After wandering around for a few years in the wilderness of The Only Shadow That The Desert Knows, I stumbled into a city. ASCII characters, caves, and poison toads led me to believe that the creator of the game, Jeremiah Reid, had made a fairly traditional roguelike for 7DRL 2016. But when I steppe
What is a city? It’s a question we rarely consider: that word, city, being such a useful label for the dense, multi-layered, contradictory, opaque, ever-changing, utopic, perverse, magical, and mundane piles of decaying masonry where most of the world’s population spend their lives. A city can be a
Anyone who had the misfortune of going through bible school will know the story: the Jewish people spent generations in slavery, tortured at the hands of great Pharaohs, before God inflicted 10 plagues upon Egypt to free his ill-treated servants. What wasn’t covered in the Abrahamic texts, though, w
Given the mixed reaction to No Man’s Sky—we love it, others not so much—plus the fact that you have to lay down $60 on it in one go (not to mention the troubles with the PC version), perhaps you’re hesitant to buy in. Or, perhaps you’ve played it and have been disappointed by it. That’s fine. But th
With the majority of the 2016 Rio Olympics now behind us, it’s easy to feel a little inadequate. Michael Phelps has now won more Olympic gold medals than anyone in 2,000 years; Simone Manuel made history on Thursday when she became the first African-American woman to win an Olympic gold medal in swi
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Morrissey has yet again teamed up with PETA, this time to create a game illustrating the atrocities of factory farming. Created by independent studio This Is Pop, This Beautiful Creature Must Die is a highly-stylized 8-bit clicker that, at first glance, is al
Jake Hollands’s Spaceplan starts with a blank screen, the controls of your space ship are damaged, and the only way to start it up is to click on the Kinetigen on the top left of your screen. I click, and every click gives me a single watt of power. Solar panels, I’m then informed, will cost 10 watt
The game jam A Game By Its Cover 2016 is over, leaving behind many interesting and wonderful games. Inspired by fake Famicom game cover art, some of the games got weird, and that’s certainly the case for Parachute Pete. The game is immature in the best way, bringing together the terrifying majesty o
What happens when Johnny goes to work? What happens when he buys the red dress or makes love to his fiancée Lisa? If you’ve ever wanted to know, there is an answer: The Room (2003), the best worst movie of all time, now has an adventure game adaptation. A 2D adventure game, The Room Tribute “is a to
One of my favorite urban legends as a child centered on the sewers of New York City. As the story goes, it suddenly became popular in New York to have an alligator as a pet. The giant lizards were kept in fish tanks and then in bathtubs, until owners were horrified to discover that an alligator outg
Ashi Wash is a ridiculous game with a ridiculous premise—a terrible, funky foot comes crashing through your ceiling. It’s got a serious fungus problem. (I’d suggest crashing into a doctor’s office next time, foot.) Its toenails are overgrown. Also, it can talk. The giant foot makes it pretty clear—i
Love indie games? We are relaunching our print magazine with Issue 9. For a limited time, use the discount code RELAUNCH to receive 10% off your purchase of Issue 9, or off a 4 issue subscription. /// In the 80s and 90s, “indigo children” were a topic out of New Age philosophy that gained some mains
What is the art that sticks with us as children? Is it the pleasant ones? The ones that are comforting and safe? Or are they the strange ones? The ones that first expose us to to a world beyond the pre-approved bubble of sanctioned entertainment? In a time when getting media to everyone—including ch
Here, in full, is the hotel review Rami Ismail wrote that led to the goofball game jam entry Breach & Clean: Hesperia Tower was a phenomenal stay, with clean rooms and a free Spanish lesson that taught me that “no molestar” doesn’t mean “do not disturb” but “breach and clear like you are a SWAT team
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. GIRAFFES VOLLEYBALL CHAMPIONSHIP 2016 (Windows, Mac) BY SANDWICH PUISSANT The problem with many sports is that they’re taken too seriously. Competition is king in the land of sports. It drives
The power of the engine doesn’t matter—it is the landscape which dictates the speed of a train. Some journeys are staccato and breathless, clusters of urban interest barely spaced, laying down a beat over which the melodies of weather and light might play. Others are long drawn-out sighs, exhales as
In a previous life, There You Go would’ve been a sleeper hit on a flash portal website, where lots of different creators submitted games and animations to test out new ideas, or to show off what they could do. It feels like it has a lot in common with puzzles that were popular back then, halfway bet
Have you ever been sexiled from a shared apartment? I haven’t, but I recall an instance of a friend in college being sexiled while he was away in the bathroom—his roommate had come in during his absence, along with his girlfriend, and left a sock on the door. My friend sat for the next 30 minutes, t
Some racing games want hyperrealism, providing rumbled feedback to let the player know when to switch gears, recreating skidmarks on real race tracks, and giving a view from the inside where you can see all the gauges twitch. Robber Docks’s new game, Kaasua, is not one of those games, which is exact
I’ve lived my entire life in Texas. I graduated high school in a small town on the south edge of Fort Worth, Dallas’s dull little brother. There’s a suffocation, growing up in a place like that, a smallness; most people you know have had families who have been here for generations. They’ll reminisce
From the creator of Lieve Oma—the game where the only fail state is disappointing your grandmother—comes an unfinished game about traveling on a train. The Endless Express is a continuation of a 2014 game jam entry in which your character falls asleep on the train, and then needs to find their way h
We have reached the recriminations stage of the United Kingdom’s referendum on continued European Union membership. One might reasonably argue that the whole campaign has taken place in this stage from the start—recrimination is Brexit’s natural state of being. But, in short: everyone’s mad; everyon
Crows, it turns out, are probably smarter than you think. They seem to be able to recognize human faces and craft tools to solve problems they run up against—the problem pretty much always being a lack of food, but still. You learn this as you play Cullen Dwyer’s new game NEST, which he gives a kind
Games are mostly devoid of a “making of” genre. Indie Game: The Movie (2012) and various art books may tell the story of a game’s creation, but there is no Hearts of Darkness for games, largely because the amount of work and the number of art assets that go into a game means the “making of” commenta
Crows Crows Crows, the studio created by William Pugh (co-developer on 2013’s The Stanley Parable), has launched their second game—a Twine adventure called The Temple of No. The game is relatively short and comedic, similar in that regard to the studio’s previous short, narrative title, Dr. Langesko
