Mirror Lake is a strange little thing. Made in a week for Procedural Generation Jam, it creates static black-and-white landscapes, nestled inside a giant patterned bowl and suspended in space. Sometimes the space is dark, dotted with stars and the occasional sun or moon or comet; sometimes it’s a va
It’s rare to see an isometric horror game. The 3/4 perspective affords more visibility than what is conducive to most horror scenarios, where the possibility of things lurking in the darkness or just around the bend helps heightens the tension. But in Adam, at least what’s shown in its only availabl
Videogame enthusiasts are pretty good at preserving their beloved medium’s history, even if it goes against the wishes of some industry trade groups. Emulators and ROMs, while technically piracy in most cases, allow old games that would otherwise be left to rot on cartridges or discs to live on in m
I’m a sucker for found footage films—the good, the bad, and the ugly, I’ve tried to watch them all. The same goes for horror games. So when something like The Tape comes along, a found footage-style horror game with a focus on “creating heavy atmosphere instead of cheap jump scares,” you immediately
Cavemen games seem to be the next big thing, a natural evolution of the survival genre. Now that the post-apocalypse is becoming a little tired, it makes sense to reach way back to pre-civilization for something fresh. Big titles like Far Cry Primal and WiLD may be the ones people are talking about,
I need more historical games in my life that aren’t pure strategy games or Assassin’s Creed, so when I heard of Somber, a game set during the political turmoil of mid-50s small-town Argentina, I was immediately interested. That’s primarily because Somber isn’t a game directly about war, which seems
The most striking thing about the new trailer for Kôna, an upcoming surreal mystery game from Parabole, is its narration. It has this really odd, stilted intonation that I can’t quite place; the boom and quirk of old timey radio announcer meets the uncanny poetry of The Residents. Whatever it is, I
Pathologic Classic HD, the remaster of Ice-Pick Lodge’s classic horror game, is out and along with it, a brand new trailer. It’s exactly what a trailer for a game like this should be: a long, slow montage of people and places, monuments and landscapes recognizable to loyal fans, but foreign to those
The first time I saw Museum of Simulation Technology was at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC in 2014. A forced perspective puzzler about using visual tricks to navigate a labyrinthine dreamworld, it’s one of those charmingly clever games that’s just delightful to watch, especially for a new
After two months of silence, Night School Studio has some exciting things to share about their upcoming “supernatural teen thriller,” Oxenfree: a release timeframe of January 2016 with a console debut exclusively on Xbox One, and a brand new teaser. This new video gives a much clearer look at Oxenfr
SCALE captures so much of what makes videogames exciting: that feeling of interacting with ordinary objects in new and strange ways, the abstraction of mundane things, the sense of wonder that comes with experimentation, and the reward when your presence in the world means something. But it isn’t al
A couple years ago, I had a job that required me to work late. I’d have to drive home on the verge of midnight a few days a week, through an unlit part of town I wasn’t very familiar with. There were jackrabbits in the field by the office. I saw one alive once. More often I’d spot them at night afte
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
Coming right off the tail of Davey Wreden’s The Beginner’s Guide, the other Stanley Parable co-creator William Pugh has begun teasing a new game of his own. The unnamed mystery game, described as “a weird puzzle,” will be the debut project for Pugh’s recently founded studio Crows Crows Crows. But as
Few games have topped the truly epic scale of Shadow of the Colossus and its iconic boss battles, but an upcoming game called Prey for the Gods looks like a worthy comparison. Created by No Matter, the recently revealed Prey for the Gods will have you battling huge deities on a frozen island in a jo
Desert punks in a puke bar. Gore on the cave walls. A giant weeping blood into a lava pit. It can only be… Death Trash! Death Trash is an upcoming game pitched as a post-apocalyptic RPG mash-up of Planescape: Torment and Ultima 7, with added helpings of sex, cyberpunk, and horror. At first glance, I
I often wonder if the internet of today will ever be as ancient a place as the internet of my youth, some 10 or 20 years into the future—if I’ll look back on my Twitter feed, the various chat programs I use with my friends, and get the same pang of nostalgia I do now from hearing Windows XP boot up
One thing that made cult RPG Maker horror game Yume Nikki really good was its sense of place. Whether defined by its music, color scheme, level design, or its strange lurking occupants, each location in the game world was so distinct in its own way. That’s something that I think Zykov Eddy, creator
You’d think videogames and magical realism would’ve found each other by now, but the pairing is still a tragically rare sight. Kentucky Route Zero is one of the few games I can name that embraces elements of magical realism without evolving into full-blown fantasy, but another project called Memoran
I’ve only ever met people who love or hate Pathologic. The strange Russian game about a diseased town (to put it simply) won several awards, but English-speaking players criticized it for its poor translation. Its recently crowdfunded remake aims to solve this issue, among other things, but Ice-Pick
The world outside Allison Road’s iconic house setting is even stranger and more dangerous than what’s previously been revealed. New concept art for the upcoming horror game shows off an eerie forest setting, a moss-covered wood in the shadow of a looming mountain and overlooking a grey lake. In one
There’s a graceful fragility to the works of Devine Lu Linvega and his latest game is no exception. Verreciel, which launches on January 10th, 2016 for iOS, will let you explore “surrounding universes” aboard a vessel called the Glass Ship. There isn’t much info about it beyond that. Its interface i
Murder is the name of Peter Moorhead’s upcoming cyberpunk adventure game, which is set to launch on October 21st for desktop and mobile devices. While Moorhead’s previous game Stranded might’ve looked to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 for inspiration, Murder is rooted in the works of cyberpunk masters, incl
