CitizenArcane

For nearly a century, thanks primarily to Walt Disney and his monolithic movie empire, fairy tales have been signified by talking animals, dance numbers, and finding true, everlasting love. These charming, simple stories are so lovable and so memorable that we have, as a society, nearly forgotten the source material for those films. But the […]

Somewhere out there a space marine is discovering the horrors of space war; a ragtag band of survivors are facing difficult moral quandaries in the face of the zombie apocalypse; and an elf is wading his way through the racial tensions of Stodgy Fantasy Capital City. Lessons are being learned, tears and blood are being […]

The sad, lonely plucking of an out-of-tune guitar. A tired old dog. An empty gas station. Trucks ambling down a distant highway. A squeaking mine cart with a flickering lamp… That’s in a nutshell. A point-and-click adventure game, yes, but also a series of impressions, a “magical realist” love letter to the American South. This […]

There is no shortage of horror games that cram their dark corridors with spooky shadow men, smears of blood, and coils of barbed wire. What seemed so nightmarish ten years ago in the early  games can now seem trite. A large part of the reason those early games were so effective was that the horrific imagery […]

Many games deal with the relatively basic emotions of anger, frustration, and joy. Few games deal with complex emotions like grief and loss, and even fewer attempt to do so with more than a minimum of subtlety or nuance. So kudos are in order to indie developer Krystian Majewski for tackling subject matter rarely seen […]

As much as I enjoyed traipsing around Hill Valley circa 1935, it was growing a bit stale. The second episode of Back to the Future, Get Tannen!, seemed like little more than a retread of its predecessor that was more concerned with tying up loose ends than moving the story along. The preview at the […]