Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 208

The Reality Hunger of Davey Wreden

How The Beginner’s Guide expands the lexicon of games.

A note about our reviews policy

In defense of scores. 

Someone figure out this terrifying internet puzzle already so I can sleep at night

It's important to appreciate the spoopiest month of the year by scouring the internet for what it does best: telling you horrifying stories that freak you the fuck out. From creepy pasta to Slender Man, you might as well think of the internet as the ultimate crowd-sourced nightmare fuel. And now we have a new addition to the group: the distressingly cryptic video puzzle sent to Johny from GadgetZZ.com this past week.

Here's what we know so far: a CD-ROM was sent from Poland to the Swedish website with a seemingly meaningless set of numbers hand written on it. After looking at the actual contents of the CD, however, it became clear that those numbers might actually be the key to solving one of the internet's creepiest and toughest mystery challenges to date. The video burned onto the CD depicts a cloaked figure hovering near the shadows of an abandoned building wearing a Pathologic-esque mask used by doctors during the black plague. The figure sends several cryptic messages throughout the video using various methods like morse code, odd body movements, and video distortions. 

the ultimate crowd-sourced nightmare fuel 

While it only took the Internet 13 minutes to solve the decades old mystery of an old woman's coded language, this video is still mystifying amateur sleuths on forums everywhere. Unsurprisingly, the most promising leads are coming out of the Reddit forum (which actually originated a month, ago when the video was first posted to YouTube with the description "Are you listening?").

Several amateur Internet P.I.s have taken to running the video through a spectrogram, which turned up an image declaring that "you are already dead," as well as a number of other disturbing images of women being horribly tortured (NSFW, obviously, though many are speculating that the images come from different horror movies). One person decrypted a set of numbers only to reveal the letters: "REDLIPSLIFETENTH," which is most likely an anagram for "KILL THE PRESIDENT." This particular theory is supported by the fact that other codes translate to the exact coordinates of the White House.

While some jaded sleuths speculate that this exceptionally well-crafted puzzle is little more than a marketing ploy, others claim it is a student project from the original YouTube poster, Parker Wright. Certainly, the puzzle strikes the perfect balance of disturbing yet alluring enough to capture the internet's obsession (at least for a little while.) But more than just razzle dazzle, the videotape found on the 11B-X-1371 CD-ROM seems most convincingly to be part of a well thought out alternate reality game. The feverish hunt on Reddit reads like the perfect game feedback loop: find clue, toil for answer, broadcast answer, vote to top; repeat. Even the pacing of how information is being discovered feels purposefully designed, perhaps hinting at some mastermind who both a) knows how to make a damn good puzzle, and b) loves the shit out of Halloween and scaring the bejesus out of people.

Freefalling in love with Downwell, the tiniest roguelike

Spelunky has a furious little heir apparent in Downwell.

Relive those awkward AIM chats from your youth with this videogame

I often wonder if the internet of today will ever be as ancient a place as the internet of my youth, some 10 or 20 years into the future—if I’ll look back on my Twitter feed, the various chat programs I use with my friends, and get the same pang of nostalgia I do now from hearing Windows XP boot up and the creaking door of a friend signing-on to AIM.

Given the nature of the internet today, I doubt it. Things are so permanent now. Data is sorted so neatly, documented so conveniently. I can copy and paste a URL and within seconds see what a website looked like a decade ago. People, places, and things are mere clicks away. Experiences are saved, stored, archived for later. Few things are as fleeting and long-lost as those late-night chats with internet friends on AIM and MSN Messenger. Emily is Away knows this, and captures it so bittersweetly.

all the awkwardness, tension, sadness, and hope of a doomed friendship 

Emily is Away is more than just an AIM simulator for nostalgia’s sake, though. It’s also an exploration of a friendship carried on mostly through instant messages, between two people who would’ve otherwise grown apart if not for this thing we call the internet. Your connection with Emily, or emerly35, is painful to watch and probably achingly familiar to anyone who has experienced growing distant with someone in this way, whether or not romance was involved.

To watch your lively conversations crumble over the years into awkward interrogations about relationships, to confusing rants and accusations, and finally, those terse, one-line responses that put the responsibility of saying goodbye all on you—it’s too real.

For anyone who did use AIM back in the day, the nostalgic element is there, but it comes naturally in the look, feel, and sound of the game. Nothing is forced. For those who can say they spent their teen years on AIM, the memories manifest more deeply too: from light-hearted things like reading away messages and setting your text and background color, to deeply and perhaps harmfully over-analyzing the lyrics in a friend’s profile, searching for a sign to explain the sudden tension between you two.

Emily is Away doesn’t try to sell itself solely on the nostalgia aspect, which is good. The real strength is how it captures all the awkwardness, tension, sadness, and hope of a doomed friendship in such short bursts of text spoken through an outdated, but dear, piece of software.

Pay what you want for Emily is Away on itch.io.

The IRL Dogmeat is nobly keeping Bethesda sane before the release of Fallout 4

Meet the real life Dogmeat from Fallout 4, who brings joy to even the bleakest post-apocalypse

Skeleton flower's mystery plays out in an obsolete 1990s operating system

The bit of you left behind in your desktop.

Electric Highways explores the eerie loneliness of virtual worlds

One thing that made cult RPG Maker horror game Yume Nikki really good was its sense of place. Whether defined by its music, color scheme, level design, or its strange lurking occupants, each location in the game world was so distinct in its own way.

That’s something that I think Zykov Eddy, creator of the Yume Nikki 3D fangame, really gets, and I’m even more convinced after playing his latest project, Electric Highways.

The ten levels of Electric Highways are set in a weird virtual reality world that’s being tested one last time by its creator before being sent out to the web. Each level is so visually different from the last that I had nowhere to place my expectations.

Electric Highways is actually a pretty scary game 

Like Yume Nikki or even LSD: Dream Emulator, transitioning into the next world was an exciting, albeit daunting experience. I say “daunting,” because if there’s one thing the worlds of Electric Highways have in common, it’s this unrelenting feeling of loneliness, permeating every shady corner and bright precipice of its uncanny otherworlds with an unshakable power.

Electric Highways taps into that same anxious isolation felt in the long-abandoned virtual worlds of the real web, the forgotten servers of Worlds.com and Second Life, but without the silly quirks. Electric Highways is actually a pretty scary game.

Even when it drops you into a vibrant new zone full of futuristic monuments and bright lights, pumping (pretty good) electronic music through your speakers, the fact that you were just seconds ago wandering through a dank sewer system, or floating on a multidimensional plane poked with hundreds of holes, does a lot to remove any feeling of comfort or trust in your environment.

Add to that the fact that I swear there was a ghost with a rotted face following me the whole time and… yeah… just in time for Halloween, I guess!

You can download Electric Highways for free on Windows. Find it on itch.io.

From Candy Crush to Virtual Reality

Why Tommy Palm thinks casual games will thrive in VR.  

Steve Reich is being phased onto the Game Boy

Steve Reich composes music for humans, and good music at that. You could, however, be forgiven for thinking that there is something mechanical to his work. Phasing, the technique most commonly associated with Reich, involves the same sequence being played at gradually—and slightly—divergent speeds. You can best imagine it as two tape machines that have fallen out of sync and, by the end of a composition, have found each other once again. 

In that vein, here is Reich’s Piano Phase as performed on two Game Boy Micros by chiptunes artist Pselodux:

the underlying pursuit is human. 

This is, on the one hand, a profoundly mechanical affair. Since Reich’s compositions are built on very simple sequences, they lend themselves to this sort of technological reinterpretation. Who needs a piano when you can fit the whole phase on a music box’s embossed metal drum? Heck, you could probably fit it on there twice. In that respect, the Game Boy rendition of Piano Phase, like the app for Reich’s Clapping Music, gets at the mechanical nature of the underlying composition. 

Piano Phase and Pselodux’ interpretation of it is, nevertheless, a profoundly human endeavor. Orchestra’s are often likened to finely tuned machines, but Reich’s work takes that torturous metaphor to its logical conclusion. Pieces like Drumming and Piano Phase are often performed without conductors or set lengths as the musicians, in an act of impressive synchronicity, all move to the next phase in unison. If the coordination required to perform at the highest level is mechanical, the underlying pursuit is human. The same holds true of Pselodux’ work here, which uses technology as a canvas for human obsessions. His version of Piano Phase may stand out because of its unique, digital instrumentation, but that fact should not erase the human pressing the buttons.