Feature Excerpt The Horror of the Tortured Artist By Rachel Watts • October 24th, 2019 Both Layers of Fear games tap into the horror of what happens when artists become desperate chasing their muse.
Feature Excerpt Two Hands Off the Wheel: Learning to Embrace the Chaos of Zweihander By R. M. Jansen-Parkes • October 24th, 2019 Most tabletop RPGs boil down to a roll of the dice.
Feature Excerpt Grim, Perilous and Inclusive By Adam Brown • October 24th, 2019 Zweihander: Grim & Perilous is a fresh take on dark fantasy and tabletop RPGs.
Feature Excerpt Dwarves in Space By Ian Williams • September 24th, 2019 The gig economy is everywhere, even in our videogames. At least Deep Rock Galactic makes it fun.
Feature Excerpt Ghost in the Machine By Harry Mackin • September 24th, 2019 Both the psychological thriller Personal Shopper and Breath of the Wild explore what happens when we allow technology to shape us.
Feature Excerpt Taking Control of my Sobriety By Blake Hester • September 24th, 2019 When you take addiction out of your life, you’re left with more hours in the day than you know what to do with. Luckily, there are games like Control.
Feature Excerpt The Year Videogames Blew Up Shanghai By Mark Hill • August 26th, 2019 Unlike most first-person shooters, these two titles make you think about the very real city destroyed in the wake of your protagonist’s outsider crusades.
Feature Excerpt What Makes a Game Trash? By Evan Dennis • August 22nd, 2019 While it’s easy for a game to fall into being trashy, it takes a bit of lucky circumstance for a game to be fully trash.
Feature Excerpt I Wanna Be Your Dog By Jeremy Signor • August 22nd, 2019 That awkward moment when giving up your free will to a supercomputer-powered hive mind brings out your inner sub.
Feature Excerpt Silly Old Bear By Dick Page • July 22nd, 2019 The review-bombing of Devotion was never about Winnie the Pooh.
Feature Excerpt Springfield Forever By Noah Springer • July 22nd, 2019 Some mobile games are only entertaining for a few hours. For Noah, The Simpsons Tapped Out has proven fun for nearly a decade.
Feature Excerpt Lo-Fi Hip Hop Beats To Have a Nervous Breakdown To By Ana Diaz • June 25th, 2019 At least an entire generation working themselves to death can listen to some cozy beats while they do it.
Feature Excerpt Order and Chaos By Justin Reeve • June 24th, 2019 Behind Hitman 2‘s stark, modernist buildings lies a symbolic crusade to reclaim the architectural style.
Feature Excerpt Godzilla is Political By Haru Nicol • May 6th, 2019 It’s impossible to untangle Godzilla from the nuclear anxieties that lead to the kaiju’s creation.
Feature Excerpt Hints of Depth in Pikuniku’s Flat World By Jon Bailes • May 6th, 2019 While Pikuniku’s narrative mostly sticks to the shallow end, it offers neat observations about the distractions of consumerism
Feature Excerpt Donut County and the Boisterous History of White Guilt By Jason Dafnis • March 26th, 2019 The quirky indie game makes a statement on gentrification, capitalism, and – in the raccoon BK’s character – the weaponization of racial guilt.
Feature Excerpt Replaying Deus Ex In An Age of Conspiracy Theorists By Mark Hill • March 26th, 2019 Nineteen years after its release, Deus Ex’s story reveals its age far more than its clunky graphics ever could.
Feature Excerpt A Legacy of Movement By Khee Hoon Chan • March 1st, 2019 Doom may have defined the first-person shooter, but Mirror’s Edge made it flow.
Representing Disabilities: An Evolution in Gaming By Quin Callahan • March 1st, 2019 We’re finally seeing more people with disabilities in games, but casual representation still pales in comparison to those defined by tragic backstories.
Feature Excerpt Friday Nights in the Hostile Environment By Rob Haines • January 28th, 2019 British developer PanicBarn’s Not Tonight offers a Brexit-flavored critique of the past ten years of the hostile environment.
Feature Excerpt Teaching Crunch By Melissa Brinks • January 28th, 2019 Many students enter the video game industry well aware of its infamous crunch culture. After all, their colleges groomed them for it.
Feature Excerpt Videogames in Kuwait By David Wolinsky and Tali XOXO • January 7th, 2019 David Wolinsky and Tali XOXO share their impressions of GX and Kuwait Battle Royale.
Feature Excerpt Go to Jail: The Complicated World of Pirated Board Games By Ryan Cooper • January 7th, 2019 Tabletop Simulator lets board game fans recreate their favorite games and craft a globalized shared space. . . even if that means breaking a few laws to do so.
Feature Excerpt Scorched Earth By Devin Raposo • January 7th, 2019 Fornite’s 50v50 mode can feel like performance art or improvisational city-planning, with outcomes based more on luck than coordination.
Feature Excerpt Crack the Network: It’s Called Cyberpunk Not Cybersecurity By Liam Conlon • November 23rd, 2018 While disappointed by Cyberpunk 2077’s announcement to exclude a non-binary option, Conlon thinks it’s necessary to desire more than small kernels of representation.
Feature Excerpt Flash Forever By Phantom • November 21st, 2018 A history of the delightful weirdness of Flash games.
Feature Excerpt God of Shame By Kenneth Shepard • November 1st, 2018 Violence is a language with meaning in God of War, rather than the gratuitous thrill of the game’s predecessors. And this legacy is exactly what Kratos means to hide from his son.
Feature Excerpt A History in Translation By Odile Strik • October 25th, 2018 Heaven’s Vault turns learning a language into a game mechanic.
Feature Excerpt Your Hands Are Always Tied By Adam Goodall • September 27th, 2018 A card game wrestles with the darker side of the clothing production and its own mission to change how players see the world.
Feature Excerpt Climbing the Virtual Mountain By Rowan Evans • August 23rd, 2018 When rendered in videogames, a mountain becomes more than an obstacle. They’re living sites, where introspection, healing and learning take place.
Feature Excerpt Never Alone Again (Digitally) By Gavin Craig and David Wolinsky • August 20th, 2018 Meditations and musings on the lack of solitary videogame experiences, and what that might mean.
Feature Excerpt For She Has Tasted the Fruit By Katherine Cross • August 1st, 2018 In a universe divided by Sith and Jedi, Knights of the Old Republic 2’s Kreia forges her own philosophy in one of Star Wars’ rare instances of feminism.
Feature Excerpt The In-game Museum By Daniel Fries • July 26th, 2018 Devoid of physical limitations, games examine what museums represent and what they soon could be.
Feature Excerpt Skin Deep By Malindy Hetfeld • July 25th, 2018 For a modern racial allegory, David Cage repeats a lot of history’s mistakes
Feature Excerpt A New York Adventure By Alyssa Hatmaker • July 12th, 2018 The Blackwell Convergence captures the ambiance and rumble of “old” New York as it tells the story behind one author’s decades-long writer’s block.
Feature Excerpt Remembering Doom on SNES By Ben Sailer • July 12th, 2018 Doom for the Super Nintendo was an incredible feat of technical trickery. It’s also my favorite game of all time that I never want to play again.
Feature Excerpt Gorogoa and the Power of the Frame By Rachel Watts • July 2nd, 2018 An exploration into how the beautifully crafted puzzle game Gorogoa uses the power of framing and panel composition to create a unique puzzle mechanic and an immersive storytelling technique.
Feature Excerpt The Mass Effect Issue: At All Costs By David Shimomura • June 6th, 2018 Humanity never needed Cerberus.
Another Look The Mass Effect Issue: Artificial Immortality By Yussef Cole • June 6th, 2018 Mass Effect makes us question our preconceived notions about artificial intelligence.
Feature Excerpt The Origins of Assassin’s Creed By Yussef Cole • April 20th, 2018 Yussef Cole explores the complex relationship between Assassin’s Creed: Origins, Egypt and blackness.
