Author: Chloi Rad

Chloi is a San Francisco-based writer interested in games and film.
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Imber grants us a glimpse of its subtle domestic horrors

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 small home and exploring the various living areas before an odd noise draws them back out into the main room. the right kind of weird  The sound is strange. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it sounds like and because it’s a video, the…
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Jotun’s gorgeous hand-drawn Viking woman action is out now

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, which is on full display in its launch trailer below. Its range of environments, from grassy woods and ancient mines to mythical planes among the stars, capture the cartoonish, but epic majesty of Disney adventures, and its music works just as well to ground the gallant nature of Thora’s…
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Gods Will Be Watching team parodies what they’re good at: videogame violence

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. Violence in games is often trivial, reduced into menial tasks that rarely reflect anything important about characters or plot beyond serving as shallow narrative impetus. These acts usually result in some form of currency for the player, like coins, money, items, or points, that make them worthwhile—something to be rewarded for. That isn’t to…
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Ghosts of Memories sets its puzzles across beautiful, impossible structures

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 across wider, more fragmented areas composed of floating ruins, hanging platforms, and ancient shrines. Its worlds vary from desolate sand gardens occupied by energy-filled obelisks to volcanic grey islands surrounded by a sea of patterned turquoise, each putting to use Escher-inspired perspective tricks in their own way. According to the Ghosts of Memories website,…
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Magic Flute reimagines the famous opera as an urban puzzle adventure

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 Flute—as performed on-stage in a rendition created by the acclaimed Japanese stage director Amon Miyamoto. Miyamoto reimagines Mozart’s fantastical musical adventure as an urban tale, using moody city sets combined with grand, classical architecture to create a mystical mash-up of worlds. The actual opera itself uses video projections to generate…
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Allison Road aims to engorge its chilling sights and sounds with your help

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. So when Konami cancelled Silent Hills and removed P.T. from the PlayStation Store, where was there to turn? A little house on a quiet street in Manchester. It began as a spiritual successor to P.T., but the more details that surface about the upcoming Allison Road, the more it…
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The Long Dark’s latest update makes surviving in the wilderness more like home

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 first-person survival sim from Hinterland, is as committed to building out these minute aspects as much as they are the larger, more complex systems that make The Long Dark great. A new update from the team, called Desolation Point, gives equal priority to both, bringing a ton of…
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Ragdoll humor takes flight in Piloteer, a physics game about jetpack dangers

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 flailing around in the air, doing unintentional backflips, and almost face planting into every available surface before even beginning to orient yourself mid-air. Piloteer debuted its humorous physics-based challenges first on iOS and Android, but it’s coming to PC, Mac, and Linux next. A new trailer reveals its desktop release date…