Remember Nidhogg (2014)? Before its release there was whispers of it as the 2D fencing game that people just couldn’t stop playing. After its long-awaited arrival it made its way to other platforms, until it seemed to become nearly ubiquitous—its pixels once only glanced at now brash and animated in
Well, here’s something. This year’s first-person mystery-adventure game Firewatch is being turned into a movie. For real. According to The Hollywood Reporter, independent production company Good Universe has teamed up with Campo Santo to develop content for both videogames and feature films. The fil
BalanCity is a diamond in the rough. The menus and presentation of the game leave a lot to be desired, but the actual game, the act of balancing hospitals atop skyscrapers without accidentally sending your whole city into the ocean, is about as compelling as city-building gets. It’s no SimCity (2013
It’s been over 20 years since Jonny Lee Miller screamed “hack the planet” as he’s bundled into a car after his arrest in the movie Hackers (1995). And yet our obsession with hacking hasn’t wavered a single iota. But it is changing. Slightly. The world of fictionalized hacking has long been presented
I don’t drive in real life. I can’t face it, the idea of having to pay that much attention to anything makes me anxious. The same is true of racing games: Forza, Gran Turismo, Burnout all get me a little nervous as they approach top speed. Drive! Drive! Drive! takes my anxiety and multiplies it tenf
You could be forgiven for not hearing of Virginia before now. The first-person detective game—described by many as a mix of Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Brendon Chung’s Thirty Flights of Loving (2012)—is something you probably want to be focusing your attention on right now, especially as it’s arriv
There’s something magical about travelling by train. It’s something that participants in the yearly Train Jam—a 52-hour game jam set on a train ride between Chicago and San Francisco—try to harness to make games. Alan Hazelden’s latest game, Cosmic Express, has it origins in that very train jam, and
I didn’t know much about Robert Moses before playing Confetti with the Brick Bats. The creators of the game, New York Game Center students Alexander King and Noca Wu, didn’t know much about him either. That is, not before Tim Hwang’s “Power Broker” contest, which offered cash prizes to those that co
Jake Hollands’s Spaceplan starts with a blank screen, the controls of your space ship are damaged, and the only way to start it up is to click on the Kinetigen on the top left of your screen. I click, and every click gives me a single watt of power. Solar panels, I’m then informed, will cost 10 watt
Slayaway Camp is a puzzle game about massacring hapless teenagers, and, perhaps fittingly, it comes from a place of aggression. “After a decade [of] making gems go clink and pegs go… Peggle at PopCap,” said Jason Kapalka, one of the founders of PopCap, and now returning to independence with Blue Wiz
Needless to say, this article is NSFW. /// This is a difficult question to ask, so I’m just going to go ahead and get right to the meat of it. Have you ever been playing Pong (1972) and wished that, instead of the rigid paddles, you could get something a little more floppy in your hands? Schlong cou
If there’s one thing that Disc Room shares with Vlambeer’s games—the studio for which creator Jan Willem Nijman works under when he’s not toiling away on other projects—it’s the ability to get all the action packed into a single GIF. That and screenshake. Of course it has screenshake. Disc Room is a
A big part of playing videogames is doing so collaboratively. We like to talk about and share our experiences. Before now, arcades were the place to go for this, where you could gather around arcade cabinets, watching your peers smashing high-scores and giving commentary as you wait for your chance
While On Rusty Trails may look like yet another 2D platformer at first, its creators at Black Pants Studio took it beyond that simplistic impression by enabling a discussion about race through the game’s primary mechanic. “It was one of those days where I read the newspaper and there was an article
As a 6’7 (2m) man, the cramped quarters of submarines are anathema to me. So, when I saw the teaser for Jujubee Games Studio’s submarine survival game Kursk last year, it’s fair to say I was horrified, and more than a little uneasy. It wasn’t only due to the small virtual spaces of the game, either.
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
If you asked me to describe bitHuffel’s second title, Sinner’s Sorrow, in one word after having seen the teaser trailer, it’d be bleak. It’s all skeleton soldiers, sentient trees, large demons, bashed iron shields; dark medieval conflict. It’s also a drastic departure from the studio’s first project
Fans of The Chinese Room will want to keep a slot open in their diaries. The Barbican has teamed up with the studio to put together a live performance of their game Dear Esther (2012) on October 14th. The performance will coincide with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 re-releases of the game. Dear Est
It seems fitting that I’m to write about The Man Came Around today. We’re going through a rare heatwave right now in the UK and a right wing government is currently wrestling us into a headlock. The Man Came Around is the total opposite: set in the frozen heart of an icy mountain, it tells the story
