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Diesel Power drives back to the golden age of arcade racers

We’ve seen so many games in virtual reality: shooters, simulators, hotdog crossbow slingers, among dozens more. Though one genre, at least for the most part, has been notably absent from the technology that boasts ‘immersion’ and ‘innovation’: the arcade game. Whether they’re the ones people would l

In Fractal, art is a weapon

Art is a weapon. A weapon against the patriarchy, against the status quo, against hate, against The Man. But in Fractal, a new virtual reality game from Phosphene Designs, art is a different kind of weapon: it’s a literal one. In Fractal, the player wields a paintbrush as their instrument of choice

A new videogame about piecing together drunken memories

Is it a coincidence that autobiographical games are the ones that seem to experiment with new storytelling ideas the most? Look at the infinite scrolling world of life and death in Passage (2007), the collage of frustrations in Dys4ia (2012), the awkward online conversations of Cibele (2015), and th

Birthplace of Ossian explores the artificiality of videogame landscapes

The mountainous terrain in Connor Sherlock’s exploration game Birthplace of Ossian isn’t of this world. I don’t mean that rather than being real, it is virtual—its disconnection has many more layers than that. For starters, its colossal landscape is based on Glen Coe in Scotland, a place that Sherlo