Consumerist Hand-Wringing – Everybody's Talking at Once

William Pugh’s studio Crows Crows Crows has just released The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. It’s a remake. It’s also a lot more than that. But like The Stanley Parable itself, what exactly it is can be slippery to explain, and slipperier still to talk around. Here William goes into that, as well as into Crows […]

Star St. Germain has worked in an uncommonly wide variety of media, from music to comics to gallery art—all within a consistent and unified practice, which she talks us through here, and which she also brings to ArcaniteCo’s debut game HoloVista. In talking about that project, we also talk about the existential perils of social […]

Victor Burgos stops by to talk about his studio’s debut game, Neko Ghost, Jump! We get into the difficulty of figuring out who your game is for, the challenge of controlling scope and scale when working with a small, part-time team, and the perils of trying to live and work in the frankly-sometimes-pretty-hellish social space […]

Whether you’re a longtime listener or just tuning in—either way, thanks for that!—here’s a roundup of our conversations from 2021. These are of course just samples, especially insightful or funny or surprising moments from their respective episodes. If you want the full context, and a whole lot more good conversation, then do check out the […]

The Mechanical World of Dr. Gearbox is first and foremost an attempt to rethink educational games, and specifically to rethink them into something that kids would actually want and choose to play. This is of course far from the first time that a game developer has attempted that lofty, elusive goal—so in this interview, Mike […]

At midnight tonight, David Galindo and his team are surprise-releasing ChefSquad, a collaborative cooking game that can only be played on Twitch. “Wait, what?” you might reasonably ask—and by way of answering you there, David has kindly stopped by to give us the scoop on this weird, joyful, formally inventive, genuinely new creation. ChefSquad shares […]

Megan Fox heads up Glass Bottom Games, the small-core-team-and-a-cloud-of-contractors behindSkateBIRD. (They were a larger core team for their first-person brawler/roguelike Spartan Fist, it should be noted). Here Megan talks about how SkateBIRD first came to be, and the nuts and bolts of bringing it to life—not only from a technical and artistic perspective, but also […]

A Musical Story takes place in the mind of a musician, and it also takes place in an era when rock as a wide-open experimental space, and the album was the thing, and every album was in some sense a concept album. The game is likewise an experiment in telling a story—here a wordless, internal, […]

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is a big heartfelt spectacle of a game—you’ve likely seen some of its dream-vibrant, mirror-polished visuals, and a bit of its cartoony gunplay—and as the game’s Lead Writer, Lauren Mee had a huge amount to do with the heartfelt part of that equation. Rift Apart is a game about blowing […]

Amid the E3 madness, this crush of new games and games yet to be, we thought we’d take a moment and think a bit about games that are, in one way or another, not new. Let’s talk about games that we replay, and especially the ones that we keep revisiting at different points in life. […]

Xalavier Nelson Jr. is an absurdly prolific artist and an inveterate collaborator, having left his creative stamp on Hypnospace Outlaw, We Are The Caretakers, Can Androids Pray, Mr. Bucket Told Me To, and so, so much else, from tabletop RPG systems to comics to games journalism. Currently he’s working on SkateBIRD and Space Warlord Organ […]

Jeremy Warmsley’s music has spanned pop (or more broadly, the whole touring band thing), film, television, radio, and recently, games. He’s an inventive, thoughtful, ever-expressive voice wherever he shows up (including on podcasts, as it happens). Here we mostly talk about his game soundtracking work on Russell’s Quinn’s Linda & Joan, and on Minskworks’ historica...

Russell Quinn has had a unique career as a technologist enabling stories, building the underlying systems for the ahead-of-its time McSweeney’s app, as well as for the equally-ahead-of-theirs, novel-adjacent multimedia projects The Silent History and The Pickle Index. He’s brought remarkably inventive and playful stories to the world, though not as a storyteller, exactly. That […...

Anisa Sanusi is an accomplished UI/UX designer, probably best known for her work on Elite Dangerous and Planet Coaster—two utterly different games that bring with them utterly different challenges in terms of usability, accessibility, tone, and scope. She’s also the founder of the Limit Break mentorship program, an organization dedicated to providing guidance, access, and […]

Our America puts you in the shoes of a Black father driving his son to school—and if that doesn’t sound potentially harrowing to you, then you might be exactly the project’s intended audience. It’s a work that means to illuminate, instruct, challenge, and speak simple, difficult truths. In this interview, Bryant Young talks about why […]

For our hundredth episode, we’re trying something a little different and editing together some of our favorite moments from the past year of the ‘cast. If you’ve been looking to catch up but haven’t had the time to dive into entire longform interviews, then this should provide a good place to start?and even if you’ve […]

2020, everybody. It was a weird year for lots of things, we think it’s fair to say—including but by no means limited to games. So in this episode, we take a moment to recap the games we played this year, the games currently glistening atop (or languishing deep within) our to-read piles, and the games […]

Like Eliza before it, Möbius Front ’83 is a Zachtornics game that longtime Zachtronics fans probably didn’t expect—though also like Eliza, it has more than a few themes in common with the rest of the catalog, and beyond that, Möbius Front ’83 adheres to Zach-like conventions more closely than you might expect. Like a lot […]

The PlayStation 5 is out, as is the Xbox Series X and Series S Series! That’s exciting, at least for those of us who can get our hands on them. Drew’s been PS5ing, and he and Lucio both built new PCs this year, so now seemed like a fairly ideal time to take stock of […]

After a decade working on the Assassin’s Creed games, Nick Guérin joined Thunder Lotus Games as the Creative Director on Spiritfarer, a farming and management sim about death, kindness, labor, wants, needs, and all manner of other things that Assassin’s Creed (venerable though it is) rarely finds the space to explore. (What a moment it […]

Brian Handy stops by to discuss Wild Honesty, his game of, well, wild honesty. Just how do you design an experience of radical openness and ever-expanding intimacy? How do you then adapt that networked play, with all its extra layers of isolation and all the kinds of human connection it lack by default? (Brian would […]

Nils Deneken has been working on Mutazione in one way or another since 2008. (You might have heard 2009, but in this interview, we set that particular misconception straight!) Through more than a decade of reinvention and revision, the game has retained its core of ensemble-cast intimacy and gorgeous mutated nature (rendered in desaturated vectors […]

Bobby Fowler and Brenda Noiseux outrun the Hunter to join us again and talk about Space Chase, their co-op tabletop map-’em-up and the delightful follow-up to their assiduously PvP card game Wicked Apples. This is, to put it mildly, a strange time to be making indie tabletop games—not only because tabletop games are irresolvably social […]

Greg Haynes is the Lead Games User Researcher at AbleGamers, an organization dedicated, simply but profoundly, to making sure that everyone can play video games, regardless of disability. That’s a huge mandate, serving a dauntingly large and diverse group of players. So in this interview, Greg talks us through AbleGamers’ philosophy and approach, from research […]

Animal Crossing: New Horizons has been stealing hearts, blowing up timelines, and filling in blanks in our shared social fabric for about two surreally protracted months now. For once, the zeitgeist hasn’t outrun our goofy, research-heavy way of picking topics! So in this episode, Lauren Villegas joins in to talk about Animal Crossing, inclusivity, games-as-platforms, […]