Author: Kill Screen Staff

Kill Screen is the definitive source for independent games and culture writing. Since 2009.
Walkie Talkie
News

An online chatroom isn’t where you’d expect to find a platformer

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Walkie Talkie (Windows) BY DANIEL LINSSEN Daniel Linssen must see platformers everywhere. He’s already made one inside a computer interface and one that works in tandem with a separate game. Now he’s made a platformer inside an online chatroom. It also doubles up as one of the most easy-to-use level creators ever conceived. Called Walkie Talkie, the game is a fully-functioning online chatroom where people can talk to each other by typing into a box. You can scroll through the entire conversation and, at…
News

SHENZEN I/O is here to make you code like it’s the 1980s

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. SHENZEN I/O (Windows, Mac) BY ZACHTRONICS Some games and educational apps try to ease you into the art of writing code. SHENZEN I/O isn’t so soft. It’s a throwback to the 1980s, when there wasn’t much so media geared towards teaching people how to code. Hence, it begins its lessons by throwing a hefty manual (which you can print out) and a number of circuit-based challenges at you, and then leaves you to figure it out. There’s a little bit of guidance at first but…
Feature

From small beginnings to Esports stardom

This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel. After church on Sunday, 13-year-old Christine “Potter” Chi followed her brother and his friends to an amateur Counter-Strike tournament at the Mug and Mouse LAN cafe in Dallas, Texas. While sipping boba tea, Potter and her reluctant friends watched as the teams faced off with nothing but pride on the line. “Once I realized they were going versus each other, it sparked my competitive side,” she said.More than a decade and a half later, Potter has five Counter-Strike world championships under her belt and is a reminder of just…
News

Rearrange a world of typography in unWorded

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. unWorded (iOS) BY BENTO STUDIO A hospitalized writer reflects on his life with the strange tales he has read and written over the years. This is the premise narrative puzzle game unWorded. It’s set in a world made of letters, which immediately draws comparison to Type:Rider and DEVICE 6, but it’s only an interest in typography that connects them. unWorded’s unique task is in creating pictures out of letters and punctuation. As the writer reads books from his past, you might have to piece together parenthesis and the…
News

New platformer wants you to know the environment is screwed

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Even the Ocean (Windows, Mac) BY ANALGESIC PRODUCTIONS Even the Ocean is a warning. It’s a game that wants to raise awareness of the human impact on the environment and for its players to spread its message. Its fictional world needs to be balanced by light and dark energies, and due to an imbalance brought about by power-hungry politicians, that world is accelerating towards its end. You play a power plant engineer who is tasked with trying to restore the balance and hopefully saving the world.…
Tyranny
News

Tyranny is an RPG about being properly evil

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 world where evil has won. It doesn’t want you to quell this evil, instead, it wants you to enforce its rule, and asks you to indulge in your sadism. Mostly, it does this through the choices it asks you to make: Will you smother a baby? Commit the mass murder of innocents? Throw a prisoner…
One Night Stand
News

Dating sims don’t get much more awkward than One Night Stand

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. One Night Stand (Windows, Mac, Linux) BY KINMOKU What did you do last night? This is the big question that visual novel One Night Standopens up with. And for your first couple playthroughs you’ll probably pursue the answer to it. You know that you slept with the girl you woke up next to, that you abandoned your friend Gary after the first drink, and that you have a terrible hangover. The rest you have to uncover by investigating the debris around the bedroom: a used…
News

Sara is Missing is some good text-message horror

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Sara is Missing (Windows, Mac, iOS) BY MONSOON LAB Films like Unfriended and the recent Blair Witch have tried to bring the found footage genre into the digital age with varying success. But the attempt seems much more at home in Sara is Missing, a free game by Monsoon Lab. In it, you come upon a phone with an Intelligent Recognitive Iconolatry System (I.R.I.S.) that takes you through its owner’s last known whereabouts and moments. Best played on an Android device (but available otherwise), Sara is Missing…
Tonight You Die
Feature

20 free horror games you should play on Halloween

There is no short supply of free horror games. Hell, the rise of reaction videos in recent years has actually brought a surge of them. People have raced to to make a videogame that’ll scare the pants off their favorite YouTubers so they can watch. But that’s also a problem: a lot of these small, free horror games go for the cheapest thrill to achieve their goal. Yes, the jump scare. It is with that in mind that the 20 free horror games below have been selected. We prefer creep outs, an intense sense of dread, the kind of horror that…