News

Nina Freeman’s next game is based on her mom’s 1960s childhood

Game designer Nina Freeman first rose to prominence with How Do You Do It (2014), a game exploring precocious sexuality based on her own experiences as a child. The following year, her senior thesis project at NYU-Poly was commercially released as Cibele, a game about online gaming, sex, and falling in love on the internet. Interested in themes of sexuality and self-reflection, Freeman currently works as a designer at Fullbright. Freeman’s latest project, Kimmy—made in collaboration with Laura Knetzger and Aaron Freedman—shifts the focus to childhood. Based on her mother’s experiences as a babysitter in the 1960s, Kimmy will explore what it was to be a child before the…

Announcement

Announcing Play/Off, NYC’s first league of digital play

EDIT: Keep an eye out for Play/Off in 2016. We have decided to postpone it until then in order to do the best job possible on this event series. Games have been inherently social for most of our history, from basketball to chess. Why should videogames be any different? In our new event series, brought to you by Grind coworking spaces and arts and culture publication Kill Screen, we want to bring people together to play face-to-face in New York City’s first league of digital play. Over the course of six events, teams will face off in games plucked from…

News

It’s dangerous to go alone, so bring a friend to the beautiful world of Yonder

With a few notable exceptions, platformers are typically solitary adventures that measure determination against dexterity. The life of a whip-wielding vampire slayer or bounty hunting contortionist is a lonely one. Players often left to fend for themselves as they chart a course through a labyrinthine quest for treasure and triumph through adversity. Yonder, the first game developed by André and Johan Steén of Venturous Games, looks to buck that trend while sporting a gorgeous art style. A 2D platformer with an emphasis on exploration, puzzle-solving, and companionship, Yonder sets itself apart from the isolationist bent of its contemporaries, eschewing their predilection…

News

FTL proposal is the sweetest thing you’ll ever see in a roguelike

Maybe I just have a soft spot for love letters and roguelikes, but this proposal in FTL: Faster Than Light is kind of beautiful. A Redditer going by the name oft_wears_hats is now a happy fiancé after patching his girlfriend’s copy of the game with a dialogue tree in which a the man of her dreams boards her ship and asks her to marry him. She said yes, of course, or else this story would be sad and we’d not be posting it: Man gets rejected in FTL just doesn’t have the same ring.  We’ve seen sweethearts popping the question…