Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 16

Rubi’s Room tests what it’s like to solve a life-sized Rubik’s Cube in VR

Rubi’s Room wasn’t always in virtual reality, but gazing at its perfectly dizzying human Rubik’s Cube antics, it wouldn’t be surprising to think it was. The game was borne during the latest Ludum Dare game jam, but in a much simpler 2D state. But for Germany-based developer David Hagemann, the idea of reworking the project for VR was on his mind all along.

“The immersion and the natural interaction [of VR] are the most compelling factors for me, it is not comparable to what you’re used to with playing games the regular way,” wrote Hagemann over email. “This brings a lot of problems and challenges with it, things that worked flawlessly in non-VR games can look and feel just wrong or cheap in VR.” Rubi’s Room, in its most basic essence, works similarly to its 2D version: the player shifts a room-shaped puzzle like a Rubik’s Cube, to make everything match again.

You are the Rubik's Man trying to solve the world #screenshotsaturday #LDJAM #UE4 pic.twitter.com/lv70HEZIer

— David Hagemann (@TocoGamescom) December 17, 2016

The new Rubi’s Room reiteration has gained traction on Twitter, after Hagemann has regularly shared gifs of the development process—spotlighting both the positives and challenges he’s faced over the course of its re-development. “One of the challenges in VR is that you can’t have a HUD (sticking anything on the players view is pretty much the worst you can do in VR) and all those scores and text you see pop up in games look cheap in VR and they go against the immersion aspect,” wrote Hagemann, but the developer found a solution to the pointed problem: by making the text pop out into the world itself. “The text being in the physical world is a radical experiment [I did] to [work] around all these problems, [even if] the piling up of the text in the room is obviously a bit annoying at some point.”

As I watched the human VR Rubik’s Cube be shifted and put together time and time again along Hagemann’s Twitter timeline, my first thought was how impossible the pieces fitting together all looked. I wondered, for the folks like me who have never solved a Rubik’s Cube, was their hope for us in the digital VR puzzle room? Luckily, Hagemann’s solution to this is easy, he explained. He implemented miscellaneous game modes to solve potential issues. Whether it’s playing a Match-3 mode, or otherwise.

Hagemann got his start in game design as a teenager with Flash, where he would make “simple games just for fun.” He continued to pursue his knack for game making over the years—from interning at a two-man company that made 3D browser games, to becoming a freelance artist later in life. His first commercial game was Last Knight, a 3D platformer with a twist: “ragdoll driven jousting.”

You can follow Hagemann on Twitter for regular gif updates of the VR edition of Rubi’s Room. You can download the game’s original 2D version on itch.io here.

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Diesel Power drives back to the golden age of arcade racers

We’ve seen so many games in virtual reality: shooters, simulators, hotdog crossbow slingers, among dozens more. Though one genre, at least for the most part, has been notably absent from the technology that boasts ‘immersion’ and ‘innovation’: the arcade game. Whether they’re the ones people would lose quarters on continues over at a local pizzeria cabinet, or the modern variety—like the retry-prone Trials or even Turbomania. Yet developer MimiMe is trying to change that, by bringing an arcade racer to VR.

Diesel Power is a neon-hued ode to the F-Zero-esque arcade racers of yesteryear. Its description bids that the game is best described by simple words: “Raw. Challenging. Enraging. Satisfying.” Also known as, the words that come to mind when playing a good arcade game. But Diesel Power isn’t a racer in the ways one might expect. Instead of racing other vehicles, you’re just racing the omnipresent ghost of certain death.

As your neon orange car putts along a teal road, the road unexpectedly shifts and forms around you, where a turn can take you by surprise and send you flying off the track, or worse, an unanticipated foe might ruin your run. At the very least, Diesel Power is a game that encourages frequent retries, outfitted with a quick restart that’s integral to success.

Since the game’s in VR, the player is almost like a puppeteer, watching over puppets at play. The car has no qualms with gravity, and drives upside down without a worry. And you, the player in VR, have to peer around the ever-shifting track to make sure no crashes await your car’s retro-vivid surroundings. Just remember to restart.

Diesel Power is currently in Steam Early Access for 2 to 3 months, though its developer notes that the game is “content finished.” The game is available for $9.99 for the Oculus Rift. Drive soundtrack not included, sadly.

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In Fractal, art is a weapon

Art is a weapon. A weapon against the patriarchy, against the status quo, against hate, against The Man. But in Fractal, a new virtual reality game from Phosphene Designs, art is a different kind of weapon: it’s a literal one.

In Fractal, the player wields a paintbrush as their instrument of choice in VR—a brush that’s akin to the popular art and sculpting tools of late. “The concept of Fractal actually came from Tilt Brush, funny you should mention that,” wrote Bo Scott Pu, 3D artist, animator, and self-proclaimed “decider-of-what-to-eat-for-lunch-everyday” at Phosphene Designs over email. The brush itself, Pu tells me, is more of an indirect weapon than an active one. While the player paints their way through the world, shielding themselves from enemies with the digital art painted in the process, a level’s end beholds an interesting sight: a digitally-tangible visual representation of their progress to that point. All through the floaty brush strokes swiped through the digital air.

“We want the player, at the end of the level, to be able to look back at their progress and see that they’ve not only defeated the challenges in the level, but also have created a piece of ‘painting’ from their motions,” wrote Pu. “Even the strokes that you draw are not so violent in that they really act more like a shield than a sword, blocking and protecting you from the enemies.”

Fractal, in a sense, memorializes your actions in the game. Instead of moving and mashing your way through an environment with no means to remember it other than memory, your paintbrush always leaves a trace by mapping out your path. The paintbrush’s everlasting strokes leave a story behind; an instrument to visualize a quest, rather than a fleeting visuals-free recollection.

With a recent release on Steam Early Access, Fractal still has a long way to go until it sees a fully polished release. Among the future additions include “a fully realized story mode,” one that explains the game’s world and gives purpose to what the player is doing. Harboring inspirations from the videogames Journey, Transistor, Limbo, and surprisingly, the Souls series, Pu pegs Fractal‘s overtly stylized visuals as a way to keep the game sleek yet elegant. “The Souls series comes to mind, where just standing in a particular environment can tell you its rich history and stories of that place,” wrote Pu.

Fractal is currently available on Steam Early Access for $4.99, and will remain in active development for 4-6 months before a full release. You can watch a trailer for the game above.

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A new videogame about piecing together drunken memories

Is it a coincidence that autobiographical games are the ones that seem to experiment with new storytelling ideas the most? Look at the infinite scrolling world of life and death in Passage (2007), the collage of frustrations in Dys4ia (2012), the awkward online conversations of Cibele (2015), and the interweaving of emotionally-charged 3D spaces in That Dragon, Cancer (2016).

We can now add to this list the latest game by Jenny Jiao Hsia, which recalls a night out drinking with friends, or at least the part where she had to look after one of them and get them to hospital. It’s called and i made sure to hold your head sideways, and was made for the FLATGAME Annual 2016, which tasked people with creating games that are played strictly by moving pieces around on a flat plane. The challenge also required the participants to make physical art for their entry, use no sound effects, and make it in a short time (a few hours, ideally).

Hsia’s game works by recalling the events of that night a scene at a time. It’s as if she’s relaying the information to her drunk friend the day after it all happened, as they can’t remember most of the night. It feels personal, intimate, and the scrappiness of the artwork helps with that—as the intended audience is a friend, and both of them are probably groggy, there’s no need for the lines to be drawn straight or the faces to be recognizable.

What i made sure to hold your head sideways is about, then, is piecing together fragments of memory. Each scene is found across the flat surface the camera pans across, but their arrangement is chaotic. While the camera moves from one to the next in chronological order, without its guidance you wouldn’t know where to even start, you’d be staring at a disjointed mosaic of messy lines and shapes. You’re totally dependent on the narrator to direct you through this jumbled map of memories.

visually represents the difficulties of recollecting a drunken memory

The most interesting part of the game, however, is how your interaction with each scene reflects the nature of the story itself, and how it is being told. The idea is that you’re piecing together the separate components of a picture, bringing text, lines, colors, and shapes into unison so that they make sense. You do this by pressing the arrow keys and finding which one can be held to unify the image. As you do this, you press the three incorrect keys, and when you do this the parts of the picture shimmy, fidget, and shuffle. The overall effect is one that visually represents the difficulties of recollecting a drunken memory.

Hsia manages to double down on her design here too, as she uses the same method to represent the total opposite. Most the time you’re required to piece an image together, but sometimes the image starts out complete, and you press the arrow keys to send it into disarray. This reversal is used when the narrator is talking about how drunk someone is, so that they their outlined form is lost to the same kind of destruction their brain is undergoing while under the influence of alcohol. Another instance of its use is when an ambulance doesn’t show up, so rather than piece an image of one together, you press the arrow keys to take one apart.

All of this is, obviously, much better experienced that it is having it explained to you. So make sure to check out i made sure to hold your head sideways for yourself on itch.io.

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Birthplace of Ossian explores the artificiality of videogame landscapes

The mountainous terrain in Connor Sherlock’s exploration game Birthplace of Ossian isn’t of this world. I don’t mean that rather than being real, it is virtual—its disconnection has many more layers than that.

For starters, its colossal landscape is based on Glen Coe in Scotland, a place that Sherlock has never been but feels connected to through media like Highlander (1986)—he’s actually named after the main character, Connor MacLeod. Sherlock wanted his recreation of Glen Coe to reflect his physical distance from it. “I wanted the space to be as distant an echo of the real thing as I could make it, like a garbled game of telephone,” he told me.

the volcanic rocks tower with stupendous verticality

Upon looking up reference material, Sherlock found that he didn’t need to rely solely on his own distant impressions of the location, as it has been subject to a similar act of detached mimicry before. His discovery was the 18th century Scottish poet James Macpherson, who said that Glen Coe is the birthplace of the mythic bard Ossian, from whom Sherlock’s game gets its name. Macpherson apparently spent a lot of his time translating the original 3rd century poems of Ossian, but it’s believed that’s not entirely true and that the poems are mostly his own writing, guided by older pieces and known oral traditions.

Glencoe, by Hugh William Williams, 1812, via Wikimedia Commons

“Now not only did I have my memories of Highlander, but also early romanticism’s take on 3rd century oral tradition, as well as a whole subgenre of landscape paintings inspired by the Macpherson version,” Sherlock said. “I dug into all these as I made the game, though I haven’t yet read the entirety of Macpherson’s work (which is free online!).”

This combination of influences mostly shows in the game through its poetic exaggerations: the volcanic rocks tower with stupendous verticality, while the dips between them are filled with an ethereal fog. There’s also a dreamlike texture to the whole game, as rather than hard details and outlines, the rocks and grass are realized with a watercolor aesthetic. Plus, there are instances of aligned rocks that seem unnatural; either placed there deliberately for some ancient ritual, or are perhaps the knots in the landscape’s tough skin, as if it were a humongous living creature.

It turns out that most of what you see in Birthplace of Ossian isn’t deliberate or molded into shape by human hands. Sherlock wanted to create “a wilderness that ignores and swallows the player as a real place would,” which required an approach that ignores the presence of the player. He derived the game’s 100km² of craggy land from perlin noise that had extensive erosion modelling applied to it. It took him a number of tries to get it right and when he landed on the look he was after he touched it up as little as possible—no set pieces, no authored sightlines, nothing that would make it more of a playground for the player’s maximum enjoyment, as most other videogame landscapes. 

“The result is a topography that can feel hostile to cross unless you choose to follow the ‘ancient’ glacial paths,” Sherlock told me. “But since there’s no win state or ultimate goal (aside from jumping off the edge), I’m happy to have the mountains themselves antagonize the player. Scrambling up hills is a pain in real life, too.”

“By exposing the edge of the world I’m incorporating it into the piece”

You’ll note that Sherlock mentions that you can jump off the edge of Birthplace of Ossian there. This isn’t a fault with the game but an integral part of it, which Sherlock intended as a way to draw attention to the artificial nature of the virtual space. Most of the landscape’s edges are bordered by insurmountable peaks, but there is an open side that players are encouraged towards by floating structures made of concrete pillars that EW completely out of character when compared to the rest of the game. What they do is indicate the edge of the game world where the voidspace begins.

“The edge of a game world is like the ocean—inhospitable and seemingly infinite,” Sherlock said. “The pillars that extend outwards in Birthplace of Ossian are there to blur the line on where the void begins, and allow the player a vantage point from the other side of it. By exposing the edge of the world I’m incorporating it into the piece, like an elaborate frame on a painting.”

Sherlock is drawn towards this out-of-bounds space due to its “strange power,” which comes from over two decades of videogames trying to hide these empty, black 3D spaces from players. In Birthplace of Ossian you can enter it, falling a great distance, but also finding an unknown realm down there, platforms suspended amid a great fog. It’s as if you’ve accidentally fallen off the edge of Sherlock’s thought cloud which was dreaming of Glen Coe, or exited one of the oil paintings that depict it. Through this, Sherlock asks us to consider themes that surround our lives, such as the constantly shifting line between artificiality and realism, the possibility of heterotopias, and the existentialism of escaping virtual reality.

Birthplace of Ossian is intended as the first in a series of what Sherlock describes as six “semi-abstract, semi-generated pieces of topography floating in an explorable void.” He’s hoping to have them packaged up and ready by the summer of 2017 under the title A Physical Box EP.

You can purchase Birthplace of Ossian over on itch.io.

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Night in the Woods comes out February 21st, for real this time (hopefully)

I don’t want to alarm you, but … okay, screw it, I do want to alarm you. BE ALARMED. February is gonna be a helluva month for videogames. I swear it. Just wait and see.

What’s that? You don’t want to wait that long. Alright, alright, well, let me just lay this on you for starters then: Night in the Woods is coming out on February 21st 2017 for PlayStation 4, Windows, Mac, and Linux. That’s reason enough alone to grant, oh, I dunno, a knighthood to the month of February. Yeah, let’s go all out. What a good month you are, February. Er, Dame February, I mean.

captures that gnawing feeling of leaving your youth behind

Before we get carried away (too late?), though, it’s worth addressing that this isn’t the first release date that Night in the Woods has been given by its creators. At the end of last year, we were told that the game would be available on January 10th 2017. That was two days ago if you haven’t realized. Yeah, it got a delay. How can we possibly trust that it will be out on February 21st then? Well, you can’t, not entirely, but the creators are adamant that it’s gonna happen on that very day—providing that some unexpected and awful disaster doesn’t befall either them or us.

That all got a bit gloomy, didn’t it, which isn’t unlike Night in the Woods itself to be fair—an appropriate note to hit. It’s a game with a bit of doom and gloom to it, plenty of post-teen frustration, it even captures that gnawing feeling of leaving your youth behind. Oh, and let’s not forget the catty shenanigans like walking along walls you’re not supposed to and climbing up to people’s roofs. You are a cat, after all, even if she’s called Mae, walks on two legs, and enjoys shoplifting. A cat that probably represents many of our twenteen selves, lost in the world, young enough to not know which direction to go still, but too old to get through life by riding on the sympathy of your parents.

Anyway, let’s stay on track. In fact, let’s dial this down. Night in the Woods is an adventure game. It’s a looker, especially the animation, and its small-town slice of America feels like it lives without you’re being there. The idea is to join Mae as she returns to this town of her youth, called Possum Springs, and attempts to return to a life of aimless hanging out and petty crime. Her friends have grown up and are slightly reluctant, but then something strange happens in the woods …

You can find out more about Night in the Woods over on its website. Pre-orders are available from the links provided here.

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Sunless Sea will wash up terror and cannibalism on your iPad this spring

It was Failbetter Games’s seventh birthday yesterday, and so, to mark the occasion, the London-based studio decided to make an announcement. You remember that terrific nautical adventure game Sunless Sea (2015)? The one in which you sailed across a vast, dangerous ocean, collecting a range of stories, scars, and probably losing your sanity? Well, it’s only been available on PC before, but it’ll also be coming to iPad this spring.

Great news, then. That’ll mean iPad owners can travel across the dreaded Unterzee with a tap of their finger, and from whatever real-world location they might find themselves in—handheld terror wherever you go, oh joy! And hear this, m’lads, the iPad version will have all of the updated content in the original PC version, but it won’t include the Zubmariner expansion, which only recently came out. Whether the Zubmariner DLC will be available for an extra price or at some other time hasn’t been mentioned.

Last bit of news on this matter is that the port (and the touch controls) has been handled by the capable people at BlitWorks, who have previously done the mobile versions of Invisible Inc. (2014), Don’t Starve (2013), Broken Age (2015), and Bastion (2011). You’ll need to have iOS 8 or higher to run Sunless Sea on your iPad Pro, iPad Air, or iPad Air 2 or higher.

Oh, and if you don’t know, Failbetter Games has hardly been kicking back recently—the studio is launching a Kickstarter for its next game, Sunless Skies, on February 1st. Not long to go now. From what’s been revealed about Sunless Skies so far, we know it’s to be a game very much in the vein of Sunless Sea, except it takes place in outer space. Though, it should be noted that its version of space isn’t the one we’re used to, details here.

You can find out more about Sunless Sea on its website. 

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The secrets of Dishonored 2’s mongrel city

I first noticed it in the windows: their subtle, curving mullions that rise and fall like waves. Those curves lend a romantic lightness to the architecture they are set into. You might not notice them when you first set foot in Dishonored 2’s Karnaca, but you’ll surely feel them.

Like a thousand other details that litter the streets of this imagined city, Karnaca’s arches, windows, and alcoves conspire to create a distinct sense of place. They gather to form a visual map imprinted piece-by-piece in the player’s mind, as they turn the camera this way and that, down back alleys and up toward balconies, on their restless journey.

But the pieces that make up this image aren’t just fanciful shapes, picked from thin air by a designer’s idle mind; they are instead extrapolations of images and ideas that lurk all around us.

Take those curved mullions, set three quarters of the way up the sash windows of Karnaca’s sheer-faced blocks. They are an unmistakable signature of art nouveau, that total style of decoration and design whose organic forms and undulating curves flowered in the late 19th century. It’s a style that is echoed across Karnaca, from counterweighted table lamps to the strange typewriters that perch mantis-like on lacquered desks.

They are an unmistakable signature of art nouveau

Each gestures towards the focused aesthetics of art nouveau, marked by a turn away from the academic and scientific towards expressive ornament. In this turn, art nouveau architects would, for a short 30 years or so, fill their cities with curving, imaginative forms. Yet this does not describe Dishonored 2’s Karnaca. Its use of art nouveau comes alongside hints of art deco, layers of gothic revival, all amid designs cribbed from Victorian industry and colonial extravagance.

The origins of this mongrel style begin to emerge when I speak to art director Sebastien Mitton. He tells me the first city that inspired Karnaca was Los Angeles, for its “lighting and ocean atmosphere.” He also explains that others at Arkane contributed photos from their travels in Cape Town, Benares, and Gibraltar. To this collection he added his own research: “I was very interested in Havana, and did a photo trip to Barcelona which has similarities in terms of urbanism and architecture.”

At first this might seem like an incongruous list; Cape Town, Benares, Gibraltar, Havana, Barcelona—a trip halfway around the world and back to build a single city. But Mitton explains that all these places, with the exception of Barcelona, share a key identity: that of being or having been a colony. “We investigated a lot of colonies, in different places like Australia, India, and Africa, to understand how people from the cold Dunwall climate would adapt to a warmer area.”

Dunwall, the capital city of the game’s fictional “Empire of the Isles,” and the setting for the first game in the series, is also an important point of orientation for Karnaca. Mitton describes Karnaca as the “Jewel of the South;” a “less austere” sister city to Dunwall. This relationship is finely honed in Dishonored 2’s architecture—its southern hemisphere reference points, organic ornaments, and natural materials all a massive shift from the London- and Edinburgh-inspired Dunwall and its steel-grey streets.

You only need stand in the interior of one of Karnaca’s many apartments to feel the way Dishonored 2’s architecture makes its distinctions from the salons of Dunwall. Everything in these interiors feels stretched, lifted—windows and ceilings raised to let the air flow through, to gather the ocean breezes that rise above the dust. Wooden floors, lacquered to a sheen, bounce white tropical light across lightly painted paneling. You can almost feel the thick-skinned Dunwall residents sweating in this exotic heat, hiding themselves in backrooms cooled by slatted shutters. Karnaca comes alive in these quiet moments, its precise style somehow both pointing forwards, towards a new conception of Dishonored’s world and back, to its great mother city.

It is this colonial history that shapes Karnaca as a fictional city. “I imagined different waves of settlers who slowly shaped the landmass and crafted the city themselves,” Mitton says. He explains that, in the game’s fiction, Karnaca was built by a series of colonists, from the laborers of the Celtic-inspired island of Morley, to the merchants of Gristol, Dunwall’s isle. This makes Karnaca a city constantly rebuilt in relation to a perceived home or center. The way Mitton imagines it, Karnaca’s architecture didn’t emerge exclusively from a local character, but from the interaction of established styles with the materials, restrictions, and topography of a new land.

a city constantly rebuilt in relation to a perceived home or center

It’s a process that explains why Mitton and his team chose Karnaca’s international architectural references. The styles and fashions the game appropriates are extrapolated in their original usage—from the capitals of Europe to their colonies—but also in their use in game, from our reality to the fictional one of the Dishonored series. Karnaca is a colony in two senses then: a colonial reinterpretation of Dunwall’s iconography but also a new, imagined melange of Western colonialism and the styles it exported to cities like Havana. These styles are, of course, recolored with fictions, reshaped by imagined political events, rebuilt by non-existent architects, but they remain traceable in each ornament.

Karnaca is a half-remembered fragment of Havana, a mirage of Benares, a sunlit flash of Barcelona, carefully orchestrated together. The process of its creation is both the gathering and the expansion of these fragments. As narrative designer Sachka Duvall told me, a great fictional city “needs to be both realistic and bigger than life.”

In this sense, it is Mitton and his team who are the vessel here. It is their trips, photographs, research, and focus that make up the pieces from which this mongrel city is constructed. Mitton says to his team that “Karnaca is their city,” that they “spent years thinking through the mind of these inhabitants” to create this exemplary piece of videogame urbanism.

But Arkane are the citizens of Karnaca in another sense as well. They are the particular holders of a kind of secret, architectural savants of the strangest kind. They are, after all, the only ones who might locate the pieces of Karnaca, distributed around the cities of the world, and identify them for what they are. An ornament here, a shutter there, the ironwork from that building in the distance; each piece now carries a little of Karnaca with it, just as the capitals of Empire were changed irreversibly by the reflections of their character that emerged, in shifting imitations, in the distant cities of the South.

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Get in the mood for a spring clean with a new zen puzzler

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Empty (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android)
By DustyRoom

It’s almost time for the big spring clean this year, which might mean you need something to get you in the appropriate head space. Empty could be that something. It’s a zen puzzler that has you clearing out all the objects inside a series of rooms that look like they were decorated by Mark Rothko. You achieve your goal by rotating your view around the room to match each object’s color to the blocks of color on the walls and ceiling. Once an object is no longer visible against its backdrop then it will disappear. Clear your mind and think clean thoughts and you should come out on the other side of Empty ready to declutter your own home.

Perfect for: Interior designers, spring cleaners, minimalists

Playtime: 30 minutes

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A cosmic horror game inspired by the work of manga artist Junji Ito

The cancellation of Silent Hills, the horror game sequel that was to be led by Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) director Guillermo del Toro, was a shame for a number of reasons. Primary among them was the fact that one of the collaborators on Silent Hills was legendary manga artist Junji Ito.

Ito’s artwork often explores two areas: a disturbing style of body horror that is unique to him, and the existential inevitability of one’s demise. These interests shape his manga with horror stories that are hard to get out of your head, not merely for the strange ideas he thinks up, but due to the mastery with which he is able to visualize them on paper.

“this certain kind of cosmic/body horror blend is criminally underrepresented in the western media”

One of Ito’s most well-known works in the West is Uzumaki (2000), which tells the story of a small town that becomes obsessed with spirals, which sounds innocent enough, right? That vague premise lets Ito go deep and wide, with horrific images of spirals doing awful things to the human body; huge circular cavities in heads, a whole person turned into a spiral shape with a complete disregard for bones and joints, two bodies fully entwined in a painful corkscrew. This kind of unexpected, absurd terror permeates Ito’s mangas, which depict humans trapped inside chairs, people drawn towards mysterious holes in a mountainside, and chased around their homes by sharks with mechanical legs.

A page from Ito’s manga Uzumaki (2000)

Again, it’s a huge shame that we won’t get to see Ito’s work in Silent Hills (but perhaps it’ll be present in Death Stranding?). But videogames won’t be completely absent of his influence, not if Paweł Koźmiński has anything to do with it. Koźmiński is working on a cosmic horror game called Kyōfu no sekai (aka WORLD OF HORROR) that is heavily inspired by Ito’s work, and from what can be seen of it so far, he’s doing a good job of capturing what makes Ito’s manga so memorable.

Koźmiński is 24 years old, currently based in Poland, and attending medical school. Somehow, in between his studies, he’s managed to find enough time to work on his game. Speaking to him, the motivation to commit to making this game becomes clear. “I’ve been a huge fan of Junji Ito for years now. There is this unique charm in the way he mixes the cosmic horror, worthy of H. P. Lovecraft himself, and unsettling imagery that stays with you long after you’ve finished reading,” Koźmiński tells me. “I think this certain kind of cosmic/body horror blend is criminally underrepresented in the western media and I’m planning to change that with WORLD OF HORROR.”

Kyōfu no sekai is far from an ordinary horror game, and not only because of the Ito influence—it combines a visual novel format with Solitaire and RPG elements. It’s set in the late ’80s and/or early ’90s and follows the ordinary people in a town that is haunted by supernatural events. You get to pick from a range of characters with different strengths and weaknesses, before setting out to “solve mysteries, make decisions and fight eldritch creatures,” as Koźmiński puts it, “all while gaining clues how to postpone the inevitable end of the world, which is the goal of the game.”

Koźmiński has invented a wild range of scenarios and creatures

There’s an alpha demo that you can currently download on the game’s itch.io page should you want to get a feel for how it all comes together yourself. Otherwise here’s a brief explanation of how it plays: You choose a mystery to solve and are then taken though a number of different location decks. In these locations, you draw event cards at random that you then have to deal with. Typically these are horrific scenes that ask you to make a decision with success or failure being determined by your character’s strengths. It’s possible to get into a turn-based battle with an enemy too, at which point you choose an attack (or to retreat) and then roll a dice alongside an enemy dice, with whoever’s dice getting the higher number landing the attack. You can also gain abilities and buy items that you can call upon during battles to help you out, should you need it.

“While the story’s beginning and the end may be similar each time, I’m making sure the actual investigation will be full of surprises for the player,” Koźmiński tells me. “I’m planning a continued support in form of free card packs and additional content so that there will be no two identical stories.” It’s the event cards that make up the investigations and it’s there that Kyōfu no sekai really shines. Koźmiński has invented a wild range of scenarios and creatures: occult visitors who draw symbols in blood, heavy tomes bound in human skin, rotting arms coiled around the ventilation shafts of a dark manor, and a lot more.

As with Ito’s own work, what stands out about the horrors Koźmiński has created is both the ludicrous nature of the ideas, and also how the finer details in how they are depicted. The illustrations that accompany each event, while static, are either as obscene or shrouded as they need to be to maximize the terror of the moment that the accompanying words describe. It also helps that Koźmiński has chosen to simulate the 1-bit black-and-white graphics of early Macintosh computers, which feels similar in style to much of Ito’s black-and-white drawings.

From what’s on show so far, it seems safe to say that Koźmiński’s goal of bringing Ito’s style of cosmic horror to videogames is on the road to success. Kyōfu no sekai feeds you enough information to evoke an irrational world of forbidden cults, faceless monsters, and bizarre compulsions. Koźmiński is hoping to get it finished and ready for Windows, Mac, and Linux by summer 2017.

You can download the Kyōfu no sekai demo on itch.io. Follow the game’s development on Tumblr. 

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