Downwell might be a perfect game title. Not only is it short and pithy, but it serves as a perfect summation for what developer Ojiro Fumoto has created. It’s a game in which a young boy is continuously falling down a well, avoiding enemies and purchasing upgrades along the way. But it’s not a hopel
In videogames, cityscapes are often the most interesting types of environments. From Jet Set Radio’s neon-colored, ever-grindable Tokyo-to, to Mirror’s Edge’s parkour-ready, futuristic city, cityscapes in videogames emit the uncanny, but not quite in a Freudian way. Fictional cityscapes are instead
Despite—or perhaps because of—the horrifying nature of nuclear disaster, something of the sublime tends to emerge from out of the plumes and ashes. Creators have been trying to make sense of this ungodly power that we’ve wielded ever since the nuclear bomb was first invented, only to lay waste to it
A new victim of the Silent Hill mythology has been uncovered, and it is neither in the form of a new game or a new movie (thankfully, for the latter at least). A recent addition to The Campo Santo Quarterly Review, a journal curated by the ombudsman of the small yet star-studded game studio of forme
We expect our surgeons to have steady hands. Some of the time, our lives depend on it. But what happens when that steadiness deserts a surgeon? Like a golfer with the yips, one crisis leads to the next, spreading outwards to affect the surgeon’s professional life and his emotional state. Suddenly, t
I have but one question to ask about puzzles: if at some point a creator had a complete picture, why on earth would they smash it into pieces just so we would have to do more work before enjoying it? Kintsukuroi, an Android “experiment” by Chelsea Saunders, attempts to answer this question. It takes
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” – Alfred Hitchcock Hifumi Kouno, creator of the classic 1995 Japanese horror franchise Clock Tower, announced an upcoming spiritual successor to the series, to be developed by a small studio with some very big names, called Nude Maker
If you had a chance to check MoMA’s last design exhibition Talk to Me, you might have noticed several devices such as Sputniko!’s Menstruation Machine which mimics the pain of, well, menstruation. Or Kate Hartman’s Talk to Yourself Hat which transmits sounds from one’s mouth directly into one’s ears
Take a moment and watch this micro-documentary on a 64-year-old Japanese woman who is sewing elaborate dolls, leaving them in the place of departed neighbors from her dying village in the valley of Shikoku. For the past decade, Ayano Tsukimi has been repopulating the remote village of Nagoro with ar
