I have bizarrely fond memories of playing around with Bokida when it was first released back in 2013. Bizarre because, at the time, the game was only a limited prototype. But there was something about its openness and the toy-like expressions its world allowed. It gave you a vast white landscape wit
Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all. —William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936) One of the currents running through Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, and indeed the Southern literary tradition at large, is the difficulty of
Narayana Walters, a computer science student at Appalachian State University, is fed up with seeing the same old designs in horror and survival games. But rather than sticking to moaning about it, Walters is doing the admirable thing of making his own: a non-linear, open-world survival horror game c
Upcoming open-world game Great Cascade has been renamed Thousand Threads. The reason for the title change is due to a copyrighted game having a similar name. And so, in order to avoid confusion, Seamount Games changed the name, which is inspired by a quotation from Herman Melville. “Ye cannot live f
This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console. To see other articles, go here. /// Up until Grand Theft Auto III (2001), it was standard to classify videogames by their central mechanics. There were stealth games, platformers, shooters, racing games, actio
At the very end of his playful Postscript to The Name of the Rose (1980), Umberto Eco made a casually sibylline gesture toward the future of interactive fiction. “It seems,” Eco wrote, “that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has f
In the first few hours of The Division, you will be bombarded with phone recordings, resources and consumables, an overwhelming litany of damage numbers and weapon mods. It puts you in such a constant state of information overload that after a while it’s easier to ignore everything but the essential
Hark, another open world, first-person game in which you traverse picturesque natural environments! That is both slightly unfair to Eastshade, a PC game that is currently in the making, and factually beyond reproach. Eastshade, as with many games before it, is all of those things, but it is also end
I have never been to Paris. In my provincial life I’ve never even left the United States. Despite or, perhaps, due to my localism, I was beguiled by the vision of the city given by Luc Sante in his 2015 book The Other Paris. Sante provides an underground history of the city, of its crime and prostit
Help us cover the art of destruction in games by backing our Kickstarter! /// Here’s a really enjoyable thing you can do in Avalanche Studios’ Just Cause 3: fly a fighter plane over the rolling green hills, white sand beaches, and turquoise waters of Medici. Spot a military base and strafe it with c
Cryptic Sea’s upcoming shooter is described by the developers as “about tense deals, double-crosses and car chases.” Car chases and gunplay have been done to death, but what’s this about double-crossing? Less of a shooter and more of a corporate warfare simulator, the game encourages you to be an al
In what might qualify as the most ambition creative project in the history of creative projects (aside from Caligula, of course), a small studio in Montreal is scanning the entire face of the Earth with civilian drones to use it as the location for their RPG ReRoll. This triggers some obvious red fl
