Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 144

1979 Revolution shows the nastier side of Iran’s historical uprising

1979 Revolution, the upcoming adventure game following the political revolution that took place that year in Iran, just got a new trailer. It’s the most in-depth look at the game we’ve seen so far, and it paints a desperate picture for both the country and the game’s photojournalist protagonist Reza Shirazi.

Neutrality no longer seems a viable option

The trailer opens in a small interrogation chamber with Shirazi in handcuffs and a prison jumpsuit, scratches and bruises marking his face. A menacing, clean-cut man wielding a club addresses him. “In a clear voice for the machine,” he explains, gesturing to the recorder on the table next to them, “Give us all the information about your collaborators and the details of your next target.”

It’s a startling reversal of power for Shirazi, who as a journalist, is likely more familiar with asking questions rather than the other way around. It’s also an unfortunate misunderstanding, as up until this point, Shirazi has tried to remain as neutral as possible on the growing dissent within his country. “My part is taking pictures, not choosing sides,” he explains. But with his capture, he suddenly finds himself thrust into the center of his own story, no longer able to remain an objective observer.

The rest of the trailer follows Shirazi as he interacts with both revolutionaries and authorities alike, neither side entirely happy with him. Neutrality no longer seems a viable option for Shirazi, leading him, and by extension the player, to make difficult choices between his passion as a storyteller and his life as a citizen of Iran.

You can experience Shirazi’s story for yourself when 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, focusing on the Black Friday Massacre in which armed Iranian troops fired into a crowd of protestors, releases on April 5th.

See how far Hyper Light Drifter has come before its arrival next week

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) wasn’t a tough sell. It had audiences entranced from its first trailer. A desert slashed with muted yellows and clay reds set against a crisp aquamarine sky spoke for itself. The dies irae of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Requiem” was only there to make sure you never forgot. The first trailer for Hyper Light Drifter was different in almost every way, but the effect was the same.

Alex Preston introduced his stylish action-RPG not with an apocalyptic bang but with the rhythmic chiptune meditations of a specialty Baths track. Grounded in Will Wiesenfeld’s introspective beat, Hyper Light Drifter wrapped its precious pixel art tendrils around every viewer’s grey matter until it held their imagination firmly in its grasp. Preston asked for a humble $27,000 for the game’s Kickstarter campaign, but ended up raising over 20 times that by its end. People saw Preston’s fluid and vibrant animations, they heard Wiesenfeld’s haunting melody, and it felt like coming home.

A new trailer announcing the game’s March 31st release on PC and Mac shows just how far the project has traveled since backers were first entranced by its audio-visual siren call in October 2013. Taking the sentiment of the original trailer and presenting it in a deeper, more polished light, this final reveal serves as an epilogue to the game’s development, gesturing with the forlorn ambling of its piano toward what awaits the player once they’ve completed a similar journey.

“It’s been an incredible adventure leading up to launch. I deeply appreciate everyone who has backed us, had faith in us, had patience through this process,” Preston wrote in the project’s most recent update. What started with just one person eventually grew into a full-time team of five, including essential contributions from Akash Thakkar who worked on the game’s sound and Rich Vreeland, better known as Disasterpeace, who composed the game’s music.

It’s the combination of these elements, pulsating electronic sounds fused with fluid pixel animations that helped Hyper Light Drifter flip a switch somewhere deep inside people’s souls. One that would prove to be hard to turn off, even after minor delays and worrying setbacks. Preston attributed this appeal to the game’s personal, idiosyncratic style, calling it more illustrative. “It is very much representative of the things I enjoy aesthetically,” he said.

“does this mean anything to you?”

He pointed to games like Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (2011) and Fez (2012) as inspiration, and it’s not hard to see Hyper Light Drifter as taking up the pixel art mantle and pushing it in a more cinematic direction. “That was something that I always loved from Street Fighter III (1997), when they actually had the memory and the power to produce that many frames per second and that many frames of handcrafted animation” he said.

But the animations lack substance without equally vibrant sound work, which is why Preston worked so closely with Thakkar. “Sound is just as important to me in games as the visual stuff is,” Preston said. “He’s kind of created his own aesthetic while leaning into things that I like, like in the old Metal Gear (1987) sound and Final Fantasy VI (1994). He mentioned the way Infinity Ward elevated the feel of first-person shooters by taking the same calculus of hit points and travel speeds and underlining them with sounds that felt like “chewing through metal.”

Hyper Light Drifter has looked to take the audio-visual aesthetic of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras that feels familiar and intimate to so many and elevate it in a similar way. Preston attributed this ineffable quality in the game to style. “That’s maybe an ambiguous or broad term, but there’s something about certain games, and I think our game too, that it knows what it wants to do and it executes on that in a way that people can see,” he said.

What the full effect of this vision would be is unclear, even to Preston. “I think as long as it resonate with somebody in a meaningful way, then that’s all I could really ask for,” he told me. “Whether they fucking hate the game, or they love it, and they love it for different reasons because everyone’s going to love and hate things for their very personal reasons, that’s great.”

The game’s three trailers are like mirrors in this way, drawing people for some singular reason despite always reflecting something different back. None of us know what we’re looking for in Hyper Light Drifter, but we all desperately hope we’re able to find it, whatever it turns out to be. “Making any kind of art or anything you put out there for people to consume, I think that’s all you can really ask for as the creator: does this mean anything to you?”

A videogame that tricks you into reading literature

The puzzle island of The Witness, released back in January, contains a theater in which you can unlock and watch movie clips. Among the documentaries and interviews about science progression and spiritual awakening is the last 10 minutes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983). Since it’s been discovered, chatter has spread across the internet from people first discovering the Russian film-maker, not just hoping to discuss what the Nostalghia clip could mean in the context of The Witness, but also showing an appreciation for the artistry of the film’s ending too. In this case, the game has acted as conduit, introducing its players to broader ideas and art works than itself, and which it was probably informed by—a rare moment of videogames breaking out of their widespread insularity.

Pippin Barr, however, wasn’t so inspired by the Tarkovsky clip in The Witness as he was another moment in the game that reaches out to a different medium. While the majority of The Witness is silent—that is, without music, there are plenty of sounds in its environments—it does actually have two songs hidden away inside it. If you toil the hours away to get to the end of the game there’s a secret area you can find where the game’s hardest challenge resides. Here, upon pulling the lever to start the series of puzzles, the time you have left to complete the challenge (for it is timed) is broadcast to you by playing two movements from Edvard Grieg’s “Peer Gynt” (“Anitra’s Dance” and “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” as Barr handily points out); once the music stops, your time is up.

By simply playing the game they have become familiar with a piece of art outside of it

“Unlike most encounters with game music, here the drama of the music is intimately connected to what you’re doing in the sense that it represents the time you have left to solve puzzles,” Barr writes about this challenge. “Combine that with the drama of the second piece in particular, and you have this kind of magical integration of play and music that I find to be quite rare.” What Barr sees here in The Witness is a successful effort to take a pre-existing piece of art and to integrate it “intimately” with the action of the game. The effect of this is that the player builds a connection with this piece of music that they probably wouldn’t have anywhere else, or at least not on their own accord. By simply playing the game they have become familiar with a piece of art outside of it, having emotions and memories tied to it, which should help garner an appreciation for that piece of music outside of its use in the game.

Exploring the potential of this idea is what Barr’s latest game is all about. It’s called Eveline and is primarily about the act of writing. Upon starting it up, I deliberately kept myself unaware of what it was all about or what it set out to do, and found myself struck with the familiarity of its scenario. You play as a writer hoping to have a story published but first must write the story up on your typewriter. There’s an immediate tension between this objective and becoming distracted by the various sights of the writing room. You can stare out the window at a silhouetted cityscape, turn the radio on for musical accompaniment, or read The Metamorphosis (1915) by Kafka.

As I’m sure most writers will tell you, the hardest part of the activity is sticking with it; waiting for inspiration or waiting to be in the mood, or more commonly for me, avoiding the distractions of the 10,000 tabs flashing with notifications in my browser. The first moments of Eveline are rife with this tempting procrastination, but then you exhaust all the items in the room of their curiosity and sit the writer at their desk to get busy typing. Eveline shows no mercy in its simulation of writing. Sure, you don’t actually have to think of anything to write (arguably the hardest part), but you endure the labor of it all: sitting restlessly, tapping away, forcing yourself to focus on getting these words out of your brain and on to the page. The dullness of the white page and complete lack of reason to escape it (i.e. a distraction) is exhausting. It’s why the option to have the writer lie down on the rug in the room resonates with me—staring at black-on-white for so long does something to you after so many hours, and I’ve found the best way to snap out of that trance is to lie down on the carpet for a while.

There are certainly some writer ‘truths’ in Eveline. The biggest of those comes with its, I guess, twist ending. Once you’ve finished typing up the story you’re told to phone a publisher for them to look at it. Three weeks later they send a rejection despite praising the prose. Yep, it turns out you wrote up James Joyce’s 1904 short story Eveline, hence the title of the game. There are two clear points to be made here. The first is that, yes, a lot of writing and indeed art takes, or is sometimes stolen wholesale, from previous works. T.S. Elliot’s famous quotation goes: “good writers borrow, great writers steal.” This seems to be especially true these days in the age of what some people call “remix culture.” The second point is that Barr makes you sit there and play your keyboard like a machine gun, typing up every letter of Joyce’s Eveline, and as you do this it’s almost a given that you’re reading along with it. “You create and consume it at the same time,” he reasons. “Perhaps it’s one way around the ways in which videogames often seem so stunted in terms of the kinds of themes and effects of currently existing ‘great’ works in other media. Just steal them…”

You can play Eveline for yourself in your browser.

Infinite Arms aims to make the toy game adult-friendly

When Activision’s Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure first launched in 2011, it resonated with older kids by balancing the act of imagination with the act of playing a videogame. While it was more structured than a more free-form toy like Legos, Skylanders created the illusion that, by placing plastic figurines on a light-up pedestal, players could bring inanimate objects to life. Adults didn’t understand this. As an added bonus for Activision, this was a natural point of entry into the toy industry, and the ability to bolster sales with a physical product line was something that everyone from Nintendo to Lego would soon pick up on.

The latest challenger to the “toy game” throne is Jumo Inc.’s Infinite Arms, a game that almost instantaneously registers as an attempt to make Skylanders and Lego Dimensions interesting for older audiences. Unlike the physical components of its static, miniaturized predecessors, Infinite Arms features interactive toys that are big and bulky—more action figure than mini-fig—equipped with posable arms and legs, and painted over with a chrome sheen that evokes steel and robotics. Not only are these toys posable, but they’ve got sockets all over the place: two sockets on the back, and two more sockets located near each hand. Press the button on the toy’s chest, and it pops up in-game. Slip a weapon into one of the toy’s weapon sockets, and that comes up too.

If it feels like there’s a lot going on here, it’s because there is. When the Jumo team first showed Infinite Arms to me just over a month ago, their presentation read like a cornucopia of gaming-related buzzwords, bursting with almost every hot tech trend of the past couple years. The game itself, which is planned to launch as a free-to-play mobile title for iOS and Android, seems to defy a quick description sans jargon. It will feature an episodic story mode, as well as a seasons-based third-person action combat multiplayer mode that hopes to follow in the eSports footsteps of games like League of Legends (2009) or Vainglory (2014). The aforementioned toys can connect with a user’s device via Bluetooth, and the whole set will feature purchasable weapon mods that also sync with the game instantaneously.

takes inspiration from Japanese mecha and tokusatsu series

The cumulative effect of all this technology is to conjure up an illusion similar to what Skylanders and Amiibo brought to the table, only with thicker smoke and less smudgy mirrors. More importantly, Infinite Arms seems to understand what older toy collectors want out of a game like this. The action figures’ art design, led by Transformers and Tamagotchi veteran Yasuo Takahama, takes inspiration from Japanese mecha and tokusatsu series and wouldn’t look bad at all when placed up on a shelf with other collectibles. The game’s seasonal rotation means that weapons can only be bought for a limited time, and the resulting scarcity is meant to translate into demand and, ultimately, a dedicated base of collectors.

I only got the chance to play through a couple rounds of Infinite Arms, and while the Mechwarrior-esque gunplay and side-strafing felt like they hadn’t quite been perfected, it’s hard to say for certain whether the game will bank its success on mechanics alone. What’s more interesting about Infinite Arms, at least at this stage in its development, is what it means for collectors—the demographic whose experience will be most directly influenced by the new tech at play here.

In what is perhaps the most dastardly monetization scheme in recent memory, Infinite Arms’ in-game store sells real-life toy weapon upgrades that, at the touch of the button, are delivered to the player’s home through Amazon. Along with the rest of the buzzworthy features packaged in with the game, this purchasing model says a lot about how Jumo perceives the gap between what kids like about toys versus what adults enjoy about them. Whereas children just want to see their action figures come to life in a game—something that Infinite Arms accomplishes with relative ease—adults use toys as a means of personal expression and as a way of amassing value through their belongings. They want to own weapons that are rare, to hand-paint their figures after the fact, to own limited edition pieces that they’ll never take out of the box. Infinite Arms’ greatest strength is that it’s built to accommodate for all these audiences, which is a funny idea when you consider the one major difference between this game and its predecessors: a more pronounced monetization infrastructure.

You can register for Infinite Arms and find out more on its website.

Twilight of the Superheroes

In his review of X-Men (2000), Roger Ebert begins with an evocation of the mythological gods of Ancient Greece, and ends with a plea to die hard comic book fans, whom he wishes would “linger in the lobby after each screening to answer questions.” Sixteen years later, viewed from a cinematic present overrun by the cape and cowl, Ebert’s words read as both prescient and portentous. The rise of the superhero blockbuster, beginning in earnest with the release of Spider-Man, in 2002, is comparably bifold, driven by two dissimilar but potent cultural forces: a civilization’s ancient, collective need for a self-defining myth, and the thoroughly modern drive to commodify that desire. Superheroes have become the contemporary American equivalent of Greek gods, mythic characters who embody the populace’s loftiest hopes, its deepest insecurities and flaws. Between 2016 and 2020, an estimated 63 comic book adaptations will receive a major theatrical release, with scores more scheduled to take the form of TV shows, videogames, and every saleable medium in-between. The public’s appetite for these properties appears blind and bottomless, its stomach willing to rupture long before it’s sated. If American culture is indeed in a state of decline, these are the stories built to survive its demise.

Superheroes have become the contemporary American equivalent of Greek gods

And yet, as of late, movie superheroes have seemed less inclined to heroics. Consider, for example, the upcoming Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, a horizontal consolidation of superhero properties set to premiere this March. Based on the film’s five trailers, director Zack Synder has recast Superman (Henry Cavill), that paragon of American exceptionalism, as a kind of inadvertent terrorist, a questionable savior for whom destruction is a prerequisite for rescue. Enter an aged Batman (Ben Affleck), never broodier, to serve as humanity’s last line of defense, his Batsuit more SWAT vehicle than Kevlar. And who’s supposed to be fighting crime while the superheroes fight each other? It doesn’t matter, because, as the trailers make unabashedly clear, the heroes will join forces well before one pummels the other into submission. Once again, the fate of humanity rests in the hands of a superhuman few. But unlike previous iterations in both franchises, Batman and Superman have bigger concerns than saving the world—punching each other to no end.

A similar fate has befallen Marvel’s The Avengers, who also find themselves thrust into an arbitrary civil war in the aptly titled Captain America: Civil War. Scheduled for release less than two months after Batman vs. Superman, the movies recall a misbegotten arms race, with each vying to package in as much unwanted internecine warfare as possible. There is, too, a trend in both films toward a darker handling of the subject matter. The Batman franchise, already dimmed considerably by Christopher Nolan, now looks filmed through a filter of soot. The playful banter of the Avengers has been subbed for the slap-fighting words of jilted teens. (“…he’s my friend,” Captain America says to Iron Man. His response: “So was I.”) The animating energy of both enterprises recalls the worst of internet fan fiction, or children grown bored with their action figures. To illustrate, compare Tobey Maguire’s pie-wholesome Peter Parker to the murderous, cuss-spewing Deadpool. Our superheroes have lost all interest in being heroic. In the name of brand consistency, they’ve lived long enough to resemble villains.

This progression has a complicated explication but a simple trajectory, wherein the blue skies of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy darken gradually into the eternal night of this year’s Suicide Squad. In that film, the villains of the DC universe have been convinced, albeit temporarily, to moonlight as heroes for the day, acting as short-term contract laborers for justice—super villains do, after all, lay equal claim to the prefix. Whereas other hybridized superhero stories, like the pseudo heist film Ant Man (2015), or the gritty noir Jessica Jones (2015), have contrived to settle their protagonists into an ethical grey area, Suicide Squad eliminates all pretense and contrivance. Its grey area is more tar pit. And its arrival represents the uncovering of the harsh truth at the core of the superhero mythos.

For 15 years, the superhero blockbuster has allowed American audiences to project an illusory dual image of its character, a fiction in which it’s at once helpless victim and benevolent savior, the damsel in distress and the hero coming to her aid. Where Batman vs. Superman and Captain America: Civil War strive and likely fail, Suicide Squad presents a much more honest, holistic image of America as superpower in the 21st century. It’s the conclusion to an argument whose articulation has been a decade and a half in the making. We’re neither the victims nor the heroes, it suggests. The resemblance isn’t passing. We simply are the villains.

We’re neither the victims nor the heroes. We are simply the villains.

///

In spite of Roger Ebert’s tepid review, X-Men went on to earn a global box office of nearly $300 million, approximately four times its production cost. The movie was, for its era, a mammoth success, a green light for studios to reconsider the viability of superheroes as intellectual property. Along with reboots of the Batman and Superman franchises, Spider-Man was a direct result of this renewed interest, and its then record-setting performance—$114 million in its first week, $871 million global box office—was a bellwether in cinema. The sub-genre of the comic book movie consumed the mainstream, in turn becoming the mainstream. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) received eight Academy Award nominations. The Avengers movies ultimately became two of the ten highest grossing films in history. Even non-comic book franchises, like The Fast & The Furious began to imbue their otherwise normal characters with superhuman powers. There are 16 annual Comic Cons in the United States alone. For the characters on the screen as well as for the people in the seats, being a superhero has become the norm.

The explanation for this preponderant interest in superhero stories could be traced, potentially, to that transitional period in American history, bridging the summers of 2000 and 2002, when a new found enthusiasm in comic book stories arose in the American movie goer. What may account for this increase, as it does for so many of America’s ongoing syndromes, is the advent of the age of terror, and the stories that audiences needed to hear in its wake. These were, of course, tales of impossible heroism in the face of evil, a commitment to ultimate justice at all costs. The superpower had been rendered momentarily vulnerable, and its media may have adapted to capitalize on that vulnerability. Observe how willingly films like Man of Steel (2013) co-opt the iconography of destruction, or how, in The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger’s The Joker threatens the societal order with terroristic chaos. The tone and tenor of superhero blockbusters have long paralleled the public’s view of American interventionism abroad, following the oblivious self-assuredness of the past into the darker, more complicated self-reflection of the present. 9/11 may have been the reboot of the American character. If so, every year since has been a rehash of an old origin story.

Superman Vol. 2 #75, “The Death of Superman”

That our superheroes have become contemptuous and combative shouldn’t surprise: the theater’s screen has always doubled as a mirror. In Spider-Man, the rose-colored surety of Peter Parker’s character was a true reflection of the American public’s. Today, those sentiments appear from one angle alluringly innocent, from another profoundly delusional, but therein lies their tensive power, the unsentimental truth they convey about the human compulsion to escape normalcy, no matter the cost. Our superheroes have shrunk down to the size of an ant, grown to stand head and shoulders over skyscrapers—it feels like progress that the only path these myths have left to stride is the one toward reality. May we arrive there sooner than later. For nowhere are fantasies of heroism more cherished than in the land of villains.

Featured image via “Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” Superman Vol 1 #423

The bizarre, Burton-esque JRPG that almost got away returns on PS4

Okage: Shadow King (2001) was always the game that barely slipped away. The game Hot Topic would have capitalized on, had it discovered it in time. The game I (now regretfully) sold as a teen for store credit to put towards buying a PlayStation 3. Yet now, despite the odds, Okage is back. When it was announced a few days ago that Okage was coming to PlayStation 4 through the platform’s PS2-to-PS4 emulation, my brain tickled with fond but long-forgotten memories of the cult classic that never entirely faded away.

Okage: Shadow King is a strange title among its genre’s console-cousins. Okage didn’t boast an addictive, crafting-heavy system like in Level-5’s Dark Cloud II (2003). It didn’t transport the player into magical, nostalgia-laden worlds like in Square’s Kingdom Hearts (2002). Instead, Okage probably rests most comfortably alongside something like Atlus’ Persona 3 (2006), a similar game in dark mood alone (even if Persona takes itself a bit more seriously). Okage: Shadow King accomplished something striking in the overcrowded golden era of PS2 JRPGs: it was wholly unique.

Okage: Shadow King is a JRPG with pure Tim Burton sensibilities. Its characters are thin, tall, and long-limbed. Their eyes are large and round, gazing from sleep-deprived, dark sockets. Even the game’s protagonist, Ari, is described as being quite literally “overshadowed,” a character whose overtly timid personality one would think was lifted right out of Burton’s own Edward Scissorhands (1991). Ari is quiet and average in almost every sense, and barely slinks along in life. In a bid to save his sister’s life after she falls victim to a curse—and with the prodding of his family—Ari allows his shadow to be possessed by the Evil King Stanley Hihat Trinidad XVI (or Stan, for short), when Stan promises to help. After saving his sister’s life, the rest of the game follows Ari and his newfound shadow-master Stan, as they embark on an adventure to defeat the other Evil Kings so that Stan can rightfully rule the world.

Okage accomplished something striking in the golden era of JRPGs: it was wholly unique

The game only grows more unwieldy from there, as Ari and Stan meet a host of memorable, quirky, impeccably-designed characters. Some end up joining Ari’s group, some don’t. Nonetheless, they all exist in a dreary, bleak world—but with a sense of humor, at least. Okage: Shadow King has more personality and style than most JRPGs, and that alone should be reason enough to give it a shot.

If you too are fiending to hang out with a cool shadow named Stan, Okage: Shadow King is now available on PSN for $9.99 .

The triumph of despair in Life Is Strange

This article contains spoilers for Life Is Strange.

There are several moments in Life Is Strange (2015) which, even now, weeks after finishing it, come into my head on a daily basis. First is the closing sequence of Episode One. As Syd Matters’ “Obstacles” kicks in, we drift away from Max and Chloe by the lighthouse and across the town of Arcadia Bay. We see vignettes of the game’s entire cast—Warren, Victoria, Joyce, Kate, Jefferson, Wells, Nathan. Some of them are working, some are plotting, some are crying. David Madsen, Chloe’s bossy and suspicious step-father, is working on his house. Frank Bowers, the town drug dealer, emerges from his trailer and admires the sky. These are only small moments, but they lend what could otherwise be one-dimensional and predictable characters all important depth.

With the exception of Jefferson who, in one of Life Is Strange‘s most clumsy narrative turns, transforms into a Thomas Harris villain, Christian Divine and Jean-Luc Cano’s script ensures everybody has “a moment.” When he viciously beats Nathan Prescott, Warren is more than Max’s hapless, on/off love interest. When she confides in Max at the Vortex Club party, Victoria is more than just a stock, preppy bitch. David, initially paranoid and bullying, becomes one of the most endearing and sensitive characters in the series. Wells, the avuncular school principal, turns out to be incompetent and a drinker.

It’s a big story, but Life Is Strange always finds time to examine its characters

It’s a big story, but Life Is Strange always finds time to examine its characters. I’d argue, in fact, that above science-fiction, horror, or even teenage anxieties and a desire to be able to undo one’s mistakes, Life Is Strange is a game about people. As you travel back in time, and later through alternate dimensions, you encounter myriad versions of the same characters, altered and permuted to reveal different aspects of their personalities. It’s profoundly melancholic to see, in the other universe, Chloe’s softer and believing side and then return to the base world, where, although those parts of her still exist, they’re buried beneath the hardships of another life. If the premise of Life Is Strange plays on theories of space-time and physics, the end of its first episode reminds us we can change something’s behaviour simply by observing—characters who have been hostile to Max are, in private, different, more complicated people.

This is what saves Life Is Strange from adolescent simplicity. What could have been a saccharine game about the majesty of youth, compared to the cynicism of adulthood, reveals itself at the end of its first part to be interested more broadly in people. And if you want to talk about Life Is Strange as a coming-of-age story, maturity can be measured by empathy. As a teenager, everyone is out to get you and it’s not your fault. As an adult, you’re considerate to other people and more able to judge yourself. From David to Nathan to Victoria, Episode One of Life Is Strange is filled with villains—in its closing moments, it hints at complexities we’re not yet experienced enough to understand.

The Vortex Club party, in Episode Four, is another sequence that’s stayed in my head. To explain, I first I have tell you that, before I played it, Life Is Strange was a game I was ready to dislike. Its acoustic guitar, Polaroid camera, teenage outcast aesthetic smacked, to me, of a queasy inferiority complex. I expected the script to unambiguously adore Max, for her iconoclasm, and rejection by the high school social elite. I thought she would be pious and noble, and the popular kids would all be nasty and wrong—judging from its artwork and website, Life Is Strange looks like a passive-aggressive revenge fantasy, created by people who were bullied at school, and then grew up to be game designers. And to begin with, I thought my suspicions would be proved right. When Max exits the classroom in Episode One, and walks the halls of Blackwell listening to her iPod, drowning out the voices of everyone around her, Life Is Strange started to feel like another the type of game that worships the imagination of a child and arrogantly implies that for some beautiful, chosen few, the rest of the world isn’t good enough.

But the Vortex Club party is peculiarly welcoming. You can sneak in, although it’s possible for Max to be formally invited. Alyssa, the girl who’s always seen on her own, and who reality itself seems to bully, is here. The music is great. People are having fun. The VIP area, created by draping a sports hall curtain around the deep end of the swimming pool, is endearing more than threatening. And Max knows people. There are plenty of characters—drunks, jocks, cheerleader types—to who she can talk. Before I played Life Is Strange, if you’d told me there was a scene at an exclusive high school party, I would have rolled my eyes, expecting it to be presented as part of a vicious, adulterated place, the reality of which encroaches on precious and simple innocence. But Max is at home here. To the thumping sound of “Got Well Soon” by Breton, I couldn’t help but nod my head. Time and again I’ve written about the determination of some videogames to remain in adolescence, to not just refute adult subject matter, but to effectively lie to their audience, and sell twee simplicity as meaningful insight—to serve up sizzle and call it steak. Of that, the Vortex Club scene could easily have been another example, but Life Is Strange surprised me again. In their own defence, so many videogames attack the outside world, the mainstream and the notion of belonging: since the wider world won’t accept videogames as works of art, or anything above base entertainment, videogames will tell their players that they don’t need the wider world, that it’s a hostile and unpleasant place anyway. Life Is Strange is not that insecure. Aware of what happened to Kate, we arrive at the Vortex Club party understandably suspicious, and are quickly wrong-footed by its congeniality. The high school social elite, such an easy stand-in for all the mainline detractors from games, game players, and game-makers, is unexpectedly friendly.

Life Is Strange undermines the usually morally black-and-white choice systems in the medium

The greatest part of Life Is Strange, however, is the climax of Episode Three. Travelling back in time to save William’s life to spare Chloe the hardship of growing up without a father is incredibly uncomfortable. Inhabiting Max’s 13-year-old body inside Chloe’s jarringly clean and tidy childhood home, as William and Chloe swap jokes and loving platitudes, makes the whole sequence feel inherently wrong. It’s plastic. It’s sugary. It’s alien. It’s too nice. I felt less like I’d walked into the past and more like I was trapped in some sickly, Truman Show-esque soap opera. When, in Episode Five, Max hallucinates that she is a tiny version of herself, watching the conversation between Chloe and William from within a snow globe on their mantelpiece, it drove the scene home. Chloe and William’s relationship is nauseatingly idyllic, like a father and daughter from a lousy sitcom, and Max watches it, as if watching television. When Jefferson, Life Is Strange‘s worst character, later talks about capturing on film the moment a person loses their innocence, his monologue is straining and hamstrung. The jadedness that comes with adulthood is better illustrated during the scenes between Chloe and William. Watching them as a grown-up Max, a Max aware of the reality these people will ultimately sleepwalk into, their relationship is unbearably naïve.

As too is that ending of Episode Three. When Max has saved William’s life, and returned to an altered present, although the world looks nicer—beaming sunshine, a better dressed and more popular Max, Warren is in love—it’s positively emetic. Climbing aboard the school bus and noting that David is the driver and he doesn’t recognize Max is the first sign that something is wrong. The two whales, washed up on Arcadia beach, cooking in the sunlight, is the next. And when you arrive at Chloe’s house, and instead of run-down it’s classically suburban, rather than hope it is dread that strikes you. This halcyon version of Arcadia is straight out of David Lynch, a director to whom the license plate on Chloe’s truck makes clumsy reference. The sun, the music, the altered versions of familiar places and characters are barely disguising an awful reality. So when William answers the door and we see Chloe in the wheelchair, paralyzed from the neck down, it hardly feels like a twist at all.

Jefferson turning out to be Life Is Strange‘s antagonist is the game’s weakest narrative beat. As well as an inexplicable u-turn in an already unneeded sub-plot, it’s an overwrought allegory for the dangers of adulthood, slapping you round the face with the message that the grown-up world is not always safe. Chloe being in the wheelchair is—arguably—similarly hamfisted, but it’s an attack on whimsy and ignorance. When you see what has become of Chloe in this perfect but fabricated Arcadia Bay, the love that people and the videogames they create have for idealized, internal worlds is swiftly undercut. To pigeonhole this moment as part of a discussion on videogame form—to say that, by showing how right and humanistic decisions can have bad consequences, and that therefore Life Is Strange undermines the usually morally black-and-white choice systems in the medium—is to do it injustice. So, too, is to think about it as part of a coming-of-age story. Max’s realization that she is not all powerful, important, or able to affect the change that she would like is definitely part of her growing up, but Life Is Strange plays on that much better in its final episode, when Max is forced to walk through the myriad unstable alternate realities she has created.

I personally like to think of the ending of Episode Three as a moment of pure despair. When you see a kid eating an ice cream and the scoop falls off and lands on the floor, and the kid bursts into tears, it’s anguishing because it happens for no rhyme or reason—the kid is innocent and has done nothing wrong, and even if the fall can be explained by wind, gravity or some coalescence of natural forces, it’s still unfair. The very reality in which things like that can occur starts to feel premised on vindictiveness. Chloe in the wheelchair, next to her dad, is a lesson in that perverse precept: despite your best efforts, or often for no reason at all, reality itself is your punisher. That idea of things just happening, and being able to feel in the face of that idea, only despair, is a far-reaching human experience, one that Life Is Strange grotesquely—almost gleefully—illustrates.

The strange appeal of being locked in a room for an hour with friends

It is Saturday night, February 27th, and I am trapped in a submarine. Moments ago I was dancing on my tip-toes across the sidewalk, oddly gallant amid the bitter air of the Bristol harborside. Now there’s a tall man in a yellow jacket bent-double in the corner, sick from weeks of tinned peaches—I try to stare through his facade before shying away as his eyes turn towards mine. I am not really on a submarine. We are pretending. Five adults fumbling around a concealed wooden cube for printed cards and hidden cabinets. A digital timer counts down from 60 minutes to zero on one of the walls. Incomplete grids, nautical maps, and a rotary phone hang on the others. At the center of the room is a periscope that doesn’t work yet. We have to get out of here, quickly.

This was my first time having played an escape game. Perhaps that’s not true. Sure, I’ve played many “escape games” in my time; those causal time-wasters that pop-up in your web browser. In those, I sat at my computer, collecting a trove of keys and collectibles, frantically clicking around the walls and floor of each room. This type of escape game is derived from the grander genre of videogames known as adventure games. The format varies but plays largely the same—point-and-click through environments, inventory screens, and dialog—however, the goal is steadfast, always being to escape from a place where you have been trapped. Now, following on from these computer-based experiences as well as a tradition of popular ’90s television shows such as The Crystal Maze, the escape game is going physical, and it looks like it’ll be going big.

look through keyholes to view hints

I know this as my friends know this, in particular, the two of our party of five trapped in that made-up submarine who have just launched EscapeGameHub. Between them and the other two members of their team they have played 25 escape games around the world. That number seems to rise almost every other weekend but it’s not enough to keep up. “Since 2010, escape games have grown from 0 games across the world to now well over 6000,” my friend Gareth Beeston tells me, who is EscapeGameHub’s marketing director. “There are currently around 250 escape games in the UK across about 150 venues, with the rate of new escape games being opened at one a week, according to our latest records.”

The one we played in Bristol is called Fathom Escape, which Beeston tells me is one of the better themes he’s seen out of the many escape games he’s played. Others he highlights includes Cyantist in Bournemouth, in which you have to find an antidote to a deadly poison filling the room (you don’t actually get poisoned, of course); City Mazes in Cardiff, which offer two options, either to beat Jack and Rose to the top deck of the Titanic, or survive a nuclear fallout in a 1950s home; and Escape Rooms Durham, whose debut room has you rifling through the twee, polished oak office of a peculiar gentleman. His favorite, however, is the detective-themed room of Salisbury Escape, not only due to the puzzles and narrative, but also because the owners “make sure that they are fully in character from the moment they open the door, all the way through the brief, and well into the game.”

The role-playing aspect of live escape room games isn’t going to be for everyone. I found that I couldn’t fully commit to it myself. But that doesn’t matter too much. As while the owners of each escape room brings a histrionic pretense to the whole set-up, you can mostly ignore it, instead focusing on solving the physical objects in your hands. There’s nothing fake about the puzzle boxes, large iron keys, wind-up lights, and treasure chests. And it’s this that proves the biggest appeal. It’s so rare to be able to touch objects like these—even if they don’t have any actual historical value—as either they are seen behind glass in museums, or only viewed from a distance on a film or TV set, or perhaps inside a videogame. Virtual reality can’t match the distinct pleasure of turning a key in a lock and feeling it click in your fingertips as a lid pops open.

“you will want to play more, I can guarantee it”

Outside of the UK and further into Europe, Beeston has found some real treasures, including an escape room based on horror film The Ring (2002) in Poland, which is played in the dark by torchlight and involves staring into a well and rearranging creepy dolls. Others are similarly creative but in smaller bursts, having him look through keyholes to view hints, and use an old 30s-style telephone to ring someone on the other end for a clue. It’s this type of detail and experience-based feedback that the team at EscapeGameHub are hoping their new website will provide. It’s something that they were looking for when getting into escape games last year but couldn’t find—hence, they made it themselves.

Grandpa’s Last Will, by Lock’d in London

First and foremost, the idea is for the website to act as an easy-to-use search engine for escape games. You can search by location and see what escape games are available there, including descriptions, images, and vital info such as price, length of time, and number of players allowed. The website also allows for people who have played an escape game to leave a written review and rate it out of five stars. It’s basic stuff but it’s something that until now has been crucially missing for anyone into escape games. Because here’s the thing with escape games: once you’ve played one you can’t really play it again, as you’ll already know the solutions. And so, to keep playing them, you need to find others. EscapeGameHub should make feeding that particular hobby easier.

For now, EscapeGameHub is focused on the UK but it will reach other countries over time. Especially as escape games continue to grow, too. Right now, Beeston said escape games are in their “infancy,” easily trumped in popularity by other group activities such as bowling, laser tag, and paintball. But knowledge of their existence is steadily spreading through the stories that people are usually very eager to share after having played them. As to mine, we didn’t escape the submarine in time, but we were on the cusp of doing so when the timer reached zero, apparently. If nothing else it’s incensed me with an urge to find another to play and escape within the given time frame. “Once you have played just one escape game, you will want to play more, I can guarantee it,” Beeston said to me before I played. I know what he means now.

You can check out EscapeGameHub here.

Header image from EXIT Berlin, via An English Man in Berlin

Web code lets you simulate the jarring experience of dyslexia

Victor Widell, a Swedish web developer, released a piece of web code called dsxyliea a couple of weeks ago via GitHub. The code sets out to emulate an experience with dyslexia by keeping the first and last letter in each word the same, but mixing up the letters in the middle, to give the appearance of letters shifting and jumping in and out of place. Widell shows the code being applied to a Wikipedia article to illustrate how it can adapt to different pieces of text the user might be interested in.

As much as the internet is known for its memes, gifs, vines and cat videos, its also filled with mass amounts of text

We are often fascinated with how others experience the world in ways that are different than our own. Whether it’s getting a sense of how English sounds to non-English speakers, how those with synesthesia may experience art forms such as music, or how sensory overload feels to those with autism. All of these are approximations based on selective experiences. However, the window they provide us can move from being simply “fascinating” toward allowing us to empathize with and better understand other’s experiences of our world.

Image via Alison

The “us” in this case is the assumed majority who do not experience the everyday in any unusual way. But these normalized ideas are constructions in the first place. When we talk about the democratization of knowledge—which in a contemporary context mostly refers to the rapid growth of the internet—it can be easy to forget that even those with direct access to the web may not have the type of access that you or I might have.

As much as the internet is known for its memes, gifs, Vines, and cat videos, it’s also filled with mass amounts of text. Even the example of a Wikipedia page highlights for us how much text one might tackle on the internet daily. This is even more the case with our current online thinkpiece culture, in which articles carry a lot of weight in how we often talk and think through issues that are important to us.

Dyslexia is a varied experience, far from adequately captured by this web code alone. However, it does allow us to get a sense of how reading may be made more difficult on a daily basis, providing an extra barrier for those who want to engage with text-based sources of knowledge. The idea that you may have to look twice, three times, or more just to be sure of what you’re reading, is a reminder that not everyone experiences the internet, or the world-at-large, the same way.

Featured image via James Leocadi

Ancient India: The Birthplace of Modern Game Design

This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel

Ancient India produced some of the oldest and longest surviving games in history, and though the country’s videogame creators face modern day challenges, its contributions to game design are undeniable. They’ve gone by many different names and variations, but games like Chess, Chutes and Ladders, Parcheesi, and even the six-sided die are all believed to have originated in ancient India. Mostly created during a turbulent and formative time in the country’s history, the nature of these games gives a better understanding of the ideas, values, and social climate surrounding them. They also prove that India has been a historical powerhouse of play, with a promising background that inspires game designers today.

India has been a historical powerhouse of play

“Games and toys in general often reflect the culture of their place of origin” said Nic Ricketts, a curator at The Museum of Play. “Their mechanics and design may reflect earlier customs and beliefs that might otherwise be lost.” Ranging from morality lessons to commentaries on social hierarchy, the games of ancient India teach us about the lives of the people who played them. And their survival in modern day may even speak to the continued pertinence of their lessons.

The classic Parcheesi derives from the Indian game Pachisi, in which players attempt to be the first to move their pieces all the way around a cruciform board. Some of the earliest evidence of play has been dated back to the 300s AD, during which time people used cowrie shells to dictate the number of moves they would make. A rounded shell with a flat bottom, cowrie shells were cast in handfuls, with the number of bottom-up pieces representing the number of spaces or moves a player could make. According to Ricketts, the moving pieces on a Pachisi board are “meant to represent dancers, dancing for the Indian royalty.” This was a game popular with all people in all classes, ranging from boards drawn on a dirt floor to a life-sized version found in the courtyard of an Indian king.

Chess board at the Jai Mahal image via Peg Prideaux

Meanwhile, the sheer number of variations on a game like Chess make it a somewhat contentious subject when discussing where it originated. But currently, it’s believed Chess draws its origin from India, where it was known as Chaturanga and was highly influenced by games from China. Ricketts explains Chaturanga translates somewhat roughly into “the four armies,” with each of the four different types of pieces on a board representing different positions of a hierarchy. Once the game spread to Europe, Chess was tweaked and altered to more closely resemble the game we play today.

Snakes and Ladders, on the other hand, fully embraces its Hinduist origins as a game that expresses a clear morality. It’s believed that Snakes and Ladders was used to help children understand that choosing the good, productive path isn’t always easiest. The ladders are believed to represent virtue, lifting the player up as a result of her good deeds. Conversely, snakes are seen as the embodiment of vice, sending the player backward and forcing her to make up for lost ground as a consequence of the player’s failings. Although it doesn’t maintain all the elements of this veiled morality lessons today, the game Chutes and Ladders is heavily derived from this Indian classic.

the games of ancient India teach us about the lives of the people who played them

Today, India struggles in the race to keep up with the fast-paced and global scale of modern game development. Indian video game designer Shailesh Prabhu of Yellow Monkey Studios, who created Socioball, attributes this to a number of factors. “Everything from poor infrastructure, to lack of quality talent and infrequency of meetups and discussions about games and gameplay, to geographical distribution of developers all over the vast landscape hamper game development in India,” he explained.

Prabhu sees the current Indian game development scene as a burgeoning one, with a handful of successes contributing to the industry at large, but not leaving a remarkable impression globally. Regardless, he remains hopeful, admitting things are moving slow in India, but it shouldn’t be counted out. “I feel that indie developers here increasingly [are starting] to see international success, even though the pace might be slow,” he says. Regardless of the struggles developers face in India, he’s hopeful that a few successes might put the birthplace of gaming back on the proverbial map.