Spencer Johnson sees Pragmata as a mirror for current, distributed interactions with Artificial Intelligence. The key lies in how humans and AI form relationships and develop them together, not in t...

Don’t you sometimes just feel…tired? Edmond Y. Chang discusses “ludofatigue,” how it feels to live with the persistent sense that play just isn’t fun anymore, and the perennial relevance of Candleman ...

In Future? No Thanks!, Paolo Pedercini, aka molleindustria , asks, “how many loose ends can you tie up before choosing to die?” Pranav Krishna Kumar considers the perspective of main character Harv...

In Future? No Thanks!, Paolo Pedercini, aka molleindustria , asks, “how many loose ends can you tie up before choosing to die?” Pranav Krishna Kumar considers the perspective of main character Harv...

Blizzard's many disparate unions are also being condensed into three groups for ease of future bargaining

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man How to Fish and he buys a shotgun instead.

What can parents learn from playing so-called “friendslop” games with our kids? As Nate Schmidt discovers, sometimes there’s an…interesting misalignment between the lesson you were hoping to teach and...

In the early access version of Hell Maiden , Astral Shift fleshes out a great demo into a narrative that invites a new generation of players to enjoy its source texts, even as we wait in Limbo for th...

In this extensive review of Elijah Beahm’s encyclopedic book on Dead Space , Spencer Johnson also explores the connections between the transmedia elements of the franchise and the economic pressures ...

Tower Solitaire is a good base for a game, but Forbidden Solitaire forces too many junk jokers into the mix. Caroline Delbert considers Grey Alien Games’ impulse for maximalism from the perspective ...

Doug the duck is in search of a new outer space home. When he crash lands on a planet, he has the good fortune to find new friends, community, and some lighthearted humor. Samantha Trzinksi shares her...

Robert W. Chambers’ stories from The King in Yellow are often described as Lovecraftian by association - but, as Housemarque demonstrates in Saros, the horror of Chambers’ Carcosa goes deeper than Lov...

Who is eligible to apply for this fund?This fund is for game workers in the US and Canada impacted by record layoffs & other hardships in the games industry within the timeframe of January 2024 to the...

How do video game maps invite us to understand space? Samantha Trzinski discusses the evolution of map design from linearity to open-world complexity, making the case that the straightforward way is s...

Indie Cyberpunk Games, Part 2

When you examine it for even just a second, it’s pretty strange that we ever talk about “the college experience” in the singular. Nate Schmidt reviews Perfect Tides: Station to Station, finding a comp...

After the nonstop action of Sektori , Don Everhart took a few beats with Kimmo Lahtinen. They discussed the arcade tradition, how Lahtinen incorporated roguelike design, Kimmo’s brother’s soundtrack,...

After the nonstop action of Sektori , Don Everhart took a few beats with Kimmo Lahtinen. They discussed the arcade tradition, how Lahtinen incorporated roguelike design, Kimmo’s brother’s soundtrack,...

There’s a lot more to repair than simply restoring an object. Dídac Jiménez Torras finds that Koyamachou Watch Repair Shop raises questions about how societies prioritize efficiency over preservatio...

Passenger x Princess isn’t exactly a fun game. It’s so messy, uncomfortable and frustrating to watch the train wreck of a relationship that develops between its main characters, but that’s also what m...

If you needed to repair a friendship that was worth everything to you, would you let anything get in your way? In Mixtape, the active rejection of player input for a scene explicitly presented as game...

Amberspire rejects the stereotypical sounds of climate emergency in favor of gentler aesthetics: no sirens here. While we deal with the impact of each new catastrophe, Amberspire asks us to listen to ...

With credits ranging from Dispatch and Marvel Rivals to Uncharted and Dragon Age, over 30 devs share their thoughts on gen AI

Class is coming up, it’s syllabus-writing season, and you’re getting ready to bring a game into class as the cornerstone of a lesson plan. Where could you find a list of games that satisfy all three o...

And Roger begins with scenes of disorientation, showing a girl alarmed by a stranger in her home. Routine tasks, from dialing a phone to eating breakfast, are strangely difficult. As the main charact...

And Roger begins with scenes of disorientation, showing a girl alarmed by a stranger in her home. Routine tasks, from dialing a phone to eating breakfast, are strangely difficult. As the main charact...

On the eve of a movie theater finale, Shira Chess examines The Amazing Digital Circus's place in our current moment of digital dehumanization.

TOWNSQUEER: A gamedev.lgbt zine and games bundle: 39 items for $20.00

In this comprehensive review, Spencer Johnson describes how Replaced flips the standard posthuman premise entirely. In short, this is not a story about a human mind uploaded into a machine. It is a ...

Sometimes you play a great demo and you just have to come back for the whole thing. Sophie Atkinson follows up on the promise of the full version of MOTORSLICE after covering the demo during Next Fe...

There is beauty to be found in the depths of grief. Before anything else, I’ll remember The House of Hikmah as the first game I ever played that’s fully voice acted in Arabic. There’s also a powerfu...

Dosa Divas promises a nourishing fight against repression, but it winds up delivering empty calories. The spice of loving, well-meaning representation doesn’t cover up the familiar flavors of a typic...