Indie game No Pineapple Left Behind, currently in Alpha stage, puts you in charge of an American school. Your goal is to prevent your students from being children. Children are chaotic beings, with feelings, thoughts, hopes, friends, crushes, vendettas… it’s all very charming to watch them go about their lives, but it doesn’t make for […]

You are lost in the woods. The more you panic, the more your vision tunnels inward. You can see less and less far in front of you, until eventually all you can do is grope at the plant life directly in front of you. You have to calm down or else you will never escape. […]

It’s nice when a new installment of a long-running franchise is executed with self-awareness. It doesn’t get much longer-running than King’s Quest, the adventure game series that birthed a genre in 1984. Roberta Williams’s work on the original King’s Quest games not only brought graphics to adventure games; it also set out what would become […]

JRPGs used to dominate my gaming time. Then something changed. Maybe I changed, but I think it’s fair to say that JRPGs changed as well. There was a cultural divergence perhaps 10 to 15 years ago. Japanese games increasingly embraced lengthy narrative exposition, often without even offering the player options for how to respond. In […]

Penny Arcade has announced a Diversity Lounge at PAX 2014: a safe space where marginalised groups can play games and have conversations about minority issues in gaming. Within minutes of the announcement, the target community of the lounge had largely laughed this off, suggesting that it was woefully inadequate and borderline offensive. The implication that […]

In Star Trek: The Game there is a genuine attempt to harness the unique narrative powers of video games. A touching bromance is played out as remote two-player co-op, with one player taking on the role of Kirk and the other as Spock.