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To put it mildly, the hype machine has shown nonstop love for the upcoming Superbrothers production Sword & Sworcery EP. I played through a fair bit of a mature beta, and it is every bit the smartly crafted affair I had hoped for. Sword & Sworcery feels like a game created by one of us. Among those

Late Friday evening, the city of San Francisco experienced its first touch of snow since 1976. The sudden change in weather, however, did not stop a crowd from gathering at the IGN Entertainment headquarters the next morning. Snowfall or shine, they came to participate in StartupCraft, a no-holds-ba

One of the best compliments I can give 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors is that it has nice-sounding text. (After all, it is a sound novel, marking the fiction-focused genre’s maiden voyage to the West.) The dialogue spoken by the game’s nine personalities isn’t voiced, but conveyed in a pl

Remember the ending of the first Men in Black film? After Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones save a marble-sized galaxy from falling into the hands of a giant cockroach, the camera zooms out to reveal that the Milky Way is itself the size of a marble—likely inside an even bigger marble, which is inside

For the last couple months, we’ve been combing the web looking for the best videogame-related material scattered here and there. Here are some of our favorites from the past week.

Does it matter why these minotaurs insist on riding asteroids straight into the sun? Maybe they are the victims of a tragic intergalactic mining accident. Or perhaps, long ago, Hercules banished them from their home on Crete by tossing them into space. And why have we, the players, been condemned to

Doodle God wants to be a game about being God. Instead, it’s a game about being like a god. It answers the question: What if we had to do the work of God, but we didn’t possess the resources to do it? Sure, the game gives us resources, in the strictest sense of the word. We start with stone, air, fi

The fourth wall is broken less than a minute into Cthulhu Saves the World. Turns out H. P. Lovecraft’s ancient squid-faced god of darkness has been eavesdropping as the narrator was explaining the plot. A mysterious wizard has drained his evil energies, and to restore them, Cthulhu will have to beco

You may have noticed that Kill Screen has started running reviews. We realize now that some explaining is in order—in FAQ fashion!

Last year, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Schwarzenegger v. EMA, the case in which videogames entered into their epic battle with Arnold Schwarzenegger, not in his capacity as Conan, the Barbarian; or his capacity as T-800, the murderous Terminator robot; or his capacity as Ben Richards, who k

Adventure games are a genre that everybody has nostalgia for, but nobody plays. That’s because games like Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective feel old-fashioned compared to the open-world, massively multiplayer, online-all-the-time games we’re used to. Some detractors have even gone so far as to call des

Yesterday, Activision turned its virtual amps down from 11 to zero by halting the Guitar Hero franchise. Citing “continued declines in the music genre,” the company canceled an as-yet-unannounced seventh Guitar Hero game, along with its lukewarm spin-off DJ Hero, and laid off hundreds who work on th

?We are past the point of zombie saturation. I’m even sick of articles about the glut of zombies in the media today. They are everywhere. I am playing two zombie games right now, and at the point of diminished returns.

We’ve been selected by Kickstarter to create a curated page so we can spotlight projects that we think fit in with the Kill Screen ethos. Without further ado, here are our first picks.

A review of Tetris at 22 lines, 10 words a line.

When he walked past the office at 5:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, Paolo saw my wife and me sleeping facedown on a desk, sitting side-by-side on rolling chairs. On the screen of my laptop, the tail end of Kiki’s Delivery Service was squeaking away, Kirsten Dunst’s piercing voice somehow failing to wake

If videogames are two things, they are spatial and temporal: concepts a Kantian would say are human instincts. Likewise, poetry often uses space (imagery) and time (rhythm and meter) to magnify the emotional details of human experience. Dinner Date poeticizes our small, unconscious tics. A tutorial

“SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express—verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral conc

You won’t take arms against it, but you will face a literal sea of troubles in Michael Molinari’s Flash game …But That Was [Yesterday]. An oily, churning wall—seemingly made of memories—blocks your way. Your first objective is to figure out how, by opposing, you can end it.

Things get out of hand quickly in Super Crate Box. It always feels unexpected. Maybe it’s because the game seems so simple: Collect crates to score points; careful around the enemies. The pixel style hints at halcyon days, and gameplay traces a direct lineage to the old Mario Bros. arcade game.

Effing Meteors is a game about jilted love. A very angry god (think Jonathan Edwards-level fury) has decided that he’s no longer pleased with the little planet below, and it now deserves judgment. Punishment, of course, is the domain of the meteors. As this angry god, you desire satisfaction in the

It’s a simple idea, really. A single object hovers, darts and dashes in every direction, and I am tasked with following it for as long as possible. There are no power-ups in UFO on Tape, no other levels. This is it. I’m filming a UFO.

“What does the Like icon really communicate?” As teenagers we spoke in likes. We would articulate our thoughts about a new interest, and we would fail. We used the word “like” to cover up our mistakes. This Radiohead album is like, like, um, kind of a—it’s like, you know, those electronic undercurr

A famous political thriller opens with a scene of KGB officials deploying a dreaded torture technique: complete sensory deprivation. A man is suspended in a vat, in complete darkness, all his senses rescinded. The point of the test is to determine how long it takes for this man to panic to the point

I’ve never been reviewed. I’ve received angry fan letters now and again, but I’ve never had the distinct privilege (or dishonor) of having my work evaluated by a professional. That feeling of reading another man or woman’s words; their reflections, critiques, and assumptions about what I’ve poured m