The games, studios, and culture behind the screens — from blockbusters to the experimental indie scene.
10 storiesFrom Umurangi Generation to Viewfinder, a new wave of games is making the camera the core mechanic — and revealing something profound about how we see virtual worlds.
From Slay the Spire to Balatro, the deckbuilder mechanic is colonizing every genre in gaming. We examine why shuffling cards became the ultimate game design Swiss Army knife.
Once a dying relic of physical media, the demo is back — and Next Fest's week-long events are quietly reshaping how players discover, trust, and commit to games in an era of $70 releases and endless choice.
From Hades to Balatro to Slay the Spire, the roguelike's loop—death as progression, randomness as narrative—has become the most copied design language in modern gaming. Here's how it spread and why it stuck.
From Lethal Company to Content Warning, a wave of proximity-voice indie hits is reviving couch co-op for a generation burned out on ranked lobbies and toxic matchmaking.
Incremental games have quietly built a devoted following by making the absence of play the core mechanic. Here's what their rise reveals about patience, compulsion, and game design's strangest experiment.
The speedrun community's obsessive quest for frame-perfect runs has quietly created the most meticulous archive of gaming history ever assembled — and no one planned it.
How games like Ironsworn and Thousand Year Old Vampire turned the loneliest format in tabletop into its most intimate and fastest-growing genre.
The biggest games are getting bigger and safer. The most interesting games are getting smaller and stranger — and finding their audience anyway.
For a decade games were about winning. A new wave is about tending, building, and being — and it is quietly becoming the most played genre in the world.
