Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 225

When everyday life is a performance

This Is My Costume explores life with a non-binary gender identity and its parallels with performative attire. It's a short point-and-click adventure that was made by game design team Pride Interactive for a recent Ludum Dare, in which the theme was "You Are The Monster."

It begins with the protagonist, Finch, getting dressed—first by putting on a binder, then a t-shirt that reads “this is my costume,” and some cat ears. Later, during a short walk around a party, the character is shown relating more to an abandoned balloon in the corner than the other party-goers, longing to be elsewhere.

Once they return to their room their friend Fletcher arrives. The two have a brief conversation about what it’s like for Finch to be out to their brother. Fletcher then promises to stand by Finch’s side when they come out to their parents. The point of the game should then become clear.

a serious point in a comedic package. 

It sets out to redefine what it means to be in costume. Finch has to wear one everyday but it's not the kind you rent from a shop. It's a mask over their identity, necessary as they cannot predict how people will react to their true self, and fearing the worst.

The game is a short, quick, quirky play with multiple outside references (hi, Frankie and genderbent Luigi!) that manages to make a serious point in a comedic package.

You can download This Is My Costume for free on its Ludum Dare page.

Nioh, or the difficulty of making a videogame that honors Akira Kurosawa

Can Nioh succeed where Seven Samurai 20XX failed?

Forget Donald. The Contender stages your own, better presidential debate

The Contender is a tabletop game that combines the rhetoric of political campaigns and the mechanics of Cards Against Humanity, all of which raises a thorny interpretive question: Would tonight’s second Republican presidential debate be improved if it were replaced by a televised game of The Contender?

To answer this question, let us consider the rules of each debate. CNN’s primetime debate and the straggler’s undercard that precede it surely have rules, which probably involve speaking times and not interrupting others. If history is any indicator, those rules will probably be ignored by at least one of the candidates, and few—if any—repercussions will be meted out. (Just ask Megyn Kelly how that system works.)

we’re going to be doing this for a good, long time 

The Contender, on the other hand, has a certain amount of flexibility built into its design. In the game’s Kickstarter video, its developers explain that they are curious to see how its rules will be bent and toyed with. This seems preferable to the faux naiveté of network news anchors. Anyhow, should you really care about the rules, here’s how The Contender works: One player assumes the role of the moderator and selects a topic card from a central deck. The other players formulate answers using the fact and arguments in their hands. The players’ cards are based on great moments in previous campaigns. The moderator decides which player has the best answer to, and that player assumes the role of moderator for the next round. The Contender is simultaneously more structured and more flexible than a presidential debate. It’s the best of both worlds!

The game ends…at some point…surely it must? This appears to be an accurate description of both The Contender and America’s endless campaign seasons, but I can only speak with any certainty to the former. Look, we’re going to be doing this for a good, long time—well, at least for a long time—so you might as well settle in. And while you’re settling in, you might as well have some fun. At this point, most citizens are resigned to their debates amounting to little more than talking point competitions, but The Contender’s mechanics helpfully reveal just how mechanical these events are. Thus, in one of this election season’s great many ironies, tonight’s CNN debate might well be improved if it were replaced by a game that seeks to mock this very event. 

Find out more about The Contender on its website.

Rememoried is a beguiling take on videogame dreams

Few games tackle dreams with the grace of Rememoried.

The Japanese ghost stories that give What Remains of Edith Finch its eeriness

What Remains of Edith Finch is rooted in Japanese horror as much as it is Lovecraftian. That’s why Giant Sparrow, the team behind the game, is pretty happy with its localized title over in Japan: ��������������������������������������������������� or, translated back to English, What Happened at the Strange Estate of the Finch Family.

The long name calls to mind some of Lovecraft’s own eerie tales, like A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson or the even longer Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family.

Giant Sparrow also shared a message on the game’s Japanese site, which you can read in English on their blog. It details some of the specific Japanese works that were influential in the making of Edith Finch, including Ugetsu Monogatari and Kwaidan, both collections of ghost stories that were later adapted into film. Also listed are two additional movies, The Woman in the Dunes and Kuroneko, and Junji Ito’s horror manga series Uzumaki.

It's surprising how strongly Edith Finch's existing Japanese horror vibes are highlighted in its recent Japanese trailer, especially in its use of flashback and the sickly grey green hue saturating everything.

mysterious, unsettling and strange 

“Our game is a collection of tales that are meant to feel mysterious, unsettling and strange, which is a feeling Japanese artists seem to capture really well,” writes Giant Sparrow. “Hopefully our game feels like nothing you’ve ever played before but if any of it starts to seem a little familiar, and maybe even a bit Japanese, don’t be too surprised!”

Learn more about What Remains of Edith Finch on its website.

The Literary Heritage of Sunless Sea

Or: why all those poor captains had to die.

Thief of Bagdad meets zoological lithographs in this bizarre shoot 'em up

Arabian flights.

The rhythm game genre is about to get a whole lot darker

You were lured in by the sight of a skeleton astronaut, weren't you? Or is that just me? The idea of an astronaut left to rot in space grips me as one of the horrors of the future. At the moment, as far as public records show, there are no dead people floating around in space. But we have to suppose that one day there will be. There'll be an accident and, for whatever reason, a body will be left to drift off into the void, unrecoverable. 

what makes a human a human 

Laserlife is an upcoming videogame that follows this line of thinking and will have us exploring the memories of one such departed astronaut. It's a dramatic change of setting, tone, and theme for the studio making it. Choice Provisions, formerly known as Gaijin Games, is perhaps best known for its BIT.TRIP Runner series of doolally rhythm games. In those, you followed sturdy jogger Commander Video as he streaked rainbows across animated worlds, jumping and kicking to the beat.

Here, with Laserlife, that cheery exposition of goofy road signs and grinning hilltops is traded for a darker philosophical musing among the dead of space. This sudden change of direction is led by Choice Provision's founding pair, Alex Neuse and Mike Roush, who say they are "fascinated by what makes a human a human." They hope that the game will have us ask questions even if it can't answer them: "What makes us whole, and are we simply the sum of our accomplishments, or are we more?" It's an unexpected turn for the studio to take but it at least falls in line with a longer tradition of sci-fi that has led an examination of the human condition, from Philip K. Dick to Interstellar. 

What Choice Provisions hasn't abandoned is the treasured rhythm game format. Laserlife begins as a future intelligence discovers the dead astronaut and sends in its technology to extract the remaining memory fragments. All this means is that you'll be guiding two lasers through tunnels to hit floating shapes (the memory fragments) along to the beat of the music. It's meant to be a lot less testing than the studio's previous entries in the genre but the challenge can be tweaked to your preference.

The entire trip is referred to as an "interactive biography" as you discover how this astronaut met their end and why they're alone. You steadily piece together key moments from their life including, as the trailer shows, the fateful rocket trip and a happier scene back on Earth playing with a pet dog. There will also be symbolism to pick apart as it passes you by in the musical tunnels that Choice Provisions hopes will touch on those grander themes of what it means to be a human.

Laserlife is meant to be played in one setting so it may be worth doing so when it arrives for PlayStation 4 and PC on September 22nd.

Everybody hates you (in Dropsy the Clown)

The trials and tribulations of a repulsive sweaty boneless clown-thing.

An upcoming videogame takes a heartfelt look at depression in Tokyo

We expect our surgeons to have steady hands. Some of the time, our lives depend on it. But what happens when that steadiness deserts a surgeon? Like a golfer with the yips, one crisis leads to the next, spreading outwards to affect the surgeon’s professional life and his emotional state. Suddenly, the steadiness in question is both literal and figurative. The ground is trembling beneath their feet and nothing calms it down. How can our surgeon ever be made whole again?

Healing Process, a game by developer Sam L. Jones, tells the story of a surgeon who needs to be made whole again. Not too long ago, he was leading the perfect life. He was a surgeon, and a successful one at that. He had met a lovely woman at college and they were eventually betrothed. They moved back to her native Japan, and everything was going swimmingly. At least until it wasn’t. Now our surgeon needs help.

That’s the logic of surgery, isn’t it? Humans need the occasional interventions to keep everything functioning properly. That doesn’t mean that the human body is not miraculous. Rather, the miracle is that the surgical intervention is not required on a daily basis. As Healing Process’ surgeon descends further and further into a spiralling depression, he would surely agree that just making it through the day is one of life’s biggest miracles.

Surviving the day is life's biggest miracle 

Now, in one of life’s strange turns of fate, you are the one who has to get the surgeon through the day. Everything has been going wrong for him, and at some point in the next 24 hours he will have to perform one final surgery. If he doesn’t get it just right, it’s fair to imagine that his career will be over. And so Healing Process calls upon you to guide our struggling surgeon through a series of experiences that are supposed to help him piece his life back together. At any point during the day, you can declare him ready for the surgery and see how it goes, but you only get one chance. There are no mulligans in surgery so choose wisely.

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Healing Process is a multilayered story about the work—both physical and emotional—required to piece a human life back together. Some of us choose to assume this responsibility. Some of us feel that this is not our place. But the responsibility of preserving life cannot be divided along such neat lines. Sometimes life and duty compels us to help those we care about, even if it’s just in a game. Conversely, doctors who have devoted their lives to saving others sometimes need more help than they can dole out. So it goes. Everyone needs to be made whole, and there is only so much capacity to help that can go around. 

You can support Healing Process: Tokyo on Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight.