HeroQuest By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • April 6th, 2020 Prepare for adventure! This week, we dive into Milton Bradley/Games Workshop’s classic board game HeroQuest!
Animal Crossing and Queer Agency By Jeremy Signor • April 2nd, 2020 Animal Crossing gives queer folks the kind of agency they may not have in the real world.
Feature Excerpt Expanding Worlds with Video Game Tabletop RPGs By Scott Roepel • April 2nd, 2020 Unlike in roleplaying videogames, for tabletop roleplaying, all you need is an imagination, a good storyteller and a set of dice.
Feature Excerpt Carrington’s Dreamscape By Daniel Lipscombe • April 2nd, 2020 Videogames, especially those of the horror variety, could seriously stand to take a leaf from surrealism’s book.
Feature Excerpt Accepting Death as the Sun Goes Out By Ryan Cooper • April 2nd, 2020 The Outer Wilds’ tragic time-loop helps Ryan Cooper process real-world struggles.
Exploits Feature She-Ra and the Princesses of Power By Violet Adele Bloch • April 1st, 2020 She-Ra is about to enter its fifth season, and that’s because it’s good. It’s one of the goodest shows ever produced.
Star Frontiers By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • March 30th, 2020 Join us in the far reaches of known space as we explore Star Frontiers!
Gingy's Corner Raging Loop By Gingy Gibson • March 27th, 2020 Raging Loop is a horror visual novel that makes you care more about the ‘how’ than ‘who’ behind its mystery.
Gliding by the Light of The Red Lantern By Levi Rubeck • March 26th, 2020 This upcoming rogue-lite adventure novel has been two years in development, a bit before the annual Alaska race crashed through puppy Twitter, but happy to ride some of those waves nonetheless.
Archipelago America By Jeremy Signor • March 25th, 2020 Video games give us a window into how the US is structured, how it isolates us, and how we can connect.
Revving the Engine A Juggler’s Tale: Pull the Strings By Stu Horvath • March 25th, 2020 “There is a traveling circus inside a puppet theater play inside a videogame – it’s always so hard to summarize this game in one short sentence.”
The Happenstantial Politics of Need for Speed: Heat By Evan Dennis • March 24th, 2020 Heat’s quite possibly the most anti-cop game in the entire Need for Speed franchise.
True Crime for Beginners By Amanda Hudgins • March 23rd, 2020 I’ve got a reputation. Let me put it to work for you. There’s a lot to true crime, and if you’re truly interested there’s some good stuff out there. ACAB, let’s watch some true crime!
The Shadow People By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • March 23rd, 2020 Descend into the depths of the earth to meet The Shadow People!
Towards a Carrier Bag Theory of Videogames By Edwin Evans-Thirlwell • March 23rd, 2020 Applying the lessons of Ursula K Le Guin’s criticism to the art of videogame storytelling.
Exploits Feature Modernism and Auto-Tune By Noah Springer • March 20th, 2020 “I see auto-tune playing the same role in hip hop in the last two decades as photography played in art in the 19th and early 20th century.”
No Faith Without Blood: The Passion of Darkly Noon (1995) on Blu-ray By Orrin Grey • March 20th, 2020 It’s barely a spoiler to say that this all ends, as it inevitably must, with a literally burning bed and a homicidally crazed Brendan Fraser, painted red and wearing a barbed wire shirt.
Pox Free at PAX East 2020, Part 2 By Levi Rubeck • March 19th, 2020 Levi serves up two more from PAX East.
Letter From the Editor Unwinnable Monthly – March 2020 By Stu Horvath • March 18th, 2020 Welcome to March, gang. It is getting weird out there, but a new Unwinnable Monthly is here, as ever.
Bunnies & Burrows By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • March 16th, 2020 An RPG about rabbits? From 1976?!
Another Look Fantasies of Fatherhood By Yussef Cole • March 13th, 2020 In Death Stranding, players get a chance to parent less a child than the idea of one.
The Fail Cycle Healing and How to Make It All Better By Declan Taggart • March 12th, 2020 [redacted] was a huge success last year for [redacted] Studios, Inc., but players consistently complained that being a healer was boring. How can we improve on that?
Pox Free at PAX East 2020, Part 1 By Levi Rubeck • March 12th, 2020 Three mini essays for the price of one!
Musings Rock is Dead. Long Live the Dirty Nil. By Blake Hester • March 12th, 2020 The Dirty Nil, in just one 39 minute album, is more intelligent, interesting and fun than most classic rock out there.
Good Grades By Jeremy Signor • March 11th, 2020 Grading systems in games are more than about showing the player how well they’re doing. They also plant the seed for expanding the possibilities available.
Try Reading... It’s Just a Game By Harry Rabinowitz • March 11th, 2020 DIE Volume 1 asks: if your game becomes real, can you still treat it like a game?
Forms in Light The Genius of Beauclair Palace By Justin Reeve • March 11th, 2020 Justin dives into why, exactly, this Witcher 3 structure commands such a presence.
Self Insert When Fanon Eclipses Canon By Amanda Hudgins • March 10th, 2020 How a Canadian TV show from the ’90s lives on in alternative universe fanfiction.
Collision Detection Could the Decline of Violent Football Videogames Have Predicted the Future of Player Safety? By Ben Sailer • March 10th, 2020 Football videogames in the early to mid-1990s reveled in over-the-top physical violence. Could the disappearance of that tendency be connected to changing public perception around the safety of the sport?
Here's the Thing Avatar and the Importance of the Mundane By Rob Rich • March 10th, 2020 Rob takes a look at one of the most well-loved episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender and posits that it’s mundane slice-of-life moments that truly draw us in to stories about people with superhuman abilities.
Revving the Engine Backbone: We’re All Animals By Stu Horvath • March 9th, 2020 What better way to examine the human condition than in a story about animals?
This Mortal Coyle The Ad Salesman from Animal Restaurant By Deirdre Coyle • March 9th, 2020 Animal Restaurant is a mobile game that does the impossible: It makes promoting in-game ads adorable.
Wizards & Spells By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • March 9th, 2020 Jim Zub is back on the show this week, dishing about the newest Young Adventurer’s Guide, Wizards & Spells, and dropping some hints about volume five!
Rookie of the Year Abducted in Plain Stupidity By Matt Marrone • March 8th, 2020 And the award for worst parents of the century goes to . . .
Noteworthy Hip Hop Noteworthy Hip Hop – February 2020 By Noah Springer • March 6th, 2020 This month’s column includes one of the more powerful albums Noah’s heard in a while.
Gingy's Corner Magical Diary: Wolf Hall By Gingy Gibson • March 6th, 2020 Let’s go back to school! Again. And again. And again!
Exploits Feature The Male Gaze is What’s Wrong with CATS, Actually By Violet Adele Bloch • March 2nd, 2020 “Apparently, as he was making his latest film, Tom Hooper thought a lot about fucking these cats. But only the female ones.”
Horror on the Orient Express By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • March 2nd, 2020 Choo-choo! All aboard the Orient Express, where horrors beyond imagining await you!
Look For Me Under Your Bootsoles By Jeremy Signor • February 26th, 2020 We all have things that are haunting us. What matters is how we move forward together.
