Episodes
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This Nightmare Will Never End! Hell Yeag! with Lilith Walther
Lilith Walther aetherboosts her way on over to talk about Nightmare Kart, its previously life as Bloodborne KART, its demake predecessor Bloodborne PSX, and the relationship between retro aesthetics, open development practices, and a general attitude of… YOLO? Nightmare Kart will be out for free…
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Dragon’s Dogma II, Chaos, and Dogs
Dragon’s Dogma II is full of inventive, quirky flourishes, meaningful frictions, and… shameless micro-transactions that capitalize on those exact quirks and frictions. We can, of course, get meaning and joy out of art that comes to us compromised. Which is good news, since most art, if not all…
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Helldivers II and Making Art about Fascism without Making Fascist Art
Helldivers II is a wildly popular co-op shooter. It’s also extremely funny. It’s also very much about fascism, both in the sense that its satirical lens is aimed at fascist tendencies in moribund democracies, and in the sense that its core pleasures are… sort of fascist? The music makes you feel...
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Palworld: A Ludic Reading and a Luddite Reading
While the show was taking a break, Drew started putting together some essays on the growing list of recent recent surprise hits—games that, for whatever reason, have been doing vastly better than their developers or publishers had expected. 2024 does, so far, seem to have a sort of serial…
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Some of What We Played in 2023
Lucio and Drew talk about some of the games they’ve enjoyed gaming at this year, from KarmaZoo, Pizza Tower, Wobbly Life, and The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, to Remnant II, Spider-Man 2, Street Fighter 6, Jedi: Survivor, Wo Long, and Tears of the Kingdom. Speaking of, spoilers for Remnant II…
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You Should Be Free, with Glen Henry and Chase Bethea
Glen Henry and Chase Bethea drop achor awhile and talk about Sunken Stones, why pirates mean freedom, and why the Golden Age of Piracy was a lot more Caribbean than Pirates of the Caribbean would have you believe. Also, inevitably, One Piece. You can play the Sunken Stones demo on Itch.io, and...
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Setting the Stakes, with Ezra Szanton
Ezra Szanton painstakingly platforms his way over to talk about To The Flame, the first in his new studio’s forthcoming kinda-trilogy of horror games. He also talks about how to effective horror, what makes a game interesting to watch as well as play, and some of the...
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Devs, Uh, Find a Way, with Eric Peterson (a.k.a. Baja the Frog)
Eric Peterson hops on over to talk about the joys of hobbyist game development, the things that need to change in professional game development (even when compared to other parts of tech), and the cultural importance of drawing little guys. You can play JOUNCER PX (as it’s called now) on...
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Reality, Augmented and Otherwise, with Ryan Canuel
Ryan Canuel of Petricore stops by for a mostly-not-especially-spooky conversation about augmented reality, what bootstrapping actually means, and?alright, some stuff about horror movies right at the end there. You can get the Mythic Realms demo in Quest App Lab.You can wishlist...
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That’s the Point of the Thing, with Jerry Belich
Jerry Belich talks about his wild work in the Alt.ctrl milieu, his boundary-redefining escape rooms (for lack of a better term), and his digital game work, from Recommendation Dog and Reel Steal on the Playdate, to High on Life and High on Knife. High on Knife is out now on Steam, Epic, Xbox, and...
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Ambitions and Ascensions, with Des Gayle
Des Gayle ascends to the sky island of podcastery to discuss his storied career as a producer, the difficulty of enjoying art when you know how it’s made?experiencing it with kids can help?and the joys of self-contained stories in the age of the mega-franchise. You can learn more about Altered…
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Chance, Curation, Providence, with Matthew Brelsford
Matt Brelsford opens his hundred eyes and talks about the “loose collective” that is Tiny Mass Games, the spiritual dimension of game development, and (of course) Ophanim. You can find Tiny Mass Games on itch.io.You can also find Betty & Earl and Retro Wing Prime on Steam.———• Here are our...
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Baldur’s Gate 3, as Rolled by Two D&D Neophytes
Drew and L talk about their time so far with Baldur’s Gate 3, which works beautifully as a sprawling computer RPG, and as a unique intersection of free play and complex game rules—but how does it work as an introduction to Larian’s RPGs? How about to Dungeons & Dragons? This ends up being a...
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On Sequels, with Bryant Cannon
Bryant Cannon tunes into our frequency to talk a bit about OXENFREE II: Lost Signals (which it’s too early to spoil), and a whole lot about The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (which it’s high time to start spoiling). We do in fact start spoiling the latest Zelda at 00:36:13. OXENFREE II:...
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A True History Turnip Exchange, with Jaku
Jaku is a security expert, a speedrunner, and a longtime builder of tools that expand how we interact with games online—from Crowd Control, which empowers streamers’ audiences to alter the state of the games being streamed, to Turnip Exchange, which vastly expanded the scope and functionality of...
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Drama, Not Trauma, with Jessica Antenorcruz
Jessica Antenorcruz has a unique, and also uniquely appropriate role on the upcoming drag queen fighting game Drag Her! She’s in charge of the game’s writing, from spoken lines to character concepts to plot?and she’s also in charge on posing and motion, using her own physical performances to…
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Somewhere People Want to Be, with Harris Foster
Harris Foster is the former Community Manager at Finji and the current Director of Communications at Good Trouble. Here he talks about where those roles overlap, how they differ, and what a purpose-built, welcoming community looks like in practice, online and off. You can follow Good Trouble on...
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Monsters and ‘Merica, LLMs and Luddites, with Ichiro Lambe
Ichiro Lambe has been making games since the days of MUDs and Palm Pilots, and here he talks to Drew about what’s new—from the possibilities of so-called AI (as exciting as they are fraught) to his strategic deck-builder of ramshackle autobattles, Million Monster Militia. You can wishlist Million...
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The Thing Nobody’s Talking About, with Andrew
Andrew anthologizes on by to talk about Indiepocalypse, as well as the alleged indiepocolypse. We talk about genre, curation, how to bring people together without Community-Building (capital C, capital B), and how to publish games without acting like a publisher. You can buy or subscribe to...
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I Was a Teenage VR Museum, with Sarah Northway and Colin Northway
Sarah and Colin Northway land on our own little art-loving exoplanet to wax philosophical about The Museum of Other Realities, I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, and Fantastic Contraption (as well as the spiritual successor to the latter, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom). PRETTY BIG SPOILERS...
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There’s Heart in the Art and the Boat Is Afloat, with Tanya X. Short
Tanya X. Short descends to our dunj to talk about her ten years as the Captain of Kitfox Games. We talk about about long-term studio survival, what so-called AI really is, and making systems-driven games with heart—as well as the necessity of a tea-witch in all functional partnerships. You can…
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Spacefarers, Shredders, and In-Home Lasers, with Chris Hanney
Chris Hanney is probably best known for his work on Space Pirate Trainer—and particularly on its multiplayer modes, from the Tetris-Galaga–Max Payne melange of VERSUS to the ambitious, tennis-court-scale hide-and-seek-’em-up of ARENA. Here’s a project that walks right up to the edges of what has…
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Hackers and Big Robots, with Paul Chamberlain
Paul Chamberlain originally wanted to be a hacker—which led him to work as a “technologist” (ooh) at the Signals Intelligence Agency and the Australian Federal Police, which led him to work in computer security and “information warfare” (ooh again) at Google, which led him to work on anti-cheat...
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More Sleepier Goblins, Fewer Shorter Meetings, with Anya Combs
Anya Combs joins our crowd (of guests) to talk about her work at Backerkit (and previously at Kickstarter and Nickelodeon), her saxophoning for the Funkrust Brass Band (among a fair many other bands), her love of tabletop, and her blood-feud with meeting culture. Backerkit’s new crowdfunding...
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What We Heard and What We Learned in 2022
Before we dive into this year’s interviews, we thought we’d take stock of last year’s, as has become tradition here on the ‘cast?connect a few dots, and provide a sort of a digest for anyone who’s missed some (or all!) of our 2022 episodes, and for first-time listeners. So join us once again as...
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New New Content, with William Pugh
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...
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Reality-Adjacency, with Star St. Germain
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...
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Being Real with Victor Burgos
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...
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What We Heard and What We Learned in 2021
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...
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A Changing World and How to Change It, with Mike Grieci
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...
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(Chef)Squad Goals, with David Galindo
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,...
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Trying Your Best and Helping Somehow, with Megan Fox
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…
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This Sense of Freedom, with Charles Bardin
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, […]
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Hope Too Is Rad, with Lauren Mee
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...
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On Replays, Remasters, and Remakes
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. […]
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As Joyously and Explicitly as You Can, into the Fleshy Breach, with Xalavier Nelson Jr.
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...
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The Mayonnaise Allegory, with Jeremy Warmsley
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...
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The Futures of Stories, with Russell Quinn
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...
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Designing for Empathy, with Anisa Sanusi
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...
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Experiencing America, with Bryant Young
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...
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What We Heard and What We Learned in 2020
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...
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What We Played (and What We Didn’t) in 2020
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...
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The Work of War, with Zach Barth
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...
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The Latest Generation
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 […]
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This Kindness unto Death, with Nick Guérin
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...
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Art, Honestly, with Brian Handy
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...
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Utopia by Necessity, with Nils Deneken
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...
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Space Chasing Together, Apart, with Bobby Fowler and Brenda Noiseux
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…
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Access and Challenge, with Greg Haynes
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...
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Everything Animal Crossing, and Everything Else
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...