Have you read The Grapes of Wrath? If you’ve been through the American school system you probably just hissed through your teeth at the sight of its title. For bringing up those aching memories, I apologize. But if you did study it, you’ll be familiar with how John Steinbeck structured the chapters
The battles in Badblood are ones of wit and wariness. Like Manhunt meets hide-and-seek, two trained killers sneak around in a field, hunting and fleeing from the other as the screen orientation constantly shifts to mask their movements. It’ll take strong spatial awareness and alertness to find your
Stage Presence is karaoke with less musicality and more social anxiety, and really, what’s not to like about that? You play as the frontman of a band. You’re on stage at a large festival—think Glastonbury, but without the ambient fug—when something goes wrong. Who knows what went wrong. This is the
Anyone who played Monument Valley remembers the feeling of wellbeing that washed over them as they discovered the solution to each puzzle. It’s that sense that everything had its proper place; that things fit together and work in harmony. The world, when you manage to see it from the right perspecti
Have you ever been watching a cartoon when suddenly the screen goes white, the main character is standing there alone, and the animator’s pencil drops down into screen to mess with the world? It’s a classic fourth-wall-breaking gag that’s all over the place in animation—from the classic Looney Tunes
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Barmark (Android) BY Stormhatt Studios The characters in Barmark are all damaged in some way. You can see this as they wander the rigidly-cut pastoral landscapes guided by your finger. They a
A blue sky riddled with floating islands, purple deer, and idyllic waterfalls—the opening scene of Aer’s trailer is a scenic glance at an abstract cubist-esque world. The expanse hovering before us is at peace, but we know that there’s so much more to see. Taking in the view with us is Auk, a pilgri
Life is a brutal slog. You spend the majority of your waking hours working, and spend the remainder recovering from the toxic effects of that work. Your body is constantly deteriorating, unless you are like a little kid, in which case, I have this to say: it is all downhill from here, bub. The plane
You might remember Yarny from E3, when he made us wonder whether all videogames would eventually get Etsy-fied. Or you might remember his creator, Martin Sahlin, who was one of the few presenters at E3 who passed our fashion police‘s standards with flying colors (well, mainly just two colors: green
Think of all the words that an eagle typically conjures: mighty, inspiring, soaring, majestic. The eagle in Gathering Sky is none of these. I don’t think I’m going beyond myself to say that, frankly, it’s a bit of a shit. I know we shouldn’t wish an excruciating death on any of Earth’s creatures—esp
“Don’t get into any scraps,” a voice tells Faith over her comm about a minute into the latest trailer for Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst. Yet, by now, we’ve already seen Faith take out three guards, with more to come. Though most of the trailer is focused on the series’ signature parkour, it does bookend i
The world of speedrunning is a mad, mad, mad one. It’s playing a videogame obsessively to the point that you know it inside-out. A speedrunner will put hundreds of hours into a videogame, if not thousands, all in order to learn the shortest routes, and also to discover any way of breaking it to thei
The Ear Force PX51 is a lot of headset—$296.95 worth of headset, to be precise. It is billed as an “advanced gaming audio system.” It comes with many features that are prefixed with “dual-”, which makes sense insofar as most people have two ears. All of that is a complicated way of saying the PX51 a
The launch trailer for Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, an exploration game that juxtaposes the mundanity of human lives with the apocalypse, has been released. While it’s clear the game focuses on the few left behind after most other people have gone missing, the cause of the tragedy is unclear. pe
The new Rise of the Tomb Raider footage from Gamescom has gotten a lot of attention for depicting Lara doing some pretty gruesome stuff. She uses a kitchen knife to tenderize a dude’s neck, bludgeons another bro with a bottle, then somehow accurately fires two arrows at once into as many oblivious h
There’s a giant skull fella leering out of the darkness towards a pale light in the new Dark Souls III trailer. As it has no flesh, you can’t tell if the facial expression it might pull as the torch-bearing knight walks up to it would be a sneer of anger, or a less hostile and quizzical one. All we
