“Making Soul Searching has been a way for me to make sense of what’s happening,” Turkish game maker Talha Kaya told me. He’s talking about his latest videogame, his biggest to date, which explores the theme of leaving your homeland and parents behind—a journey that’s inspired by the real-life drama
Watching the R-rated horror classic The Evil Dead (1981) when you’re about seven years old leaves a lasting impression. Mike Blackney can vouch for this. He can trace his fascination with a distinctly American strain of horror “set in rural areas or suburbs” back to that seminal viewing. It carried
A cold wind blows around the stony ramparts of an old, crumbling fort. A young girl in a red dress lies on her belly, seemingly asleep in the grass, black hair fidgeting with the breeze. The electrical wires hanging between tall mechanical pylons also shake to the chorus of the grey gale. The new te
Jarek Beksa first encountered the need for audio-based games when working for Orange—the telecommunications company—in Poland. He was doing a usability study with voice recognition and speech synthesis applications, during which, one of the blind testers said, “Nobody makes games for us.” It drew Be
Thanks to the events of 2016, a lot of us are starting to get used to the concept of living in a society filled with evil. Stone Story is way ahead of you. The game is set in “a dark and vile world,” populated with haunted trees, reanimated skeletons, giant snails, and antagonistic bats. The protago
If you’ve ever had a table at a convention, or had your work in a gallery, you’ve experienced the sharp sting of a stranger’s silent judgement. “How are you enjoying the show?” you ask as they walk by. They look down at your work and scowl, moving on wordlessly to buy some crappy fan art from the ne
The second episode of the point-and-click game series The Lion’s Song is now available to purchase and download on Steam. It’s a doozy, letting you dive into the imagined fears of real historical figures that were part of Vienna’s artistic elite at the turn of the 20th century. You play as an aspiri
“Being ‘only’ a designer in highly political or economically difficult times feels weird,” Jana Reinhardt, one half of the German game-making team Rat King Entertainment, told me. She feels frustrated and desperate as the world changes in volatile ways around her, and all she can do is design stuff
As an American college student, I’m no stranger to protests. In the past month, I’ve attended roughly two or three per week regarding issues like health care, systematic racism, discrimination against undocumented students, and most recently, our president-elect. After the election on November 8th,
“They deserted us. You’re all that’s left.” These are the words that echo through Visual Out, a Metroid-like platformer set inside the guts of a broken down, dying computer. Created by Ohio-based game maker MadameBerry, Visual Out has you play as an escaped program tasked with exploring different se
It’s time to make some dicks look silly. Yep, Genital Jousting has arrived on Steam Early Access today. It’s an online and local multiplayer game about penetrating your friends, and yes, it’s as crude as that sounds. Everybody plays as a creature made of male genitalia in this game: a flaccid penis,
Airport luggage gallops, potted trees ride escalators, and soda cans cyclone in Carl Burton’s first videogame ISLANDS, released today for PC and iOS. It’s a “surreal trip through the mundane,” concerned with those transitory urban locations that lie between destinations. Its subtitle, “Non-Places,”
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Tyranny (Windows, Mac) BY OBSIDIAN ENTERTAINMENT The alternative title for Tyranny is, presumably, “50 Shades of Evil.” It’s an isometric RPG in the traditional style that takes place in a wor
Ah, it’s so good when this happens. What am I on about? Oh, you know, nine independent game makers decided to get together and make a game each, then package them all under the title Ambient Mixtape 16. The idea was for all of them to use the same tools and format—a First Person Camera controller ma
Just over a week has passed since Donald Trump became the United States’ president-elect in a historic upset that rattled the hearts and minds of progressive America. Like so many others, I watched the final hours of the election in tears as the inconceivable became our new reality. Since last Tuesd
This article is part of a collaboration between Kill Screen and Art of the Title, celebrating videogame title sequences and the artists who made them happen. “FALLOUT.” One word in block letters, set against a black background. The crackle of a needle dropping on a vinyl record starts up; a black-an
Videogames have a history of being terrible at depicting young girls. The problem is usually that the designers want you to care about them, to want to safeguard them, but try to engineer that in the most obnoxious way. Either they’re being used as zombie bait like Sherry in Resident Evil 2 (1998),
Four years ago, Spanish duo Jose A. Gutiérrez and Miguel Vallés were still at university but had dreams of creating their own videogame. They were naive back then: Gutiérrez had spent years drawing and doing a Fine Art degree but had never done animation before, while Vallés was studying Software En
Amanita Design has teased its next game after this year’s brilliant adventure, Samorost 3. It’s called Chuchel and is being created by the team that made bucolic tree-friends adventure Botanicula (2012), including director Jaromír Plachý and the Czech band Dva, who have provided the music. It’s due
Videogame GIFs are one of my favorite things on the internet. Retro game nostalgia less so, but that hasn’t stopped me enjoying the NES game-inspired GIFs that are being showcased on Back to Bits. The website launched today and is a curated animation project created by Washington-based artist Jerry
Anyone should be able to play Circles regardless of age, language, and their experience with videogames. It’s a game that has mastered the art of communicating abstract ideas to players in as minimal a way as possible. A designer’s wet dream, no doubt. At the heart of its success is tying everything
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. When their aunt was abducted and traded into a pipeline of human trafficking while crossing the Mexico-US border, sisters America and Penelope Lopez turned to Internet of Things (IoT) technology to find a way to help other women. Human traffi
Game maker and web artist Nathalie Lawhead announced that she’s making an interactive zine earlier this week, under the working title “Everything is going to be OK.” It’s about being hopelessly optimistic while everything is breaking around you. “It’s a cathartic dump of my past experiences mostly a
1979 Revolution is a game about the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79. It came out back in April this year and, two weeks later, the Iranian government announced its plans to ban it. Specifically, Iran’s National Foundation for Computer Games (NFCG) planned to ban any website or individuals selling the
This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. In the 2013 film Her, protagonist Theodore plays a videogame where he is surprised by a wild, swearing artificially intelligent cartoon character. The foul-mouthed little alien launches into a conversation with Theodore, remaining stubbornly
