You a Barnacle Phister, Mister? What’s a player to do with an asshole protagonist?
All in Features
You a Barnacle Phister, Mister? What’s a player to do with an asshole protagonist?
Is Elden Ring really an open world game, or is it closed off in all the right ways?
Atari 2600 games might not have the flashiest graphics, but their minimalism makes them poetry.
What’s so magical about parkour in videogames? It’s the fantasy of finally conquering the late capitalist city.
Amnesia: Rebirth asks what it takes to be a good mother - and if it’s worth it.
For all its promise of open-world freedom, Grand Theft Auto IV strips players of the choices that really matter. Noah Wardrip-Fruin offers a vocabulary for thinking critically about games.
Metroid’s Mother Brain is more than a brain in a jar. It also poses an existential question about what it means to have a body.
What can the morph ball ability in the Metroid series teach us about game design and exploration? When is a ball a world? When is rolling a lifestyle?
Can the JRPG remain a lively or innovative genre? Might its best chance to do so lie in its past: turn-based combat?
What is a house, when it’s left abandoned? A place to haunt. Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy invites players to haunt domestic space.
What’s scarier than cooking up monsters? Doing it for the camera! Read Tof Eklund on how Battle Chef Brigade reworks the tropes of reality television.
Nate Schmidt discusses the true terror of Metroid Dread: what if the EMMI were to make Samus obsolete?
How do we make sense of the enjoyment derived from watching Asian death in Squid Game?
What is cottagecore? Why is fashion political? And how does Stardew Valley help us imagine a better world through its farming fantasies?
In Life is Strange: True Colors, Alex Chen struggles to make a home for herself. Is empathy enough?
Gaming culture and industry culture feed off each other, and in this moment of reckoning, we have the opportunity to build better communities for everyone.
Generations are convenient ways of describing the history of video games and useful marketing tools, but they seldom capture the brilliance of game design or the pleasures of play.
Outer Wilds reveals that the horror of space has nothing to do with monsters. It’s about losing your sense of world to the cold void of the stars.