When I left the Rubin Museum of Art’s Waiting Rooms exhibit, I had 14 yellow tickets, 24 pennies, and a form with a picture of a unicorn on it in my pocket. It sounds like the random hodgepodge of garbage a quirky Tina Fey character might carry, yes, but within the world of the exhibit, it was a ver
Never Alone (2014) is a game steeped in culture. Not just for videogames in the role of cultural accuracy, but in preserving the waning history of Alaskan Natives. The game, based on Alaskan Iñupiat (a hunter-gatherer indigenous people of Alaska) folklore, was an anomaly in the videogame space when
It’s difficult to grasp the meaning of a global refugee crisis. For much of the world this mass displacement is a moment on a newscast, a headline to be skimmed, a statistic to move us, but only briefly. UNICEF’s Sofia is the latest attempt to give us a deeper understanding. Sofia is a 3D animated g
A third-person shooter in which you destroy thousands of robots using big guns and lots of bullets. That could be a description for both Binary Domain (2012) and Vanquish (2010). They’re both science-fiction and both published by SEGA. And each of them is styled in a way that might be described as “
Systems thinking is an approach to analysis, focusing on how different parts of a system relate to each other, and how they change over time and within the context of larger systems. That’s lot of words to process, but luckily Nicky Case has sketched up a great reflection on systems thinking in rela
When Ludum Dare announced the theme for its 35th game jam would be “shapeshift,” it triggered something within the mind of Deconstructeam’s creative director, Jordi de Paco: a memory about a short story he once read in the book Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking (1993)
Jessie came into my life a couple of weeks ago. She was announced by her creators at PullString at the beginning of April as part of a conversation-based narrative game called Humani: Jessie’s Story, which you play on Facebook Messenger. You only need to say “hi” to meet Jessie, who is a 20-somethin
Created for the latest Ludum Dare game jam, the theme for which was “shapeshift,” Shadow of the Red Hand is a game made entirely out of shadow puppets. In it, the player’s hands take on the role of a rabbit, and must hop away from the evil “Red Hand of Doom” as it chases them through the ever-changi
The first time I ever watched Princess Mononoke (1997) was on a grainy bootleg from a relative. I was a kid, maybe nine-years-old, but the otherwise beautiful film’s terrible quality was ingrained in my psyche. Since I was only nine, its fuzziness didn’t bother me. It wasn’t until I was much older,
When you think of outdoor educators, someone like Z (name changed to protect privacy) probably comes to mind: grey hair in braids, wearing a wool sweater with jeans and mukluks, she uses her university email account with reluctance and sees devices as a harbinger of the end-times. Her pedagogy born
While we at Kill Screen love to bring you our own crop of game critique and perspective, there are many articles on games, technology, and art around the web that are worth reading and sharing. So that is why this weekly reading list exists, bringing light to some of the articles that have captured
Last time we saw cubist flying game Aer, its bird girl protagonist Auk was left quivering, alone and scared, in a distant ruin. She had just been threatened by a large monster, one she had met before, only soon afterward finding herself surrounded by ominous blue spirits as an ethereal crescendo swe
In October of 2015, French duo Koola and Viv released a screenshot of a cat sitting in a dark alley, silhouetted by a hazy red light as the sun filtered in from some unknown opening above. This scene is the first glimpse of the as yet untitled “HK project,” an experiment in third-person exploration
It’s easy to get lost in perception-skewing art. Artist Bradley G. Munkowitz, better known as GMUNK, is easily one of the most intriguing (and prolific) visual designers around. His portfolio spans from the astounding holographic sequences of Tron: Legacy (2010) to Box, an artistic and technical pro
This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console. To see other articles, go here. /// I hear him pad up next to me before I feel his whiskers tickle my ankles. A wet, impatient nudge tells me to hurry up already—there’s something I should see up ahead. Won ove
Nearly two years after the release of Transistor (2014), Supergiant Games has announced its third project: Pyre. Slated to release sometime in 2017, the reveal trailer for the upcoming game shows off the combination of richly drawn animation and intimate musical scoring the studio has become known f
This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console. To see other articles, go here. This article contains spoilers for Shadow Hearts, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, and World War I. /// Several famously grim prophecies were recorded in the run-up to World War I. “The
In All Walls Must Fall, an upcoming isometric action game from newish studio inbetweengames, the Cold War never ended. It’s 2089 and Berlin is still caught in the midst of political powerhouses threatening to push the button. But in inbetweengames’s alternate timeline, the factions of the Cold War h
UK-based studio Bulkhead Interactive has released an announcement trailer for their upcoming game The Turing Test, slated for release on Xbox One and Steam in August 2016. It’ll have you playing as Ava Turing, an engineer for the International Space Agency (ISA), as she investigates the truth behind
As you can surmise from the title, Push Me Pull You (PMPY) is about the delightful tension between polar opposite forces. Even the world behind this couch co-op game is simultaneously the same and exact opposite of our own world. Because, you see, PMPY is populated by a very similar society with one
This is a preview of an article you can read on our new website dedicated to virtual reality, Versions. /// A fight scene is a dance: not just between the characters in conflict, but between stunt people and the effects crew, between the cinematographer and choreographer, between the editor and soun
Originally created as a short title for a 2014 Ludum Dare game jam, old-timey narrative adventure game The Lion’s Song is now getting a full release. According to a new trailer for the game, four episodes are planned in total, expanding it beyond the “finely honed short story” of the original and in
It is rare that a piece of key art is worthy of comment. That ugly, industry-saturated term, “key art”, tells the whole story, bringing to mind images of focus testing promotional images usually of men with guns facing away, silhouetted in the light of an explosion. But this bit of key art, this is
This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console. To see other articles, go here. /// Shinobi (2002) begins with a cliché. Two honorable ninja warriors, a master and a student, face off in a duel. The winner will take a position as the leader of his clan. The
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Stephen’s Sausage Roll (PC, Mac) BY INCREPARE GAMES Sometimes, you look down at an item of food and wish it was twenty times bigger so you could enjoy more of that food. Other times, you play
