Feature Excerpt Made With Love: Anime Mashups and Their Creators By Justin Kim • February 23rd, 2024 They’re not just shitposts!
Feature Excerpt Fortnite, Eminem and Kidproofing Media in the Age of Content By Holly Boson • February 22nd, 2024 Eminem’s presence in The Big Bang can be interpreted as an apology to the players following their disastrous attempts at childproofing.
Feature Excerpt Why I Played a 20-Year-Old Nancy Drew Game Over the Holidays By Amanda Tien • January 24th, 2024 Twice a year for more than a decade, I’d gather around a computer with my mom and sister so we could play the newest Nancy Drew game. This was our ritual, until the games stopped coming.
Feature Excerpt Solace and Play Within Games By Alyssa Hatmaker • January 23rd, 2024 Sometimes being reminded that you’re playing a videogame is a welcome feeling.
Feature Excerpt How We Learned to Stop Arguing and Enjoy the Vibes By Aldo Garcia • December 22nd, 2023 Style (like modern discourse itself) is everything to Killer7.
Feature Excerpt A Destructive Love Affair with Minimaps By Jon Place • December 21st, 2023 As games got bigger, and their worlds got bigger still, the need for a constant map sitting on the screen at all times became more important as a tool for navigation.
Feature Excerpt The Stories of Virtual Fragments By Clint Morrison Jr. • November 22nd, 2023 Modern games are littered with fragmented narratives, digital ephemera often left obscured or abstracted in their incompleteness.
Feature Excerpt Killing the Vampire By Elijah Gonzalez • October 24th, 2023 Xenoblade Chronicles 3 exorcizes an age-old symbol of stagnation and exploitation to foreground a story about systemic change.
Feature Excerpt May Chaos Take the World By Gerry Hart • September 22nd, 2023 The cosmology of Elden Ring’s world is complex and daunting even for veteran players, but there is little in the way of ambiguity with the Frenzied Flame.
Feature Excerpt AI is Advancing Rapidly – The Outer Worlds Tells Us Why That’s Bad By Mira Lazine • September 21st, 2023 The Outer Worlds gives us insight into what it’s like to live in a society run exclusively by corporations, but it also gives us insight into what it’s like to live in a world dominated by AI.
Feature Excerpt Odes of the Boomershooter By Holly Boson • August 23rd, 2023 “If we’re entering an age of renewed zeal for nu-metal, I think Slayers X deserves to be mentioned within the first breaths of the conversation.”
Feature Excerpt In Hi-Fi Rush, Style is Substance By Ryan Stevens • July 21st, 2023 The hit rhythm-action title’s design decisions all emanate from its central comic booky visual style and its core commitment to its music.
Feature Excerpt The 3DS Made Dungeon Crawlers Accessible & Its Legacy Is Palpable By Latonya Pennington • July 20th, 2023 Through the 3DS, dungeon crawlers would go from being a niche genre to something more accessible as the console matured.
Feature Excerpt Don’t Hurt Girls When You Dance (Or Any Other Time) By Juno Stump • June 23rd, 2023 I don’t know if Kurt Cobain would still be here today if he had the ability to inject estrogen instead of heroin, but I know his journal pages carry the same pain as me.
Feature Excerpt Painting the Past With a Broad Brush By Saniya Ahmed • May 19th, 2023 Intimacy and ordinary life in art is lacking when attention goes toward religious and imperial powers. Mundane, everyday things are forgettable and not as well-preserved through time as a monument.
Feature Excerpt The Future Will Forget Us By Ben Thorp • April 21st, 2023 Season and Pentiment on how art fails to capture our complicated present.
Feature Excerpt What Video Games Did to Haunting By Nathan Schmidt • April 20th, 2023 Where are all the haunted videogames?
Feature Excerpt The Environmental Horror of Elden Ring By Kathryn Hemmann • March 22nd, 2023 Caelid resists the post-apocalyptic fantasy that the detrimental effects of human activity on the environment are temporary and reversible.
Feature Excerpt Hope and Sacrifice in Andor By Kiernan Elam • March 21st, 2023 Andor paints a clear and lucid picture of the absolute power authoritarians can wield over people and how cruel fascism must be in order to preserve that power.
Feature Excerpt Lifelong Friends are Made in Dead and Dying Games By Brian Lee-Mounger Hendershot • February 22nd, 2023 Videogames lost something special when developers pivoted from server browsers to matchmaking. A small group of players show us what we’re missing.
Feature Excerpt A Ride Through the Objective Field of Passion By Braden Timss • February 21st, 2023 Disneyland is a place where one can fall backward from the future to the frontier days of the American westward expansion without the slightest struggle, physical or cognitive.
Feature Excerpt Hideo Kojima Hates You By Emma Kostopolus • January 23rd, 2023 A study in difficulty scaling.
Feature Excerpt Time Loop of Trauma By Alma Roda-Gil • January 20th, 2023 There is no catharsis to be had at the end of Returnal’s time loop. It becomes clear, as the player finishes the story, that it will keep going.
Feature Excerpt An Ode to Little Freaks By Phillip Russell • December 20th, 2022 On a surface level, Gremlins is a movie that evokes classic horror tropes, but when you dig deeper you find a meta horror satire that attempts to comment on American excess and consumerism.
Feature Excerpt Surviving Humanity By Jon Bailes • November 21st, 2022 The cat, the fox and the apocalypse.
Feature Excerpt Lost in Translation By Aidan Moher • November 18th, 2022 The Sega Saturn is one of the best JRPG consoles of all time…just not in the west.
Feature Excerpt Monsters Built by Human Hands By Hyacinth Nil • October 20th, 2022 A close reading of Lakeview Hotel.
Feature Excerpt Stop/Motion By Orrin Grey • October 20th, 2022 Ray Harryhausen and the magic of stop motion monsters.
Feature Excerpt To Be a Bird on an Island By Taylor Hidalgo • September 23rd, 2022 During unsteady times, it’s easy to get caught up in the sadness of uncertainty. Thankfully, there are little animals tromping around an island to remind us that it doesn’t have to be that way.
Feature Excerpt Shark Party By Michael Lee • September 22nd, 2022 The kinds of relationships people form in online spaces can be as meaningful and socially rewarding as physical encounters with human bodies.
Feature Excerpt The Horror of Finding a Home By Andrei Filote • August 25th, 2022 Path of Exile doesn’t end when the story concludes but when the player’s will to imagine the next character fails.
Feature Excerpt The Chaos Detective By Daryl Li • August 24th, 2022 The Return of the Obra Dinn supports a detective fantasy by casting the player into the role of textual interpreter who seeks to organize the chaos into coherent solution.
Feature Excerpt Misremembering DOOM By Ben Sailer • July 27th, 2022 In this revised reprint from 2018, Ben revisits the SNES version of DOOM, and destroys part of his childhood in the process.
Feature Excerpt Blue Keys on a Red Planet By Hilver • July 26th, 2022 An excerpt from Hilver’s cover story for our special all-DOOM edition of Unwinnable Monthly.
Feature Excerpt Why Aren’t There Treasure Chests in Demon’s Souls? By Jon Thumas • May 25th, 2022 Not having treasure chests is a provocative decision for a Japanese action RPG to have made in 2009, but it was far from a transgressive one.
Feature Excerpt Cyberpunk 2077 is a Haunted House By Alma Roda-Gil • May 24th, 2022 Just because death permeates Night City doesn’t mean it’s a privilege afforded to everyone.
Feature Excerpt Imagine the Possibilities By Noah Hertz • March 23rd, 2022 How a college course in Second Life taught me everything I needed to know about the Metaverse.
Feature Excerpt Missing Mediocrity By Van Dennis • March 22nd, 2022 The extinction of regular cars in racing games.
Feature Excerpt Hell is Other Shooters By Andrei Filote • February 22nd, 2022 If we organize our play to prepare for the demands of later life, then is it possible to create a new set of values simply by the games that we choose to play?
Feature Excerpt Comfort in the Abyss By Luke Rotella • February 21st, 2022 My relationship with That Night, Steeped By Blood River.