Killscreen

09/12/2026

On a palace in Mantua, the keystone over the main arch was built oversized on purpose, so it juts out over the pediment like a tongue. Nobody was confused. That was the joke.

Art historians call it Mannerism: breaking a style's rules from inside it, so you feel the rules straining.

Ario Barzan's essay from our archive follows that instinct forward to Bloodborne's Yharnam, a city that keeps building upward past the point of sense. It reads as architecture criticism that happens to be about a game.

https://www.killscreen.com/understanding-sublime-architecture-bloodborne/?ref=facebook

09/11/2026

In 1996 it was reported that 99% of American girls aged three to ten owned at least one Barbie. The games that followed her onto the computer inherited her limits: one body, one skin tone, outfits that snapped into place in the only order the designer allowed.

Two women rebuilt the genre anyway. Rinmaru, a Turkish developer who started making games after high school, broke a single shirt into a neckline, a torso and two sleeves so players could combine them freely. Ola Rogula, a former geneticist, spends about six months on each game at Doll Divine, and then shipped one with three different body types, a first for the genre, which meant redrawing every garment for each body.

Mariam Naziripour wrote about them in 2014. It has aged strangely well.

https://www.killscreen.com/awfulness-and-importance-dress-game/?ref=facebook

09/10/2026

I asked Jakob Kudsk Steensen what ten minutes inside a volcanic vent actually feels like.

There are four places in the world where you can dive into one at human depths. He went to one of them, into a sixteen-foot hole with gases coming out that dissolve rock into organic matter. He compared it to a door onto the other side of the moon. Ten minutes is the limit, and you smell of sulfur for three days afterward because it sits on your skin.

He was there to record it. He has spent fifteen years turning disappearing places into virtual worlds you can walk through, and the disappearing is real: the ice cave he digitized in Switzerland has since collapsed.

Full conversation, free: https://www.killscreen.com/jacob-kudsk-steensen-ecological-game-engine-art/?ref=facebook

09/10/2026

Six questions, about forty seconds, and we'll hand you one game worth your weekend — plus the piece we wrote about it and the episode where we argued about it. No email required to get your answer.

https://www.killscreen.com/what-to-play/?ref=facebook

09/09/2026

Bennett Foddy (QWOP, Getting Over It, Baby Steps) once saw Oxford w**e experts score a bottle 10/10 that novices called gasoline. His games work the same way — the deeper you get, the more you crave what beginners reject.

Bennett Foddy on Oxford w**e tastings, clumsy bodies, and two decades of games built to feel real.

09/09/2026

A year after the University of Minnesota Press published The Little Database, UCLA's Danny Snelson has rebuilt its resources as thelittledatabase.com, a clickable fake OS you browse like a desktop directory. https://www.killscreen.com/the-little-database-expands-into-a-desktop-directory/?ref=facebook

Danny Snelson's thelittledatabase.com files a year of reviews, podcasts, and little databases inside a clickable fake OS.

09/08/2026

A woman in The Witcher 3 asks Geralt to teach her to fence. He does. She is never in the game again — no reward, no romance, no quest line.

Joshua Calixto went looking through the forums for the dialogue option he'd got wrong. There wasn't one. Nothing was supposed to happen.

From our archive, on Tolstoy's sideshadowing, Dickens's pies, and why most "open" games are the least open thing on the shelf.
https://www.killscreen.com/lets-talk-about-rosa-var-attre-impossible-romance-witcher-3/?ref=facebook

09/08/2026

Intron Interactive's biological roguelike POLYMORPH casts you as a cancerous pathogen, which means the health packs have to die before you can use them. The comments turned healing into a moral problem almost immediately.

In Intron Interactive's POLYMORPH you play a cancerous pathogen, and healing means killing the caterpillar.

09/07/2026

In December 2014 we wrote about The Black Watchmen, an alternate reality game out of Montreal built on four colour-coded levels of consent.

Red kept the game in your inbox. Green required a signed medical waiver, and then actors started calling your phone and leaving packages at your door. One player's real-world mission ended with him arrested by "military personnel" who turned out to be part of it.

Its precedent, the Jejune Institute, ran for three years in San Francisco and pulled in more than 10,000 people. One of them tattooed a piece of it on her wrist.

The headline promised a launch "early next year." That year was 2015.

Four colour-coded levels of consent. The highest one sent actors to your door, and required a signed waiver before you began.

09/07/2026

Helsinki has named Ville Kallio, the creator of Cruelty Squad, an Artist of the Year. He shares the city's annual 5,000-euro award with soul singer Emilia Sisco and knitwear designer Juha Vehmaanperä.

Ville Kallio takes a Helsinki Artist of the Year award, alongside a soul singer and a knitwear designer.