It’s been a little over two years since ambitious space exploration game No Man’s Sky, with its “planet-sized planets” and “universe-sized universe,” was first announced back in December of 2013. Since then, the game’s trailers and various press showings have been great at capturing the imagination,
That NORTH is about the current climate surrounding mass immigration is about as obvious as a sledgehammer to the face. It’s coated in 80s synth-pop sci-fi as if to cover it up but there’s no denying it. You are a person in an overwhelmingly foreign city. You must learn the customs of this new cultu
“My grandmother is probably the most important person ever to me,” writes illustrator and game maker Florian Veltman. This text appears on the website for his latest game—it’s to be called Lieve Oma, the Dutch for “Dear Grandmother”—which Veltman confirms to me will very much be framed as a letter t
Pages contain bodies and blood both literal and metaphorical. Illustrations and text occupy a confined world of disarray, littered with skulls. Among this is the beauty of rain falling and of bright wallpaper colors. A world where your hands are not your own. This is a world of contrasts, the world
Firewatch gets it. Beauty alone isn’t enough to carry an experience. There needs to be some grit, a bit of dirt, conflict even, to elevate a videogame (hell, any piece of art) from the whimsical to something more. I have a problem with 2009’s Flower and 2013’s Proteus precisely because there isn’t a
Hark, another open world, first-person game in which you traverse picturesque natural environments! That is both slightly unfair to Eastshade, a PC game that is currently in the making, and factually beyond reproach. Eastshade, as with many games before it, is all of those things, but it is also end
If you look upon the mournful, decaying figure sat atop that webbed plinth above and don’t immediately think of Zdzisław Beksiński then you aren’t familiar with his work. And if that’s the case then you might not fully realize the appeal of Scorn, the videogame that this concept art informs. Time to
“Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had j
The idea of the New York City apartment as we know it had yet to be established at the end of the 19th century. The inhabitants of huge multi-occupant living spaces were mostly low-income immigrant families, isolated physically and culturally. The change began with Jacob Riis’s 1890 book How the Oth
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Mad Max. Fallout 4. Star Wars Battlefront. In a year of stunning videogame landscapes—or at least landscapes that are mildly pleasing, so long as you enjoy dull, pretty pictures—Off-Peak, by Cosmo D, is exceptional. Its train station cum art gallery is an evocation o
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
The city in A Place for the Unwilling is alive. It may even be possible for it to die. The streets and buildings make up its physical form as bones and muscles and arteries do ours. The population is its life force; rushing like a bloodstream through the alleys and avenues, occasionally stopping for
Be warned: This article spoils all the surprise of Orchids to Dusk that is so crucial to the first-time experience, so it’s best played before reading. /// The fallen astronaut in Orchids to Dusk is not eager for adventure. You can see this in their hands, which are timidly held together, head shyly
If you want more in depth interviews like these, support us on Kickstarter! // Few games have captured the public imagination like No Man’s Sky. Due out in June 2016, the game promises an entire universe to explore: some 18 quintillion planets, which would take some 600 billion hours for players to
“Come, bunnies,” I announced to the empty room behind me. “Follow me, your glorious leader!” In Future Unfolding, you run around a forest that has the florid appearance of spilled paint, and you can talk to the animals. As if some glorified Pied Piper, you stride with great bounds across flower patc
Spawned from his background in photography, Ivan Notaros has come up with a beautiful way to explore a videogame world in his upcoming project Scanner. As the title reveals, it has you seeing through a first-generation robot’s eyes as it ventures into a post-humanity world, constructing 3D images wi
If you’ve ever moved house you should be familiar with the peculiar act of emptying familiar spaces. In doing this myself, I’ve come to realize that memories not only lie within the objects we own but also the walls and floors we have them occupy. The difference is that we have to leave those memori
Colorful going-outside sim Lovely Weather We’re Having has a release date of November 10th for PC and Mac. You can watch the Big Announcement in this totally real clip from the Ellen DeGeneres Show. Lovely Weather We’re Having is described as a “goal-free” game about spending time outside, chatting
One thing that made cult RPG Maker horror game Yume Nikki really good was its sense of place. Whether defined by its music, color scheme, level design, or its strange lurking occupants, each location in the game world was so distinct in its own way. That’s something that I think Zykov Eddy, creator
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
This cat is out of place. But maybe all cats are out of place. The one in Psychic Cat is probably no more suited to its environment than, say, my cat Smudge who fell through the roof of the greenhouse last year. The temptation was to call Smudge a klutz at the time (and let’s be fair, Smudge, you ar
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
Even though it took the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and Excellence in Design awards at the Independent Games Festival earlier this year, Outer Wilds is something of a mystery. It was still in very early alpha when it was being judged for this year’s Game Developers Conference, and has flown under a l
Julian Glander doesn’t need to glamour you with guns, collectables, obstacles, death, or sex. He has the weather, a lovely pink dog, and rocks for you to kick around. The vibrantly colored world of Lovely Weather We’re Having doesn’t take you back to a specific time necessarily, but to a mind set, w
