Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 106

An iconic anime permeates The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Acclaimed animator Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) is a story of learning to live in harmony with nature—without destroying it. It’s whimsical and heartfelt, an unmatched adventure fantasy unlike any other animated film of its time. Nausicaä predated the continued magic that animation powerhouse Studio Ghibli (co-founded by Miyazaki) has produced over the years, including Miyazaki’s consistent environmentalist-focused fantasies and the low-key realism of Isao Takahata works. It stands as one of the single-most influential animated films of all-time. In the first full-trailer and gameplay footage of Nintendo’s highly anticipated The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, its style looks homeward.

While comparisons to the Western Elder Scrolls series are apt (regarding the game’s widened scope and new crafting focus), the new Legend of Zelda’s visual style remains anew. Not quite as adorable and strongly cel-shaded as the remarkable Wind Waker (2002), nor as bleak and drab as Twilight Princess (2006). Instead, Breath of the Wild finds its stylistic footing somewhere in between—similar to Level-5 and Studio Ghibli’s heartwarming RPG, Ni No Kuni (2010).

In the first lengthy footage revealed from Breath of the Wild, we see Link waking up (as he always has). But instead of resting in a bed, Link’s in a bizarre pool of sorts. Dressed only in bare boxer briefs, Link awakens in this ominous navy-hued shrine. From the get-go, this scene draws similarities to the mystical qualities of Nausicaä’s environment-endangered world. Link’s new world isn’t the Hyrule we’re used to—there’s new creatures and fantastical qualities at play. As Link emerges from the shrine, he views a full panorama of his volcano-inhabited surroundings. And boy, is it gorgeous.

Link must fully respect his environment, just like Nausicaä

One of the primary species in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind are that of the feared and endangered Ohmu. The humans in Nausicaä fear the Ohmu, but the titular princess does not. She travels to the Toxic Forest the Ohmu reside in in an effort to find a way the two species and co-inhabit the Earth in peace. In the first peek at Breath of the Wild footage, not only do environments appear Nausicaä-esque, but even characters themselves do. Perhaps most notably: the tentacled “Guardian” (which will also become an Amiibo when the game launches next year).

Among other aestheticized similarities to Nausicaä are the stylistic simplicity in the game’s Japanese logo, and in the Joe Hisaishi-musings of the game’s piano-keyed soundtrack. Breath of the Wild seems most keen to rest its roots in the massive open-world environment that’s promised. Link must craft, scavenge, and hunt to survive (even if the last is optional). Link must fully respect his environment—or respect the breath of the wild, as the game is titled—to reside in it, just as Nausicaä did. So maybe, just maybe, the implied Nausicaä-ness of Breath of the Wild isn’t just an outlandish surface comparison after all.

Nonetheless, The Legend of Zelda series has always been rooted in fantasy. But with each installment, Nintendo bends just what that fantasy entails. Link and Zelda can reside within parallel realities of the ever-changing Hyrule, just as they can in skyward islands where giant birds are the primary mode of travel. The Legend of Zelda has no rules to adhere by per game. Just that there’s Link, there’s Zelda, and there’s an evil to be eradicated. And I’ll probably cry at some point.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, releases on Wii U and NX in 2017. But will we ever find out what the NX is? I’m doubtful.

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Dishonored 2’s main attraction is still its arcane artistry

It was there, in the very first shot of Dishonored 2’s gameplay debut. Shown off by director Harvey Smith at publisher Bethesda’s E3 press conference earlier this week, the game’s first true appearance opened with slatted light falling across an unfinished sculpture, the chisel marks visible in the aging hardwood, depicting some tentacled monstrosity, some creature of the deep. Beside it a painting of a knight or soldier, hunched in the shadow of a tree, atop a huge boulder and surrounded by fireflies, or perhaps hidden, glinting eyes. Both were set in a series of rich apartments, filled with entomology collections, fossils and strange brass instruments. Among this all was a woman, tapping away at the elegant shape of a distorted belle époque typewriter, under the soft breeze of a steel fan.

From this opening tableaux the presentation moved onto more concrete things: descriptions of the new setting of Karnaca, a colonial outpost of heat and dust, demonstrations of the now-empress Emily Kaldwin’s supernatural abilities, and the openly structured stealth gameplay we have come to expect. The woman, her typewriter, the sculpture and the painting, however, remained unexplained. This enigmatic opening, imbued with the hallmarks of developer Arkane’s richly-drawn world, mirror some of the strongest aspects of the Dishonored universe.

Though the first game might have been hung around a simple revenge plot, the world it inhabited emerged as a complex construction of culture, history, and ornate masonry. More importantly, the game was eager not to explain the mysteries of Dunwall and the Empire, keeping its lore terse and equally mysterious. A list of months, an account of a whaler’s voyage, fragments of a song; its documents and books only provoked more questions in the player’s inquisitive mind. The significance of that mysterious first shot, with its artworks and artefacts is that it suggests that, for Dishonored 2, Arkane are extending this approach beyond their lore and into the art of their world.

a rich symbolism and a classical attention to light and anatomy

It is the same tentacled monster, or at least a creature of the same species. Snapping its jaws at the pinprick flock of birds that circle its head, it rises from the water like a Great White breaching, if a Great White were the size of a mountain. In the foreground three men stand on a rocky outcrop facing the monster. Two of them stand in shock, but the other, the one closest to us, seems to have an attitude of steely resolve. This painting, released alongside the unveiling of the game, is not your typical pre-production concept art. This artwork, and the others released alongside it, are assets from the game, art that will be found hanging in the studies and apartments of Karnaca at Dishonored 2’s November release. Elegantly hued and drawn with precise and studied brushstrokes, they suggest stories of mythical significance, historical events, and lost narratives. These are not the usual dull landscapes that line the walls of videogame interiors, but comprehensive works of art in themselves, ones that will feed into Dishonored 2’s great mysteries.

One of the paintings depicts two bodies, suspended in shallow water. Twisted around each another, bound with branches and beams, they form a surreal vignette that resembles a deconstructed crucifixion, one with no immediate explanations. Perhaps we are looking at a depiction of the great flood that befell Dunwall when the barrier broke, or a popular folktale rendered in macabre detail. Perhaps this is just an artist’s surreal flight of fancy, a dream made concrete in oils. However, this image is not just striking because of its potential web of connections with the game, but on its own terms as well.

Though there is much technically skilled and beautiful concept art in the world, most of it trades on scale, spectacle, and escapism. This piece instead possesses an intense focus, a rich symbolism and a classical attention to light and anatomy. Rather than taking fantasy tropes, romantic landscapes and cinematic grandeur as its reference points, its aesthetic points towards Goya’s rotting dead and Caravaggio’s sculpted bodies, its composition suggesting the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky or Alexei German. This is what distinguishes the art we can expect to find in Dishonored 2: its sophistication, its awareness of references, and its refusal to be instrumentalized as simple exposition.

Arkane, it seems, are eager to ensure that Dishonored 2 is not just good art, but that it contains good art. It’s not surprising then that they have sculptor Lucie Minne on staff, or that art director Sebastien Mitton focuses his team almost exclusively on fine art influences. This focus on artworks themselves as expressive tools is so often missed in games, as developers strive to build worlds, but leave them empty; without culture, without art, without poetry of any remark.

Classical paintings and sculptures are what bring our own history to life, with all its mysteries, inconsistencies and powerful symbols. Beyond documentary and historical study, it is great art that complicates simple histories, refuses singular authorities and communicates that which lies between and beyond the facts of the past. For game worlds to be denied this influence is to leave them unfinished. Dishonored 2, however it turns out as a game, is a project uniquely sculpted to correct that imbalance.

Dishonored 2 is coming to PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on November 11th 2016.

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WTF is going on in Death Stranding?

At the Sony E3 press conference last night, Kojima Productions unveiled its first game since breaking up with Konami—it’s a surreal action-adventure entitled (get this) Death Stranding.

Death Stranding features Hideo Kojima and Norman Reedus working together again, as the two had previously partnered up for the presumed-cancelled Silent Hills. Kojima’s projects and narratives have always been a touch odd, but with the release of the Death Stranding trailer audiences have confirmation that Konami was only holding him back. To call the trailer ‘different’ would be an understatement.

Is the game the baby?

The trailer features a naked Norman Reedus, curled up on a beach surrounded by dead sea creatures, and tied with a wire umbilical cord to a newborn baby. When he holds the baby it seemingly turns to oil in his hands, and then he stands—incision proudly marked on his belly—looking out over an ocean with a group of figures in cross-like poses over the water.

Was Norman Reedus pregnant? Male pregnancy is a frequent enough trope, from the domestic fanfictions on Archive of Our Own to the horror of the chestburster in Alien (1979). With the blackened oil and dead fish, it seems more likely that it would take after the latter rather than the former. Kojima has already dipped his toes into horror with Silent Hills, so his first post-Konami foray could easily be a horror game.

But then, is the baby real after all? Is the game the baby? Is Kojima the baby, birthed anew from Norman Reedus after his tumultuous break-up from Konami? There are no further answers here.

Death Stranding is set to be a PS4 exclusive and current has no announced release date.

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We try to form opinions on everything that happened at E3 – Part One

Every group has a clown. Here, at Kill Screen, we have two. Coincidentally, they are called Zach (Budgor) and Zack (Kotzer). We love them very much. Which is why we sit them down in front of a screen and force them to watch everything that happens at E3, trailer after trailer revealed before their tired eyes. Imagine that scene in A Clockwork Orange (1971), the one in which the Ludovico technique is demonstrated—it’s exactly like that. They scream at the videogame horrors, we put the drops in their eyes, they continue watching the videogame horrors. The following is what they managed to write down in between yelling this year.

Injustice 2

ZK: Finally, Batman will square off against Superman!

ZB: Why is everyone glowing?

ZK: It makes for better action figures.

Berserk

ZB: I fucking love Berserk. This teaser alludes to the most horrific thing that happens in the manga’s run, and there’s a lot of competition. How that leads into a Dynasty Warriors-like I have no idea.

ZK: If I had to guess? Murderin’.

Titanfall 2

ZB: Rifleman Jack Cooper: the gunman, the strong military boy who sets the world on fire, and his large metal son who carries him into war.

ZK: I’m so glad they’ve gotten around to adapting Tony Bill’s My Bodyguard (1980) into a videogame.

ZB: This multiplayer trailer is very serious for a mech game. It doesn’t have to be plausible, guys.

ZK: The fact that we’re getting three trailers for these new games doesn’t speak to the fact that we have too much game as much as too few editors. If a movie studio made a trailer exclusively for the goofy best friend I’m sure a producer would hit someone with a rolled up newspaper.

Prey

ZK: I too hate Mondays.

ZB: Half of this trailer: cool and exciting! The other half: I can only imagine How Fun shooting those shadow facehuggers will be over 20-odd hours.

ZK: I’m already concerned that this Prey will not have Art Bell.

ZB: All I remember of the old Prey was that the inciting incident involved your grandpa getting ground up or otherwise absurdly mutilated by aliens, which made the protagonist kinda mad.

ZK: Videogames, where new IPs are not new IPs.

Watch Dogs 2 

ZK: This game is horny for all the technology your parents have heard of. I can’t imagine 3D-printing guns in a videogame is more efficient than waiting for them to materialize on the ground.

ZB: As this is set in Disruption Capital Of The World San Francisco they really missed a trick by not going with, say, “DONE_IS_BETTER_THAN_FINISHED” or “MOVE_FAST_AND_BREAK_THINGS” as their slogans. I imagine the story asks the important question “who disrupts the disrupters?”

ZK: Why does a trailer about anti-capitalist tribes of computer hackers also feel like it’s trying to sell me running shoes?

ZB: So dogs actually feature in this game—the lack of dogs in the first installment being one of modern gaming’s greatest slights—so, I dunno, maybe I do like it now. At the very least, good boys have never been rendered with this kind of fidelity before.

ZK: I’m bummed that this isn’t coming out in the same year as Sleeping Dogs, like last time, so I can’t barge into Best Buy yelling “SHOW ME THE DOGS!” I actually became so complacent with calling Sleeping Dogs “Sleepy Doggies” that I once asked a clerk for it under that name.

ZB: By this point in the way-too-long Ubi stream, the Kill Screen crew had begun to hallucinate, saying “I feel slightly disassociated” and “Wait did the exact same guy just walk onstage?”

ZK: The Assassin’s Creed movie does look like a bad dream.

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands

ZB: Holy shit. This makes The Division look like The Battle of Algiers (1966). How do you make something this tone-deaf?

ZK: Do you think Aisha Tyler reminded us that Ubisoft is French moments before to soften the blow of a very, very American perspective of foreign diplomacy?

ZB: The presenter laid out a whole lot of loaded exposition before this remarkably enervating footage began, but the gist was: what if we could kill Mexicans in Bolivia, which is also now a “narco state?” Uh, also, “a massive dangerous open world.” Take a shot.

ZK: He kind of looked like a Peter Serafinowicz character in a bit about how knuckleheaded games about geopolitics can get. Bolivia, a charred river of ruins and hole-riddled infrastructure has been saved, all thanks to the Real American Heroes! And not to get too finicky about the visual narrative but why do we get a motorbike tire screech after they’ve finished turning all those drug mules into bullet mules?

ZB: I can’t tell if the voiceovers are in-game, if they’re feigned player chatter, or if the breathy, close-miked lust of a low-rent porno made its way onto the stream. I do hope for a moral choice about doing some of that rock. I mean, U-God would not have name-dropped Bolivian coke specifically if the stuff was bullshit, right?

ZK: CIA in the streets, Secret Service in the sheets.

For Honor

ZK: That water puddle does look pretty tasty.

ZB: I continue to have an inexplicable affection for this game. And also the creative director, who clearly snuck in a reference to doom forefathers Candlemass with “black stone legion” … because look at him.

ZK: This game is dedicated to everyone who cried for three uninterrupted weeks when Spike TV didn’t renew Deadliest Warrior.

ZB: Love the way this massive viking man hacks through lesser opponents. Just tossing them aside like handfuls of bird seed.

ZK: Why does the mysterious war goddess sound like a GPS? “Swing sword – left into – skull – in three – seconds.”

ZB: This could be Spartan: Total Warrior 2, honestly.

ZK: Did I ever tell you how frustrating Japanese history museums were? They’d have all these feudal dioramas set up, swords-a-flyin’, Sashimono-a-wavin’, displays could tell you all the numerical details, how many people fought, died, when, where, the weather, but if you asked anyone “why” they were fighting you wouldn’t get any answers. Anyway, I’m sure they had their reasons.

We Happy Few

ZK: This is the fate you seal when you allow your country to call flashlights “torches.”

ZB: My Life As A Splicer, then?

ZK: This still isn’t as dystopian a nightmare as that year they willingly played Ming Tea on music television.

ZB: What I’ve seen of this made it look like a pretty stifling stealth-em-up, but it gets points for having at least some actual ideas. I think.

ZK: The rubbish bins are shaped like the robots from the British space man show! What’s it called… Adrian Mole!

Observer

ZK: Is this a horror game or a simulation of cleaning up one of Moby’s old raves?

ZB: Love this. PT-ish, and I hope those jarring teleports are part of the game and not a concession to the game’s brief onstage timeslot. Is “mindhacking” scary, though? I dunno. Freddy Krueger’s kinda hacking your mind, right?

ZK: Freddy redecorated his boiler room to look like that bygone Yorkdale Mall store that sold Aeon Flux posters and dick-shaped pasta.

Vampyr 

ZK: Wait, are you telling me that being a vampire actually… sucks?

ZB: Wow. I was going to say some shit about Carl Dreyer … but I can’t top that.

The post We try to form opinions on everything that happened at E3 – Part One appeared first on Kill Screen.

Horizon: Zero Dawn, a classic fantasy adventure novel with added dino mechs

Horizon: Zero Dawn, which is probably better remembered as “that dino mech archer game,” was among the games displayed at yesterday’s Sony E3 2016 conference. It premiered a whole eight minutes of in-game footage, in fact—I know, very fancy.

It follows the story of a hunter named Aloy as she seeks to uncover what happened to her world. We might question the same thing. Consider this: the world of Horizon belongs to the hunter-gatherer era, but is accented by large mechanized dinosaur-like creatures that look as though they fell out of an anime rather than prehistory. Just what is going on here?

magical creatures replaced with glowing red mechs

This rather bizarre mixture of technology and primitive times means that Horizon: Zero Dawn feels like a combination of a classic fantasy adventure novel—with Aloy leaving a peaceful valley much as Bilbo Baggins left the Shire—and a 1980s pulp post-apocalyptic film, albeit with higher production value. Aloy is outfitted in furs and braids, but she also has a mechanized exploding bow and rides a mech steer through a lake with large creatures that look a lot like a brontosauruses (brontosauri?).

As Clarke’s law states: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This feels like the case in Horizon: Zero Dawn; the game is high fantasy, but with the magical creatures replaced with glowing red mechs. In a world of primitive and wild tribes, what is more magical than machines that corrupt at a touch, even if they do so with programming and wires rather than actual magic? 

Horizon: Zero Dawn is set for release February 28, 2017, and will be a PlayStation 4 exclusive. You can find more information about the game on its PlayStation page.

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Blood fetishists rejoice: the Vampyr E3 trailer understands you

The vast majority of videogames harbor a raging, barely concealable boner for violence. But it takes a special kind of violent videogame to step over that fine line into the realm of fetish porn: where violence is used for neither shock nor gore nor anything remotely resembling reality. Rather, the videogame snuff film aims to entice that primal, buried part of your sexuality that lusts after something without knowing whether you want to consume it, have sex with it, kill it, or some combination of all three.

That’s the Vampyr E3 trailer in a nut shell: the loving caress of a CGI-ed blood stream splattering across your face with the warm tenderness of a paramour. While certainly not the most expected followup from Dontnod, the same French team that brought you the heartfelt teen drama Life is Strange last year, Vampyr‘s bloodlust is only deliciously amplified by the studio’s dramatic left turn away from the innocuous and toward depravity. Brand consistency be damned. Vampyr is the crimson-soaked goth teen Max wishes she could have been, before abruptly realizing she’s a lot less “alternative” than she originally thought.

the blood spurting from his every orifice

Vampyr follows the story of Jonathan Reid, a newly-minted vampire living in a 1918 London so desolate and diseased that Bram Stoker would feel at home in it. Harkening to the campy grit of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful series, the game takes a folkloric approach to horror. Adding a Jekyll & Hyde layer to the classic vampire gothic, Reid struggles with the duality of his own existence, “torn between the Hippocratic Oath he swore as a doctor, and the bloodthirsty need to kill due to the monster within,” according to publisher Focus Home.

While adding combat to the mix, Vampyr‘s biggest connection to Life is Strange comes through in its focus on choices that cause ripple effects in the story, both big and subtle. As a vampire, the player is forced to make tough decisions come dinner time, choosing who to feed on among the humans that inhabit the city. Every NPC is a potential target—or victim, depending on your vantage point. The people you kill lead to ramifications in the city’s ecosystem—murder a good doctor from a prominent hospital, and you’ll watch the body count from Spanish Influenza skyrocket.

While the game appears to be set up as another choice-driven moral quandary a la The Walking Dead, the preview launched during E3 yesterday suggests a more abject ethical backdrop. The trailer so thoroughly eroticizes blood and violence that I honestly blushed while watching it in public. Especially when, midway through, the camera pans adoringly over a suspended figure in climactic slow motion: a blade thrusting through the poor guy’s innards as blood spurts from his every orifice. Whoa there, Vampyr, you haven’t even bought me dinner yet. Can a girl get to know you first before she’s expected to “be down” with the hardcore stuff?

For more info check out director Philippe Moreau’s blog post as well as Vampyr’s official website. The game is slated for release in 2017 on Xbox One, PS4, and PC.

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God of War is the new daddy in town

Upon seeing the new Norse mythology reboot of God of War at Sony’s E3 2016 press conference last night, I was ready to declare Kratos the new God of Phwoarr. I changed my mind pretty quick. Just because Kratos has a beard now doesn’t automatically put him up there with the lumbersexual appeal of Hot Ryu. And, in fact, he’s actually gone through the same facial hair evolution as Fred Durst—from gnarly-wannabe goatee to middle-aged man beard. That isn’t so cool.

Let’s not forget: Kratos is a profound asshole who, in his Greek myth form, had sex with women and then brutally killed them after. It’s hard to shake that history from a character, especially when we’re now being asked to find affection for him and his endearing relationship with his son. It’s the same issue that Uncharted 4 verged upon by making the cocksure Nathan Drake more relatable through quiet moments of him at home with his wife Elena (and especially the familial scenes of its epilogue), while also acknowledging that, yeah, this guy is a mass murderer who steals precious artifacts from their native lands while causing the destruction of pretty much everything in his wake. Tellingly, there’s a Trophy in Uncharted 4 called “Ludonarrative Dissonance” that you get for killing 1000 enemies. Uncharted creators Naughty Dog are well aware of the conflicting messages they present.

Kratos is influenced by the birth of his son

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Kratos has been a father. The original God of War had him so angry because he had been tricked by Ares into murdering his wife and daughter. He was a post-father, a has-been father, a father whose role was compromised by his own bloodlust. That Kratos, who churned the gods of Greek myth into a bloody butter, hasn’t entirely disappeared but he’s certainly a little mellower in his Norse myth form.

Rather than acting on pure rage, in the reveal trailer for this new God of War he spends his time haranguing his son while they hunt a deer. It’s the kind of shit that I (and I’m sure many others) had to endure in my younger years, my dad trying to teach me woodwork with a careful wrist and a firm screwdriver grip, while I pushed through the boredom and inevitable incompetence by banging everything I could find with a hammer (which I managed to break in half). Everything he tried to get me to do, I failed, or showed a complete lack of interest towards. Kratos and his son is an appropriation of this common kind of disjointed relationship. When Kratos pins down a gigantic brute and asks his son to finish him off with an arrow, it’s Kratos that gets the arrow in his chest. When Kratos tells his son to finish the deer off, he has to literally guide his son’s knife to the kill after he hesitates and says “I can’t.”

In other words, Kratos is all of our dads—he is the dad disappointed by his son’s inability and differing points of view. Kratos still wants to kill, kill, kill. His son, already facially scarred, sees a purpose in life beyond killing. That may give God of War one of the more interesting parent-child relationships in recent videogames. Other contenders include the aforementioned Uncharted 4, the upcoming Dishonored 2 and its daddy-daughter pair of assassins, the harrowing battles of Joel and adopted daughter Ellie in The Last of Us (2013) as well as Lee and his adopted daughter Clementine in the first season of Telltale’s The Walking Dead (2012), the ghostly dad trails of Rise of the Tomb Raider, and of course BioShock Infinite (2013).

Daddy of War

The reason for this rise in videogame daddies, it is speculated, is due to the directors and writers of these games becoming parents for the first time themselves. That’s certainly the case with Neil Druckmann, the director of The Last of Us, who said his own fatherhood shaped his thinking on the game, going so far as to describe it as being “about the love of a father and a daughter.” Unsurprisingly, Cory Barlog, the writer of this Norse myth reboot of God of War says that the new Kratos is influenced by the birth of his son, which he describes as “a tremendously transformative event that had [him] thinking about all kinds of change in life.”

“It is hard for human beings to truly change, but one thing that can really motivate us is the thought of being responsible for a life, and especially the life of our child,” Barlog writes. “The weight of that responsibility drives the instinct to protect, to want to prevent the mistakes of our past being delivered upon them. There is no end to the lengths we will go, no adversity we will not overcome, to be better… for them.” Expect Kratos and his son to go through some shit together, then. Should have called it Daddy of War.

God of War is heading to PlayStation 4. There is no announced release date yet.

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Overland is the road trip from hell, but it’s okay, there are dog friends

Finji showed off a new trailer for their upcoming game Overland yesterday as part of the PC Gaming Press Conference at E3. In order to be both accessible and complex, Overland has pared the tactics genre down significantly. It plays out on a series of nine-by-nine grids, where your squaddies have around three health tops, can usually perform two actions per turn, and—whether it’s a machete or a medkit—can carry only one item at a time.

There’s a lot of tense counting out steps

Each turn feels like a puzzle—how will we keep quiet and still collect the gas we need? How much longer can we keep using this van? When it comes down to it, should we leave behind Keith who talks in his sleep, or our adorable dog Cupcake? There’s a lot of tense counting out steps and inventory slots and gallons of gas, and then pulling the last teammate into the car as you drive off into the sunset.

The trailer highlights the landscapes and the survivors—both are randomly generated, and the modular character design (along with random backstories) means you can get even more attached to your particular crew members before the monsters rip them apart. While the earthy tones and board-game scale of the world are lovely to look at, Overland pushes players to move quickly to avoid fights and save supplies, surviving encounters by the skin of their teeth and making the drive west—towards possibly freedom and definitely more monsters.

Overland is also a demonstration of itch.io’s new early access program, called Refinery. Overland First Access started in April and this trailer coincided with the third round of early access keys. There might still be a couple left over at overland-game.com if you’re lucky.

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The layered, AR-embodied story of Tacoma

Gone Home, our favorite game of 2013, was a quiet marvel. Often slapped with the label of “walking simulator,” Gone Home was a revelatory shift in videogame storytelling in its non-standard exploration of a family via a house’s inanimate objects. Gone Home told a heartfelt coming-of-age tale about family and teenage sexuality during a time where such stories were rare in videogames. In Gone Home’s highly anticipated follow-up, Tacoma, The Fullbright Company have shifted their focus to a new venture beyond Earth itself: space.

In the newest trailer and gameplay footage for Tacoma, revealed yesterday during YouTube’s Live at E3 stream, humanity is still the focal point in the game’s narrative, just as it was in Gone Home. In Tacoma, the player, an astronaut named Amy, ventures onto an abandoned space station. While she encounters other entities, unlike the eerie quiet of Gone Home‘s mansion, they aren’t human. They’re tech-ghosts, sorta—remnants of a once lived-in past. Our protagonist must interact and watch over these ghostly beings as they interact with one another, to discover just what happened on this space station long ago.

When Tacoma was first announced at The Game Awards in 2014, it was initially hoped to be released in 2016. But through playtesting, as Fullbright co-founder Karla Zimonja explained during an interview on the livestream (alongside fellow co-founder Steve Gaynor), they discovered ways to improve the game—specifically, how it plays and resonates with the player—and thus delayed its original release window.

The ability to see a story from every angle—beyond just a single perception

In Tacoma, how the player engages with the story itself differs wildly from Gone Home’s simpler approach. “We have these [Augmented Reality, or AR] characters, that are these kinds of echoes of what happened to the crew on the station,” explained Gaynor. “And it’s great to be able to spend time with them, follow them around, hear what was going on with them during these moments in their lives. But what was more important for us was how does the player have control over that?”

On the Lunar Transfer System Tacoma, AR technology has left silhouetted imprints of the station’s inhabitants. As Amy, the player has the ability to utilize the AR technology, from pausing and rewinding a conversation, to moving around in the environment to witness new things. Tacoma is giving players the ability to see a story from every angle—beyond just a single perception, as we only see in our everyday lives. While exploring the impact and implications of manipulating AR technologies in doing so.

You can observe AR ghosts and play zero gravity basketball when Tacoma releases in Spring 2017 for Linux, Mac, PC, and Xbox One.

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Let the tears flow: The Last Guardian is coming out this October

I already want to cry. No, it’s not that The Last Guardian has a proper release date of October 25th now—which, you know, at last, it’s been 11 years since Shadow of the Colossus (2005) for crying out loud. It’s that the first minute or so of the game’s E3 trailer features the many whines and sobs of Trico while wounded or otherwise upset. I can’t take it. Poor thing.

This giant bird-cat-dog is initially frightened and fearful of the tattooed boy that we’ll be playing as, which is unsurprising given that it’s found chained up, isolated in a dingy cove made of stone. The boy saves it and, over the course of the game, the pair bond and become friends, I guess. That said, the game’s director Fumito Ueda did recently say that the “role of the creature is ambiguous,” further implying that it’s always going to be dangerous and not always a friend to rely upon.

“Are your wings broken?”

One of the reasons for that may become clear in the new trailer. Turns out that Trico isn’t the last of its kind, which is something I’m sure most of us had assumed given the game’s title. In the new trailer you can clearly see that there is another bird-cat-dog, it landing in front of the boy and stalking him like a fresh piece of meat. Oh, and this one’s horns are intact, whereas Trico’s have been broken off, presumably by its previous captors. Whether Trico will stand up for the boy and fight off its own kin or turn on him is a mystery we’ll have to settle in October.

But let’s get back to crying, shall we? After that encounter in the trailer, gentle piano kicks back in, the title swells into view, and Trico is seen rearing up in distress from up high overlooking a landscape, flapping its meager wings. “What’s wrong?” the boy asks. “Are your wings broken?” My heart! It’s a telling detail when combined with the beginning of the trailer in which we saw a large, raised circle of earth that surrounds the location the boy and Trico are trapped in—it seems the only way out of there is to fly over the top as the drop would probably kill you, and digging would take a long time.

The one other detail shown in this trailer is the knights that chase the boy and Trico around the raised wooden walkways and stone structures—they seem to be ancient and ghost-like, functioning to add further peril to situations when the boy is separated from Trico and therefore unable to fully protect him.

The Last Guardian will be available for PlayStation 4 on October 25th.

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