Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 201
November 3, 2015
Seriously, we���re launching a Kickstarter & it���s awesome
For real, our magazine is going to be amazing.
Nighttime Visitor brings cell phone horror to videogames
You do not answer a ringing phone. This should be one of the rules to surviving a horror movie if it isn't already. Don't pick up the goddamn phone. Don't you remember Scream? Or When A Stranger Calls? If you pick up that phone the countdown on your death clock accelerates at a blistering speed. Don't bother making a phone call either. That's how Lynda opened herself up to Michael Myers's choke hold in Halloween. Steer clear of phones, okay?
you cannot turn the phone off or otherwise silence it.
Unfortunately, in Nighttime Visitor, that's not possible. This is a cell phone horror that turns the convenience of always being reachable into a threat against your life. It begins with your cell phone ringing as you stand outside the toilets in an office block. Of course, you answer it, condemning yourself immediately. The guy on the other end of the call, Alex, delivers a blunt explanation of his murderous intentions, ending with a convincingly psychotic laugh. Beep. He hangs up. You shit yourself.
What then unfolds is a terrifying game of cat-and-mouse around a maze of eerie and oppressive corridors towards the exit. There are many horror games that have this same set-up but with Nighttime Visitor it's different. Here's the reason why: "Alex will call you and try to locate you by the sound of your ringing phone." Knowing this, when your phone does ring, it becomes a mad scramble to answer or end the call as quick as possible. And no, you cannot turn the phone off or otherwise silence it.
You're left with gritted teeth, desperately staying silent while listening for nearby footsteps, once your cell phone has sent its terrible noise echoing through the corridors. You can never tell if Alex heard the rings and now has the upper hand or not. That grey area full of suspense is what pure terror is made of. And, if you want to make matters worse, deciding to answer Alex's call will have him breathing heavily down the phone as if some overgrown beast. It does a lot to make Nighttime Visitor completely unnerving.
One thing you may get into the habit of doing under the false pretense that it will help you is calling up Alex's cell phone. You do this in hopes of not hearing his phone ringing as that means he's nowhere near you. But what if you did hear it? Your cell phone may seem like your only weapon against Alex but in Nighttime Visitor's corridors it only causes panic. Even if you know where he is there's nowhere to hide and you cannot outpace him.
What Nighttime Visitor gets at in its own simple way is a modern fear that many of us feel; that we cannot avoid surveillance. It's through our cell phones and computers that we are so easily trackable. Have a webcam or a microphone? Corporations and government organizations are most likely using it to listen or watch you without you knowing. They may not be out to kill us with this information but that doesn't remove the thought that it could be done so easily, and if not by them, then by an invasive interlocutor.
5 Queer Video Games Breaking the Mold
Indie game developers create narratives that showcase queer culture beyond gender identity, connecting with players through universal human experiences.
K��na invites you to investigate an abandoned town in 1970s Canada
The most striking thing about the new trailer for Kôna, an upcoming surreal mystery game from Parabole, is its narration. It has this really odd, stilted intonation that I can’t quite place; the boom and quirk of old timey radio announcer meets the uncanny poetry of The Residents.
Whatever it is, I like it. It sets such a strange tone for the rest of the video, which is just as good: as we learn from our dramatic narrator, you play as a Korean War veteran named Carl Faubert who ventures into the Northern Canadian wilderness to investigate a bout of vandalism. The narrator speaks about Faubert’s cynicism and the troubling situation he’s found himself in over shots of a snowstruck wilderness and a seemingly abandoned town.
The trailer ends on a proverb that Carl recalls a man from Seoul repeating: “In times of peace, don’t forget danger.”
when he arrives in the town, it’s mysteriously empty
We learn more about the circumstances of Carl’s journey on Kôna’s official website.
The year is 1970. A rich industrialist named W. Hamilton is accused of destroying land belonging to the local Cree population, while Hamilton believes the Cree have vandalized his summer home. Carl, who works as a private detective, is hired to sort things out, but when he arrives in the town, it’s mysteriously empty.
The reason is unknown, but Kôna’s Steam Greenlight page does mention the presence of a Wendigo. The creators insist it will not be the source of “useless jump scares,” but either way, I hope it’s at least designed more interestingly than the ones in Until Dawn.
Kôna is said to blend elements of survival games with the puzzling and storytelling of classic adventure games. Each of its planned four episodes will last about one to two hours, with its debut episode set for January 2016.
Learn more about Kôna on its official website and Steam Greenlight.
Stillness is the move
From Tokyo Story to Kentucky Route Zero, art speaks through silence.
November 2, 2015
Announcing Failsafe, which sends you running through a Miyazaki-esque world
Failsafe recalls The Wind Waker, Journey and Mirror’s Edge.
Memoir En Code, or how to sell yourself through a videogame
"The more you play, the more you know me."
This is the line that hammers out, a single word at a time, every time you open up Alex Camilleri's autobiographical game album Memoir En Code. It strikes me as an odd objective for a creator to imply to their audience. But, as I think about it, I realize that it's hardly strange at all. How much of art appreciation has been dedicated to finding out more about the artist's life?
A lot of it. That's the answer. When we talk about van Gogh we don't only speak of his paintings but also the parts of his personal life that informed them. The man seemed to invite it, too, having painted self-portraits and scenes from the places he lived; his personal life is integral to understanding his art. This is the case with many artists, and not just those who paint either, just think about how many pop songs are about personal breakups and new loves (here's looking at you, Drake).
a snapshot of his past to play around with.
But let's not be romantic about our study of the personal lives of artists. It has snowballed into something much more grim and disturbing these days: celebrity culture. We no longer want to observe or at least guess at an artist's life through their work, we want to see what they're wearing when they leave their house, to stalk them 24/7 so there's no detail outside of their own heads we don't know about.
It's even got to the point that you don't even have to be an artist for people to be interested in what you're up to in your everyday business. People often cite Kim Kardashian as an example of this, having become famous due to a leaked sex tape, and rolled with the attention it has brought since. What's interesting about Kardashian is how she has turned her personal life into a career. It's almost an art in itself, and this is something that can be understood by playing the mobile game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, as you have to constantly keep busy, getting new gigs, staying in the public eye, all in order to pull yourself up the celebrity career ladder.
As Gita Jackson writes about the game on Paste: "The greatest asset for videogames as fiction, one that it holds over other forms of media, is the immediacy with which you can identify with people and experiences that are not your own. While books and movies allow you to observe, videogames really allow you to be someone else. With each little tap on my tablet's screen, I feel like I am closer to experiencing Mrs. Kardashian West's world."
there's a secret message to decode
Going back to Camilleri's game album, the idea that you can get to know him through a videogame he made isn't so bizarre with all this in consideration. It's not like this is the first autobiographical videogame either. Through each of the mini-games inside Memoir En Code, Camilleri gives us a snapshot of his past to play around with. Key to this is learning what the rules in each scene are as they all have their own. In doing that in each scene we come to understand part of what has shaped Camilleri.
One of the mini-games instructs us to press a button to open an umbrella in the rain, but as soon as we do the rain stops. Upon putting the umbrella down again we see that the rain starts up again almost immediately. The rule is that the weather will always contradict your efforts. And in finding this out we get a snippet of Camilleri's experience with the weather in the Netherlands. This is perhaps the simplest of the mini-games in Memoir En Code but the idea stays the same throughout despite the complexity.
This observation is something I've noted before after having played an earlier version of the game and spoke to Camilleri about it. Since then, and this is what makes Memoir En Code more unusual than previous autobiographical games, Camilleri has added a meta layer to the game. It's why that sentence pops up when the game starts.
What that opening message is really saying is that you should play the game a few times in order to unlock all of its secrets. There are eight "pieces" to unlock by playing Memoir En Code, and when you get them all, you can use the decryption tool that comes with the game download called "Memoir De Code." As you might guess there's a secret message to decode that lets you have a "deeper conversation" with Camilleri (he put it in there as testers of the game wanted a "real ending").
It's interesting that he dangles his personal information in front of players like this. In doing so he turns it into a commodity. It's this that gets me drawing parallels to the Kim Kardashian model of celebrityhood and success. The biggest difference being that Camilleri is trading his personal info for player dedication and curiosity rather than straight-up cash. But the idea is fundamentally the same: both artists lay tender their livelihood in order to pull us in and we consume it through media. You could argue that this has always been the case with art but Memoir En Code makes the mechanics of that relationship much more visible, for better or worse.
Pathologic Classic���s new trailer is how videogame trailers should be done
Pathologic Classic HD, the remaster of Ice-Pick Lodge’s classic horror game, is out and along with it, a brand new trailer. It’s exactly what a trailer for a game like this should be: a long, slow montage of people and places, monuments and landscapes recognizable to loyal fans, but foreign to those who have yet to step into its world. It’s ominous, inviting, it shows, but doesn’t tell, it raises more questions than it answers, and most importantly, it makes me want to play.
The HD remaster was announced earlier this month as a separate game from the Pathologic remake that Ice-Pick successfully Kickstarted last year. It’s simply an updated version of the original game, with improved visuals, an entirely new English script, and supposedly better voice acting. People tend to be picky with dubbing so you’ll have to determine that for yourself.
In any case, the point of the remaster was to preserve what made the original Pathologic good, while making everything else more accessible. “This way, the original Pathologic will always be available to you even if you come to disagree with the changes made in the Remake,” writes Ice-Pick. “And if you haven’t played it at all, you’ll have a chance to get to know the game that has defined us as a studio.”
You can buy Pathologic Classic HD from Steam, GOG, and Humble.
Cibele captures all the awkward intimacy of digital love
The fickle, ephemeral love of the online boyfriend.
Hotline Bling is now an actual hotline. Thanks, Justin Bieber
I can’t say that I ever imagined myself as a late-night hotline customer. I can definitely say that I never imagined myself as a late-night Justin Bieber hotline customer. But last Friday night I found myself dialing 231-371-1113 from my bedroom to hear the little terror’s cover of Drake’s “Hotline Bling.”
Call me 231 377 1113 on my cell phone pic.twitter.com/UAGG4ntQNf
— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) October 30, 2015
And I must confess that it’s quite good. Less of a cover or remix than it is a third-party intervention, Bieber’s song recycles Drake’s Casio beat and technological ennui in service of a new story. Whereas Drake’s original song is structured around a central pair—“You used to call me on my cellphone/Late night when you need my love”—Bieber creates a love triangle of sorts: “I know you call him on his cellphone/When you couldn’t reach my love.” Are they talking about the same person? Probably not: Canada isn’t that small. But the strange points of overlap and divergence between these two versions of “Hotline Bling” create a fascinating expanded universe.
To cite another Canadian, the real story here is that “the medium is the message.” Bieber’s cover of “Hotline Bling” is good, sure, but it’s only compelling because you have to call in to hear it. (There are low-quality versions on YouTube, but they are decidedly underwhelming.) “Hotline Bling” is a song about neediness—stupid neediness, the kind of neediness that, less charitably, might be called male entitlement. It is an exhortation to effort. Pick up the phone, dammit! Drake’s version gets at that effort through dance—he’s an entertaining dancer, but not sufficiently natural to make anything seem effortless—but the effort is his whereas he really wants you to exert yourself. Bieber’s hotline more accurately achieves that goal. If you want to hear the song—and you should—you’ll have to do something.
In that respect, Bieber’s remix resembles Charles Seeholzer’s “Insert Customer Feedback Here,” an interactive installation involving a phone that has been reconfigured to occasionally ring and robotically ask you for feedback. The whole experience is a little bit off. The robotic female voice doesn’t fill in the blanks in her script, asking instead about “insert product name here,” but the experience nevertheless rings somewhat true. We have all been there before. That, in effect, is what the “Hotline Bling” hotline does. It’s a familiar transaction that has been automated for artistic purposes. If the transactionalism of it all wasn’t obvious enough, a voice announces Bieber’s upcoming album at the end.
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