Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 168

Here comes another horror game contender for the P.T. throne

One of the primary pleasures of European horror from the 70s is the sheer amount of wandering that takes place. In France you had erotica auteur Jean Rollin and his undead ingenues padding barefoot around mist-shrouded moors; in Italy, the more overtly perverse Dario Argento was stalking actresses through baroque ballet schools and haunted apartment complexes. Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) is full of luscious landscape photography and endless strolls through the wilderness.  Don’t Look Now, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Psychic—there’s simply no end to the interminable, dreamy walks to nowhere that dominate these movies.

Part of this is simply the nature of tension-building; for there to be highs, there have to be lows. But the atmosphere of these films—beautifully shot and unhurried, with ornate set designs and sudden lapses into bloody violence—is all their own. It’s the vibe that Ti West tapped into with his mostly successful House of the Devil (2009): letting the audience linger in a moody place, abandoning plot for long stretches.

SadSquare Studio’s upcoming Visage (now on Kickstarter) seems to understand this strain of horror. In the above Kickstarter video, we see through the eyes of someone wandering aimlessly around a suburban home: opening drawers, flicking light switches, and of course opening plenty of creaky doors. It’s definitely in the P.T. (2014) lineage, but reshapes that endless nightmare into something more traditional: the rust-and-pipes underworld at the end of Visage‘s trailer is straight out of early Silent Hill games. And the long-haired, gurgling ghost from The Grudge movies makes an appearance as well (along with the whole “dead family, cursed house” thing), albeit in some delightfully creepy ways.

reshapes P.T.’s endless nightmare into something more traditional

Where does all this intertextuality leave Visage? Somewhere between homage and imitation, between reference and derivation. The copy on the Kickstarter page promises a whole lot, from sheer abject terror on the abstract side to a blend of point-and-click and “rummage everything” approaches to interactivity. The designers do seem to have a handle on what made P.T. tick, as well as the game’s myriad other inspirations: as with the upcoming Allison Road, there’s no reason not to be optimistic.

But P.T. was a promise, too; what the ragtag brain trust behind Silent Hills would have come up with is anyone’s guess. The knotty, ruthless hallway that P.T. milked for every jump it was worth was a fluke. It was never intended to stand alone, but it did, and the potential of Silent Hills is now public domain.

Of course there was zero wandering in the P.T. gauntlet. Surely a larger game can’t hope to replicate the oppressive, nerve-shredding atmosphere that such a small space created. Visage and its ilk may have to pull from an older playbook, from the lazy Eurohorror of the 70s and the domestic horror that stretches all the way back to the Gothic, to succeed.

And if they don’t? Until Silent Hills proper is raised from the dead, I have a feeling there will be no shortage of contenders to take their place. Hell, if these games never come out and all we have are these trailers, that’s a fitting end as well.

The many failures of the Five Nights At Freddy’s creator

On January 21, Scott Cawthon’s Five Nights at Freddy’s World (FNaF World), the surprisingly light-hearted role-playing followup to the popular horror series, was released on Steam, ahead of its announced February 19th release date. User reception was generally positive, but the drastic shift in style and tone left some fans confused, leading to an 87 percent user review rating. Not satisfied with an aggregated score of “very positive”, Cawthon pulled the game from Steam, promising to update it with new features and release it for free on Game Jolt once it was ready.

In a post on Steam, Cawthon explained that his own excitement led him to release the game too early. “I got too eager to show the things that were finished,” wrote Cawthon. “to a community that I’ve enjoyed and respected for over a year and a half now- I’m sorry.” It’s a remarkably apologetic measure to take such drastic steps in response to what is still a high rating, like a straight A student begging for forgiveness after bringing home a B+. But it says something about both how highly Cawthon regards the opinions of his players, and what that’s meant for his career and his personal life.

This is something that Cawthon talks about in a 2014 interview with Christian nerd culture website Geeks Under Grace. Turns out this recent commotion with FNaF World is only the latest in a history of Cawthon drastically altering his work to appease his fans. While some game creators get by with ignoring or outright antagonizing fan reception, to Cawthon, his relationship with his audience seems to be the most important part of his work.

The interview was conducted shortly after the release of the first Five Nights At Freddy’s (2014), the inspiration of which Cawthon explained came from criticism of his previous game, Chipper and Sons Lumber Co (2013). “I had made a family friendly game about a beaver before this, but it was criticized online; people said the main character looked like a scary animatronic,” explained Cawthon. “I went into a pretty deep depression…Then something in me snapped and I thought to myself that I bet I could make something a lot scarier than that!”

his relationship with his audience seems to be the most important part of his work.

In this instance, Scott’s tendency to listen to criticism lead him to mainstream acclaim. However, before the release of Five Nights at Freddy’s, this same strong reaction to how his games were received also had him questioning his career path and faith. A devout Christian, Cawthon had gotten his start in game development making Christian adventure games. Among these was Pilgrim’s Progress (2012), an adaptation of the 1678 religious allegory of the same name. Perhaps more notable is The Desolate Hope (2012), a more original game that combined sidescrolling elements with top-down Zelda-style dungeons and Final Fantasy-esque boss battles.

The game’s world featured a dark, brooding, and twisted industrial landscape with small clusters of life being suppressed under robotic outgrowths that sprung from the ground like tumors, almost like a prototypical version of the horror on display in Five Nights at Freddy’s, in which uncanny animatronics stuff unlucky players into mechanical suits that snuff out their lives and humanity all at once. It was provocative stuff. And when taken alongside the game’s plot, which focused on rescuing a fetus being used as a scientific specimen, it drew ire from some players, who interpreted it as condemnation of abortion. “The game places a very high value on human life, even at its smallest,” said Scott. However, he also clarified that “The game itself was not designed with abortion specifically in mind.” Still, even with The Desolate Hope’s ambitions, it failed to meet Cawthon’s goals.

“Despite good reviews, my Christian projects were all financial failures,” he explained. “I came to a point where I was very disillusioned and frustrated with God…actually it was more like a broken heart. I felt like I’d squandered so many years of my life.” Elaborating on this crisis of faith, he added “Either God didn’t exist, or God hated me. I didn’t know which was worse…I decided to change careers, at times pursuing web design, then computer programming, even truck driving.”

After having his life insurance policy cancelled when his insurance provider caught wind of suicidal thoughts he had shared with his doctor, Scott decided to go before God and ask for him to channel his power through him, to use his earthly body. Drawn back to game development as a result of this, surprisingly enough with a secular project this time around, Scott began work on Five Nights at Freddy’s. “I felt drawn back to games again, but not Christian games anymore,” he explained. “It’s not that I wanted to leave the Christian market, I just didn’t feel ‘led’ to make another Christian game.”

“I came to a point where I was very disillusioned and frustrated with God”

This brings us up-to-date to the Scott Cawthon that most people have come to know through his Five Nights At Freddy’s series. And so, as much as FNaF World seemed like a departure for the man known for those popular horror games, it was actually more of a return to Cawthon’s previously ambitious nature, hitting similar adventure tones to and matching the art style of The Desolate Hope and Chipper and Sons. It reads like Cawthon attempting to not only go back to his roots, but redeem them, finally showing critics that a game in this style could work.

Which is why it’s so disheartening to see him dismiss it as a failure. If FNAF World was Scott’s attempt to vindicate himself as an artist, then seeing it flop is akin to seeing Chipper and Sons torn apart. If a success, FNAF World might have allowed Cawthon to put his old demons to bed and feel more comfortable showing us more of his dream projects. Ideas that might not have appealed to everybody, but would have shown us more of the man behind the game. As it stands, it is yet another entry in a cycle of criticism-and-redemption that seems to leave Cawthon attempting to please others more than himself. This self-flagellation is a remarkably Christian take on game development, and while it has motivated him a number of times, it’s clear that it has taken its toll.

Read the full interview over at Geeks Under Grace .

Darkest Dungeon’s unpredictable terrors get inside your head

His foot slipped, and Kugel the cleric fell toward the lava that was rapidly filling the chamber. He seemed oddly resigned, taking no immediate actions to alter his fate. “Perhaps this is the end of Kugel,” he whispered as his boots hit the magma.

Darvin the fighter, too high up to be of immediate help but ever the problem-solver, called down to the monk Talia, beseeching her to extend her staff for Kugel to grab. But a sudden fit of selfishness had taken hold of the monk. “I don’t think so,” she replied calmly. “I really like this staff. It’s magical. I don’t want to get lava all over it.” She continued to climb.

Meanwhile the sorcerer Kirby, who had developed a kind of paternal fondness for the young, imperiled cleric, panicked and began spamming irrelevant spells from his perch on the wall. “What do you mean mage hand can only lift five pounds?” he cried out in anguish. “This is bullshit.”

Gomorrah, a dextrous ranger who had already reached the egress at the top of the room, watched the proceedings in silent horror.

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HUMAN NATURE IS, IN FACT, THE SECRET INGREDIENT

Dungeons & Dragons does not have a stress mechanic; it does not need one. As illustrated by the scene above—culled from a recent session of the D&D campaign that I have run for my friends in one form or another for several years—people are perfectly capable of acting in impulsive and irrational ways all on their own. Human nature is, in fact, the secret ingredient that makes tabletop role-playing so compelling. A bad roll of the dice may have sent Kugel into a freefall, but everything that followed was pure psychology: thoughts, feelings, and actions based on the characters’ traits and interrelationships. And, to a more veiled extent, the traits and interrelationships of the players themselves.

Some tabletop RPGs, such as Sean Preston’s excellent tremulus (2013), employ mechanics that encourage players to lean into their characters’ flaws. This can be a useful way to discourage “metagaming”—that is, playing the game as yourself, the player, who wants to win, rather than as your character, whose goals may be more complex and contradictory. But even in the case of more psychologically-oriented rulesets, the basic assumption across all tabletop RPGs holds: while players need concrete rules to dictate how they interact with the game-world, their spontaneous engagement with internal and interpersonal problems will almost always be more surprising than anything a game designer could think of in advance.

Darkest Dungeon, from Red Hook Studios, attempts to synthesize that which is usually the purview of the human. It is a beautifully gothic dungeon-crawler with a wealth of clever mechanics, the most unique of which is that, as your adventurers delve deeper into Lovecraftian tunnels, coves, and ruins, they become stressed. And as they become stressed, they start to develop coping mechanisms—some productive and some destructive. My crusader David (I name all my characters after friends and family) may be powerful enough to smite even the most formidable unholy beasts, but he is also a stress eater and entertains delusions of sainthood; the only way he allows himself to relax between missions is through the brutal practice of self-flagellation. My bounty hunter Molly, of whom I had been particularly fond, died in the blight-infested Warrens when overtaken with masochistic impulses, refusing help from the party’s healer and shoving herself to the front of the battle line, where she met her end at the hands of a large, sentient fungus.

The game historian Jon Peterson has written of the “Nietzschean promise” of RPGs like D&D, in which players are always rewarded for their efforts, and hardships only serve to make you better and stronger than you were before. Typically, slaying creatures yields loot and experience points, not traumatic confrontations with your murderous impulses. A near-death experience in a filthy, haunted cavern will usually have no lasting impact on your mental or physical health; after a good night’s rest, all hit points are restored. Darkest Dungeon subverts this promise by coupling power with fragility in equal measure. You cannot bring a character to a high level without also turning her strange and neurotic—at the very least, you’ll spend thousands of gold coins at the sanitarium attempting to cure her of her most deleterious traits.

YOU MUST ALLOW ROOM FOR YOUR CHARACTERS TO BE THEMSELVES

What surprised me was how much this simulation of the irascible human spirit reminded me of some of my favorite moments playing RPGs around the table with friends. D&D may be Nietzschean in design, but the rules are merely a foundation for the game itself, which is brought to life by flesh-and-blood players and dungeon masters, with all our idiosyncrasies. The potential for unpredictable behavior, embedded so firmly in Darkest Dungeon’s design, is the very thing I have always felt was missing from computer RPGs, for which the rules are the game.

Darkest Dungeon still offers plenty of tactics to master—the frugal allocation of character abilities and equipment, the consideration of unique aspects of the various dungeon settings, the mindful positioning of your party in a lineup so that they can attack, buff, and debuff in glorious harmony—but each foray nevertheless begins with the gleeful anxiety of the unknown. You wonder not only what horrors this new maze will bring, but what strangeness your party will bring upon themselves. Will your jester, obsessed with dead things, insist on cracking open a rotting animal carcass only to find himself stricken with spotted fever? Will your arbalest, teetering on the brink of madness, find a miraculous inner resolve to overcome her fears, and in so doing imbue those around her with renewed confidence? The answer to all of these is more than likely going to be exactly what you dread. Strategy will only take you so far; you must allow room for your characters to be themselves.

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Back at D&D, Talia eventually conceded to offering her magic staff to Kugel, which didn’t work, and as she feared it was lost to the searing magma. Darvin constructed a crude pulley system out of spare rope and chains, and managed to hoist Kugel out of the lava just as the cleric was losing consciousness. In the end, everyone survived, and, in accord with the rules of D&D, nothing would change in terms of ability scores or modifiers; if anything, the group was that much closer to leveling up and becoming even more powerful. But once revived, Kugel decided that his face must be terribly scarred from the fire, and that the whole ordeal had shaken the very foundation of his clerical faith. What permutations these player-derived effects would have on future adventures, only time would tell.

The narratives of Darkest Dungeon cannot, by their nature, be so dynamic. Possibilities are not infinite; they remain bound to the system of the game in the way that human decisions in a tabletop session are boundless. But I am so genuinely impressed with how Darkest Dungeon appeals to both my tactical and psychological inclinations that I can easily overlook the moments when the illusion breaks down and the system feels predictable again. I have no reason to believe that the designers at Red Hook Studios had any intention for me to measure their game against a tabletop giant like D&D, rather than other role-playing videogames. The fact that this seemed like the only apt comparison speaks to the ingenuity and, above all, appreciation of human weirdness that Darkest Dungeon offers.

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Twofold inc. makes matching tiles feel like shooting a gun

Who is this fumbling little alien? Looking like the offspring of Kang and Kodos, cyclopean and tentacled, working some dead-end 9-to-5. In space, nonetheless. And without a clue. No, really, who are you little dude?

This alien’s job is to not know anything. It’s a tutorial alien that is stupefied by me as I work out how to play twofold inc. That’s right: inc. I’m working for a company in this game. Or, at least, this alien is supposed to be. But I’m doing its job for it. I suppose that’s fine. I mean, I don’t mind, not with the bleeps of this game, the shudders it sends across the screen as I score points. If all work was made with the type of chunky feedback I’m getting right now I would not stop to sleep, not voluntarily. Let me pull pints that ripple the bar. Let us enact transactions with body punches.

the shudders it sends across the screen

Alright, so what is my job here? I have to match adjacent tiles of the same color to fulfil each “request” as it comes in. The request is always a number tied to a color—a complete abstraction of units (what are we making and selling in this place anyway?). Except it’s not just one but several colors, and the requests never stop coming in. Yes, this is factory work. And yes, perhaps it does sound similar to the mega-hit mobile puzzler Threes!. But this ain’t Threes!, bud; there’s no flick of the finger here.

In twofold inc. you have to drag your finger across the tiles to connect them, making chains. As long as you can make a continuous line through each tile in that same-colored cluster, without having to turn back on the path you’ve carved, you will see all those tiles pop into points. And, oh, I’ve just realized… ha, this sounds like the puzzles in The Witness now, doesn’t it? Drawing non-stop lines on a grid? Yeah, okay, it’s similar to that I guess, but only in practice—there are no ciphers here, no greater mystery. It’s you and a daft alien filing away colors and getting a buzz from the after-effects.

matching tiles rarely feels as good as this

In fact, I’m struggling to discern if there is much strategy to twofold inc. at all. Let’s go back to that comparison to Threes!, because in that game you were able to sorta see what tiles would enter the grid to replace the ones you’ve matched ahead of time. You could learn to work with this, plan ahead, there was some analog semblance of strategy—a way to organize the tiles on the grid to your benefit. In twofold inc. it seems you cannot do this to quite the same extent as the tiles you remove are replaced en masse with a random selection. Colors rain down onto your grid as if it were a Skittles advert. As this is the case, you can feel a bit hopeless as your attempts to shuffle the grid to match up the colors can be spoiled so easily. Luckily, the grid is much larger than the one in Threes!, so there’s more room to maneuver inside.

This doesn’t necessarily make twofold inc. worse than Threes!, but it does lend to failure feeling more up to the whim of chance than your own lack of strategy. The space for you to improve within feels smaller. Having said that, you do get a chance to place tiles in the grid yourself, replacing ones that are useless to you—you start with a replacement tile of each color, but can (I think) create more through play. And, admittedly, I haven’t played twofold inc. anywhere near as much as I have Threes!, and it took me a little while to understand how to make use of all the data Threes! gives to my advantage. Maybe there’s parts of twofold inc. I’m missing that inform strategy in the same way but I don’t feel confident in that being the case.

But, heck, I’ll keep playing twofold inc. if only to drink up all the impact of scoring points that it rattles through my iPad. Does that make me an endorphin junkie? Perhaps. But matching tiles rarely feels as good as this, that is, about as punchy as shooting a big-ass gun in a shoot-’em-up. And creator Grapefrukt has once again delivered on the graphic design here, as he did previously with his meditative space strategy game rymdkapsel. It seems his vision of space is one of rigid blocks in full color. He really knows how to deliver on that geometric simplicity. Oh, and now there’s a little alien dude in the Grapefrukt expanded universe, too, I guess. That nitwit.

You can purchase twofold inc. on the App Store and Google Play. Find out more on its website.

How to talk about videogames (if you’re blind)

One of the first things that people notice when they flip on their consoles are the catchy intro sequences; the flashy animations of the screen. Videogames have a quantified area around them that’s visual. After all, so many game elements are conveyed through visual means, such as objective markers and collectables.

Usually, in a videogame review, these visual references will pop up. Pixels will be examined, judgments will be passed on art direction and the success of animated bodies. I, however, don’t review visuals at all. I have to look to different aspects of a videogame to make up for this absence.

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I am not totally blind but I am still unable to see most visual data, no matter how close I may sit to the TV. I was born prematurely in 1989, and this lead to my lungs not developing properly. Weighing in at a mere six ounces, the medical team who helped deliver me had to make a stark decision: Place me in an incubator and save my life with possible after-effects, or let my life dwindle into a memory. They chose to save my life and put me in an incubator. I am assuming that’s what caused the blindness. Ever since I was a month old, I have lived with one good eye that has a visual acuity of 20/200 even with corrective tools, and tunnel vision, which means I have to portray a new kind of bobblehead every time I want to talk to three different people standing near me. Because I’m legally blind, I consider the long red-and-white cane I carry around to be a necessity when going out of my apartment.

SO MANY GAME ELEMENTS ARE CONVEYED THROUGH VISUAL MEANS

My vision can be an advantage, however. In the Halo games, I am often the best sniper among my party. The scope resembles how I see things every day, so I am able to strut around the arena, shooting people with prompt agility and precision (occasionally running into walls). My focus with scopes is stellar—hence, I find sniping to be a stroll in the park, as if birds were singing to my step.

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In lieu of a game’s visual tellings, in the reviews of videogames I write for various websites, I focus on other components more critically than others would, components that are elevated in their presence as they more wholly inform the experience for me. I specifically examine factors that can help tie up the strand that I am missing. The music, does it compliment the story? Can you increase the font sizes in menus? Do I have the option to enable a colorblind mode? Is the crosshair used to aim my weapon easily visible? All of these questions are separate elements that any applicable videogame should offer to players whether they have a disability or not. Yet this rarely happens.

Many bad examples of accessibility can be found throughout gaming history. Those that swing the other way are few in number and it’s for that reason they are worth celebrating. For instance, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003) on the original Xbox is among the best RPGs for disabled players due to a number of design aspects that would be unremarkable to most. There being an icon that hovers around any interactive element is one of these. Someone with a motor disability could move the cursor on the Xbox controller to a character across the room, hit A, and the character will walk over and interact with them, all using a single button. If a player has a visual impairment, like me, they can look up to the top-left corner of the screen to see a very readable description of whatever interactive element they are focused on. There are also a dozen combat styles to consider in the game. This is easily managed by having the game pause every round, letting you set attacks ahead of time. The pressure of urgent action is removed. Once your moves are set, you can then watch it all play out with a press of the X button, while also having the option to pause with the white button. It’s small considerations like those that end up being so simple but can make a videogame inclusive to everyone. Not to mention that Knights of the Old Republic also has easy-to-read captions—blue text on a black background. That detail, especially, made me feel included in the game’s audience.

It’s true that videogames have tried to become more accessible over the years by providing more ways to customize their experience. But the reality is videogames still have too few accessibility options. And so while I want to tell people what games they might enjoy in my reviews, my primary concern always has to be with telling readers what’s accessible and why it’s accessible. This is made ever more harder as lots of games have promising accessibility features yet can still prove difficult to play for a number of people. An example of this type of game is the Call of Duty series. Infinity Ward has a controller layout for Call of Duty that helps me due to my cerebral palsy. It toggles aim rather than requiring continuously holding the trigger for aiming. Unfortunately, the crosshair is so small and indistinctive that it’s very difficult for me to see, so I can’t tell if I am aiming on target.

THE REALITY IS THAT VIDEO GAMES STILL HAVE TOO FEW ACCESSIBILITY OPTIONS

One of the many other problems I find in playing games is text being the size of an ant. It’s an issue that baffles me especially with the prevalence of 60-inch TVs these days. You’d think that, by now, minuscule details such as menu text would be well-considered across all games. But take Forza Motorsport 5 (2013) as example. The text size varies quite a bit, with major heading text being fairly large and in all caps, and then the message boxes using a very small typeface. These types of oversights are frustrating discoveries every time I start a new game. Another example is the mini-map in Grand Theft Auto V (2013) which, for people with a significant visual impairment, can be very hard to see. It’s small as it is, then it has even smaller indicators that aren’t always clear, and then the final kick in the pants is not having the option to enlarge the icons or move the map to an easier-to-see location.

To combat the challenges that most videogames present me with I’ve developed different ways to experience them.  Easiest of which is sitting close to the TV. I sometimes also use a rapid-fire PS4 controller when there are mandatory quick time events. Then there is sound. Sound is an element all on its own that I can judge without visuals. It’s so wonderful. When I play, a headset has the effect of sitting me down in the world of Sora and his friends, or placing me behind the wheel of a dashing car, or maybe sucking me into the granular details of a BioShock (2007) landscape.

The easiest games for me to play are those with vibrant, clear, and bright areas, such as Kingdom Hearts (2002). Or those with one-button maneuvers so I am not struggling with my cerebral palsy to do a quick-time event—Star Wars: Republic Commando (2005) is good for this. Games that have a lot of spoken feedback, such as Portal (2007), or turn-based combat, such as Final Fantasy X (2001) also work well for me. All of this I have had to discover for myself over many years of experimenting.

But it’s not always a lengthy process. Sometimes a game clicks with me as if it were made to cater to my abilities. BloodRayne (2002) is one I remember well for this reason. I was able to adapt to the Aura Sense (a vampire-enhanced vision) quicker than any of my full-sighted buddies. I usually inverted the visuals to a high contrast setting—white text on black—when looking at any digital display, if the option was available. But using Aura Sense, Rayne blitzed through Louisiana and the future locations without any fumbling around on my part. Shocked exclamations leapt from their lips as I creatively used a mix of Aura Vision and regular vision to find an unexpected space of mastery within this game. It was a thrill, especially when my friends were asking for me to aid them through the more difficult parts that their own sight simply could not grasp.

Angel Raphael image via Wikimedia Commons

Train digital pets to eat eggplant in this cute game

Digital pets used to be the big craze. The late 1990s and early 2000s flourished with numerous digital pet-raising simulators. From the ubiquitous monster-collector RPG Pokémon, the digi-pet raiser website Neopets, the weird creatures within Tamagotchis, the loving pups of Nintendogs on the DS, as well as a slew of others—digital pets were everywhere. As time passed on, the digital pet raising fad mostly faded away (my rare Snow Cybunny on Neopets probably starving to death to this very day). In a modern day effort to reinvigorate the digital pet genre, smartphone game Pakka Pets was born.

Pakka Pets bustles with the personality of Animal Crossing and the collectibility of Pokémon

Pakka Pets, developed by Proto Games, is fresh off a successful Kickstarter campaign. The newly released mobile game is a conglomerate of its pointed inspirations, bustling with the personality of Animal Crossing and the collectibility of Tamagotchis and Pokémon, all rolled up into one easily-accessible digi-pet simulator. As a smartphone game, Pakka Pets is instantly playable at your fingertips, much as Tamagotchis were joined to every kids’ hip in the 1990s.

Pakka Pets differs from most digital pet imitators, adding unique crafting mechanics, real-time pet-growth, and even the ability to venture out into the game’s plaza-world for tangible quests. If studying alchemy to create new items and caring for one of 70 collectible pets from egg to evolution isn’t enough, the room your pet resides in is customizable as well. Cyberpunk-y wires hanging from the ceiling and a giant gummy bear to furnish your home? Sure thing. To the tunes of the sweet chipper melodies of prolific composer Calum Bowen, Pakka Pets is the complete package of everything cute about digital pet simulators of the past, an homage to an all but forgotten colorful 90s aesthetic.

In a similar fashion, Neko Atsume originally launched in Japan in 2014, with an English version hitting digital storefronts in late 2015, taking kitty collectors from all around by storm. In November of the same year, an English version of Level-5’s ghost-befriending Yo-Kai Watch saw its first Western release, and with no new Pokémon release that year, became a strong new adoptee for fans of the gotta-catch-’em-all way of games. Meanwhile Pakka Pets isn’t trying to own the digital pets market, but instead subvert the niche digital pet genre in new, interesting ways, where it can sit proudly alongside its inspirations.

Pakka Pets is available for free on the iOS AppStore and Google Play .

Would you like a side of VR with your dinner?

They say we eat first with our eyes, so it was only a matter of time until a restaurant told its patrons to strap on virtual reality headsets and enjoy some retinal feasting.

That scenario is not a joke—well, at least not entirely. “Sublimotion, along with award-winning chef Paco Roncero, recently hosted their second virtual reality event using this technology at the Hard Rock Hotel Ibiza,” Samsung reports. “The concept earned Sublimotion the Best Innovation in F&B award at the Worldwide Hospitality Awards in 2014.” No mention of how the food tasted can be found in Samsung’s statement, though “sensory experience” and “wow factor” feature prominently.

things might get messy

Unless eye contact really isn’t your thing, VR dining is probably not the greatest of first date ideas. Strange events in Ibiza notwithstanding, however, it could still be an interesting idea. Sensory deprivation and overload are, after all, not new ideas in dining. Many cities have dining in the dark restaurants which use the lack of visuals to take taste buds by surprise. Again, insofar as we eat first with our eyes, total darkness can be the best way to catch diners off guard. This is a novelty experience, sure, but a culinary experience nonetheless.

VR dining, however, would more closely resemble a course British chef Heston Blumenthal served at his flagship restaurant, The Fat Duck. “Sound of the Sea,” a seafood dish presented in a manner that resembled waves lapping up against the shores of a beach, comes with an iPod hidden in a seashell. Diners put the ear buds in their ears and listen to the waves. The audio was meant to heighten the sensory experience, and it worked well enough for The Fat Duck to be named Best Restaurant in the World in 2005.

This same sort of sensory overload is what VR could conceivably provide to diners. You can see the scene your food is supposed to evoke while eating. Of course, you can’t see what you’re eating with a VR headset on so things might get messy. Indeed, that is the main difference between “Sound of the Sea” and VR dining; whereas the former only added to your sensory experience, VR cancels out everything you’d normally see in order to show its own world. That world may be great, but it comes at a cost. Hopefully that cost does not include VR sickness.

Now this is a videogame worthy of Beksinski’s haunting paintings

If you look upon the mournful, decaying figure sat atop that webbed plinth above and don’t immediately think of Zdzisław Beksiński then you aren’t familiar with his work. And if that’s the case then you might not fully realize the appeal of Scorn, the videogame that this concept art informs. Time to change that.

What Beksiński did with bone haunts. He was a Polish artist, best known for his many paintings, especially the gothic fantasy that dripped from his brush during the 1970s and 1980s. But Beksiński’s gothic fantasy isn’t like any other: forget about crows, full moons, and vampires. He rarely spoke of it, but Beksinski’s younger years saw the horrors of World War 2 and the holocaust spiral around him—that has to have an effect on a guy. “I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams,” Beksinski said. But where did these dreams come from? The piling bodies, recurring osseous matter, gutted deformities; it all speaks to a vernacular of despair that too much resembles the most graphic and depressing images to emerge from the extermination camps. Something stuck.

the bone has the venous detail of tissue

All of Beksiński’s paintings are untitled as he didn’t want words to lead to a misunderstanding of them. No matter: these paintings speak for themselves. They let you peer into entire unearthly worlds, which is of course the purpose of any fantasy, but these are worlds you would not want to visit under any circumstance. The taint of hell is here. Terror is here. There’s an oil painting of a mass of bodies all cramped and crushed together, all raw-boned legs and elbow joints, hundreds of limbs like a vehicle made of spider legs, anguished faces floating in space, some have horns—it’s fucked up.

Zdzisław Beksiński, 1980

What’s most remarkable about Beksiński’s depiction of bodies is that it evokes our own confused and terrified relationship with death and decay. What comes of us and our physical selves once we pass away? His paintings confront us with this question without remorse. One is a portrait of a solider—you can tell by the helmet—who must be dead given that only a skull remains, but the bone has the venous detail of tissue, almost as if the afterlife has latched on and started leeching the mineral decay. But this face, my god, nothing is flat and smooth like a typical skull; it has strata, a neck like the ladders in tights, several parts are softly dented and the eyes are gouged into abyssal cavities. It’s like it has its own architecture.

And that’s a common theme throughout Beksinski’s work: the dead body as construction material. He has cathedrals, chairs, towers, and staircases made of coffins, skulls, and ghoulish cadavers. Other times it’s the bodies themselves that have been carved into, shaping out ridged roofs and living spaces where there were once organs—a sublime horror. Often, it looks like the bodies have been brought back from death into a painful existence all in order to stretch themselves across the walls. It’s a fantasy that acknowledges only a profane death, denying the holy burial, and one in which the body is reused to hoist the landscape out of horrific icons.

Switching gears, Beksiński’s spread to videogames is rare. Prominently, the devastated rusty world of Ilos in Mass Effect (2007) is said to have been styled after him. Last year, Tormentum: Dark Sorrow made a more obvious effort through its barbarous world of dried flesh and suffering. But have a look at Scorn, would you? Now this appears to be a videogame worthy of citing Beksiński as an inspiration, hence it being this article’s raison d’etre.

What does a Beksiński world sound like?

A lot of Scorn‘s concept art seem to be conceptual extensions of Beksiński’s work. It carries that same notion of taking place in a world where the body is used as architecture. But it’s notably more fleshy and wet than anything that Beksiński ever painted. That may be the result of crossing influences with the more famous artist H. R. Giger, albeit without the disturbing sexual imagery associated with him. Giger of course being known for his work on Alien (1979), specifically the monster itself as well as the egg pods and nest design, all of it black, bony, and oozing. That’s probably why the bodies, walls, and machines in Scorn aren’t lined with the type of arid gossamer that Beksiński’s models so often were, but with something that is less decayed and dried out, much more intestinal and abdominal in style. But underneath those ribbons of flesh and the tapestries of tissue are the bones of Beksiński’s masterworks, and it’s the most visible aesthetic inspirations of Scorn. This is good—Giger shouldn’t get all the attention.

It seems that the people making Scorn also want us to experience it as you would looking through the sprawling online galleries of Beksiński’s collected works, too. You’ll be “thrown into the world,” moving in first-person without a HUD—in other words, with no text and only the sights of this somber place to guide you. Apparently, this labyrinthine world is made of many interconnected parts that each have their own theme, all of them open to your exploration from the start. There will be weapons and combat, but hopefully that won’t overcome the bigger aspiration here, which is to have the main character be this terrifying “lived-in world.” Scorn should also finally move us closer to answering questions like: What does a Beksiński world sound like? How do the creatures that inhabit it move and behave?

You can find out more about Scorn on its website. It had a failed Kickstarter in 2014 but has since been funded by a private investor.

Vimeo to support female filmmakers with new Share the Screen initiative

Vimeo is no longer YouTube’s cooler, artsier cousin—they’re aiming to be an usher of progress for women in filmmaking.

While Hollywood figureheads have been busy vociferously pointing out the lack of female presence in, well, most every facet of filmmaking, Vimeo has taken decisive action to tip the balance toward equality. Their recently announced “Share the Screen” initiative will seek out and fund at least five projects led by women in an effort to give female voices a chance in an industry that doesn’t want to take a chance on them. In addition to financial support, the projects will receive marketing and distribution on Vimeo on Demand, their original programming service. “The ability of the Internet, and Vimeo specifically, to put power in the hands of anyone who wishes to create great video is something that we’re very excited to get behind,” said Kerry Trainor, CEO of Vimeo.

providing female filmmakers a proving ground

Vimeo touts that Share the Screen will provide the whole package, including not only financial backing but also mentorships, workshops, and networking specifically for female creators. Envisioned as a way to combat the gender disparity in the film business (about which there is data upon data proving this is a persistent problem just in case there’s any doubters still out there), Share the Screen leverages the unique capability of online video to break the age-old boundaries of Hollywood filmmaking.

This move comes as a continuation of their original content development, which has quietly been growing since the production and success of High Maintenance, a character-driven weed comedy, in 2014. Even in a quickly crowding field of online video platforms, Vimeo fits very comfortably in the space between the more “legitimate” strictly online publishers like Netflix and Hulu, and the homegrown and nontraditional voices found on YouTube. They offer creators the no-rules freedom of online video while still throwing their hat in (or at least in the general direction of) the ring with the established online content-producing powerhouses.

The fact that Vimeo chose to use their unique position to specifically support female creators feels simultaneously like a groundbreaking win while also a completely obvious next step for online video. As the advent of online video has allowed us to rely less on Hollywood to provide the content we consume, so too have creators been able to rely less on traditional Hollywood methods to be able to make great stuff. Vimeo’s support for female creators is an assertion that online video provides a uniquely suited gateway for traditionally underrepresented voices to be heard—Hollywood can’t (and won’t) do anything to fix the status quo in the short term, but Vimeo can (and is).

With Share the Screen, Vimeo is not only is it providing female filmmakers a proving ground, it’s asking all of us if online video can be the new norm, then why not also equal representation?

Death of the author: A Review of The Ice-Bound Concordance

In the glacial caverns beneath a polar research facility, someone hears a distant groan. No, that’s not right. Maybe she hears laughter instead, but that goes against the tone of the piece—an air of mystery with a heavy sense of foreboding. Distant whispers… no, faint whispers breathing through the ice makes far more sense. Changing that bit of language, of course, only fits one particular moment in a much larger narrative. Still, it feels significant enough given the delicate nature that comes with editing a novel—especially one written by the author’s digital ghost.

Such are the considerations needed in The Ice-Bound Concordance, a game and accompanying book by Aaron Reed and Jacob Garbe that tasks the player with reconstructing the lost novel of the deceased fictional author Kristopher Holmquist. Holmquist’s posthumous fame generates interest in Ice-Bound, his unfinished magnum opus, and most significantly, leads to the creation of KRIS; a simulacrum meant to mimic Holmquist in order to finish the novel. Highlighting certain imagery (environmental objects, characters’ possessions, etc.), the player chooses points of focus for Ice-Bound’s narrative, and each choice ramifies as the player helps the AI unlock new chapters to build and order the book from incomplete data.

a game about the tension between authorial intent and editorial obsession

Aiding in this digital project is the physical book The Ice-Bound Compendium, a sort of forbidden text replete with ambiguous imagery and background information on Ice-Bound and its author. At times, KRIS asks the player to find pages of the Compendium that contain hidden symbols relating to themes of the novel, and showing the book to KRIS (through either the player’s iPad or computer camera) decodes any AR information hidden beneath the mass of symbols and words. This transmedial network of information forms the basis of the player’s work in aiding KRIS in its project of unlocking its dead counterpart’s incomplete novel.

And delving into The Ice-Bound Concordance is indeed work. As I played the game, I settled into a steady mechanical rhythm of designing a chapter, locking in editorial changes in language, and then combing through the unintelligible pages of the Compendium to set up my next effort on the upcoming chapter. Much like actual editorial work, helping KRIS is tedious and inelegant, and the book itself becomes a tool to aid in navigating the crude alleys of a partially-written novel.

On its own, the tedium of The Ice-Bound Concordance would not be enough to carry the text to any sort of end beyond exploring the well-trod intersection between play and work. Instead, the game focuses on narrative layering in a way that attempts to discover the compulsive allure of difficult texts. The echoes of Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), or Borges’ Labyrinths (1962) are fairly apparent, but present also are the interests of electronic literary experiments like Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) or Michael Joyce’s Afternoon: a story (1994). Like these artists and their respective works, Reed and Garbe use The Ice-Bound Concordance to prompt its player to embrace the pleasures that come with deciphering, or maybe just interacting with, texts that actively resist comprehension.

The source of The Ice-Bound Concordance’s difficulty comes from its complicated structure. At the basest layer, the player works with the AI to complete the chapters of the novel, and each chapter has its own narrative that influences the later chapters due to choices in subjects or theme. When I put together a chapter in which a soldier thinks he interacts with his twin brother’s ghost, for example, I consequently expand on a theme of doubles and duality that I had only gestured to in the previous chapters. That theme alongside the spiral imagery I kept inserting developed further into a supernatural drama I did not predict, steadily uncovering more strata of narrative complexity beneath the ice.

As the player excavates the novel from the singular mass of data, the AI KRIS starts to question its role in the whole process and what will happen to it once its goal is realized. After I helped it resolve a particularly dense chapter, KRIS pondered the motivation behind its creation, wondering, “Maybe they think they’re fixing me. Sculpting me into a thing they can use. A machine for finishing Ice-Bound. A machine that’s broken because it’s got too much tragic childhood. Not enough self-confidence. Too many sharp-edged memories.” Helping KRIS reconcile his human desires with his digital existence adds another narrative dimension to The Ice-Bound Concordance’s baffling structure, albeit one not as interesting as the content of the novel itself.

there are systems at play beyond the human faculties of language

Holding these spheres together is the metanarrative of the player’s work, which in my case was one of constant frustration. While KRIS wanted to write about “human dignity” and “going it alone,” I fought to keep the focus on the aforementioned spiral imagery and ever-growing threat of existential horror that haunted dark places below the facility. KRIS cared more about character flaws as they related to the personal sins of the writer whose mind the AI was meant to emulate, but I found its quest for self-discovery a dull moral tale about the need for humanism in the process of artistic creation. KRIS and I fought constantly, each of us vying for authorial control until we landed on an ending that disappointed the both of us.

Ultimately, it was my struggle against KRIS that interested me most in The Ice-Bound Concordance. Even as that damn program insisted that “endings are the crux of this matter” and warned me not to “get distracted by the medium” because “it’s the material that’s important,” I found my time spent trying to use the book to redirect the program’s focus to fit my needs far more satisfying than coming to any sort of end. All of this is by design, of course, though the heavy-handedness of KRIS’s direction over-explains the themes of the game that were already revealed organically. Indeed, if The Ice-Bound Concordance has any noticeable flaws, they appear in the occasional pontifications about the toil of creation that are a bit too obvious, or with a few supposed tricks that are far too telegraphed in their method. But such observations may reveal more about my own hubris than it does an actual flaw in a game about the tension between authorial intent and editorial obsession.

I suppose such revelations about my own role in the excavation of Ice-Bound simply adds another layer to the damn near impenetrable palimpsest that is The Ice-Bound Concordance. I have been enjoying this sort of renaissance of text-based games from the unflinching realness of Depression Quest (2013) to the surreal nightmare of Mastaba Snoopy (2013). These reflections on some of the earliest experiments in electronic literature show how language still remains just as provocative and intricate as any system of play, and Reed and Garbe’s extraordinary work rests comfortably among the best of its genre.

That said, after my time with The Ice Bound Concordance, I cannot maintain that the game matches the transcendent language games of Borges or the provocative textual experiments of Nabokov and Danielewski. But to dismiss Reed and Garbe’s work as valuable only in ambition would be a mistake. There’s something troublesome at the heart of The Ice-Bound Concordance that rests in the space between the physical copy of the book and the way a machine can see patterns and forms beyond the player’s perception. The complicated networks of mediation reveal that there are systems at play beyond the human faculties of language. From the actual mechanics of printing and editing to the complex codes that run software required to read the physical Ice-Bound Compendium, these unseen forces aiding in the processes of artistic creation trouble our concept of the single author.

After all, we can never read Ice-Bound in its native form because it only truly exists in the raw data of the computer program and the obscure iconography of the compendium, each only readable when filtered through the computer. For us, that text will always be just beyond our scope of understanding—formless, changing, and warped as if it is partially obscured behind a translucent sheet of ice.

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