The new 'Pokémon' game thinks through the possibility of 'dying well' in an age of looming disaster and environmental collapse. Phoenix Alexander discusses Pokopia in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Database thrillers are a subgenre of knowledge games/thinky games/metroidbranias where the primary mechanic involves searching through databases and other sources for information to solve a mystery. Tumblr user velteris has complied an extensive list of database thrillers and similar games, including The Roottrees Are Dead, Type Help (recently remastered as The Incident at Galley House), and Her Story. (note: the first link is originally in Korean but translated by the website itself into English using AI)

Super Auto Pets is a free browser-playable auto-battler game. Buy animals for your team, combine them, feed them and send them into battle. Originally released in 2021, produced on a shoestring using emoji for graphics, it stood out for its appealing style, quick play and approachable mechanics and remains popular in a crowded genre. Quickstart: Play > Arena > Start.

Auto-battlers are a genre of game about recruiting and refining a team of some sort. Each round, the team competes against another player's without any direct control. With each round, winners are rewarded, losers punished, and you have new opportunities to upgrade and tweak your team until you hit the win limit or run out of lives and crash out. They rocketed to mainstream popularity in 2019 with the DOTA 2 mod Auto Chess. An official equivalent, DOTA Underlords followed. The creator of the original mod produced a standalone mobile-focused game which arrived late in the boom and saw comparatively little success. The biggest auto-battler is likely Hearthstone Battlegrounds - an experimental mode for the free-to-play Blizzard cardgame that ended up eclipsing the popularity of the original game, spawning a new subgenre of imitators and a crisis of "how do we monetise this!?" In comparison to its maximalist peers, Super Auto Pets is small, low-key, and approachable. Free to play in browser (registration required to track progress) or by standalone application. The game's supported by making more complex alternative rosters of animals available to purchase. The original core roster is always free, as are rotating weekly custom rosters. Because users of the same roster are matched against each other, players are always on perfectly even footing.

When a user uploads a Minecraft video to YouTube, it automatically gets listed under the Minecraft category. Many of these uploads received only 100 views. This site brings together those raw unseen gameplay videos: Minecraft Roulette

A project by Mike Wing