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Weekend Reading: What The Hell Is Virtual Reality

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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Crossing the Valley, Walter Kim, Harper’s Magazine

You may have been hearing a little bit about this virtual reality thing so brace yourself for criticism and meditation from every publication from the ivory towers to the sewer zines. But how do we address how we’ve been addressing VR? Harper’s Walter Kim looks at the evolution of technical platforms, and encountering the uncanny valley that has been mused about for so long. Specifically through pornography, of course. It’s a new age, but we’re still on the same planet.

America’s Whites-Only Weed Boom, Amanda Chicago Lewis, Buzzfeed

Speaking of a new dawn for old vices: If you live in North America you may have noticed, or whiffed, that numerous states and the entirety of Canada are moving towards marijuana legalization, which would be plum great if it wasn’t for a longer, cruel history of drug policy. Addressing the overlooked, contentious, and incredibly important matter of how even the green wave neglects black people punished for the same practice, Amanda Chicago Lewis speaks with those who will be left behind and explores how The War on Drugs will continue to screw over citizens long after it ends.

A history (and the triumph) of the environmental artist, Robert Yang

Good game maker and also a good writer Robert Yang looks at how games have shifted priorities from making creative characters to making the creative environments they live in, and how it will influence the way games are developed as well as those who pursue 3D modelling.

 

The Last Lifestyle Magazine, Kyle Chayka, Racked

Lifestyle magazines, collections of middle class people writing about upper class luxuries for other middle class people, haven’t really been the media cornerstone they once were. Yet somehow Kinfolk, a recent and rapidly expanding media empire that you’ve probably never heard of before, has managed to cut itself a place of cultural influence. Racked profiles the modern, more precious, idea of good living.

 

Synesthesia and vibrators: a history of innovation from Rez

There’s a moment in the demo of Rez’s PlayStation VR inception (retitled as Rez Infinite) where I accidentally transgressed my professional demeanor and said “holy shit.” Not a lone “holy shit this is kinda cool,” as I glanced around the technicolored space of Area 02. Nor a woozy “holy shit I feel nauseous,” as I dizzyingly locked onto rockets flying towards me. But an awe-inspiring “holy shit, this is VR.” VR at its most realized. Rez is VR. And honestly, it kinda always has been.

Game designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Rez was always on the cutting edge of not just experiencing technology, but game innovation as well. “The game should feel like a new media form,” said Mizuguchi, during the retrospective talk “Classic Game Postmortem: Rez” at the Game Developer’s Conference. “It’s our job [as developers and designers] to create new experiences.” Mizuguchi’s Rez has become synonymous with many things over the years since its initial release in 2001: Synesthesia, electronic music, even a controversial vibrating accessory. Yet what many don’t realize is the simple motivation behind it all—a marriage between music, games, and feeling.

“It’s our job [as developers and designers] to create new experiences”

Mizuguchi’s first encounter with inspirations for Rez —even before he had a concrete idea for the game—stemmed from the classic shoot-em-ups Xevious (1982) and Xenon 2 Megablast (1989). The games’ punchy sounds and energetic music spawned delight in Mizuguchi, an idea that music and games could truly be joined together. It elicited a feeling of hope. “[It] opened up my imagination about what this all means,” he said. “And how do I create something off what I’m experiencing right now.”

After graduating from university, Mizuguchi developed a handful of racing games for Sega, including the notable arcade racing simulator Sega Rally (1994). Despite a foray into another genre, Mizuguchi’s mind stayed within his ultimate goal, always thinking of a way to intertwine music and games into a cohesive existence. It wasn’t until a trip to the EDM festival Street Parade that the idea of synesthesia plagued Mizuguchi’s senses that, as he mused, “it perfectly synced in my head.”

Synesthesia, as Mizuguchi defines, is the ability to “hear the colors, see the sound.” A primary inspiration for this method of thought was from Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, who frequently painted the sounds that he saw and producing abstract work in the process. It was this, coupled with the question, “Why does music make us feel so good?” that finally paved a direct path for Rez’s development. The quest to make music feel positive in the realms of a game was another hurdle for Mizuguchi to climb. In a pointed example, Mizuguchi talked of electronic DJs acting as “mood designers.” DJs don’t just hype up the crowd, but control the mood that the crowd absorbs. DJs seek to “elevate our feelings,” said Mizuguchi. “Lift us to the next level.” Quantization, the syncing of rhythm to make one feel good, later became the “essence to perfecting the mechanics of Rez.”

With Rez, Mizuguchi created an eclectic experience, but found that the surface of playing and hearing the game to, of course, not be enough: it was missing an additional element to resonate with the player. Thus came the Trance Vibrator. Bundled exclusively in the “Special Package” of the game in Japan, the vibrator plugged into a USB port, and pulsated along with the music in the game. Ideally to be used underneath feet or a player’s bum, it gained notoriety through a more controversial use for the Trance Vibrator: as a masturabatory toy.

The Trance Vibrator was only the start of Mizuguchi’s innovations outside of the game itself. 15 years later, alongside Rez Infinite’s announcement, was the Synesthesia Suit, which is essentially a highly evolved, wearable 2016-version of the original Trance Vibrator itself. The Synesthesia Suit is broken up into two layers, one of 26(!) vibrators, the other of LED lights. Easily too expensive to ever be released for commercial use, the Synesthesia Suit is instead sitting in Mizuguchi’s home of Tokyo for the time being. The suit is currently on display for public testing at an interactive art exhibit in Roppongi Hills until March 21. Towering high above Tokyo from 52 floors in the sky, patrons are able to wear the suit and play Rez Infinite in PSVR, while friends can sit in vibrating chairs (of course) that pulse along with the suit and game.

When Mizuguchi set out to create Rez, he sought to re-design experience entirely. An experience that, as Mizuguchi himself said, is “not just a journey, but a treasure.” To marry two mediums he deeply appreciated, and felt didn’t join together in the ways they deserved. The path to Rez Infinite is almost painfully obvious with Mizuguchi’s history of utilizing the newest technology available to him at every turn of his career. With PSVR, Mizuguchi’s at last giving Rez an extra level: Area X, an area with particles that sway with the music to boot. Given Rez’s innovative, whirlwind of a history, the leap to VR makes complete sense. Despite not always existing as VR in the sense of a literal virtual reality headset to plop on your skull, it was VR in the vein that it transcended expectations for videogames. Rez innovated outside of the space of a lone visual experience, transcending it into something much greater. And it’s not bound to derez anytime soon.

During his talk, Mizuguchi noted that he hoped to release Rez Infinite at the launch of PSVR in October 2016, but held no promises. Check out our ongoing coverage of GDC 2016 here.

The simple pleasure of tossing bottles and listening to sea shells in virtual reality

Virtual reality is absolutely everywhere at GDC this year. On the expo floor, a man strapped at the waist to a treadmill-like device runs in place. At the lunch tables, a woman’s jaw drops as she experiences some simulated haranguing of her sensory organs. Everyone is goggled up. Despite being my first time at the Game Developers Conference, I’m inclined to believe that the nigh ubiquitous presence of virtual reality gear is a first for the event.

I was ecstatic just to walk around the world

But even with an excess of hardware, there’s only so much actual content to go around. Most playable things in VR are demos, like the HTC Vive’s Longbow—literally just archery in virtual reality. They’re less about presenting a completely realized experience and more about showing off potential. So when I was first dropped into the world of The Gallery, a complete game played on the HTC Vive, I was knocked off my critical horse.

On a beach in the midst of a starry night, I wandered through the detritus of ships wrecked long ago. I tossed bottles into the ocean, lit roman candles in a bonfire, I held a seashell to my ear and listened to the ocean. It was a demo, yes, but it was also just the first level of a game. The effect of that completed effort towards full-body immersion defeated any cynicism I might have walked in with. Like a toddler who’s just figured out his own agency, I was ecstatic just to walk around the world Cloudhead Games had created, picking stuff up and, on occasion, smashing it.

Though I was caught off guard, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the game is so impressive. Cloudhead Games began development of The Gallery on the Oculus DK1, making it one of the first games designed to be in VR from the ground-up. “The more we tried to use traditional game design wisdom, the more we realized that it just wasn’t going to work,” Mike Wilson, Cloudhead Games’ narrative director, told me after my test-run. After plenty of iterations, they nailed down a user interface based around natural player motions; to put an item in your inventory, players need only to drop it over their shoulder, into their “backpack.”

Wilson pulled me out of the beach after a little while, dropping me into a scene with much bigger and more spectacular set pieces. However, my favorite moment, and the one that most impressed upon me the power of VR, was in a cavern just off of that initial shore. On a weather-beaten wooden table, someone had left a note. I held it up, but couldn’t quite read it in the cave’s gloom. Without thinking, I grabbed a candle and held it in front of the paper, reading by the flickering light. It’s the quieter, subtle scenes that most effectively draw you into a virtual world.

Check out our ongoing coverage of GDC 2016 here.

Documentary outlines how Cities: Skylines is being used to plan real cities

Having enjoyed a brief sneak-peek at Austin, Texas’ SXSW art and technology festival last weekend, My Urban Playground is an upcoming documentary from game publisher Paradox Interactive that tells the story of popular city-building game, Cities: Skylines (2015), and the fans who are using it to plan real-world architecture projects. Set over the two years leading up to and following the game’s release, the documentary is planned to cover how architects, politicians, and fans of the game have come together to create new real-world building initiatives. Additionally, the film will also feature interviews with United Nations development group UN-Habitat, which helps struggling communities deal with the difficulties associated with rapid urban development, as well as game studio Mojang, the creators of fellow building game Minecraft (2011).

helped players find interest in topics they might have otherwise ignored

“Since the release of Cities: Skylines last year, we’ve seen our creative players use it to design thousands of different things, from clever road layouts and traffic simulations to recreations of entire real-world cities,” explained Susana Meza, COO of Paradox Interactive. “It shouldn’t come as a surprise that among our millions of players, we have plenty of architects, urban planners, public officials, and many more people who have found parallels between the game and their professional lives.” As an example of the type of projects Cities: Skylines is inspiring, the documentary will also be telling the story of a new transportation system being built in Stockholm, Sweden that was planned using the game.

Cities: Skylines isn’t the first game to have inspired real-world research. In 2010, Montreal’s McGill Centre for Bioinformatics released Phylo, a free puzzle game that tasked players with solving various easy-to-understand color-matching puzzles. These puzzles were based on real-world nucleotide sequences, and solutions from high-scoring players have since been used to further the university’s real-world research. By making themselves accessible to experts and non-enthusiasts alike, games like Phylo and Cities: Skylines have both helped players find interest in topics they might have otherwise ignored.

My Urban Playground is due for release later this year. You can find out more on Paradox’s website.

Planet Licker, a game that you play with your tongue

By far the most innocent game with the smuttiest implications at GDC this year was the alternative controller entry entitled Planet Licker. In the game’s fiction, you are a monster who eats planets made of popsicles. As the player IRL, you are also a popsicle-licking monster of sorts, only instead of planets your tongue is manhandling an edible controller.

Planet Licker not only puts your tongue to the test; it’s also a race against time. You have to schlurp up six planets before the clock runs out. As part of the annual ALT.CTRL.GDC showcase, Planet Licker was an unusual experiment for creator Frank DeMarco, to say the least. “It definitely changed the way I thought about game design, more than I thought it would,” he says when I caught up with him in the expo hall on Thursday. “I usually make very traditional games, like 2D arcade style games with simple mechanics. But the idea for this was just so good, I knew we had to make it work.”

Designing for the tongue proved to be a unique challenge, too. Flavor, taste, and texture were the most important elements to nail down, since players don’t really have time to look down but need to be able to differentiate the inputs while licking. Of course, the team took precautions to ensure the controller was safe to use as well. The popsicle buttons are single-use, and the controller is sanitized after each use to account for overzealous players (like myself) who might spread their sticky enthusiasm via mouth juices. The tech behind the controller is deceptively simple, too. “You’re actually just closing the circuit between two disconnected wires with your tongue,” DeMarco explained.

When it comes to players, DeMarco noticed there are two different types of people who were intrigued enough to stop by the booth. “One is the type of person who’s really interested, but too skeeved out to play it themselves. But they’re still too fascinated too turn away and watch others do it. The other type of person is the one who comes up and is like, ‘Yeah. I definitely want to lick this right now.'”

“I just kept licking. And when I needed to lick more, I licked more.”

Apparently, I was the latter of these two types. But after losing pretty quickly, I inquired into viable strategies before trying again. “I would say the best tongue tactic is the poking technique. Just leave your tongue out and poke at it,” DeMarco instructed.

The top player on the leaderboards (“It’s asking me to lick interface my name!” exclaimed one player who also made it onto the list) from that day, Nikk Mitchell, happened to drop by by the booth as well while I was trying out the game. When asked about his tactics, Mitchell gave simple but instructive advice. “I just kept licking. And when I needed to lick more, I licked more.”

When pressed about how his tongue had developed such licking skills, Mitchell responded with a demure “Oh my god,” before respectfully declining to answer with anything more than “I guess my tongue was just born for Planet Licker.”

Check out Planet Licker’s website here, and the other insanely inventive alternative controller entries here.

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst and the art of videogame lighting

“We always want more control,” said EA DICE’s Fabien Christin, Senior Lighting Artist (and a man who is very particular about reflections), who led a fruitful panel at the Game Developer’s Conference on Thursday morning. In his technical talk, “Lighting the City of Glass – Rendering Mirror’s Edge Catalyst,” Christin listed off the successes and many challenges he and his team faced over the course of developing the as-of-yet-unreleased Mirror’s Edge Catalyst.

“Getting the right white was a challenge”

Christin talked of everything in the realm of lighting, from the “natural” light dependent on the in-game skies, to the reflections bouncing from virtually every surface in the game. In the case of skies, the direct intensity of the lighting reflected onto the scene depends on the time of day (the in-game’s day cycle runs at 48 minutes). When the sun’s reflection bounces off a surface, Christin and co. crank the intensity up to 75% to help the sun consistently illuminate. This is global illumination, a real-time indirect lighting solution, for when those pesky buildings or other objects get in the way.

Then is the case for reflections, a whole ‘nother ballpark in lighting conundrums. To solve the many problems that may arise, Christin discussed four specific adjustments he and the team use to deal with problems faced. The first is distance reflection volume, a sky visibility mask for enlightening. The second is local reflection volume, a “capture point” that can be moved or updated with just the time of the day. The third is screenspace reflections, which helpfully reflects anything visible on the screen. The final is local planar reflection: a mirror for reflecting for characters, such as the dynamic main character Faith.

“Getting the right white was a challenge,” said Christin. “Because pretty much the whole game is white.” White, contrasted with bright reds or other primary colors, has become a strong recognizable aesthetic point for the Mirror’s Edge series. In creating the sorta-reboot title to success the original, the white has become an even more recognizable factor. A specific problem that arose in the in-game sun’s rotation was that around sunset, the natural light contribution fell to its lowest rate. As a result, all the whites looked gray—and that’s a big problem. By dividing the sun’s intensity to create a linear white balancing, rather than a filmic one, the problem is seemingly remedied. “Your brain sees it as white just from the color next to it,” clarified Christin.

Before designing Faith, EA DICE hired models to come in for the day to become in-game models. The development team then opted out of using any of the models, wanting Faith and all other characters to “remain stylized.” Without a model to test dynamic lighting on, Christin elected a 3D rendering of himself in the engine, so that he could perfectly spot the many ways in which light can hit a character’s face at any given time. For the cinematics, an entire other set of rules are placed for the game. There are as many as 472 “lights” on a single track at a time in a cutscene, a truly daunting number, considering the semi-brief length most cutscenes materialize as. At the very lowest level of comprehension, the game sure does look pretty, lighting and all.

Admire the many lights of Mirror’s Edge Catalyst when it’s released on May 24, 2016 for Playstation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Check out our ongoing coverage of GDC 2016 here.

Posthuman: Sanctuary challenges how board games are adapted

When adapting a game from tabletop to computer, emphasis is often placed on reducing abstraction. Objects, characters, and events only representable by cards, markers, or dice in the physical world can instead be fully realized by digital artists in a videogame. But Gordon Calleja, game designer at Malta-based studio Mighty Box, isn’t sold on this approach. Calleja is currently heading a Kickstarter campaign for Posthuman: Sanctuary, a videogame that expands on the ideas of his board game Posthuman (2015), itself an unusual and technically complex mixture of tactics and narrative storytelling.

“for games we need a radical reconceptualization of those ideas”

“We had this big discussion about dice and tiles, and whether we were going to use the board game metaphor [in the videogame],” Calleja told me recently. “Eventually I decided to embrace that metaphor. So the map tiles from the original game, for instance, remain tiles. You’re not traveling in a preset map, it’s still an abstraction of a ‘journey.’” Calleja said he is more interested in evoking “images in the mind” of the player over presenting everything literally on the screen. By maintaining some elements of tabletop abstraction, players are forced to imbue the game’s iconography with narrative meaning, rather than being force-fed meaning by the game itself.

Posthuman: Sanctuary is set following a mysterious event known as The Fall, in which a large portion of the world’s population has mutated into, well, a post-human species. You play as a human attempting to reach safe harbor at a rumored locale known as The Fortress. Achieving this goal requires braving combat and narrative encounters, as well as managing the loyalty of followers, foraging for and managing supplies of food and ammo, and resisting the ever-present threat of death or mutation.

In addition to his role at Mighty Box, Calleja is a games academic at the University of Malta, currently focusing on issues of narrative. Specifically, he advocates that “narrative in games is a wholly different thing… all the ideas we have of narrative come from, say, film and literature, and for games we need a radical reconceptualization of those ideas.” For Posthuman: Sanctuary, this means a rejection of traditional notions, such as developing a linear, three-act structure, and instead focusing on what Calleja referred to as “emergent storytelling.” Each journey to The Fortress is designed to be unique, informed by the player’s active decisions as well as the intersection of random and non-random events that befall her throughout.

As an example, Calleja said that a player may—through mismanagement, disloyal followers, or pure bad luck—run out of food and begin starving to death. This would trigger one of several encounters that can only be experienced if the player reaches the point of starvation, and how the encounter resolves can influence factors for the rest of the game. Surviving starvation therefore becomes a sort of battle scar on the personal journey of that player, with specific consequences radiating out from it. Calleja envisions players comparing their diverse play experiences with one another, not unlike you might imagine post-apocalyptic survivors trading stories around a campfire.

Calleja also hinted that, even as players are presented with the familiar abstractions of dice rolls and Game Over screens, Posthuman: Sanctuary will challenge them to see past the artifice. While the rules of the game appear to dictate that humans are good and mutants are bad, the emerging narratives may compel players to defy the urge to “win” in the interest of pursuing a more personally meaningful story. According to Calleja, this kind of independence will ultimately pay dividends in unexpected ways. The ideas of mutation and adaptation within Posthuman: Sanctuary might therefore prove to be as complex as the analog-to-digital adaptation process Mighty Box is bringing to the game itself.

Keep track of Posthuman: Sanctuary on its Kickstarter page , or watch an extended gameplay video recently released by Mighty Box.

Chambara aims to capture the tension of samurai films

Esteban Fajardo and his team have been devouring samurai films while crafting their competitive action game Chambara. They were particularly drawn to the work of Akira Kurosawa, the renowned Japanese director known for films such as Seven Samurai (1954), Yojimbo (1961), and Rashomon (1950). This last of those films has come to inform Chambara‘s visual style, if not its tone, the most. “These strange impulses of the human heart would be expressed through the use of an elaborately fashioned play of light and shadow,” Kurosawa wrote on Rashomon.

The title of Chambara refers to Kurosawa’s own film genre, the samurai film, but it’s also an onomatopoeic word in Japan for the clashing of swords. In the game, players take control of bird-like ronin seeking to strike each other down. First, though, they have to find one another—easier said than done, in Chambara’s predominantly black-and-white world.

“We had shadows that would crawl up walls”

Aside from visual motifs, the team behind Chambara was most inspired by the pacing of samurai movies. “In those films, a lot of combat is dealt with in the blink of an eye, but there’s this slow ramp up, with tons of tension,” said Kevin Wong, who helps lead the team. “You can see that in the ending of Sanjuro (1962).” As in that legendary scene, the fights in Chambara end in a single blow.

But while Chambara’s ties to the samurai film are clear now, it bore a familiarity to a different cinematic tradition earlier in it’s development. “We started with these primitive shapes, and what that resulted in was landscapes that were very evocative of German Expressionism,” says Fajardo, referring to the cinematic movement that would produce films like Metropolis (1927). “We had shadows that would crawl up walls, and these stark binaries. We started by leaning pretty heavily into that, and building abstract worlds with very expressive, but also depressing, shadows.”

Chambara still carries elements of its initially stark visual style, but the team ultimately decided to take the aesthetic in a different direction. “When we stepped away from it, we felt that the really stark, really oppressive vibe didn’t really represent what we wanted to make,” said Wong. “We were going to be presenting the game to kids.” In pursuing a softer edge to the stark visuals, they changed the player characters to giant birds. Instead of blood, players disappear into a puff of feathers when struck down. You can opt to wield a fish or a guitar instead of a samurai sword.

“A lot of people take visuals on a surface level from film, but I think there’s a lot to be gained from rhythm. That’s what film has been practicing, through editing—the ability to control pacing,” said Fajardo, on how game creators might look towards film for inspiration. Chambara’s combination of striking visuals and intertwined mechanics should stand as evidence in their favor.

Look out for updates on Chambara’s progress on its website. Check out our ongoing coverage of GDC 2016 here.

Broadway comes to videogames in Peter Panic

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Peter Panic (iOS)
ADULT SWIM GAMES

The musicals of Broadway permeate Peter Panic. Not only is the game about restoring a small town theater, it features a full score by award-winning concert composer Benjamin Bonnema, and also stars a voice cast of actual Broadway talent. It is also a musical itself. You play as aspiring director Peter as he hops around the local businesses to get funding for the defunct theater of his childhood town. Conversation is sung with arms and mouths stretched wide. Once Peter agrees to work for the business owners in exchange for funding, you’ll have the task of keeping up with the mini-games as they’re fired rapidly at you. It plays very much like WarioWare: silly, simple, but fast. Make three mistakes and you’ll have to start again. While Peter Panic is free, and you can play it as much as you like, you’ll have to pay a few dollars if you want to save your progress.

Perfect for: Singers, dancers, musical enthusiasts

Playtime: An hour or two

What the hell is Cloverfield, anyway?

It all stands out to me as clear as yesterday. A scrawny, bright-eyed teenager circa ‘07, sat across the aisle with his friends, popcorn gripped between thighs, the SMS touchpads of flip-phones being thumbed impatiently. It’s the opening weekend of Michael Bay’s Transformers and we are ready to see some gigantic robots.

Our excited chatter is quickly hushed with the operant cue of the dimming house-lights and the sound of a worn projector sputtering to life. Images of an upscale house party fill the screen—a scene so far removed from our expectations that the question as to whether we were in the wrong theater slowly built traction. It continues: a DIY sizzle-reel of drunken goodbyes and half-hearted well-wishes… Something wasn’t right.

And then it happened. A primal roar bellows from out of the Earth. Calamity ensues. The night sky clots with molten shards of debris, crashing to the earth in fits. Hand-held footage spasms sharply before cutting to black. Then an ominous projectile whirrs and ricochets into a packed Manhattan street as a huddled mass of onlookers cries out in disbelief. The Statue of Liberty has been defamed by decapitation. A date— ‘1-18-08’— pulsates ominously across the screen before vanishing as abruptly as it appeared. 



“What the hell was that?” I whisper, leaning over to my friend. He shrugs, a smile peeking at the corners of his mouth. “I have no idea.”

It’s a question that landed as heavy and unceremoniously as a severed head plummeting into the Earth. What the hell is Cloverfield? To begin to answer that question, we should acknowledge that what we once previously knew as Cloverfield exists both as something much larger than and a touch short of the span of an average feature-length film. There were, in fact, two Cloverfields: one produced by J.J. Abrams and the other directed by Matt Reeves. They exist simultaneously in a superpositional state of co-dependence, suspended in that quantum realm of speculative inference known only as pop-culture.

Cloverfield (2008), as a film, is inextricable from the marketing that preceded it, indebted to that mystique attributed to the stewardship of one J.J. Abrams. Say what you will about his hit-or-miss track record as a showrunner of television action-dramas, there’s one quality as a producer that Abrams has ingrained so intuitively well—it has become the defining mark of his professional success. Simply put, he understands that much of the appeal of a story is more in how it is told, and not necessarily in what is being told. He’s a seasoned architect of expectations, synonymous with expository puzzle-boxes and red herrings, luring audiences into theaters as if it were the answer to a riddle. And he’s good at it.

It’s a raw, messy attempt to depict that most inexplicable of tragedies

Away from all that, Cloverfield is entertaining genre fiction in its own right: a monster movie that lingers less on its titular American-bred kaiju and more on the physical and spiritual devastation that it leaves in its wake. That the film is the product of a post-9/11 world is of little debate, and it arguably stands as one of the best to emulate the totality of existential shellshock that haunts the aftermath of such a horrific event. For all its grating, half-baked dialogue and incredulous reliance on the framing device of T.J. Miller’s “camera work,” Cloverfield’s emphasis on the faux-documentation of its core cast’s reactionary panic and spur-of-the-moment sleuthing echoes the spirit of cinéma vérité. It’s a raw, messy attempt to depict that most inexplicable of tragedies, the devastating loss and displacement of human life amidst a catastrophe.

Toho’s many Godzilla films are the obvious spiritual precedent to Bad Robot’s Cloverfield. Abrams attests to this, his initial inspiration arising from a desire for America to have its own “King of the Monsters.” But the former is so much more than a shorthand for the entirety of a sub-genre. Godzilla—or Gojira as pronounced in his native land—is nothing short of a living monument to the collective sins of nuclear proliferation; the planet’s wrath made manifest. Compared to that, Cloverfield’s purpose pales in its ambition. Call it a back-door resurrection of sorts intended to atone for the missteps of Roland Emmerich’s abysmal take on the “God of Destruction” back in 1998. History has not been kind to Emmerich’s rendition, distinguishing it as single-handedly throttling the momentum of big-budget American monster films dead in its footprints. Less of a symbolic corollary, Cloverfield was more of a redemptive appeal to both audiences and filmmakers to give the genre another shot at relevancy. Did it succeed? The existence of films such as Pacific Rim (2013) and Welsh director Gareth Edwards’s 2014 rendition of Godzilla would seem to attest to it, no matter how many years removed they are from Cloverfield’s theatrical release. And yet the world has moved on since Cloverfield. Initial rumors of its potential follow-up, dating as far back as the original’s premiere, soon petered out in the wake of Abrams’s gradual ascendance to ringleader of two of the largest science-fiction epics in cinematic history: Star Wars and Star Trek.

Which brings us to 10 Cloverfield Lane, a film eight years removed from its predecessor that seeks to test the limits of what general audiences are willing to accept as a follow-up. 10 Cloverfield Lane is equal parts Psycho (1960) meets The War of the Worlds (1898), with a generous splash of David Schmoeller’s Crawlspace (1986) thrown in for added flavor. Which is to say, it’s the story of an unwilling captive literally locked in a battle for supremacy against her self-styled “savior”—a Stockholm Syndrome-infused case of cat and mouse. Compared to Janet Leigh’s iconic turn as Marion Crane in Psycho, Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Michelle in 10 Cloverfield Lane is a strong contemporary who has no patience for come-hither pouting and pleas of desperation. She is instead a woman of hard-nosed grit and merciless, patient cunning. She awakes to find her leg in a brace, chained to a wall. Among her first instincts is to fashion a lance-sized prison shiv out of the base of a crutch. She doesn’t fuck around.

Then there’s John Goodman’s Howard, whose omnipresence makes for an entirely different antagonist when compared to the brief, out-of-shot monster encounters of the first Cloverfield. He’s a power-starved recluse with a martyr complex and a nasty predilection for abducting young women to groom into his surrogate family. It’s a credit to Goodman’s craft that he’s able to render someone so sympathetic and yet utterly reprehensible, sometimes within the same scene. John Gallagher Jr.’s presence as Emmet—albeit short—injects some much-needed comedic flavor that breaks up this tempest of frayed egos and thinning tempers into digestible sequences. Particular praise is owed to Bear McCreary’s score, whose shrill intensity and prominence alone nearly asserts itself the status of a principal character. All in all, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a clawing captivity narrative marinating in a pressure-cooked broth of Hitchcockian menace. Yes, a tightly-wound thriller that unspools confidently into an overall interesting if trite conclusion, whose cliffhanger worryingly hints towards Battle: Los Angeles (2011) levels of genre flick hokiness. But is it a Cloverfield film?

nothing short of an attempt to redefine our preconceptions of the entire model of genre franchises

That’s a question whose answer exists, much like in a game of Jeopardy, in the form of another question. We return again to the mystery of what Cloverfield is, or better yet, what does Cloverfield mean? As stated by Reeves in a 2008 interview with LAist, the name ‘Cloverfield’ is little more than a malaprop, the word ‘Cloverdale’ misheard only to be appropriated into a motif. It’s a name questing for an identity, as equally at home attached to the broadside of a giant Kaiju revivalist effort as it is to a locked-room horror-thriller. Who knows where next it will graft itself, remora-like, tainting the underbelly of an unassuming genre flick with its presence. It’s near-impossible to see a movie like this in theaters and not find yourself within earshot of a row of teenagers excitedly trading their own theories, all the while clamoring for authoritative answers. This is the defining quality of which Abrams’s work most successfully traffics in; mysteries that entice the collective imagination, inciting the communal spectacle of speculation. In this way, 10 Cloverfield Lane could not be more faithful as a “blood relative” to Reeve’s monster film. They each share this most essential of qualities. And as such, the premature allegation lobbied by some critics that the film’s marketing is in some way ‘misleading’ rings as both ill-founded and, for lack of a better term, basic.

10 Cloverfield Lane, Trachtenberg’s debut, is more than worthy of inheriting the mantle of a ‘Cloverfield film’ simply by the way its ambitions and execution easily succeed in trumping those of its predecessor. Cloverfield’s sole intent was in trying to resuscitate a middling subgenre, while its successor is nothing short of an attempt to redefine our preconceptions of the entire model of genre franchises. What shape will the series take next? The appeal of Cloverfield is that it will keep us guessing. It’s a series that refuses the direct sequel logic we’ve come to expect. But it isn’t shapeless, as it operates by taking a motif and turning it on it’s head. Its power is in how it can take a nonsense word and transforms it into a symbolic shorthand for the many-sized monsters of our daily lives.