The original Super Meat Boy is one of the best-known indie games of all time. Released in 2010, it’s a brutally difficult 2D platformer, but so fun to play: The short levels almost feel like speedrunning puzzles, and even though they’re filled with traps and buzzsaws, dying isn’t so bad because you revive nearly instantly. […]
The Legend of Zelda games are grand adventures, but they can also be very comforting, with quaint villages to explore and warm landscapes to take in. Under The Island takes that idea a step further. It still offers the sense of exploration and puzzle-solving that makes Zelda games so satisfying, but it also takes place […]
The best Super Mario games are ones I find myself coming back to again and again. I’m not sure I want to count how many copies of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World I own across various Nintendo platforms, but it’s worth it because of just how satisfying it is to replay those […]
The funny shape of eggs is the curious lifeblood of Oeuf, the new physics platformer by prolific developer Increpare Games. In a gaming landscape saturated with complex systems dropped into simple games, that grapples with metaphor within straightforward narratives, and that is desperate to bring cinematic sensibilities into gaming, Oeuf only asks that you briefly […]
There are a lot of games that try to emulate The Legend of Zelda, but few that manage to capture that spirit in such a small, concise package as Ratcheteer DX. The postapocalyptic game only takes a few hours to complete, but over that span it nails the classic Zelda vibe almost perfectly, offering a […]
Nintendo has a history of fleshing out the larger Pokémon world through spinoffs. What games from the Pokémon Snap and Detective Pikachu series lacked in terms of action, they made up for in the way they made pokémon feel like creatures with rich lives outside of their relationships with trainers. And as the mainline series […]
I’ve always wanted to go skydiving. Aerial_Knight’s DropShot, from indie developer Aerial_Knight, lets me live out that dream – at least in a safe, virtual kind of way. It also lets me shoot bullets from finger guns, wield laser skulls, and wear cool sunglasses while I’m falling through the air. So maybe it’s better than […]
Colonialism is not merely about occupying nations. It’s a project of mass violence, part of which involves total erasure and the widespread theft of some of the most culturally significant artifacts in the world. Even today, colonizing nations proudly display stolen artifacts, acting as peacocking robbers under the guise of tourism. See, for example, the […]
The woods in Reanimal are full of surprises. You will encounter human cadavers that slither like snakes, gigantic talking pigs, and, at one point, a forlorn, supersized whale who seems resigned to an agonizingly slow death. These variously monstrous beings inhabit a realm that, though it looks like our own, seems to defy spatial logic: […]
A postmodern surrealist tale of geopolitics. An otaku’s hellbent journey to become the top-ranked assassin. A high school cheerleader who kills zombies with a chainsaw and pompoms, with a story co-written by James Gunn. Every project under the Grasshopper Manufacture umbrella sounds like an unlikely anecdote. The Japanese video game studio founded in 1998 by […]