Working as a trader used to be a glamorous—if also morally dubious—job. Note the use of the past tense in that sentence: Wall Street (1987), with its yelling into phones and power-suits, power-lunches, and power-everything-else is a thing of the past. It’s not for nothing that the most exciting cult
The Westport Independent is a game about journalism. And so, in the interests of good journalism, a full disclosure is in order: I was employed as an editor at a newspaper company in Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post Group, from 2012-2015. This is important because The Westport Independent is,
“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time—back home to the escap
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Unsolicited (PC, Mac, Linux) BY Lucas Pope Given the vacuity of the junk mail that mailboxes regularly puke onto entrance mats, you’d be forgiven to think there wasn’t a single soul behind it
File some junk mail for the devil in Unsolicited With Unsolicited, Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope turns his attention to corporate America Lucas Pope, creator of Papers, Please, turns his bureaucratic attention to junk mail
Since announcing it a year ago, Lucas Pope has been hard at work on the flashback-driven mystery game Return of the Obra Dinn, his follow-up to Papers, Please. Last October, he released a rough build of Obra Dinn to play for free, showing off the primary dynamic of the game’s puzzle. You are an East
“Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.” – Mark Twain Absolutism is absolutism, no matter how you slice it. Whether worshipping a God or a state, christianity or communism, absolute answers to complex questions often lead people down iffy moral territories. Papers, Please extolled this
British Developer Twice Encircled has announced Big Pharma, a game which puts you in the deeply conflicted shoes of a c-level suit at a pharmaceutical conglomerate. It follows the Tycoon playbook: soft, twee visual design over top a game of space and resource management. As in the canonical Kairosof
Sheltered, a cool-looking management sim on Kickstarter, has all the down-to-earth trials and tribulations of daily family life. You provide food and shelter for your loved ones, repair home appliances, make a quick run to the store, take care of the pets, and, uh, defend your fallout bunker from th
Digging through game jam games is hard work, so thanks to those who mined The Westport Independent from the veritable pile of games that Ludum Dare consistently produces. Instantly visually and thematically similar to Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please and his earlier title The Republica Times, The Westpor
The Official is another game about the angst of the work force. It’s based on that familiar daydream that anyone who sits behind at desk from 9-5 has doubtlessly imagined: the one where you fall asleep on your stack of papers and awake after hours alone in a strange alternate version of your office
SimCity is about building a flourishing biome where citizens can live without dying of smog. Factorio, contrarily, says screw that. It is a game about wrecking the environment by building sprawling, Rube-Goldbergian, obscene, waste-shitting factories out of conveyer belts and tens of thousands of cl
We’ve seen a lot of great videogames that deal with social issues, but we haven’t seen that many boardgames. The crew of Italians behind Riot want to change that by putting you in the shoes of a citizen who is caught in a dangerous riot situation, where tension between protesters and officers is eru
The dark fantasy esport Dota 2 is undeniably Steam’s killer app, according to the number-crunching-smiths at Ars Technica, who found that over 25 million copies have been downloaded and played on Valve’s popular digital download service. We shouldn’t be shocked that such a hardcore, complex game—eve
We have comments by another so-called “indie” game auteur disavowing any interest in this whole indie-ness business. This time it’s Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope, who, speaking at the BAFTA Games Awards this week, said that there are no indie game-makers, just individuals and studios making smal
Despite being the locale for one of our favorite games of last year, traveling to Arstotzka is probably not advised. However, it’s a fine place to go to war, now that a modder has created the fictional state in the Brave New World expansion of Civilization 5. The beautiful thing here, aside from th
