Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 410

Who needs iPhones when we have gigantic storytelling ribbons?

Touch-screens are pretty great for mobile phones, except when you're typing, and cutting-and-pasting, and, well, a bunch of other stuff, but using a touch-screen at a museum takes the ritual out of running your fingers through those old archives. So The Museum of The History of Polish Jews in Warsaw commissioned this statuesque, narrative ribbon that looks like a gull with spread wings on which to present the stories of Semitic Poland.

Called Macrofilm, this one-of-a-kind slide projector allows visitors to spin a hand-sized wheel to scroll through cards. It was important for them to come up with an unique experience because, after all, there would be less reason to go to the museum if all the archive material was digitized and placed on the Internet for convenience. This way they can still retain all the charm of going to the microfiche cabinet, even enhancing it by making that moment an inspiring experience, while presenting information in a convenient, tech-savvy way.

Via Creative Applications

Sadly we’ll never get to play this lost game from Device 6 devs Simogo

Before Simogo brought us games that charmed our pants off, games like Bumpy Road and Year Walk and Beat Sneak Bandit, they were just two guys working at a studio in Malmö. While there, one of them was prototyping a wonderful-looking solo project called Brisby & Donnovan. It was never finished. 

Posted on their blog today, the game is equal parts weird and adorable—in other words, a Simogo project. As you can see in the footage, you play as a teddy bear and his giant Englishman buddy who’s made of ribbon candy. It doesn’t get more charming than ribbon candy.

Too bad this one is likely never to get out into the wild, as it belongs to the former developer, who has since gone out of business. The good news is that Simogo is hard at work on their next project. But man does this lost one look delightful.

Does Trials Fusion have a hidden Soylent Green subplot? The evidence is pretty convincing

Trials Fusion is a mindlessly fun game about doing tricks on dirt bikes, in which you repeatedly and tirelessly crash to your death—the type of game you’d never expect to feature a morose, creepy plot about an unethical corporation cloning human bodies. But according to this theory on YouTube, all those crates are stuffed with lifeless cloned bodies that are revived in the cloning facility moments before you spurt off and suffer a spinal injury in a horrible crash, bringing an “It’s people!” twist to the concept of the extra man. 

While this is very much conjecture, the video points to some pretty convincing evidence. We should remember that the original Trials HD had a similar secret, a rabbit hole more esoteric than the most overanalyzed Stanley Kubrick films. RedLynx even fessed up to it. Just something to keep in mind while you’re pulling ungodly chains of backflips.

0RBITALIS is like Angry Birds in the actual fathomless depths of space

Not Angry Birds Space, though. 

Watch The Alien: Isolation devs recreate Alien's shoddy analog computer systems

The future just got a lot more retro.

The totally necessary automated S.E.L.F.I.E. mirror

Consider high angles a thing of the past.

Technolust begs the question: What happens if you enter virtual reality while in virtual reality?

With a name like Technolust, this VR game, now on Kickstarter, could have only be a sleek cyberpunk noir, or some sleezy VR sex game. Luckily it's the former, because up till now we haven’t really seen a full-blown cyberpunk game in virtual reality with neon cities and mega-corps and cybernetic Asian women and whatnot.

The absence has been strange as cyberpunk and virtual reality have always been attached at the hip. I figured every dev would be racing to make a game aping Blade Runner instead of, say, nature documentaries. But not so. As far as details on this one, it looks to be a post-human, narrative-driven adventure set in roughly the same grungy neon world as all things cyberpunk, which if you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it. But not in virtual reality!

Heart Forth, Alicia is a gorgeous RPG seven years in the making

Videogames are hardly wanting for another Metroidvania - that exploration-heavy, upgrade-focused branch of the RPG tree.

But Heart Forth, Alicia is a particularly tempting fruit. The game lays its cards on the table with a $60 tier that delivers a boxed copy of the game and manual designed “in the style of the PS1 games that inspired Heart Forth, Alicia.”

This is no lazy imitation, no cash-grab nostalgia play: from its ornate pixel art - ripe with complex Metal Slug-style animation and floating damage text - to the pitch-perfect soundtrack, which you can hear in the video below, it looks to pay pretty righteous dues to its forebears. If you played its recent, under-sung spiritual sister Valdis Story: Abyssal City, welcome another entry in the field.

Of course, seven years’ development time didn’t hurt either. Creator Alonso Martin estimates four cumulative years poured into the game, giving him time to weave an elaborate backstory - which he promises to keep out of your way - and an intriguing mystery that the trailer drops in its final seconds.

Yes, it appears Heart Forth, Alicia contains FMV sequences, which certainly makes good on its promise to deliver a “90s-inspired” experience, but also hints at something fascinating behind the sprites: is this a metafictional wrinkle, a Bastion-esque narrator, or what?

Martin’s had seven years to come up with the answers. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.

This building-side Frogger is the arcade of the gods

As this 22-story-tall Frogger clone in São Paulo proves, major metropolitan areas are quickly becoming skyscraper arcades. Street Crosser, a game with a social cause, joins that giant game of Tetris played over Philly a few weeks ago as the two latest examples of god-sized videogames. 

But this installation isn’t merely touting that Brazilians love big buildings and games. The creators at Noobware, a Spanish game studio, say the game is an attempt to raise awareness of the high number of traffic deaths in São Paulo, having you play as little old ladies crossing busy interstates instead of the customary frog. Let’s assume this was played out of the line of sight of drivers, as it seems like a giant shiny screen in the sky might not help the issue. 

via Creator's Project

Amnesia’s Thomas Grip: “Right now we're sort of in the slasher horror genre in games.”

Horror games are currently in a rut with their slasher film mentality says Thomas Grip, designer of games that chickens like me stay far, far away from. Speaking with Rock, Paper, Shotgun about his upcoming title SOMA, he explained that scary games have yet to evolve from gory, cheap scares into a more psychological and terrifying type of horror. His words precisely: 

Right now we’re sort of in the slasher horror genre in games. You’re just running from evil dudes or evil monsters. It’d be nice to move away from that and get into something more like Omen or Exorcist territory, where you have a very normal situation at the start, with normal people, that escalates gradually throughout the movie and eventually reaches a crescendo.

Basically, he’s talking about severing the survival from survivor horror, a genre that encapsulates pretty much every scary game ever, from Dead Space to Outlast to all those Slenderman games. This is something we’re coming to expect from Frictional Games, whose last game Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs wasn’t about fighting boogymen but unraveling the twisting murderous past of its protagonist. It sounds like SOMA will continue to haunt us long after we play it.