Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 131

Weekend Reading: Worker exploitation of today, yesteryear, and beyond!

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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I am Alex St. John’s Daughter, and He is Wrong About Women in Tech, Amelia St. John, Medium

Last week, game circles were aflame over an an incendiary and irreverent piece on VentureBeat by Alex St. John that promoted ideas that sounded like all the “bad” choices in a choose-your-own-adventure book. It was a cheerleader for crunch, uncompensated overtime, and claimed that work done on a computer isn’t hard; the op-ed didn’t sit well with many. And that’s excluding the fact St. John also believes companies should seek out people with Asperger’s because he thinks they’ll be more cooperative or that he earnestly refers to himself as “The Saint.” Many people have rebutted him since, but none are more important than the one from Amelia St. John, his daughter.  

How a global board games giant exploited Ireland’s Magadalene women, JP O’ Malley, Little Atoms

The wrongdoings of the Magdalene Laundries have been uncovered since the ’90s, and only apologized for by the Irish government in 2013. For generations, women whose sexual activities branded them as sinners were incarcerated as if they suffered from a dangerous disease. Lesser known, however, are some of the parties who profited from these operations, including one very famous game maker. JP O’Malley has written his extensive research on why getting KerPlunk one Christmas didn’t feel right.

Image via The New Enquiry

Future Games, Alfie Bown, The New Inquiry

Stardew Valley’s popularity is a real curveball in a developing tradition of curveballs. Examining some of the undertones of the Harvest Moon send up, Alfie Bown discusses how its nostalgic sensibilities and rejection of the modern workplace isn’t exactly an attack on capitalism, but something a little more interesting.  

What I Learned From Tickling Apes, Frans de Waal, The New York Times



While it’s tempting to say, “Listen, this article is called What I Learned From Tickling Apes. Don’t you want to hear what Frans de Waal learned from tickling apes?” it also feels key to tell you know that ON TOP of descriptions of tickling apes, de Waal also reflects on the history and functions of anthropomorphism, and why the perception of animals as human-esque isn’t the greatest practice for reasons beyond very questionable Star Fox fan art.

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Header image source

Aer’s beautiful skyworld gets even more inviting in its latest trailer

Last time we saw cubist flying game Aer, its bird girl protagonist Auk was left quivering, alone and scared, in a distant ruin. She had just been threatened by a large monster, one she had met before, only soon afterward finding herself surrounded by ominous blue spirits as an ethereal crescendo swelled up around her. As the game’s newest trailer resumes her journey, however, this unsettling tone is set aside, instead introducing us to the friendlier side of the game’s world.

When the trailer opens, we briefly find Auk in what appears to be the same temple as last time, praying to a statue and receiving a lantern in return. Suddenly, the music swells from stoic majesty to freeform enthusiasm as Auk transforms into a bird, and like a loftwing from The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (2011), begins to soar across her homeland of scattered floating islands.

exudes more than enough warmth

On her way to the next temple, the loneliness of previous trailers is broken as she meets a group of people huddled around a campfire, makes friends with a few sheep who are so enamored with her that hearts fly out of their bodies, and meets what appears to be a stone lion who tells her about someone named “Priestess Karah.” Even the spirits from the last trailer seem to be back, their menace now gone as they help guide Auk on her journey.

Again, like in The Legend of Zelda, Auk must still overcome her own share of dungeon-delving and puzzle-solving, as she uses her lantern as well as various ancient devices to reactivate the magic of long forgotten ruins. But unlike the isolation of her last dungeon-crawl, she is no longer alone in her quest. Her world is lived-in, and though occasionally frightening, exudes more than enough warmth to compensate.

However awe-inspiring exploring Skyward Sword’s Skyloft or Wind Waker’s (2002) Great Sea can be, part of what makes them so memorable all these years later is the colorful cast of characters who call them home. Aer seems to have learned this lesson well, complimenting its breathtaking flights and idyllic natural paradises with friends cheering the player on and giving them a reason to explore. There is danger, yes, but it is undercut by beauty and joy. This time around, no monster joins Auk as the trailer ends. Only the wind, the sun, and the sky.

Aer is set to release sometime in Fall of 2016. You can keep up with the game’s progress over on the developer’s Twitter and Facebook pages, as well as on their YouTube channel.

There’s an upcoming game about exploring a dystopian city as a cat

In October of 2015, French duo Koola and Viv released a screenshot of a cat sitting in a dark alley, silhouetted by a hazy red light as the sun filtered in from some unknown opening above. This scene is the first glimpse of the as yet untitled “HK project,” an experiment in third-person exploration that promises to be a pioneering influence on the genre of “cat adventure videogame.” Early glimpses of gameplay send our feline protagonist across pipes and up air conditioner stairs, to its end goal of talking to a bunch of robots, probably.

Though the creators haven’t said much about the setting (“dystopian city”) or the time period (“indefinite”), early art shows robots lounging around the cramped hallways and a small flashing harness on the back of the cat. HK blends the legendary ominous aesthetic of the Kowloon Walled City with characters that seem more in line with the cute dog-bot that romped through the Recore trailer last year, complete with blinking blue eyes. In a piece of artwork released as a thank you to early supporters, one android reaches out tentatively to pet our furry friend. The robots scattered around the concept art don’t appear ominous at all—they actually seem pretty nice.

HK is by no means the first game to tackle Kowloon as an environment. Its density and crime rate made it an ideal backdrop for films about seedy activities like Bloodsport (1988) and Crime Story (1993), inspiring dystopian images of cramped cities in all sorts of media. You can explore the Walled City in both Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) and Shadowrun: Hong Kong (2015), but neither of them feature a protagonist as charming as this one. It’ll be up to the HK project to prove to us that their Kowloon will be something other than a refuge for gangsters and villains, but if what they’ve given us so far is any indication, that won’t be a problem.

The HK project is still pretty vague in its description, and the only hint at a release date is “not soon,” but Koola and Viv are hard at work making HK’s kitty as cuddly as possible. They ask only for comments and virtual hugs as they continue their journey.

Follow the “HK project” on Facebook , Twitter , and its devblog .

Expect vertigo as you gaze upon Sub.Division’s perceptual landscapes

It’s easy to get lost in perception-skewing art. Artist Bradley G. Munkowitz, better known as GMUNK, is easily one of the most intriguing (and prolific) visual designers around. His portfolio spans from the astounding holographic sequences of Tron: Legacy (2010) to Box, an artistic and technical project of synthesizing “real and digital space” (created with Bot & Dolly, where Munkowitz served as design director). Munkowitz has a long history with contorting technology in new, artistic-leaning ways, while combining color and practical effects (as with Box) in the process.

Some grid-like spaces feel like they span miles

In Munkowitz’s latest project, Sub.Division, he swaps his typical 3D shapes with flat geometrics. As described on the project’s site, “The goal was to generate perceived movement and pattern by taking basic primitive shapes and subdividing them into various levels of geometric intricacy.” So, essentially, creating a surprising amount of depth, but with shapes that wouldn’t otherwise provide it.

Sub.Division hosts a variety of different “perceptual landscapes.” In some, the color is completely saturated, and cubes spiral downwards to create a sense of vertigo. In others, the color itself helps to stretch the viewer’s perception of the image, making some grid-like spaces feel like they span miles. Munkowitz created the varied collection using a combination of the MASH plugin for Maya, the Arnold Utility Shader, fisheye warping (for the wormhole effect), Adobe Lightroom, and of course, manually fixing all the little imperfections that Munkowitz faces.

Sub.Division’s pieces are no small feats. In fact, they measure in at approximately 15,000 pixels by 15,000 pixels, with 300dpi to boot. Though every piece of art within Munkowitz’s Sub.Division seeks to bend atypical perspectives of shapes and grids, it’s the complicated process behind the motley of works that makes the series even more enriching to the naked eye.

Munkowitz’s perspective bending collection of Sub.Division has high-quality prints available for purchase on CinaArt here .

Jak and Daxter: the Search for Player Two

This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console. To see other articles, go here.

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I hear him pad up next to me before I feel his whiskers tickle my ankles. A wet, impatient nudge tells me to hurry up already—there’s something I should see up ahead.

Won over, I look down. “What is it, Dax?”

His ears perk at my response before immediately shooting down to the ground with the rest of his body. Head low, eyes steady, he slinks forward to his new objective with laser focus. But, after reaching a bend in our path, he pauses.

A golden retriever tears out of some nearby bushes, a maniacal, blurry ball of yellow fur flying across my vision. Just like that, the tension melts from Dax’s body, instantly replaced by the prance of a baby goat. Before I can even think of telling him to stay, he’s off—all bow-legged limbs and effort, but with very little to show for it.

I know calling him back now will be pointless. I know he’ll run his heart out to catch that golden retriever and I know he’ll fail, either by tripping over himself, crashing into a tree, or some other form of physical ineptness. He’ll fail, and come sauntering back to me, head held high, like I can thank him later for doing all the hard work of saving the day.

“You’re really something, Daxter,” I say, shaking my head, petting him despite myself. His only response is a full-toothed grin overflowing with slobber.

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I was a weird kid. People didn’t seem to like me much and I didn’t like them either. I preferred fictional, computer-generated, and four-legged company to most human interaction. The complexity of people—with all their subtext and hints and the ever-present threat of a faux pas—paralyzed me. So instead of the living thing, I studied the human experience in the controlled environment of books and games and my own mind. Fiction was less of a fancy and more like my social life; the stories they told and that I invented serving as friends, boyfriends, mentors.

I did have a few real life girl friends for the occasional playdate or recess, but it was by no coincidence that all those girls had older brothers with videogame consoles. I wasn’t allowed to play games at home, so all my early gaming experiences were strictly covert operations.

“Is your brother home?” so often became the first words out of my mouth when I went over a friend’s house that I started to worry they’d find me out and stop inviting me. So I forced myself to make small talk for at least three minutes before broaching the possible availability of the GameCube and Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001) disc that needed to come with it.

how much he’d love a girl who could beat him at videogames (boys loved that, right?)

But, sensing how unsatisfying my version of small talk was, I decided to figure out some other way of earning my keep to play games. Too quickly, my attention turned to the owners of these beloved consoles: the mythical Teen Older Brother Gamer, who I scarcely knew but whose presence always decorated my gaming spaces. Discarded sweatpants, half-eaten bags of Doritos, a stack of blank CDs and mixtapes with lewd titles like “Summer Shit” and “Got my license homos.” I wondered—probably more than I should—about the creatures that inhabited these rooms when I wasn’t there. Did they know we lay on their beds for hours, giggling and gossiping? Would they blush to hear their names come up when we played MASH? Could they even imagine how #ready #my #body was for our inevitable coupling?

Without the mythical Teen Older Brother Gamer, I would never have gotten my gaming fix all those years ago. Without them, I might’ve never gotten the opportunity to love games at all. But above even the joy of playing, the mythical Teen Older Brother Gamer of my childhood gave me the gift of a daydream (a hot commodity to 10-year-old me). I imagined our beautiful gaming marriage together: how he’d give me a run for my undefeated championship in Super Smash Bros.—how much he’d love a girl who could beat him at videogames (boys loved that, right?). To my excitement and horror, the day came when I met a legend. Midway through a Super Smash Bros. match, one of the Teen Older Brother Gamers walked through the bedroom door and out of my fantasy life. He had braces, referenced Wayne’s World (1992) a lot, and smelled… stale. I can’t remember if we interacted directly at all, but doubt it. I do remember this weird tingly, empty feeling finding its way into my gut that hasn’t gone away since. I couldn’t open my mouth or make my vocal cords work. So instead, he opened the GameCube disc drive to remove our game, ignoring his sister’s shrill protests and silently replacing it with Madden. Then, after a few minutes of watching him shout obscenities at a virtual football team, he farted in his sister’s face, which caused them to get into a fight, which caused him to yell at her to leave his room, which caused my friend to eject herself from his room crying. Which caused the abrupt end to our relationship.

In the end, the Teen Older Brother Gamer taught me the most valuable lesson of all, though: that the real thing never lives up to the fantasy.

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It wasn’t just the mythical older brother, either. Throughout almost all my formative gaming experiences, a dude stood as gatekeeper.

A little later, my sister’s considerate high school boyfriend would give me his old Nintendo 64 after deciding he was “too mature” for it. Much later, when I myself was in high school, I would rediscover my love of games with my boyfriend and his own rat pack of Teen Older Brother Gamers. With the status of Girlfriend, I found myself accepted by that gaming community for the first time as a non-sexual entity. Until the invitation was promptly rescinded upon our break up.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Because before all that, there was the PlayStation 2. The first console I ever owned myself: the symbol of my victory over my mother’s strict gaming ban, and the forces that made gaming so inaccessible to young girls.

a dude stood as gatekeeper

My PS2 came at a cost, though, as most great victories do. My mom only agreed to buy it for me as a consolation prize for not getting me what I really wanted—what I’d been begging for every Christmas and birthday since I learned how to talk. I wanted a dog. I didn’t want a puppy. I didn’t want a cat. I didn’t want a stuffed animal thrown into a gift box that we inevitably threw out along with the Christmas tree. I wanted a dog.

I wanted a companion.

One time, I was so devastated by the biannual dog battle with my mom (after taking it upon myself to do extra chores for weeks around the house to demonstrate how responsible I was), I staged a literal hunger strike in protest. My parents did their best to not negotiate with 12-year-old terrorists, but a few days and pounds lost later, their resolve waned. We bargained one rule for another rule. I couldn’t have a dog. But how about a PS2?

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Jak and Daxter (2001) wasn’t the first game I played on my PS2, but the series defined my relationship to that console—and games as a whole. I returned to them, again and again, like you would a best friend, in need of someone who understood without you having to say a word. Like every other early teen who owned a PS2, I grew up with the Jak series in the literal sense of the word. We matured together: our first chapters idyllic and simple; the second chapter a brooding mixture of anger and sexuality; our third chapter more nebulous, ill-defined, and undetermined than all the rest. As Jak was pumped with Dark Eco and the series took a turn away from boyhood, I too started to feel the effects of a new chemical as it coursed through my body, telling me to fight and/or fuck everything in sight.

It’s hard to reconcile with the knowledge that one of your formative teenage experiences was the result of a Sony executive liking the idea of “growing with your audience.” And, granted, for all the timeless aspects of the Jak series, its treatment of women betrays its age in a way that you can’t help but wince at. But the truth is that I only started seeing myself in Jak when the childhood drained from his eyes, only to be replaced by the deep, pulsating thirst for violence that was Jak II (2003). I fell in love with him as he struggled to cope with the uninhabitable, colorless world he suddenly found himself in after the rose-tinted glasses of childhood had been unceremoniously shattered. I understood the impossibility of his return home, and how it was time instead of distance that made going back hopeless.

Like all the male videogame protagonists I loved during my teen years (for there were many), I wanted to be Jak as much as I wanted to date him. Coincidentally, I ended up finding the companionship I needed in my PS2 after all. Not only through my love of Jak, videogames, and play, but also in the male camaraderie between the game’s titular characters. Jak and Daxter encapsulated the relationship I had been fantasizing about since the days of sweatpants and Doritos. I still longed for the loyalty and mutual respect that came with waging war and fucking shit up along side each other. To me, it seemed the essence of this era in gaming—Ratchet & Clank (2002), Banjo-Kazooie (1998)—and the friendships born out of playing them together. I saw glimpses of this camaraderie in the non-videogame play experiences I shared with female friends. Yet those relationships, while immensely powerful and affecting in their own ways, felt more complex, layered as they always are by the trauma of being a young girl in a society built predominantly to accommodate adult men. Girlhood play, though just as savage and raw, never felt the same as what I saw in the movies and commercials where boys were boys and talked shit on each other to show affection.

a secret part of me clung to the promise of belonging

I will never know whether my concept of male camaraderie is something that exists only in the games and coming-of-age media I consume or whether it speaks to actual real-life experiences. Part of me recognizes the familiar vagueness of a beloved fantasy; that warm, uncomplicated kind of comfort that comes with longing for something your mind controls. An even bigger part of me has come to understand how the male power fantasy shaped almost every game from this time period—God of War (2005), Hitman (2000), Prince of Persia (2003)—giving maleness the pedestal from which a player gazes down upon a world created exclusively to entertain, excite, and embolden his ego.

But still, I clung to the promise of belonging for much longer than I should have. I never really gave up the search for my Player Two: that partner in crime who looks at you with equal amounts challenge and encouragement. I’ve been chasing the fantasy of male camaraderie, unwittingly, ever since most of my youth was defined by videogames about being a dude doing dude stuff with other dudes. I can look back at it all now and see how the desire for it led me to make terrible life decisions, one after the other, most of them men.

But after graduating college—during that immutable time when you learn to shed the skin you thought you wanted—I finally made the first good decision inspired by my doomed quest for male camaraderie. I adopted a dog. I named him Dax.

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I won’t drag you through the finer details of why my dog is the awesomest (at least not here). But one thing you need to know about Dax is that he understands rejection and isolation like few others do. After five months of a tortured early life, he was discarded at the local ACCT—half dead, all bones, covered in his own shit, with a clipped ear and a misshapen spine—and it was clear he had been left for dead in a cage for quite some time.

But what makes Dax special isn’t his trauma (that’s pretty standard for a shelter dog and doesn’t define any of them). What drew me to Dax was actually his unbreakable, unadulterated, unquenchable love of play. If someone can love playing to a dangerous extent, that would be Dax. He will almost literally die before he stops playing. He’d rather die. I’ve seen this dog—all 45 pounds of mutt—run full sprint toward a grown Great Dane he had never met before, forgetting in his excitement that they would eventually collide if he didn’t slow down, until the last second when he made the questionable decision to attempt to jump over the eight-foot-tall dog, only to wind up body slamming into a nearby tree trunk… before getting up and trotting off like nothing happened.

Early on, I realized Dax was not a normal player at the dog park. The lack of socialization in his first few months of life had turned him into something of a loser, slow to pick up on social cues and unable to contain his fervent excitement at being alive and not in a cage. He demonstrated an almost concerning level of commitment to fun and games, which other dogs found odd or at the very least annoying. Many dogs don’t like Dax. But what I admire most about him is that he doesn’t seem to notice. Or mind. His social ineptness doesn’t make him so ashamed that he hides away from the world. If anything, Dax finds a way of being more insufferably himself the more someone rejects him, winning over the crowd with sheer persistence.

This power fantasy has real-world victims

For all his incredible qualities, Dax is not a necessarily easy dog. His over-excitement can cause a small ruckus everywhere we go at the park as he prances off, oblivious. His early isolation and obsession with play make him a liability out in the real world. A liability I had to address. When I started dog training, I realized that most trainers teach owners to view their pets as living objects that must accommodate their needs. The presumptions of patriarchy are oddly embedded in the human understanding of dog behavior. Dominance training, the most widely practiced theory promoted by supposed experts like Cesar Millan, twists dog behavior to fit the underlying assumptions of machismo and human superiority.  Your dog jumps on you to lick your face? That’s a dominance play and you must physically assert yourself over your dog in order to earn their respect and ensure they won’t do it again, according to dominance training. Meanwhile, back in reality, it’s safe to assume your dog is genuinely excited to see you, and keeps jumping on you because they love kissing your face. At the end of the day, pack mentality (and the dominance training theory that stems from it) was invented by one guy in 1947 who didn’t even study wolves in the wild. The biases of patriarchy, the language of masculinity, lead us to wrongfully impose the concept of pack hierarchy (alpha, beta, gamma) onto wolves and dogs for decades. Only now experts debate whether it even exists.

Dog may be man’s best friend, but man has proven to be the scourge of canine existence. Throughout modern history, we’ve played god with the species, over-breeding them into genetic mutations with significantly worse lifespans and quality of life purely for our amusement. At the heart of our misguided relationship to dogs is another kind of seductive power fantasy, where owners can derive a false sense of superiority by domineering creatures who trust and depend on them the most. Unlike power fantasies in videogames, though, this one has real-world victims, like the millions of dogs left to starve in their cages each year in the U.S. because they were “too stubborn” (read: too autonomous) to accommodate their owner’s ego. Pitbulls (or the dogs commonly misidentified as pitbulls) suffer the most from this intersection of hyper-masculinity and dog ownership, not only making up the largest percentage of shelter dogs but also 40% of those euthanized. The pitbull’s unfounded reputation for viciousness tends to attract the worst kind of owners: those who want a dog to demonstrate how tough and manly they are. Bad owners have left their scars on this otherwise loyal, intelligent, and gentle breed. Not only physical scars, but the scars of perpetual neglect and stigma. Yet, somehow, the breed we project our most dangerous concepts of masculinity onto—the ones we breed for the pits we build to force them to fight one another for our amusement—still aren’t broken or ruined by human depravity, trusting us enough to become faithful companions when given the chance. We abuse pitbulls time and time again and, to their detriment, they never stop hoping for the human hero who can reciprocate the lifelong loyalty they have to offer.

Dax had already suffered through the hell of one human ego. So instead, I opted for force-free positive-reinforcement training, which preaches learning through the fun of meeting challenges together. Force-free training makes the ludicrous assumption that dogs will listen and love you more if treated as an equal. Training becomes a game you both play, rewarding good communication and mutual understanding, while saying “we’ll get it next time” whenever there’s a Game Over screen. As two dedicated yet different kinds of players, Dax and I get on just fine that way. In fact, Dax excels in every category, eyes trained on me with that determined focus, only his tail betraying the fervent need to pass our mission with flying colors and beat his high score.  

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What sets Jak and Daxter apart from other classic gaming duos like Ratchet and Clank is how they share the spotlight instead of playing either first or second fiddle. “Behind every great hero is an obnoxious nincompoop,” says the old sage Samos at the beginning of Daxter’s own beloved spin-off PSP title from 2006. The journey that follows shows Daxter fighting tooth-and-nail to save Jak from imprisonment. By the end of the game, you’re left to wonder: who is the hero and who is the sidekick of this story? Taking turns in saving one another; it’s hard to tell with Jak and Dax. It’s hard to tell with Dax and me. Because Jak and I, we share the title of protagonist with our furry companions. Or, at the very least, the role of “obnoxious nincompoop” remains interchangeable between us. Sure, Daxter might be all charm and zero social aptitude, all confidence and no competence. He might be impulsive, and quick to land us in more trouble than when we started.

But Jak and I are the ones too self-conscious and hot-blooded to even speak. Avoiding contact, we prefer isolation to the possibility of vulnerability. The biggest revelation of Jak 3 (2004) was not the glaringly obvious “twist” at the end that the benevolent leader the duo had been following throughout the game was actually Jak’s father. No, Jak 3 flipped the entire hero-sidekick script on its head by revealing that the most powerful beings in the series, the Precursors, were not pointy-eared humans, but instead fuzzy orange  Ottsels like Daxter.

the PS2 was more than a gaming console. It was my autonomy.

To me, the PS2 was much more than a gaming console. It was my autonomy. Able to play whenever I wanted and whatever I wanted, I began to develop a relationship to games on my own terms. Though still limited by the pervasive male power fantasy, I came to see myself in gaming’s greatest heroes, for better and worse.

Of course, the real thing never lives up to the fantasy. The fantasy is a fantasy because it is inherently unattainable, relying on the distance of an outsider gazing in on perfection. Letting a fantasy die isn’t all that bad, either. Often, the reality is endlessly more complicated and engaging, forcing you to face challenges that give just rewards if you work hard enough to earn them.

I look down again at my Player Two. He’s several feet away from me, trying to dig up a large insect, butt high up in the air in a classic “play bow” position.

“He doesn’t want to play with you, Dax,” I sigh.

He couldn’t care less.

The team behind Transistor makes purgatory look beautiful in their next game

Nearly two years after the release of Transistor (2014), Supergiant Games has announced its third project: Pyre. Slated to release sometime in 2017, the reveal trailer for the upcoming game shows off the combination of richly drawn animation and intimate musical scoring the studio has become known for.

According to Supergiant’s blog, Pyre follows the journey of a band of exiles as they explore a “vast, mystical purgatory” in an attempt to uncover its secrets and eventually find their freedom. While the trailer shows a combination of lush environments and encounters with enemies, the game will reportedly also feature a decision-making process involving characters and a larger world map.

a more fluid, Disney-inspired animation style

“As you journey across the Downside in the wanderers’ custom blackwagon, you’ll meet a variety of characters of all shapes and sizes, and learn what’s in store for each of them should they prevail in the Rites,” Greg Kasavin, the game’s writer, says in the post. “Your actions will determine who returns to glory, and who remains in exile to the end of their days.”

Like a number of smaller studios that cropped up in the late aughts, Supergiant is partially responsible for transforming the way we anticipate new videogames. In many ways, it’s closer to a band announcing they’re in the studio recording a new album than a company revealing a new product. In part that’s due to the small team size and continuity between games.

Darren Korb, who composed for both Bastion (2011) and Transistor, will also be doing the music for Pyre, with the song in the trailer performed by both him and singer Ashley Lynn Barrett. Jen Zee, Supergiant’s art director, is also still at the helm. Not content to simply replicate the aesthetic of the studio’s earlier games, however, Pyre looks to have a more fluid, Disney-inspired animation style, giving the impression of The Banner Saga (2014) meets The Legend of Korra (2012-2014).

Pyre will release on both PlayStation 4 and Steam, and is playable this weekend at the PAX East convention in Boston.

The immortal weirdness of Shadow Hearts

This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console. To see other articles, go here. 

This article contains spoilers for Shadow Hearts, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, and World War I.

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Several famously grim prophecies were recorded in the run-up to World War I. “The lamps are going out all over Europe, and we shall not see them lit again in our life-time,” said Sir Edward Grey, turning a phrase better remembered now than his own role in the disaster. On the first day of the war, Henry James wrote privately of “the plunge of civilization into the abyss of blood and darkness.” And over a decade earlier, military theorist Jan Bloch had seen the shape of the conflict: a “great war” fought in trenches, a “catastrophe which would destroy all existing political organizations…any attempt to make it would result in suicide.”  

But no real doomsayer went over the top in quite the way Albert Simon, the villain of the 2001 JRPG Shadow Hearts, does. Standing ramrod straight in his formal cravat, top hat, and little white gloves, he’s a caricature of what Samuel Hynes called the “Edwardian afternoon,” which ended when the war began. In an alternate-history 1913, the game’s occultist heroes chase Simon from his gore-caked laboratories in Kowloon to dive bars in Prague. When they finally catch up in Wales, he reveals the “terrible vision” that drives him: “I can see the future in store for this world…earth will overflow with the screaming of the dead who know not yet their fate. An iron behemoth shall rise and in a flash, countless lives will be snuffed out. A hopeless future!!” To prevent this, he explains, he’s decided to summon one of the “Outer Gods” from “the M72 Nebula” to remake the planet.

Loyal in the end only to the principle of staying weird

Simon’s plan sounds, at best, like it might improve Bloch’s scenario to the status of “assisted suicide.” But as far as reasons to reformat the world go, “disquieted by industrial warfare” is not bad. Simon’s announcement embodies the strange appeal of the Shadow Hearts series, which dabbles in ghost stories, pro wrestling, political science, dogfighting, distrust of the Vatican, Japanese militarism, secret societies, and JRPG tradition, but is loyal in the end only to the principle of staying weird. By going sci-fi in its last hours, the game escapes the gravity of the political maneuvering it used earlier to set off its cast of Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, and English characters. Our protagonists can’t line up for turn-based battle against the Schlieffen Plan, but they can fight the “Meta-God” in space.

It’s the last of many swerves in a long and eccentric adventure. Shadow Hearts begins in Manchuria, where a Chinese warlock is absorbing local spiritual powers to clear the way for a national invocation—we’re told that he once tried to “blow Japan to bits” with a similar ritual, which left half his body warped and reptilian. The player’s party trades insults with his psychic projections while crossing China on trains, rusty biplanes, and a fishing trawler that looks less seaworthy than some vessels found on the ocean floor. In the second half of the game, the pattern more or less repeats in Europe with Simon as the antagonist. The game’s unusual eye for locations means your next destination is usually a mystery: you take in not just world capitals and mystical fortresses but small-font locales like Dalian and Rouen. (The sequel, Shadow Hearts: Covenant, is perhaps the only RPG to include a section in Southampton.) Some of the best stops, like the fortress in Hong Kong and an evil doll’s home in England, are hidden away and easily missed.

It’s a world of disparate horrors. There’s a town in Shadow Hearts where the spirits of domestic animals masquerade as the human masters they ate: “You don’t have to worry about your manners so much here…it won’t change the taste of [the] meat,” the mayor, a “Cat Lady,” tells you. In London, the owner of an orphanage melts down his wards into a “soup of life” to revive his long-dead mother. In Prague, a witch reaches out from the mirror in a women’s bathroom to rip the life out of unwary souls. At one point, to explain a ghost’s convoluted beef with the villagers of Dalian, the game launches into a grungy narrated cutscene that amounts to a campfire story (“the door opened….creeeeaaaakkkkkk….”) and runs nearly eight minutes, but feels like it could easily continue for the rest of your life. There’s nothing remotely like it before or after.

The hard-heartedness of the first game, which coolly dispatches minor characters throughout, gives its ghost stories some unexpected bite. (It has two endings, but the sequel picks up from the bad one.) So too does the designers’ oddly sexual approach to monster design, which is on display in both games: Janus-faced Peeping Toms hang upside down in midair; hovering eyeballs shudder with pleasure when casting spells; pale cylindrical men with backwards-facing heads patter over on stubby feet, then bend toward you to reveal a prehensile penis-tail reaching out from their navel. A monster log—that is, a diary, not an evil log that lives in the woods—describes each foe with clinical detachment: “Otherworldly snake that swallowed a pregnant woman whole and absorbed the fetus into itself. The human half is in agony and screams constantly.”

Grody visuals are inextricable from its weird-fiction atmosphere

There’s something to admire even in the pre-rendered, vaguely regurgitated-looking backgrounds and hammered-flat faces of the first Shadow Hearts, whose grody visuals are inextricable from its weird-fiction atmosphere. When Shadow Hearts: Covenant arrived in 2004, it brought with it fuller 3D backgrounds, a somewhat mobile camera, and bumpier faces. Yet these technical improvements led to plain interiors and an outpour of broad, repetitive cutscenes that can be unpleasantly reminiscent of Kingdom Hearts. (Particularly in an interminable mid-game episode involving Anastasia and Rasputin, which plays like a second-rate adaptation of the Don Bluth movie.)

The Judgment Ring, the series’ singular timing-based battle system, is one piece of technology that gets stranger and better in Shadow Hearts: Covenant. In both games, you must stop a spinning arrow on the colored “strike zones” of a dial before your character can attack or use an item. Missing a zone means losing a turn. In the first game, the routine does eventually become second nature: hit X at 3, 7, and 10 o’clock to nail the hero’s combo every time, even when the strike zones are invisible or status effects shrink the ring. But Shadow Hearts: Covenant goes wild with the concept, letting you stack characters’ attacks into brutal combos that require upwards of 10 successful ring hits, but scuttle everyone’s turn if you miss any strike in the sequence. The combo system turns battles into wagers, mirroring the Judgment Ring’s use as a gambling game in towns throughout the series. The greatest secret society in Shadow Hearts is comprised not of its antagonists but the hidden “Lottery Members” in each city, who bestow gifts on anyone who can win their ring-spinning carny games.

Does Shadow Hearts have anything to say about World War I—the futility of the conflict, the great waste of life, the end of Henry James’s notion that we lived in a “gradually bettering” world? Not really. The setting adds to the game’s novelty but doesn’t take it over. Ideas from history wander in and out of a digressive narrative, mingling with concepts swiped from Final Fantasy VII and Lovecraft, with elaborate metaphors for depression and badly dated sexual politics and bizarre meta-gags. You can find someone pontificating about the “bitter battlefield of men,” but it’s the Great Gama, and he’s talking to a vampire pro wrestler about the ring.

All Walls Must Fall to explore the cultural division of Cold War-era Berlin

In All Walls Must Fall, an upcoming isometric action game from newish studio inbetweengames, the Cold War never ended. It’s 2089 and Berlin is still caught in the midst of political powerhouses threatening to push the button. But in inbetweengames’s alternate timeline, the factions of the Cold War have the ability to manipulate time, and are using it to draw out the stalemate.

All Walls Must Fall is a “tech-noir” game, a term coined by James Cameron for his 1984 film The Terminator, “merging classic noir themes with sci-fi, often featuring time travel elements,” inbetweengames co-founder David Hassal told me. He, along with other co-founder Isaac Ashdown, described their upcoming game as “XCOM meets Braid (2008), in cold war sci-fi Berlin.”

That location, Berlin, and its citizens, are something very important to inbetweengames. Giving “an inclusive representation of the people of Berlin featuring their diverse cultural, sexual and gender identities” is a big pillar of All Walls Must Fall. Ashdown explained to me that the Berlin Wall created a cultural division of the city. “Immigrants from different parts of the world came to the two separate sides and different sub-cultures sprung up that influenced each other in different ways.” But, by 2016, he told me, Berlin has mixed up a lot “and has new waves of immigrants like us. But you still notice a sudden change in the languages spoken, for example, when you go from one neighborhood to another. In All Walls Must Fall, we want to reflect this reality of the city, rather than only use it as an architectural or musical backdrop.”

we want to reflect this reality of the city

What you’ll do this near-future is control secret agents who can navigate time and use “social stealth and combat” to hopefully prevent a nuclear holocaust and bring down the Berlin Wall—which by the time All Walls Must Fall begins, has stood for 128 years. According to inbetweengames, it will be a “parable that reflects on free will, moral ambiguity and the meaning of freedom.” But rather than explain how it hopes to achieve this in the game’s narrative, Hassal said: “It is very much an ambition and we have ideas on how to do it, but ultimately it will require players to play the game and tell us whether it works or not.” You’ll be able to give feedback on the game in the near future when it enters early access.

For Hassal and Ashdown, going independent was a risk, but one they felt they had to take. Both veterans of triple-A development, they’ve been involved with games such as Spec Ops: The Line (2012) and the yet-to-be-released Dead Island 2. “When you spent years on a game and pour your heart and soul into it, you develop a real relationship with it,” Hassal said, referring to a project as a “shared child” of a developer and their team. “So if then someone else with the power to do so comes along and aborts it, even if from a purely objective and business oriented point of view it makes sense, for the people developing the game it is soul crushing really.” Having this happen more than once, they decided to take a different gamble, forming their own studio.

“I think being constrained for so long has really given us a hunger for those forbidden fruits. Now we really want to go for it and see where it leads us … we’re fine with the possibility of failure as long as we gave it our best shot.” Hassal continued. All Walls Must Fall is expected to enter Early Access early this year. Time will tell if inbetweengames’ forbidden fruits yield success.

The Turing Test will have you question your humanity

UK-based studio Bulkhead Interactive has released an announcement trailer for their upcoming game The Turing Test, slated for release on Xbox One and Steam in August 2016. It’ll have you playing as Ava Turing, an engineer for the International Space Agency (ISA), as she investigates the truth behind the ISA research base on Jupiter’s moon Europa. As you dig deeper into the moon’s frozen core, the game aims to explore the phenomena of consciousness and challenge the meaning of human intuition.

How it will manage this is through the format of a first-person puzzle shooter that features obstacles designed in a way so that only humans can solve them, as opposed to machines. It’s here that the game starts to draw a parallel to the “Turing Test” of the game’s title—the test developed by Alan Turin in 1950 to determine if a machine can exhibit intelligent behavior that is equivalent to a human’s. Puzzles are solved in The Turning Test by using the Energy Manipulation Tool (EMT) to transfer power from one object to another. You can also power up and take control of the artificially intelligent machines to be found in the environments, which plays into another deviant on the game’s main theme: the human struggle for control.

In an age in which technology is rapidly advancing, the ideas of artificial intelligence and space colonization are no longer inconceivable thoughts. We’re planning on sending humans to Mars, attach inflatable habitats to the International Space Station (with the possibility of opening up space tourism in the future!), and have discovered plants with the ability to house microbial life. The Turing Test slips in easily with all the discussion around these advances, but also other fictions probing the question of artificial intellligence, such as last year’s Ex Machina and 2014’s Transcendence.

It seems humanity is destined for the stars.

While current games set in outer space serve to fulfill the need for human exploration or satisfy the urge to solve problems creatively, The Turing Test brings morality into the equation. The discussion that places man against machine has always been grounds for controversy. This game looks to transcend the boundaries between artificial intelligence and humans through its multi-layered story of introspection and morality.

You can find out more about The Turing Test on its website. It’ll be out for Xbox One and PC this August.

The adorably grotesque world of Push Me Pull You arrives next month

As you can surmise from the title, Push Me Pull You (PMPY) is about the delightful tension between polar opposite forces. Even the world behind this couch co-op game is simultaneously the same and exact opposite of our own world.

Because, you see, PMPY is populated by a very similar society with one key difference: people are joined at the waist to one another, turning the populace into a squirming pile of two-headed mutant tube creatures. Despite the body horror this image suggests, PMPY depicts a utopian society built around play, diversity, and a strong sense of community. For all its grotesqueness, this society of skin worms seems endlessly more charming and self-loving than our own.

The bond struck between each one—quite literally unbreakable—is also tested regularly in the sports arena where most of PYMPY’s action takes place. With the option of a two-player mode that lets you fight your own better half, versus a four-player mode where you battle the flesh of a rival sportsmonster alongside your partner, Push Me Pull You makes players both recoil and come together all at once.

The new trailer above announcing PMPY‘s May 3rd release date showcases a full range of strategies and body contortions possible in the game, from classic moves like “The Puff” to the unintelligible “I Don’t Even Know What Even.” During GDC this year, I met up with House House, the young team behind Push Me Pull You, to throw down in a battle of the flesh—a battle I emerged from more wholesome, serene, and humbled than when I first entered.

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Kill Screen: What audience were you imagining while creating this game?

Stuart Gillespie-Cook: The best outcome for us is if a mum or someone else with no interest in games whatsoever walks past ours, and it doesn’t look like a videogame, so they allow themselves to get interested, thinking it’s a kid’s show or some other funny new thing.

Nico Disseldorp: It’s kind of the local multiplayer game made to trick your friends who may not play the kind of games you want to play. It’s like a Trojan horse to get you into local multiplayer.

KS: The “elastic-feel”—as I would describe it—is so good in this. What was the process of getting it just right like?

N: It was actually really intense because the elastic feel is also the balance of the game. All those strategies that you can do, all the ways that you can hold the ball and move your body, they’re all tied to the sensation of elasticity. Like, as you pull apart from each other, your body gets thinner in the middle through an animation technique called conservation of mass. There’s lots of components to the elasticity. It’s like a big physics soup where you have to get the flavors just right, adding pinches and seeing how it goes. You might tweak the numbers to make it feel better, but now the strategy may not be as fun.

S: Yeah, one of the most important things for strategy in this is that your head is the strongest point of your body. So if someone’s pushing into the middle of your body, you lose your grip, and that’s kind of the basis for everything. That’s where it all comes from. Having to constantly shift around. There’s no optimal formation for every situation that emerges from that. You’re always able to flip it around and subvert another person’s move.

a Trojan horse to get you into local multiplayer

Jacob Strasser: It’s not just a tug of war where if you pull harder and harder, you win. You can reconfigure your body to get an advantage at any time.

S: Which leads to this big mess of bits.

KS: Who was responsible for these incredible sound effects?

N: That was a big team effort. We realized we had spent months and months on sound and hated everything we had. So we locked ourselves in Stuart’s parent’s holiday house and said, “We’re not coming out until we have the sound right.” The first morning was harrowing, we couldn’t get anywhere, tried everything. None of us had any experience with sound design, but we knew we specifically wanted a billowy, stretchy noise. Then we started making lunch, cutting up the vegetables, and it was a moment of epiphany. We were like, “Cut that again!”, scrambling to put the knife through the lettuce and cheering, ‘That’s it—yucky, but that’s good!’ We frantically ran back to the store, bought every vegetable they had, then sat around and, soon after that, we hit upon what it is now.

S: We’re pretty new to everything. This is our first game—our first entry into games. We’ve been very lucky to happen upon the right sounds, and the music from the new menu screens, that’s all one guy. He’s really gone above and beyond. We just give him vague ideas about what we’re going for and he just spins it into great stuff.

KS: What’s one of the weirdest things you requested of him?

N: We had a Skype call where he brought out his saxophone and one of the keys fell off. We got really exited like, “That’s it! That’s the sound we need! That’s what we want for Push Me Pull You.”

KS: So just anything that’s broken.

S: We always encouraged him to go flat on more and more notes, a little less polish, a little more fun folk-y kind of music.

N: It got to the point where he’d say, “I know this sounds bad but I know that’s what you want.” Just everything a little rough around the edges.

KS: What’s been your favorite experience while watching people play the game? What are the moments when it’s doing exactly what you want it to do?

N: I think our favorite is when it’s played by a non-games crowd. Like, a roomful of people who might be a bit scared of videogames, but start playing Push Me Pull You and have a really good time. We love that face people get when they’re playing a game for the first time.

KS: Have you gotten any, well, not negative reactions, but people who were confused or uncomfortable?

S: A couple of minutes ago, I watched this woman come up behind us and just go, ‘”Oh no, what?” In this really sweet, questioning way. She wasn’t unhappy… but she wasn’t thrilled either.

J: We designed Push Me Pull You to be as accessible as possible, though, so that any games-illiterate person could come, pick it up, get the basics, and just have some fun with it.

N: And I guess part of the reason why we did that is in line with the game’s theme, too: that sense of community, lots of different types of people being literally tied together, or just hanging out with each other.

make a game about bodies in a way that accommodates all people.

S: It’s the reason why sports in our world are so great. It’s that super low-level community matches. Sure, it’s still competitive, but anyone can have a bash even if they’re not playing well.

N: There’s two excuses adults have for playing: games and sports. We wanted to emulate the lighter side of both. We’re used to playing sports videogames where it’s all like, “This is it: you’re at the stadium during the grand finale.” We wanted to get at the games you pick up on the street in front of your house, or at the beach with your family. It’s the version of sports that means something to everyone, even to people like us who can’t play sports very well or get intimidated by formal sports settings.

KS: I’m so curious about the world these creatures live in. How did you imagine it?

S: We think about it all the time. There’s so many little design decisions we have to be really careful about not giving too much away while also still staying in the realm of believability. We wanted to draw a car in their world, for example, and we had to rethink the concept of a car entirely. Because how would it work for them? What would it look like? Would it have two steering wheels, four pedals? We have to be so careful. We have to maintain the illusion that these things are human and relatable and live in the same kind of world that we do, but we just don’t want to explain too much. We definitely don’t want to start saying they’re genetic experiments gone wrong or anything like that.

J: In our minds, these people go home after playing these matches and watch the professionals play the same exact sport on TV.

N: Yeah, things like that help us find the midpoint in the Venn diagram of our world and their world. So on the menu screens, we show them sitting on a chair. We stressed out for a while about what that chair could possibly look like, and then ended up with a banana lounge. It’s the one chair we have where you can sit on it backwards and forwards at the same time. That’s just one of their many ergonomic requirements.

KS: This is a game with such a unique sense of body—of accepting your body in all its bizarre forms.

J: We went to great lengths to make a game about bodies, and that’s why we tried to be as non-prescriptive as possible when it came to the character creation.

N: Bodies are inherently political, so you have a responsibility to make a game about bodies in a way that accommodates all people.

S: That’s one of the things that draws me to videogames as a whole, too: abstracting your body in interesting ways, pushing and pulling, doing all of these crazy things with your fingers and seeing it mirrored in another world.

KS: What are some of the challenges these creatures face in comparison to the challenges we face?

J: Just being connected to a family member for your whole life seems like a big challenge. Having to live your entire life connected to your grandpa, your girlfriend, your mother, your father, your baby—any number of your relatives. We’re still not quite sure how those relationships would survive.

They’re gross things but beautiful in their own way.

N: We constantly talk about scenarios they get into, like, “Oh, what if they’re having a big fight and they draw a line down the middle of the room—they’d have to draw a line down their own body. But yeah, in this world—if this was your life—you wouldn’t get along all the time. And that actually maps to co-op games pretty well, because as much as you and your partner sometimes feel like a perfect well-oiled machine, other times you’re just two people yelling at each other, really frustrated, like, “Why won’t you go the way I want you to go or why won’t you do what I need you to do?” That co-op approach to life, there’s a lot of communication to be found there.

KS: It’s easy to literally lose yourself in all the limbs during a match. When we were playing just now, you kept asking each other: “Do you know who you are?” A lot of the time we were totally wrong about who we thought we were on the screen. I love that. Existential, but still very silly.

J: I like the idea of managing your only resource, and it’s the elasticity of your own body.

KS: Have you guys ever considered any weird controllers for Push Me Pull You?

N: Yeah we had one made. It’s covered in, like, skin… I don’t know what it is. As far as I’m concerned, they’re skin controllers, and the guy who made them takes them out to bars and makes people play on them.

S: Somewhere in a warehouse, there’s also a controller that’s sawed in half because our initial plan was to stretch rubber bands between two people’s controller. So you’d have to share the controller with your team member while you played as a two-headed tube of flesh.

N: We got as far as sawing the controller in half before we remembered we didn’t have any electrical engineering skills.

J: Yeah so we ruined a controller, and then it got too hard.

KS: What’s the role of disgust in Push Me Pull You ? Obviously there’s that initial disgust. But actually playing the game, it feels like ultimately an acceptance of it.

J: It’s how we feel about our bodies a lot of the time, I think. They’re gross things but beautiful in their own way.

S: We didn’t go out of our way to make this grotesque. Granted, I was always in favor of having them sweat a lot.

J: Yeah, Stu wanted the most grotesque bodies possible. It was a constant process of reeling him back. But, regardless, people react with a sense of revulsion to Push Me Pull You. Particularly on the Internet. And that’s not what we’re going for, so it might just be a byproduct of the thing that we’re dealing with.

N: It’s also that Uncanny Valley of body physics. Nothing we put in it is particularly gross. But when you see bodies put together by computers that also move weird, you can’t help but feel the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

KS: Do you have a name for these creatures?

N: A couple. We call them pempys, mainly. Pempys. Push-me-pull-yous.

KS: Come again?

J: It’s PMPY, but with an E. There’s PMPY the game, then there’s pempys the things.

S: Sometimes people call them sportsmonsters.

N: They would never see themselves that way, though.

KS: Of course not. They’re beautiful.

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Push Me Pull You releases for PlayStation 4 on May 3rd.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.