It took Billy Basso seven years to make Animal Well, the dense, dark Metroidvania game that crashed onto Steam’s top-seller chart earlier this month amid a flurry of player hype. The game is a labyrinth exercise where players wander a world inhabited by sometimes friendly, sometimes not-friendly creatures as a …
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On its surface, Marvel’s new “immersive story” What If…?, available to Apple Vision Pro users starting Thursday, seems like a win-win. Marvel gets to mess around with how to combine storytelling and spatial computing, and Apple gets a big-name experience to appease everyone who ponied up $3,500 for their new …
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One night this past February, over drinks and moody bar lighting, Eric Green and his friends were swapping stories of their recent hookups when one mentioned they’d used the app Sniffies to have public sex. A 30-year-old tattoo artist who works in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Green identifies as a bottom, is …
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Kabosu, the dog best known to the internet as the inspiration behind the Doge meme cryptocurrency, has died. Kabosu died on May 24, according to a blog post from his owner Atsuko Sato published the same day (translated from Japanese by Google Translate). A farewell party will be held on …
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Repression was survival for Jane Schoenbrun. In their tidy, suburban enclave of Ardsley, New York, television was where they went to escape from the margins of reality. It was the 1990s, a golden age of TV. Supernatural dramas Twin Peaks and The X-Files were appointment viewing, and Schoenbrun was obsessed …
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In Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History, media entrepreneur and journalist Nellie Bowles fashions herself as a dissident chafing against orthodoxies in pursuit of truth. Despite her efforts, this posturing achieves a different effect: Bowles has produced a book hewing so wholly to her own …
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The fear was reasonable. It was a fear I also carried. Uncertainty about whether or not I should tell this story now, and whether or not it was right to air what many consider family secrets, crept into the back of my mind. But I knew it deserved to be …
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Red vs. Blue is officially over. On Tuesday, Warner Bros. Discovery released Red vs. Blue: Restoration, the final installment in the long-running saga that was once at the forefront of a whole new form of entertainment: web videos created from in-game footage. Machinima signaled a new world where that footage—of …
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Like a soap opera, you skip an episode and lose track of the story. For the past month, two of the most successful hip-hop artists of recent times—Kendrick Lamar and Drake—have been embroiled in a back-and-forth rap beef that reached new levels over the weekend as Lamar released “Meet the …
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Supergiant Games is handing over the keys to the underworld early. Hades II, the sequel to the studios’ critically acclaimed roguelike, is now available to buy for $30 on PC via Early Access on Steam and the Epic Games Store. Hades II follows Melinoë, underworld princess and sister to the …
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