To the Moon creator readies A Bird Story, which will also probably make you cry
Showing instead of telling.
narrative
Fighting the power-and a rough beginning-in Unrest
No giant rats to grind on here.
The Sun Also Rises finds the human side of drone warfare
Hemingway’s epic gets an update for the War on Terror.
I had a panic attack while playing The Walking Dead. Is this a good thing?
What games can help us overcome.
Grand Theft Auto 5 characters as found art
GTA comes alive.
Three Fourths Home drives us into the eye of a storm
Bracket Games finds chaos in a Nebraskan cornfield.
Fragments of Him’s ghostly minutiae is now more heartbreaking
Loss can be surprisingly small.
The clash between systems and narrative comes to a head in The Hit
On the difficulty of chairs.
Last Life will be a Kentucky Route Zero-style adventure game, says dev. We say: hooray!
Remember Last Life? Of course, you do. Who could forget that smoking-hot noir/sci-fi adventure game with an art style like Grim Fandango and a twisty transhumanist subplot. Well, we know a good bit more about the details now that it’s, like, 30 minutes from being officially funded, raking in over 1
Alaskan tribe and game studio team up, document folklore in enchanting game
There’s just something inspiring about a small game studio teaming up with Alaskan natives to tell Iñupiat folklore through a beautiful puzzle-platformer game. What’s more, Never Alone, coming to PC and unspecified consoles this fall, gives you a trusty little white dog sidekick. Dogs are pretty ins
I’ve got 99 problems but Notch’s new game about existential dread isn’t one
The bowler-hat-wearing, dubstep-bash-throwing Minecraft creator created a quick little game about exploring the squirmy mental content of a nihilist. Coded for the latest Ludum Dare game jam, Drowning in Problems is sort of an existential take on the Cookie Clicker genre. This text-based, choice-lad
Rabbit meets and woos woman, beautiful card game ensues
As is so often the case with falling in love, the first attraction to Poupée de Son is physical: “I could see myself with this good-looking person; I could see myself playing this card game gorgeously illustrated with rabbits and brides.” But that’s just the start. This attractive game you were jus
Who needs iPhones when we have gigantic storytelling ribbons?
Touch-screens are pretty great for mobile phones, except when you’re typing, and cutting-and-pasting, and, well, a bunch of other stuff, but using a touch-screen at a museum takes the ritual out of running your fingers through those old archives. So The Museum of The History of Polish Jews in Warsaw
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter devs want their story to be as believable as their graphics
The buzz around The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is all about its camerawork, and rightly so. It’s gorgeous. But in an in-depth interview with Edge, the devs talked about how important non-obtrusive storytelling is. After all, if you’re going to create an environment that is indistinguishable from life
Extrasolar, or How I spied on the XRI with a Mars Rover
Join the conspiracy.
Gone Home creator talks reading in videogames and the danger of lore
There have been many-an-editorial about whether games should have narratives at all, and, if so, how they should go about telling them. Gone Home’s beautiful answer was to wed stories to objects and environments, instead of, say, through non-interactive voiceovers and cutscenes. But it wasn’t perfec
Wadjet Eye to release fifth in series of beautiful point-and-click games
We’ve been graced with a new trailer for The Blackwell Epiphany, the fifth and final game in Wadjet Eye Games’ long-running series about a dejected, undead detective investigating suicides and occult objects. That’s one reason why people love this series: the plot is mature and intricate and long. T
The Lightning Returns and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 trailers look great, if you ignore the dialogue
After watching the new trailers for Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy 13 and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, I’m cautiously optimistic for both of these big sequels. But, holy hell, do they have some melodramatic dialogue. Which one’s worse? Be the judge for yourself, but it’s a mighty close contest,
The amazing Leviathan turns the movie theater into an aquatic fantasy
If experimental forms of narrative intrigue you, then you will love Leviathan, the new storytelling initiative shown off by Intel at CES this week. As with all cross-media projects, Leviathan can be hard to describe, but here’s what you need to know: a giant, magnificent whale sails off the screen a
How mortal enemies in DayZ became BFFs on Twitter
There are literally thousands of stories about unpleasant things that happen in the harsh, brutal zombie game DayZ, but this one is pretty fascinating: Guy plays game, guy meets bandit, bandit handcuffs guy, guy begs not to be chopped with an axe. Did I mention that the guy was Sean Vanaman, the lea
The noir-ish Framed could be the Device 6 of 2014
Framed is a noir game in which you rearrange the panels of a comic so that a silhouetted PI in a fedora can proceed through the story. The fragmented narrative and cartoon-spy schtick sort of evokes Simogo’s triumphant Device 6, although with a slightly less sinister vibe. It’s a kitschy game, a th
Batman: Arkham Origins is one big identity crisis
Is this a prequel or a sequel? Does anyone care? Is this thing on?
Device 6 is a mystery game that creates as many mysteries as it solves
A real page-turner, this.
How The Walking Dead uses big data to make life-or-death decisions
Telltale Games mines decision-making numbers to change the player experience and the narrative itself.