Author: Kyle Kukshtel

Kyle Kukshtel is a volumetric filmmaker and game designer based in Brooklyn, NY.
The Game: The Game
News

A new dating sim highlights the pickup artist’s ugly game of seduction

The dating sim has been experiencing something of a reexamining of late, finding itself in the broader public eye as iterations upon its core tenants are warped, distorted, and pushed past their typical use cases. Whereas dating sims were once predominantly focused around a male protagonist trying to date—and eventually have sex with—beautiful women, the modern dating sim is unbounded. It rejects the notion that a potential partner is hetrosexual (Kindred Spirits on the Roof and Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story), “perfect” (Katawa Shoujo), or a human at all (Hatoful Boyfriend and Hot Date). The…
News

Widowmaker made a widow of me

We love Overwatch. So we assembled 22 of our best writers and set them to work—a writer to jump into the skin (or robotic shell) of each character. The result is 22 odes. You can use the “Overwatch odes” tag to leaf through them all, or use the handy list at the bottom of this post. /// Dear Widowmaker, I’m writing to you because it’s been awhile since we’ve looked into each other’s eyes and saw anything more than that first moment we met. We reveled in predestination (surely knowing that you would see me and I you) and in…
Brendon Chung
Feature

Brendon Chung and his love for big dumb plastic switches

This article is part of Issue 8.5, a digital zine available to Kill Screen’s print subscribers. Read more about it here and get a copy yourself by subscribing to our soon-to-be-relaunched print magazine. /// The midpoint of Daft Punk’s 2013 album Random Access Memories is marked by an effusive, sprawling ode to touch. An unidentified narrator walks the listener through memories and speculation on feeling as they try to recall what seems like fading indicators of what feeling ever was. On “Touch,” we get a sense that the narrator was once organic like us. But now, metallic and glistening under a…
Feature

Imagining the technological singularity with Factorio

The trouncing of the world’s top Go player by Google’s AlphaGo AI has led more than a few people to speculate on how we’ll be feeling the ramifications of this victory in the near future. What this speculation mainly concerns is the question of what will happen if software continues to eat the world with such a voracious appetite that we are only beginning to truly fathom. For now, “Big Data,” the truly massive collection of data that humans collectively generate through any and all combinations of internet browsing history, biometrics, credit card payments, and more, provides the equivalent of…
News

The Westport Independent plans to pick up where Papers, Please left off

Digging through game jam games is hard work, so thanks to those who mined The Westport Independent from the veritable pile of games that Ludum Dare consistently produces. Instantly visually and thematically similar to Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please and his earlier title The Republica Times, The Westport Independent proposes to take us a step further, setting the game inside the borders of a totalitarian state that has set out to dissolve any independent entities—and, especially, your publication. As you are sent articles each day, you choose what will or won’t be censored from the each week’s issue, your choices gathering either loyalist suspicion or rebel…