Returnal Pushes Against the Risks of Ambition By William Fox • December 21st, 2023 For Thoreau, mundanity might be a feather duster, but for ambition, it’s anything which takes away time from achieving something extraordinary.
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!
Thieves’ World (Remastered) By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • December 18th, 2023 Back alleys and dark deeds await in Thieves’ World!
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
Grim Fandango and Notions of a Working-Class Underworld By Joshua M. Henson • December 13th, 2023 Manuel’s status as the protagonist permits him this grand redemptive journey, but many of Grim Fandango’s most memorable side characters resonate specifically because they have simply allowed their afterlife to pass them by in menial jobs.
Getting To Know Jack: How a Jackbox Pack Is Born By Elijah Beahm • December 12th, 2023 Even before their more recent innovations, Jackbox has held an immensely wide appeal, with fans across the globe, even among those who don’t play more “traditional” games.
I Played It, Like, Twice... Rune Bound: Exploring the Realms of Terrinoth By Orrin Grey • December 11th, 2023 Terrinoth lacks any attempt at gritty realism, reaching instead for the classic familiarity of a video game version of your standard high fantasy.
First Quest: The Music By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • December 11th, 2023 There is always some new relic to haul up from the pits of the earth.
Interlinked Personal Emergence By Phoenix Simms • December 6th, 2023 Games are often, especially at the AAA level, power or pleasure simulators.
The Marvelous Children of Inang-Uri By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • December 4th, 2023 Imagine riding a horse. Now imagine the horse is the size of the whole world.
Fun in N-dimensions By Jonathan Fenn • December 1st, 2023 The ever-expanding world of space-twisting puzzlers offer captivating worlds not possible outside of videogames.
On ObsCure Horror Games and Unfinished Business By Megan Bidmead • November 28th, 2023 Here’s the problem: It’s been a few weeks since then, and I actively don’t want to finish this game.
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.
Good Books 2023, Part 2 By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • November 27th, 2023 Stu recommended books, but now it’s Hambone’s turn!
Chicago, the Ambiguous, and Ourselves By Zonghang Zhou • November 22nd, 2023 Beneath the veneer of a near-future dystopian technocracy, Watch Dogs is a bildungsroman of a man seeking redemption and salvation.
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.
Russ Nicholson Interview (Remastered) By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • November 20th, 2023 Straight from the archives!
Letter from the Editor Unwinnable Monthly – November 2023 By David Shimomura • November 17th, 2023 We’re not putting up the Christmas decorations yet.
Why Me? A Narrative Feature About Games Media Layoffs By Jess Reyes • November 16th, 2023 Everyone who was laid off was scheduled for a video meeting. If you had no video meeting, I guess you were safe. This is apparently considered the most “humane” way to lay someone off…
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.
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.
Open World Best Of All You Can Play The Whole Game Any Way You Want By Edward Smith • November 9th, 2023 The rapidity with which games lie to us is so great that we barely notice it on a conscious level.
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.
I Played It, Like, Twice... Stealth Mission: Exploring the Corners of Warhammer 40K in Execution Force By Orrin Grey • November 6th, 2023 Execution Force is a relic of a specific point in GW’s release history – in this case, the year 2015.
Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • November 6th, 2023 We’re hitting the road!
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.
Sam Porter Bridges Redefines the Anti-Hero By John Anderson • November 2nd, 2023 It is undeniable that most games center around violence in some shape, and due to the hours the average game takes to complete being well into the double-digits, the protagonist will have racked up quite a monstrous body count before the credits roll.
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?
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.
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: How RERUNNER Continues The Bit.Trip Saga By Elijah Beahm • October 24th, 2023 We have already seen levels that have blown our minds, have made us laugh, and have made us say “You can do that?!”
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.
The Ancestral Trail By Stu Horvath and John McGuire • October 23rd, 2023 Can you imagine waiting a fortnight for anything in this day and age? I can’t!