Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 219

Kung fu epic The Assassin is impossibly, breathtakingly, stupidly gorgeous

Hou Hsiao-Hsien has been working for a long time (he's 68), but The Assassin has more verve than stuff from directors half his age. It's an insanely vivid, pared-down wuxia fable that unsurprisingly won him Best Director at Cannes. From the first scenes, rendered a sumptuous inkblot black-and-white that makes the rest of the film’s color pop even more, this is thrilling, fresh stuff.

Hou, along with DP Mark Lee Ping Bin (In the Mood for Love), twists well-loved martial arts tropes into entirely unfamiliar forms. You have acrobatic swordfights, stoic killers, unflinching masters, and old, wizened magicians presented in stark, flat terms. It’s all pitched at the same level, a sort of matter-of-fact magical realism, and it works wonders.

But, again, let’s not bury the lede: this thing is gorgeous. The background of the frame is blown into creamy dabs of light glittering behind the characters; shots are layered, dense with detail like red strands of silk draping from the ceiling; close-ups are few and far between, making them feel like climaxes in themselves; soft wind is ever-present, always blowing through curtained windows and open doors.

Hou carefully stitches the fight scenes together 

The handful of fights (be warned, I guess, that this is not a fight-heavy movie) erupt with abrupt violence, thrusting their way into the narrative, with no warning. We’ll cut in in the midst of things, the combatants nearly done, or we’re watching from across a river as a lone fighter cuts down ranks of men amid flickering torchlight. Hou carefully stitches the fight scenes together, often cutting a wind-up and a hit into one nearly-seamless take. The result has the grace of dance and the physical abandon of slapstick.

The plot is skeletal; merely a scaffold for Hou and his collaborators to hang an unbelievably lush film. Their craft brings a world of formal, rigid custom to expressive, electric life.

The Taken King is the weird, wandering sci-fi shooter Destiny dreamed of becoming

With The Taken King, Destiny remembers the power of narrative.

Disclosure and the problem of internet-sourced ���90s nostalgia

The faceless faces behind ‘90s nostalgia.

You'll be laughing all the way to hell in this Arcane Kids racing game

Arcane Kids, most recently known for Sonic Dreams Collection, already have some practice at turning your childhood memories into nightmare fuel. After tackling everything from Pokémon to the beloved hedgehog, they've now moved on to destroy/infinitely enhance classic racing games in their Fantastic Arcade entry entitled CRAP! No On Loves Me.

a glitch and and a nostalgic guilt trip 

Described by its creators as "a daily affirmation," the game continues the Arcane Kids' unique brand. Which is to say it delivers an experience somewhere between a glitch and and a nostalgic guilt trip. Presumably named after that realization you had at the age of ten in your mom's basement when you deployed a speed boost directly into your friend's face before crossing the finish line first, CRAP! No On Loves Me captures both the nostalgia and underlying anxiety of playing videogames. As a call back to the age of SSX 3 type racers, the game is fueled by rambunctious moves and a VHS-inspired art style. Granted, since your vehicle in CRAP! No On Loves Me is—in fact—a coffin, the aerodynamics are not that optimized. But the airtime, and consequent wipe outs of your coffin bobsledding prove to be just as radical as the best and brightest from early 2000s racers.

But while you'll mostly be focusing on getting sweet air and making sick high jumps, the world of CRAP! No On Loves Me is a more insiduous one altogether. You inhabit the land of the dead, but unlike Grim Fandango, there's no punchline to really distance you from the inevitability of your mortality. At most, you interact with things by smashing your body into them and watching your skeleton fly, limp, across the track. In fact, the only way to get to these deathly races in the first place is to smash through a window and rag doll physics your corpse into a poisonous dumpster.

In the underworld, you ride all the way from "Purgatory Etc" to "Millennial Road" and, at the end of every race, you must aim your bobsledding coffin directly in a floating cellphone screen in order to pass on to the next stage. If you miss the screen by even an inch, it's death—your bones scattered across the pavement once again. Each world's aesthetic becomes increasingly hellish, too, with the finale featuring a massive figure one can only assume is "the Baroness" that the game description mentions. Will she "take pity on your lonely no-followers having soul, or will she grind your bones into dust?" the Arcane Kids ask. "Is there a difference? Is there such a thing as relief?"

No, there is not. Not in this world, at least because I have yet to even mention the hellish difficulty of CRAP! No On Loves Me. I spent more time than I should have trying to beat this game and, just like when I did the same thing as a young child, I felt my youth actively slipping away from me as I did it. Yet I felt compelled to keep trying anyway, the Baroness calling me onward to her twisted death grip, as I wept and apologized for my pathetic soul.

Despite the fact that I can barely play this game and had to look up how to even get past the opening screen, it speaks to me. What do they say is our only certainty? Death and taxes. But when it comes to the Arcane Kids, our only certainties are death and disturbance. But, as always, its a good kind of disturbing. Like, the kind of disturbing that touches you in places you should probably refrain from discussing in public.

You can journey through hell yourself by buying the Humble Bundle for Fantastic Arcade.

A love letter to Persona 4, and the hellish servitude of its protagonists

Hey, look, a game you can play on the Vita.

Join us for good times tonight at the Ace Hotel

Kill Screen takes over the Ace Hotel. 

Ride through a snapshot of Italy in the wake of its 1970s social revolution

More than just an escape, the quintessential road trip both captures and distills a moment in time. The car's make, model, and condition—all of it tells the story of not only an era, but its owner and the life that brought them to this long stretch of pavement. Maybe you're riding a VW Camper full of ash stains and pilling carpets. Or, it could be a Ford Sierra, still carrying the faint scent of your mom's perfume. Perhaps your road trip vehicle is actually more like a getaway car: a beautiful, vintage Mercedes that's one rich girl's ticket out of her messed up family.

Wheels of Aurelia, a beta featured in the first wave line-up for the Fantastic Arcade happening now in Austin Texas, puts the player in the driver's seat of a girl named Lella's road trip. As she and her friend Olga run from their obligations, their conversations highlight the social changes taking place in Italy during the early seventies. As the girls make their way through Via Aurelia, a famous stretch of Italian coast on their way to cross the border into France, you feel as though they're not only saying goodbye to the more stifled life they knew before, but also welcoming an era of post-war second wave feminism where women demanded more from life. 

mod-ish, 70s, post-Breakfast at Tiffany's banter 

Since Wheels of Aurelia is half a racing game, half an interactive fiction, it gives the player with different literal and narrative paths which lead them to different endings. By combining the starkly different genre of games, creators Santa Ragione (the same team behind FOTONICA) created something entirely different as a whole—though not always a better game for it. Having to pick dialogue choices during races and chases results in a type of gameplay I would be describe as a texting-while-driving simulator. As you try to juggle both, you can never fully commit to one, rendering your road trip more frantic than monotonously relaxing like it's supposed to be.

But what the game lacks in mechanics it more than makes up for as an interactive fiction filled to the brim with mod-ish, 70s, post-Breakfast at Tiffany's banter. The two main characters, Lella and Olga, have the option to pick up a plethora of hitchhiking characters along the way, including a priest and an over-eager street car racer. At the core of our story are the two girls and their burgeoning relationship to each other and the rest of the world as it evolves. 

Wheels of Aurelia can be downloaded as part of the Fantastic Arcade Humble Bundle on Mac and PC. Or, if you're in Austin, be sure to check it out in the flesh. Finally, be sure to vote for the game of Steam Greenlight.

You're one step closer to actually touching Lumino City

The narrative arc of history bends towards our being able to reach through a screen and actually touch Lumino City. Everything between now and then is just a stopgap measure. 

Meet the latest stopgap, Lumino City for iPad and iPhone:

You may have noticed that it looks just like Lumino City, as well it should. The buildings are all still made out of paper and delicately pieced together. The scenes have still been filmed with a shallow depth of field, giving everything a toy-like quality. This world is still full of puzzles that the game’s animated lead must traverse. The only difference is that she now follows your touch instead of your clicks.

Lumino City has always been billed as something of a tactile game, which is both fair and a little bit silly. On the one hand, the fact that the game is based on a physical model does give it a more lived-in feel. But it exists behind your screen. Click or tap, it is still behind glass. It’s not really a tactile game in the sense that you can’t touch anything and—at least in a purely physical sense—you can’t feel anything either. Lumino City does something interesting with that tension, drawing you closer and closer to the screen but never letting you slip through the glass threshold.

Never slip through the glass threshold 

All of which is to say that if the narrative arc of history bends towards our being able to reach through a screen and actually touch Lumino City, maybe history’s headed in the wrong direction. Don’t get me wrong, I’d kill to play with the original models for Lumino City, but I’m not sure that experience would actually make for a more interesting game. In that spirit, the iOS compromise may be the best of both worlds, putting your hands to good use while maintaining a measure of intermediation. 

Virtual reality needs more people like Justin Roiland

“I want to create amazing, beautiful environments to explore.”

Fire Dance With Me turns Twin Peaks into an everlasting jive

Of the many peculiar clues that the dwarf in the Black Lodge gives Agent Cooper throughout Twin Peaks, dancing is one of them. Not just any dance, an awkward 1940s-style jazz step with a machine-like sway and disjointed rhythm, all of it operating from the elbows and shoulders as if his arms had minds of their own.

Due to being given this clue at the beginning of the series, every time someone started dancing in the show, we sucked in air and wondered if that scene would tell us something more about the murder of Laura Palmer. This is what director David Lynch probably wanted. We examined those dancing scenes with intense stares as they told us more about the character the camera intimately focused on.

someone has made a Twin Peaks videogame that is all about dancing. 

Anyone who has sat through the first series of Twin Peaks will know that Leland Palmer is the dancer to keep an eye on. After losing his daughter he constantly shuffles between fits of depressed weeping and absurd grasps at happiness by getting someone, anyone, to dance with him. No one usually wants to dance with a crying man and it breaks his heart every time. Through his dancing he projects his inner feelings and creates his own physical metaphor for the abandon he feels.

But he's not the only one who dances. Perhaps even more odd is Audrey Horne's lone dance in the middle of a café. She throws her head back as if making love with the music, only moving on the spot, letting her arms out to the sides on occasion as if pretending to fly or to move her hand through silk. She normally has the ditzy gait of a schoolgirl or, if she's spying on someone, a more careful tip-toe approach. But when she dances in this scene she seems possessed (which is surely not an accident) and completely lost in her own little world. She's haunted enough, it would seem, to at least break the social conventions that may stop any of us suddenly getting up in a public place and dancing by ourselves—we won't even dance alone at a club.

Anyway, all of this is to say that dancing is important in Twin Peaks—more than it is in most other TV shows—mostly as it is a way to spotlight certain characters and let them express their feelings without resorting to less interesting verbiage. So it's appropriate, and somewhat amusing, that someone has made a Twin Peaks videogame that is all about dancing. It's ingeniously called Fire Dance With Me (a riff on the show's oft-repeated line "Fire walk with me").

It has you matching arrows to make either Agent Cooper or Audrey Horne dance. It's two player so you have to be one of them as they dance off against each other. Leland is also there, dancing miserable by himself in the center of the Black Lodge. Audrey does her weird ghost-dance, and Cooper—who isn't really the dancing type, so providing some comedy here—resorts to a chipper jig with his beloved coffee.

You can download Fire Dance With Me for free or play it in your browser over on itch.io.