I’ve just finished a super little game called Yoku’s Island Express on my Switch, a pinball Metroidvania featuring a tiny red dung beetle rolling a lil’ rock around. Yoku’s Island Express came out right before E3 for just about every major platform, but I didn’t have a second to actually play it until last week,…
Whenever I’ve interviewed a games industry executive over the past few months, I’ve asked them what single thing will revolutionize video games in the next five years. I was expecting a range of answers: game development becoming more accessible, perhaps, or games finding bigger markets in the developing world, or a technology innovation like VR/AR…
In the past few months, a video game has become popular among young people, prompting experts and commentators around the world to decide that there must be something dangerous about it. Newspaper columnists, education commentators and politicians are variously claiming that the Popular Video Game is having a detrimental effect on children; that it’s encouraging…
I would like to tell you about a mortifying encounter I recently had with a very well known figure in video games. It’s a better story if you don’t know who it is until the end I was hanging around the Ubisoft booth at E3 this year, waiting for a private demo of Transference, the…
Sometimes you go into a game demo, and it’s just absolutely not what you were expecting. After a trailer for CD Projekt Red’s next game, Cyberpunk 2077, appeared at the end of Xbox’s E3 press conference, I agreed with the author William Gibson,who said that it looked like GTA in an 80s retro-future. Where he…
Video games’ version of paternalism is usually reductive: parents and children rarely stray from the roles of protector and charge. You, the player, are almost always the parent (and always a father), chaperoning a character who is vulnerable. Occasional games like The Last of Us screw around with the traditional setup of those roles, reversing…
At a Square Enix event in London yesterday evening, I played through an hour of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the final game in a trilogy, which comes out September 14 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Though the action felt very familiar, the tone was a little different. The newest Tomb Raider game is…
Hypnospace Outlaw is an alternate-reality Internet simulator set in 1999. It captures that half-remembered, vaguely sinister strangeness and freedom of the early Internet uncannily well. Fittingly, it is extremely bizarre. If you spent your youth as an explorer of the early Internet, clicking around weird Geocities fansites and painstakingly creating your own wallpapers in MS…
The first question you might have about Labo is: what’s so special about a box of cardboard and some mini-games? And the first thing to understand about Labo is that what’s actually in the box is only part of the appeal. What’s more valuable is what this tiny cartridge and its accompanying sheets of cardboard…
If you’re into games yourself, playing video games with kids can be one of the great joys of parenthood (or aunt/unclehood, or godparenthood). It can also be a total pain in the ass. Trying to play a co-op game with a small child is often an excruciating exercise. You might imagine cherishable hours spent playing…
I’ve played many hours of Far Cry 5 co-op, both with my partner and with colleagues. A lot of the time it’s been a blast, except when you’re trying to actually get things done. There’s a pretty major caveat to the co-operative experience, as there was with Far Cry 4: only the host player’s progress…
Homo Machina is an excellent example of what happens when video game creators look outside pop culture for inspiration: an intricate and beautiful puzzle game that you can appreciate all the more when you learn about the history behind it. This iPhone and Android game, due out in May, portrays the human body as a…
To the surprise of anyone who’s played Monster Hunter in the past decade, Monster Hunter: World has become extremely popular, selling over six million copies. But that’s not all that’s happened in the last month. Here’s a rundown. First, though, those numbers: Monster Hunter: World is the fastest-selling game in Capcom’s entire history. Can you…
Monster Hunter: World is a showcase of the best creature design in video games. From fire-breathing wyverns to weird birds to elder dragons, the game’s monsters are impressively realistic for imaginary creatures. But which one is the best? Below is a totally subjective ranking of all 27 of Monster Hunter: World’s showcase creatures, from worst…
Kotaku’s review of Monster Hunter World will be coming soon. (Sneak preview: it’s pretty damned good.) In the meantime, here are a few of the things I like about it. The monsters are terrific This series has always been all about the beasts. They have such personality in their animation and behavior. The new creatures…
Couch co-op games tend to be more intimate than competitive multiplayer games; when it’s just you and a friend or partner, there’s more time to learn and absorb. Where competitive multiplayer needs to be accessible enough to pick up in a pub, co-op games can grow on you over the course of a few evenings.…
Most years, I find whittling a best-of list down to just 10 entries a tortuous process. Not so in 2017, because in December 2016 I became a mother, and that brought with it a complete change in my video gaming habits. This year, I rediscovered how people play games when it’s not part of their…
For Monster Hunter fans, the way that you describe the game to others has never really lined up with how it actually looks to people who don’t know what’s going on. I’ll breathlessly describe epic, exhilarating, 35-minute face-offs against the series’ trademark towering beasts to a friend, but when I show them the game, all…
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