Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 186

The gorgeous, empty dystopia of Anno 2205

Beginning with its first release, Anno 1602: Creation of a New World (1997), the Anno series has distinguished itself from a crowded field of strategy games by making economic competition, rather than military action, the focus of its simulation. Though Anno looked to the past for the first decade of its existence, the series turned towards the near-future with the excellent Anno: 2070 (2011), which tread new “historical” ground in familiar, materialist footwear. Anno 2205, the latest release in Ubisoft’s dependable series, picks up where 2070 left off; humanity is on the verge of interplanetary colonization and a rush for valuable lunar land is underway. Conflicts are inevitable, but as Anno always has it, it’s the supply lines and not the front lines where wars are won and lost.

Most of Anno 2205 involves designing and managing a trio of cities in three distinct regions: a temperate coast, a windswept arctic archipelago, and a lonesome lunar plain. Slight mechanical variations on the design of each zone’s city planning—arctic settlements must be designed around heat from factories, while lunar habitats require protection from space debris—give each region a relatively distinct and welcome sense of place and play. As the player erects factories and negotiates trade agreements, Anno 2205 shows itself to be adept at revealing and representing the intricate web of interdependencies between its regions: one product might be demanded on the moon, but can only be manufactured on the coast with materials from the arctic. Micromanagers rejoice: balancing production, distribution, and consumption is an elegant task and Anno 2205 deserves credit for reminding players how truly global (and, in this case, more than global) the complex exchange of commodities really is.

But so what? Fans and critics of strategy titles throw around the only-half-joking insult “Excel: The Game” because most believe that optimization and number-crunching don’t make for an inherently meaningful or, frankly, enjoyable game, even if the majority of games contain at least some element of them (sometimes it’s as simple as comparing the stats of two items). When games demand computation on the player’s behalf, it’s usually because the numbers-game is made meaningful by something else, whether it’s a rich sense of atmosphere, a compelling narrative, or simply an edge in combat. And as a general rule, the more number-crunching a game demands, the more justification it tends to need. Consider: Eve Online’s economic system is far more complex than anything in Anno 2205, but Eve’s sense of inhabitation and investment (financial and otherwise) more than justifies hours spent speculating on virtual commodities and calculating returns.

War, too, has become perfunctory.

In other words, it’s one thing to design a simulation, but quite another to make the player care about what’s being simulated. And on this count, alas, Anno 2205 falls desperately short in just about every way imaginable. The underlying simulation is relatively sophisticated, yes, but it does little to convince the player that the flow of goods between regions actually matters. Anno 2205’s narrative—something about free market lunar separatist space pirates—manages to pull off the the unenviable combination of being both utterly forgettable and completely mandatory (unlike previous entries in the series, Anno 2205 has no sandbox mode). War, too, has become perfunctory. Periodic naval skirmishes (mercifully, only some are necessary) are little more than click-and-wait dust ups and the segments rank among the least inspired war games in recent memory. And Anno 2205’s cast of CEOs and consultants—distinguishable mostly by their half-assed accents—are so profoundly unoriginal that I simultaneously felt like I knew each of them from somewhere yet never wanted to see any of them again. If Anno 2205 appeared more thoughtful, the identical models for each of its citizens might read as a comment on the fate of individuality in an unencumbered free market. As it stands, though, it just comes off as lazy. Everywhere the player turns, there are unavoidable signs that someone couldn’t be bothered to give a shit.

What might be most disappointing, though, is the sheer lack of atmosphere in what is otherwise an environment ripe for speculation on the human future. Anno 2205 is firmly in the realm of the capitalist u/dys/topia; personal identification no longer centers on the geo-state (as in Civilization: Beyond Earth) or ideological communities (Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri), but on the corporation. How we look and what we think is all subsumed by where we work and what we buy. Anno 2205 is not the first to suggest that the corporation will supersede the nation-state as a central piece of of social identity (“The Osirion of Sonmi 451” from David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas comes to mind), but among such works Anno 2205 might be the least interested in explaining how it came about or why it matters at all. A near complete absence of backstory combined with the pedantic functionalism of Anno 2205’s writing (e.g., “Hi! Come trade with me at the depot on the left side of the map!”), strip what could be a meaningful take on the future of humanity of any of the kinds of provocation needed to inspire further thought.

In fact, beyond due diligence, the only reason I kept playing Anno 2205 was its spectacular art direction. The Anno series has always made a point of flaunting its graphical prowess, but Anno 2205 takes the visualizations of its utopian cities to the extreme. The skyline of my coastal city—a cascade of glass and steel that looks like someone gave Skidmore, Owings & Merrill free reign and an infinite budget to remake Manhattan—is among the most breathtaking amalgamations of virtual architecture I’ve ever seen. So compelling, in fact, I often found that the most compelling reason to optimize my production and balance my supply chains was the raw aesthetic appeal of watching my seaside settlement blossom from a cluster of prefab houses into a first-rate metropolis, home to millions of (identical) workers.

The only reason I kept playing Anno 2205 was its spectacular art direction.

Still, glorious though Anno 2205’s cityscapes may be, a game that justifies the banality of numerical mechanics through visual sensation alone is inevitably one that provokes the question of whether or not it needed to exist at all. From this respect, Anno 2205 might have more in common with Photoshop or Illustrator than with its predecessors; for me, its most compelling purpose wasn’t doing something, but making something. Whether or not that makes for a fulfilling experience is an open question; that Anno 2205 could be so much more is not.

Can Telltale game design and the Game of Thrones universe coexist?

On paper, Game of Thrones’ complex medieval intrigue and Telltale Games’ unique brand of choose-your-own-adventure storytelling is a perfect match. And in the final episode of season 1 of Telltale’s series, the stakes are the highest of the whole season, not only for the characters beset with the inevitably bloody dealings within, but also for a game design thesis that has continued to promise and remind players that their choices will matter, steering the plot and shaping the characters. But now with season 1 at its close, it’s worth asking whether a plot that the player controls is really in the spirit of Game of Thrones to begin with.

If you remember back to episode 1, Telltale’s saga begins with the tragic Red Wedding, where some of the most likeable protagonists from the TV show and book are shockingly murdered, and certain game-only characters suffer the same fate. Prior to the slaughter, you control Gared, a humble squire, as you make idle chatter amidst the would-be celebration, but there’s no option to stop the massacre that you know is imminent. You decide how much you want to brag to a friend and how respectfully to treat your superiors, but there’s no way of making Gared say, “Hey, did you all see the title card for this scene? We need to get out of here!” It’s this sentiment that set the tone for the episodes to follow, particularly in relation to the HBO show from which it is licensed: yes, your choices matter on a performative, player-as-actor/director/scriptwriter level, but they bear no consequence on the canonical happenings of Westeros at large.

The result is that episodes of the game largely come off as fanservice—a loose remix of the Starks’ story, if the Starks were only important enough to be mentioned in passing one time, in the company of several other “clans,” across George R.R. Martin’s dense, five-books-and-counting saga. So while Telltale isn’t afraid to throw some gut-punches with the choices it puts upon players, there is, in most cases, a weightlessness to the endeavor. While some of the Forresters are likeable, none inspire the adoration of an Arya Stark or a Jon Snow, which in turn lowers the ceiling of player investment. The litany of technical issues (audio dropout, graphical hitching, etc.) that the series suffers from only serves to further shatter that artifice. Characters will die in Telltale’s game, and in episode 6 you have some control over who goes under the knife. The game fluctuates between the TV show’s penchant for rubbing the audience’s face in their own powerlessness (shocking deaths of “safe” characters) and the expectations players have for controlling and molding game worlds to their liking. Ultimately, it’s unclear whether these two polar concepts can coexist in a Game of Thrones context as complements.

The result is that episodes of the game largely come off as fanservice

Still, Episode 6 gets closer to figuring out the puzzle of Westerosi agency than any prior. While there’s no climactic moment where all of your choices laid in front of you, ala the conclusion of The Walking Dead’s first season, there are plenty of instances where the game limits your options to force role-playing in frustrating, but nonetheless enlightening, ways. One example of this is when Asher (assuming your Asher is still around) has to decide how to deal with the Whitehill forces that are laying siege to Ironrath. You are given two choices, and both surprisingly involve violating the ancient laws of guest right. The plan, either way, is to attack your foes over dinner; it’s just a question of method. While that may seem par for the course in Game of Thrones, for the Forresters to essentially stoop to such villainous tactics illustrates a desperation and a blind pursuit of survival at the cost of honor. As a player, I set out to push for an alternate non-violent route before the attack was to take place, which gave me a goal to pursue without the game spelling it out plainly. Of course, the game eventually offers up some dialogue choices that could possibly derail the scheme, but the pursuit of that derailment was one of the only moments over the course of Telltale’s series where “player choice” didn’t feel reactionary.

In contrast, with Mira and Gared’s storylines, you’re just nudging the wheel a bit to the left or right as you’re presented with decision after decision. It’s to Telltale’s credit that here in episode 6, those nudges can beget wildly divergent endgames for characters, but it’s taken a full season, and 4 months since episode 5, to get to this point. Queen Margaery may remember what I said to her before the coronation ceremony a few episodes ago, but I sure as hell don’t. Thus, Mira’s troubles in King’s Landing in episode 6 often come off as disproportionately severe, seeing as her arc has been languishing in fantasy bureaucracy for a while now. And Gared’s story suffers from the opposite fate. His has consistently been the most engaging tale throughout the season, and one could argue that his journey north of The Wall is actually the only instance of Telltale’s game bringing genuinely new elements to the world of Game of Thrones. Yes, Gared finally arrives at the North Grove in episode 6, but what exactly the fabled power of the location is isn’t even a core facet of the cliffhanger ending. Gared’s final choice feels underinformed, no matter which way you decide to nudge.

I’m a big Game of Thrones fan, but Telltale’s game series is, unfortunately, inessential material. Maybe that will change in season 2, but as of now, the game is a bonus featurette class and a cautious, buggy half-step, as far as Telltale making any significant alterations in their Walking Dead formula. That’s not to deny moments where that formula gels into a delicious cocktail of political maneuvering and steel-bearing physical altercation, but it’s one that’s tasted better elsewhere.

Minecraft now has a working smartphone that can make video calls

Oh, I remember the halcyon days of 2010, don’t you? When we were all flabbergasted by some guy who had spent days and nights constructing a 1:1 scale model of Star Trek‘s Starship Enterprise. It was a one-man architectural feat and, actually, it’s as impressive today as it was five years ago. But we can now look back at this as Minecraft‘s primitive and ancient history, pretty much in the same way we do the pyramids in Giza. I don’t think that Enterprise could even take off, could it?

These days we’re so used to seeing huge recreations in Minecraft that it takes a lot to impress us. The entire country of Denmark created with Minecraft blocks? Meh, it’s alright I guess. The Legend of Zelda‘s Hyrule? So-so. A detailed facsimile of World of Warcraft‘s Azeroth? I won’t say it again. We’ve seen all this too many times now. Give us something new.

How is that even possible?

And now someone has. If big-scale recreations are no longer enough to entertain all of us Caesars, then technological feats seem to be the way forward. You know what Verizon has recently done? It’s ridiculous. They’ve created a smartphone in Minecraft that can browse the internet and make video calls to actual people outside of the game. I know, I know: How is that even possible? Verizon has offered an explanation but it will probably only mildly temper your bafflement.

“In the world of Minecraft, almost everything is made of blocks. We’ve created a web application, Boxel, that translates real web pages and streaming video into blocks so they can be built on a Minecraft server in real time. Our server plugin uses Boxel-client to handle the communication between Minecraft and the real world as translated by the web application.”

The result of Verizon’s portal between the virtual and the real is showcased by YouTuber Jordan Maron in the Verizon-sponsored video above. As you can see, after crafting the smartphone as well as having automated engineers build him a cell tower, Maron is able to browse the internet in what is possibly the lowest resolution it’s ever been seen in, as well as call his tablet and the computer of a friend to have a video conversation. It works, even if it’s a little crude, but the achievement here is that this is able to happen at all.

Oh, and don’t miss the fact that when you do call someone else from inside Minecraft using its smartphone that the person on the other end sees your character inside the blocky virtual world. You can move your character around as normal in front of the smartphone and they’ll see every movement. It’s a bizarre state of affairs that, not only do we have video calling and it’s of common usage these days, but we’ve reached the point in the future that videogames are interacting with the real world in these ways now. Soon it’ll get to the point that you’ll never have to leave virtual reality and can still live your life as you otherwise would…

h/t Kotaku

Orchids to Dusk lets you find a quiet place to die

Be warned: This article spoils all the surprise of Orchids to Dusk that is so crucial to the first-time experience, so it’s best played before reading.

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The fallen astronaut in Orchids to Dusk is not eager for adventure. You can see this in their hands, which are timidly held together, head shyly dipped towards them to create a tight prism of safety. It’s a pose familiar to shut-ins and the timorous. How it came to be that this person got as far as becoming an astronaut without the necessary confidence is unknown. Nor does it matter. Everything is ending now.

Typically, this astronaut would be bounding into the wilds, shipwreck in wake, probably shooting pulse rifles at giant plants and collecting space scrap to build a ship mere hours later. This is the videogame way. They teach us to keep going, to never stop, relentlessly gobbling up quests and targets and stat upgrades. It’s exhausting. Can’t we just fucking stop for a second? Orchids to Dusk let’s us. It recalls Merritt Kopas’s Lullaby for Heartsick Spacer in that it places value in inertia and self-healing. Yes, it’s a contemplative “wandering experience,” but the exploration here is only for the sake of finding somewhere comfy to rest.

the colorful swirls fly around your fishbowl helmet

In fact, you don’t just rest, you die. The only visible measure in Orchids to Dusk is the oxygen level on the left of the screen (and there’s no way to refill it). It’s a familiar sight for a videogame set in space or on an alien planet, usually being the part of the interface made to make you panic—a countdown to when you die. But here that meter may not actually end soon enough. It might be that you waddle over to one of the sporadic circles of alien vegetation and stop for a second, watching the colorful swirls fly around your fishbowl helmet, the shrubbery dancing nervously at your feet. As you move your mouse in orbit the astronaut will tilt their head to mimic your admiration of this calming oasis. Then something wonderful happens. They sit down.

It’s important that the astronaut settles like this on their own accord. There is no button for you to press; it happens through a short period of inactivity. Sure, it’s an idle animation, you might say, that’s hardly anything new. But unlike, say, Sonic’s impatient tap of the foot (“I’m waaaaaiting”), sitting down in Orchids to Dusk isn’t filler, it’s the next phase of the game’s short structure. You search the mostly barren landscape, sit down where you wish, and wait for the oxygen to run out. It becomes an experiential acceptance of serene futility. But here’s where it takes another unexpected emotional turn. Sit down for long enough and the game reveals an interaction that it didn’t tell you about before. You can take the helmet off.

This gesture meant a lot to me. Removing the helmet means surrendering the remaining oxygen and accepting death sooner than is necessary. Rather than wandering aimlessly in hope of finding a miraculous resupply of oxygen, delaying the inevitable, you can pull back, take a moment, and decide to die on your own terms. It’s like directing your own funeral. I decided to sit in the center of a small pocket of forest and relish the joyful theater of nature for the last time. Appreciating your surrounding beauty … that’s not a bad way to die, I reckon.

Here’s a game that’s saying no to all that

I think it’s that sometimes I get so exhausted of always staggering onwards through life that getting the chance to abandon that ceaselessness for once in Orchids to Dusk brought a tear to my eye (the gentle music by Marskye helped it happen). I wasn’t expecting that. It was a wonderful, touching realization for me. Look, we constantly push each other to press on, to deal with whatever shit is bothering us and move past it, no matter how bad, that’s just our way. Do we ever let ourselves truly savor anguish? Most videogames reflect this constant charge into the unknown, such as the recently released Fallout 4, which gives us hundreds of side quests to do before, during, and after the search for our kidnapped son. It never wants us or its main character to stop and contemplate the pain we should be feeling. But here’s a game that’s saying no to all that, do what’s necessary to make you happy, look after yourself when it’s needed. Sometimes you need to cry, let it all out, y’know? Orchids to Dusk also reminds us that the joy and beauty we’re after—that forever distant utopia—can be found now, all around us; it’s whatever we make it. But we’re gonna miss it if we’re dragging ourselves endlessly towards some obscure goal. That it lets you accept death and be at peace validates an alternative to the drudgery.

This is further expressed in what happens after you die upon taking the helmet off. When you do, the astronaut pops into non-existence, and then plants sprout to mark their resting place. Yes, each of these pockets of flora are, essentially, monuments to the deceased. What’s not immediately obvious about Orchids to Dusk is that it takes place inside a persistent online world, and so by dying in this way you’re leaving behind a leafy refuge for other players to stumble upon. However, there is another way to die inside the game. If you carry on strolling until the oxygen runs out then the astronaut will only leave behind a discouraging cadaver for other players to find. In my second playthrough, I had my astronaut curl up next to one of these bodies in order to keep them company in death. Needless to say it was a much more forlorn and lonesome ending than the previous one I had experienced.

Hopefully, then, many more people will choose to blossom rather than deteriorate, creating a pleasant forested world for future players to wander rather than a dried up bed of dead bodies.

You can download Orchids to Dusk over on itch.io.

Metal Gear Solid V’s nuclear disarmament event begins

Nuclear deterrence has long been a subject of Metal Gear Solid games: the idea that if all sides of a conflict have weapons of mass destruction, then nobody will use them. But is that really peace?

That’s what a special mission in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain hopes to address. A cutscene associated with the event was datamined from the game files a few months ago, but now Konami has officially kicked off the event itself, which invites Phantom Pain players across all platforms to dispose of the nukes they’ve built or work together to forcefully disarm uncooperative players’ nukes.

It’s working, too

The option to build nukes on your Mother Base in Metal Gear Solid V comes after a certain story point, but they factor into the multiplayer element of the game very heavily. If you build a nuke, it means you can only invade the Forward Operating Bases (FOB) of players who have also built a nuke, but if you fail to successfully infiltrate and take control of that player’s base, then they have the option to bomb your FOB, destroying everything you’ve worked for. If players with nukes invade you, then you get the same choice if they fail.

What this effectively means is that the players who are making it their mission to disarm other people’s nukes in Metal Gear Solid V are taking on huge risks in-game. If they invade a player’s base with the intention of disarming their nuke, but fail, they could be set back to square one. Yet despite this, there are groups of players banding together to make this happen.

It’s working, too. According to Konami’s official page for the event, the number of nuclear weapons owned per platform has reduced drastically from November 1st to November 25th. On Playstation 4, the number has dropped from 2,761 to 352. On PC, it’s gone from a whopping 36,552 to 15,691. The most recent numbers indicate 165 left on PS4 and 10,450 left on PC.

Once players have disarmed all the nukes within a regional server (so not in the entire world), the special cutscene will play. While it depicts an inspiring scene involving Metal Gear Solid‘s cast of characters, it ends on a pretty somber note for the real world involving: a brief history lesson about the rapid proliferation of nuclear weapons during the Cold War and various nations’ attempts to reduce that number, a quotation from U.S. President Barack Obama about the decreased threat of nuclear war, but the increased threat of a nuclear attack, and a statistic that puts the number of nuclear warheads in the world at over 16,000…

Forget Van Halen: these 70 Zebra finches are my new favorite rock stars

I’ve been trying and failing to learn how to play guitar since high school. No matter how many classes I take or Rocksmith sessions I play, the seeming complexity of the instrument always scares me away from any higher level practice. Now, to add salt to the wound, I’m being upstaged by birds. But to be fair, there are 70 of them.

In an exhibition that went up at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on November 25th, French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot released 70 zebra finches into a room where the only perches were 10 Gibson Les Paul guitars and four Gibson Thunderbird basses. As the birds simply do what they do best and land on the guitar strings, they naturally create what Boursier-Mougenot refers to as “living music.”

“I want to make music from these birds on the wire”

“Looking through the window, my feeling was that I want to make music from these birds on the wire, and 30 years later I did this,” Boursier-Mougenot told Canada’s CBC News, explaining his childhood inspiration for the piece. With a history in theatrical composition, Boursier-Moguenot has been working since 1994 on combining his musical talents with visual arts to create new styles of live entertainment from unorthodox sources.

As the birds “play” their guitars, groups of 25 will be slowly lead through the exhibition room, encouraging the birds to fly around and create brand new soundscapes, making the visitors a part of this living music as well.

While one might expect the resulting music to have a random feel to it, the actual sound of the exhibit has more of a rippling effect, creating a soothing melody out of all the chaos.

The exhibit has previously travelled from New York to Paris to Milan, and will be making its Canadian premiere on its 19th outing. Visitors can catch this brand new type of songbird in Montreal up until the exhibit’s closing day on March 27, 2016.

h/t CBC News

The Joy of Nature

Right now, Paris is hosting the United Nations conference on climate change. It’s the 21st session to be held since these events started, and the 11th meeting since the Kyoto Protocol was agreed in 1997. These events tend to be underwhelming—a smattering of watery half-promises and spurious statistics—but this year there’s increased scrutiny following the global protests of last September. Three hundred thousand people took to the streets of New York while concurrent marches were being held across cities such as Berlin, Lagos, Johannesburg, Seoul, and London. And this November, the United Nations weather agency warned of the new “permanent reality” we have entered, as CO2 in the atmosphere hit a record high, up 43% from pre-industrial times. We can expect extreme weather events to become increasingly commonplace: heatwaves, flash floods, and rising sea levels—all with greater frequency and severity.

What role does art have to play in our response to this new reality? Writers, artists and film-makers have long been engaged with environmental issues. Romanticism, in the 19th century, was conceived partly as a reaction to the rise of industrialism and the environmental destruction that accompanied these developments. The poet John Keats rhapsodized about the beauty of the natural world, infusing it with notions of the sublime, and the painter Hans Gude gave us the untouched picaresques of his native Norway. And, since the mid 90’s, filmmakers have attempted to formulate responses to the specific issues of melting ice-caps, climate change, and increasing CO2 emissions, albeit with a silliness and scale special to Hollywood. Waterworld cast a spectacularly unsuccessful look at a future in which rising sea levels wiped out landed civilization, and The Day After Tomorrow took hokey science to its destructive limits, decimating New York in the process.

Nature writing, too, has come to play an important role in documenting our environmental anxieties. In 1986 Barry Lopez published a classic of the genre called Arctic Dreams. His was a book that brought together the natural sciences—the biology, geography, and geology of the region—with anthropological analysis and cultural history. And his poetic lyricism conveyed a deep respect for the environment, animals, and people of the Arctic. Lopez’s examination of the Arctic began with the aesthetic but always tended towards the ethical, a kind of moral gaze, as fellow nature writer Robert Macfarlane described it. And central to that moral gaze is the idea that our evaluation of a landscape, be it physical, cultural, or otherwise, is shaped by a human desire to put it to use.

Landscapes in videogames are always put to use—they are digital constructs, fabricated realities that provide a framework for the player to interact with and within. These landscapes are an integral part of narrative and message, and their presentations are vehicles for the implicit and explicit assumptions of their creators. But it’s not only aesthetics that help us piece together the relationship videogames have with environmental issues, it’s their use and utility.

Videogames, to a large extent, are disinterested in the real-world issues of energy, consumption, and the environment. Depictions of warfare dominate many popular videogames—megahits like Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Destiny lock the player into a perpetual grind of combat, a seemingly infinite campaign of destruction, production, and reconstruction. And the conflict portrayed in videogames, just as in real life, at best exudes an indifference—a shrug of the shoulders towards energy consumption—and at worst treats the environment with disregard and contempt. This contempt isn’t new, though. Strategy games like 1995’s Command and Conquer, and 1997’s Age of Empires, have long placed environmental exploitation at the heart of their experiences. Resource consumption was a pre-requisite for the player’s progress, their depletion integral to winning the game.

consumption of resources doesn’t always have to be at the expense of the environment

But the consumption of resources doesn’t always have to be at the expense of the environment. Lionhead’s Black and White, from 2001, allowed for a conservationist approach towards resource management. Forests could be managed, felled trees replaced, and growth encouraged through the use of a water miracle. Yet Black and White was not only conservationist but preservationist, too. It was morning; my villagers yawned and stretched as they left their homes, the sleep still in their eyes, and a flock of birds rushed through the settlement, their wings gleaming in the morning light. The early risers pointed, cheered, and stood gazing at this act of natural beauty. In their world the natural aesthetic is highly prized, and for my villagers the natural world provided opportunity for spiritual contemplation—it was a moment that allowed them to break out of the intensive resource management that dominates their lives.

There are other videogames which are gently preservationist in outlook, too. There’s a moment towards the start of 2010’s Enslaved where Trip, your partner throughout the game, stops for pause and examines the remains of the fish tank that you have just helped to destroy. She is distressed, upset, and laments the loss of life that has occurred through human interference. These fish are the first living animals she has seen for years—it was a closed, self-sustaining eco-system in a post-apocalyptic Earth where wild animals are a thing of the past, replaced now by robotic approximations of their forebears. She weeps and you, the player, reflect on your own destructive action. It’s a powerful moment rendered sensitively, and it serves as a stark reminder of what could be lost if current environmental issues are not addressed effectively. The visual design of Enslaved, too, is suffused with a message of ecological regeneration, its reclamation of urban spaces. Trees poke through the New York high-rise apartment blocks, and the red hue of aging leaves and poppies spread out across an overgrown sidewalk.

There’s no sense of ecological regeneration in 2015’s The Flame in the Flood. Its landscape is to be feared, not marvelled at. But it does a good job of making you feel comfortable, initially. There’s beauty in the quiet, and in the solitude; morning light shimmers in the water refracted through the spray of the rapids, the faded browns of autumn and lilting banjo are familiar, woven into the fabric of a homespun America. But the actuality of the experience quickly dispels these impressions. I encountered a wolf; Aesop, my dog, did little to stifle its advances—and the wolf inflicted numerous lacerations on my weary body. As I escaped the rain began to lash down, and the dark blue of night began to draw in, quicker than I needed. Hypothermia took hold as I reached my raft, and as morning broke, my body gave out—the flame extinguished. The Flame in the Flood, then, is a warning that life will be tough and it will be lonely, reminding us of what we stand to lose should environmental disaster hit. And whilst its title hints at a romantic take on disaster, the loneliness that sets in is anything but. It’s reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; as the father lay dying he told his son to keep carrying the fire—what fire replied the boy—the fire inside of you said the father. The bond is broken and the boy is alone—and it’s the scariest thing in the world.

But what else, aside from this moment of dawning isolation, makes The Road so scary, and how can it help us better understand The Flame in the Flood? Familiarity plays a crucial role in making the terror feel real. McCarthy lets the drama unfold in a recognizable landscape, the highways and intersections that unfurl across north-America, and the anonymous small towns that eke out an existence in this terrain. The disaster that has occurred is identifiable to anyone that has lived a winter in the north. Grey stretches into the infinite, the blackness of the forest silhouette cuts through the dull sunlight, and darkness consumes the river; days neither begin nor end during these months. Yet it’s not only familiarity that makes The Road’s disaster so chilling, it’s the vulnerability the father and son are subject to. They’re prey for the roaming gangs of cannibals that stalk the landscape, but more than this, they’re exposed to the worst a dying Earth can muster; the interminable cold and damp of the long dark winter. Father and son are surrounded, and dwarfed, by the rising coniferous trees that threaten to collapse at any moment, but whose fallen needles provide fleeting comfort during a night’s rest.

Its landscape is to be feared, not marvelled at

Familiarity and vulnerability are crucial to the horror of The Road, but together they instil a sense of urgency, and it’s this urgency that lies at the core of the environmental reading of the novel. It’s a scenario that is palpable, close to the bone, and it’s these feelings that The Flame in the Flood draws on so well. The flood imagery found throughout the game- submerged settlements and floating cars- is an increasingly common site on broadcast news; the “permanent reality” of extreme weather the United Nations warns of could have disastrous consequences sooner than we think. And the vulnerability of the player is placed at the forefront of the experience; this is not a situation you’ll be able to fight your way out of, or level-up your way through. There’s no hero narrative, no supernatural element, no zombie premise, and the lack of these aspects brings the reality of the situation into sharp relief. Both The Flame in the Flood and The Road ask the player and viewer, what’s more terrifying than dying in a global disaster; and the answer, emphatically, is surviving it.

Throughout all of these titles, designers have attempted to depict humanity’s attitude towards the environment, natural resources, and ecological disaster. Some present it beautifully, others morally, but these digital landscapes are always put to use, just as they are in the real world; our own foibles are always reflected in the screen. Ultimately, designers ensure that these issues are accounted for in videogames, just as they’ve been represented in the art, literature, and cinema of the past decades and centuries. And in the same way these art-forms have inspired thought, action, and in some instances change, so too can videogames make similar sorts of gains. The Flame in the Flood points towards this, allowing us to interact with the world we might be creating, placing future tribulations at the heart of its experience. Going forward, pre-civilization landscapes are beginning to be explored by titles such as Before and WiLD, offering us the potential to formulate a more meaningful relationship with the environment. Perhaps in these games we’ll get a second chance at history, or perhaps we’ll just get to make the same mistakes again.

Finally, a card game created exclusively for weirdos

If you have a bunch of weirdo friends who think it’s normal to be weird (and why wouldn’t they?), boy have we got the card game for you.

The strategic party game DEER LORD! is basically a trying-to-assimilate-to-society-but-can’t-because-you’re-too-weird simulator. It’s described as being ideal for a group of friends that likes to “deceive, manipulate and confuse each other,” because the basic premise is that you must trick other people into thinking your weirdo tendencies are normal.

Each player draws five cards from the deck that give them the option to either “duel” with another player, or instructs them to “do something.” Duels are won by who performs the action on the card the best. So if the instruction is to tell the story of a sordid love affair between a spoon and a fork, you better tell the hell out of that story because your fellow players will determine who wins.

The “do something” cards are where it gets really interesting. These cards are used during other players’ turns, and instruct you to do things like “tell a boring story” or “start kicking another player.” The catch is that you can’t be too obvious, or another player can call you out by shouting DEER LORD! which means you’ve failed to be sneaky enough in your weirdness. Acussers must tred carefully, though, because wrongful accusation will set them back in the game.

you’ve failed to be sneaky enough in your weirdness

DEER LORD is basically like the game BS, only for the millennial generation. Combining non sequitur humor with the fun of deceiving your friends, it’s the perfect party game for a generation that’s adept at anonymous ironic humor on the internet. The creators are even advertising some expansion packs that range from “gangsta” to “flirty.”

Ultimately, what’s great about DEER LORD! is that (as the creators point out in the video) it encourages people to unleash their inner weirdos, since that’s the best strategy to win the game. And I mean, don’t you kinda wish life was like that: rewarding you for your strange-ass behavior that everyone else only barely puts up with?

You can play a basic print and play version of DEER LORD! on their website. You can also support DEER LORD! on Kickstarter.

Why Fallout 4’s 1950s satire falls flat

War may never change, but Kill Screen does. Back our Kickstarter to help support our print relaunch!

Fallout 4 takes us back. Back to the beginning. Back before the bombs fell, and before the world of the Fallout series took on its mutated, feral, apocalyptic form. But what did that world look like? The Fallout series has, since its inception, hinted at a world before nuclear annihilation that resembled, in its culture and its design, the 1950s, rather than the 2070s, which is the decade in which Fallout’s “Great War,” a two-hour series of nuclear blasts that decimated the planet, took place. But the series has only ever revealed this in the clues left behind in its various wastelands. That pre-war world, untouched by nuclear fallout, has never been shown, and because of this the series has always managed to uphold an ironic distance between the wastelands the player explores and the past these spaces gesture back to. But Fallout 4 is different; it begins before the bombs. And by allowing the player to be a part of this world, even briefly, this distance breaks down completely. Fallout 4 is the most nostalgic of the series, pining for its lost home and its lost world. You play as someone who lived and loved this old world, somebody who has an emotional attachment to it. But to get the player to feel the same is difficult, and the game doesn’t exactly reconcile this newfound sentiment with its irreverent tone. Fostering an emotional attachment to what has come before is not something that sits easily with the game’s satirical take on that previous world.

There is a marked difference as soon as the game’s introductory film begins. Previous games in the Fallout series have begun with a maudlin old tune from the ‘30’s, ‘40s or ‘50s, wailing away over a series of grainy images of a destroyed world. After the song ends, the monologue begins, with the videogame-famous intonation, “War. War never changes.” Fallout 4 changes this. For the first time, there is no song, and the opening monologue is spoken by the game’s playable male character. This does two things: firstly, it sidelines the female character, and presents the male as the default, intended protagonist of the game (an opening speech by both of them could have been interesting); and secondly, it creates a character before the player has had a chance to. Character creation has always been a key element of Fallout, with the playable character often being a blank state that players fill in for themselves. In the previous game, subtitled New Vegas, players are told the protagonist is a courier; apart from that, no other information is given. In Fallout 3, the game begins at the birth of the protagonist; in that game, the player is absent from no single moment of their life. This opening speech is much more revealing. The playable character is a former soldier. He speaks of his grandfather, of his wife, his child, of the shattering of the American dream. About the fear he feels. The game seems to be using this speech to pull the player in emotionally, to feel what the character feels, so that when the bombs start to fall, we understand what is at stake for this family.

Then the film ends, and the game opens up, and we are plunged into its pre-war world. On a sunny autumnal morning, somewhere in the suburbs surrounding Boston, the player is finally witness to the world before the bombs fell. The house we find ourselves inhabiting, in both its exterior design and its interior decoration, resembles a brand new home of the suburban 1950s; shiny new cars lay dormant outside each bright new house. The opening film has made it clear that the male playable character loves his family very much; it would make sense if this was shown and explored in this scene. It would make sense too for the wife to be given some characterization, for their relationship to be given some depth. But this doesn’t happen. The sequence gives the player no opportunity to engage in any meaningful way with either spouse or son. Instead, the game seems to utilize 1950s imagery as a visual shorthand; by presenting the traditional nuclear family in their comfortable suburban home, the game is telling the player to assume that they are happy and loving, rather than this being illustrated through in-game actions. This upends the stance previous games in the series took, in which the cultural mores of the 1950s, including the idea of the happy, suburban nuclear family, were plundered for satire. Being part of such a family, and feeling like an emotional attachment is meant to be made to them, sits uneasily with the game’s overall tone and sense of humour, and this is only heightened by the lack of effort the game makes in showing real relationships between these characters.

This begs the question, then: why the ‘50s?

This begs the question, then: why the ‘50s? Outside of the irony we as players are meant to perceive and enjoy, there is no reason why the culture of the Fallout world, in its music, its design and its fashion, is permanently stuck in the mid-twentieth century. We understand the inherent humour in the juxtaposition the game creates between its cosy ‘50s aesthetic and its hyperviolent imagery, but there is nothing in the world itself that justifies this, or at least expands on it. The series’ retrofuturism is its longest running joke, and by combining many different facets of ‘50s American culture, from naive technological optimism to the focus on the nuclear family and the beginnings of consumer capitalism, and coupling this with nuclear fallout on a planetary scale, the Fallout games have always carried with them an ironic commentary on the so-called “Atomic Age,” in which the power of nuclear energy was viewed as something that could change the world.

In the United States, the rise of nuclear energy came to a slowdown in the 1970s, and halted drastically after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, when a nuclear meltdown took place in one of the two nuclear reactors in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. After this, public support for nuclear power in the U.S. dropped significantly. Globally, the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 and the Fukushima Daiichi disaster of 2011 continue to fuel debate regarding the safety of nuclear power. But in the Fallout series, it is the harnessing of nuclear power that is key, both to its society’s technological advances, and its eventual self-destruction. The historian William Knoblauch writes of Fallout 3 that “the game’s reliance on 1950s imagery suggests that nuclear war was only ever really possible during the early Cold War. Put simply, Fallout 3’s apocalypse is born of a distant, but culturally familiar, 1950s era.” Maybe the answer to “Why the ‘50s?” is simply that without the ‘50s, Fallout wouldn’t be Fallout. Perhaps there is no other decade in which the cultural and political climate could be as severely juxtaposed with nuclear annihilation as that of the 1950s.

In many ways then, Fallout 4, like the rest of the series, is a satire of the 1950s and that decade’s dream of a science-fiction utopia. The wastelands of the series have always been strewn with the burnt-out remains of these dreams, yet because of the distance in time and in culture between the remains of the old world and the reality of the new, the kitsch ‘50s culture of the pre-war world always appeared ridiculous. By allowing the player to begin the game in that setting, and to play as someone who lived in that world, the game loses this distance from events, and therefore, so does the player. Being cast as somebody whose life is contained in the remains of the old world means that what before was considered ironic now has to be taken in with a very straight face. How is it possible to roleplay as anything but a parent pining for their child and for their home? But it’s still Fallout, and so this is perfectly possible. After hours spent wandering the wasteland, the memory of that brief stint in a past life will vanish, and all the leftovers of the old world will revert back to what they were in every other Fallout game: stuff to pick up. But maybe this is where Fallout 4’s settlements, in which the player can rebuild broken down towns and homes with junk assembled along their journey, will come in. Perhaps it can all be built back up, that image of the old world, and our son will be found, and that past life can begin again.

Decide which pets are useless in Animal Inspector

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Animal Inspector (PC, Mac)
BY TOM ASTLE

Ever seen a useless pet? There are plenty around. For every Lassie and K-9 there’s a cat as round as a bowl doing absolutely nothing. Adorable, sure, but also completely pointless. If you don’t know how to identify a useless pet then Animal Inspector is for you. It won’t teach you, mind, but it’ll send your mind racing with judgmental thoughts on the topic. This cat with its jaw hanging, is it useless? How about this goldfish won at a county fair? Ants, in general, are they useless? Yes, it’s rapturously silly with an underlying mystery worthy of Tomorrow Corporation (think Little Inferno) keeping you guessing at something larger going on. The question isn’t how to identify a useless pet but why does it matter in the first place? While Animal Inspector may play similarly to Papers, Please its lighthearted wag and cartoon presentation let it strike out on its own. And like a dollop of jam on top it even has quirky music by Donut County creator Ben Esposito. Top stuff.

Perfect for: Animal lovers, pet haters, fat cats

Playtime: Half an hour