Feature
Magic and gender in Final Fantasy VI
Kathryn Hemmann on magical girls, posthuman bodies, and what Final Fantasy VI shares with the bioethics fights of 1990s Japan.
RPG
News
Lonely Star brings a lo-fi apocalypse to the Weird West
“FAIR FIGHTS ARE GOOD, IF YOU ARE IN A MOVIE, OR WOULD LIKE TO BECOME DEAD.” This is told to me by a crystal in the middle of a desert, surrounded on all sides by dust and cacti and one single, solitary highway. It’s the third of these I’ve found, sprouting carelessly out of the cracked earth, there
News
Everything we know about The Chinese Room’s next game so far
There’s a terrible pun here about The Chinese Room leaving us totally in the dark about their new game, Total Dark, but I’m trying to be better than that. Maybe. Anyway… It’s been a few months now since Everybody’s Gone to Rapture (2015) emerged, triumphant, on the PlayStation 4, and so it’s fair to
News
Persona 5 has a lot of new footage and it looks so good y’all
I’m already in love with Persona 5. I’ve probably been in love with Persona 5 all my life, even before it was announced. Persona 3 (2006) and Persona 4 (2008) are, arguably, two of the greatest games of all time. Hell, Persona 3 is my personal favorite game of all time. The Persona series, starting
News
Long Gone Days imagines the world of war that’s coming for us
If a dystopian novel was written about the world that we live in right now, what would it look like? Chilean game maker Camila Gormaz wants to explore that in her upcoming game Long Gone Days. Unlike dead-Earth dystopias, where human society has overreached to such an extent that what remains of our
News
No Truce With The Furies is the isometric RPG to look out for
A revolution-wrecked port city. An enthusiastic policeman out of his depth. “Neither fantasy, history, nor any kind of -punk.” Helmed by a “chronically success-impaired” science-fiction writer and describing itself as a combination of Planescape: Torment (1999), Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, and K
News
Undungeon’s pixel art makes the fantasy genre fresh again
A point of honesty: I still have yet to play more than the first hour of The Witcher 3 (2015). Not because the game is bad—in fact, I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen so far—but because at this point, I’m just too exhausted with fantasy to have much interest in delving any further. How many hours have I sp
Review
Bravely Second: End Layer turns play into labor
Bravely Second is as unfortunate a title for a sequel as Bravely Default was for its predecessor. Where the phrase “Bravely Default” seemed to suggest that it would somehow be valiant for you to keep doing whatever you would have ordinarily done anyway, “Bravely Second” is poised to become a snowclo
News
Tyranny will let you play around with the cruellest politics
What happens to the world after war? Obsidian Entertainment’s upcoming role-playing game Tyranny is interested in exploring that dilemma. Taking place in a fantasy realm sat right in the middle of the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, the game begins after the evil dictator Kyros the Overlord has united
News
Cuphead programmer’s side project is inspired by Canada’s long winters
One of the people behind the upcoming Cuphead has begun work on his next game, a Canadian winter inspired open-world adventure RPG called Winternight. A game developer out of Ottawa, Tony Coculuzzi is working to create an indie RPG in the spirit of Morrowind (2002) or Ultima Underworld (1992). While
News
Digitizing your ex: How men are using RPGs to cope with breakups
Videogames are a medium often used to escape the cruelties of reality, fostering a safe place for players to take a load off and step into a world that is familiar and comforting. Using a digital space to cope with complex situations or emotions isn’t a new concept, but it seems that some users are
News
Knuckle Sandwich shows us how to fight boxing bees and giant noses
As most of your teenage or 20-something friends can probably tell you, working in food service isn’t exactly the most rewarding way to spend your time. Customers will yell at you for mistakes you didn’t make, your manager will ask you to work overtime just as you’re heading out the door, your cowork