Cold, grey beaches are my favorite. When the mist rolls in, they can feel disconnected from the rest of the world, an isolated plane of white sand, water, sky. Sights and sounds stand out against the emptiness, turning every piece of driftwood or seaweed into a landmark along the shoreline. In Foggy
It’s amazing how far Mushroom 11 has come from its original 2012 prototype. The theme of that year’s Global Game Jam was an image of the Ouroboros, a serpent eating its own tail. Creators Itay Keren and Julia Keren-Detar took this concept of cyclicality and gave it new life in Mushroom 11, which put
There isn’t a lot that happens in this short video of Imber, but that’s a good thing; it makes the ending that much weirder and left me wanting to know more. Imber, like Allison Road, seems to be concerned with exploring the horror of a familiar space. The video depicts your character waking up in a
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
Violence is commonplace in videogames. It’s commonplace in most popular media, but its role in games comes under particularly heavy fire. What strikes me as weird about videogame violence, as someone who plays plenty of violent videogames herself, isn’t its prevalence as much as its weightlessness.
Ghosts of Memories is an upcoming iOS and Android game set in a mystical, isometric world of impossible architecture. While the game it resembles most, Monument Valley, presented its puzzles as compact structures to be rotated, explored, and manipulated, Ghost of Memories spreads its puzzles out acr
I can name few games based on renowned European operas, and even fewer based on famous Japanese adaptations of classic European operas. In fact, only Magic Flute fits the bill. Created by LabLike, Magic Flute is a tile-based puzzle game for iOS set in the world of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic
In a genre dominated by Slender clones and zombie-infested action game hybrids, P.T. filled a void in many horror fans’ hearts; a small, but twisted taste of what the larger Silent Hills project would be, it succeeded as its own, compact experience and also gave folks something to look forward to. S
It’s the little things that I value most in survival games—those small, but important details in the environment that let me make reasonable predictions based on my surroundings, or the ability to place items in the world so that I can actually feel settled in my makeshift home. The Long Dark, a fir
Flying a jetpack is hard in Piloteer. Comically hard. That makes your goal of convincing the people of Piloteer’s world that jetpacks are cool and safe and fun even harder—you have to actually land without injuring yourself first. Even if successful, this more often than not includes plenty of flail
What Remains of Edith Finch is rooted in Japanese horror as much as it is Lovecraftian. That’s why Giant Sparrow, the team behind the game, is pretty happy with its localized title over in Japan: ????????????????? or, translated back to English, What Happened at the Strange Estate of the Finch Famil
Shape of the World is pure joy. It’s a game about finding your place in the world as much as it is being lost in it—about learning how to be lost while still feeling like you belong. As you wander through its colorful biomes, life sprouts up all around you, in real time. Shrubbery bubbles up like fo
Vignettes is an adorable looking game about rotating adorable tiny objects in such a way that transforms them into other adorable tiny objects. The little shapeshifting things tell an “underlying story,” making each individual item a vignette of their own. A telephone becomes a television set which
On September 8th, 1978, the Iranian government opened fire on a large group of protestors in a public square in the country’s capital of Tehran, killing almost 100 and wounding several more. The event came to be known as Black Friday. It was one of the pivotal moments in the burgeoning Iranian Revol
New screenshots from The Witness, pulled from its upcoming trailer, provide a look at the varied locations you’ll visit on the vast and mysterious island where the game is set. Some of the shots look familiar. About a minute into the last trailer—which creator Jonathan Blow points out is two and a h
Tale of Tales, the creative duo behind The Path, Luxuria Superbia, and most recently, Sunset, announced in June that they would stop making games—commercial ones, at least. Sunset, despite earning good reviews, was a financial failure according to their blog post on the subject, and at that point, i
It’s hard for me to say no to new survival games, but only because I haven’t found the perfect one yet. The Long Dark, with its lovely low-poly snowscapes and focus on enduring the harsh wilderness rather than zombies or other creatures, is the closest I’ve come to a favorite. But now there’s a new
Replace Mad Max’s Fury Road with the post-apocalyptic wasteland of the American Midwest and you might get something like The Rust Belt, a dusty looking truck combat game by Galvanic Games. The Rust Belt puts you in control of a tow truck driver trying to get by in rural America after pollution has l
Back when the first SimCity was released in 1989, the editor of Computer Gaming World magazine, Johnny L. Wilson, was commissioned to write a guide for the city management sim called The SimCity Planning Commission Handbook. In a manner befitting the complexity of the original SimCity, Wilson didn’t
Even in board game form, games by Studio Oleomingus are simply mesmerizing. The team behind Somewhere, a surreal stealth game set in an alternate world version of colonial India, have started work on an unnamed historical project about running a Portugese colony in 17th century Goa. In a recent post
I didn’t find the monster in The Howl, but I knew it was there: a looming silhouette out in the blinding white of the forest’s sparse horizon. I’d get a glimpse in the corner of my eye and ready my bow, but then the violent winds would start up, casting a layer of snowy fog to obscure my vision agai
Eerie adventure game Year Walk is headed to the Wii U, but rather than celebrate with a spin-off, or DLC, or other things game companies like to put out before a new release, Simogo has published an eBook called Year Walk Bedtime Stories for Awful Children to mark the occasion. Bedtime Stories for A
