News

Samorost 3’s fairy tale of microbiology is now on iPhone

Samorost 3 is a game that cares about the tiniest organisms on the planet. It’s made of them: curious bugs that harvest moss, fungi blown up to the size of three-story houses, tree knots as gargantuan as an abyss. It seems fitting then, that Samorost 3 is now available on iPhone and iPad; smaller sc

A videogame about puking shouldn’t be this darn cute

There’s a gigantic chicken chasing after Gilbert. In any other videogame, this would seem out of place, but not in the upcoming platformer Eggggg, where absurdity rules. The chicken is just one of the many ridiculous elements featured in the game. Did I mention Gilbert also does a lot of puking? Yes

Simplify This Horse isn’t what you might expect

Simplify This Horse is, on the surface, a simple browser game made as a promotional tool to hype up the Swiss band Extrafish’s upcoming album, Simplify This Fish. That is, until its layers are pulled back, and what’s exposed is a game that’s obtuse, weird, and fascinating. Extrafish is a balkan-dada

You can play a videogame on Snapchat now. Yes, really

Serena Williams’ Match Point is Snapchat’s first attempt at a multiple-level videogame embedded into the social platform. (It’s also a glorified 8-bit Gatorade ad.) It’s actually pretty fun—and an impressively detailed look at Serena Williams’s history in tennis. If you didn’t know, Serena Williams

At last, the Lynchian detective drama Virginia has a release date

You could be forgiven for not hearing of Virginia before now. The first-person detective game—described by many as a mix of Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Brendon Chung’s Thirty Flights of Loving (2012)—is something you probably want to be focusing your attention on right now, especially as it’s arriv

Get ready to suffer in Agony’s depraved vision of hell

Who do you think was the first person to start wrecking shit in Hell? It couldn’t have always been a nightmare ditch fraught with furious anger and the scabbed lamentations of sinners. Someone must have made like Saturn in Goya’s famous oil painting and started to devour all their children or someth

Be a magical fox that can change the seasons on September 2nd

Though the strangely-specific genre of “fox adventure game” isn’t exactly lonely this summer, the upcoming platformer Seasons After Fall is determined to assert its individuality. A fox wandering through a forest: good. A fox wandering through a forest in order to collect fragments of every season i

Childhood game ‘The Floor is Lava’ is being turned into a videogame

As a child, imagination turned the familiar and mundane into something more during play. Legos let you create amazing structures and recreate your favorite heroes and cartoons. Battles worthy of their own comic splash pages took place between action figures. A playground wasn’t just baking metal sli

Carl Burton’s gorgeous GIFs are being turned into a videogame

Shopping malls. Airport bookstores. Hotel lobbies. Carl Burton—the artist and animator behind Serial‘s second season GIFs—is creating a videogame that exploits the “boringness” of these liminal, corporate spaces. Using the foggy, surrealist art style of his GIFs, ISLANDS is a videogame you experienc

Some of Japan’s best artists are reimagining Astro Boy for a card game

Of all the collaborations that the disco and electronic composer Giorgio Moroder has participated in (collaborations that include the likes of Janet Jackson and David Bowie), a joint project with Osaka-based game studio Project Atom to make an Astro Boy digital collectible card game might be the mos

If you didn’t get your hands on Overland before, now is your chance

If you’ve been waiting to play Finji’s new game Overland, but didn’t make it into the limited First Access Program, then good news: Overland is now open to the public. Overland is a tactical survival game in the vein of XCOM but with far more adorable dogs and heartache. The game has you balancing a

One of the most authentic hacking simulators is getting an expansion

The videogame and hacking simulator Hacknet has been praised over and over again for its dedication to realism since it arrived last year. The whole game is viewed through an interface, and the player’s tasks are all as close to actual hacking as possible, using real unix commands. It’s not a game t

Malkia, a game about the struggles of an African businesswoman

HELP: The Game is a recent project that saw 11 videogame studios—including Angry Birds creator Rovio and the studio behind the upcoming Dead Island 2, Sumo Digital—team up with the WarChild organization. The idea was for each studio to design a game that could then be bundled and sold together. All

The wordless beauty of Pan-Pan

There are no words in Pan-Pan—just bubbling variations of boops and beeps. After crash landing on Pan-Pan’s colorful low-poly world, you’ll be introduced to a bunch of little dudes with bushy ‘staches. They’ve come to your aid after the crash, and despite there being a language barrier, they’re tryi

Look upon the terror of Pokémon Bones

Pokémon don’t have internal organs. At least, that’s what Miles Peyton—a Fine Arts and Computer Science student at Carnegie Mellon—found out when he pulled the skin back on different character models from Pokémon X and Pokémon Y (2013) exposing “skin balloons without flesh or internal organs.” Peyto

Cosmic Express will give you the opportunity to swear at cute space trains

There’s something magical about travelling by train. It’s something that participants in the yearly Train Jam—a 52-hour game jam set on a train ride between Chicago and San Francisco—try to harness to make games. Alan Hazelden’s latest game, Cosmic Express, has it origins in that very train jam, and

Try to fix NYC’s subway system in a new historical simulation game

I didn’t know much about Robert Moses before playing Confetti with the Brick Bats. The creators of the game, New York Game Center students Alexander King and Noca Wu, didn’t know much about him either. That is, not before Tim Hwang’s “Power Broker” contest, which offered cash prizes to those that co

Odd noir adventure game Jazzpunk comes frolicking to PS4 soon

The adventure game most likely to puzzle your eyeballs with a noir-inspired pixel odyssey—Jazzpunk—is coming to PS4 on September 20th. The trailer for the PS4 release is weird in that quintessentially Jazzpunk way; a combination of live-action shenanigans, a smidge of gameplay, and a dash of constru

The rise of VHS horror games

The introduction of VHS cassettes in the 1970s was a revolution in bringing horror closer to people. Two decades before, television became the primary medium for affecting public opinion, trumping newspapers and radio. This bore a generation eager to sit around a humming electronic box in their livi

Are videogames ruining Sleep No More?

She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. — To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s

Niche, a survival game based on the real science of genetics

There are a lot of educational games out there that might teach you a thing or two about biology, evolution, and how genetics work. But they can be easy to disregard due to the often boring and dull methods of delivering that information. Well, Team Niche—a small five-person independent studio locat

A videogame for anyone who’s felt uncomfortable on the dance floor

Team Lazerbeam, the folks behind Snow Cones and Wrestling With Emotions, started their latest game Dress To Express Dancing Success—a dancing and dating simulator—with the intention of creating their least sensible and least complicated game. And they kind of failed. “Before that we’d been on a pret

Party on down with a skeleton dress-up game

Ever had one of those nights where—no matter what you do, how you accessorize, in sweats or dressed to the nines, after a good day or a bad one—you still feel like nothing but a skeleton with skin crudely stretched over your bones? To make matters worse, this is the sort of night you can’t avoid; gi