Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 122

Ace of Seafood is all too human

Borne onto Steam by a zephyr of Nipponese weirdness, Ace of Seafood is the fish-‘em-up I never knew I was missing. An unsolicited sequel to Neo-Aquarium: The King of Crustaceans (2012), the progenitor and sole occupant of the “armed-lobster-conflict-simulator” genre, Ace of Seafood takes the frenetic pace and visual spectacle of aerial combat and submerges it in the spumy waters of the South Pacific. The results, at least in terms of delirious, absurdist enjoyment, are never less than spectacular. Where else can you watch a school of laser-mouthed chinook salmon issue a salvo against an inexplicably resurrected Bismarck-class battleship? Ace of Seafood, in short, is glorious and utterly incomprehensible.

Novelty aside, Ace of Seafood joins a growing tradition of Japanese-to-English ports that take the end of the Anthropocene and subsequent rise of kingdom animalia as their setting. Hatoful Boyfriend (2014) imagined a future in which superintelligent but emotionally stunted avifauna rule our earthly roost, while Tokyo Jungle (2012) left a crumbing impression of its titular city to a menagerie of increasingly feral species. We’re told the mackerel-crowded seas of Ace of Seafood belong to a future in which “humans have all but disappeared.” The reasons for our disapparation are left unanswered, as is the manner by which fish and crustaceans alike evolved oral lasers. Some questions are probably best left open; any cogent answer would be a disappointment anyway.

Like its posthuman antecedents, Ace of Seafood is meant to be funny. And it is. But lurking below the humorous sheen of Tokyo Jungle and Hatoful Boyfriend were surprisingly thoughtful takes on what really separates humans from the ‘lesser’ beings with which we share this rocky sphere. At heart, both Tokyo Jungle and Hatoful Boyfriend were motivated by one of the thornier questions proposed by the philosophy of mind: what is it like to be anything other than yourself? Not ‘like’ as in ‘resemble,’ but ‘like’ as in what it’s ‘like’ for an other being to experience itself. It’s hard enough to ask what it would be like to be a fellow human, but with animals, we sink into a speculative abyss where language largely fails us. How could we describe the experience of a non-human entity using one of humanity’s defining tools?

Simulation, though, can do something words can’t. More than describing the experience of some ‘other,’ simulation enables us to embody an interpretation of the experience of an ‘other,’ however incomplete and imperfect that interpretation may be. Tokyo Jungle excels at exactly this, dredging up a kind of Heideggerian drama in which ‘play’ is inseparable from coming to terms with the relative strengths and weaknesses of a species unlike your own. The game requires you (animal-you, that is) to situate yourself in the world vis-à-vis things’ “tool-being,” the quality by which objects are understood only in relation to their potential uses. Everything—environments, other animals, etc.—in the game is instrumental in one way or another, organized and defined by the facts of your species. For Tokyo Jungle, what it’s “like” to be a pomeranian, hyena, or sika deer, is to suffer the burden (or is this a liberation?) of being unable to think beyond utility.

Ace of Seafood is not a game about what it’s like to be a fish

Yet Ace of Seafood deviates from this conclusion in that the game shows exactly zero interest in a fish’s distinctive qualia, of which the ability to shoot lasers of uncertain origin is only the most obvious sign. Ace of Seafood’s English translations are imaginative at best and incoherent at worst, so what little exposition the game provides should be taken with a hearty grain of sea salt. We’re told, though, that the player, in their “currently [sic], newly awakened state . . . [is] no more than a piece of seafood, but also blessed with talent in leading allies in battle,” and that “it is the future. The human mind is separate from the body, but has not yet forgotten all forms of life.” How, uh, enigmatic! But I choose to interpret these missives as evidence that the “consciousness” that animates the protagonist of Ace of Seafood is, in fact, a human “consciousness,” transmogrified, somehow, into the body of a chinook salmon (or sardine, or sharpfin barracuda, or…). The titular “ace of seafood” is, after all, seemingly the only fish in this particular sea with the capacity for leadership, tactics, and long-term planning.

In practice, the experiences this higher-order thinking enables are the only things that justify the handful of hours it’s possible to sink into Ace of Seafood. There is no meaningful narrative, only the slow acquisition of more “reefs” (read: bases) and “genetic material” (experience points). Weirdness be damned, Ace of Seafood quickly settles into the habitual rhythm of a conventional role playing game: explore, fight, upgrade, repeat. As more and bigger fish are rallied to the ace of seafood’s cause, increasingly fearsome foes—from hermit crabs, to tiger sharks, to (presumably automated?) submarines—are made vulnerable. As ace among seafood, you quickly come to think of your scaly allies in familiar tactical roles: sardines are ranged DPS, spiny lobsters are frontline tanks, et cetera. So there is, in a sense, an instrumentality to Ace of Seafood reminiscent of Tokyo Jungle. The difference, though, is that the ace of seafood is not motivated by the will to survive, but the will to power and conquest, those peculiar qualities of the human animal, the only creature known to wage war when extinction is not at stake.  

If Ace of Seafood’s preordained objectives are distinctly human, so too is the interface through which you pursue them. True to its name, Ace of Seafood sports a HUD that has more in common with the interior of a fighter jet than a fish’s experience of vision (whatever that may be). The assemblage of sensors that populate this interface—navigation points, indicators for roll, pitch, and yaw, a depth gauge, etc.—are modeled on the prosthetic extensions we humans have developed to enable us to act in environments that evolution did not deem necessary for our survival. Such inventions were designed to grant us ‘senses,’ or something like them, that we would not otherwise have. But what are these tools doing here behind and on the glassy eyes of a pacific chinook, which does by nature and instinct what we can only do through technology?

Ace of Seafood is not a game about what it’s like to be a fish. But it does, in oddly literal ways, imagine what it would be like for a human to be a fish, albeit a marauding and cybernetic one. But perhaps that’s exactly the point. As strange as it sounds, Ace of Seafood, down in its depths, is really about how we see ourselves—as human after all.

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Footage of the cancelled 16-bit Akira game arrives from 1994

If a cancelled game adaptation of the cult classic Akira (1988) is displayed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in an era before live-tweeting, does it even make an impact? Apparently so, as rare footage of the Sega Genesis and SNES title recently emerged in the form of a shaky camera on the showfloor of that 1994 CES of long ago. Now, the long-lost holy grail of a potentially good Akira game is bound to the dismal land of YouTube, for all to gawk at and wish the cyberpunk anime were a playable reality.

Akira is the rare classic that transcends genre-specific praise. It’s not just widely-acclaimed in cyberpunk fiction. Not solely in anime, either. It’s a landmark in both. Akira’s a rare film adaptation by the actual source material’s creator, Katsuhiro Otomo, himself. An immense feat in condensing his own vast material into a comprehensive, film-length form (opposed to six dense, full-length manga volumes). The anime version of Akira is a legend in its own right, just as the expansive manga series is (even if the film lacks its depth).

The recently-emerged cancelled Genesis and SNES Akira game isn’t the only interactive Akira-related property in existence, but it’s probably the only half-decent one. In 1988, to coincide with the film’s release, a Famicom visual novel adaptation of the film was released. Contrary to the exhilarating and intense action and violence that pulsates through the veins of the anime and manga, the visual novel fell flat. Plain and simple: it’s boring. Instead of high-stakes tension and consequence, the player makes lackluster choices. It’s essentially reading the most barebones Wikipedia description of a movie you like, but with all the fun sucked out of it. Akira also saw game adaptations in the form of a debatably awful Amiga game in 1994, and a bizarre digital pinball game entitled Akira Psycho Ball (2002).

There you are, speeding through Neo-Tokyo at night

Despite these past missteps, the newly surfaced footage for this particular Akira game is interesting in myriad ways. It appears to follow the film almost precisely, right down to the opening sequence of Kaneda and the rest of his bosozuku gang (the Capsules) hanging out at their regular seedy bar Harukiya. Where the visual novel failed the film in its tired, verbatim tendencies, the Genesis/SNES adaptation puts you directly into the shoes of Kaneda. There you are, speeding through Neo-Tokyo at night, chasing after your enemy gang the Clowns, sequential drums soundtracking your every swerve. There you are again, this time as Tetsuo, growing confident in your new found psychic powers and your flowing red cape, as you fend off enemies with powerful blasts.

It’s a shame this version of Akira never saw the light of the day. Despite a similarly nearly shot-by-shot Amiga game, this version was bigger budget, and looked a hell of a lot better. The 16-bit aesthetic works well for Akira, and is probably the best way to showcase the classic dystopian narrative. Especially in the early 90s, when it was in its prime as literally the most impressive animated film existing (even though its legacy hasn’t dampened a bit). Unfortunately, reality wasn’t written that way, and we’ll just have to make do with this shaky cam recording of Kaneda fighting the blobby mass of Tetsuo, and imagining that the game turned out okay.

We’ll never play this game and that sucks.

Nite Fite is a game that doesn’t need you

Playing videogames is overrated. This is, I’ll grant you, not a position that videogame writers tend to take. In varying measures, we are known to value continued employment, professional relevance, and the grudging tolerance of our readers. There are, however, pleasures to be gleaned from videogames even if you don’t play them.

Damian Sommer’s Nite Fite, which was created for the most recent TOJam (Toronoto Game Jam), is a perfect test of this theory. The game, which has all the trappings of an early 8-bit videogame, plays itself. Four abstract characters start in their own corners and swirl weapons in progressively larger radii. Hit another character, and that character dies. The longer a round lasts, the more the absurdly catchy music builds. For what it’s worth, the last character standing wins. The extent of your involvement is starting a new game and deciding when you’ve had enough. That’s it.

In both functional and aesthetic terms, Nite Fite most closely resembles the screensavers that served as an important source of computer entertainment in the pre-YouTube days. There was the one where pipes snaked around the screen until they had taken over all the real estate, like an NPC version of Snake. There was also the one where a ball bounced around the rectangular computer screen, producing patterns reminiscent of Nite Fite. There, too, the only real user input was in moving the mouse to end the performance.

There are many different ways to watch videogames. The most common forms—esports and let’s play videos—are in large part about the human element. The variance between Twitch streams or YouTube clips is overwhelmingly attributable to choices that players make. You are watching a videogame, to be sure, but the unique product here is human. In Nite Fite, however, you are really watching the game, so much so that you have to ask whether it’s really a game at all. I would submit, however, that there are enough choices here to qualify Nite Fite: you choose when it starts; you choose the win condition; you choose how much you’re willing to put up with in the name of a longer run. It’s basically a game, only you’re not doing the grunt work.

You can play Nite Fite on itch.io.

Nadia Was Here plans to dish out 8-bit existentialism

I’ll be honest: if the world imploded in a deadly apocalypse every 100 years without fail, I would probably live my life beneath my bedsheets, refusing to do any work or, actually, anything at all. Any mark I’d make on the world would be erased with my existence, so what’s the point in getting out of bed? Nonetheless, this is the premise of Nadia Was Here, a pixelated RPG in the style of the classic 8- and 16-bit eras, and which is currently on Kickstarter. It’s an RPG that seeks to explore themes of ennui, finality, and that desperate, human desire to be remembered across time, fueled by the hope that even the smallest actions can have a big impact on the world.

Created by Netherlands-based artist Joep Aben, Nadia Was Here takes place in the magical world of Amytah, where the land and its citizens are stuck in a time loop, forced to lose their history and memories, and thus rebuild from scratch every century. The story takes place in the final year before Amytah once again reverts to the beginning, and you play as three characters: an old and mildly egotistical warrior named Hogan, a mage named Tereshan who carries a dark past and scaredy-cat tendencies, and the eponymous Nadia who is a thief that believes life has no meaning but wants to change hers anyway.

a warm, vintage feel

Each character presents their own story depending on your actions in the game, and their charming character designs have me fawning over Nadia already. Not only that, Aytah is a visually stunning world for an 8-bit game, and its people are painted with an unusual, muted color palette that’s gentle on the eyes and gives the game a warm, vintage feel.

The game provides a point-and-click turned-based RPG fighting system where you have to keep repositioning the three main characters throughout each battle in order to optimally destroy an enemy. Depending on your party’s Energy bar, your characters’ strengths increase, and they can even summon creatures to their aid. According to Aben, you don’t need to grind, as there is no level-up system and battles can be avoided. Instead, your characters grow stronger by learning (or buying) new and more powerful skills and further by employing the appropriate weapons most effective against certain enemies.

Nadia Was Here and its characters struggling to establish a legacy, even in a world that may very well forget they ever existed, might just inspire you to jump out from under your bedsheets and make a mark of your own. Find out if that’s the case sooner rather than later by downloading the demo.

Nadia Was Here is currently up on Kickstarter, and if funded, will be released in November this year. Check out the Kickstarter here.   

Deidia, a love letter to broken games and abandonware

When Barch released DEIOS back in 2014 there was something immediately off about it. It proposed that you were a man. It proposed that this man assembled guns from hundreds of possible parts. It proposed that with one of these guns this man would shoot gods until they were dead. But all the guns were fucked. And killing even one of the gods proved to be near-impossible. DEIOS seemed too hard or too broken to feasibly spend much time with it. Yet this seems to have been the game and perhaps the experience that Barch wanted to create.

What to expect from a sequel, then? Barch has now announced Deidia, which he’s deemed “Deios II,” and yeah, it certainly looks the part. But the idea behind Deidia seems stronger—it knows where it’s coming from this time around. Barch still uses terms like “cyberpunk” and “glitchventure” to describe Deidia, as he did with DEIOS, but this time he’s not only pulling ideas from tech culture and sci-fi, but plotting them on a timeline.

“celebration of Lost, abandoned games”

The description claims that Deidia was created in 1994 as “part of a series of works to be ported amongst the thousand cassette independent Operating Systems.” The back story then goes that Deidia was quickly abandoned, forgotten, and left in a broken state. Only now, many years later, have “various post-amiga demogroups” found it and restored the uncorrupted files so that they work on modern systems. That’s what we’ll purportedly get to play when Deidia comes out. It’s still very much of the alternate world that Barch has imagined and presumably enters to channel his creativity, but Deidia has a solid concept, as a “celebration of Lost, abandoned games – and their unique enjoyment of their unique qualitys.”

Not only that, but where DEIOS also had some technical problems—I recall having issues trying to get it to launch—Deidia has had that addressed from its very inception. DEIOS was Barch flaunting his art skills, creating a beautiful psychotropic glitchscape of subterranean spaces and frothy lakeside archipelagos, and then inserting a game into that. The result was a clunky piece of software, which admittedly did fit in with the aesthetic, but ultimately proved too close to actual abandonware. And so, for Deidia, Barch has created the DeityRPG engine, which allows the artwork to be more of an automated process while he focuses on building levels to explore—”scenes can be developed in real time in order to build expansive areas quickly in what would of taken weeks is done in seconds,” Barch writes about his engine.

What this should mean for Deidia is it’ll provide a lot of lush, 2D pixel-art vistas to smoothly scroll across, running and jumping in a mad frolic. That much is evident from its trailer. In other words, it’ll play from start to finish without too much of a hiccup, fingers crossed. Aside from that, it seems Barch is trying to encourage people who do play it to leave “memorys” on DeityNet—his messaging program and Alt.BBS community. And it’s with this that Barch’s entire vision comes into focus. He’s not making a videogame meant to be played as a singular experience, he’s looking to create a whole abandonware realm, where broken and forgotten software is discussed, appreciated, perhaps even worshiped—where the pinnacle of videogames is their ability not to adhere to realism’s principles, but to enrapture us in an alternate dimension. In this case, it’s one where the “broken cable boys & girls of the internet streams” are brought together around an “experimentation of micro-genre games.”

You can find out more about about Deidia on Steam Greenlight.

A new and wild audiovisual instrument requires no skill to play

The Mayhem Machine, a new musical instrument created by Marieke Verbiesen from the Netherlands, allows for its audience to interact not only musically but visually as well. “It functions like a musical instrument, but instead of just steering sound, you steer animation as well, and the machine lets you be a composer,” Verbiesen said.

Verbiesen wants people to be able to create “mayhem” through a series of knobs, dials, and buttons that activate animations onscreen with accompanying sounds. Some of these parts require more than just pushing a button, such as the bit-crusher voice sampler and the bad guitar solo joystick. Another interesting facet of the Mayhem Machine is the noise generating finger pad. The functionality of the Mayhem Machine is discovered through playing and trying out all of the tools available to the player.

Verbiesen drew a lot of her inspiration for the visual aspects of the Mayhem Machine from the Golden Age of Cartoons. She said that the era created the meaning “Language of Vision,” which really brought together cartoon motion and sound (think Mickey Mouse whistling in that “Steamboat Willie” episode) and also that the era had been “striving for a symbiotic image and sound experience in which animation could allocate itself a new function in which animations could be created an experienced as a dynamic experience instead of a linear experience.”

create music without having any actual skills involved

Verbiesen also liked the cartoon “Jem and the Holograms,” which inspired her to become an electronic musician, since she thought that she could create music without having any actual skills involved. “Plus, I anticipated a powerful consumer market hologramming machine would be manufactured by the time I would reach adulthood, but alas…”

One final piece of art that Verbiesen looked at was “Auto-destructive art,” which is a type of art that can be created with natural forces, traditional art techniques and technological. Verbiesen tells us that “primarily a gorm of public art for industrial societies. Self-destructive painting, sculpture and construction is a total unification of ideas, sites, forms, colors, method, and timing of the disintegrative process.”

It’s easy to see how Verbiesen not only got her character inspiration for her animations, but for how the Mayhem Machine works as a whole—cohesively bringing together music and animation for a unique experience. When Verbiesen was designing the Mayhem Machine, she had made several versions to see what would fit her vision best. The base for her machine is a classic music sequencer, which she tells us is a device that can record, edit, or play back music. She also says she has a “slight obsession” with sequencers and samplers, as she’s produced electronic music herself.

Another source for her inspiration were the classic analog interfaces for audiovisual interfaces that were made between 1950 and 1970, such as an installation in Evoluon, which you might recognize as a building that resembles a flying saucer in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, which once held an exhibit on science and technology. Verbiesen points out a particularly famous installation, the “Poeme Electronique” in 1958.

It made its debut at the World Fair, and was an 8-minute piece of electronic music by Edgard Varese, by which Verbiesen said that it “…showed that art no longer had a closed character.” Shortly after the debut of “Poeme Electronique,” things like the “Mayhem Machine” started popping up, allowing the audience to be in control of what happens in front of them.

Verbiesen said that with the “Mayhem Machine,” she really wanted to create something that challenges users to experience the machine without explanation. “What we see in games is that players love to explore both the possibilities and the limits of what they can do and experience. “When I see people using my machine, playing with the tools, laughing and having fun, I get a sense of relief, because it’s like I’m having a conversation with them. They have understood what I’m trying to show, and they are talking back, in a way that we could never do using spoken language.”

You can find out more about Mayhem Machine over on its website.

IGX spotlights potential for the gaming industry in India

This article is part of a collaboration with  iQ by Intel .

On a warm November morning last year in Mumbai, a crowd of thousands of curious young people queued up on the street for a chance to try out the latest and greatest in videogames. Some were decked out in cosplay outfits, others came dressed like anyone else. But more than just a chance for free rein on new titles like Batman: Arkham Knight (2015) and FIFA 15 (2014), this was a big moment for videogames in India. And the Indian videogame community proved its merit in droves. “The Indian gaming ecosystem is at the cusp of a major transformation, and will soon become one of the key markets for developers and animators,” said Intel South Asia’s Marketing Director Aurora. “Rapid economic growth, increasing access to Internet and exposure to other cultures has resulted in a niche society that is embracing digital content and entertainment like never before.”

In example, the Indian Games Expo (IGX for short) was unveiled to an enthusiastic and ever-intrigued crowd of game lovers who had been waiting for the opportunity to show their love for playing to the world. While the videogame convention is a popular phenomena in other regions of the world—including Los Angeles’ E3, PAX Prime in Seattle, and Gamescom in Cologne—this would be one of India’s first.

“what I wanted to do was [create a space] where people could come and play”

Being the first entirely consumer-focused gaming expo in India wasn’t easy, though. Games are still not ubiquitous in the country in the way they are in the United States for a variety of reasons ranging from apathetic retailers to cultural stigmas. Another reason is the cost of games compared to the living wage. “We get all the big games, the popular games, but people aren’t aware of them. Gaming is not very big,” said the chief organizer of IGX (who wishes to remain anonymous for employment reasons). Lack of awareness doesn’t mean Indians are disinterested, however. In fact, as Sandeep Aurora explained, “Global games and characters are gaining popularity among the Indian youth, who are embracing this brave new world and breaking free from cultural stigmas.”

As testament to India’s burgeoning gaming scene, IGX managed to draw in 19,000 people in two days, double the initial organiser estimates. The story behind this success is, in a way, simple. IGX’s head organizer had experienced the spectacle and glory of gaming conventions firsthand while working as a journalist abroad, and wanted to evangelize the bombast of games back home. They went about liaising with big game companies such as Sony and Ubisoft to create an “experiential expo,” as they described it. Essentially a one-person operation, the organizer behind IGX took it upon themselves to expand gaming literacy in the motherland. “Since India did not have an expo or event where people could walk in and see what games are all about, what I wanted to do was [create a space] where people could come and play,” they said.

Image courtesy IGX

Gaming in India is still in the process of filling out and finding its wings, so the tenor of the show was curiously different from fan-centric expos found elsewhere. Unlike Comic-Con, for example, the yearly Mecca for comic book savants and pop culture nerds alike in San Diego, this show was intended for the newcomers. For the first time ever, people who wanted to understand games could come see for themselves what all the fuss was about. Many even decided to pick up a controller. “It’s funny because most of the people who came had never played a game in their life, so for them everything was so new and exciting,” the organizer said. “We had VR games and PC games and console games. All the options were there. [You could] play everything and see what you liked. If you like something, then, that’s it. You are a gamer, you know.”

Being a game convention located in a place where fewer people play games, IGX naturally had its share of doubters. “People didn’t think that a gaming event would work in India. Maybe a tech expo. But not gaming on its own,” the head organizer told me in reference to several major publishers whose absence was conspicuous. “We could have made it even bigger than this. But they didn’t [show up,]” the organizer told me, sounding annoyed. But IGX is not giving up. “We will go to them next year and say, ‘You weren’t here last year but come. Come this year!’” Though future plans are indefinite, IGX has every intention of coming back bigger and better in 2016 and even thereafter as an annual event. If all goes well, the whole country will soon be playing together.

Header image courtesy IGX

Badiya hopes to change Arabic representation in videogames

“Sometimes showing things just the way they really are is the biggest contribution you can make toward the cause,” explains Ahmad Jadallah, the director of development at Saudi Arabian studio Semaphore. He’s looking to help fix representation of the Arab world in videogames, and hopes that his team’s upcoming survival game Badiya will be able to do just that.

Badiya looks to capture a key point in the desert’s history as it takes place just after the events of the first World War. Those familiar with Saudi Arabia’s establishment as a kingdom will know this period as when the unification of Saudi Arabia was occurring. While the real life events had the area conquered by the House of Saud, Badiya will instead focus on human life during the violent period. One where it was a struggle just to survive.

Semaphore is viewing their upcoming title as a period piece, and are implementing aspects of the local culture (such as falcon hunting and pearl diving) into it. That said, they’re also looking to make a more relatable experience and not just an interactive history lesson. “With Badiya we decided to avoid using any names for people, places or factions [and] flags,” Jadallah told me. “The reason for this is that we wanted to focus on the core of the game which is survival as opposed to narrative.”

The rich culture is one of the reasons why Semaphore’s past games, including Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta (2013), have focused on the Arab world. “We have plenty of great stories to tell from this region be it from fiction or from real history and we want to tell them to the whole world and not just to the Middle Eastern gaming market,” said Jadallah. “There is a lot of misrepresentation in media with regards to this region and we aim to remedy that.”

“a huge task [that] puts us against decades of negativity in games”

While huge releases such as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) have tackled the region, it hasn’t always been the most accurate representation. Infinity Ward’s popular shooter infamously used Arabic in their map set in Pakistan, despite the area speaking English and Urdu. Jadallah says that there have been good attempts in the past, but “not enough research was performed and instead it was easier to just fallback to stereotypes in many cases.”

“One key element of representing culture is language and that has been suffering in games lately,” explains Jadallah. “[There are] flipped letters, broken words, misspelling, meaningless translations, and wrong voice accents to name a few.” This is especially timely considering that Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail recently pointed out how Captain America: Civil War failed to properly check the Arabic in the film’s United Nations logo.

Jadallah knows that changing representation won’t be an easy thing to push, as it’s “a huge task [that] puts us against decades of negativity in games, media and movies in general.” He views his studio as “part of a collective effort that should be made toward that goal.” One of the ways Jadallah hopes to educate is by making Semaphore’s games playable by as many people as possible. In order to do this Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta was translated into over 20 languages including Farsi, Hindi, and Malay. That said, Semaphore doesn’t want to limit themselves creatively, and are “planning to develop games with global themes and settings.”

When I asked how the Arabian desert would present unique opportunities for the survival genre, Jadallah said it would bring something new to the table as the genre often focuses on post-apocalyptic themes. “We aim to change that by presenting a realistic environment and in a rich time period where survival was really hard.” This means in Badiya, players won’t be battling against zombies, but against other humans and the dangerous desert itself.

Another area where the game is attempting to innovate is by presenting a procedural narrative within Badiya. While it won’t be available in the first playable alphas, the system will create “a unique story/quest is generated for every player.” This won’t be the end goal for players in Badiya, as Jadallah told me that just like in real life “the end of one story is simply the beginning of a new one.”

Badiya is releasing on Steam Early Access “soon” and will later come to PS4 and Xbox One. Find out more on its website and check out the trailer on YouTube .

Visions of hell: Dark Souls’s cultural heritage

It’s the trees; the twisted, whorled trees, their skeletal branches raking the belly of the looming sky. Those are Caspar David Friedrich trees, unmistakably corkscrewed and bent. They rise out of collapsing stonework just like Friedrich’s do, and are touched by the same fading light, decapitated by the same dusk shadow. They crowd like pious pilgrims around ruined churches and abbeys, as if, like Friedreich’s painted forests, they were about to pull those ruins to the ground. Perhaps a few branches are woven here or there between the stone work. Getting a purchase, working their way through a century-long demolition, an inch at a time. Not that these trees, or Friedrich’s trees are moving—they are frozen, locked in rigor mortis, clawed into the dirt and stone like the hands of an eternally dying man, scrabbling for his savior. These are Dark Souls 3’s trees, and they are, among a thousand other things, marks of a certain history.

The German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich is the kind of figure that is hard to escape. His influence describes a wide field of images and imaginings that stretch out from his paintings like roots set in frozen ground. In the early years of the 19th century he depicted landscapes punctuated by decaying ruins, images that were bleak and melancholy and reached towards the metaphysical, the sublime. Though his painting Abtei im Eichwald (“Abbey in the Oak Forest”) might appear now like a collection of horror cliches—its procession of shadowy hooded figures within a graveyard, towered over by an empty stained glass window and those skeletal trees—it was instead a pursuit of the spiritual, of the spaces of transience that might open up once we passed through the portal of death. It is a work that imagines our end, both as individuals and a whole, and the beauty in that truth.

Caspar David Friedrich, Abbey in the Oak Forest. 1809-1810

Dark Souls 3 is full of ends, though it might not be the end of the series. Its central thematic image is of fading embers—life dying out in a slow and sustained crawl. In its world, once great dragons turn to ash in the wind, pilgrims lie on the road where they fall, and even great warriors have turned against their own, fighting themselves in steadily decaying battles. It’s a fitting conclusion for a set of games marked by seemingly endless decay. Our first steps into this world in Dark Souls (2011) were as a deathless hollow, imprisoned to await the end of the world. Dark Souls 2 (2014) continued the trend, placing us in a kingdom whose very king wandered his own crypt in circles, like a restless sleeper. And though it might have been used as a brash marketing tool, the original “prepare to die” slogan might be recast as an existential statement of biblical proportions, a metaphysical challenge. After all, can one ever be truly prepared for death? In Dark Souls we realize that fallacy—the player never truly dies, only prepares endlessly.

a love of the macabre that goes beyond the reverence of romanticism

For Dark Souls 3 to turn so decisively towards the romantic influences of the series, where man is a fading figure in a landscape of natural processes of erasure, makes for a satisfyingly logical turn. It’s not only the sudden influx of crooked trees, growing from every ruin: the game even seems to explicitly reference what is Friedrich’s most recognizable painting, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (“Wanderer above the Sea of Fog”), with a single hollow standing on an outcrop above a similarly mist-bound landscape. Friedrich’s Wanderer is generally thought to represent introspection and a sense of the uncertain future that faces each of us. That Dark Souls 3 might remake the image with a deathless hollow at its center perhaps carries a sense of irony—the future in question being only an endless cycle of death after death, the metaphysical plane of peace and salvation remaining forever distant and unknown. Yet can such a line be drawn between a 19th century German romantic painter and a videogame of the new millennium? Can the influence be true across all those epochs, reaching forward or back past so many years? No, like Friedrich’s trees, the true path is far more twisted and whorled than that.

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Dark Souls, as a series, is never as somber as I remember it. Think of the skeletons. They jig from foot to foot, scimitar and shield in hand, like Harryhausen intended. And when they build themselves up from a pile of bones, they pick up their own skull and neatly place it atop their shoulders like Jack Skellington himself. Not that they aren’t terrifying in their ceaseless pursuit of the player, but they betray a certain kind of joyful horror, a love of the macabre that goes beyond the reverence of romanticism. Even High Lord Wolnir of Dark Souls 3, surely the peak of the series’ skeleton crew, seems to rattle his bones in a jingle-jangle way, his jaw hanging open in a perverse facsimile of a smile. But to place Wolnir and his kin entirely in thrall of these influences would be wrong. Dark Soul’s skeletons are not just the Children of Hydra’s Teeth, or warriors from Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Triumph of Death, they are Gashadokuro.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), Mitsukuni defying the skeleton specter invoked by princess Takiyasha

Gashadokuro are giant skeletons, formed from the gathered bones of the dead. Part of Japan’s rich folklore of yōkai—supernatural beings that haunt or help humans—Dark Souls’s skeletons of all sizes emanate from these tales, much like many of the other demons and monsters that make up the bizarre, alluring and terrifying pantheon of the series’ enemies. To talk of Dark Souls bestiary without talking of yōkai is to miss its true origin. It’s not that every one of Dark Souls’s enemies can be traced directly back to a specific yōkai, it is that all of them are crafted in the spirit of these creatures. This spirit finds perverse enjoyment in the weird and the supernatural, a sense of joy in the tricks of the dead and the demons of this world.  

There is no better illustrator of yōkai than Utagawa Kuniyoshi. His Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, like Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre (pictured above), play on the grotesque and the spiritual, reaching deep into popular Japanese folklore. His fingerprints are all over the world of Dark Souls. When you see the summoned skeleton leaning up out of the void in Kuniyoshi’s print, it’s not hard to imagine Wolnir’s ornate bracelets draped over its forearms, or golden crown sitting atop his head. Kuniyoshi was a master in his own time, perhaps one of the greatest printmakers of 19th century Japan. Eager to learn from both classical Japanese methods and a new influx of Western art, his work became known for its imagination and supernatural flair. Limited by strict censorship, he used monsters, demons, and spirits as a way to make hooded statements about the culture he saw around him. A non-conformist within a traditional form, his popularity was ensured by the a growing interest in the macabre in a rapidly modernizing Japan.

To find the ultimate Kuniyoshi creature in Dark Souls you might turn to the game’s humble Mimic. A tradition that stretches back to Dungeons & Dragons original 1977 “Monster Manual”, these sentient treasure chests have been embraced by Japanese games for decades. Yet Dark Souls’s mimic stands high above them all, with its repulsive lolling tongue and distended, emaciated body. Once disturbed, these comical monstrosities strut around like a cross between a clown in a Kabuki comedy and Buster Keaton, their prime attack a slapstick kick. Watching them, I can’t help but think of Kuniyoshi’s series of prints depicting monsters performing samurai plays; semi-satirical images filled with personified objects and bug-eyed freaks. It takes only a small leap of the imagination to place a gambolling Mimic among them, gurning from behind a paper screen.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi, The Monster’s Chushingura, 1839-1842

It is this cavalcade of grotesque creatures that brings life to the otherwise dead and dying world of Dark Souls. Again and again the series finds delight in its perverse creature designs—from the pop-eyed froggy Basilisks to the deformed and oh-so-white eyes of the troubling Wretch. Even in its darkest moments, the series presents an unhinged goofiness that has spread to its fans. It’s this that feels like a distinctly Japanese sensibility of its art history; a tribute to the tricksters and freaks of folklore. That attitude connects clearly to a history that has the work of Kuniyoshi at its center, producing print after print of the mystical and the comical, to fill the walls and bookcases of 19th century Japanese homes. Yet at the same time, that Kuniyoshi’s prints of yōkai were gaining popularity in Japan, another of Dark Souls’s great influences was in the early stages of his career half a world away.

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It’s hard to place a finger on the most recognizable reference to Gustave Doré’s incredible illustrations in the Dark Souls series. The artist, who in a short 50 year life span produced over 100,000 pieces, and illustrated many of the great works of world literature, haunts many a crooked corner of Lordran, Drangleic, and Lothric. Flicking through his illustrations for Dante Alighieri’s great masterwork The Divine Comedy (1320), it is impossible not to be reminded of the landscapes and demons of Dark Souls. On top of a sheer rock wall we see a clutch of figures, huddled like the Deacons of the Dark. In a shallow pool lie piles of corpses, twisted into an inseparable mess, like the horrible sights that await in the drained ruins of New Londo. The great king Nimrod chained, now a giant and no longer a man, echoes the lost ruler of Drangleic. It is no surprise that it is the first book of The Divine Comedy, Inferno, depicting Dante’s journey through hell, that brings us these images. Doré’s bleak, stony, and understated depictions of Satan’s kingdom so strongly contrasted with decades of medieval hellfire that had gone before. They are powerfully mythic images, ones that have been reached for again and again by artists in search of the power of the dark.

the concepts of loss, despair, and the allure of the occult

Though iconic now, the success of Inferno was never assured. Many of Doré’s supporters called it too ambitious and too expensive a project, and so, in 1861, driven by his passion for the source material he funded its publication himself. His risk paid off, and the volume and its subsequent sister volumes Purgatorio and Paradiso, depicting purgatory and Heaven respectively, became his most notable works. A critic at the time of its publication wrote that the illustrations were so powerful that both Dante and Doré must have been “communicating by occult and solemn conversations the secret of this Hell plowed by their souls, traveled, explored by them in every sense.” This plumbing of the depths of despair in search of beauty is the true thematic link between these illustrations and Dark Souls art. Like the monsters of Kuniyoshi, in Doré we don’t just see the aesthetic roots of Dark Souls, we see its themes—the concepts of loss, despair, and the allure of the occult sketched out in chiaroscuro black-and-white.

Gustave Doré’s (1832-1883), illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy

As well as being the year Inferno was first published, 1861 was also the year Kuniyoshi died. In his final years, he had trained Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, an exceptional artist in his own right, who would become the last master of the Ukiyo-e woodcut tradition. Both Doré and Kuniyoshi were working at the end of their own traditions, and within decades of their deaths, woodcuts and wood engraving would be replaced by lithographic and photographic techniques. Both artists were childhood prodigies and, though they never met, there is a certain underlying synergy between their work. Not only did they both make their names depicting a powerful mix of the modern and the supernatural, they both were populists, their works not designed to be hung on gallery walls, but to be collected in books, placed in homes, to terrify and delight the population. This, along with both artists’ incredible volume of work, is perhaps one of the secrets to their lasting influence—they didn’t court the academy or the critics, they instead captured the imagination of a whole generation within their respective cultures. This connection may have never manifested in their lifetimes, but in the Dark Souls series we can begin to see its power. Yet, From Software’s games were not the first to connect these Eastern and Western traditions in pursuit of the fantastic, and it is at their meeting point that we find the most direct of all Dark Souls’s influences.

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An absurd greatsword, so huge it can barely be lifted. An army of demons, grotesquely mutated, stalking a medieval landscape. Knights, dressed in ornate armor, hammering each other in swift and bloody combat. After reading Berserk it is impossible to return to Dark Souls without the adventures of Guts in mind. Kentaro Miura’s manga, first published in 1989, is like a blueprint for many of Dark Souls’s most distinctive pieces of design. It’s a connection that ranges from the general to the specific, with many armor designs, weapons, and enemies riffing off Berserk directly. Bosses like the iconic Ornstein and Smough look like they might have walked off the pages of Berserk’s first volume, while the Darkwraith Armor, Balder Armor, Dragonslayer Armor, and the Armor of Artorias are all tribute pieces to Miura’s work. But more than that, Berserk represents a twinning of Eastern and Western artistic traditions that finds its successor in the distinct art of Dark Souls.

Panel from Berserk, Vol. 1 (1990)

There is nothing subtle about Berserk at first glance. Pulpy to the extreme, its pages are a patchwork of sex and violence, drawn with a flair for sweeping swords and fountains of blood. Guts, possessed by an evil spirit and missing a hand, most obviously brings to mind Ash from Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead (1981). Meanwhile, the wandering swordsman plot is a classically Japanese story, taken from legends of Samurai and Ronin. Berserk’s world, however, is distinctly Western, taking place in a fictional version of medieval Europe, albeit one overrun with demons. It is this setting that hints at the inspirations underlying Miura’s stark artwork—a rich vein of gothic, romantic fantasy art that runs through the manga, some of it reaching back hundreds of years. Doré is more than present, having come to Miura through one of his heroes Go Nagai. Inspired by a Japanese edition of Doré’s The Divine Comedy given to him as a child, Nagai created Demon Lord Dante, a manga which would become the popular Devilman. Miura found both the Western mythology and the dynamic art of Berserk in Nagai’s work, pushing it to violent extremes in his own energetic linework.

the Souls games have settled themselves into a tradition that will outlive them

As Miura’s work developed, he also began to go directly to Doré and other, even older Western influences. The Berserk panel below is a reinterpretation of the third panel of the triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights by 16th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. For those unfamiliar with this master of the weird, Bosch’s unique hellscapes capture the surreal and playful side of the dark mythology of medieval christianity. His cast of demons, not dissimilar to the yōkai of Japanese folklore, are part carnivalesque celebration and part terrifying vision of eternal damnation. Miura’s desire to engage with such a reference shows the complex world that hides in plain sight within the bloody pulp of Berserk. Guts is a centerpoint in this rich network of references, tormented by demons in a facsimile of Michelangelo’s Saint Anthony in one panel, then posing like Rutger Hauer in Salute of the Jugger (1989) in another.

Kentaro Miura, Panel from Berserk Manga, 1989-1992

For the Dark Souls series, Berserk isn’t just an influence, it is a mirror image. The world of the Souls games may not have the same pulpy feel as Miura’s work, but it possesses the same appetite for rich historical influences recombined into new and powerful images. The visual sophistication of the Souls games doesn’t only come from the talent of its artists or the clarity of their vision, it comes from a willingness to seek inspiration from every source—not just games and pop culture with their readily accessible fantasy tropes. It’s hard to think of another game series that so readily quotes the masters of its art; confidently repurposing the weighty aesthetics and themes of gothic romanticism and yet still maintaining a taste for the weird and the comedic, for parody and perversity. The resulting tapestry only gains from the mixing of Doré’s damned and Kuniyoshi’s demons, Friedrich’s trees and Miura’s swords. And through this process, the Souls games have settled themselves into a tradition that will outlive them.

Kuniyoshi and Doré may have been working in the dying days of their respective forms, but they were also laying the groundwork for what would come next. Ukiyo-e lived on in the birth of manga; illustration in the invention of the graphic novel. The separation of these two masters, at opposite ends of the Earth, has been slowly eroded over decades of fantastic art and fantastic artists, those who saw only connections, and sought to pursue them to their end. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to think of the world of Dark Souls as a realization of the promise of those two distant greats, and many others between. The hellish congregation of Louis Boulanger’s satanic mass, Kawanabe Kyōsai’s demonic visions of bloody slaughter, the dungeon-like imaginary prisons of Giovanni Piranesi, even the apocalyptic landscapes of John Martin. Traces of all can be found in the DNA of Dark Souls. Not as a single strand, stretching back into the past, but as a vast network, a root system of imagination and inspiration and a desire to pursue the macabre wherever it leads. As Dark Souls 3 suggests, one day this will all be history, stone carvings of another age, and when that happens it will be Souls games that will be seen to have carried the torch, lighting a new path deep into the enticing dark that surrounds us.

Ancient Syrian arch destroyed by ISIS recreated with 3D printing

The issue of whether replicas in restoration are or should be desired is a hotly debated topic. With a replica of Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph, which was destroyed by Daesh (Isis) last October, being unveiled in Trafalgar Square as part of World Heritage Week, this debate is brought back into the fore. The restoration, which is spearheaded by The Institute of Digital Archaeology (IDA), is intended to be an act of symbolic defiance against terrorist acts of cultural destruction.

Deborah Lehr, who heads the Antiquities Coalition, a private advocacy organization in Washington, told NPR “Unlike other militant groups, the Islamic State has created a ‘Ministry of Antiquities’ in areas under its control. We’ve never seen it on this scale…” The idea behind this restoration project, in light of this unprecedented destruction, has been to highlight that because of technological advances, the loss of such cultural artefacts does not have the desired permanent affect which terrorists are leveraging. In his official statement, Roger Michel, the director of the IDA says:

“Monuments – as embodiments of history, religion, art and science – are significant and complex repositories of cultural narratives. No one should consider for one second giving terrorists the power to delete such objects from our collective cultural record. When history is erased in this fashion, it must be promptly and, of course, thoughtfully restored.”

“I think archaeologists should stay out of this”

However there have been critics of the restoration, who raise concerns with the project’s intentions and outcome. The political elements at play in this are considerably complex. As Mark Altaweel, a near-east specialist from the UCL Institute of Archaeology, told IBTimes UK, “I think archaeologists should stay out of this, it would seem ridiculous to rebuild the site in the middle of a civil war but – that said – ultimately it is a Syrian decision to take”. There are also the ethics involved with creating a restoration which is completely artificial, with no tangible link to the original historical site, other than its appearance. If this is to become a larger scale restoration of the Palmyra area, it is not something which can be undertaken lightly.

This is not the first time that high tech restorations of destroyed cultural items has been publicly undertaken. When hearing about this story I was immediately reminded of the 3D light projection last year which was used to temporarily “resurrect” The Buddhas of Bamiyan, which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. Although this project was privately pursued and funded, it was done with governmental and UNESCO support. The IDA are also not the only ones currently pursuing the issue of pressing archaeological preservation through technology. Project Mosul has sought to create 3D images of various, now lost, artefacts.

As complex as these issues of restoration are, in terms of their politics and ethics, what this project shows is that we are eager to use our newer technologies to assist us with bringing back what has been lost. This concept begins to cross over into what’s called “virtual heritage” and the possibilities are so much greater than your average digital tour of a museum.