Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 127

Dark Souls III and the color purple

You first encounter them in the Undead Settlement. It’s a moment of incongruous reprieve: having rolled and dashed your way through a hail of human-sized arrows and swarms of rake-wielding peasants, you come up a hill and into a dark, somber cathedral that all but invites you to stop and smell its flowers. With their violet hue and soft yellow centers, these delicate beauties scattered around the building seem more unlikely than any of the monstrosities you’ve been busy butchering. Dark Souls III’s kingdom of Lothric has, up to this point, largely displayed the same taste for earth tones favored by the depressive landscape architects of Lordran and Boletaria. You’re left to wonder at the explanation for this sudden infusion of color in the dreary wasteland of the settlement.

You can hazard some theories if you pay attention to your inventory. Dark magic is presented in a spectrum of purple, so that it can be distinguished from white lightning, flame, and the typically dark environs. Purple is the color of the items you use to relieve poison effects, and the color of the build-up bar for poison and other types of damage. And then there is one particularly duplicitous miracle—”Atonement”— illustrated in purple. Using this miracle earns you increased attention from your enemies; its description benignly encourages you to kiss their swords in the interest of forgiveness. Tempting offer—but what does it have to do with those flowers?

As you look closer in the hall’s wan light, you see that they are not sprouting from the stones themselves, but from a system of roots that have wedged themselves into the veins of the cathedral. When you follow the roots and the flowers multiply, your finely-tuned sense of imminence tautens. There’s something unpleasant at the end of this trail. And you wouldn’t be wrong, except that what you find behind the inevitable archway is also sort of comical—a scattering of Hollows, kneeled in worship before an enormous, anatomically suggestive tree. This is the Curse-Rotted Greatwood, one of Dark Souls III’s optional bosses. Pick a fight and you’ll find that it cares little for its faithful devotees, stomping all over them as it tries to prevent you from piercing its bulbous vulnerables.

The Greatwood, we learn, was a “spirit tree” sullied by locals desperate to seal away the curses that plagued them. Since they died, it presumably didn’t work. But this makes the religious rites a bit mysterious. Perhaps what these Hollows are praying for is atonement, and a benign sword to end their murderous subsistence. They might be imploring the mighty oak for greater power, and darker magics. Or maybe they are simply pleading for relief from the poison that—enacting nature’s revenge—it leaked into the soil they once tilled.

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From this point on you play arboreal detective, delving progressively deeper beneath Lothric’s ashen surface in pursuit of the curses’ roots. You pass through the requisite poison swamp in Farron Keep, only this swamp—unlike Blighttown or the hellish Valley of Defilement from earlier entries in the Souls series—is actually not such a bad place to get bogged down. There are no flowers, only regally decaying leaves spotting the hills with bronze and crimson and pools of purple poison offsetting sickly tan stalks. It’s all rot and decay, but once again possessed of an unworldly beauty that speaks to something higher—or lower, in this case—at the fount of the dreck.

Tradition and order can only be maintained at the cost of blood

Finally, you hit rock bottom. All the toxic, earth-scorching curses emanate from a single room in a large cathedral, which puts a Romanesque spin on the Thicknesse-era Ministry of Magic. Here, you find no beasts or mighty lords—only a gaggle of ancient, withered clerics who give up the spirit rather indifferently. As you render their faded violet robes one by one, the deacons pass a radiant, purple light—a soul—back and forth between them like some unnatural beach ball. Hack one down, he bounces the ball along, sacrificing himself for the continuance of a heritage long corrupted.

It’s a brilliant image, and a fiendish variation on the principal theme of every Souls game: tradition and order can only be maintained at the cost of blood, and above all the blood of those who maintain it. To link the fire is to unite the polis, and no one here has the patience for a social contract. But those who held the power in earlier series entries were usually queens, knights, or monsters—here, the game’s most wide-reaching and perfidious evil is a particularly decadent strand of Catholicism. The story of this domination is, as with everything else in Hidetaka Miyazaki’s singular art, told elliptically and symbolically. It would be easy to miss altogether if you were solely focused on surviving. But this speaks to one of the qualities that distinguishes Dark Souls III, even from its venerable predecessors: the visual detail now conveys as much to the attentive eye as the series’ famous item descriptions always have to the curious mind.

So it is that when you follow the trail of those “Deacons of the Deep” to the lost city of Irithyll, you are greeted by the only other purple flowers found anywhere in the game. There are fewer this time, and it’s a different species, but that shade is unmistakable. It’s a reminder. This place is cursed, poisoned, sullied with sin. But also: this place is holy. If poison represents one end of the symbolic spectrum in this game’s use of purple, the other end belongs to the grandeur and beauty that the great ecclesiastical traditions of the Medieval period were capable of before their decline.

These two meanings converge in Irithyll, where you find that an order of priests has infested and overtaken a once-mighty, once-secular kingdom whose true name will be familiar to Souls veterans. Here we meet Pontiff Sulyvahn, a formidable pope who encourages his knights to use kamikaze tactics. And we meet Saint Aldrich of the Deep, a cannibal who may or may not be in the process of devouring The Dark Sun Gwyndolin when you meet him. “Aldrich” seems to derive from the Germanic name “Aldric,” which, in Old German, means “old power.” “Ric” would then be a distant cognate of “Reich.”

Miyazaki has previously explored themes of religious decline and oppression in Bloodborne (2015). But where the narrative of that extraordinary game is steeped in the anxieties of modernism, Dark Souls III keeps its feet firmly planted in the Middle Ages—specifically, if this part of the narrative is any indication, the Byzantine era. This relatively neglected period in western history overlaps with what self-aggrandizing Renaissance historians would call the Dark Ages, but Byzantium itself—known as Constantinople in the high years of its power, and now as Istanbul—was one of the most stable and intellectually rich empires in human history. It was also the first empire founded on the authority of the Christian church. Whatever the real connection between these facts, the Byzantine era is typically thought of now as a period of decline, slotted between the grandeur of the Roman Empire and the genius of the Renaissance. If we take Anor Londo as our Rome, Irithyll can then be seen as a mythologized version of what Byzantium represents to a modern historical consciousness.

Authority, even holiness, composed from the remains of mass slaughter

Pontiff Sulyvahn and Saint Aldrich wear purple because it was the color of authority in this period of history. Coveted by Roman magistrates and emperors, it was adopted by the rulers and bishops of Constantinople and the Holy Roman Empire. The reason is simple—they were the only ones, in that time, who could afford it. Purple is a rare color in nature, and the only method of producing it in large quantities back then was costly and time-consuming. A particular type of mollusk that secretes a purple dye to sedate prey had to be captured and either “milked” or crushed to remove the dye. But since each shellfish only produces a tiny amount, the poor creatures had to be sacrificed en masse—12,000 mollusks for every 1.4 grams of dye, which was about enough for the lining on one garment. There was reportedly quite a smell. A thin veneer of authority, even holiness, composed from the remains of mass slaughter. It sounds like something out of Dark Souls.

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The color purple has a wide range of symbolic connotations across different cultures. To some it signifies magic, mystery, and the numinous unknown. Others associate it with creativity and individuality. It is a sign of mourning in Britain, Thailand, and Italy, where some actors will refuse to appear onstage wearing the color. And the LGBT community has adopted it as a symbol of pride. In Japan, however, it principally has the same meaning that remains dominant in western culture—power, wealth, nobility.

It seems undeniable that Miyazaki wants to gesture at some of these themes. At the same time, I think it is a mistake to interpret Dark Souls III as a critique of religion, the way many critics interpreted Bloodborne. Miyazaki makes popes and priests into enemies, yes, but he also makes foes out of crippled crows. It seems just as likely that the auteur is creating combat scenarios to indulge what is obviously a deep appreciation for certain virtues of western religious traditions—their impersonal devotion to lineage, pursuit of higher knowledge, and architectural imagination.

If the admirable elements of organized religion coexist in the game with oppression and decadence, it’s because these coexist in the world outside the game. And they are mutually implicated in the color most closely associated with ambivalence. Purple is poison, and toxic, and glorified suicide; purple is grandeur, nobility, and sovereignty. Purple is sin, and the transgression of those who give penance. Purple is the flower whose toxicity is its beauty.

Ambiguously purple, too, are the mad phantoms. A new addition to this Souls entry, these shady avatars have the unique ability to attack anyone in the world they’re summoned into. You and your enemies alike—they swing both ways. I’ve made the mistake of employing these so-called Mound Makers just once. It was back in the Undead Settlement, in fact, at another point of worship. Hollows kneeling before a burning tree. As I gleefully set to with my companion, hacking through the poor, prostrate undead, I was too busy counting souls to wonder what they were praising, or why. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so upset when, my back turned, my purple compatriot took the opportunity for a mortal backstab. What felt like betrayal may have only been atonement.

How Japan shaped nostalgia in games

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

For Shigeru Miyamoto, the inspiration for The Legend of Zelda (1986) series lay in the natural beauty of his hometown of Kyoto, Japan. As a young boy, the Nintendo designer behind Mario, Zelda, and Pikmin would take hikes around nearby forests, rivers, and old Sonobe Castle ruins. It was on one such hike that Miyamoto happened upon a cave that fascinated him. He returned to it a few days later, shook off his nerves, and, armed with a homemade lantern, journeyed into its mysterious depths. It was this feeling of discovery and awe that stayed with Miyamoto throughout adulthood, ultimately inspiring the games that would change the medium forever. From Chrono Trigger (1995) to the Persona series, nostalgia went on to characterize many classic Japanese games

Closely linked to the idea of “mono no aware,” nostalgia describes a ‘gentle sadness’ at the impermanence and transience of life. A sensitivity to nostalgia is even prominent throughout Japanese manga and literature, often invoking a sense of longing for the good old days. Due to the nation’s large cultural influence over the medium, a love for nostalgia spread globally in games, influencing designers everywhere for years to come. As evidenced by the success of Toby Fox’s Undertale last year, childhood continues to be a source of inspiration for gaming’s most talented creators.

The small French studio Atelier Sentô, designers of the painterly Coral Cave, are also among those modern creators who took Japanese nostalgia to heart. “Like many people, we discovered Japan through its culture: the films, music, art. Japanese culture as we receive it in the West is interesting because it’s very different from what we know and at the same time it’s strangely familiar,” said Oliver Pichard, the team’s background artist and programmer. The Coral Cave  is drenched in the warm glow of happy childhood memories. Set on a small tropical island off the main Japanese archipelago, it follows the adventures of a willful Okinawan girl as she discovers its secrets.

They found they had developed a taste for Japan’s unique nostalgic identity.

The sandy atolls and gently ebbing waters were painted by hand in watercolor, giving the player a tactile experience. The designers pointed to their deep affinity for Japanese manga artist Daisuke Igarashi, particularly his beautiful lines and portrayals of young people in the nautical world. There is one scene in the game in which the hero builds a bridge out of coral, while catching glimpses of a ghostlike woman from the Edo period beneath the waves. It immediately brings to mind the classic animated films of Studio Ghibli, yet another universally influential staple of Japanese nostalgia. A genuine sense of longing for these Pacific islands is evident throughout The Coral Cave. When the team was living as exchange students in Japan back in 2010, they were captivated by the quaintness of each island.

Pichard and Cécile Brun, the game’s character artist and animator, said they soaked up as many traditional festivals as possible while in Japan. In Okinawa, they were even given hand-drawn maps to find their way around. The tiny coastal getaway of Minna-jima in particular captivated them, as an island so minuscule one could walk from shore to shore in just a matter of minutes. “There was only one road on the island so we kept bumping into the same group of kids all the time. We started thinking about what kind of adventures they could have on that tiny piece of earth lost in the sea. That’s how the project was born,” Brun reminisced. When Brun and Pichard returned to France, they found themselves pleasantly haunted by memories of these islands. They found they had developed a taste for Japan’s unique nostalgic identity.

They missed everything from the wooden houses that aged quickly from the humidity, to the traffic lights that played children’s lullabies. Even the bone-chilling Siberian winds of Niigata that kept everyone indoors didn’t seem so bad in retrospect. They realized how the Japanese had “a different way of seeing life and time—a deep sense of the ephemeral nature of things,” said Pichard. They found their recollections took on an almost dreamlike quality because of it. So they did what artists do: manifested their dreams into reality. “Too often games are based on other games and not on personal experience,” Brun said. “It is difficult to care for a game with no emotion. It’s important to make games based on something that’s really important to you.”

Perhaps that focus on recreating profound experiences is exactly what makes Japan such a powerhouse in the gaming world. Japanese creators, particularly those of games from the 80s and 90s, bring the earnestness of their childhood memories into the work. Born out of a culture with such a strong sense of nostalgia, legendary designers like Miyamoto inherently understood that Hyrule needed to be a place that players would want to revisit again and again—like a favorite memory.

The many faces of grief in Fragments of Him

Content warning: Death, PTSD, graphic imagery

I don’t have many memories from when I was eight-years-old. It feels so long ago, and if I try to think back on them now, they tend to blend together. But there’s one night I’ll never forget, even in the smallest details. We had pizza that evening. I got an A+ on my class project that day. My mom had the news on when I got home, and was staring at a routine story about a car accident with the kind of concentration usually reserved for medical breakthroughs and presidential scandals.

It was the day I lost my father.

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Fragments of Him, coming to Steam on May 3rd, is a game about these kinds of memories. In it, the player takes on the role of three people in grief—a grandmother, an ex, and a lover—as they mourn the loss of a man named Will. Wherever they go, they see ghosts of him, unexpected reminders in small mementos and old hallways. It’s an experience too many of us have dealt with, and according to the creators, it’s something “all of us will have to face someday.” But despite its universal nature, it is also deeply personal in how it manifests.

For my mom, it was the reluctance she felt when she couldn’t stand to get rid of any of my father’s old clothes, trying to hold on to anything that reminded her of him. For me, it was the relief I experienced when I moved out of my mom’s home, happy to leave behind the place where I once felt so much pain. For my grandmother, it’s the tragic twist of fate she feels whenever she looks at my face, only to see her deceased son’s features staring back at her. It’s something that no one person can speak to entirely, which is perhaps why Fragments of Him isn’t about just one person.

In a new release trailer, we see just a few of the many different faces grief will take in the game. Will’s grandmother isolates herself at home to dwell on Will’s childhood. Will’s ex reminisces to no one in particular about how she used to feel when “it was just them.” Will’s partner, Harry, isn’t sure how to begin coping, surprised by how often little things remind him of Will. Each of these responses is treated as valid, and are given equal space as stories worth telling.

Fragments of Him isn’t about just one person

There’s a fourth perspective, too, one we previously thought might belong to the person responsible for Will’s death. The new trailer, however, reveals that this perspective is actually that of Will himself, with the player listening in on his final thoughts as he walks unaware to the accident that will take him from his loved ones. It’s a twist that has me wondering what was going through my father’s mind as he drove home from work on the day he died, before his thoughts were cut short when an errant semi-truck broke across the highway median and struck him before he could react. He died instantly, or so the police told us, meaning that he was blissfully unaware of his own passing. Ironic as it sounds, I have a sneaking suspicion that Will’s thoughts will be the happiest in the game, as he is the only one not caught up in grief, and I hope the same was true for my father.

It’s a perspective not often seen in grief narratives, not only of unburdened joy, but of the deceased person themself. More often, these stories tend to sideline their “person of honor” largely as a source of characterization for others, or as an inciting incident for a larger, semi-related narrative. Think of Julia from Firewatch (who, though not deceased, is treated in a similar fashion), or countless superhero origin stories. Rather, Fragments of Him insists that this is just as much Will’s story as anyone else’s, emphasizing that he left this world having given to it more than just tragedy.

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The day I turned 20-years-old, my mother slept in. She had just picked me up from college the previous day, and I assumed she was understandably exhausted from the drive. I did, after all, have to take over for her halfway through. Content that she was snoring loudly and thinking she was safe and sound, I decided to go about preparing for my birthday party, eventually leaving to pick up my birthday cake. When I came back, the house was silent.

It was the day I lost my mother.

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Like the characters in Fragments of Him, I’m no stranger to seeing ghosts of loved ones. They frequently visit me in my dreams, and sometimes when I’m awake as well, taking the form of graphic flashbacks. It started in the months following my mother’s passing, and though they have become less common now, they still occasionally interrupt me when triggers come from nowhere to remind me of my pain. What follows is a series of rapid images that pierce through my mind with no control. I see myself dropping my cake and running to my mother’s room to discover her lifeless body. I see our dogs cowering in the corner of her room, scared and confused. I see myself calling 911 and thumping on her chest to their instructions, hoping to bring her back even if it was too late. I see the police coldly questioning me as if I had killed her.

death isn’t something you get over

To this day, I feel guilty for leaving, for not calling 911 sooner. My therapist told me that I wasn’t responsible, that I couldn’t have known, that I checked on her before I left. The doctors told me that it was heart disease, that it was inevitable and there was nothing I could have done. They were trying to make me feel like less of a failure for something ultimately out of my control, and even though I know they’re right, it’s still difficult to believe them.

I don’t see—or imagine—ghostly figures walking around my house like the characters in Fragments of Him. Partially because I no longer live in the house where it happened, I’m sure. But I recognize how debilitating the unwanted reminders can be, and how hard it can be to want to give them up despite that. The guilt is infectious. It gives the death a purpose where it previously had none, and it allows you to dwell on the image of the deceased a little longer, even if in the worst possible way.

Perhaps the most relatable part of the trailer for me is a brief moment towards the beginning when Harry snaps back at those who would tell him to find closure. “People talk about getting closure,” he says. “But his story was only half-written.” When my dad died, so many of our closest friends told my mother and I that we would eventually get over it as well. But death isn’t something you get over. That’s repression, and it only makes it worse.  Instead, you have to learn to live a healthy life alongside the grief. However you express it.

Fragments of Him releases for Steam on May 3rd. An Xbox One version is planned for release shortly after, with a PlayStation 4 version coming later this year. To keep up with the game, visit its website.

Go on a virtual tour of Don Draper’s apartment

Don Draper, John Hamm’s suave protagonist in the dearly departed series Mad Men (2007-2015), didn’t so much as work in advertising as embody the field. At an instinctive level, he understood that aspirations wrapped up in objects need to be made tangible, and that advertising is a means to that end.

The Draper home, then, was a central part of the man’s riddle. It wasn’t a showroom—no home ever is. Carpets don’t stay white forever. But if it wasn’t simply there to sell its contents, it was still there to sell an idea or a lifestyle or—failing all that—the man himself.

That goes a long way towards explaining why Don Draper’s apartment feels so strange when rendered in 3D. You can visit if you have a second; it’s on the website of a company named Archilogic, which promises to “turn your floor plans into 3D virtual tours.”

Not everyone can look at a blueprint and see a lived-in space

So it does. You can walk through the apartment’s stylish halls, the jerky navigation roughly emulating Don Draper’s drunken staggers. It’s all a bit cold, really—colder than the lived-in version, which is hardly a paragon of domestic warmth. The edges are crisper and the surfaces are harder. If this is life in 3D, it isn’t exactly hospitable. For good measure, you can click on the various pieces of furniture and find out where to buy them. One can’t help but suspect that Don Draper would be proud of that.

Archilogic isn’t advertising per se; it’s architectural visualization. Po-tay-toe/Po-tah-toe. Architectural visualization, like advertising, seeks to get around the limits of the layperson’s imagination. Not everyone can look at a blueprint and see a lived-in space, just as not everyone can look at a list of specs and see their new family car. So we tell stories, we visualize, anything to make the future seem tangible. Insofar as we cannot all read blueprints or extrapolate from spec lists, such information isn’t entirely unhelpful. The world, however, always seems to be crisper in 3D visualizations and devoid of human complications.

That is how buildings on popular design blogs come to have trees perched on their balconies. Sure, why not? The ArchViz aesthetic, even when applied to Christian Grey’s house, is meant to evoke possibilities but ultimately flattens the world. Each tour and house comes to look the same. You may not be stumbling around the house with Don Draper’s drunken nihilism but, in a sense, Archilogic’s tour will do the trick.

Start your virtual tour of Don Draper’s apartment right here.

Fixing Australia’s game rating system for the digital age

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

Australia is notorious for its strict approach to media bans and classification, coming down hard on videogames in particular. While the Australian Classification Board (ACB) has softened since the introduction of an R18+ adult rating in 2013, the list of banned games continues to grow. The more recent among them range from the hyper-violence of Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, to the juvenile humor of South Park: The Stick of Truth. Aside from bans, many criticized the classification process itself, seeing it as a long and costly burden on creators and ineffective at cautioning consumers.

As digital distribution became a widespread practice, the ACB found itself unable to review the increasing volume of games, which could total in the thousands every month. Beyond just lengthy waiting periods, creators found it difficult to accommodate the expensive fees, which could run as high as $5,000. Some designers even circumvented the law altogether, releasing unclassified games digitally. When Dennation Games’s Hotline Miami 2 was refused classification in 2015, lead designer Jonatan Söderström invited Australian fans to “just pirate it after release. No need to send us any money, just enjoy the game!”

But pushing creators to sell unregulated content online, where parents have limited control over their kids’ activities, forced the ACB to rethink its strategy. Classification systems are in place to inform parents and ensure age-appropriate consumers, and the system was failing. According to one parent who wishes to remain anonymous, their child—who is usually fine playing games aimed at more mature audiences—wasn’t prepared for the emotional weight of 2012’s story-driven The Walking Dead videogame. “We thought it was just another mindless zombie shooting game, he’s played those before. But The Walking Dead forced him to make decisions about killing normal people, even kids not far off his own age!”

A new system hopes to address the concerns of both creators and consumers, while also encouraging more in-depth content review. Created in partnership with the International Age Ratings Coalition (IARC), the tool allows studios to classify their own games by filling out a survey. After translating the creator’s responses into a corresponding classification, that’s it. No mess, no fuss: the game is released into the world. Importantly, self-classification also arms consumers with enough context to make an informed decision. “If you look at it purely from an information point of view, there’s a significant difference in the amount of information consumers [are being] armed with,” said Ron Curry, CEO of the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association (IGEA).

With most of the bureaucracy removed, Australian creators can release quickly and legally on the digital storefronts partnered with the IARC, like Google Play, Nintendo eShop, Windows Store, and Firefox Marketplace. “We really like the fact that we can submit ratings this way,” said Kamina Vincent of Tin Man Games, a Melbourne studio focused on interactive fiction.

Yet, almost a year into the pilot of this new system, many improvements remain to be seen. Namely, Vincent points to the need for partnerships with larger gaming platforms like Steam or Xbox Marketplace. She also notes that the IARC survey is less accommodating of games that don’t fit the usual mold. “Some of the questions are very much geared for games like [Grand Theft Auto], rather than a text based game. Questions regarding gore and the like are for a much more visual medium and so for those questions we tend to err on the side of caution.” Also, although the pilot solves digital distribution issues, boxed physical releases are still subject to the old system (at least for the time being.) According to Curry, this is due to “a high level of nervousness from states and churches in approving the legislation.”

a step forward for the Australian gaming community as a whole

But the tool’s successes are undeniable. Curry confirmed that in June 30 2015, before the pilot began, around 500 games had been classified by the ACB. Which pales in comparison to the 380,000 classified by the IARC tool in a mere six months. While the pilot is scheduled to end on June 30, Curry speculated that, due to its success, it only “makes sense to let [the new system] keep running for now.” In all likelihood, the Australian government’s stance on content with extreme violence, sex, and incentivized drug abuse will not change any time soon. In fact, increasing the rate of classification will only increase the amount of banned titles.

Ultimately, the new system does not change the rubric for classification, but instead improves the method. But the IARC tool promises to be a step forward for the Australian gaming community as a whole. By shedding some of its more archaic methods, the ACB is learning to serve creators and consumers in the notoriously unregulated world of online media. “Coming into this year we know that around 50% of content that’s sold is sold digitally, and we know that [number is only] going to increase,” said Curry. “Using IARC bypasses the question of ‘Do we need to classify all content?’ Because we just will. It’s that easy.”

The time has come to drop Drake off his own album cover

In Aubrey “Drake” Graham’s home city of Toronto, there are only two seasons: Winter and Summer. “It’s a very unique place,” said the rapper in an interview with Zane Lowe on his Beats One radio show OVO Sound Radio. “You start to value your days a lot more, when seven months are spent in the icy cold.” Views, the “fourth” studio album from Drake, dropped on Apple Music and iTunes lat last Thursday night (after a blitzkrieg of two mixtapes in the past year alongside some summertime diss tracks and singles—but none of them official, of course).

Views, as described by Drake, is a journey through the seasons of Toronto. The album’s good. It flexes Drake’s ever-growing ego and wish for the women in his life not to embarrass him at the Cheesecake Factory. More notably, the impeccably polished record firmly establishes his longtime producing partner Noah “40” Shebib as a force to be reckoned with. Without 40, Views would be nothing. Maybe Drake would be nothing, too.

Drop Drake is a sort of air-borne sibling to QWOP, flailing limbs and all

It’s weird that, less than a decade go, we were watching little Drake grow up as the dauntless Jimmy Brooks on Canadian teen soap Degrassi: The Next Generation (where in one late season episode, he aptly stole the spotlight from his aspiring-musician girlfriend Ashley by rapping over her track, mirroring his real-life rise to fame as he eclipsed former mentor Lil Wayne). He started from the bottom, and now we’re flinging the grown-up, well-established rap monger from Toronto’s CN Tower in an interactive version of the album cover for Views, created by comedy and animation group Super Deluxe. In a decade, Drake has gone from teen soap star, to rap and hip-hop crooner, to living meme.

As you goofily drag Drake across the interactive Views album cover—entitled Drop Drake—he bemoans quips from his own hits. A miffed “not again” (stricken from part two of his Meek Mill-diss track saga “Back to Back”), to the longer spit “I got enemies / got a lot of enemies” (I don’t want to be an enemy of Drake, but here we are). Drop Drake is a sort of air-borne sibling to QWOP (2008), flailing limbs and all, while poking fun at the painfully obvious photoshopping of Drake sitting atop the tower.

As the seasons pass in Views, as do the unlockable outfits in Drop Drake, showcasing the most important looks of Drake’s career (or at least, since 2014). There’s Courtside Drake in an oversized sweater and grandpa-esque glasses, sitting courtside at a Raptors game. And of course, Hotline Bling Drake, but you already know that look. These are in addition to other “unlockables,” achieved from the amount of far flung drops, such as the Tony Hawk game-reminiscent Big Head Mode and even a floaty Zero Gravity option.

Drake’s Views is essentially Take Care All Grown-Up Edition. A side-step away from the vicious, hotel-recorded If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late (2015), and from the banger-filled Nothing Was the Same (2013). It’s Drake returning to his got-rich-off-a-mixtape roots, which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on where you fall on the Drake-fan-spectrum. He’s still easy to poke fun at, evidenced by the giggle-inducing glee of Drop Drake. And if this rap thing falls through, at least he can find continued success as the meme-generating human being he is. Come on, he literally said “what are thoooose” on a track on Views, so anything is possible for the 6 God now.

You too can fling the 6 God around Toronto’s CN Tower in the browser based Drop Drake, all you have to do is click here !

Stephen’s Sausage Roll and the blue collar heroes of puzzledom

I’m a clunky Fisher Price toy on an island made of rough patches. My body, hands, and clothes are probably toxic, blistered and greasy, as I have spent hours pushing and shoving big honkin’ sausages across pipin’ hot grills in taxing and inconvenient ways.

I’m not wearing an apron. I am wielding a big fork; a mighty claw that swings in heaves. When raw, these sausages are wormy and pink. Halfway done they look like stogies. Upon being cooked you can smell the continental breakfast through the screen.They are easily the biggest sausages you’ve ever seen in a puzzle game. I’m assuming my character’s name is Stephen, because the name of the game is Stephen’s Sausage Roll.

Now I am staring down a dark tower of pork. Sausages and sausages stacked up like Jenga blocks. I could wedge a passage within the meat and hide in there forever; my fleshy fortress of solitude. I honestly don’t know where to start with them. The grills are on the other sides of barriers and narrows, and all of the viable options to move the sausages are paralyzing: surgically shimmy them across, knock them all down and make sense of the chaos, pierce them with my fork (it makes a toot noise when you puncture the meat casing), even balance the raw meat obelisk on my head (wearing it like a foul fuck-you hat in Beach Blanket Babylon’s hypothetical closing revue).

What I could do with this raw meat is overwhelming

But all I want to do is grill it to perfection. Roll each side over the flame once for that perfect texture. Any more and it’ll be burnt, the puzzle failed until I restart it. Again. God as my witness, this meat is getting cooked right.

Let’s talk about puzzle games. The Witness has revived a public lust for ornate brain teasers in a way that is primitively satisfying. Though The Witness’s puzzles pursue something far different, it has been compared to Myst a lot, mostly for feeling contemporary in its time, for feeling elegant, and because there’s a showboat to ride around its mysterious island. These are puzzlers meant to emanate sophistication, grandeur, grace. They’re supposed to feel like the kind of sudoku you’d play in Italian film director Bernardo Bertolucci’s office, where I assume the chairs are made of marble and a dashing red light glows behind the spare few windows. Echochrome (2008), Intelligent Qube (1997), Chime (2010), Tetris (1984)—the  puzzles of these games lean towards geographic simplicity, which feels inherently design-y and warm to the eye. In half of their instances, they forego intrusive scores for the quietness of a gallery hall. A lot of modern puzzle games follow this aesthetic.

But don’t let puzzle history erase the genre’s blue collar heroes. There are no monuments for Charlie Blast, who blew up cactuses on the Nintendo 64 in Charlie Blast’s Territory (1999). And no one gives a damn about that poor schmuck in overalls from the obscure Sega Genesis puzzler Shove It! (1990). But with Stephen’s Sausage Roll, creator Increpare (aka Stephen Lavelle) has made a puzzle game that seems to remember this crude and forgotten past. He doesn’t make lookers. His games are a megaphone at the opera.

With Increpare, you do not underestimate rough as simple, and you do not make assumptions such as elegance lending itself to genius. It is not uncommon for social criticism to lurk just beneath the skin of his games, such as Striptease (2009) or Slave of God (2012), and even without that type of cleverness his games almost always feel like an aptitude test. Stephen’s Sausage Roll is a game about cooking sausages. But in that culinary activity it finds a glorious puzzle game. It reminded me most of Octat (2011) and Block Pusher Championship (2011). These are games that are not merely tough, but frustrating,

with extra stress coming from your multitude of mistakes

And what a damn klutz you are.There have been countless times where I have overcooked a sausage or rolled one into the ocean. You can always move back a move, you can even undo out of the level and into the previous one, but they feel like band-aids for boo-boos. Generally speaking, while playing Stephen’s Sausage Roll, I always felt like I was wearing a traveller’s backpack in an art gallery: trying to stay conscious of my space while not toppling over any mixed-media pieces, instead knocking dozens of other people out of that mitigation.

Stephen’s Sausage Roll is tough and tumbly, with a greater emphasis on one’s own form than any other puzzle game, which usually waiver the avatar as too grotesque of its gorgeous world. The body, another heap of meat, becomes another piece of the puzzle. On several occasions I dusted my hands thinking I had completed a puzzle, before noticing I had blocked off the exit in the process. The feeling of form and clumsiness in these interesting puzzles demand you be all the more clever, the head-stumpers extended to your hands and feet.

Don’t let beauty erase you, you schlubby stars of puzzledom. You unfit geniuses. You grimey goblins. You may not be a dancer, you may not be a model, you may not be a statue for the world to marvel in its indescribable allure, but you are smart, and you can roast a hell of a sausage.

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Weekend Reading: The Cultural Icosystem

While we at Kill Screen love to bring you our own crop of game critique and perspective, there are many articles on games, technology, and art around the web that are worth reading and sharing. So that is why this weekly reading list exists, bringing light to some of the articles that have captured our attention, and should also capture yours.



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The Story of Fumito Ueda, The style of game

Originally published in 2005, but recently translated into English, this candid interview with Fumito Ueda draws the vivid creative and commercial lineage to classics like Ico (2001) and Shadow of the Colossus (2005). People like those games! A lot!

The Case Against Reality, Amanda Gefter, The Atlantic

You know that old stoner adage that we might not all see colors the same way and how crunchy and mind-blowing that is? Well that’s the tip of the crunchy mind-blowing iceberg. Our perception of everything could be a big lie, and who is committing that lie is a conundrum that’s left everyone from biologists to physicists combing for the truths of all truths. Amanda Gefter speaks with Prof. Donald D. Hoffman about how we came to fool ourselves about reality.

Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener, n+1

The office is two places. It is a human place, a building full of people who give and receive emotional impact. It is an inhuman place, where business takes precedence and goals, milestones, and invisible metrics weigh upon interaction. It is a strange place, and Anna Wiener writes a series of strange moments amid one of the many tech offices that wall our world.

Jennifer Murphy, Gold and Black Circles. 2007. Clint Roenisch Gallery.

When Bitcoin Grows Up, John Lanchester, London Review of Books

Sure, Bitcoin is its own punchline right now, but that doesn’t make its rollercoaster lifespan as worthless as investing in it at any given minute. The digitally deconstructed currency had a precedent, and John Lanchester writes an extensive history about money and its value.

Do you want poptimism? Or do you want the truth?, Chris Richards, The Washington Post

When poptimism first emerged, it had a noble purpose. Address the hierarchy of music criticism, and tear down the notion that only people who play guitar were worth a critic’s time. The era of indie rock and obscurity cred fell and the age of pop music getting its fair shake began. But now it’s ended up full-circle, and Chris Richards elaborates on how music criticism has merely repeated itself.

Become a shapeshifting road warrior in a Mad Max-style game

Last weekend, Renaud Forestié released a game called Shapeshifter Biker, a free-wheeling road movie mixed with shapeshifting mechanics. Shapeshifter Biker has you drive around a desert map on the lookout for animal power-ups that give you the ability to temporarily shapeshift into a variety of different animals—flying eagles or sheltered turtles. However, you are constantly being chased by ducks in large black cars who will stop at nothing to defeat you.

The game was created as a part of the latest Ludum Dare game jam, which gave participants 48 hours to create games under the theme “Shapeshift,” which was clearly at the core of Renaud’s design.

“There’s indeed a Mad Max feel to the game”

For his part, Renaud cites the final chase scene of Thelma and Louise (1991) as inspiration, mixed with a touch of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series of novels, borrowing their strangeness that the theme called for. Set with a chill guitar soundtrack (performed by the Forestié’s band Uniform Motion) the game places you in a low-poly environment, just one dude on his bike trying to outrun an unstoppable force. There’s an unrelenting nature to the enemies and the chase—a slide across brightly colored dunes.

The game definitely also has elements of the Mad Max and other Road Warrior movies. “There’s indeed a Mad Max feel to the game, you’re not imagining it,” Forestié said. “It wasn’t the case as I first started building it, but looking at these black trucks go I thought I’d go all in, set things in a desert, and have fun with it.”

You can play Shapeshifter Biker on PC, Mac and Web now. You can also find more information about the other works of Renaud Forestié here.

New Processors Give Mobile Gamers a Competitive Edge

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

Players who traverse new games like Star Wars: Battlefront, retro games like Horizon Chase or virtual reality experiences are keen on having the best new processors and computing performance they can get. But for many gamers, having a computer that pushes their skills to a game’s limit is no longer enough, according to Mark Chang, gaming strategist on Intel’s performance notebook team. “It’s not just about playing the game anymore,” said Chang. “It’s also about sharing and engaging with the community and friends. That completes the gaming experience.”

He pointed to the rise of people using their PCs to simultaneously play and live stream on Twitch or record their games, edit and then post them later on YouTube. Typically this is done using desktop PCs, but Chang said even new laptops have what it takes, so playing and live streaming can be done almost anywhere. “It requires lots of computer horsepower to drive the game and transcode video at the same time,” he said. He said new processors, such as the 6th Gen Intel Core i7 with four cores that can simultaneously process 8 threads of instructions, are up to the task. “The onboard graphics of 6th generation Intel Core processors gives you fast transcoding via Quicksync,” he said, referring to a dedicated media processing capability built into Intel Core processors. Citing Intel benchmark tests, Chang said that transcoding speeds for the latest Intel Core i7 are up to 17 times faster than previous generation processors over the last five years.

The trend of playing games and live streaming simultaneously is pulling people deeper into gameplay details, tactics and the emotions they evoke. Technology is allowing gamers to transform their skills into money-making careers and engage more people into the world of gaming. A recent report by Superdata stated that 486 million people around the world currently watch live streams and other gaming-related content made by fans. That audience is expected to reach 790 million by 2017.

Chang said killer transcoding and other capabilities found in the latest processors have been years in the making, since chip designs are done well ahead of products hitting the market. “It’s amazing to think that years ago chip designers saw how people would want to push their computers to new limits doing new things,” said Chang. Other perks gamers can find in new processors – for desktop, all-in-one, laptop and 2-in-1 PCs –include the ability to run Intel RealSense camera technology, use Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3 interconnect ports to plug in displays and gaming peripherals, leverage top-of-the-line DDR 4 memory and the ability to overclock the speed of the processor. “Anyone who live streams video, say an online video show host or even someone who video chats a lot, can take full advantage of the RealSense virtual green-screen capabilities,” said Chang. “It lets people easily take a live video feed of themselves playing and place that in the corner of video showing the gameplay.”

This isn’t simply a vanity endeavor. Sharing a player’s reaction to tense takedowns in the latest games like Call of Duty: Black Ops III can turn even the most amateur broadcaster into a recognizable face. Gamers can use the Thunderbolt 3 connections to attach their laptop or desktop PC to two of more ultra-high definition 4K monitors. “Will you be able to play your game in 12K on a notebook? Probably not,” he said. “But would you be able to watch a movie on three 4K screens? Yes. Can you play games in full 4K on a gaming notebook? Absolutely, yes!”

“It’s not just about playing the game anymore”

While high-definition graphics are essential for most players, even the most extreme games into supersampling – the anti-aliasing method for removing ugly, jagged edges that appear in some games – will benefit from improved performance of new processors. Laptop gamers can also overclock their CPU if their PC has an unlocked Intel Core i7 mobile processor. Overclocking allows players to easily increase the speed, and thus the overall horsepower, of their system. “With dynamic overclocking, overclocking has become something you can do within the operating system,” explained Dan Ragland, who has been working for 13 years on overclocking engineering and architecture at Intel. “Instead of having to tediously modify a number of BIOS settings and wait for a PC reboot, overclocking changes can now be made live, in real time.”

All 6th generation Intel Core processors support DDR4 RAM, which helps bring smooth gameplay even at high video frame rates. With DDR4, speeds can go up to twice that of the previous DDR3 and up to four times the capacity, all while using less electricity. Whether playing a flight simulator on a laptop, sharing strategies live on Twitch or diving into a detailed world displayed on a pair of 4K monitors, gamers with the latest processors can get the most out of the games they play. Chang points out that the latest line of Intel Core processors give better performance that previous generations, but they also utilize less energy, something on-the-go players can appreciate. “For gamers, it’s not the top priority, but an added convenience,” he said. “Overall there’s more innovation, more performance and more options built into Intel Core processors than ever before.”

Ken Kaplan contributed to this story.