Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 46

The Outlast 2 demo made me scream in front of my dad

Red Barrels Studio decided to suddenly release a demo for its upcoming survival-horror game Outlast 2 yesterday. It’s available now, for free, via Steam and the Xbox One and PlayStation Stores. And it’s scary as shit.

Outlast 2—as you might have guessed by the name—is the sequel to the relatively successful Outlast (2013). It puts you in the role of Blake Langermann, a cameraman who, after wrecking with his wife Lynn in the Arizona desert, finds himself frantically evading a twisted religious cult. This sequel is set in the same universe as the first game, and still keeps its found footage-style of presentation (i.e. you’re peeking through a camera to see in the dark), but wisely loses the mental asylum setting.

things there are just awful

The demo drops you into what is presumably the beginning of the game, having you explore a dilapidated town, discovering quickly that things there are just awful. Like, simply the worst.

Mutilated corpses of children, religious iconography, and a seemingly never-ending cornfield await those brave enough to play Outlast 2. I, to be honest with you, was not brave enough, asking my dad to sit with me while I played the game, only to—much to his delight—scream in front of him after finding myself face-to-face with a monster. While Outlast 2 certainly achieves what it sets out to do—terrify—and I commend it for that, I have no plans of ever playing that game again.

Outlast 2 is due out for PC and consoles in 2017. Find out more about it on its website.

For more on Outlast, read our conversation Red Barrels’ co-founder Philippe Morin about incorporating adulthood into its 2013 horror game.

The post The Outlast 2 demo made me scream in front of my dad appeared first on Kill Screen.

Destiny: Rise of Iron has learned nothing

I was at E3 when Destiny was first shown to the world in 2013. I remember being shepherded into a theater, the outside marked with huge printed artwork, among a group of whispering journalists. In that theater, we would be taken through the opening to the game: the wall, the breach, the first areas of the Cosmodrome. The person demonstrating the game spawned at what I now know—after hundreds of hours in Destiny’s world—to be the hard edge of the map. But back then I had no idea where this sprawling landscape ended, where its invisible walls lay. So as they carefully rotated the camera to face away from the level, pointed to a shape on the horizon and said something like “you can climb that mountain,” I guess I believed him. “This is all playable terrain,” he added, gesturing to what I now know to be little more than a backdrop.

This feels like one of the most audacious lies I have encountered in my time covering games. Its audacious because the person who delivered it must have been completely aware that, not only was that not playable terrain, but that there was no plan to ever make it into playable terrain. It was also an oddly unnecessary lie; the game was impressive enough as it was, why not let people assume that this beautiful vista is theirs to explore? Why lie? It’s almost as if the demonstrator was operating on autopilot, cracking out the age-old PR line of “see that mountain, you can climb it!”—a line that has become a kind of running joke. Or perhaps that was just the atmosphere surrounding Destiny at the time; that it could be unbelievably vast, beautiful and filled with promise.

I had forgotten about much of this before the release of Destiny’s most recent, and perhaps final expansion, Rise of Iron. Structured around the Iron Lords, the strangely medieval-themed band of warriors that predated the player’s guardians, it is the backward-facing bookend to two years of Destiny grind. Consisting of a handful of missions laid out in a slight campaign, a new area to patrol, another more truncated raid and the usual handful of multiplayer maps, loot and items; it is a slimmer package than last year’s The Taken King, though it imitates much of the same structures. There is the Archon’s Forge, an analog to the group battles of The Taken King’s Court of Oryx, as well as a set of collectibles linked to lore, much like the Books of Sorrow. However, unlike The Taken King, whose infusion of narrative into every activity and sense of mystery invigorated Destiny, Rise of Iron has the feeling of being a dulling second run for these ideas, less interesting and more dysfunctional than before.

the bitter cherry on top of that year of dangling plot threads

That idea of a return seems central to Rise of Iron as it cack-handedly attempts to gather together two years of u-turns, revisions, confusion, and frustration into a legacy. The first mission in Rise of Iron, for example, has you climbing a mountain, one tellingly situated in the general area indicated by the host during that E3 demonstration more than two years ago. It’s hard to tell if this an ornate in-joke, an attempt at reparation, or a thoughtless coincidence, but looking back at the game’s history it’s quite possible that it might be all three. Being a regular Destiny player over the game’s life up to this point has meant watching as Bungie tried to hammer systems unfit for their purpose into some kind of shape, struggle with providing enough for its eager players to do, and roll out “quality of life” updates that exchanged one thankless grind for another. When The Taken King released last year, I called it their “grand correction,” an expansion that seemed like Bungie finally getting hold of what Destiny was, and starting to move this tanker-like behemoth against the inertia, turning it in the right direction. I also predicted that the year ahead would be a tough one for Destiny post-The Taken King, with a need to capitalize the plot lines and systems it set up, to make the most of this renewed sense of direction. What I hadn’t predicted was that Bungie would near-abandon Destiny over the next year, to be run by a skeleton crew with the absurd objective of treading water for an entire year.

This skeleton crew, the “Live Team,” collapsed the progress made in The Taken King with a series of empty fan-baiting events. The Sparrow Racing League brought Wipeout-lite racing to a game that didn’t need it, and the Halloween themed Festival of the Lost and the totally misjudged Valentine’s Day tie-in Crimson Days provided empty scavenger hunts wiped clean of any narrative implications, plot-lines, or lore. It was as if Destiny was masquerading as an MMORPG, like World of Warcraft (2004) or Guild Wars (2005), offering the same easter egg-like events but without the core of a rewarding, rich world to place them over. Beneath this tacky sheen Destiny festered, its player counts tumbling as content grind became overwhelming. What was supposed to be a return to glory, heralded by The Taken King, became a march of attrition, as Bungie struggled to trickle out the bare minimum amount of content players needed to stay interested. Perhaps that was because, after the clear success of The Taken King, Bungie instantly isolated its core team (headed by two of the remaining Bungie veterans not wiped out by the studio’s painful process of birthing Destiny into the world—Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy) and set them to work on next year’s worst-kept secret, Destiny 2.

Rise of Iron is the bitter cherry on top of that year of dangling plot threads and empty experiences. It takes nostalgia as its refuge, attempting to gather up the last positive feelings players have towards Destiny and weaponize them. One quest sees you gathering the pieces of the Gjallarhorn, the exotic rocket launcher that, when sold by the merchant Xur in 2015, sent the fanbase into a frenzy. A new version of the first strike mission you encounter, “The Devil’s Lair,”  has a fan’s heavy metal cover of the theme over the boss fight. Another has you rebuild the first gun you ever received in the game, the Khvostov, by gathering pieces across a changed version of the opening areas to the game. This quest ends with your Ghost companion asking you to take in the view with him, delivering this saccharine monologue:

“On the inside, I’d always known who you were and that together, we could be something more. When you think about everything we’ve seen, everything we’ve done I feel like I’ve made the right choice.”

Even if these could be construed as affectionate touches from a studio to its fanbase, this territory feels so worn out by now that these moments only instill a sense of being emotionally manipulated. It perhaps doesn’t help that Ghost doesn’t even have the same voice actor as he did when we started, or that most players have clocked so many playthroughs of the Sepiks Prime boss fight that it is little more than a series of audio-visual cues leading to a loot drop. But Rise of Iron isn’t interested in these experiences, or in charting the true history of Destiny. It merely seeks to keep its fanbase ticking over, to salvage as much good will as possible for that final push towards Destiny 2.

it almost tricked me into believing

If this sounds overtly cynical, perhaps it’s because Rise of Iron, rather than reminding me of days of glory, has instead reminded me of all the ways in which Destiny’s incoherence has undermined its ambition. We might start with that mountain comment, but we could just as easily point to Rise of Iron’s mention of Rasputin, the AI warmind, whose plot was severed in the original campaign and despite teases in subsequent expansions, remains lost in reams of nonsensical suggestion. Or we might turn to the new patrol area, The Plaguelands, which inadvisably ditches the density and tight design of The Taken King’s space dungeon, and returns to the empty, limited spaces of the original game’s patrols, filled with repeated enemy groupings and little else. Even the campaign, headed by Lord Saladin and his unremarkable scout Shiro-4, seems to return to the days when Destiny was portentous, humorless, and run through with a streak of military dullness that discolored its beautiful space-opera worlds. The voice acting and writing may be the worst Destiny has offered so far, without even the comical absurdity of “that wizard came from the moon!” or “I don’t even have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain.” It’s not that Rise of Iron’s “knights of the round table” meets self-replicating machines idea doesn’t have potential; it’s that its execution is so without humor, energy, or passion.

Clayton Purdom’s 2014 review of Destiny was titled “I Still Believe in Destiny.” Even now, belief feels like an important part of being a Destiny player. Destiny is a game that blends the optimism of its music, of its narrative, of its space-opera setting with the seemingly unending optimism of its players. Even in its worst missteps, it has always contained a strange grain of hope, the sense that it could be something special if it could wrestle itself free from the convolution of its systems, narrative, and economy, and ascend to something greater. I still hold some of that belief, but more and more I can only see Destiny as something that is purposefully tunneling deeper into that convolution, wrapping itself in ever increasing layers of dysfunctional economics, broken grinds, and fragments of storyline. Perhaps Destiny 2 will be its chance to start anew, to clean the slate of all this mess, yet the fact that I am suggesting such a thing only points to the hold the game’s “ever-forward” philosophy has on its players. Rise of Iron turns to a fictional past in the hope of finding the energy to drive towards this bright future, but in doing so it only highlights the instability of its foundations.

In a detail that I can only laugh at, my most enjoyable time spent with Rise of Iron was in fact spent climbing a mountain. The expansion’s new social space, Felwinter Peak, has a hidden route of precarious rocks that can take players to a hidden, higher summit. I must have spent nearly an hour wrestling with the game’s bizarre and broken jump, tumbling down the mountain to repeated deaths in a comical fashion alongside a handful of strangers. It was so unexpected, so surprising that it ignited something in me, something that found satisfaction in breaking out of the straitjacket of the game’s grind and doing something that felt like breaking the game. Invisible walls are so prevalent and disappointing in Destiny, and so to seemingly pass through one on an ascent to an unknown peak felt new and exciting. I eventually made it to the top, and, standing by a fire on a small rock shelf, I looked over the landscape in all its beauty, snowblown and windswept, dappled by clouded sun and glowing with the fires of some dark project. It was just a backdrop, a suggestion of a place that will never be fully realized. But it almost tricked me into believing, into hoping that one day I might go down there, into the valley and find what I have spent all these hours looking for.

Though, I am starting to wonder if I, or Bungie, would know what that looked like, even if we found it.

For more about Kill Screen’s ratings system and review policy, click here.

The post Destiny: Rise of Iron has learned nothing appeared first on Kill Screen.

Vienna Automobile Society makes a puzzle out of racing cars next year

The racing line is perhaps one of the most crucial aspect of motorsports. Carefully modulating speed and direction to take a corner optimally is key to shaving precious seconds and fractions of a second from lap times. Cornering strategy and track condition and vehicle limits are linked in that moment of driving precision.

Royal Polygon understands the importance of the racing line. The studio’s upcoming arcade racer-puzzler hybrid Vienna Automobile Society takes that moment, the careful navigation of the corner apex, and crafts a minimalist test of reflexes and fast-paced planning around it. It’s come a little way since we last saw it, and is now up on Steam Greenlight with a new trailer. Oh, and Royal Polygon has announced that the game will be out sometime next year, too.

In some ways, Vienna Automobile Society didn’t have to be about cars. The same concept could translate to sprinters on a track, or even chariots in a arena (as seen in Slitherine’s Quadriga and its management of cornering). But Vienna’s use of cars and classic formula racing acts as an easily understood visualization of its mechanics, as you change gears and drag your vehicle to adjust its racing line.

it’s an abstraction of racing

These simplified controls shift the focus from the moment-to-moment thrill of driving to looking ahead and planning your approach of each corner, how your speed and angle in the turn will influence your car at the next corner and beyond. By design, it’s an abstraction of racing.

“Vienna Automobile Society is not a game about driving a perfectly simulated car, it is a game that tries to distill the high-level concepts of circuit racing,”  said creator Nic Tringali in a recent blog post regarding the game’s design philosophy. “I’ve made a huge number of abstractions in order for those concepts to be communicated to people who don’t know how tire sidewall flexing and graining can impact the grip as it goes around a fast Eau Rouge or Piscine, but can see how taking a corner wide or shallow lets you overtake the person in front.”

Overtaking, cornering, speed. Those are the concepts one needs to understand to master Vienna Automobile Society, in your races against other players both online and locally. By stripping formula racing to its most basic form, Royal Polygon plans to deliver a racer where how well you understand and predict the track is the means to come in first place rather than how well you drive.

Vienna Automobile Society is coming to Windows and Mac early next year. More details can be found on the game’s site and development blog.

The post Vienna Automobile Society makes a puzzle out of racing cars next year appeared first on Kill Screen.

Social Interaction Trainer will help you in life’s awkward moments

Don’t know how to socially interact? That’s okay. Neither do I. And I suspect there are lots of us, too—the ones who always respond “you, too” after the movie theater ticket taker tells us to enjoy our movies; the party-goers who’d rather sit on the couch and pet cats than talk to other guests; those of us who stare at the ground instead of making eye contact with folks we know at the grocery store. Hell, let it be known: in kindergarten, I peed my pants standing at my desk because my teacher didn’t see me raising my hand to ask to use the restroom. (We were doing stretching exercises for some reason, so everyone looked like they were raising their hand.)

Here’s to hoping that creator Ryan Jake Lambourn has addressed those sorts of situations in Social Interaction Trainer, due out on November 4th. Initially created as part of the IndiesvsPewdiepie game jam, a smaller version of Social Interaction Trainer was released in 2014. Since then, Lambourn has added a bunch more terrible situations for his players to get through—job interviews, funerals, meeting parents. He’s kept in the classics, too—navigating the urinal, talking to cashiers, romancing a lover.

I peed my pants standing at my desk

Much of the game is based on the character’s eye movements. For instance, in the urinal level, you’re not to look at the other person standing beside you. On your date, you can make things seriously awkward by staring too much at your potential partner, or by not looking at them at all. It’s a balancing act of non-verbal communication. And the game’s not meant to be totally serious, though. Speaking to me, Lambourn said the game’s meant to show you that you can’t always worry about “losing” social interactions. “If there’s a real world takeaway,” Lambourn said, “it’s that you can’t take everything so seriously.”

Social Interaction Trainer is here to remind us all that we all have moments that will keep us up nights for years after they’ve happened. I’m still thinking about that pee incident, y’all. Social Interaction Trainer was created so that we can all cringe together.

Social Interaction Trainer’s full release is scheduled for November 4, but there’s a pre-release version available for Windows PC on itch.io now.

The post Social Interaction Trainer will help you in life’s awkward moments appeared first on Kill Screen.

No Man’s Sky and the trickiness of advertising a procedurally generated game

No Man’s Sky has been knocked by players since its release for false promises—advertisements featuring fighting factions, developer interviews that discuss rare occasions where players can meet on distant planets (which has seemingly been disproven), and more. As a result, Sean Murray—the public face of Hello Games—has become a Molyneux-esque icon, a figurehead for what some perceive as the perpetuation of misleading advertising in videogames.

These grievances were realized in a series of complaints to the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) over the past couple of months. But nothing came of them until now. Last week, those complaints were answered by the UK-based organization, which began an investigation into the storefront for Hello Games’s procedurally-generated space sim.

proving these advertised claims as false isn’t so easy

The specific issues the ASA has with Hello Games (as listed in a Reddit post) are in discrepancies between the videos and screenshots posted on the Steam storefront and the final product. A lot of these complaints surround the three main characteristics of the game in general: the animals aren’t as varied, the structures aren’t as pictured, and the grand space battles don’t exist. But proving these advertised claims as false, as the ASA must seek to do, isn’t so easy in the case of No Man’s Sky.

As PC Gamer found out by talking to a bunch of lawyers on the matter, previous cases of false advertising in videogames have been easily proven as they dealt with “technical absolutes.” In the case of Killzone: Shadow Fall (2013), the marketing claim that the game ran in 1080p resolution was simply a case of collecting hard numbers. But to take that same approach with No Man’s Sky, the ASA would have to see every single part of the game’s procedurally generated universe of 18 quintillion planets, just to find out whether or not the images shown in trailers and screenshots weren’t reflected in the final game.

And even then, the ASA would have to take into consideration that those marketing materials were only showing the “ideal” results of the game’s systems. PC Gamer adds that no trailer or screenshots could possibly show the breadth of what the game offered and that the ASA has to accept that all procedurally generated content is inherently unpredictable. And so, according to the lawyers that PC Gamer spoke to, the most logical and likely approach to this investigation will be attempting to distinguish what’s possible and what’s a certainty in the game. If what was shown in the marketing materials is possible in No Man’s Sky, then Hello Games have done nothing wrong, but if the version of the game that was released doesn’t allow for those possibilities then there’s a potential issue.

No Man’s Sky’s perceived failings, both in terms of advertising and delivering on promises, have been made worse by a rabid fanbase that managed to reach a fever pitch on a game that had not been released. The No Man’s Sky subreddit became an oft-mocked locale where fans would gleefully talk about the game to end all games, talking up a game that did not exist in the final product, let alone in the potentially inflated advertisements. Looking at this, some of the lawyers that PC Gamer spoke to put some of the player complaints about the game down to misinterpretation of the marketing material. Another relevant note that’s made by the lawyers is that anything that Murray said in interviews and on Reddit aren’t considered forms of advertising, and should have no legal sway in the ASA’s decision.

h/t PC Gamer

The post No Man’s Sky and the trickiness of advertising a procedurally generated game appeared first on Kill Screen.

Guts and Glory is trying to kill you and your family

If you mixed MTV’s Jackass series with Bob Guccione’s Caligula (1980) film, and sprinkled a healthy dose of Super Meat Boy (2010) on top, there’s a good chance the result may be developer HakJak’s upcoming game Guts and Glory.

Recently launched on Kickstarter, Guts and Glory asks its players to do one thing: race to the finish line while “everything tries to kill you.” Giving you control of such characters as a father bicycling with his toddler or a family out in a car, traps such as guns, saws, ramps, and run-of-the-mill crashes stand in the way of success. If it sounds a lot like Happy Wheels (2010) then, yes, you aren’t wrong—this is essentially a 3D version of Happy Wheels.

more “extreme” gore settings

HakJak is currently looking to raise $30,000 USD via its crowdfunding campaign. At the time of writing, it has already secured over $14,000 with just under two weeks to go. While the game has already been confirmed for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and has a host of confirmed features, the creator is looking for additional funding to help it add things such as a level editor, more characters and levels, and more “extreme” gore settings—not that it’s currently lacking in the latter by any means.

Additionally, if the game continues to receive support, HakJak has expressed interest in adding features such as a 3D platformer-esque game mode, a deathmatch arena, and bus/taxi game mode where characters must pick up passengers and deliver them to their destinations with as little bloodshed as possible.

To give Guts and Glory a go, click here to try out its current alpha. HakJak plans to release an the game via Steam’s Early Access program in Spring of next year. The game’s Kickstarter campaign will last until October 16.



You can keep up with Guts and Glory by liking the game on Facebook or following HakJak on Twitter.

The post Guts and Glory is trying to kill you and your family appeared first on Kill Screen.

Meet my new friends: the 10,000 rats of Vermintide

Ubersreik is a beautiful city: the rain-slick cobblestone streets, the gothic towers stretching up into the night, the carpet of limbs from two hundred ratmen I just killed. It’s unsteady footing, way up here on this corpse pile, but I see a whole wave of them burbling up from the sewers ahead, so I’ve got to be on my way.

They have a startling amount of character, these guys. Some are naked, save for a ragged loincloth and a rusty butter knife or a sharpened stick. Others are covered in thick armor and tote six-foot-long halbreds—they’re a little harder to decapitate, but Mama Dwarf didn’t raise no quitters. Some inventive sorts seem to have stuck their metal weapons in a fire long enough to heat them to a red-hot glow. One charming fellow has a gun that he must wind like an old clock before it’s ready to fire.

I wave hello to my new friends, with my axe. A line drive worthy of Tiger Woods separates three heads from shoulders. Their bodies stumble around for a second afterwards, like butchered chickens. I’m a little sad to see them go, but there will be more where that came from. There always is.

I’m glad that their tunnels run deep and their hordes are without number or whatever, because I kind of love the rats of Vermintide. I’d hate to be bereft of them because of one greedy cleave too many. Like any relationship, it took some time to develop intimacy with the rodent horde. The shrieking and sniveling sounded like white noise at first, but, like a traveler embedded in a foreign country, I started to pick up bits of the lingo as I went forward. “Die, elf bitch!” was one of the first lines I actually parsed. It was nice to find out we carried some sort of notoriety when I made out “We kills they! Gets the reward!” Well, “I’m on fireeee!” sort of translates itself regardless of mother tongue.

I wave hello to my new friends, with my axe

I grew to love listening to their chatter, but learning to love killing them didn’t take much time at all. Sometimes, when I hit a ratman, he’d just fall apart like a Lego person, limbs and head and torso falling into a cute little pile on that ground. But the game is is big on fidelity in these corporeal matters, and will often render for me in beautiful detail just exactly how I’ve ruined any particular meat-vessel. The first time I thwocked a rat’s arm off with a downward chop of my axe, he just screamed at his stump until I brought it down on his main self next.

It’s delightful in a way that doesn’t really have anything to do with the gore, I think. Your strokes have a visible and immediate impact on the world you’re playing in, and the line of cause and effect is so clean—whack a vermin at neck level and get a severed head. Your input is enacted in the world so swiftly and specifically, fighting feels almost like a creative process. They’re the canvas, and I’ve got a very sharp paintbrush.

As much as all videogames tend to be internally referential, it’s hard to have a discussion of Vermintide without mentioning Valve’s 2008 zombie game Left 4 Dead, from which a tremendous amount of Vermintide’s basic systems are lifted. Every round is about going from point A to point B safely, managing your resources carefully, and dealing with both massive hordes and smaller detachments of enemies. I’m fairly certain even the bandage wrapping animation is the same. But hey, everyone needs role models, and if you’re going to pick a game to emulate, Left 4 Dead is a pretty good choice. Vermintide makes a lot of smart little changes and additions without altering anything big, for better or worse. The most notable improvement by far, as I hope I’ve made clear, is this game’s take on the innumerable foe.

The Skaven, which is the official name for the ratmen, are “chaos-born.” Whatever that means in-world, it’s the game’s way of telling me that I shouldn’t feel bad about rendering them to stew chunks. And they do seem to be asking for it, often, running in just as you’ve reloaded your blunderbuss or gotten a nice backswing prepped on your zweihander. But I’ve also seen them hesitate; after their first two ranks of brood-chums get chopped like a mixed salad, sometimes the Skaven stumble back, wanting to keep their blood inside their bodies a little longer. Separated from the pack, I’ve seen ratmen press themselves up against a wall, obviously terrified. That kind of vulnerability isn’t something I’m used to in games about mowing down waves of enemies. I’ve never seen a zombie confront its own mortality.

The titular vermin of Vermintide may come in a horde, but they’re all unique, in their weird, chittering way. It almost makes me feel bad about the carnage I’ve spent the last ten hours dealing out to them.

Then again, there will always be more.

For more about Kill Screen’s ratings system and review policy, click here.

The post Meet my new friends: the 10,000 rats of Vermintide appeared first on Kill Screen.

Get ready to prod GNOG’s monster heads in early 2017

Australian milk packaging from the ’80s, designer toys made from wood, illustrations of otherworldly science-fiction landscapes. These are the sorts of images you’ll find neatly organized on GNOG creator Samuel Boucher’s Pinterest board; the sort of things that he cites as inspiration for GNOG’s monster heads—most of which are almost done. After three years of work, GNOG is almost ready for release.

Yep, it’s been announced that, in early 2017, GNOG will be released on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR. And a Steam and iOS release will come soon after.

Until then, Boucher and his team at KO-OP will be refining the game. “We’re in the polishing phase right now, so we have the whole package and we’re just adding little effects and animations,” Boucher told me. “It’s really changed a lot [since we first started development.] I needed to learn 3D modeling to make the game. The first model looks really shitty and it eventually got better.”

Calling GNOG’s monster heads simply “better” is an understatement. They’re remarkably complex-looking, but still neatly packaged. Clean. (Looking back to the Pinterest board, it’s not a surprising aesthetic to see.) Calming. It’s an effect that will hopefully muffle the frustrating feelings of not being able to solve a puzzle. And if you’ve played puzzle games, you know you’ll likely feel it at least once, even in a game as enchanting as GNOG. Players will basically have to brute force puzzle solving in GNOG, pushing buttons and pulling levers, to see what everything does. “You don’t necessarily know what the goal is,” Boucher said, “but by playing with stuff you sort of learn, ‘oh, okay. I need to put that thing there. I need to rotate this.”

Curious players will succeed

Each monster head is its own contained puzzle. “It’s not like there’s a system and we expand and it’s ramping up in difficulty or something like that,” Boucher added. “We sort of need to start from scratch [in terms of teaching the player] for each level.” That’s not to say that nothing carries through, though. KO-OP had a “very limited” number of interactive features available in GNOG, so players will likely catch on to the game’s puzzle functionality.

Curious players will succeed. After all, that’s what the game is about. Curiosity and exploration. And toys—which, by the way, is somewhere Boucher would love to take the game one day. Creating physical toys based on GNOG, a la Nathan Jurevicus and Scarygirl (2012), would be a dream for Boucher. For now, it’ll stay a dream, though: “The upfront cost of it is so much,” he said. “Maybe one day if we get successful or we have a bunch of money.”

GNOG will be released in winter 2017 for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4. The game will also come to Steam, but a release window has not been announced. See more of it at the GNOG website.

The post Get ready to prod GNOG’s monster heads in early 2017 appeared first on Kill Screen.

The endearing and quiet adventure of Burly Men at Sea

This tale begins with a message in a bottle and its discovery by the Brothers Beard. The message reveals a map, a seemingly ordinary one of the area’s surroundings. Curious, the brothers set sail to a nearby village to ask about the map’s purpose. When they meet an old man who seems to know about it, he grins and leaves them with a puzzling message: “… it’s a worthwhile adventure that begins with the unknown. This map has tales yet to tell.”

This is the prelude to Burly Men at Sea, an adventure game made by Brooke and David Condolora, the married couple behind the studio Brain&Brain. In development since 2014, the game previously caught our attention due to its minimalist and adorable visuals topped with an intriguingly curious title. Finally released last week, Burly Men at Sea shows off Brain&Brain’s illustrative style of storytelling with influences ranging from Scandinavian folklore, Saul Bass’s Henri’s Walk to Paris (1962), and Star Trek (1966), among others.

it feels like you’re reading and watching an illustrated story book

The game itself is not so much about how you control these characters but rather the experience of seeing their adventures unfold. “This is a game about a group of people. But since it’s also a folktale, we’re trying to keep some distance between the player and the Brothers Beard,” explained David. “You don’t control the Brothers … while they do react to you and move, you’re never controlling a specific character …”

Limited by the choices you can make, you won’t be choosing what the brothers say or how they are portrayed. Unlike other adventure games featuring dialogue trees (allowing you to choose responses), the game sees characters going through scripted conversations revealing their personalities and moving the story along. “[This keeps] you from getting tired of clicking through options and prevent[s] you from reading the same dialogue more than once,” said David. “Conversations contain not only spoken dialogue, but description. This is intentional … [we want] a story-telling feel … you’re not playing as them, but you are telling their story.”

This storytelling feel weaves itself throughout the game to the extent that it feels like you’re reading and watching an illustrated story book. While there are limitations, when you do get to push and prod its world—by steering which adventures the brothers will inevitably face—Burly Men at Sea transforms into an experience where you’re also stepping inside the book itself. The delight comes from choosing where to go and then seeing how these stories play out.

Another way Burly Men at Sea differs from other adventure games is its “draggable vignette mechanic,” where you click and drag rather than point and click. It takes a little getting used to, but once you know how it all works, Burly Men at Sea grabs you in unexpected ways. What starts out as an ordinary day cascades into one adventure after another: be it with the brothers being swallowed by a humongous whale to a water race against the grim reaper with only barrels keeping the brothers afloat. With these encounters building on top of each other and gradually unraveling the world’s mysteries, the otherwise ordinary day becomes more and more extraordinary.

Described as a “quiet adventure,” the game is quiet only in the sense that it’s not dictated by a frenzied pace. You can take your time marveling at the surroundings, float along the sea, and be surprised by whatever awaits beyond the bend. As its core, the game is a celebration of adventuring, of facing the unknown, and of three ordinary burly men crafting a folktale of their own adventures. As explained by Brooke, Burly Men at Sea “explores the idea of adventure, not as some unattainable journey for hero types, but as the sort of experience anyone has by trying something out of the ordinary.”

Burly Men at Sea is available on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. For more information visit its website .

The post The endearing and quiet adventure of Burly Men at Sea appeared first on Kill Screen.

Against Crafting

Some videogames exist solely to allow us to make things: Minecraft (2009), LittleBigPlanet (2008), Super Mario Maker (2015). Many more games—too many more games—ask us to make things for no good reason. Crafting systems were once grafted-on additions to games already engorged with an excess of “features.” They have evolved; they have expanded; they have become sentient. They need to be stopped. This is a manifesto against them.

I. Crafting is boring, because it’s never more than a form of waiting

Crafting is spreadsheet management, data entry, Dilbert on a Monday as he looks for ways to use a stapler to kill himself. It requires no skill except recipe recollection (on the off chance that the recipe isn’t emblazoned prominently on the player’s HUD); it requires no resource except oceans of precious time, consumed in minute-sized chunks. It promises nothing except an exit from itself, holding better experiences at ransom. A videogame blacksmith is worse than any bridge troll.

Crafting is endless purgatory in No Man’s Sky: you have to craft everything, and craft constantly, before new horizons open to you, beckoning in their strangeness. Crafting turns Monster Hunter into my own personal hell. There are no levels to gain, no narrative developments to pursue. Besides monsters to hunt, there are only items to craft until you tire of crafting, or until they run out and must be crafted again.

Videogames always need ways to dilate themselves, to provide pacing between explosive moments: the long corridor before a boss fight; the panoramic silence before a brutal, agonistic descent. Crafting is not a good way to pause, precisely because it happens on the flat, dead plane of the pause screen, where materials like “iron ore” and “blue leaf” lie smugly in wait. It interrupts rather than interpolates, pulling you out of the rich sensory world of the diegesis and into a world of arbitrary, schematic abstraction.

People praise “deep” crafting systems as though being able to make 10,000 different versions of Leather Armor +1 were somehow inviting. These depths should be regarded with anxiety and terror.

II. Crafting is never about simulating actual craftsmanship

When was the last time you moved the control stick to carefully sand down the side of a canoe? When was the last time you released the trigger to align a needle and thread? When was the last time you felt any challenge—or satisfaction—in crafting itself, rather than the gathering of ingredients?

“Game design is a process of abstraction,” as Ian Bogost memorably put it. You can’t begrudge a game for abstracting a deeply material process that takes a lot of time into an incredibly immaterial—and immediate—virtualization. But everything that makes crafting crafting is not what crafting systems want to simulate. They’re not designed to make you feel like you’re making items; they’re designed to make you make items, to impede you ever-so-slightly with a middleman between “getting” and “using.” At their best they create tension: think of Joel in The Last of Us (2013), cobbling together a health pack—or, more literally, waiting for the bar to fill—in the middle of a room full of prowling zombies. But at their worst, and much more often, crafting systems create nothing except delay. They create a form of friction that is never physical, only temporal—never the feel of an object; only the feel of impediment.

There have been attempts to make crafting into ‘gameplay,’ introducing elements of risk, loss, timing, and skill into the process of making virtual items. This mostly happens in MMOs that want to make it possible to roleplay as an artisan. I remember the hardcore tanners, blacksmiths, and even cooks would spend whole days working the arcane systems of Final Fantasy XI (2002), hoping for better results under a full moon. In its worst—but still maybe more ambitious—incarnation, Final Fantasy XIV (2010) was designed to be a game, like Star Wars Galaxies (2003), where crafting and combat were equally complex and important experiences. Life is about making things as much as doing things, and there’s a lot of room for simulations of crafting in games that want to simulate life.

Most games don’t want to simulate life. And yet, they have crafting.

III. Crafting is a little bit satisfying, but that shouldn’t be enough

Finally collecting that one last elusive ingredient; hitting the ‘assemble’ button and seeing a new item pop into your inventory; hearing a canned sound, for the millionth time, that says you have something new—it all produces a dopamine rush. But it doesn’t produce wonder, fear, joy, sadness, anger. It doesn’t feel like a discovery, or a hard-won triumph, or a terrible mistake. It feels like an incremental, incidental nothing, like scratching an itch or eating a fry.

Some of us like to think that we pursue deeper, more complex pleasures than the nearly comatose Candy Crush-ers and Clash of Clan-ners at the airport. Crafting systems provide the same affective payoff—another completion; another checkbox—and beg the question of whether that payoff is the only thing we really want. Do we want games to make us feel things, to move us in complex and surprising ways, or do we want them to give us stuff to do?

Crafting systems turn one game into every other game; they are the faceless footsoldiers of a regime of homogeneity, a religion of systems. They turn play into the most deadening kind of work: the kind you neither rage against nor love with a passion; the kind you simply do, because it’s fine and it’s there.

IV. Where crafting is an attempt to simulate unalienated labor, it’s only more alienating

When Marx developed his theory of alienated labor in the 1840s, he was observing factory workers who had no emotional or existential connection to the things they made by the thousands, minute by minute, day by day. The problem hasn’t abated; if anything, it has intensified. We live in an age of infinitely-anonymous mass manufacturing and infinitely-obnoxious handicrafts—an age in which the production of most things is kept purposely out of view (e.g. Shenzhen), but the production of some things (e.g. handcrafted dog bowls made from repurposed pallet wood) is purposely in-your-face.

The controller in your hand is a commodity from nowhere. The videogame you play asks you to make a gun holster out of two humpback whale skins, because it’s the height of manliness not just to make your own shit out of animal parts, but to know where your upgrades come from. These two things, the reality and the fantasy, are deeply related. One begets the other. The problem is that making the holster is just another form of mass production, masquerading as meaningful labor. You have no attachment to that holster. Neither freedom nor necessity goes into the making of it; you do it because the game tells you to do it, as part of an endless and repetitive list of tasks.

The actual ‘making’ of that holster is obscured completely, placed beyond the frame of virtual experience, and the ingredients are completely arbitrary, determined from on high. “Humpback whale skin” could be “disco ball” for all you see of its actual shaping into gun-holster form—it could just as easily be “controller.” And all the feeling of individual self-actualization you might get from making it—this is my humpback-whale-skin holster, goddammit, and I made it from whales—is torpedoed from the beginning by the fact that there are so many more identical pirates out there, pressing A to make the holster happen. Games mass produce experiences that are supposed to feel singular: moments of heroism, of tenacity, of technocratic excellence. Nothing highlights this disjunction more than crafting.

V. Where crafting is an attempt to mimic survival, it only underscores our safety

There are two kinds of crafting systems in games: those that are geared toward excellence and those that are geared toward necessity. With the former, you craft because you want the best armor, weapons, consumables, etc. With the latter, you craft because crafting is the only way to stay alive in a harsh and commerce-less world. The former is common in RPGs; the latter is common in survival horror. And it must be said: the latter is never the most effective element of survival horror. In Resident Evil 4 (2005), you can make “Mixed Herbs” with various properties by combining herbs of different colors. This is not a source of tension. It’s a source of comfort, a way of giving the player a gift in a game already too generous with its items and upgrades.

https://killscreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/hJZ1JTS.mp4

“Displaced, neutralized, they are traces of a necessity that no longer need be met with forethought or ingenuity,” wrote the essayist Mark Greif in a polemic against exercise machines. He could just as easily have been describing crafting systems in videogames. They are the antithesis of dread and the enemy of the unknown, which too many games have abandoned in their pursuit of emotional regularity. When you reach a new planet in No Man’s Sky, you know hardly anything about it. But you know what you need to make. You begin to search, to scan, to collect, and the frenzy of activity transforms trepidation into comfort. Home is where the chores are.

VI. Crafting allows us to forget the dimensions of objects that have meaning

Objects are always embedded in contexts. They speak to the conditions of labor and class that produce them; they get transformed by the interpersonal webs they travel through; they are inscribed with memories and histories. A game itself can be meaningful precisely because of the baggage it carries around. Because of who gave it to you as a child, or who you played it with as an adult. Because of what happened in the background while you played it. Because it carries the essence of a different world within it, a home planet lost to time.

Items within games can have the same kind of weight. Uncharted is a series full of meaningless treasures, but Nathan Drake’s ring is something special—an heirloom, a burden, a link to the past. In a different way, no sword in Zelda is more significant than the sword you receive in the first Zelda, from an old man who simply says, “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.” The item is almost devoid of context—who is this guy, and why is he giving this sword to me? But it’s the only thing that comes between you and the unforgiving world. It becomes a kind of companion, as meaningful things always do.

Compare that to the Griffin Steel Sword you crafted from 1x Leather Scraps, 2x Steel Ingot, 1x Monster Brain, and 1x Monster Eye. Like all the other Griffin gear in The Witcher 3 (2015), it’s attached to the legend of an ancient hero, embedded in myth. But the fact that you have to craft it makes it all-too-ordinary. It becomes an assemblage of materials and stats, totally instrumental. It becomes a thing to throw away when you’re done with it, melted back down into virtual ingots. Crafting wants to give items meaningful context: this is a thing I “made” rather than a thing I found. But it only strips them naked.

VII. Crafting allows us to forget that games themselves are crafted

Like other, cuter attempts to mimic IRL textures and materials—Unraveled; Yoshi’s Woolly World (2015); LittleBigPlanet (2008); Kirby’s Epic Yarn (2010)—crafting betrays an anxiety about the virtuality of games in general. Those things are real. Games are not. Those things are authentic, handmade objects. Games are not. But games are always real, and it’s easy to forget that they’re also, always, objects. As Bogost has argued in his recent collection How to Talk About Videogames (2015), “We don’t watch or read games like we do cinema and novels and paintings, nor do we perform them like we might dance or football or Frisbee.” Games are aesthetic forms, but they are also “devices we operate.” It’s easy to forget their materiality largely because they contain things like crafting—because they feel like worlds rather than things.

Perhaps the only thing crafting has going for it is that it facilitates this amnesia: the universe of No Man’s Sky feels a bit more like a universe because you can take and make so many things within it. But what makes No Man’s Sky beguiling is that it’s a universe and an object at the same time. It’s a handmade experience despite the procedural generation of its terrain, and despite the crafting systems designed—always designed—to feel like another life. So many of its critics wanted the game to be “more” because the game itself invited, and still invites, expectations of totality. Crafting systems facilitate those expectations, and inevitably fail to meet them. They point at the inability of the game to have everything, to be a complete, livable world. They let us forget to treat the world as a piece of design, alive in its limitations as much as its expansiveness. They let us forget that the world of the game is a crafted object.

The post Against Crafting appeared first on Kill Screen.