Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 273

Here's why Marilyn Manson's latest album was distributed on a PlayStation disc

Pure black.

Presenting Let's Play, a documentary about the art of videogames

“We didn’t want to make a movie about games, but about people creating games and people playing them.”

Do Not Track is a web doc bringing data-mining uncomfortably close to home

The issue of Internet privacy is bigger than you.

After two long years, the enigmatic spaces of Relativity are locking into place

For Willy Chyr, everything is locking into place all at once. There's probably a click echoing through the cosmos in his name right now. Don't listen for it, but know that if it exists, it's satisfying in the way cracking your joints is, or crunching into that first thick-cut potato chip.

For the past two years, Chyr has been working by himself on Relativity; an ornate metropolis of virtual architecture that doubles up as puzzle pieces. Only recently, as little as a few months ago, has it moved beyond being a series of disembodied enigmas and random spaces. Then, after a lot of searching, he had that moment. Everything aligned as one. It was unified. Parts became whole. For the first time, he knew what the game was all about.

Angles bend in ways that make no sense. 

Wisely, Chyr is keeping his new-found insight into his own work a secret. So we're left to our own devices—as we will be once inside that virtual puzzle box—to decipher what's going on inside Relativity. What we do know is that, similar to Monument Valley, you're expected to navigate floating dioramas that are structured in a manner that should baffle our perception. Angles bend in ways that make no sense. Staircases braced against every incline reveal a topographical interest in climbing. You fall to the bottom of the world to reappear at its top in seamless transition. It's a universe that repeats endlessly in every direction and that operates on a different set of physical laws.

The most significant change that Relativity has been through since its inception is how its central gravity shifting idea was inverted. At first, it was the world that shifted rather than the player. "The problem with this version was that as soon as you rotated the world once, all the objects would slide to the bottom corner and the entire level would be a mess," Chyr said. It took him four months of working on this idea before he realized that the solution was to have the player change orientation while the world remained still. Everything else has branched out from that first revelation.

When Chyr talks about how Relativity came together over the months and years, he compares it to learning a language. Due to its mathematical complexity, and self-contained rules of physics, not a lot of traditional game design could be cross-referenced. So he's had to invent a completely new vocabulary. Chyr's example is how, in a lot of 3D worlds, a tower or castle is often used as a reference point for players to orientate themselves; a trusty landmark. But in Relativity, there is no consistent up and down—progression comes at all angles, and it's entirely possible for objects to be simultaneously above and below you—"height is meaningless," Chyr said.

"I absolutely love the scale of the world in NaissanceE" 

He had to find new angles. As with the world he's grafting, a tilt was required, a shift in perspective, to find what he needed to make it all work. Chyr hasn't yet revealed what techniques he fell upon that acted as equivalent design solutions, filling the same holes with new shapes. But he did say it took a lot of repeated and arduous playtesting to arrive at them. A similar story can be told about Alexander Bruce, the solo designer behind the flabbergasting non-Euclidean geometry and psychological puzzles of Antichamber. Bruce toiled over the ideas in Antichamber for three years before trying to realize them as a videogame. And when he started, it took him another three years and several bouts of testing, as well as unexpected emotional hardships, to finish it.

Chyr has examined Antichamber, and has worked to integrate its pacing, especially in the first hour, in Relativity. The key to this, Chyr realized, is to constantly give the player something new, never presenting the same puzzle twice. So there are cubes to move, switches to push, towers to climb, trees to turn on their side. Antichamber isn't the only purveyor. Chyr has also fallen for the beguiling brutalist architecture and world building of Limasse Five's NaissanceE. "I absolutely love the scale of the world in NaissanceE and how expansive it appears. That's something that I've brought into Relativity as well, with each level being infinite in size through its own repetition," Chyr said.

There's another, less obvious bellwether leading Chyr to Relativity's final composition: Starseed Pilgrim. Alexander Martin's subtle 2D puzzler differs from others due to its obfuscation of purpose. You enter its world, plant seeds, watch them grow into cubes, and wonder why. Eventually, patterns emerge, you learn to use the seeds to climb into white space, but even then there's an existential question that goes unanswered. It's a mystery fuelled by curiosity and idle play, flowering a petal at a time, and refusing to budge an inch on revealing its mysteries.

For Chyr, it's how Starseed Pilgrim focuses on its mechanics as an "embedded layer of systems" that resonated, and that is also an important aspect of Relativity. Speaking of Relativity in comparison to Starseed Pilgrim, Chyr revealed that "you can pick up a box and place it on a switch to open a door, but that box is actually part of a much larger ecosystem of mechanics, and part of progressing through the game is discovering that ecosystem."

left his confidence in limbo 

With Relativity being the first videogame that Chyr has ever worked on he has always second guessed his ability and ideas. He has never been sure if something was working, was perhaps even interesting, or if he was just being delusional. With no experience, he's not had any measurement for his success so far, and that's left his confidence in limbo. This has now changed with the backing of Indie Fund.

Comprised of people whose own creative efforts in the videogame space has led to Chyr's utter respect, Indie Fund's approval and financing is wholly reassuring. "It lets me know that I’m on the right path," Chyr said. With the funding, Chyr has been able to bring on a programmer to help him out, granting him the time to focus solely on Relativity's design. It has proven to be the nudge that has exceeded the final ridge in the lock. With it, Relativity is fastened, bolted, and should be completely secure. Whereas before it resembled mess as a space—lined with the cloistered barracks of a mind at war with itself—it now has harmony, each pocket of math and construction complementing one another.

"There's still quite a bit of work ahead, but I think it's going to be easier moving forward," Chyr said. What he didn't make clear was which direction forward might be.

You can find out more about Relativity on its website.

What happens when you combine the roguelike with a traditional JRPG? Nothing good

Etrian Mystery Dungeon is a star-crossed abomination.

SOMA's creepy tendrils threaten to reach out with reality-questioning horror soon

Frictional Games, creator of 2010's infamous horror hit Amnesia: The Dark Descent, has announced that their latest title SOMA has hit beta—it looks and plays near-exactly as it will in its final version, in other words. All that’s left between now and a release date is waiting for Frictional to gather feedback from their 40-or-so testers and get to work on the finishing touches.

The first-person sci-fi horror game takes place in and around an underwater research facility called PATHOS-2. You play as Simon, an amnesiac mysteriously stranded in this derelict installation as the world around him is transformed by a malevolent otherworldly presence. While attempting to escape, you'll be confronted by sentient machines that have taken on the personalities and traumas of their former handlers, hunted by mysterious creatures known only as the “Jiangshi.” As the horror genre demands, you'll be required to plumb the darkest recesses of the ocean to discover who or what is causing this disaster.

what is and isn't real 

Little else is known about SOMA currently, which is intentional, and part of why the announcement that it has hit beta is worth note. Frictional's other titles showed a rare understanding of how horror translates to games, and this one purportedly takes inspiration from the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft and the ever-questioning dystopian thoughts siphoned through Philip K. Dick's cyborg dramas.

Hilary Putnam's “Brain in a vat” thought-experiment also plays shepherd to SOMA. Putnam's theory suggests that all physical and mental sensory activity experienced by a person is not, in fact, real. Rather, it purports, we are fed a series of artificially-crafted stimuli from a machine into the nerve receptors of a brain floating in a vat. Think The Matrix. How would that person know what is and isn't real and, even more terrifying, what happens if they found out they weren't?

Look out for more information on SOMA on its website.

It’s hard not to love The Hole Story, a game made by teenage girls

From summer camp to game convention.

Sunset arrives May 21, but you can play it before then at Two5Six

Come to our free arcade in Brooklyn to play Tale of Tales' latest before its release.

Samorost 3's new trailer promises more gorgeously surreal space-gnome misadventure

Alice In Wonderland, eat your heart out.

Canada's National Film Board made a videogame to help reduce the number of unidentified dead

Unresponsive and dressed in a hospital gown, her body was found on the sidewalk in front of what is now an Aston Martin dealership. Perhaps she stepped out of the rehabilitation center next door only to collapse under the prurient stares of the Vantages and DB-something-or-others in the dealership window. No one knows. No one even knows her name. It is, all in all, a strange place to die, but death has no qualms about such things.

God, I wish I could at least call her by her name. 

You can comb through what little information we have about this woman—God, I wish I could at least call her by her name—. “There are more than 11,000 cases of unnamed dead in the United States alone,” reads the introduction to Facing the Nameless, which takes 12 of those cases and attempts to better understand them using digital tools. 

The results are undeniably macabre. No matter how many Law and Order episodes you’ve watched, it’s still unnerving to see actual pictures from a morgue or the deceased’s inventoried belongings. Reverse image searches only serve to demonstrate why these twelve people remain unidentified. The woman from in front of the Aston Martin dealership was most definitely not Victoria Beckham.

Facing the Nameless does, however, have its touching moments. Eulogies commissioned by the NFB grapple with the challenge of honouring a person who, in the absence of a name, is little more than a collection of objects. Facing the Nameless is inescapably voyeuristic but it is trying to be something more. It is trying to bring dignity and recognition to those who died alone and unrecognized.

There’s an “I know who this person is”-button at the end of each Facing the Nameless page. Hopefully all twelve buttons get clicked. It’s hard to imagine that an “interactive haiku” will be the thing that makes the difference after all these years, but none of these cases really have better options. Until then, however, Facing the Nameless is a fascinating attempt to restore some humanity to those who tragically had it taken away at the death. 

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