The Game Design of Severance
Ben Stiller's Severance uses game design principles to explore information, identity, and workplace control through the lens of split personalities and corporate mystery.
mystery
Upcoming point-and-click mystery brings a fresh vision to future Florida
As a college student, my professors are pretty important to me, and not just because they hold the future of my GPA in their hands. My professors have been endlessly patient with my classmates and me, providing us with guidance, insight, and even free dinner once or twice. If one of them went missin
Ekko’s pretty spaces will let you explore the butterfly effect
Rob Milus isn’t saying much, but it’s enough. He’s working on a game called Ekko with fellow game maker Peter Dijkstra, one that he’s only showed glimpses of on Twitter—abstract shapes floating across a space lit by a distant sun. I wanted to find out more, a lot more, but he only responded with a f
Videogame invites you to discover someone through their lost phone
You find a phone on the ground outside. You look around, but there’s no one in sight. Hoping that there will be some information to help you contact the owner, you turn the phone on. This is where the preview for A Normal Lost Phone starts. Immediately, four messages pop up on the phone, sent over t
Protest your innocence in a new nonlinear courtroom drama
Bohemian Killing, released last week on Steam, is a game about being guilty. More specifically, it’s a game about being guilty and then convincing a court of law that you’re not. A courtroom drama that wants to avoid both Phoenix Wright camp and Law & Order plodding dullness, the main draw of the ga
The Hex, a new mystery from one of videogames’ greatest tricksters
At its core, one could shave down a detective story to three basic questions: who, why, and how. Who was the victim, who was the perpetrator? Why and how they did commit the crime? From Sam Barlow’s FMV mystery in Her Story (2015) and Cole Phelps’ investigations across the seedy streets of 1940s Los
New female detective game seeks to right L.A. Noire’s wrongs
Ben Wander, a game developer with experience at BioWare and Visceral Games, has wanted to make a game about the 1920s for a while. After years of ogling independent game makers from afar, he finally dove in with a short demo of his upcoming detective game. The premise is that you have to interrogate
Lo-fi survival horror returns next week as Back in 1995 comes out
The year 1995 was a turning point for the videogame industry. It was the first year of E3—now the biggest videogame awards and announcement show, which still runs annually. It was the year of the release of Sony’s PlayStation in Europe and North America (it had been released the year prior in Japan)
Development of Papers, Please creator’s next game hits rough seas
It’s been a year and a half since Papers Please (2013) creator Lucas Pope first announced his nautical mystery game Return of the Obra Dinn, releasing a small demo of the game for players to try for free. Like many demos, it offered a vertical slice of the game’s typical routine, helping to embody w
Solstice leaves its best mysteries unsolved
In the eighth episode of The X-Files, agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are dispatched to investigate radio silence at a science outpost in Icy Cape, Alaska. There they discover a parasite—because it’s always a parasite—that makes its host hyper-violent. Suspicion and fear threaten to tear the team
Kôna invites you to investigate an abandoned town in 1970s Canada
The most striking thing about the new trailer for Kôna, an upcoming surreal mystery game from Parabole, is its narration. It has this really odd, stilted intonation that I can’t quite place; the boom and quirk of old timey radio announcer meets the uncanny poetry of The Residents. Whatever it is, I
The #Victorian frame of mind: A review of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate
With Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Ubisoft’s machinelike series finally finds its era.
SUPERHOT wants to get inside your brain and change how you think
Conduct an ensemble of bullets and glass in SUPERHOT
Profiles of the Forgotten is "a videogame within a movie"
“Have you ever loved someone so much, that you could step out of time?” These are the words that introduce Profiles of the Forgotten, a project that lies somewhere between a traditional game and a film. The first project by Los Angeles developer Pablo Leon-Luna, Profiles of the Forgotten is describe
Shut up, Her Story
Her Story might be a good videogame, but it’s the worst kind of crime fiction.
Listening to Her Story, looking for the right questions
The surprising rewards of a murder mystery in an obsolete search engine simulator.
Creepy digital ghosts will keep you company in Fullbright’s Tacoma
Gone Home gets zero-gravity.
The astonishing riddle that started inside Trials Evolution ended up spanning the globe
The racing game Trials Evolution was released for Xbox 360 in the spring of 2012. It was well reviewed. It sold reasonably well. It was notable in the sense that all games are notable to someone. Then something strange happened. Actually, a lot of strange things happened. Wooden planks inscribed wit
Whodunnit? In Her Story, you’ll always write the answer
Overanalysis for the information age.
An upcoming game about being a crime scene cleaner is both grim and fascinating
I have a friend who works in the ambulance service. He tells me stories. I ask him to. The expected tragedies aside (horrific traffic accidents, families in peril, octogenarians dying alone completely neglected), the most fascinating details of his job, at least to my eager ears, are sourced from hi
A Dog Tale, or the death of mystery
On the strange power of unremarkable games.
Hitchhike across a small-town conspiracy in The Long Way
Last year, games such as Glitchhikers and Three Fourths Home addressed us from behind somber masks as we drove down their lonesome roads. The former took us on a spiritual journey to have us question the direction our lives were headed. While the latter acted as more of a reminder to continue to tre
Gabriel Knight’s 20th anniversary edition is a shrine to its father
Jane Jensen’s classic, just like you remember it.
Lucas Pope finds his procedural zen
The follow-up to Papers, Please is looking lovely and decidedly lo-fi.
Firewatch’s design is rich with American history
The New Deal, renewed.