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Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. In Ruins (PC, Mac) TOM BETTS The craggy, mysterious ruins of Ico’s fortress-like castle are known for their wind-blown eeriness. Tom Betts has taken that game’s architecture and used its melan
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Google is an optimistic company. Presenting itself as Silicon Valley’s version of Disney’s imagineers, the tech giant consistently predicts a future where its innovations drastically change the way we approach everyday activities. To be fair, advancements like its widely-used Android operating syste
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What do you see when told to imagine a videogame titled “Pony Island”? Verdant fields of grazing horses, foals nestling by their mothers, others leaping on spindly legs? Sorry, but I have to break this to you now—a game called Pony Island exists and it is nothing like that. The title is deliberately
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Fashion is basically LARPing at scale. You decide on an identity to take on for the next few hours—a functional person, a grown up, someone loveable, Matt Bomer’s character on White Collar—and then you give it the old college try. Results may vary. The connection between LARPing and fashion is appar
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TR-REC is basically Guitar Hero by another name, and it seems unlikely that any of the parties involved could object too strenuously to this characterization. The game is an exercise in conflating genres and media forms. The self-described “pattern sequencing game” is made by Roland, a company more
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If you’ve played last year’s Fallout 4, you’ve doubtless seen the series of animated shorts that play upon starting the game up. Black-and-white and with scratchy audio, these videos turned the post-apocalyptic Boston wasteland of Fallout 4 into a comedic, 1950s-style cartoon. (If you haven’t seen t
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What better way to celebrate it being 50 years since influential Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s death than redesigning his famous Villa Savoye? Oh, not actually, of course. We couldn’t possibly bear to spoil what is considered by many to be one of the keystones of modern architecture (and also an of
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Battletoads was released in 1991 as an effort to rival the success of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The game features three humanoid toads named Rash, Zitz, and Pimple and—while they do share some aesthetic similarities with their amphibian contemporaries—the series couldn’t be more different. B
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Libraries, huh, yeah. What are they good for? With apologies to Edwin Starr and Betteridge’s Law, the answer to that question is probably not “absolutely nothing, uh-huh uh-huh.” That’s a start, but it still leaves the not insignificant question of what, exactly, a library is good for in this day an
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Textures in games are hardly ever painterly. There are clear cut examples of games trying to emulate the look of a painting (like Okami’s cel-shaded, oil painting art style), while others are literally hand painted (like Double Fine’s Broken Age)—but to find a genuine surreal art style implemented i
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A lot can change in three years. It was back then that the Green family and the small team with them started production on That Dragon, Cancer—a heartfelt videogame that passes through interactive vignettes like a dream, depicting the family’s journey with baby son Joel as he battled with cancer. He
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City building games are rarely exercises in democracy. The player’s agency stems from her role as a central planner; she designs cities that hopefully please their residents, but this is not a consultative, bottom-up process. Considerate urban planning in the city-building game is an act of benevole