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.
Video Game of the Year By Noah Springer • September 15th, 2023 “…an inviting look into the history of the genre since Pong popped into people’s homes all the way back in 1977.”
Exploits Feature Freaks By Dr. Dobermind • September 1st, 2023 “You laughed at them, shuddered at them. And, yet, but for the accident of birth, you might be one as they are.”
Funeral Rites Inventing a World of Insectoid Wonders By Justin Reeve • August 25th, 2023 We delve into the mind of creator Eduardo Carabaño, exploring the history, philosophy, inspirations and design processes that carried Settlers of a Dead God from inception to publication.
Feature Story Spacemen & Dinosaurs By David Busboom • August 24th, 2023 Interplanetary explorers have been encountering dinosaurs or dinosaur-like creatures in fiction for more than a century.
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.”
Exploits Feature Playable Campaigns By Toby Jaffe • August 9th, 2023 I cannot imagine anything as alien in 2023 as conceptualizing politics as fun.
Exploits Feature The Batman Problem By Jeremy Greco • August 1st, 2023 In a game set in Gotham City, why would a player ever want to be anyone other than Batman?
Funeral Rites Making Friends with Swords in The Vorpal Almanac By Jay Castello • July 25th, 2023 Swords, writes Levi Combs in the book’s introduction, need “to feel lived in.” And that’s exactly the focus of the 22 blades of The Vorpal Almanac, beautifully illustrated by Sally Cantirino.
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.
Funeral Rites Depths of the Abyss By Noah Springer • June 27th, 2023 To play, at least for Max Moon in the world of The Abyss of Hallucinations and MÖRK BORG, is to participate in a ritual that can potentially break the reality laid out by the capitalist trap.
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.
Funeral Rites Composing the World of Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City By Phoenix Simms • May 24th, 2023 Luka Rejec’s world is suffused with mind-expanding, psychedelic heavy metal and is also inspired by “the Dying Earth genre, and Oregon Trail games.”
Feature Story Whatever Knows Fear By Orrin Grey • May 23rd, 2023 The uncanny history of Marvel’s muck monster.
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.
Exploits Feature Mechanical Sympathy By Van Dennis • May 1st, 2023 “…you learn to care for a machine to the point where you see it as more than just metal.”
Funeral Rites After Ragnarok: Featuring Colin Le Sueur By Oluwatayo Adewole • April 24th, 2023 It’s a bold move for Le Sueur to make a Norse-inspired Souls-like tabletop roleplaying game, and yet he manages to avoid some extremely fraught territory.
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?
Exploits Feature Formula 1: Drive to Survive By Amanda Hudgins • April 3rd, 2023 I don’t care about Formula 1. One of my favorite shows is the Netflix F1 series Drive to Survive.
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.
Exploits Feature The Beauty of Backlog By Connor Queen • February 3rd, 2023 Speak to most gamers, and they’ll probably tell you the same thing: Backlogs are annoying.
Exploits Feature Biking the Beat By Autumn Wright • February 1st, 2023 “After biking some 2,000 miles in the city last year, my memories of my new home are tied to rides and their soundtracks.”
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.
Exploits Feature Unpacking By Krista McCay • January 2nd, 2023 Objects they keep, objects they part with…
Feature Story On Gremlin-tology By David Shimomura • December 21st, 2022 As humans, we like to have answers as to why. Why did my brand-new air fryer work only once? Why did my car just sputter and stop? Why did that airplane go down for seemingly no reason? Gremlins.
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.
Exploits Feature My Least Favorite C-Word By M. Shaw • December 1st, 2022 Every brush I’ve had with actually celebrating Christmas has been a complete horror show.
Feature Story What Creates Class In The Internet Age? By Ciaran Doran • November 22nd, 2022 Worldwide internet penetration is only hovering at around 50%. That means that every other person worldwide has no independent chance to read this article.
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.
