Discovering Silent Hill Through Heather, and Where to Read About James.

Jagex spent twenty-five years building a world for thousands of strangers. Dragonwilds is what’s left when that world has to work for you…

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 ...

You’re never in danger in Burn-9, which is exactly why it’s so stressful.

Zach Cregger’s movie borrows Raccoon City’s bones to build something else entirely, and he’s at his best exactly where he stops trying to…

Peripeteia hands the player the exact power that built its own amnesiac protagonist, and asks what you’ll do with it.

The new demo runs about thirty minutes, split between a crypt and somewhere much stranger.

Rebel Wolves built a thirty-day countdown that made me hate it before I realized there was more than enough time to do everything that…

Square Enix’s HD-2D throwback won me over completely in just three hours

Mark Essen has spent fifteen years designing games around movement. In Blood Dungeon, that instinct finally has to share space with a stat…

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

Welcome back, everyone! I am extremely pleased to present to you the entrants in the Blogs of the Round Table “Friendslop” Essay Jam—all twenty-four of them! This has been an incredible…

"What would Lovecraft have written as a story if he were alive in World War II?"

A tactics game about mercenaries makes a better case for what Star Wars needs next than any of its recent movies or shows.

Sophia can handle almost everything on her own, which is what makes the one time she can’t hit so much harder.

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...

The combat holds up fine on its own, but it’s everything the developers didn’t make by hand that got them in trouble.

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 ...

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

A review of an average action RPG, and an explanation for why average was always going to be enough.

The zombies were never really the problem. The problem was me, turning on a teammate with thirty seconds left on the clock and hearing him…

Horde Siege makes you feel outnumbered on purpose, and Versus feels more balanced and traditional than ever now that Gnasher spam and…

A headband, a walled village, and a simulated paradise all promise the same thing: stay inside, and you get to keep living.

Game Freak’s post-Pokémon soulslike recycles its own boss fights, and stumbles into a theme about a world that never learned how to grieve.

Long before Eve sets anyone on fire, the game has already taken something from Aya. It buries the one place it gives that back behind…

Escape from Tarkov and ARC Raiders eventually start to feel like reruns. Mistfall Hunter’s borrowed Soulsborne dueling might be the thing…

Transformation isn’t a new idea in games. But it’s water mechanics feel fresh.

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...

How a cancelled adventure game and a rushed deadline shaped a forgotten PS1 horror title

ACE Team’s extraction game borrows its mythology from an obscure 1929 Lovecraft novella.

Halo Studios nailed the nostalgia on Xbox, but the game’s biggest achievement might be showing exactly what the series shouldn’t do next

Revisiting a VR classic on a flatscreen and finding the story never needed the headset to work

Before I ever got to steer the Jackdaw again, I had to sit through the Ubisoft hub, the menu that supposedly gives you access to basically…

There’s a moment early in Echoes of Aincrad, still inside the closed beta, before Sword Art Online has even become the thing it becomes…

In September of 1983, trucks backed up to a landfill outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, and buried a mountain of unsold Atari inventory under…

I’ve been chasing a specific feeling since I first played A Link to the Past as a kid, long before anyone had a name for it. It’s the…

In March 2006, a seventeen-year-old Italian named Chris Darril got hold of an early Japanese copy of Rule of Rose through contacts he had…

I came to Rule of Rose already reasonably hardened. I had played the Silent Hill games. I had grown up during that stretch of the…

Welcome back readers. Lots of good stuff to share this week–21 reads in all. A critical blackjack? No, no, not my best work. To support our best work–compiling and organizing a living t…

I didn’t know I was supposed to play Mint first. Nobody told me, there was no instruction making it explicit, and I was young enough that I…

Orcs have a branding problem, and it’s one that fantasy media has spent decades reinforcing. Tolkien made them savage foot soldiers with no…