This is part of Kill Screen’s list of the best videogames of 2016. To see the rest of the list, check out all the other parts. /// 12. The Last Guardian You don’t mind when Trico delays the journey to splash in a puddle. This large mythic fusion of cat, bird, and dog is the most lovable videogame co
There’s a close-knit cloud of terms frequently cropping up in the discussion of action role-playing games lately. “Atmospheric,” “minimalist,” “roguelike,” “pixel art,” et cetera. Hyper Light Drifter established its appeal almost entirely on the back of these signifiers. Titan Souls did the same las
A year ago, when Rich Vreeland (aka Disasterpeace) said that the work on his score for Mini Metro (2015) would be around 90 percent coding, not many knew what he meant. At the time, the only insight he shared was that the results of his work would create procedural audio for the subway system manage
After three months of radio silence, over a year of no footage, and a little over three years since its successful Kickstarter at the tail end of 2012, moody pixel-art game Radio The Universe finally has more to show us. Specifically, it’s a new video that shows off one of its boss fights. Since it
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Hyper Light Drifter (PC, Mac) BY HEART MACHINE Hyper Light Drifter starts out loud—streams of stars, planet-sized eruptions, and a huge, electric soundtrack by Fez (2013) composer Diasterpeace
Silence is difficult for most of us. It’s not just screens that prevent it, the ubiquity of entertainment and distraction, or the pace of modern life—though, that and more contributes to the difficulty of easing through the din. The chaff of life is a billowy recliner, keeping us cozy against the ch
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) wasn’t a tough sell. It had audiences entranced from its first trailer. A desert slashed with muted yellows and clay reds set against a crisp aquamarine sky spoke for itself. The dies irae of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Requiem” was only there to make sure you never forgot. The first
Our upcoming print reinvention is going to zero in on the creators we love and their current projects. Three of our favorite upcoming games are from independent Los Angeles-based developers doing exciting, diverse work that nonetheless shares strong aesthetic vision full of pixels, pastels, and bold
Hyper Light Drifter, like Rain World and a few others, seems like one of those games that exists only in shiny gifs on Twitter, so it comes as massively exciting news that Heart Machine’s mesmerizing action RPG finally has a release date. That’s right! Hyper Light Drifter comes out Spring 2016 and t
Rain World is part of an explosion over the past few years of games that express, through their pixel art, a very personal sort of fantasy. Along with Hyper Light Drifter, Witchmarsh, The Deer God, and Titan Souls, it sees pixel art not as cute but as ready for subversion, and an excuse to lavishly
Heart Machine have announced that their ultra-pretty, color-filled apocalypse Hyper Light Drifter will be getting a preview release this weekend. Kickstarter backers will find a Steam code in their inboxes this Friday, and it’ll work until Sunday at midnight. In a helpful bit of semantics, they’re
In the year 20XX, in a TIGSource devlog… Irkalla. It’s a side-scrolling arcade shooter that has the pixel-y charm of Hyper Light Drifter (or your personal favorite upcoming GIF-machine), and all the bleak, gunmetal-grey mech-strewn wastelands you can ask for. Yeah, the pored-over, long-gestating pix
We already knew action-role-player Hyper Light Drifter was easy on the eyes. That was a done deal. But this new trailer really hammers the point home. In case you missed the Kickstarter campaign that blew up last year, this gorgeous showpiece of pixel art is also a game, and judging from the footag
The dungeon hack Crawl, recently greenlit on Steam, is a grisly little action-RPG with very, very pretty pixel art. The new trailer is a visual symphony of small four-sided shapes—a feast of upside-down pentagrams, Carmackian floating demon heads, and plenty of blood-splatter. Like Diablo, it allow
