Author: Farah Rishi

Farah Rishi is a writer, lawyer, and frustrated Pakistani whose resting bitch face cleverly hides her love of trashy otome games.
Review

Beglitched starts the cyberpink revolution

I struggle every Halloween to decide on a costume. I’ve dressed up as all the basics: a black cat, a vampire, a witch—twice. But Beglitched may have saved me the hassle this year. It has introduced to me a whole new concept: a cyberpink computer witch. Now, the title computer witch itself would be cool enough. You could say, “thanks for that idea, Beglitched,” and be done. But the computer witches of Beglitched want you not only to know about them, but to become one of them. As such, they dump you in the middle of their cyberpink witching hour,…
Review

Starbound rockets you back to childhood

Socrates asserted that “man must rise above Earth to the top of the atmosphere and beyond, for only then will he fully understand the world in which he lives.” This sentiment is at least in part why NASA was established, and why investments are made in “NASA’s grand dream.” It’s why Elon Musk’s SpaceX was able to raise over $1 billion for spaceship manufacturing from companies like Google, with rocket rides for the public booked out for years. And maybe it’s why many of us, as kids, couldn’t help but stare up at the vast, velvet expanse of the night…
Review

Bound makes a case for ballet in videogames

I was eight years old when I watched my first ballet performance, the Nutcracker, at an old, musty local theater. When the show ended, my mom asked if I wanted to be a ballerina, and to her surprise, I cringed. There was no way I could be a ballerina, I insisted. My body, short and stubby, could never be so lithe, yet strong. To be a ballerina, I thought, would be to somehow transcend the human body’s limits. To my childhood self, ballerinas were these inhuman, majestic creatures who, in their bending and gliding, could tell wordless stories. Ballerinas were…
Feature

Literature games and the future of book publishing

It was called “the end of days” for literature. Bold doomsaying letters across headlines predicted that with the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the era of books would meet its untimely end, and the larger publishing world would be rendered obsolete. But traditional books didn’t die—they simply fled into the digital world and returned with new forms, the technologically-savvy ebook and digital story app. The need to diversify the medium that arose during this era is, in part, what may have kept sales of books rising through the apocalyptic flames. It pushed against any stubbornness in the publishing world and proved…
Dildo Hoverboard
News

Screw diamonds, the dildo hoverboard is a girl’s best friend

Don’t you just hate it when you need to give the ol’ honey pot a little self-loving but you’ve got an early morning meeting at work that you’re already late for? Me too. That’s why I’m totally psyched for the creator of the Dildo Drone, Michael Krivicka, and his newest invention: the Dildo Hoverboard. Okay, so maybe it’s a faux invention, but think of the possibilities if it were real. The faux-prototype Dildo Hoverboard presents a speedy way to get to work, perfect for the busy millennial, while also giving its rider the option to multitask with a little, you…
Erotica Robotica
News

Erotica Robotica proves sex with robots is tricky

In this fantastical world of booming technological advances in robotics, you’d probably be lying if you said you’ve never thought about sex with robots. After all, the topic has been almost unavoidable, cropping up in the news thanks to very possibly sex-craved innovators like this man, who made his personal robot look eerily like Scarlett Johansson, and the many people—including myself—who swooned over the AI who spouts post-modern poetry. Enter Erotica Robotica, a game where two players must work together to sexually pleasure a robot named SAMM-69, to satiate that, uh, curiosity. And SAMM-69, the genderless robot clothed in a…
Nadia Was Here
News

Nadia Was Here plans to dish out 8-bit existentialism

I’ll be honest: if the world imploded in a deadly apocalypse every 100 years without fail, I would probably live my life beneath my bedsheets, refusing to do any work or, actually, anything at all. Any mark I’d make on the world would be erased with my existence, so what’s the point in getting out of bed? Nonetheless, this is the premise of Nadia Was Here, a pixelated RPG in the style of the classic 8- and 16-bit eras, and which is currently on Kickstarter. It’s an RPG that seeks to explore themes of ennui, finality, and that desperate, human desire to be…
News

Find peace with Sodzen, a game about watering a plant

I kill nearly every plant I touch, and over the years, I’ve wasted so much money on every plant imaginable in the hopes of finding the one species that can withstand my black thumb. But only now, with Sodzen, have I finally found my perfect plant. Sodzen is a low resolution, highly pixelated game submitted for #LowRezJam by Ottawa-based team SweetHeart Squad, which includes Sean LeBlanc, Ryan Bluth, Emma Thurlow, Cat Wong, Michael Hetman, and Ian Martin. The goal of Sodzen is simple: water the plant. You don’t have to water several plants (there is only a single plant), or…
The Garden of Earthly Delights
News

Gross digital animation brings Bosch’s painting of Hell to life

Late medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch is known for highly-detailed, nightmarish paintings so fantastical that the Surrealists, including Salvador Dali, found inspiration in them. And it so happens that Bosch’s unique brand of grossness continues to inspire future generations. As the 500th anniversary of Bosch’s death approaches, artists are using today’s technology to create their own modern interpretations of Bosch’s famous large-scale triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (1510-15). Using the Unity game engine, Kaayk specifically recreated the left panel of the triptych as a monochromatic, 3D animated computer simulation. The right panel, if you didn’t know, depicts Hell in all its awful glory, where…