Author: Nicole Carpenter

Nicole is a freelance writer and reporter from Massachusetts. She has a cat named Puppy.
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A game about pretending to play chess is all about performance

It really is as if you were playing chess, except Pippin Barr’s newest game It is as if you were playing chess doesn’t include a chess board. There are no pawns, Kings, or Queens. No pieces at all, really—just instructions. Move this dot here. Look here. Now here. Tilt your head and cringe. Move again. It is as if you were playing chess makes a game of pretending to play a game. “To the observer, it should look as though the player is genuinely playing some kind of game,” Pippin Barr writes. “In this case, the idea is for them to…
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Moblets will let you catch creatures way cuter than Pokémon

You may have seen Rebecca Cordingley’s adorable videogame Moblets on Twitter. She’s got quite the following on there, with eager fans clamoring for more glimpses of the game, which she describes as a mixture of Harvest Moon (1996) and Pokémon. Twitter is Cordingley’s main form of marketing for Moblets, and it seems to be working: “I think people are interested in being a part of the development process and I love getting their feedback and encouragement,” she said. Veering away from the Pokémon-esque design, Moblets is more of a team-driven videogame. After all, “mob” is in the game’s name. “The name…
Hypnospace Outlaw
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Hypnospace Outlaw will turn you into the internet police

Scumbags on the internet causing trouble again? Dropsy (2015) creator Jay Tholen knows who to call—The Hypnospace Enforcers! Hypnospace Outlaw takes players to the literal information superhighway as internet defenders. “In said future, most people work for a powerful corporatocracy all day, and cruise the Hypnospace Highway while sleeping,” Tholen said. “There are competing virtual sleep worlds, but Hypnospace reigns supreme.” In Hypnospace Outlaw, players are moderators of the Geocities-like future internet. They’re the Hypnospace Enforcers. Much of the design focuses on browsing a series of Hypnospace websites—dancing sprites and flashing text abound—and learning about the folks who inhabit the…
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Rime’s mysterious island adventure set to arrive next year

We haven’t heard much about Tequila Works’s Rime since it was first revealed at Gamescom 2013, but that’s about to change. Nearly three years since its official announcement, we’ve got word that the adventure game is still in development, and it’s likely to be released in 2017. It’s got new publishers, too—and it sounds like it’s no longer a PlayStation exclusive. So you can keep up: Rime was previously confirmed as a PlayStation 4 release, but Tequila Works ended up dropping Sony as the game’s publisher and buying back its rights. It’s possible that Rime will now come to other platforms,…
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She Remembered Caterpillars turns personal grief into pretty puzzles

Red and blue make purple. Yellow and red make orange. She Remembered Caterpillars uses the basics of color theory to guide you through its puzzles. Red blobs can only pass over red caterpillar bridges. Blue blobs can only travel over blue bridges. Combine your little blobs, though, and your new purple blob can move over red or blue. It sounds simple—and it is, at the beginning. As the game moves forward, there are more blobs. More caterpillar bridges. More colors. It gets fairly complex, but the objective is always the same: get your blob to the white flower platform so…
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A videogame about being an old person trying to understand Pokémon Go

My nana called me up in a panic when Pokémon Go was first released. The news was reporting on stories of kids getting robbed while playing the augmented reality game. I’m sure you remember. Now, I’m no kid … I’m nearly 30 years old. But my grandma wanted to warn me—needed to warn me—about the potential dangers I was putting myself at risk of. “Bad people will try to hurt you, Nicole,” my nana said. “You don’t know what could happen to you if you play that game.” That’s what Clayton Chowaniec’s That Pokeyman Thing is about—being an old person who…
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Here comes Mei, the badass nerd hell-bent on revenge

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. /// My sister is quiet, bookish—a nerd, a dork. She’s reserved. Shy. But when you set her off, she’s brutal. If I wanted to use the computer as a kid and my sister was already on it, I might just crawl under our parent’s…
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Orwell will have you play as the surveillance state for once

You might not be surprised to find out that Osmotic Studios’s narrative exploration game Orwell is firmly linked to George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). Orwell takes place in a dystopian world not unlike that of 1984; Orwell’s world is called The Nation—and security is the highest concern of the government. A series of terrorist attacks sparked a secret (and totally creepy) security program called, well, Orwell. And guess what? You get to control it. You’re Big Brother. The whole game takes place on a desktop—think Her Story (2015) or Cibele (2015). Orwell compiles information from websites, messengers, and public records; it’s up…
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Dutch videogame maker aims to confront Europe’s colonial past

Herald’s narrative revolves largely around one question: How does your cultural heritage influence your identity? For many—including the point-and-click period drama’s protagonist, Devan Rensburg—it’s a complicated question, made even more complicated by the world’s history of colonialism. The “violent cultural clash” of colonialism plays a massive part in the complexity of the multiracial identity; and those complexities are what Herald aims to take on, through the eyes of the in-game ship’s (the HLV Herald) mixed-race steward. Wispfire cites a certain urgency in putting out this game now, in this cultural climate. Race and immigration are at the forefront of many political…