Outer space is what currently holds the global population’s active imagination. The big breakthroughs in science that wow us are made up there, and so our popular stories follow suit—whether it’s space disasters directed by Hollywood (Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian) or videogames that promise us
Where do you go after teaching girls how to code and make games with workshops, summer camps, and game jams across 38 cities worldwide? The White House, apparently. Last week, on December 7th, Girls Make Games ran a two-hour workshop inside the White House with a bunch of girls from ages 11 to 14. (
As a college student, my professors are pretty important to me, and not just because they hold the future of my GPA in their hands. My professors have been endlessly patient with my classmates and me, providing us with guidance, insight, and even free dinner once or twice. If one of them went missin
The years after Portal came out in 2007 were tiring. An influx of first-person puzzle games broke like a tidal wave over the horizon. All of them flaunting what their creators deemed to be the next big “mind-bending” idea. They simply hoped to wow people. But many of these games were were dull, unin
It’s no surprise that outer space in Sunless Skies isn’t the terrifying vacuum that we know lingers above our heads. After all, the sea in the game’s predecessor Sunless Sea wasn’t the blue ocean of our Earth—it was the Unterzee, an underground sea populated with its own terrible creatures and pecul
Sea of Solitude was one of the most intriguing and sublime game concepts that flashed across my eyes last year. It follows a girl called Kay who has been turned into a monster and is on a journey to find out how that happened. Most striking about it is the world it’s set in: a submerged city where g
It was revealed during the Playstation Experience on December 3rd that Uncharted 4’s single player DLC will feature a few familiar faces. Returning to steal our hearts is Chloe Frazer as the main character and mercenary leader Nadine Ross as supporting cast. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is slated for
A bodilesss hand floats sideways through a knife. The knife swings wildly to dissect a watermelon, cutting it into ever smaller chunks, until all that’s left is juicy debris in zero gravity. An explosion. Large rocks fall. A humming bird appears, flapping wildly, then it disappears. Another explosio
Unveiled over the weekend during PlayStation Experience, the new trailer for Rain World opens with a heavy, droning noise, and a single white slugcat, in a dark industrial world. First it states “you are alone.” Then, a moment before the cut, a question mark appears. “You are alone?” As the soundtra
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. SHENZEN I/O (Windows, Mac) BY ZACHTRONICS Some games and educational apps try to ease you into the art of writing code. SHENZEN I/O isn’t so soft. It’s a throwback to the 1980s, when there was
“Long before Alto’s Adventure had even been released, we started working on an idea for what might come next,” Ryan Cash tells me. “Today, we’re finally ready to announce it: Alto’s Odyssey.” This is all that Cash and his crew at Toronto-based studio Built By Snowman will say about their next game.
For the past couple of years, the digital artist and game maker known as BARCHboi has kept himself secretive. His primary online identity has been a logo of a portrait with a black bar across the eyes, overlaid with glitches. Now BARCHboi (real name: Joseph Dowsett) has made himself naked. His new “
If you didn’t get to play the Triennale Game Collection when it came out for mobile earlier this year then perhaps you’ll consider picking it up for PC. It came out for free on Steam today. It’s essential for anyone who is into interactive art or experimental games. Put simply, the Triennale Game Co
One night, James Biddulph couldn’t sleep, so he got up and made a quick garden generator on his computer. It worked by having you type in a word from which an abstract-looking plant would grow. He did this as the idea of having a garden has been his motivation in recent months. Biddulph is anticipat
Ian Snyder is responsible for making one of my favorite games of 2014: The Floor is Jelly, a side-scrolling platformer that makes jumping more playful than ever. So many game makers try to reinvent the platformer by tweaking the jump—the distance, the speed, or the friction perhaps. But Snyder went
In the days following the results of the American election, programmer and game maker Jessica Hayley considered running a “Fuck Trump Game Jam” in order to “channel [her] anger into something that felt productive.” But upon reflection, she realized that the games that would come out of such a move w
Plenty of things in life have expiration dates: cartons of milk, your passport, antiperspirants. After a week in the fridge, you should really retire that open bottle of wine. Relationships, on the other hand, don’t usually come marked with an end date. You might see the end coming from a ways away,
It’s been a while since we’ve had any news about Vane, a game that has defined itself by a kid running across a stormy desert, ancient temples, and a crow flying overhead. That changed on Saturday night as, during the PlayStation Experience in LA, a new trailer was released for the game, and it show
After it was revealed last week that Annapurna Interactive would be publishing What Remains of Edith Finch in spring 2017 for PC and PlayStation 4, a new trailer for the game was revealed during PlayStation Experience on Saturday night. If you don’t know, What Remains of Edith Finch follows the titu
What I think I like the most about The Franz Kafka Videogame is that it isn’t faffing around. With a title like that you know what you’re gonna get when you play it. An all-singing, all-dancing pixel-art rendition of Franz Kafka’s works? Oh yes, I’ll take that, thank you very much. But, actually, th
A lot of folks associate the holidays with good food and home-cooked meals. For me, that means a vast assortment of cookies and baked goods, as well as surullitos (a Puerto Rican snack) made with much care by my mother. In the spirit of combining winter festivity with cooking, independent studio Gho
A soft whimper causes you to look up from your work. It’s your dog, who is sleeping peacefully in bed. Is she dreaming? Her legs twitch slightly. Maybe she’s running around in a field, chasing a squirrel. She’s too old to do that now, but you like to think that the tiny mammal stood no chance in the
Sandro Magliocco spent his childhood playing around and exploring the medieval coastal town of Carlingford, Ireland. So when his Slovakia-based, multinational team at Joint Custody decided to set its debut title in Ireland, it made sense for him to revisit those early memories and set the game in a
Microsoft’s been rolling out a lot of new backwards-compatible games this month, the latest of which is 2006’s beloved The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Bethesda tweeted that Oblivion, and all its DLC with the exception of Shivering Isles, was available for download on the Microsoft store. As always,
Don’t you ever wish you could escape to a remote island just to get away from it all, even for five or 10 minutes? If so, check out ROM, a “short experimental experience” created by HTW Berlin students Paul Schnepf, Rainer Windolph, and Friedemann Allmenröder. Created as part of the Game Design BA c
