Cicerone53

The seven deadly sins—that’s pride, lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy and wrath, for the more virtuous among you—have persisted in the public consciousness for centuries, both inside and outside the Christian faith, and it’s not hard to see why: they’re universal enough across the human experience that most people will understand them, but they encompass […]

Memory is such a fundamental part of being human—essential to the development of identity, family, and society—that it’s astounding how little we actually know about it. What does it really mean to remember? How and why does it even work? For all that our brains provide physical storage, why can’t we save and share our […]

The primary purpose of a religious text isn’t to tell a story but to impart a message to the faithful, meaning that large portions of the central figures' lives often go unrecorded. It's left to mortals to speculate about many of the details, oftentimes through folk stories and legends. As a faith endures across the […]

Monkeys & Dragons might be the perfect title for the game it’s attached to, though probably not in a way the developer intended. To be clear, there’s exactly one monkey and one dragon in this game, and neither features in more than a single puzzle. So from a story and design standpoint, Monkeys & Dragons […]

The sundew is a strange and singularly beautiful plant, its name derived from the hundreds of glistening droplets that cling to its vibrantly colored tendrils. It also has a secret: it’s a carnivore, luring flies in with sweet smells and then trapping them in its sticky secretions, where they struggle in vain until they either […]

Duality is a central theme in Twin Mirror: the idea that the way a person looks, feels and behaves under one set of circumstances might be wildly at odds with who they are in another. Take Sam Higgs, the game’s protagonist. Outwardly cold and analytical, Sam is nonetheless in constant conversation with his Double, a […]

The first entry in what would become The Gateway Trilogy was created in 2006 as part of an amateur game contest held by the freeware site Jay Is Games. Receiving a warmer reception than he’d expected, developer Anders Gustafsson produced a sequel the following year, and despite even more positive reviews it remained his final […]

“All this…feels like a dream.” This line comes about a third of the way through Firewood, delivered by one of the two player characters, and it’s an apt description of the game itself. The retro-styled side-scroller feels in almost every respect like a nightmare rendered playable, though that proves more of a mixed blessing than […]

doesn't lend itself to easy categorization. Begun in 2016 and now finally complete three years later, this five-part episodic series started out as a fairly straightforward story of a young boy in a new town but ends with dimension-hopping, necromancy, body-sharing, and the slaying of eldritch beasts through the power of electric guitar. I’ve spent […]