sci-fi

A quick look at the landscape art of The Signal From Tölva

For most players, The Signal From Tölva will be a game about shooting robots and acquiring a range of whirring-and-whistling mechanical guns to do it with. But for some it might also function as an explorable gallery of sci-fi landscapes (just like No Man’s Sky has for some)—sparse wastelands, dingy

Destiny: Rise of Iron has learned nothing

I was at E3 when Destiny was first shown to the world in 2013. I remember being shepherded into a theater, the outside marked with huge printed artwork, among a group of whispering journalists. In that theater, we would be taken through the opening to the game: the wall, the breach, the first areas

All bow down before the mighty Shin Godzilla

At one point in Shin Godzilla, Toho’s 29th entry in this ancient series, a character calls Godzilla a “perfect organism.” This might sound familiar to anyone who’s watched Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979): it’s how the devious android Ash describes the xenomorph. Godzilla movies don’t typically reach out

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is a treasure among the trash

There is a sense, in videogames particularly, that the greatest science fiction is that with the budget to match its ideas. Most sci-fi games seem engaged in a kind of arms race, a process of trying to out-tech and out-spectacle each other with increasing elaborate retellings of the “save the galaxy

Arrival is an alien-contact movie that’ll speak to you

I did not expect a new Denis Villeneuve movie to make me cry. The man behind Prisoners (2013), Enemy (2013), and Sicario (2015) is not known for his delicate touch, but his new sci-fi drama Arrival makes a staggering case for looking at Villeneuve with fresh eyes. The logy, intellectually bankrupt p

Sunless Skies promises a gloriously Victorian sci-fi tale

Rejoice! The stars are right! The stars are right because they are being murdered. Sunless Sea (2015) introduced players to the lonely madness and terror of an underground sea. Its expansion pack, Zubmariner, is set to take players to the claustrophobic depths of that ocean on October 11. Now, the s

One last tour of Destiny’s Cosmodrome

Heterotopias is a series of visual investigations into virtual spaces performed by writer and artist Gareth Damian Martin. /// There’s a set of stairs in my childhood house that I still climb like I was eight years old. It’s not something I do on purpose; it’s something ingrained, so that the moment

Expect to gather round Djur’s bonfire for a sci-fi fable

The campfire story has been resurrected in videogames recently. A rush of independent games have taken their own spin on the sit-around-and-talker, and the idea of making a game out of a fable is currently being tested by upcoming games like Forest of Sleep. The recently-announced game Djur expands

The challenging design of Event[0]’s insecure AI

One of the big games coming out this week is Event[0]—available for Windows and Mac on September 14th. It’s a sci-fi game set in an alternate retrofuture reality in which humanity built a starship in 1985 and has since embraced artificial intelligence even more than we have now. The events depicted

There’s more Tacoma footage and it just keeps getting better

IGN has released the first 15 minutes Fullbright’s next game Tacoma, and it’s looking astonishingly good. We’d already gotten glimpses of its ship as Amy, the protagonist, slipped around in zero-gravity, transferring from surface to surface to navigate the empty ship, and we’d seen the first echoes

Welcome to the age of videogame beards

Let’s face it: the renaissance of the full beard has been a thing for a while now. It came from fashion and now it has arrived in our videogames. It’s nothing to scoff at, either. The power of the beard has worked to change a 20-year history of smooth-faced Street Fighter characters: Ryu now has as

The Fall Part 2 promises to plummet further into its AI nightmare

We were exposed to the first part of the sci-fi videogame trilogy The Fall over two years ago now. It’s about time some more info on the second part arrived—and that it has, and with a trailer to boot. You can expect it to arrive during first quarter of 2017 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Wii U, Window

Stare wildly at the mutated giraffes of a game set in far-future Africa

“Set in a distant future in an evocative African landscape … he is not from this place or time …” states the tantalizing blurb on Beautiful Desolation‘s website. Those are the only hints regarding the narrative of the next adventure game from The Brotherhood, the team behind bleak sci-fi horror adve

Take in the quiet, robotic wastelands of The Signal From Tölva

Big Robot, the studio behind the quirky “tweedpunk” survival game Sir, You Are Being Hunted (2013) has returned with more robots. This time, however, the tone is a little more serious, with the newly announced The Signal From Tölva, which imagines a future when space-faring groups of robots spend th

Get ready to build a relationship with an emotional AI this September

Last time we heard about Event[0] was back in February 2015 with a 20-minute playable demo. That was a while ago, so it’s understandable that we now have a new trailer and a confirmed September 2016 release date (plus, it’s being backed by Indie Fund now). Léonard Carpentier, the producer of Event[0

Alone With You brings inclusive romance to the dead of space

Alone With You is an adventure game that focuses on relationships—particularly, relationships with four fellow colonists. (Four fellow colonists who are actually dead, and appearing as holograms.) As the last member of an ill-fated space colony, the player is desperately trying to escape the planet.

The follow-up to Stasis is a mother’s worst nightmare

It seems only right that 2015’s grim industrial sci-fi adventure Stasis should get a spin-off chapter, called Cayne, and the same can be said for the fact that it is to explore the story of an expectant mother. Stasis was an isometric love letter to the dimly-lit isolated vessels, claustrophobic cor

Short sci-fi film written by an AI is absurdly human

Artificial intelligence is a common topic explored within the science-fiction genre. Sunspring, a new sci-fi short, instead of using the theme of artificial intelligence in its narrative, used AI to actually produce the narrative in the first place. The film, which had its online debut on Ars, had i

Iron Man’s suit designer is now working on actual space suits

All space travel is fiction. Alright, it’s not fake in the “we didn’t go to the moon” sense of the term, but it necessarily involves the creation of tales to justify what remains a riotously expensive undertaking. “Major achievements in space contribute to the national prestige,” American Secretary

All Walls Must Fall to explore the cultural division of Cold War-era Berlin

In All Walls Must Fall, an upcoming isometric action game from newish studio inbetweengames, the Cold War never ended. It’s 2089 and Berlin is still caught in the midst of political powerhouses threatening to push the button. But in inbetweengames’s alternate timeline, the factions of the Cold War h

PlayStation 2, the videogame console from outer space

This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console. To see other articles, go here. /// What makes a videogame console successful? Forget about software libraries and units sold, I’m talking about the design of the actual box that you hook up to your TV. At firs

What cyberpunk was and what it will be

This is a preview of an article you can read on our new website dedicated to virtual reality, Versions. /// We often forget when predicting the future that it will inevitably continue to change. Whatever we dream up, however utopian or dystopian, will be subject to resistances and reimaginings. It w

Adr1ft and the loneliness of digital worlds

This is a preview of an article you can read on our new website dedicated to virtual reality, Versions. /// Adam Orth is alone. It’s no secret. He tells me as much even as I cross the threshold of Three One Zero, his development studio just off the block-party-turned-retail-orgy that is the 3rd Stre

The videogames preparing us for space

“There is only one essential question: What’s the next thing that could kill me? Focusing on that thing, whatever it is, is how you stay alive.” Ground Control, this is Commander Chris Hadfield describing his experiences as an astronaut and career as a pilot for the Canadian Forces, North American A