The Highest Level of All By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • April 3rd, 2023 Just how many hit points does God have, anyway?
Funeral Rites The Neon Nightmare of Portents of the Degloved Hand By Emily Price • March 31st, 2023 Portents of the Degloved Hand’s promotional material describes its purpose as adding “additional chaos, misfortune, and even dark humor” to MÖRK BORG.
Here Be Monsters Every Game is Happy Death Day By Emma Kostopolus • March 30th, 2023 Videogames, with their very direct focus on death and rebirth as a normal part of play, are uniquely positioned to get us thinking about the horrors of our own mortality.
This Mortal Coyle Skyrim and Existential Angst Redux By Deirdre Coyle • March 29th, 2023 Why can’t I marry Serana? I would like to take this up with Todd Howard personally.
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.
A Time to Harvest By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • March 20th, 2023 Maybe don’t go collecting rocks and folklore in the hills of Vermont?
Forms in Light Best Games Architecture of 2022 By Justin Reeve • March 14th, 2023 The fourth annual roundup of the best architecture in games.
The Maze of Peril By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • March 13th, 2023 Down we go into the depths again!
Casting Deep Meteo Managing Minds and Blue Fascists at PAX Unplugged 2022 By Levi Rubeck • March 10th, 2023 Levi plays a few games and waxes a little nostalgic at PAX Unplugged.
Friction Burns The Writer Will Do Criticism By Ruth Cassidy • March 9th, 2023 The friction between knowing how games are made, and knowing that I don’t know how any one game is made.
Rookie of the Year ChatBOTW By Matt Marrone • March 9th, 2023 With a deadline fast approaching and no good idea about how to ridicule himself this month, Matt asks ChatGPT to take a crack at his column.
I Played It, Like, Twice... Keeping the Flame: Flamecraft and the Pleasing Complexity of Resource Management By Orrin Grey • March 8th, 2023 Naturally, that’s a bit like judging a book by its cover but, as I have discussed before, the look and feel of a game is actually every bit as important as how it plays.
Interlinked What We Make From the Ruins By Phoenix Simms • March 8th, 2023 Phoenix chats with the lead game narrative designer of The Archipelago about writing a game that explores both the political and personal.
Reviews Vs. Advertising: A Response to IGN’s Dan Stapleton By Jed Pressgrove • March 7th, 2023 We live in a world where numbers carry weight. Why not use them as part of a commitment to genuine, divergent opinions?
Collision Detection Learning to Love Roguelikes with Deathloop By Ben Sailer • March 7th, 2023 Ben plays Deathloop and finally gets roguelikes, showing that sometimes all it takes for a genre to click is a change of context and perspective.
Made of Lines and Vines One Thousand and One Excuses By Saniya Ahmed • March 3rd, 2023 Orientalized media and tales aren’t replacements for actual people.
Here Be Monsters Dead Space’s Unsettling Colonialism By Emma Kostopolus • March 2nd, 2023 If you’ve been reading this column, like, at all, you know that praise must always be coupled with loving criticism.
Persona 5: Technology and The Body – Through The Looking Glass By Jenny Zheng • February 27th, 2023 We should reject the desire for firm rules, singular stories.
Finding Time in a Dying World By Evelyn Grey • February 23rd, 2023 It’s only possible to save the world when we look to the environment and other creatures that don’t directly concern us.
Funeral Rites Capturing Wonder and Play in Kosmosaurs By Phillip Russell • February 23rd, 2023 Diogo Nogueira’s most recent release, Kosmosaurs, harkens back to the classic aesthetics of pulp science fiction novels, but with a twist – dinosaurs!
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.
Zine Month Roundtable By John McGuire • February 20th, 2023 Featuring special guests Tony Vasinda, Adam Vass and Levi Combs!
Open World This is What I Would Send in if I Applied for the Narrative Designer Job at Frictional By Edward Smith • February 16th, 2023 Our character has to care about the kid and we have to care that our character cares about the kid.
I Played It, Like, Twice... A Whole New World of Warcraft: The Board Game By Orrin Grey • February 14th, 2023 Innumerable brightly-colored miniatures and a cartographic board making it all seem reminiscent of a fantasy game of Risk.
Here's the Thing Grappling With Game Pass By Rob Rich • February 14th, 2023 A brief sojourn with Xbox Game Pass helps Rob come around on the concept of online game streaming.
Brain Scratch Bibbdi Babbdi Boo By Steven Nguyen Scaife • February 13th, 2023 I’m constantly struck by how little a game needs in order to evoke places and processes, how crude its materials can appear without compromising clarity of vision.
Forms in Light Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire By Justin Reeve • February 10th, 2023 Dishonored is a game which harkens back to a time when protection for working people was practically nonexistent, ruthless exploitation being the rule.
All The World’s A Stage By Jonathan Fenn • February 8th, 2023 Theatrical allusions don’t need to hit you over the head with high-concept meta-textual narratives in order to be effective.
Casting Deep Meteo Mapping MÖRK BORG’s Cruel Delights By Levi Rubeck • February 8th, 2023 Then it hit me, like a dirty lightbulb in an ancient office that’s gone undisturbed for far too long – I can draw these rooms.
Friction Burns When Dwarves Won’t Do What You Want Them To By Ruth Cassidy • February 7th, 2023 Friction is FUN.
Area of Effect “The Abundant Nature” By Jay Castello • February 7th, 2023 The only thing I remembered from Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s advertisement cycle was the shot where they cut to a deeply bland outdoor scene overlaid with the phrase in question.
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.
Interlinked The Triple Goddess Effect By Phoenix Simms • February 2nd, 2023 Like Hades protagonist Zagreus, Melinoë is also connected to an Orphic hymn, this time one that sings of her as a “saffron veil’d” nymph that inspires both night terrors and madness in people.
Cairn By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • January 30th, 2023 Part two of our series on ultra-light RPGs, this one mashes up Into the Odd and Knave!
Here Be Monsters Can Scorn Get Out From Under the Cosmic Horror Legacy? By Emma Kostopolus • January 27th, 2023 Scorn and other sci-fi horror games like it rely almost entirely on the horror of the unknown – the unknowable, the inconceivable, and the, well, alien.