News

A kingdom management game in the style of Tinder

You’ll know how addictive swiping can be if you’ve ever downloaded Tinder. Yes, the dating app does encourage you to be shallow (like, really shallow), but the simple choice of swipe-left or swipe-right really speeds you through prospective dates. It’s the appeal of quick decisions and minimal compl

HackyZack is about living with anxiety, but you probably won’t realize

HackyZack is a “shitty metaphor” for creator Zack Bell’s thoughts and feelings on his own past. (“Shitty metaphor” is his phrasing, by the way.) It takes a Super Meat Boy (2010) approach to platforming—its meaning abstracted and then scattered among undeniably crisp platforming challenges. But where

Anthrotari explores growing up as a queer furry in the ‘90s

Dial-up modems, Windows 95 floppies, IRC channels, and free American Online disks. Ask anyone who lived through the internet boom of the ‘90s and these are guaranteed to be some of the first things that come to mind. But for New York-based game developer J.C. Holder, who uses they/them pronouns, the

A Wolverine game from 1994 did grime music before it was cool

Producer and DJ Sir Pixalot has rediscovered what is perhaps the first “grime” instrumental piece in the boss track from the 1994 SNES game Wolverine: Adamantium Rage.  Grime is a genre of music that finds its origins in East-London from the early 2000s. The birth of the genre can be found in some r

Kursk will turn a real submarine disaster into a documentary game

As a 6’7 (2m) man, the cramped quarters of submarines are anathema to me. So, when I saw the teaser for Jujubee Games Studio’s submarine survival game Kursk last year, it’s fair to say I was horrified, and more than a little uneasy. It wasn’t only due to the small virtual spaces of the game, either.