Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 308

In Stellar Smooch, you've got a hot date with fate and outer space

Explore the abyss that is love and relationships with Stellar Smooch.

The Deer God makes you relate to hunter and hunted

Finding karma deep in nature.

Watching sports from a more videogame-like perspective could reinvent them

In praise of the first-person view.

Wander through rural Scotland in the deeply personal Beeswing

How would you capture your hometown in a videogame?

Play with your food, manipulate 3D art, lose your mind

Three totally insane games to do instead of ... whatever else you were planning today. 

Here Be Monsters

How Dungeons and Dragons lets you map the fantastic places in the corners of your mind.

Storybundle brings a stellar holiday collection of games writing

Do ereaders dream of electric stocking stuffers?

Chaos Reborn, from the maker of X-COM, is playable now

Chaos Reborn, the latest entry into the tactical turn-based strategy genre from Julian Gollop, creator of the X-COM series, is now available for early access Steam.

The current lineup of features in this boardgame-meets-Magic: The Gathering title is austere, as only online multiplayer is available. However, each of the modes not yet unlocked show a text explanation, with one glimpse highlighting possibly the game’s most interesting feature.

While players start as a lowly apprentice wizard, through hard work and effort, they can attain the first social rank, “Wizard Lord.” From there, they can ascend further by collecting “artefacts,” winning multiplayer battles or leveling up against computer opponents. The higher ranks require you to start your own order (like a guild) of “worshippers” and manage its growth.

This is all par for the course, but there’s a wrinkle: once a player hits the top, their rank is not guaranteed. Going inactive from play or allowing your order to lose too many followers can see you plummet back down to square one.

This is all par for the course, but there’s a wrinkle 

Many games have done ranking systems, although few stick out that required active maintenance. One such system was the honour ranks of World of Warcraft’s original PvP. It required continual play to collect “honour” every week, moving up the ladder to try to reach “High Warlord” for the Horde or “Grand Marshal” for the Alliance. As you progressed up the ranks to attain both prestige and the exclusive items the titles allowed you to purchase, the amount you had to collect for the week to both maintain and advance would increase. A slump in performance would likely end up in dropped rank.

For comparison, Chaos Reborn’s highest rank, “God,” allows the highest echelon of the game’s players to directly influence the world’s lore and future game features. It’s as if the week’s High Warlords got to lead the entire Horde faction, other players included, until they were succeeded by another.

Chaos Reborn is slated for a full release in Spring 2015. You can find out more on the game’s website or on Steam.

Peter Padder Pauleypop reminds players why being a grown up is totally depressing

Take a deep dive into this anguished love letter to SNES Final Fantasy games.

The uncompromising Alien: Isolation just got uncompromising-er

There are two things to know about Alien: Isolation, the Creative Assembly horror game from earlier this year based on the long-running Alien series of films. The first thing to know is that it is really, really, really good-looking. The gone-to-shit space station you explore is bafflingly dense and lived-in, and the set designers keep finding ways to transform it, from the familiar corridors of a cockpit and mess-hall to wider business and shopping plazas—riffs on Ridely Scott's aesthetic, confidently played. All retain an ironclad sense of late-70s retrofuturism; if that whole space<--->no one hearing you scream thing weren't already such a good tagline, I'd suggest "all analog everything" as a possible alternate, at least for this game. 

The other thing to know about Alien: Isolation—and this is probably what you already know, since it has dominated the conversation since the game's release—is that it's really, really difficult. There are no checkpoints (except at the beginning of missions, which are sparse and not useful), supplies are scarce, enemies are multitudinous and much hardier than you, and you will die cheaply and frequently and upsettingly. Pretty much everything you get that might be helpful sucks: your gun sucks; the map, hoo boy, does it suck; the motion tracker sucks; the flashlight is really good but it attracts enemies, and so sucks; even the trusty ol' videogame shotgun is ineffectual when you want it to be. I've been playing the game on hard, but I hear that easy mode is just as impenetrable, and I imagine that is correct. Alien: Isolation absolutely does not fuck around. 

So Creative Assembly's announcement today of two new difficulty modes doubles down on both of these virtues, depending on your vantage point. And, for real: if you're otherwise not going to play this game, do it in the new novice mode! A less aggressive alien that you can hide from easier, as well as weapons that aren't totally fucking useless, would let you get to explore one of the most lovingly created game-worlds we've seen in 2014. Nightmare mode, on the other hand, sounds like absolute horseshit: your broke-ass motion tracker is now even more broke-ass, the enemies are harder, the flamethrower—which is a healing salve, late in the game—is less effective, and there isn't a HUD.

In a game that absolutely refused to make concessions to the player, Nightmare mode sounds like the purest manifestation imaginable. I mean, I'm never play that shit, but I bet those who do swear by it.