Note: This article was originally published in Well Played 3.0 in 2011. I wrote about the book here at the time, but the old links are dead and these days you actually have to buy the book or go wading through academic PDF sites if you want to read it. So I am reposting it […]
RETURNAL was touted as one of PlayStation 5’s premier AAA exclusive games, and it plays the part well. An incessantly beautiful game, RETURNAL’s vibe is a nightmare alien forest strewn with stone relics of an ancient society, INDIANA JONES raids AVATAR’s Pandora. A novel location in part because lush is a hard adjective for rendering […]
DEATHLOOP is the latest in Arkane’s catalog of Thief-inspired systems-as-narrative games. As a fan of this genre I deeply enjoyed DEATHLOOP, particularly the way it makes my style of play much lower-stress than in other immersive sims. I am the type who wants to stealth perfectly and maintain a moral high ground, and DEATHLOOP gives […]
The principal trope of the zombie genre is that in an undead-infested apocalypse, it’s the other humans you need to worry about. A zombie plague is a natural disaster, an epidemic, an indiscriminate force of nature that is driven by neither logic nor passion–it just is. What the genre has to teach us is that […]
In 1967 yakuza filmmaker Seijun Suzuki was fired from his job at Nikkatsu Company for being too weird. He made 40 films in 12 years for Nikkatsu, each allocated less than 40 days of production from start to finish. Steadily his movies got stranger and stranger. At one point in Tokyo Drifter (1966), the entire set […]
I wonder, did they assign chapter and verse to the stones and grasses, marking the geography with a superimposed significance; that they could actually walk the bible and inhabit its contradictions? – Dear Esther As a game developer interested in the mechanics of storytelling within my chosen medium, I have found myself fascinated with the […]
I gave an IGDA talk a few years ago about the horror genre’s roots in Adventure games. You can draw a line of influence, I argued, from Colossal Cave Adventure and King’s Quest all the way through modern titles like Slender and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. This line, which crosses through all of the survival horror classics, is best understood […]
It’s pretty hard to write about Until Dawn. It is probably the highest-end horror game ever made. The art, cinematography, acting, and overall presentation set an exceptionally high standard. In addition to this impeccable production quality the gameplay is pretty great as well. The controls are good and the camera system is a glorious evolution […]
Surrealist games have it rough. Surrealism is about taking your assumptions and twisting them in a way you did not expect. You should come away with the cogs in your head grinding furiously. The best surreal titles juxtapose the insane with the mundane to show you their contrast and, if you’re lucky, a startling similarity […]
“These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness.” — William Gibson, Johnny Mnemonic If you’re an indie developer, making a pixel art game is pretty attractive. First and foremost, it’s pretty cheap and easy to develop, at least in terms of art production. A one-man-band dev can put together […]