Paul Thomas Anderson’s nearly three hour long Pynchon-adjacent revolutionary drama One Battle After Another is a hit. We here at Aftermath give it our stamp of approval and recommend you see it in the most elaborately large format you can. Isaiah and Chris sat down to chat about what they liked.

(This article contains some spoilers for One Battle After Another )

Isaiah: So, as someone who just watched their first Paul Thomas Anderson film a couple weeks prior in There Will Be Blood , I didn't walk

Rhythm is important in Baby Steps . If you’re to get Nate—the playable man-child in Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, and Bennett Foddy’s latest game—anywhere, you’re going to need to find your rhythm. Fiddling with a controller’s triggers, walking up, around, and through Baby Step ’s many obstacles is not easy. But it is possible, and made all the more satisfying by the game’s dynamic sound design that creates music from both nature and the

Microsoft, which remains a BDS priority target after barring Israel from deploying in service of Palestinian mass surveillance, and which has multiple employees protesting its involvement in the genocide, stepped in it again today. If it feels like it’s only been a few months since the last time Xbox was at the vanguard of Microsoft’s ceaseless woes, that’s because it has . Mass layoffs and studio closures, turns out, did not sufficiently satiate Microsoft’s almighty Line – which remains buoyed, increasingly , . So

Candy Crush Saga player Ruben Valenzuela is suing King and Activision Blizzard over a $250,000 Candy Crush Saga tournament, . Valenzuela and his lawyers allege in a complaint filed last week in a Los Angeles court that King “tricked players” into believing they had better chances of winning than they actually did, leading to players spending much more time and money than they might otherwise.

Valenzuela wrote that King did not accurately supply players with information necessary to assess their chances—how many players advance through each

Remember the whole dust-up about whether Balatro is ? Perhaps inspired by that situation, roguelike CloverPit also insists it’s not gambling. In the most basic sense it’s not–there’s no money involved–but by forcing the player’s attention to the mechanics of slot machines, the wants to raise questions about what gambling is and what makes it so insidious. After a handful of hours with it, I’m not sure it answers those questions yet, but it’s definitely made

For a long time the AirPods Pros have operated in a very specific classification for me. They aren’t as well tuned as the best IEMs, nor do they have any of the “good” codecs that nerds love, but if you have an iPhone and want something that “just works” then they are the one you get. They are a perfectly acceptable tool, and I was more or less satisfied to replace lost buds and broken cases Ship of Theseus style but was in no rush to replace them.

Hello there, fans of city-builders and/or idyllic 19th-century Mediterranean getaways! You two very specific groups of people need to know that I spent the entire weekend playing Town To City and did little else, because I couldn't stop playing Town To City .

It's a game that shows the people of its world, much like our own, tired of the brutalities of modern industrial life and yearning for greener pastures. So it puts you in charge of those pastures, a town

I’m to draw . Tatsuki Fujimoto’s manga magnum opus doesn’t just echo scripture—it shreds it up, duct-tapes it back together, and creates a new theology in its wake that’s equal parts unhinged and mirthful.

With anime dropping on Crunchyroll to prep fans for , I’ve been deep in the trenches rereading the manga, looping its , and bracing myself for a cinematic gut-punch. While the anime is still adapting the first part of the story—dubbed Part One

Q-UP (a game whose title I literally just got while typing this sentence, humiliatingly) is the latest from the folks behind numbers-go-up game Universal Paperclips . It’s a sendup of esports, both the industry surrounding them and what the sweatiest players demand of them. It’s got a out now on Steam; I played it for an hour on Saturday morning and… did well? I have no idea, because I didn’t really do all that much, even though I