Pippin Barr is a stalwart example of a videogame scientist. He’s one of only a few who fit that title—people who constantly experiment with videogames, testing their boundaries, remixing their components, taking curious lines of thought to their furthest iteration. Take his latest as an example. Cal
It’s a shame Monarch Black isn’t more committed to going slow. When it does, as in the first 30 seconds of its trailer, it almost has an Ozu-like sense of the beauty in stillness (or, to be correct, a slow-tracking camera). We watch a butterfly, tiny in the widescreen demarcation of the frame, dista
It’s almost surprising that there isn’t a giant Starbucks logo to be found among the pastel-colored environments of Caffeine shown in its first trailer. If it were made back in the ’90s, during the height of the genre it belongs to—the 3D platformer collect-a-thon—it would likely have some form of c
It’s fair to say that we’re quite fond of Gone Home. It was our Game of the Year when it came out for PC back in 2013. And its mark has been left not only on our own minds, but in those of other creators, with Gone Home‘s intimate exploration of household objects manifesting in various game narrativ
I remember reading once that a good fiction writer will paint images in your mind. This is vital to the craft; not just stating “a tree” so readers imagine a tree, but describing it so that this is uniquely a tree of your creation, one that will be remembered with intense detail if, say, referenced
Georges Méliès discovered filmmaking’s jump cut by accident. By cutting out some of the frames in a single, still camera shot and splicing the two separate parts, it seemed as if objects were teleporting through space when watched back in real-time. In his 1898 short The Temptation of St. Anthony, h
“Come, bunnies,” I announced to the empty room behind me. “Follow me, your glorious leader!” In Future Unfolding, you run around a forest that has the florid appearance of spilled paint, and you can talk to the animals. As if some glorified Pied Piper, you stride with great bounds across flower patc
With his upcoming game FAR, Swiss designer Don Schmocker says he’s looking to reinterpret the role of vehicles in videogames. It’s not anything outrageous such as making cars edible or turning planes into surfboards (although I’d happily give that game a try too). And it’s certainly not Transformers
Colorful going-outside sim Lovely Weather We’re Having has a release date of November 10th for PC and Mac. You can watch the Big Announcement in this totally real clip from the Ellen DeGeneres Show. Lovely Weather We’re Having is described as a “goal-free” game about spending time outside, chatting
Only Vikings that die a valiant death in the eyes of the Gods can enter Valhalla. Thora is not one of them. The just released action-adventure game Jotun follows Thora in her quest to impress the Gods following an inglorious demise. What stands out immediately about Jotun is its hand-drawn art, whic
Even the release date for The Witness is puzzling at first. It pops up at the end of the announcement trailer like this: “0126 • 2016.” It took a good 10 seconds for my brain to realize it said January 26th 2016. We have another four months to wait for it. We’ve already waited six years since Jonat
Hyper Light Drifter, like Rain World and a few others, seems like one of those games that exists only in shiny gifs on Twitter, so it comes as massively exciting news that Heart Machine’s mesmerizing action RPG finally has a release date. That’s right! Hyper Light Drifter comes out Spring 2016 and t
Unlike movies, videogames rarely have memorable trailers. Most of the commercials created to show them off are either brief sizzle reels or prolonged, hacky punchlines. The TV spot for the original Gears of War was an exception, however. Undercutting the promise of apocalyptic alien carnage with the
The feeling of movement is arguably the most important thing in a platformer. Super Meat Boy’s outrageous complexity might not be as engaging if its hero weren’t so smoothly controlled, and Thomas Was Alone was granted mounds more character by the sheer perfection of its jump button alone. “a strong
My mum used to flick the bag of slug pellets upwards so that they rained upon my brother’s grave with great spread. Each flick of the wrist sent hard blue balls of chemical into the air and I’d watch them descend over the soil. Some caught in the petals of the carnations. This taught me that slugs w
Being a teen during the rise of the internet was weird in too many ways to describe. While you were experiencing all manner of hormonal and bodily changes, the rest of the world was experiencing its own kind of tumultuous transformation. As you matured into young adulthood, attempting to navigate th
The battles in Badblood are ones of wit and wariness. Like Manhunt meets hide-and-seek, two trained killers sneak around in a field, hunting and fleeing from the other as the screen orientation constantly shifts to mask their movements. It’ll take strong spatial awareness and alertness to find your
There’s a giant skull fella leering out of the darkness towards a pale light in the new Dark Souls III trailer. As it has no flesh, you can’t tell if the facial expression it might pull as the torch-bearing knight walks up to it would be a sneer of anger, or a less hostile and quizzical one. All we
This is a complete coincidence, but a year ago—to this exact day—I reached into my gut to pull out feelings I’d forced to exist down there for a long time. Today, I’m doing the same, as I wrote about Fragments of Him then, and I’m doing the same now. It’s a first-person drama that explores how a guy
While it wasn’t a horror game, the utter abandonment of the house in Gone Home made every turn around every corner feel like an imminent encounter with the supernatural. It was only in the material possessions of that house’s residents that any sign of life was even evident. Take that format and thr
Did you catch Firewatch‘s E3 trailer? Well, after some serene shots of the Wyoming national park—which will be the exploration game’s main setting—the trailer ends on a rather tense note. Some suspicious activity has spooked the park rangers, protagonist Henry and his walkie-talkie companion Delilah
Eitr‘s red-headed Shield Maiden is justifiably pissed off after having her destiny figuratively scribbled over in crayon by the mischievous god Loki. He’s a trickster god, a god of infant-worthy trouble, and Loki is the easiest of the Norse gods to hate. He gives birth to eight-legged horses and fat
