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.
Exploits Feature Mechanical Sympathy By Van Dennis • May 1st, 2023 “…you learn to care for a machine to the point where you see it as more than just metal.”
Funeral Rites After Ragnarok: Featuring Colin Le Sueur By Oluwatayo Adewole • April 24th, 2023 It’s a bold move for Le Sueur to make a Norse-inspired Souls-like tabletop roleplaying game, and yet he manages to avoid some extremely fraught territory.
Feature Excerpt The Future Will Forget Us By Ben Thorp • April 21st, 2023 Season and Pentiment on how art fails to capture our complicated present.
Feature Excerpt What Video Games Did to Haunting By Nathan Schmidt • April 20th, 2023 Where are all the haunted videogames?
Exploits Feature Formula 1: Drive to Survive By Amanda Hudgins • April 3rd, 2023 I don’t care about Formula 1. One of my favorite shows is the Netflix F1 series Drive to Survive.
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.
Feature Excerpt Hope and Sacrifice in Andor By Kiernan Elam • March 21st, 2023 Andor paints a clear and lucid picture of the absolute power authoritarians can wield over people and how cruel fascism must be in order to preserve that power.
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.
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.
Exploits Feature Biking the Beat By Autumn Wright • February 1st, 2023 “After biking some 2,000 miles in the city last year, my memories of my new home are tied to rides and their soundtracks.”
Feature Excerpt Hideo Kojima Hates You By Emma Kostopolus • January 23rd, 2023 A study in difficulty scaling.
Feature Excerpt Time Loop of Trauma By Alma Roda-Gil • January 20th, 2023 There is no catharsis to be had at the end of Returnal’s time loop. It becomes clear, as the player finishes the story, that it will keep going.
Exploits Feature Unpacking By Krista McCay • January 2nd, 2023 Objects they keep, objects they part with…
Feature Story On Gremlin-tology By David Shimomura • December 21st, 2022 As humans, we like to have answers as to why. Why did my brand-new air fryer work only once? Why did my car just sputter and stop? Why did that airplane go down for seemingly no reason? Gremlins.
Feature Excerpt An Ode to Little Freaks By Phillip Russell • December 20th, 2022 On a surface level, Gremlins is a movie that evokes classic horror tropes, but when you dig deeper you find a meta horror satire that attempts to comment on American excess and consumerism.
Exploits Feature My Least Favorite C-Word By M. Shaw • December 1st, 2022 Every brush I’ve had with actually celebrating Christmas has been a complete horror show.
Feature Story What Creates Class In The Internet Age? By Ciaran Doran • November 22nd, 2022 Worldwide internet penetration is only hovering at around 50%. That means that every other person worldwide has no independent chance to read this article.
Feature Excerpt Surviving Humanity By Jon Bailes • November 21st, 2022 The cat, the fox and the apocalypse.
Feature Excerpt Lost in Translation By Aidan Moher • November 18th, 2022 The Sega Saturn is one of the best JRPG consoles of all time…just not in the west.
Exploits Feature Les Femmes Grotesques By Noah Springer • November 10th, 2022 Victoria Dalpe’s newest collection of horror shorts offers up visions of the weird and the terrifying that will linger in your head long after you’re done reading.
Exploits Feature The Peripheral By Sara Clemens • October 31st, 2022 Two eras, some twisty time shenanigans and virtual reality collide in a TV adaptation of William Gibson’s novel.
Feature Story Monstrous By David Shimomura • October 22nd, 2022 Monsters, necessarily, cannot be “bad.” Instead, like many horrors, the true monsters are dark reflections of our anxieties and stresses.
Feature Story Dimensions By Caroline Delbert • October 21st, 2022 With enough narrative room, you become the monster.
Feature Story Whose Body Horror Is It, Anyway? By Ruth Cassidy • October 21st, 2022 A look at body horror, the just world fallacy, and lungs that turn into glass.
Feature Excerpt Monsters Built by Human Hands By Hyacinth Nil • October 20th, 2022 A close reading of Lakeview Hotel.
Feature Excerpt Stop/Motion By Orrin Grey • October 20th, 2022 Ray Harryhausen and the magic of stop motion monsters.
2022 Unwinnable Halloween Video Store Week One: Transgressive Terrors By Team Unwinnable • October 9th, 2022 Welcome to the Spoopy Season!
Feature Excerpt To Be a Bird on an Island By Taylor Hidalgo • September 23rd, 2022 During unsteady times, it’s easy to get caught up in the sadness of uncertainty. Thankfully, there are little animals tromping around an island to remind us that it doesn’t have to be that way.
Feature Excerpt Shark Party By Michael Lee • September 22nd, 2022 The kinds of relationships people form in online spaces can be as meaningful and socially rewarding as physical encounters with human bodies.
Feature Story Blue Keys on a Red Planet By Hilver • September 16th, 2022 The DOOM games show the limits of lifeless worlds as game settings, but it is no coincidence that each time id Software had to reinvent the series for a new generation they returned to Mars.