Exploits Feature The Century-Long Humanification of King Kong By Van Dennis • March 1st, 2024 Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
Funeral Rites Embarking on a DuckQuest By Alyssa Wejebe • February 26th, 2024 “What if ducks weren’t the comical sidekick? What if ducks were the heroes of the adventure?”
Feature Excerpt Made With Love: Anime Mashups and Their Creators By Justin Kim • February 23rd, 2024 They’re not just shitposts!
Feature Excerpt Fortnite, Eminem and Kidproofing Media in the Age of Content By Holly Boson • February 22nd, 2024 Eminem’s presence in The Big Bang can be interpreted as an apology to the players following their disastrous attempts at childproofing.
Exploits Feature Is it Alt to Like Call of Duty These Days? By Elijah Beahm • February 1st, 2024 Somehow, some Call of Duty games seem to have slipped out of the mainstream…
Funeral Rites Collaborating on Microcosmic Adventures in Mausritter By Phoenix Simms • January 25th, 2024 Mausritter has come a long way from its homebrew session and zine days.
Feature Excerpt Why I Played a 20-Year-Old Nancy Drew Game Over the Holidays By Amanda Tien • January 24th, 2024 Twice a year for more than a decade, I’d gather around a computer with my mom and sister so we could play the newest Nancy Drew game. This was our ritual, until the games stopped coming.
Feature Excerpt Solace and Play Within Games By Alyssa Hatmaker • January 23rd, 2024 Sometimes being reminded that you’re playing a videogame is a welcome feeling.
Exploits Feature The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes By Autumn Wright • January 2nd, 2024 While The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes is a coming-of-age drama without any action – all its conflict is psychological – it still invokes all these tropes.
Funeral Rites Getting Exiled with My Chivalric Bromance By Alyssa Wejebe • December 26th, 2023 While its title is a tribute to and parody of the classic New Jersey emo band My Chemical Romance, the game’s roots dig down through medieval history.
Feature Excerpt How We Learned to Stop Arguing and Enjoy the Vibes By Aldo Garcia • December 22nd, 2023 Style (like modern discourse itself) is everything to Killer7.
Feature Excerpt A Destructive Love Affair with Minimaps By Jon Place • December 21st, 2023 As games got bigger, and their worlds got bigger still, the need for a constant map sitting on the screen at all times became more important as a tool for navigation.
Exploits Feature Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special By Sara Clemens • December 1st, 2023 It took me 19 years to listen to the commentary tracks for Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special, a show I’ve watched at least once a year for the past 35.
Funeral Rites ARC Turns Disaster Into a Fighting Chance By Emily Price • November 28th, 2023 While ARC is a TTRPG about the end of the world, it uses humor and warmth as often as horror to imagine what responding to the apocalypse actually looks like.
Feature Excerpt The Stories of Virtual Fragments By Clint Morrison Jr. • November 22nd, 2023 Modern games are littered with fragmented narratives, digital ephemera often left obscured or abstracted in their incompleteness.
Feature Story We Need to Talk About the Warrens By Orrin Grey • November 21st, 2023 There is plenty of evidence that the Warrens were hucksters who exploited vulnerable people for their own profit.
Exploits Feature Magnum, P.I. vs. Miami Vice By Stu Horvath • November 1st, 2023 We all know Jessica Fletcher is the greatest TV detective of the ’80s, but who is the runner up?
Funeral Rites Campfire Carnage Conjures the Real Monsters By Oluwatayo Adewole • October 25th, 2023 Campfire Carnage writer Valkyrie T. Loughcrewe sees potential for “campsite as being for horror games what a dungeon is to fantasy,” an iterative space through which you can tell all sorts of stories.
Feature Excerpt Killing the Vampire By Elijah Gonzalez • October 24th, 2023 Xenoblade Chronicles 3 exorcizes an age-old symbol of stagnation and exploitation to foreground a story about systemic change.
Exploits Feature Pop Culture Bubblegum Slurry By Michael Lee • October 2nd, 2023 “Just subscribe to Content Inc.’s new streaming service CRAM: Where we cram pop culture slurry down your throat until you die!”
Funeral Rites Challenge Cult Horror with Maximum Mystic Punks Vol 2: Crypt By Alyssa Wejebe • September 25th, 2023 “I’ve always been fascinated with medieval crypts, ossuaries and mausoleums,” Mystic Punks series creator Anthony Meloro says. “So, placing a dungeon crawl in one is an obvious choice.”
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.
Feature Excerpt AI is Advancing Rapidly – The Outer Worlds Tells Us Why That’s Bad By Mira Lazine • September 21st, 2023 The Outer Worlds gives us insight into what it’s like to live in a society run exclusively by corporations, but it also gives us insight into what it’s like to live in a world dominated by AI.
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.