Highwater mixes its dark themes with a heaping spoonful of what-the-fuckery in the vein of 90's surrealist films.
Highwater mixes its dark themes with a heaping spoonful of what-the-fuckery in the vein of 90's surrealist films.
Nate Schmidt reviews Replay, the new graphic memoir by Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner.
It’s one thing to play and review a single Llamasoft game, but what can a reviewer do when faced with dozens of them? Don Everhart takes a trip through Digital Eclipse’s interactive documentary and encounters worlds of light, color, and fuzz.
It’s not easy to get the hang of Penny’s momentum, but her big break provides lots of opportunities to practice. Although she could have had a friendlier debut, Penny’s Big Breakaway rolls into the platforming conversation with style.
Edmond Chang reviews Aaron Trammell’s Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology. Trammell challenges Game Studies to engage with BIPOC histories, scholarship, and pedagogies ;through feeling and understanding that play is embodied practice, affective experiences; and “through the lens of Black radical tradition,” what he calls “a form of intellectual reparations.”
Season is a moving meditation on loss, change, and hope for the future. And it lets you ride a bicycle through beautiful landscapes.
Tom Tyler’s scholarly book Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity asks how video games let us play (or play with) animals, what animals can teach us about play, and what humans owe to their non-human neighbors.
Scorn turns friction and opacity into an uncanny feature of the horror genre.
Radiant Citadel is 5e’s latest push towards diversity. Who is included in D&D community, culture, and canon?
Bardsung would be a brilliant exploration-driven RPG board game, if only it would get out of its own way.
Samantha Tecson reviews Frenchie Lunning’s Cosplay: The Fictional Mode of Existence, an academic study of cosplay
Can you burn your past down? In Bonfire Peaks, enjoyable puzzle solving meets thoughtful reflections on memory, depression, and trauma.
In Axiom Verge 2, players enter into an ancient alien world and find themselves utterly transformed in the process.
No Longer Home is a moving story-driven game about acceptance, parting, and making one’s way in the world.
There’s nothing more sought after in the games industry than the experience of flow, but is flow an ideology reinforcing the status quo?
Gaming Representation offers an invaluable examination of representation in video games, highlighting the urgency of intersectional analysis and calls for accountability.
Jankenteam remakes the classic 1986 platforming game, Alex Kidd in Miracle World, but is the new version too faithful to the original?
What happens when slave revolts become play? Can a video game really reckon with slavery and its afterlife?
How do we play in or with “nature” in games? Juniper Lewis reviews Alenda Chang’s Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games!