the get out kids
Imagine, for a moment, you’re a host in the midst of a group conversation with seven other people. Every few moments the focus shifts from person to person—each of them asking you a different question or opening up a new line of thought. Now, to really sum up the experience of playing The Get Out Kids—a mobile adventure game currently exclusive to Apple Arcade—imagine that, whenever a new person initiates a line of dialogue with you, they refer to you by a different name.
All of these names, to be clear, are yours. Or at least they should be. So the experience is, understandably, a bit disconcerting—requiring continuous adjustments to slide yourself into a new point of view while remaining, in all intents and purposes, the same exact person you were before.
You Might Have Missed: The Final Station
It’s as if the player is walking over an anthill, unaware that this complex and convoluted warren exists beneath their shoes. And over the course of the game, this conceit will be used again and again and again, sometimes with added flourishes or small tweaks to its simple formula. Every level is circular, just as…
You Might Have Missed: Night in the Woods
About an hour into Night in the Woods, a modern adventure game from a small team called Infinite Fall, Mae Borowski reuintes with her high school bandmates for practice. Since she’d left for college, their drummer—Casey—had disappeared, and their guitarist and singer, Gregg and Angus, had recruited another old classmate named Bea to take both…
You Might Have Missed: Hollow Knight
My favorite moment in Hollow Knight came about a quarter of the way through my forty hour playthrough, when I descended through the Fungal Wastes and found myself in a giant pit at the center of a hidden village. Three mantises—for Hollow Knight’s kingdom of Hallownest is a land of insects and bugs—sat on tall wooden…
You Might Have Missed: Rune Factory 2
A game’s qualifications for this loosely-defined series of mine usually begin and end with my belief that not enough people have played it. And while Rune Factory 2 is far from an indie game, I doubt the cross-section of audiences that enjoy both intensive dungeon crawling and Harvest Moon-style farming-and-relationship simulators is all that large.…
You Might Have Missed: The Handmaiden
There is no such thing as a perfect film. But, at least in my view, there are films that are in and of themselves and as pieces of their respective genres the best they could possibly be. And as you can probably imagine, I could count all of them on one hand. That’s not necessarily…
You Might Have Missed: Strange Desire
I post a lot on here about culture, and games, and writing that makes me think—in essence, about all the things that make me love studying what it is I study. But every once in a while I turn off that part of myself, like I did a few posts back with Where Do Birds Go and my tribute to Gravity…
You Might Have Missed: Where Do Birds Go
While I usually write about culture here—stories, narratives, movies, videogames, the like—I thought I’d do something a bit different today. Namely, I thought I’d share with you my favorite strip from xkcd, a decently well-known webcomic (at least among nerds) that specializes in weird, dry humor and science mixed with sarcasm. However, this one’s a bit different. …
You Might Have Missed: Thomas Was Alone
It’s no secret to anyone who’s ever booted up Steam that there are a lot of indie games in the world. I’ve even heard the suggestion that Valve should curb Greenlight—their crowd-sourced independent access program—at least for a while since it lets through so many subpar projects that it makes sorting the diamonds from the rough seemingly impossible.…
You Might Have Missed: The Get Out Kids
It all feels like The Get Out Kids intended itself to be a fairy tale. Or at least, it mashes a fairy tale ending onto the skeleton of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, without ever quite checking to make sure the two had fit together. It at once wants to be a grim, spooky horror story,…
Can’t find what you’re looking for? Use the search form to search the site.
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.
Sunset Over Ithaca 