You’ve lived in the same town all your life, a tiny idyllic village well removed from the world beyond its borders. Life is simple but reassuring in the way of a well-maintained schedule or a checked-off to-do list, and you have very little to want or desire beyond it. You’re content to tread well-w
When you open up RE.CO.N, the second place entry in the Indie Vault Game Jam, the first thing you see is blocky grass and butterflies. Your player character is wearing a cute little hat. You have to throw things at a pig to get him to move out of your way, and then tread carefully through a yard to
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Inside (PC, Xbox One) BY PLAYDEAD Playdead appears to have taken some lessons from Limbo and the many emulators that came after it. Focusing on atmosphere and a mounting sense of dread, Inside
The creator of the incredibly named My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant is currently funding a follow-up: Escape From Pleasure Planet. Escape from Pleasure Planet follows the story of Captain Tycho Minogue as he battles the devilish (and dangerously handsome) criminal Brutus, who he must track down. Fo
Dreams aren’t particularly easy to capture in any medium. Sometimes I’ll wake up convinced I just had a dream that I’ve actually had several times but never remembered before, and at the same time, I couldn’t tell you what happened in it. Given the complicated way memories of dreams work, and the un
Germany-based developer Robotality, who worked on the space colonization simulator and grueling strategy game Halfway (2014), have described their newest project as a “tactical RPG set in a 1930s pulp adventure scenario.” Like many good sentences that say little, their description opens up a world o
There’s a brief moment in the first hour of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End where Nathan Drake, a retired treasure hunter, combs through the artifacts from his adventures that he keeps in his attic. The space is ruined with meticulous clutter—each individual relic a callback to some grand excursion—and a
There are many different types of people to consider when making a videogame and a lot can be learned by discovering their needs. There are those that don’t normally play games, children, as well as the elderly, but there’s one group that’s easy to dismiss, if only because they seem too young: babie
Oh, it’s coming. Kentucky Route Zero Act IV currently sits out-of-sight—somewhere among the hot haze of a distant horizon—but, rest assured, it is heading this way. No, we don’t have a release date still, but there is yet another teaser to polish with your eyeballs. Last time, we had only an image.
Teddy isn’t looking so good. Stood in the freezing cold of Hell, his shawl visibly shivering, a crescent of stubble clings to his jaw and chin. This ex-minister is in search of his daughter, Bo, who has been kidnapped by a “strange entity” that claims to be God. Whether he asked for it not, it seems
Philip K. Dick may be decades-dead but the extraordinary visions that lined the pages of his fictions are more alive than ever. There is perhaps no better proof of this than Californium—a videogame that weaves Dick’s influential stories with his own drug-fueled delusions into a multi-dimensional tri
The weight of artistic expectations, particularly in the era of peak content and endless aggregation, can be crushing. A story about the next big thing and why you should care (what to expect when expecting an album?) lurks around every corner. While some reactions to this scenario are better than o
Space travel, alien babies, Justin Bieber—this and more has been the subject matter of the Sluggish Morss games, a series most known for the YouTube freakouts that occur when played by the uninitiated. Today, the co-creator of Sluggish Morss, Jack King-Spooner, has announced his newest project calle
The internet has been quietly buzzing about Oxenfree. Its status is held as the next über-cool opus of teenage ennui. But, for a second, forget all of that. Let’s just look at the damn thing. Oxenfree takes place on a small island in the Pacific Northwest; a tourist spot frequented after dark by loc
When I was 16-years-old I think I was hiding bottles of whiskey in a make-shift compartment I’d fashioned out of a flat-pack desk in my bedroom. My ambitions involved finishing school and getting drunk. I was probably considered a hopeless if academically successful wreck. This is only confirmed by
Colossal Cave Adventure (or, Adventure for short) isn’t exactly a familiar title today. Developed during the early 1970s, Adventure was written by programmer Will Crowther while working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman. Crowther was an advent cave explorer, and had vast experience surveying the Kentucky
On paper, Game of Thrones’ complex medieval intrigue and Telltale Games’ unique brand of choose-your-own-adventure storytelling is a perfect match. And in the final episode of season 1 of Telltale’s series, the stakes are the highest of the whole season, not only for the characters beset with the in
I remember reading once that a good fiction writer will paint images in your mind. This is vital to the craft; not just stating “a tree” so readers imagine a tree, but describing it so that this is uniquely a tree of your creation, one that will be remembered with intense detail if, say, referenced
