Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 242

The King's Bird looks like one of the most graceful platformers yet

The feeling of movement is arguably the most important thing in a platformer. Super Meat Boy’s outrageous complexity might not be as engaging if its hero weren’t so smoothly controlled, and Thomas Was Alone was granted mounds more character by the sheer perfection of its jump button alone.

"a strong focus on the beauty of movement and nature" 

That said, there aren’t enough side-scrollers that can set aside the traditional puzzling or platforming associated with the structure and just focus on making the movement itself at the core of the experience. If its new trailer is anything to go off of, then The King’s Bird (a self-described “air parkour” game) seeks to do exactly that.

Vast stretches of levels in The King’s Bird look specifically designed to glide over and under in one graceful, wind-swept swoop. Whether through mossy jungles, dusk-reddened forests, or deep valleys carpeted in thorny underbrush, the movement of both running and flying looks fluid and fun.

According to its website, The King’s Bird is driven by "a strong focus on the beauty of movement and nature,” and aims to deliver precision-based platforming rooted in accessibility. Besides a few story bits hinting at a land full of “mystical birds” and ruled by a “dictatorial king,” there isn’t much else known about The King’s Bird. But what we can see is enough to keep us enticed.

The King’s Bird is planned for PC and Mac and will be playable at PAX Prime 2015. Keep up with it on its website.

Long Way Home: ���Dragon Age 2��� on Immigration & Identity

Facing the harsh realities of a refugee's journey through high fantasy.

The year of Luigi came and went, leaving behind a husk of a man

The world is weightless, a black abyss we disguise behind shades of blue and brick. But when the paint washes off, you see this strange land for what it is: a place without death because no actual life inhabits it, a blackhole without meaning beyond the veneer we coat it in. You go right, not out of any real desire to, but because turning left would only get you further away from the end, where the promise of nothingness awaits. You take a drag from the cigarette clutched between your fingertips. It hisses, a sound too real for an otherwise unending melody of artificiality. "Another castle," you say to yourself, exhaling smoke, relishing the burn. "Always another castle."

You were never the hero of this story, but that doesn't matter anymore. It used to irk you, watching your undeserving brother bask in a glory you knew in your heart meant nothing. Now, you wish to be him in a different way. You wish the facade was enough. Wish you could even feign the happiness that comes so naturally to him. You wish you could ignore the unbearable listlessness of existence, if only long enough to give a single jubilant jump. "Woo-Hoo!" you try, but the exclamation catches in your throat, coming out in a growl. Your head collides with a brick wall that crumbles into disintegrated ash. "It's-a-me," you mutter, slumped on the ground, "depression."

having read a bit too much Nietzsche 

Ennuigi is a sadness simulator/interactive expose on the bleaker side of the Mushroom Kingdom. Seemingly having read a bit too much Nietzsche, Luigi finds himself in a funk. Instead of his usual confident stride, he glances in the direction the player tells him to move begrudingly, before finally taking a laconic step toward it, dragging his feet. Creator Josh Millard has forgone the jump and crouch buttons, opting instead for buttons to chain smoke and ruminate on "ontology, ethics, family, identity, and the mistakes he and his brother have made." Born out of Millard's unanswered theoretical questions regarding Nintendo's beloved Super Mario Bros. universe, Ennuigi is a game that wonders "who are these strange men?  What motivates them? By what right do they wreak the havoc they do on this strange place? What do they feel about where they are and what they're doing?"

You kind of half expect Luigi to start calling people "good old [insert Nintendo character here]" or accuse them of all being phonies. But Ennuigi's inner monologue sounds more like a mid-life crisis than the hormonal rant of a dissatisfied teen in a J.D. Salinger novel. Looking back on his life's work, Luigi questions the purpose behind their quest, and hidden evil in their careless actions. And for what? To save a princess? Fight the bad guy? Get the glory? It all seems so trite, so superficial in the grand scheme of things.

This version of the Mushroom Kingdom appears only half finished, the occasional green hill or decaying brick castle interspersed between utter darkness. The chipper melody that scored so many of our childhood memories is replaced by a melancholic spiral of sadness. As Luigi shuffles from screen to screen, he comes up against obstacles he cannot pass, though he might've easily overcome them in the golden Year of Luigi back in 2013. Defeated by meager warp pipes, Luigi turns back the way he came, only to find himself in a totally different area than what it had been seconds before, representing the dullness of a world that passes him by without notice. 

we leave them a shell of what they used to be 

But Ennuigi captures much more nuance than just the plight of a less famous sibling (obviously, no one wants to be Daniel Baldwin). Ennuigi reveals the torture we put our playable characters through, making them do the same asinine things over and over again to our satisfaction—actions, let me remind you, that are only barely justified by the premise of the world. Level after level, they lose a little piece of their pixelated soul. By winning, we leave them a shell of what they used to be. And not just any shell, but one of those useless green shells in Mario Kart.

You can play Ennuigi for free on your browser. 

Speak Up, L.A. Noire

Why L.A. Noire is the best war game ever made.

Block'hood is everything vertical cities promise to be... and aren't

What is a neighbourhood beyond a collection of functions such as greenspace, housing, shops, and schools—figurative building blocks that can be strung together to build a functioning environment? The neighbourhood-as-collection-of-blocks metaphor appeals to videogame creators and audiences because it is an easily digestible abstraction and one that can easily be mapped onto basic game mechanics. This is how Sim City eventually bequeathed games like Oskar Stålberg’s Brick Blocks, in which you extruded a block of flats out of a base grid. Now this variant on the venerable city-building genre is getting beautified in Jose Sanchez’s Block’hood.

Block’hood, which is due to be released in late 2015, starts with a base grid that cannot accommodate all the functions you’d like your neighbourhood to offer. The game is not trying to make a deep point about the scarcity of land, but this state of affairs does make building upwards a necessity. And so you build up, stacking farms, schools, and factories.

an architect’s rendering of a forthcoming luxury tower. 

Block’hood will initially offer “80+ building blocks,” though Sanchez promises “the library of Blocks will continue growing even after release, adding to the experience of the game and allowing you to design the city you always dreamed of.” The resulting neighbourhoods can be used in a variety of modes, including a research mode that joins Polynomics in offering itself as a tool for experimentation and “challenge mode” which sets goals for your neighbourhood and leaves you to figure out how to meet them.

(Because Block’hood is a polygonal pastel cluster floating in space, this is the moment when, as a professional videogames journalist, I’m legally obliged to compare it to Monument Valley. For fear of having my membership in the shadowy videogames cabal cancelled, I’m also obliged to say that it is the Monument Valley of something-or-other. Let me therefore declare that Block’hood is the Monument Valley of utopian tower cities, and now we can get on with our lives.)

The net result of Block’hood’s construction is something that looks eerily like an architect’s rendering of a forthcoming luxury tower. Indeed, “vertical city” is a common designation for architectural undertakings. Nevertheless, it is not yet clear what the term “vertical city” really describes. Literalists might imagine the vertical city as a sprawling urban environment that was cut up into tranches that were subsequently layered atop one another. For reasons of land scarcity, that might one day be the case, but that day has yet to come. Until then, “vertical city” will function as a mere euphemism.

To wit, feast your eyes on De Rotterdam, a “vertical city” designed by Rem Koolhaas’ OMA. Situated in the centre of Amsterdam, it resembles a collection of skyscrapers that have been stacked atop one another, which is possibly the least subtle visual metaphor for the vertical city. According to The Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright, De Rotterdam houses “not just 70,000 sq m of office space, but 240 apartments in the block to the west, and a 285-room boutique hotel in the block to the east, sitting on a chunky plinth of conference facilities, car parking and restaurants.” Those commercial elements do not a city make, unless your vision of a city is largely devoid of democratic and social functions. De Rotterdam may allow for the coexistence of work and personal spaces, but its conception of public space is eerily limited.

One might therefore be inclined to think of Block’hood as an opportunity to realize the more utopian (and literal) dream of the “vertical city,” a place where you could conceivably live your whole life in a tower. Indeed, the game appears to have been built to enable such experimentation. Whereas the logic of other city-building games pushes for sprawling horizontal expansion, the constrained ground plane in Block’hood will guide you to the sky. It is nevertheless hard to escape the sense that this is a game that will allow you to build the rendering of a building that will over-promise and fail to deliver—the sort of place that is marketed as a “vertical city” but ends up being an investment vehicle for most of its residents and provides a “poor door” for its less wealthy tenants. Even the phrases in Block’hood’s teaser video—“envision your neighbourhood…create abundance…think ecology…avoid decay”—feel like Mad Libs with Bjarke Ingels.

It can all feel like Mad Libs with Bjarke Ingels. 

In July, City Lab’s Kriston Capps declared “Jengaform” to be the “look of recovery-era multifamily architecture.” Like the game from which Jengaform takes its name, Capps writes that the buildings are defined by “just two factors: stacked and elevated.” These projects are not necessarily “vertical cities,” they are simply less sleek towers. “Stacked architecture makes sense for the city because so many of the development opportunities are infill,” Capps writes, “and architects can get more out of a small building footprint using various tricky cantilevers.” Capps was writing about Washington DC, but he could just as well have been describing the way Block’hood navigates space constraints.

It’s unfair to hold the political baggage of the “vertical city” or the aesthetic baggage of Jengaform against Block’hood. Yet the fact that these connections present themselves speaks well for the game, which appears set to engage with planning challenges as well as the state of architecture in 2015. Block’hood is the best version of all these ideas: A tool for building truly compelling virtual cities that presents them in a compellingly pastel manner. If only these architectural renderings corresponded with reality. 

You can vote for Block'hood on Steam Greenlight.

Turning the 1979 Iranian revolution into a heartfelt videogame

The universality of revolution.

P.T. has been out a year and people are still uncovering its secrets

It’s been exactly a year since P.T. first graced the PlayStation Store as a playable teaser for Silent Hills. Since last August, the notorious demo has gone on to become a relic of a game that will never be, but also a strong standalone experience, and a reminder of what a little risk and creative freedom can do to a slowly staling genre in an industry too lazy to do anything about it.

a sad reminder of what could’ve been 

The fact that people are still discovering new events months and months later is a testament to what an enigma P.T. is, and a sad reminder of what could’ve been if Konami had never abandoned the Silent Hills project.

Over in the Silent Hill subreddit, user metatronicsauce explains a set of conditions required to get a glimpse of P.T.’s ghost, Lisa, in the starting basement room. It isn’t entirely unknown—there’s a video on YouTube from this March showing the occurrence—but it’s a rare enough encounter that it makes me wonder what else P.T. could be hiding. It’s totally possible that it’s just a bug that was never fixed, too.

There's a recording in a separate thread of another possible bug involving the flashlight. As you can see in the video above, after an attack from Lisa near the end of the hallway, the player is forced through the door and back into the loop... without a flashlight.

this small, puzzling thing still has a community 

While both occurrences are most likely unintended glitches, the fact that the Silent Hill community bothers to document them is proof that this small, puzzling thing still has a community, and a dedicated one too. It reminds me of the Yume Nikki fanbase, picking apart every last step in the obscure RPG Maker wonder and even going into the code to uncover difficult or rare events.

I don’t think P.T. is quite as brimming with secrets, but the first time I was thrown into its dark hallway, shades of Yume Nikki’s mystery did come to mind. And like Yume Nikki, which received a ton of fan games to expand on its unique brand of strange, P.T. already has some unofficial spiritual successors of its own; namely first-person horror adventure Allison Road and the Unity remake PuniTy.

h/t Kotaku.

Missed our last evening of musical duels? Tonight is your next chance

Join us in Manhattan to battle your friends and conquer tiny Russian towns. 

New Rise of the Tomb Raider footage stars Lara Croft's daddy issues

Finally, some tomb raiding for the Tomb Raider! The latest footage of Rise of the Tomb Raider direct from its presentation at Gamescom gave fans what they’ve been yearning for since the 2013 reboot: Lara Croft scaling crumbling walls in exotic, undiscovered locales like the good ol’ days when breasts were triangles. The footage reads like a response to the critics of the first reboot who cited a distinct lack of the series’ titular activity. In Crystal Dynamics’ defense, though, they did kinda address that in the game, with Lara’s self-aware declaration that she “hates tombs.”

Yet by the end of the 2013 reboot, fans were made to wonder how Lara Croft would come to love the very thing that left her shell shocked and sans father figure. The new footage answers that question straight away (and repeatedly throughout): Real Daddy taught her, of course! “There was something in dad’s research about this,” she says upon reaching the speculated location of the legendary tomb she seeks. Moments later, Lara affirms that “this is it. Dad was right.” Then, when Lara discovers the unmarked entrance to the long forgotten tomb, she gets dangerously close to having an actual opinion of her own. "It's amazing! ...If only dad could've seen this."

she gets dangerously close to having an actual opinion of her own 

It becomes clear that her father’s recorded notes will at least partially replace the usual expository audio logs and letters scattered around levels in the previous game. But, presumably, her dad’s unfinished research doesn't just help Lara with practical things like locating the hidden corpses of lost prophets. He also appears to be a big part of her emotional motivation for rolling her (figurative) sleeves back up and getting back out there following the traumatizing events of her previous expedition. After surviving a car crash, gun fire, and a swarm of scorpions in the clip, a very battered Lara finally discovers a sanctuary no man or woman has set foot on in centuries. "Stunning," she sighs. Then, like a nervous tick: "We made it, Dad.”

Lara Croft's parentage has varied throughout the decades, reflected in her varying personalties throughout every iteration. In the original Tomb Raider, the Crofts raised their daughter to be a proper British socialite complete with a foreign finishing school and family estate. To their shock and horror, their perfect little aristocratic princess rebelled, leading to Lara's eventual disownment and stone cold badassery. In Tomb Raider Legend, we see a story seemingly similar to the one being portrayed in this recent reboot, with father Richard Croft painted as a brilliant but eventually discredited archeologist. Tomb Raider Anniversary depicted a similar background, with a few minor details changed or exaggerated.

maybe Lara's mom does do more than just disappear 

Unsurprisingly, Lara Croft's mother tends to be glossed over and/or conveniently snuffed out early on in her lifetime. Like many other games, the mother is escorted off stage like a drunk at a standup show. While the paternal aspect of Lara's parentage is frequently highlighted and explored, we've never seen a maternally influenced Croft origin story or even a pseudo mother figure (and no, Natla does not count.) Since the previous game featured such a female-centric narrative, with the core relationship between Lara and best friend Sam fueling most of the drama, I had hoped this iteration of Lara might be at least a bit more in touch with her maternal side. And, of course, we don't have the full story yet—and, who knows, maybe Lara's mom does do more than just disappear early on in her origin story. But this new footage doesn't make that hope look very promising. The emphasis on the paternal figure has been there since the 2013 title, too. "You can do it Lara," says Conrad Roth, her most prominent parental figure. "After all you're a Croft."

Presumably, Crystal Dynamics has a practical reason and vested interest in imbuing Lara's story with as much paternal crap as possible. As Ron Rosenberg told Kotaku at E3 in 2012,  "When people play Lara, they don't really project themselves into the character. They're more like 'I want to protect her.' There's this sort of dynamic of 'I'm going to this adventure with her and trying to protect her.'" Hm, then I wonder who the designers assume their presumably male audience will want to identify with. An omnipotent father character must feel natural, since Rosenberg believes players think of themselves more "like her helper. When you see her have to face these challenges, you start to root for her in a way that you might not root for a male character."

As we know, the male imagination is too limited to possibly entertain the notion of identifying as a female videogame character. Being a member of the female species, I know myself that I could not imagine identifying with any of the countless male protagonists I am forced to spend hours inhabiting in videogames on a daily basis. It is simply beyond my mental capabilities, since men have wee-wees and girls have all those girly bits. Since our genitals are different, it's impossible to see characters of the opposite sex as human first, and gendered second. Simply impossible.

Now we can all participate in the kitschy nightmares of Sonic fan art

Sonic is a gross island. His fans sit atop his belly and cast lines out into the vast pools of the internet, reeling in fetishes you've never heard of. The result is Sonic fan art: trashy Microsoft Paint sketches, dodgy amateur photoshops, and more creepy porn cross-overs than should ever be possible.

There's so much Sonic fan art that an internet pastime is typing your first name into Google Images followed by "the hedgehog," and seeing yourself transformed into the ghastly Sonicverse. (It works because fans have created an unfathomable number of Sonic variants with alternative names—almost all names, it seems. Here's mine.) In fact, Sonic fan art is so voluminous it even has its own curator, who operates under the title "Bad Sonic Fan Art," and who actively tries to find the worst examples and posts them on Twitter and Tumblr.

In an interview with Buzzfeed, that same curator reasons that there must be so much Sonic fan art as the videogame series has been reinvented so many times over the past 25 years. "With that it kept bringing in a new group of fans each time, each more awkward than the last," he said. As to why most of it is so goddamn horrendous? No idea. The only logical conclusion is that Sonic fans are just weird.

Sonic Dreams Collection is not a piece of Sonic fan art. But it blends in so easily. And that seems to be half the point. It's the latest project by Arcane Kids and Glitch City co-founder Arjun Prakash, the former being the small collective that has previously reveled in blowing up the devout fandom of millennial culture and trashy remixes with its previous creations. There was the "Pokémon Millennial Edition" video that seemed to celebrate the strangeness and admirable energy contained within Pokémon fan games. "Millennials! this is the fucked up planet we deserve" reads some text during the video. 

Arcane Kids did something similar with Bubsy 3D, which invites you to "explore your relationship with art" through the ill-fitting lens of a Bubsy videogame. It starts off as a love letter to artist James Turrell through a lo-fi virtual museum that you explore with other players, appreciating Turrell's use of light and space. But then Bubsy literally descends to hell, where he becomes a ghost under your control, one you can use to haunt other players and explore previously unreachable areas.

exploration of this kitschy, amateur fan aesthetic 

This unexpected tangent shares an outlandish flavor with the fan-made spin-offs that popular media tends to experience—especially videogames—in which bits of lore are stretched and twisted to meet perverted desires, and a lack of artistic skills tack these visions on to the swelling mass as if struck by a clumsy hammer. Arcane Kids's interest in this isn't an assumption on my part. It reads in the group's manifesto that they believe "bad is more interesting than good."

Bearing all that in mind, Sonic Dreams Collection is only Arcane Kids taking its own exploration of this kitschy, amateur fan aesthetic further. This time, it manifests as four games in a single package, with them being framed as long lost Sonic game prototypes that Sega made for the Dreamcast. This is all a lie of course, part of the parody, but it presents the collection as it needs to be: unfinished vaporware that was thrown into a bin and never meant to see the light of day.

The idea is to engage with an imagined wilder side of Sega that it ultimately had to discard. These are the commercial products that didn't meet the standard. This fragile, often unseen space is exactly what Arcane Kids is interested in shoehorning. As with fan art, it operates in that incongruous space between executive-approved material and bizarre, unrelenting expression. 

So what do we have here? First off, there's a character customizer in which you can blow up and shrink the limbs and head of your own Sonic-brand hedgehog, and change the colors as well. Not having complete control of the changes made means that what you end up with is something resembling the endless hand-drawn Sonic fan art, in which bodily proportions are completely unbalanced, the necessary art discipline to know any better absent. Plus, with the mouse, you can yank each of the hedgehog's appendages and cause the 3D model into spasm. It's easily broke.  

People have embraced the act of creating terrible Sonic fan fiction. 

There's also a virtual reality sideshow in which you role-play as the roommate of Sonic the Hedgehog. Using only the direction of your gaze to interact with this fiction, you are instructed by Dr. Eggman through the power of text messaging to tickle Sonic and win his heart while sitting next to him on the sofa. You have to tickle him while distracted so he doesn't slap your arm and turn it into floppy spaghetti as the physics system tries to keep up. Eventually, Sonic moves in closer, as if for a kiss, and you warp inside his mind, triggering a Lynchian sequence between dreams and videogames. 

The third prototype is a lot more mysterious, said to be a long lost MMORPG that you need the network adaptor for in order to play. In truth, it requires a little more investigation on your part to find out what's actually hidden here. As another part of the Arcane Kids manifesto reads, "the purpose of gameplay is to hide secrets." This prototype is one big secret camouflaged as a broken game. Of course, it reflects the entirety of the collection, which is made out to be a leaked secret—originally you needed to go through an encrypted channel to get access, typing in the password "grandpa," which was distributed only by word of mouth.

The final piece in the Sonic Dreams Collection is the "Sonic Movie Maker. " It's easily the most interesting effort of the four. Not just because it takes you on a journey through the dirt bed of Sonic fan fiction—from homemade Sonic pornos to the terrifying insides of Amy the Hedgehog's womb—but also because it lets you create your own shitty spin-offs. Each scene gives you a camcorder to record Vine-like videos of up to six seconds of self-edited sleaze. You can then directly post these short clips to Twitter from inside the game at the click of a button.

If you head over to the #SonicDreams hashtag on Twitter you can see thousands of these videos already. People have embraced the act of creating terrible Sonic fan fiction. There's no sign of the innocent speed-based platformer left: it's all pregnancy, prom night orgies, and nightmares in the dark.

In one scene, perhaps my favorite, you are in a dingy industrial building where you can feed Sonic cake and burger, his belly swelling with each meal. The speech bubbles available for you to drag near his crumb-filled mouth include one that says "Sorry daddy," implying that you're punishing him for a miscreant act by over-feeding him. I can't help but think "Yeah, eat it up Sonic, eat up all the shit you've facilitated" as I drop a patty into his gob, filming it for all to see. 

You can download Sonic Dreams Collection for free on hedgehog.exposed. If you're asked for a password just type "grandpa" and you'll get access.