Games are a complicated medium with various subcultures and tons of academic thinking on matters like mechanics and design. Footnotes is an exploration game that combines study and play, introducing players to nuggets of games academia and knowledge while wandering through colorful spaces.
In September 1999, something is wrong. A lone house holds a secret, recorded on tape. You play through the tape as it jumps through a slow descent into gore and death. The whole game lasts five minutes and 30 seconds.
In Japanese, the word “chikan” refers to those who grope others in public or the unwanted touching itself. “AirDrop chikan” has entered the public discourse.
Wandersong starts with bad news: the world is dying. The good news is that it is also packed with excellent people worth saving. Setting out from your tiny, colorful village, you solve puzzles and dispatch grumpy ghosts with music. It combines point and click adventure and rhythm games into an adorable experience full…
Once upon a time I painted a lot. I won some minor awards in high school, and I almost studied art in college. But the closest I ever got was watching Terry Zwigoff’s 2006 satire Art School Confidential. It’s a about a wide-eyed college freshman whose idealism is beaten out of him by the pettiness, cynicism, and…
In Subserial Network, humanity as we know it doesn’t exist. Instead, synthetic beings populate the world. They live mostly normal lives. There’s only one rule: don’t connect yourself directly to the net. The synthetics who disobey are deemed “Subserials.” Your job is to hunt them down.
Lucasarts made two Tentacle games and will never make a third, so a group of fans have done some heroic work and made one for us.
One Hand Clapping is a experimental project from the University of Southern California’s games program. It mixes music and puzzles—the player needs to hum or sing to create walkways and raise platforms to proceed through a colorful world. It’s short but memorable.
I scroll through itch.io every week to see what games…
Battletech is a really good tactics game that combines giant mechs with X-COM. I’ve spent many hours building experimental robots and taking dangerous jobs to keep my mercenary corps afloat. Kotaku video producer Paul Tamayo was curious about the game, so I ran him through a mission to learn the basics.
Sometimes, you just want to hit the road. Photon Highway takes cues from games like Audiosurf and Temple Run to create a randomized highway through the stars. It’s great for those times you want to sit back and cruise away from life’s problems.
Battletech’s giant robot brawls can last a long time before one side claims victory. The recently released tactics game embraces a slow, deliberate pace that can lull the player into false comfort. Thanks to an unlikely dice roll, a single critical attack this weekend became one of the most shocking moments I’ve ever…
Battletech’s character creator isn’t really about how your character looks; it’s about who they are, where they’re from, and what they believe.
Spring is here, the perfect time to come out of that backlog hibernation and play some new video games. Here are the biggest ones coming out this season.
Duck Jam mixes WarioWare style mini-games with a touch of absurdist comedy to tell the story of a bunch of ducks trying to make money. Bills, you could say. The fast-paced change from one game mode to another means you need to always be on your toes if you want to avoid begging for bread crumbs on the street.
Capturing the feeling of early AOL chats can be difficult, while crafting an engrossing LGBT narrative can be ever harder. Secret Little Haven nails both, transporting players to the earlier days of the internet and telling a story that is both empathetic and believable. It’s intriguing and a great choice for this…
Enviro-Bear 2000 is an arcade driving game about a bear frantically careening through the forest to grab fish and berries before winter comes. Awkward controls and loose car physics turn foraging into a dizzying affair of hairpin turns and rabid possums. It’s a classic game and perfect Indie Pick.
Riot Games revealed the drop rates for League of Legends’ loot crates yesterday, offering transparency for a system that until now has been opaque. This comes during a time when loot boxes have triggered a great deal of outrage among players, pundits, and even politicians.
Joy Exhibition is a freeform art game in which the player must communicate with a mute alien race by painting. They are given a blank canvas, a massive arsenal of procedurally generated paint guns, and free rein to create whatever art they can think of.
Nuts is a puzzle game where players must set up a series of surveillance cameras to hunt down a squirrel and find their hidden stash of food. Wandering through a hazy maze of trees to find the perfect space to drop a camera is a surprisingly tricky mind teaser that challenges memorization skills. The game’s concept is…
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