Exploits Feature The Rise of Miles Morales By Latonya Pennington • August 1st, 2024 A superhero can be a powerful role model to look up to.
Funeral Rites Smelting RPGs Down to Simple Bliss with Outcast Silver Raiders By Justin Reeve • July 26th, 2024 “Perhaps out of a sense of satire or perhaps just because I really like horror movies, metal and the occult, I wanted to create something that would have been absolutely forbidden in my house.”
Feature Excerpt The World Outside the Glass was Almost Gorgeous By Will Borger • July 25th, 2024 The first step to solving a problem is admitting a problem exists, and the role you played in causing it. None of us are innocent.
Feature Excerpt The Games Space By Jay Castello • July 24th, 2024 Geoff is excited for videogames at Opening Night Live in August. Geoff is excited for videogames at the Game Awards in December. Geoff is excited for videogames at Summer Game Fest in June. Soon it will be August again.
Exploits Feature Three New Novels That Change How You Think about Reality By Kathleen Levitt • July 1st, 2024 The older I get, the more I gravitate towards fiction that messes with the real.
Funeral Rites The Capricious Gifts Found in Portents of a Dying God By Noah Springer • June 27th, 2024 Soul-crushing realities are something that MÖRK BORG tends to revel in, so it’s nice to see that Matt Johnson’s newest deck offers the same type of disastrous opportunities.
626 Day This is Your Badness Level: Lilo & Stitch and Mental Health By Orrin Grey • June 26th, 2024 As a weird kid myself, who grew up into a weird adult, it’s easy to see aspects of myself in both Lilo and Stitch – and I’m not alone.
Feature Story Minus One Is King By David Shimomura • June 26th, 2024 Everyone has trauma. Godzilla is definitely still cool but he’s deeply threatening and he probably hates you.
Feature Story Making a Mess in Kaiju No. 8 By Van Dennis • June 25th, 2024 Kaiju No. 8 is a wonderfully refreshing series: a show about someone in their early 30s who finds out that their dream is still achievable, even if it’s by unconventional means.
Exploits Feature Lists Issue Introduction By Stu Horvath • June 3rd, 2024 A celebration of the importance of lists. A celebration of the ubiquity of lists. A celebration of the absurdity of lists.
Funeral Rites Sailing the Ashen Sea with Tephrotic Nightmares By Maddi Chilton • May 23rd, 2024 The strongest character in the setting – the most vivid, the most realized, and the most overwhelming – is the Ashen Sea itself.
Feature Excerpt An Attempt Against Muscular Demonstrations of Power: Child of Light at Ten By Luis Aguasvivas • May 22nd, 2024 A decade after its release, the whimsy of Ubisoft Montreal’s Child of Light still twinkles.
Exploits Feature The Impossibility of Mods Makes Them So Valuable By Elijah Beahm • May 1st, 2024 Why would anyone do this, with minimal support, working uphill against someone else’s code, for free?
Funeral Rites The Tower, The Fool, The Meatgrinder By Noah Springer • April 23rd, 2024 “His Majesty the Worm is very focused on megadungeon-crawling, and I wanted players to have this sense that surviving the dangers means something.”
Feature Excerpt Apocalyptic Pregnancy By Natasha Ochshorn • April 19th, 2024 Perhaps an emotional response to a presidential election year, the weather, uncontrolled rent, or genocide – people on a large scale are questioning parenting as an ethical choice.
Feature Excerpt It’s Not a Loop, It’s a Spiral By Autumn Wright • April 18th, 2024 Maybe Alan Wake is like me. Maybe I’m like Alan. Trying to write my way out. Maybe the writing is just incidental to this compulsion, something we’re drawn to.
Don’t Hurt Girls When You Dance (Or Any Other Time) By Juno Stump • April 5th, 2024 We may never know for sure, but I think there’s a reason that so many trans women have been able to identify with Kurt Cobain’s joy, pain and suffering, so strongly.
Exploits Feature Liminality: Fear of Transition By Kasio Dalton • April 1st, 2024 “It’s a terrifying suggestion that someone might call a transitory space home.”
Funeral Rites Between the Skies and Beyond the Horizon By Justin Reeve • March 28th, 2024 Designer Huffa Frobes-Cross refers to Between the Skies as “rules minimalist, fiction maximalist.”
Feature Excerpt Ueda, Buddha & Me By Perry Gottschalk • March 27th, 2024 Don’t come to these games as experts of others, come to these games as someone who has never played one.
Feature Excerpt This is Your Badness Level: Lilo & Stitch and Mental Health By Orrin Grey • March 26th, 2024 Sometimes watching a cute little blue alien struggle with the same things we struggle with can make it a little easier, at least for a while.
Exploits Feature The Century-Long Humanification of King Kong By Van Dennis • March 1st, 2024 Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
Funeral Rites Embarking on a DuckQuest By Alyssa Wejebe • February 26th, 2024 “What if ducks weren’t the comical sidekick? What if ducks were the heroes of the adventure?”
Feature Excerpt Made With Love: Anime Mashups and Their Creators By Justin Kim • February 23rd, 2024 They’re not just shitposts!
Feature Excerpt Fortnite, Eminem and Kidproofing Media in the Age of Content By Holly Boson • February 22nd, 2024 Eminem’s presence in The Big Bang can be interpreted as an apology to the players following their disastrous attempts at childproofing.
Exploits Feature Is it Alt to Like Call of Duty These Days? By Elijah Beahm • February 1st, 2024 Somehow, some Call of Duty games seem to have slipped out of the mainstream…
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.
Exploits Feature The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes By Autumn Wright • January 2nd, 2024 While The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes is a coming-of-age drama without any action – all its conflict is psychological – it still invokes all these tropes.
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.
Exploits Feature Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special By Sara Clemens • December 1st, 2023 It took me 19 years to listen to the commentary tracks for Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special, a show I’ve watched at least once a year for the past 35.
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.
Exploits Feature Magnum, P.I. vs. Miami Vice By Stu Horvath • November 1st, 2023 We all know Jessica Fletcher is the greatest TV detective of the ’80s, but who is the runner up?
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.