Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 222

On the Other Hand

Twenty-five years after Jim Henson’s death, a glimpse of the man who kept his most iconic puppet singing: Steve Whitmire.

Go beyond the music visualizer in today's Playlist pick

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Panoramical (PC, Mac) 
BY FERNANDO RAMALLO & DAVID KANAGA

Forget the "music visualizer" that has been spinning webs of geometry on your PC since the '90s. Panoramical finally makes it as outdated as dial-up internet or the word "gnarly." It's not a fleeting distraction for your boredom but an aperture into ethereal places. Here, music is transformed into bucolic alien worlds that billow into absorbing synesthesia. You can tweak the timbre, tempo, and volume and see hues warp, trees and mountains arise, clouds whiz by and moons arc. You interact as if with a god's hands and can dwell in the beauty of your creations for as long as you wish. And you will want to, as Panoramical lends itself almost effortlessly to feelings of transcendence through audiovisual majesty. It is no wonder that it evokes on such a great level, either. Not when it is driven by the musical talent behind Proteus and Dyad with Fernando Ramallo's soft, low-poly distillations of nature.

Perfect for: Vjays, daydreamers, electronic musicians

Playtime: An endless hour

In Bloodsport, you can run but you can't hide

In this prequel to Badblood, you are not playing a game. You are the game.

Surprise! Simogo's new "quiet" videogame isn't what you'd expect

SPL-T isn't what you'd expect from Simogo. Sure, the studio has certainly delved into puzzles before. You could even say puzzles are a staple of Simogo's house style as some of its best games included particularly memorable ones: Beat Sneak Bandit, DEVICE 6, and Year Walk especially. But the Swedish pair have never made a "pure puzzle game." This is how Simon Flesser (the "Sim" in Simogo) describes SPL-T. "'It's just you and the game' was a phrase we kept coming back to, and we didn't want to compromise on that ever," he tells me.

"We wanted a quiet game" 

To this end, everything about SPL-T is austere, stripped back, minimal. You can see this in the monochrome graphics (which, it turns out, aren't entirely black-and-white). You can hear it in the sounds, which consist entirely of the same short square sample tweaked to different pitches. And as to the challenge, you only have to continuously tap the screen to split it into increasingly smaller boxes. You score points for each split as well as having four equal-sized boxes adjacent to each other that will, eventually, explode and restore blank space. You lose when there are no more splits possible.

There's none of what you might recognize as Simogo's flair here. Perhaps you've seen it in the forgotten islands of The Sailor's Dream or the dark phantasmal woods of Year Walk. SPL-T, on the other hand, only has a little dancing character at the top of the screen that demonstrates with its arms whether the next split you make will be horizontal or vertical. Where are those scrolling Simogo landscapes for which we yearn? But then Flesser said something that inserted SPL-T into the spectrum of Simogo's vogue. "We wanted a quiet game, a game that only had its gameplay to offer," he told me. "No rewards, no telling you to share your score, no unlocks or messages that would pop up and distract you."  

Yes, SPL-T is a quiet game. It doesn't have the impatient faces of popular mobile puzzler Threes!, for example, which nag at you for being idle. It doesn't even have leaderboards, online or otherwise—Flesser argues that without them SPL-T "is more social, as it invites conversation and leads to discussions on how to master the game and build strategies." This omission is part of trying to challenge typical conceptions of what videogames must have. Similarly, Flesser says that SPL-T, the whole game at large, is Simogo eschewing expectations, and instead making what its creative pair wanted to. 

You may have also noticed that Simogo has released SPL-T rather suddenly and without warning. For their previous games, the pair has specialized in drawn-out teases, showing fragments of images and written lines pulled from the game. But SPL-T is an experiment in mixing everything up. And so it seemed only fitting to launch SPL-T with no teasing at all. "Our hope is that people will be pleasantly surprised that they can check it out immediately," Flesser said. And so you can.

SPL-T is available to purchase on the App Store right now.

PC modder culture reaches new heights

Gone are the dull gray boxes of old. Today, players mod their PCs with all sorts of forms, themes, and tech.

The Walls Have Ears is security theatre with a side of voyeurism

The Walls Have Ears is security theatre, but what isn’t? Body scanners at airports, metal detectors at sports stadia, fancy uniforms that imply nonexistent authority—it’s all a big show.

The Walls Have Ears is about that show, but you’re a performer. More accurately, you’re a desk jockey at an unnamed intelligence agency listening to intercepted communications. The files are arrayed on your screen like flashcards: enigma, DEFCON, rail gun, military intelligence, top secret. You sit and listen to the messages. Hopefully there’s something incriminating in each one, something you can use to flag the interlocutor for further surveillance. You must really hope that because you make your living flagging people for even more invasive forms of surveillance. The show must go on. But don’t flag any rich people for the no-fly list; as with any theatrical performance, the donors get all the perks.

The work performed in The Walls Have Ears more closely resembles the menial labor of online content moderators than that of security analysts. It’s boring and draining and the game is correct in noting that all office work is really about drinking coffee. Something needs to sustain you as you listen to all the sweet—and dull—nothings the citizenry has said.

year after year of this crap and you’d start hunting for humanity too. 

The predicament of The Walls Have Ears’ protagonist bears a striking resemblance to that of Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), the protagonist in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others. The work is cold and inhumane and it is this coldness that drives him to empathize with the little bits of people’s lives to which he is exposed. Playing The Walls Have Ears, you start to understand how this could happen. Voyeurism is fun for five minutes, maybe even ten. But year after year after year of this crap and you’d start hunting for humanity too.

That said, The Walls Have Ears hews even more closely to the arc of British historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash’s fabulous memoir, The File. As a graduate student, Garton Ash spent time in East Germany, where he, like everyone else, was subjected to the sort of surveillance dramatized in The Lives of Others and, to a lesser extent, The Walls Have Ears. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he returned to Germany and compared the Stasi’s file on his activities against his diaries from the time. Were the spies’ assessments correct? Had he been missing signs all along?

The Walls Have Ears strip human interactions of all sorts of context and then ask you to pass judgment on them. This obviously has chilling effects, but it also gives you a strange window into the world of strangers. Your perspective on their lives most definitely differs from theirs. One can hope that the surveillance state's rotten edifice will be torn down, but even if these fictional individuals were to get their files it’s doubtful they’d say the show had been worth it. 

You can play The Walls Have Ears for free in your browser.

The Seven Hour City

Half-Life 2’s City 17 remains a masterclass of subversive game design.

The Long Dark's latest update makes surviving in the wilderness more like home

It’s the little things that I value most in survival games—those small, but important details in the environment that let me make reasonable predictions based on my surroundings, or the ability to place items in the world so that I can actually feel settled in my makeshift home.

The Long Dark, a first-person survival sim from Hinterland, is as committed to building out these minute aspects as much as they are the larger, more complex systems that make The Long Dark great. A new update from the team, called Desolation Point, gives equal priority to both, bringing a ton of changes and new elements to The Long Dark that really prove why it’s one of my favorite survival games currently in development.

Those two things I mentioned above are both included in the update: specifically, a new item placement ability and a more fully developed weather system. The weather system smooths out transitions between weather states and generates more practical hints as to what’s coming next, allowing the perceptive to pick up on patterns and better prepare for things like blizzards or even some of its newer weather states, like fog. Weather patterns can be region-specific too, so knowing what to look out for isn’t a uniform challenge.

There’s more to this update than some audio/visual polish 

Item placement might seem like a purely cosmetic demand, but for me, it really does lend to that so-called sense of “immersion” these experiences try to create. Being able to arrange some of my excess equipment up on the shelf in that ice shanty I’ve been camping in rather than dumping it all on the floor can make my temporary stay feel a lot more like it’s part of my own unique journey. Since survival sims can often feature long stretches of tedium—tense, yet routine—it’s an important feeling to strive for.

Desolation Point’s smallest details include things like the addition of gear sounds, which change the noise your movements make based on what material you’re wearing, or what sort of equipment you have strapped on you. Improved wind sounds also alter certain weather sound effects based on things like location, temperature, altitude, and what time of day it is.

There’s more to this update than some audio/visual polish, though. Desolation Point is also the name of the update’s newest location, an icy industrial zone located farther up the Coastal Highway, just beyond a burned down forest and a run-down mine. The focal point of this new region is a whaling station, a large metallic warehouse meant to add some variance to The Long Dark’s largely wilderness-based settings.

You can read more about the changes and additions to The Long Dark, including things like its new metal forging system, on its Steam page.

The powerless reality of Everybody���s Gone to the Rapture

An inability to interact with the world of Rapture forces players to pay attention.

Ustwo will once again shift your perspective in its upcoming VR title Land's End

Only instead of looking, you'll be touching.