steady hands. Some of the time, our lives depend on it. But what happens when that steadiness deserts a surgeon? Like a golfer with the yips, one crisis leads to the next, spreading outwards to affect the surgeon’s professional life and his emotional state. Suddenly, t
Shape of the World is pure joy. It’s a game about finding your place in the world as much as it is being lost in it—about learning how to be lost while still feeling like you belong. As you wander through its colorful biomes, life sprouts up all around you, in real time. Shrubbery bubbles up like fo
There’s a certain type of prank prevalent on YouTube where the prankster dribbles hot sauce onto a friend’s food and also into their drink, so that once they eat the food and realize the predicament they’re now in, reaching for their drink will only make things worse.Merrily Perily takes that prank
Problems are no longer immaterial in Nadav Tenenbaum’s “abstract journey” WEAVE. They rise up silently from the seas as huge spheres of ebony, blocking out the sun. Or they take up all your living space as unconquerable Sisyphean boulders. Problems cannot be ignored and they will find you. This is w
Vignettes is an adorable looking game about rotating adorable tiny objects in such a way that transforms them into other adorable tiny objects. The little shapeshifting things tell an “underlying story,” making each individual item a vignette of their own. A telephone becomes a television set which
Else Heart.Break() makes me want to smoke cigarettes. It’s not that I don’t value my health. It’s that being a smoker seems to be the easiest way to people’s hearts in the game. If you smoke, you can say “yes” when strangers ask if you have either a) a lighter, or b) a smoke. With that icebreaker a
Kickstarter darling Undertale came into our lives in 2013 with the scent of butterscotch-cinnamon pie. It cradled us in its furry arms, gave us comforting and encouraging glances, before leaving us to rot—cold and alone—for two long years. Now, it’s finally returning next Tuesday the 15th, and I can
On September 8th, 1978, the Iranian government opened fire on a large group of protestors in a public square in the country’s capital of Tehran, killing almost 100 and wounding several more. The event came to be known as Black Friday. It was one of the pivotal moments in the burgeoning Iranian Revol
For a character who has already died, Dracula sure is a chill dude. In Hotel Transylvania, the 2012 children’s movie that has a sequel coming out this month, Dracula is clumsily adjusting to domesticity. In Mel Brooks’ 1995 parody of traditional vampire stories, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Dracula
“Oceanheart is a chill exploration game about sailing away and making a home.” That’s how co-designer Karen Teixeira describes the fledgling new project on her website. Teixeira began development on the game in late April of this year. Since then, she’s slowly been revealing new details and video sa
New screenshots from The Witness, pulled from its upcoming trailer, provide a look at the varied locations you’ll visit on the vast and mysterious island where the game is set. Some of the shots look familiar. About a minute into the last trailer—which creator Jonathan Blow points out is two and a h
