Review
Environmental Artist
Motorbiking in Trials Evolution isn’t about speed, flips, or flails. It’s an exercise in meditation on landscapes.
Review
Review
There She Blows
What does Nintendo’s new role-playing saga have in common with a sad, dying whale? The list spans the creature’s hide.
Review
New Drivers Wanted
Twisted Metal gets another sibling in its long familial line on Playstation. Through the game’s noble attempt to shephard in new players while staying loyal to fans, Lana Polansky wonders if the game needed reinvention at all.
Review
You Don’t Know Jackie
Gothic shooter The Darkness II is a great exercise in comic-book style and tentacle gore, but it gets tangled up in genre fiction. Rob Zacny explains how.
Review
Where’s Your Head At?
Why is Phil Fish’s new puzzle game so addictive? Because it hides everything in plain sight, and lays bare the rest.
Review
Chewing the Cud
Can poetry handle Ian Bogost? Can gaming handle poetry? Tommy Rousse takes up the joystick and puts on his literature goggles to decipher A Slow Year, Bogost’s collection of game poems.
Review
Bullish Stupidity
Jeff Minter’s new fruit ’em up Five a Day is profoundly stupid. Here’s why it dodges skill and statistics, and goes straight to the soul.
Review
Putting Our Best Brain Forward
The way to get us to jog, apparently, is to say that zombies are coming. In Zombies, Run!, an alternate-reality game about health and fitness, Richard Clark sees a more universal experience of being convinced and feeling something real.
Reset
Timeless Springfield
What do the best gags of The Simpsons lose, and gain, from being transplanted from 20-minute cuts into the potentially endless spaces of a videogame?
Review
Space Canary
Angry Birds Space shoots the birds into the stratosphere. But a larger orbit and handful of feathers feel like diminishing returns.
Reset
No More Fog in Silent Hill
Is it possible to preserve classic videogames? The new rendition of the Silent Hill series shows that technology can undermine the best intentions, and old illusions are easily broken.
Review
A Kind of Gathering Panic
Two recent apps bring human beings in close contact. Runaway iOS hit Draw Something has strangers competing for bombs and profit, while Nintendo’s Swapnote has more volume and humanity.