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Author: Ben Askren

Kentucky Route Zero: A Game, A Play, A Poem

Kentucky Route Zero, an unsettling point-and-click-plus-text-adventure starts with a wide shot, Edward Hopper style, of an old American gas station complete with a man-sitting-watching-world-go-by gatekeeper. It’s an unmistakably American scene, and a strangely constructed-feeling one. But we’ll come back to that… The good The game, being released episodically as five […]

I Have Played: Little Inferno

What exactly is Little Inferno? Is it a fourth-wall-breaking analysis of modern throwaway consumerism, set against the all too familiar backdrop of a tempestuous environmental mutation? Perhaps it’s an existential commentary, an experiment laboured with the task of projecting the developer’s qualms regarding a detached and insular society onto an […]

I Have Played: Brothers

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons is a game that I had been vaguely aware of throughout 2013, but simply hadn’t given any thought to. I think there was something about the promotional artwork that put me off, I don’t know. I managed to ignore it right up until the […]

I Have Played: BioShock Infinite

Jake played BioShock Infinite and has now sat down to write most of the things that he could think to say about it. This isn’t a review. There will be spoilers in this article. The important thing to know about BioShock Infinite is that it is, first and foremost, a […]

Football Manager: What it Taught Me About Life

For all the pretensions I could contrive about gaming, I come back to a plain fact: games are regularly a form of fantasy-living  for me. I write about games, think about games, and play a variety to both enjoy myself and fortify that writing and thinking. But when I think […]

Another World: The Art and Games of Eric Chahi

If, like me, you are a desiccated old fossil of a human, limping from one day of bone-creaking agony to another, you’ll no doubt remember both the Commodore C64 and the Commodore Amiga. These were ostensibly some of the first widely available “personal computers” for the average human being, and […]