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.
Nonhuman Meditations Where are the Giant Bats? By Alyssa Wejebe • November 14th, 2023 The shape of vampires could stretch and be more.
Here's the Thing Vampire, and the Importance of a Good Storyteller By Rob Rich • November 14th, 2023 Rob reminisces about his early days of tabletop RPGs, and how much a bad Storyteller in Vampire: The Masquerade almost torpedoed his interest entirely.
Forms in Light Parasites and Predation By Justin Reeve • November 10th, 2023 While Vampyr has been critically acclaimed for its narrative depth and gameplay mechanics, the architectural design is definitely worth a mention, being at once a thematic and functional cornerstone of the game.
Noah's Beat Box Vamps – Otherwise By Noah Springer • November 9th, 2023 Repetition and transformation.
Casting Deep Meteo One Thousand Year Old Vampire Hunter D By Levi Rubeck • November 8th, 2023 While watching Vampire Hunter D, one can’t help but connect it to the relatively recent solo role-playing game Thousand Year Old Vampire by Tim Hutchings.
Area of Effect Open World Vampires By Jay Castello • November 7th, 2023 The open world map is almost nothing but a center for consumption.
Interlinked Don’t Fear the Reaver By Phoenix Simms • November 3rd, 2023 Raziel, the tragic wraith protagonist of the Soul Reaver series, contains within his arc a nuanced portrayal of how an energy vampire is made and unmade.
Here Be Monsters A Different Sort of Vampire: The Endemic Issue Behind Redfall’s Critical Flop By Emma Kostopolus • November 2nd, 2023 Redfall is an excellent test case for how capitalist gamer culture has turned some gaming consumers into a particularly odious, never-satisfied group of soulsuckers.
Mind Palaces I Will Come Up With a Punny Title I Promise By Maddi Chilton • October 31st, 2023 Somewhere along the way in Redfall’s development someone should have asked: What is this game, and why are we making it?
This Mortal Coyle Hammer Horror Nightgown Ranking By Deirdre Coyle • October 27th, 2023 It’s easy to get lost in the aesthetic pleasures of Hammer’s smooching Draculas and bangin’ 1970s haircuts on 19th century characters; you might gloss over the more ethereal wardrobe choices.
Past Presence Taking the Cullens to Uniqlo By Emily Price • October 26th, 2023 You can wear Uniqlo anywhere. Its styling is bizarre and frequently, ugly. I don’t know of a better way to summarize Twilight’s fashion.
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.
Letter from the Editor Unwinnable Monthly – October 2023 By David Shimomura • October 20th, 2023 Vamps, the ones you’d expect and some others.
Here's the Thing Collecting Sucks and is Awesome By Rob Rich • October 12th, 2023 Rob reflects on the up and downs of toy collecting, and how some days he wishes he’d never started.
Forms in Light Building Baghdad By Justin Reeve • October 11th, 2023 Archaeological reconstruction is at best a double-edged sword, providing valuable insight into the past while grappling with a host of issues that challenge its accuracy and integrity.
Always Autumn When the Fire Falls From on High; Or, the Meteor Is Not a Metaphor By Autumn Wright • October 10th, 2023 Comparing the animation in scenes that appear both in its 2020 reveal trailer and the final product, it’s obvious that three years of something bad happened to Goodbye Volcano High.
Noah's Beat Box All the Content Warnings By Noah Springer • October 6th, 2023 Comedy and horror truly reside next to each other in some off-kilter way, balancing the truly debauched with the truly buffoonish.