Flux Empyrean
ChillCash pitched its sailing mystery as internet horror
A clip promised a cursed artifact that follows you forever, but Flux Empyrean had different ideas
open world
DDoD
DDoD brings its Fog-swallowed roguelite to Xbox day and date
The Future Entertainment Company built a 60-square-kilometer sealed zone on real-world topography, the way S.T.A.L.K.E.R. leaned on Chernobyl.
Helsinki Online
Every bench in Helsinki Online sits where it really is
Pietari Niinimäki is rebuilding the city as an open-world hangout, one tree at a time.
Sahej Rahal
Sahej Rahal's Azalabad salvages a drowned village
The open-world civilization built for ifa's ARE YOU FOR REAL is still playable on New Art City—the browser as exhibition hall.
grief
Jonathan Coryn's Good Grief
Jonathan Coryn spent six years building a game where you caress grieving figures—and somehow made touch feel like the most radical mechanic in art.
game cities
The Secret to a Believable Game City Isn't What You Think
I sat down with a SimCity historian and a real urban planner to ask: what makes a game city feel alive—and what happens when designers get it wrong?
News
If you don’t know about Bokida yet, it’s not too late
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
Review
Mafia III is a postcard tour of the American South
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
News
Making a survival horror game without all the clichés
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
News
Great Cascade gets a new name, still looking to fix open-world games
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
Feature
The false legacy of Grand Theft Auto 3
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
Feature
Umberto Eco and his legacy in open-world games
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