Interlinked Now You’re Playing with Privilege By Phoenix Simms • February 9th, 2024 With times being as turbulent as they are in real life, sitting and appreciating a game’s artistry feels distinctly useless at times.
Here Be Monsters Loading the Gun: Simulation and Realism in Horror Mechanics By Emma Kostopolus • February 8th, 2024 Horror in game mechanics arises from the difference in how we interact with things that are realistic versus things that absolutely are not.
Mind Palaces Mostly Normal People By Maddi Chilton • February 7th, 2024 In the past few years of weird and superficial social media-based media criticism, a character’s relatability (or, used not synonymously but often close to it, likability) is shorthand for how successful they are within their text.
This Mortal Coyle Goth Femmes of Elden Ring By Deirdre Coyle • February 6th, 2024 Ranking Elden Ring’s goth femmes from “least” to “most” goth.
Self-Insert Mary Sue By Amanda Hudgins • February 2nd, 2024 She is you, a teenager who is stuck in a small town with no friends, with cruel acquaintances who don’t love any of the things that you do, who has been told for years that boys bully you because they like you.
Past Presence Romanticize Your Life! By Emily Price • January 31st, 2024 If these things are the glue that makes real “mundane” life less boring, they are hollow pleasures.
Run It Back Sex and Cinema By Oluwatayo Adewole • January 30th, 2024 At the same time as a quasi-accepting era which brings us more art focused on marginalized people, a soft Hayes Code re-emerges, allowing for the clean lines of queerness but not the smudges.
Noise Complaint Age, Angst, and Paint It Black By Ben Sailer • January 26th, 2024 On their latest album Famine, long-running hardcore punk band Paint It Black prove that righteous anger has no age limit.
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.
Letter from the Editor Unwinnable Monthly – January 2024 By David Shimomura • January 18th, 2024 Welcome to the new year!
Here's the Thing Surviving Fallout 4 By Rob Rich • January 11th, 2024 Fallout 4 has a bit of a reputation for being exceptionally mediocre at best, but a new outlook and approach to the 2015 title has turned it into Rob’s latest obsession.
Forms in Light Best Architecture in Games By Justin Reeve • January 10th, 2024 A short, concise and mostly unordered list of the best level design and environmental art of the year.
Noah's Beat Box Hip Hop at Fifty By Noah Springer • January 9th, 2024 After stepping back from the contemporary, Noah reflects a bit more on the different eras of hip hop and what they mean to him.
Area of Effect Space at Sea By Jay Castello • January 5th, 2024 The oceans are a space of freedom, terror, traversal, piracy, exploration, exploitation, warfare, monsters, beauty, death and a thousand other things depending on their social context.
Rookie of the Year Lana Del(’s) Rey By Matt Marrone • January 4th, 2024 The spirit of the Newport Folk Festival is all about the music, from the morning sets to the closers, not all about Lana.
Here Be Monsters It’s an Evil Effing Room: Level Design in Horror By Emma Kostopolus • January 3rd, 2024 In thinking about horror level design, we can work to uncover a lot of the general horror philosophy behind some of our most beloved franchises.
Mind Palaces Shelf Fodder By Maddi Chilton • December 29th, 2023 The sacralization of literature – the item, not the concept – becomes annoying at best when faced with just how much of our literary ephemera is garbage.
This Mortal Coyle I Married My Goth GF in Starfield but I Feel Nothing By Deirdre Coyle • December 28th, 2023 Starfield is Bethesda’s biggest game to date. More to explore, more dialogue options, more NPCs. So why don’t I feel attached to any of the characters?
Past Presence Object Lessons #3: Megadungeon By Emily Price • December 27th, 2023 What is a dungeon? This is the kind of question you think about when you draw your fiftieth square grid room that contains yet another statue and another random battle.
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.
Letter from the Editor Unwinnable Monthly – December 2023 By David Shimomura • December 19th, 2023 A very merry Killer7 cover to you all!
Here's the Thing Thank You Monster Hunter Now By Rob Rich • December 15th, 2023 As despised as mobile adaptations of popular games may be, Rob has a particular appreciation for Monster Hunter Now and how it got him back on the hunt.
Forms in Light Primal Problems By Justin Reeve • December 14th, 2023 The architecture in Far Cry Primal closely mirrors the structures and techniques used in the Upper Paleolithic Period, providing a pretty good picture of the past
Noah's Beat Box Fine Philly Dining By Noah Springer • December 12th, 2023 Philly is known for all sorts of things – a bell, a boxer, a sitcom – but Noah knows it by reputation as one of the better food cities out there, specifically for sandwiches.
Casting Deep Meteo Grails Scores the Theater of the Mind By Levi Rubeck • December 8th, 2023 More than curtains cut for mood or ambience, Anches en Maat begs the listener to simmer in their own headspace for a while.
Rookie of the Year My Rich Life By Matt Marrone • December 7th, 2023 What is your rich life? The answer, we quickly learn, is different for everyone.
Interlinked Personal Emergence By Phoenix Simms • December 6th, 2023 Games are often, especially at the AAA level, power or pleasure simulators.
Run It Back 1979 2019 By Oluwatayo Adewole • December 1st, 2023 This month we turn our attention to Coppola’s 1979 epic Apocalypse Now, and more specifically to its 2019 Final Cut.
Eyeing Elsewhere Boots on the Ground By Phillip Russell • November 30th, 2023 Killers of the Flower Moon is a complicated film, less so because of the story it tells, and more so with how it’s told and by whom.
Noise Complaint On the Outside Looking Into Christian Hardcore By Ben Sailer • November 29th, 2023 Ben wonders what happened to all the Christian hardcore bands that once dominated VFW basements and Hot Topic shelves, and lands on a conclusion that reveals his own ignorance.
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.
Letter from the Editor Unwinnable Monthly – November 2023 By David Shimomura • November 17th, 2023 We’re not putting up the Christmas decorations yet.
Friction Burns Never to Return By Ruth Cassidy • November 15th, 2023 It feels like knowing Pyre’s secrets should remove its surface tensions, but a risk you know how to calculate just makes the gambles feel larger.
I Played It, Like, Twice... What You See in the Dark: Night and Day in Vampire Hunter By Orrin Grey • November 15th, 2023 Vampire Hunter is a fairly straightforward board game with one exception – you play it in the dark.