Jeremy Winslow

With Pyre Supergiant Games, the studio behind 2011’s Bastion and 2014’s Transistor, seems to play with the central conflict of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Citizens of the game’s Commonwealth who participate in forbidden acts are eternally exiled. Pyre tells the tale of the exiled looking for redemption, a way out of everlasting banishment. While it has the capacity to tell a heartwarming—or heart-wrenching, depending on your point of view—story, it flounders in both setup and progression. ...

Regardless of how we perceive characters, black stereotypes extensively permeate media. From the Black Dude Dies First to the Black and Nerdy to the Sassy Black Woman, and everything in between, on-screen portrayals of black characters lean heavily on tropes that have been ingrained in media since its birth. Abhorrently disgusting and inherently wrong, these spurious portrayals paint black people in ways that are not reflective of the population. It’s discrimination feigned as fiction that wa...

In 1981, an ambitious 26 year old programmer burst onto the burgeoning game development scene with side-scrolling, shoot ‘em up arcade game called Defender. Just a year later, the same programmer, California-born Eugene Jarvis, launched 2D shoot ‘em up, Robotron: 2084. And in the early ‘90s, Jarvis—not Tony Stark’s British AI—released cult classic, twin-stick shooter, Smash TV. It was these three games that inspired developer Housemarque to craft its latest sci-fi, back-to-basics shooter, Nex...

Fire Face Corporation understands the teetering of emotions captive elicits and crafts a beautifully mesmerizing game about the oscillation between the analog and the digital; however, Small Radios Big Televisions is both compelling and disappointing in the same breadth, and this dissonance is palpable throughout its short runtime.

Velvet Crowe, Berseria‘s scantily-clad-revenge-seeking protagonist, is as one-dimensional as protagonists come, and though Bandai Namco attempt to humanize her toward the latter third of the game, teen angst and heavy black eyeliner only goes so far before you start to wonder when she’ll ever grow the hell up. (Thank God most of us have grown out of this phase. Most of us.)

Denzel Washington captures that grit, that raw emotion of a play perfectly in his rendition of August Wilson’s Fences, even if the film still feels like a play.

While tantalizing as a thought, the anime began to drag, and the games continued to reinforce the same narrative told in season one of the anime, never bold enough to venture to new territory. Sword Art Online: Hollow Realization, unfortunately, is just that: a hollow fragment of an otherwise excellent series that needs to be more daring in its idea. (A criticism of both the anime and the myriad of games to come out.)

Though the presentation of these themes is tantalizingly sinister at times, the ultimate impact of confronting them is dulled by pervasive storytelling issues and tedious mechanics, making this less an examination of heartbreak and more a tale of monotony.

Tarsier Studios’ Little Nightmares presents us with the third circle of Hell, wrapped into a Tim Burton-esque package comparable to PlayDead’s Limbo or Inside. In Little Nightmares, these nightmares are grotesque and terrifying.

Though Mr. Shifty makes its influences unabashedly apparent, it blends the two so cleverly that is both tantalizing and addictive in a weird, perverse, lemme-punch-one-more-guy-out-the-window kind of way.The result feeds upon our instinctual desire for rabid, frenetic violence.