Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 53

Things seen in Yakuza 6’s new trailer: crying babies, cat cafés, and lots of sushi

The sixth and final installment in the Yakuza franchise, titled Ryū ga Gotoku 6: Inochi no Uta (Like a Dragon 6: Poetry of Life) is looking to be a bigger, better caricature of itself. Yakuza 6 will bring the legend of Kazuma Kiryu to a close—but not without having a little fun first.

Where we last left Kazuma, he had just reconciled with Haruka. He fell in the snow, bleeding—the injuries sustained from the final battle appearing to have mortally wounded him. Kazuma, losing consciousness, said he had to “go back where everyone is waiting for me.” Whether this meant the afterlife with his fallen brothers, or in the theater square with the yakuza families, or even the Sunshine Orphanage, is left unclear. In an emotional scene, he regains consciousness, asking Haruka if he’s dreaming, to which she replies it’s not a dream. The ending of Yakuza 5 (2012) lead us to believe that Kazuma, after nearly dying, was ready to start over—to leave his dangerous lifestyle behind and reconnect with the things that matter most to him.

As it turns out, leaving behind a life of crime isn’t easy. Red Dead Redemption (2010) is proof of that. A recently released 20-minute trailer outlines what to expect from Poetry of Life. The game’s location has yet to be revealed, but it appears that it is yet another fictionalized Japanese city. For the first time, you’ll be able to explore it seamlessly. That’s right—Yakuza 6 has absolutely no loading screens.

Series creator Toshihiro Nagoshi feels this will deepen players’ experience, stating in a recent interview: “We’ve worked hard to make this game completely seamless. You can engage in the central adventure, get into battles, watch drama scenes, and go back to the adventure, all without any loading screens. Go into any building or any room or any floor without loading.”

building your own cat cafe

Much like Grand Theft Auto or Shenmue, the world of Yakuza is a lonely one, primarily defined by violence and loss. There’s grit to it that you can feel. For fear of being too dark, Sega has made sure you’ve got plenty to do to keep your mind off it. So, yes, there will be plenty of sidequests, lighthearted and bizarre, to shake things up.

Poetry of Life boasts an abundance of new activities that live up to its peculiar predecessors: scuba diving, busking, battling sharks, hitting the bar, chatting with cam girls, and, in a clear nod to the Neko Atsume (2014) craze—building your own cat cafe. An in-game arcade will feature playable versions (some two-player) of Sega classics: Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown (2010), Puyo Puyo (1991), Out Run (1986), Super Hang-On (1987), Space Harrier (1985) and Fantasy Zone (1986). Think of the possibilities: you can kick Akira’s ass, grab a beer, and scoop up a homeless cat seamlessly between missions. Maybe this is how Kazuma will escape the cycle of violence and crime that controls his life—by building a cat cafe empire.

Kazuma can also add “dad” to his repertoire: though the child may not be his, he’s tasked with taking care of Haruka’s son, Haruto. Yakuza 6 is the first in the series to use parenting as part of its repertoire. What this will add to the experience, only time will tell.

Elements that are core to the series, like open-world exploration, metahumor, and over-the-top fighting sequences will remain unchanged. The game’s main conflict revolves around an uprising in the Tojo clan that threatens to destroy everything Kazuma holds dear. In order to reform the clan and lead a normal life, he needs to fight one last time. Even if the game doesn’t close with an army of diseased cats quelling the Tojo rebellion, it’s safe to say that Yakuza’s swan song is shaping up to be a memorable experience.

Like a Dragon 6: Poetry of Life is a PS4 exclusive set to be released in Japan on December 8th, with no U.S. release date announced yet. A prequel to the series, Yakuza 0, arrives in the U.S. on January 24th for PS3 and PS4.

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A videogame to help you understand your body

Joseph Perry, also known as Wick, has a background in biology; in particular, he’s studied neurotransmitter triggers in frog brains. He’s particularly interested in biological neural networks called central pattern generators—a rhythmic output system responsible, in part, for many movement and breathing functions. “It’s an important concept for understanding any kind of behavior,” Perry told me, “but nitty-gritty brain stuff is usually treated like a black box.” That’s where Crescent Loom comes in.

“I’m hoping to pull back the curtain and show that some of the fundamental principles of the brain aren’t actually too hard to understand—and to engineer,” Perry added. Described as Kerbal Space Program (2015) crossed with Spore‘s (2008) cell stage, Crescent Loom allows players to rig up neurons to circuits, creating a little character that can dance across Crescent Loom‘s built-in obstacles.

“the next step is to weave the nervous system of your creature in order to control it”

There are three steps: create the body, wire the mind, and explore the world. Perry wanted to evoke the rocket-building system in Kerbal Space Program with players creating their creature’s body. Using a 2D editor, players can drag-and-drop body parts—from hinges to muscles—to create the creature’s structure.

For the brain, “the next step is to weave the nervous system of your creature in order to control it,” Perry said. “This may be as simple as connecting a keyboard button to a muscle: ‘when space is pressed, pull.'” After functions are applied, players will be able to explore an open-ended world with a variety of available objectives—all of which will unlock new body parts and types of neurons.

“Right now, the demo uses a criminally simplistic on/off switch for the neurons, but it would be possible to go down to the level of individual conductances across each section of cell membrane,” Perry said. “This would allow people to do cool things like copy the directional specificity of retinal starburst amacrine cells, which are able to figure out what direction light is coming from within a single dendritic arbor.”

Ultimately, though, Perry’s goal is to create a toolbox for those interested in learning about the “building blocks” of neural circuits that’s accurate and friendly enough to cultivate widespread understanding of how brains work. “I wouldn’t be surprised if people come up with solutions for neural control of movement that we haven’t yet discovered in nature,” he added.

A playable demo for Crescent Loom is available on the Wick.works website. Perry expects to launch a Kickstarter for the game in January.

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A trash game that you should definitely play

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Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor (Windows, Mac)
BY SUNDAE MONTH

Similar to how Viscera Cleanup Detail used the role of a janitor to make players question the presumptions of a violent space-faring hero, Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor shows a different side to the cosmic explorer’s life. Labeled an “anti-adventure,” you play as a janitor who relatably dreams of a bigger, brighter future. The world consists of a chaotic cityscape, where you must not only incinerate everyone’s garbage, but can also explore trading opportunities, quests, and dungeons. The game shines most as not only a menial task simulator, but as a tourist simulator, as you meet a host of unique characters that populate the planet. Despite its seemingly mundane conceit, the world of Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is bursting with color and activity.

Perfect for: Neat freaks, aliens, those humbly aspiring for something greater

Playtime: A few hours

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The Determination of China’s Independent Game Scene

At night, Shanghai transforms itself into a new city. Bars, restaurants, and small shops start to open in the alleyways and neon red lights begin to shine throughout China’s largest city. Its nightlife, as well as its economic growth, makes this city the best place to see how the country has changed. At the end of July each year, Shanghai also becomes the hub of the Chinese videogame scene for one week. China Joy, the largest consumer and business game show in Asia, opens its doors for people from all over the world who arrive to try to understand what’s happening in China. However, there is another side to China Joy, far away from the spectacle of the show floor. Tonight, 30 minutes away from the city center, dozens of independent game makers from all over China are gathered at Indie Light, the first independent game bar in Shanghai.

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The independent game scene in China has been dormant for years, shadowed by the tidal wave of free-to-play games and the ban of games consoles in the country that lasted from 2000 until 2015. During that period of time, when no one could no longer buy a console legally in China, online free-to-play games for PC were the most common way to play in the country, and Chinese companies like Tencent and NetEase saw an opportunity to bring massive social games that didn’t require high system-requirements. Games like League of Legends (2009), CrossFire (2007), and Westward Journey Online (2001) were some of the most played titles at internet cafés, becoming the face of videogames in China for years to come. With the growth of mobile games in the early 2010s, the free-to-play model was then used and optimized for mobile platforms, especially in genres like MMORPGs and MOBAs.

this could be the end of publishing mobile games independently

Mobile became the new way to play in China, and so features like auto-play and player-vs-player combat—and, less predictably, storylines based on the Three Kingdom era (AD 220-280)—became the norm. China’s internal mobile game market was large enough to become the most valuable in the world by 2016, and is a major factor as to why Western game studios have been trying to decipher how it works recently. However, not even Supercell—the company behind Clash of Clans (2012), and who tops the charts on almost every other store in the world—has been able to challenge Chinese companies in the grossing ranks.

In terms of videogame development, although there have been numerous groups making games since the early 90s, visibility and distribution continues to be the biggest constraint in China. In past years, things have started to change, especially after Steam localized its services and started accepting local payment methods, as well as offering special prices for players living in China. At that point, because of the long tradition of free-to-play games and piracy, nobody thought that Chinese players would be willing to pay for games, and even less for independent games. But they did. Games like Monument Valley (2014) and This War of Mine (2014) have China as one of their biggest markets, showing that Chinese players are willing to pay for games, and through legal channels too.

That latter point is especially salient as China’s reputation for piracy has been a burden it carried for years, not only in videogames but in almost every type of goods. And with the birth of mobile distribution, hundreds of Android stores offered free downloads of premium games, exacerbating the issue. In that sense, putting a pricetag on a game distributed in China seemed an idea fated to fail. But, as with every other country, there are always people who are willing to pay for the value they receive. Making things easier, Steam and other digital stores offered games to China with a lower price than in other territories, and accepted local payments. Now that Chinese players were able to show a demand for more thoughtful games, and that they’d pay upfront for them, independent creators saw an audience waiting for them to deliver.

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Tony Xiong is one of the attendees of the party at Indie Light. He is one of the most influential local game critics and designers who got into independent games after playing Limbo (2010) for the first time. Xiong has been one of the witnesses of how independent games in China have evolved in the last 20 years. “The indie community has been booming since 2014, and attracts not only those who have been creating games silently, but also those who are now working in big companies and want to create their own games,” he said. He also mentions the rapid expansion of game jams in China as a catalyst for the growth of the community: “In the game jam hosted by indieACE in June, there were around 800 jammers in total, and five simultaneous events happening in Beijing, Shanghai, Guanghzou, Xiamen, and Chengdu.”

At Indie Light, there are at least 50 game makers and supporters of the Chinese independent scene, having drinks, eating food, and participating in a round of retro game soundtrack trivia. Xiong is hosting the contest and everyone seems to be having a good time. Outside the bar, game makers exchange their experiences on how they create their games from cities like Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Beijing. Although having never met before, they are by no means strangers, as they have been discussing for months on WeChat groups—the largest messaging app in China. As with a few others in attendance, the reason they are in Shanghai this week is not China Joy, as their games have nothing to do with the flash, bangs, and monetization systems of the games shown there; they are here because of Indie Play, the main independent games festival in China that will open the following day.

Simon Zhu has been supporting the independent scene for a decade. After being one of the organizers of GDC China and CGDC (China Game Developers Conference), he started to orchestrate Indie Play as a way to make independent game creators to meet at a single event. “In [the last] two years, I could feel there are more indies coming out, but the problem is they lack communication and even [those living] in [the same] city don’t know each other,” he said. This year, there are 40 games being showcased and Zhu managed to bring along international speakers like Rami Ismail (Vlambeer) and Patryk Grzeszczuk (11 bit studios,) as well as Akira Yamaoka for the event’s party. Indie Play feels like the Chinese IGF, where game makers meet each other and the people interested in their craft. This event also helps game makers ask for guidance and help, in a country where laws and procedures can change at any moment.

a community that supports its members

Some months ago, the Chinese government issued a new regulation that requires every mobile game to acquire the approval of a Chinese government agency before it’s released. If a game that’s already out doesn’t have this seal by October 1st of this year, it will be removed from the App Store and other Android stores. For big companies, this extra step is easily introduced to their standard procedures. But for smaller studios and individuals this could be the end of publishing mobile games independently in China due to the costs and delays they will suffer. On PC, the regulation is not enforced yet and Steam operates without problems, although that could change, as Wang Tears from indienova, the largest independent game site in China, said: “As a foreign company selling games from all over the world in China, Steam might encounter some regulation issues in the future.” Nobody knows if PC games will come next under the Chinese government’s hammer, but for now, digital distribution has enabled Chinese independent games to thrive. One example is Lost Castle, a local independent game created by Hunter Studio and published by Another Indie, which has sold more than 100,000 copies on Steam, showing other studios that “going indie” is possible in China.

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Candle Man is one of the games being showcased at Indie Play, it’s a puzzle exploration game in which the player controls a candle man who needs to light small candles scattered and hidden on each level. The team is also trying to add a narrative to the game and that has been its focus for the past few months. At the awards ceremony later that weekend, the game will win in the Best Game category. But for now, Gao Ming, the producer and designer of the game, is busy talking with players at his booth. He has been running his own studio for seven years in Beijing, after graduating from Tsinghua University where he studied arts and computer science. Candle Man will be his biggest game yet. Ming and his team have been working on the project for a year, since they made the first prototype during a Ludum Dare game jam. Now they are preparing its release for Xbox One at the end of 2016. “We need to make more games and learn more from the experience,” he said. “I think there is no quick path for Chinese indie developers.” Ming is one of the most known faces in the independent game scene in China, and due to that, the success of Candle Man could encourage more people to try and follow in his footsteps.

Another game at the Indie Play festival is Luna, a hand-drawn point and click adventure game being made by Lantern Studio, with three of its members living in Shanghai and one living in London. The game is based on an old animation project from one of the members, and they successfully launched a Kickstarter campaign early this year to fund it. Luna is a game that is being handcrafted in every detail, from each animation sequence to every puzzle design. At Indie Play, Luna won the award for Best Visual Art, but most importantly, the team received direct feedback from people who played the demo. Like other game creators in China, the team behind Luna knows that making games in China is harder than in other countries, but they are optimistic: “Chinese game business environment and policies are more strict for small indie developers than in other countries. But Chinese gamers are eager to see how our own games can represent our local culture and spirit,” one of them said. They are aiming to release the game in 2017. Meanwhile, other Chinese studios like Rocket Punch, who are working on Code: HARDCORE, are also turning to crowdfunding as a way to fund their projects.  

Indie Play seemed like the total opposite of China Joy, where all the big companies were showcasing their games and businessmen were having meetings at nearby hotels. The independent games are also on the other side of what Tony Xiong calls “capital games” and their creators. “They only know how to copy games that are popular in other countries and maximize their income by controlling the distribution channels and by using the ‘Skinner Box’ theory,” he explained. “They only treat games as a tool to make more capital gain, so I called them capital games.” Despite the uncertainty of the future and the dominance of the big players in the Chinese videogame landscape, the independent scene seems to have a bright future. Indie Play showed not only a handful of original and ambitious games that will come out in the next months or years but also a community that supports its members and that is ready to show its potential to the rest of the world.

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Photos courtesy IndiePlay

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Beglitched brings “cyberpink” to hacking games this October

It’s been over 20 years since Jonny Lee Miller screamed “hack the planet” as he’s bundled into a car after his arrest in the movie Hackers (1995). And yet our obsession with hacking hasn’t wavered a single iota. But it is changing. Slightly.

The world of fictionalized hacking has long been presented as a hard-edged world of infiltrating nodes, bouncing between servers, and mashing keys profusely to make progress bars move. This year’s Quadrilateral Cowboy encapsulated that fantasy with its loving recreation of analog technology and command prompts.

about insecurity, both in computers and ourselves as people

But Hexecutable’s hacking game, Beglitched, presents a different vision of hacking, and one that we now know is due to arrive on October 7th. Billed as a “cyberpink adventure,” Beglitched is … adorable? Yes, it’s a hacking game made in purple and pink, cute faces staring back at you as you shift its various nodes around.

In Beglitched, hacking is quite literally a magical affair often purported by internet archmagi. The best of these web-based wizards is the Glitch Witch, and you, the player, are her new apprentice. The game’s website states that the game is about insecurity, both in computers and ourselves as people. This takes the form of a series of puzzles for you to solve in a pastel world of abstracted computer processes.

As we’ve said about Beglitched before, it plays out like a mix of Minesweeper (1989) and a match-3 puzzle game, with the idea being to uncover hackers are hiding with the information you’re after. So, think Watch_Dogs (2014), but abstracted onto a grid, and then given a Tamagotchi makeover. Aiden Pearce, with his dull sweater and brown trenchcoat, could have done with a makeover himself anyway.

Check Beglitched’s website out here. Follow it on Greenlight to presumably get a notification when you can throw money at it. 

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Conduct a starlit conversation in a new videogame vignette

New game Friary Road takes place after everyone else has left the barbecue, when the coals are still warm and the stars are getting bright and you’ve had just enough beer to start thinking about how far away they are. It was made (in a day, though the jam deadline was a week) for the recent Fermi Paradox Jam, which asked game makers to consider this contradiction: if aliens are out there, and statistics say they are, why haven’t they contacted us? Many of the games take you on adventures in spaceships and have you confront the aliens about their absence or try to isolate the reason for the silence.

why does it seem like they’re alone?

Friary Road takes the opposite approach. Emphatically down to earth, it’s a short vignette of the most human of moments: looking up at the sky and asking questions. Civilizations have done it for centuries before now, weaving tales about the constellations and creating their own versions of truth about why the sky is dotted through with pinpricks of light. Now we have science and adamant belief systems, so the questions get more specific. How far away are they? What are they made of? What role do they play in the universe? And like the jam asks, why does it seem like they’re alone?

My own Friary Road moment was my first night in the mountains of Austria, when I was a quiet little exchange student who was still unaccustomed to the European sky. A life spent in Midwestern cities gives a very one-dimensional image of what night looks like—dark, dim, squinting to draw constellations through the light pollution. That night I dragged the duvet off the hostel bed and onto the balcony, and curled up underneath it with a friend who was in the same boat as I was. Part of it was the end of the night melancholy that lingers in smoldering barbecues and slumbering alpine towns everywhere. Part of it was just being 16. Anyway, I asked my friend if she would ever go to space and she said it was probably cold up there and it was like I had never seen the stars before.

Bo and Ao of Friary Road, they have the same conversation. Sure, it’s Britain instead of Austria; teenage confusion is replaced with reluctant anxiety; they actually found images in the sky instead of just plotting a hypothetical trajectory. But at the end of the night, in any corner of the world, when two people are alone and looking at the sky, the conversation is more or less the same.

Play Friary Road here and take your pick of all of the wonderful Fermi Paradox Jam entries on itch.io.

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Papers, Please parody takes aim at the downfall of video rental

The age of the video rental store is at a close. Blockbusters are the stuff of “remember when” photo essays and ghost towns; a blue and yellow sign of the times. Even independent stores that have long demanded patronage are closing their doors, murdered by Redbox and Netflix.

It is in this climate that a team of game makers asks: “Have you ever wanted to play Papers, Please! without the papers and with 100% more video rentals?”

should’ve chosen the Sandra Bullock comedy about pirates

Videos, Please takes on several elements of the game that it is clearly referencing: you are in a totalitarian government, you have mouths to feed, you must rent videos to save your family from starvation. The music speaks of videogame oppression, the colors sparse.

In its main point of difference, in Videos, Please you’re not the face of the bureaucracy behind the counter, but rather a customer. You must select from several videos (from “Bloc-Buster”), featuring a wide array of Hollywood stars and scenarios, to try and please as many of your family members as possible.

Why does your family starve if you choose the Ryan Gosling feature about birthdays when you should’ve chosen the Sandra Bullock comedy about pirates? The jackbooted video rental clerk says something about hope, but still demands you pick your videos in increasingly shortened amounts of time. Choose quickly and you all might survive this winter, comrade.

You can find Videos, Please on itch.io.

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A daddy-daughter stealth game about escaping a war-torn city

It goes without saying that sensationalized military conflict has long been a staple of the videogame landscape. From Contra (1987) to Halo 2 (2004), Modern Warfare (2007) to Bad Company (2008), the variety of titles that allow players to occupy the boots of a laconic lone shooter on foreign territory are innumerable. The number of games centered on the lives of bystanders caught in the crossfire? Not so many. Recent titles such as This War of Mine (2014) and Papers Please (2013) are a notable couple, panning the focus away from the bombs and bullets to ruminate on the human cost of living in a war zone.

holding Lily in his arms to keep her from harm’s way

Now there’s another on the way and it’s called Lily – Colors of Santa Luz. A graduate project from the Paris-based 3D animation school ISART Digital, Lily has players assume the role of Yvan—a father desperately trying to shepherd his young daughter to safety and keep her innocence intact. This is off the back of their once-vibrant home bring turned to ruins; it ensnared in the presence of a malicious occupying force. The story is told from the perspective of a 45-year-old Lily, recollecting the events of that defining day via the scrapbook of drawings and mementos the player collects amid their escape from Santa Luz.

The game’s beautiful Laika-esque art direction is one of the key traits that sets it apart from other stealth games. Forget gunmetal grays or wire-frame light trails, Lily is a palette of warm and vibrant hues framed by heavy shadows. The action itself will be familiar, however: Yvan’s breadth of abilities is limited to that of crouching to avert the line of sight of lumbering storm troopers, and holding Lily in his arms to keep her from harm’s way.

Decisions designed to stir the paternal instinct are what drive the story’s direction. Choices as seemingly inconsequential as putting a flower in your daughter’s hair or retrieving a stuffed animal take on a new weight when set against a war-torn city. All the while another, poignantly unspoken question lingers in the space between these actions: what do these choices amount to in the eyes of a child?

Lily – Colors of Santa Luz is available to download and play through itch.io

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Robert Yang’s latest game lets you stargaze with a space-loving dude

No Stars, Only Constellations, a new videogame by Robert Yang, with music by Liz Ryerson, was made as part of the Fermi Paradox Jam. Initially called Polaris (a Half-Life 2: Episode Two mod released in 2009), this standalone remake has players on a date with a dude who’s really into stargazing. An old Renaissance star chart is overlaid with the night’s sky, and the narrative moves forward as players glance towards certain constellations as your date speaks of them.

Estimates say there could be 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and an incredible number more in the wider universe. There are 500 billion billion sun-like stars, of which scientists say one percent could have Earth-like planets in their orbit. And there are more restrictions to consider beyond those. Ultimately, many believe that the sheer number of stars makes the probability of life very high.

“We always project our own ideas on people”

Still, we’ve yet to prove life on other planets. That’s where the Fermi paradox comes in. If life exists outside of Earth, why haven’t we been contacted yet? And why does it matter, anyway? “You can’t use science to justify why,” Yang told Kill Screen. “Instead, you have to appeal to a fantasy of aliens or space colonies. These are imaginary stories about space, much like constellations.”

“I took an astronomy class in college,” Yang said. “I thought learning about space was going to be really interesting, but I was surprised by how boring it was.” Yang is more interested in the idea of space, rather than space itself. Much of the game’s influence came from this idea, and its similarity toward people’s tendency to fall in love with the idea of a person; “It’s impossible to reach some sort of ‘pure person’—we always project our own ideas on people,” Yang added.

Greek pillars rise during the middle of No Stars, Only Constellations. The pillars move slowly—”below most players’ thresholds for noticing movement,” Yang said—as a way to invoke the history of Ancient Greek mythology; “the slow kind of old magic” that comes with studying space, Yang wrote in a post. The Greek columns add another element that quietly demands attention from the player. Yang is asking the question of what deserves to be noticed; what’s important enough to pay attention to?

“Civilizations have been telling stories about the sky for thousands of years, and maybe the Fermi Paradox is just the newest type of constellation,” Yang said, “the latest useful idea to help us decide which stars to notice and which to ignore.”

Play No Stars, Only Constellations on itch.io. More on Robert Yang’s work can be found on his website.

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The Tomorrow Children would fail a history exam

The Cold War refuses to separate itself from the West’s understanding of the Soviet Union. Decades of apocalyptic rivalry have painted its immensely diverse citizenry as, by turns, dispassionate murderers or buffoonish caricatures. On one hand is Stalin, casually signing the paperwork that ordered the mass killings and deportations of the Great Purge; on the other are the workers and soldiers of the Union, imagined as simple-minded enough to follow the suicidal directives of their leaders. One of the most staggeringly unusual empires in human history has, in popular consciousness, been watered down to a collection of non-thinking laborers, power-hungry politicians, and the looming violence of the immense anthro-mechanical structure their combination created.    

In truth, the Soviet Union was an amorphous and complex phenomenon. Existing for nearly the entirety of the 20th century, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was not a static political entity. Though based in Russia, it was multinational; while it was forged in Bolshevik implementation of Marxist thought, its politics changed with time. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and formal solidification of power in 1922 offered a utopian replacement for an increasingly stifling autocracy. Gorbachev’s introduction of perestroika and glasnost offered concessions to the perversions of Stalinist rule and an end to the Cold War. From its beginnings to the time of its late 1991 dissolution, the USSR was always in the process of transforming both itself and its citizens.

Its aesthetic is remarkably unsubtle

Videogames have never tried particularly hard to portray the complexity of Soviet history. The best attempts to date tackle either the specifics of its soul-crushing bureaucracy (Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please) or generalized tales of cultural identity in an Eastern Europe still reeling from decades of Communist rule (4A Games’s Metro series).   

The Tomorrow Children is both broader and more directed than what’s come before. The player is a semi-human “projection clone” who lives in a sprawling wasteland created after a failed 1960s experiment. The idea was to “meld all human minds into one global consciousness,” but what happened was the annihilation of the world. Explicitly science fiction in premise, then, the game’s point of reference is an imagined, static vision of the USSR through the lens of a capitalist propagandist. Its aesthetic is remarkably unsubtle. The player character is a living doll—apple cheeks and bright blue Bambi eyes; a Slavic stereotype. Her various outfits are culled from the imagery of Soviet cosmonauts, revolutionary soldiers, and threadbare intellectuals. The non-playable characters are similarly cartoonish, herds of ageless peasants watering plants with slack, bovine expressions while stiff-backed policemen patrol the streets, monitoring their territory and quick to issue ominous threats urging the player to get back to work.   

The towns in which the player resides quickly become filled with giant propaganda posters in faux-Cyrillic text, blocky machines with ugly, intricate inner workings, and space-age hover cars. Signs say “Public Enemy” next to a picture of a dollar sign; fake newspapers are emblazoned with “Our Great Motherland”; red and yellow abound on flags and monuments—the game does everything short of emblazoning the hammer and sickle on its surfaces (itself, like the characters’ pseudo-Russian babble, a strange, maybe cautious point of departure among so many precise references).

For a little while, it’s possible to think The Tomorrow Children’s look is in service to a satire. The goal, an endlessly repeating five-year plan that resets upon completion, is to build up a given town’s population and increase its productivity alongside other real players. Coming to grips with the process for gathering resources, buying new equipment, and upgrading the town’s infrastructure is a maze of new terminology that mimics the bureaucratic labyrinth of Soviet officialdom. Blatantly unfriendly design choices—a travel system that requires long waits for slow-moving buses; tools that break after too-few uses; having to wait in line to access any public building—show that The Tomorrow Children is willing to prioritize thematic intent over convenience.

This thread continues in the relationship between real-world capital and the game itself. Notably, The Tomorrow Children is “free to play,” which is in quotations because, of course, there’s always a catch. As in other games of its type, anyone can download The Tomorrow Children, but those willing to spend a bit of their actual money can buy an advantage over their peers. The game’s real-money currency is earned more slowly than the ration coupons meted out regularly, and can be used to bypass the requisite (agonizing) sliding block puzzles that must be solved before crafting any of the town’s shared vehicles, armaments, and infrastructure. Cheekily, those who purchase access to the game before its full, free release automatically earn “bourgeois” status, too, which allows them to use technology that “proletarian” players must work toward.

never quite manages to form any kind of statement to justify itself

The most charitable reading is that these systems are commentary. Everyone gets basic entry to the game, but spending extra allows a player to overcome obstacles and further their place in the virtual society. But, like the Red Scare visual design, the player has to be pretty forgiving to imagine that The Tomorrow Children is attempting anything other than a shallow recreation.

The only real subtle touch—as subtle as skyscraper-sized metaphors can be—is the presence of giant monsters that lumber around the endless mist surrounding the player’s town. When they turn their attention to the group settlement, their enormous, Godzilla-like bodies offer both threat and resource. The monsters, always present but often indifferent, eventually decide to stomp through town, reducing public works and housing to flaming, useless husks. Once shot down with emplaced guns, their bodies become temporary mines, ready to be pick-axed apart into valuable resources. Between the safety of the player’s home and the islands of monster corpses that hold important wood, coal, and metal, the world is a swirling white void that damages and eventually kills with brief exposure.

Alone among the context-free pastiche of the rest of the game, The Tomorrow Children makes reference to the Soviet Union’s political isolation with these monsters—its view of the rest of the world as both a constant threat to its survival but an opportunity, too, for expansion. Working with a small army of fellow players to bring down one of the beasts, mining its guts with an ad-hoc assembly line of miners and cargo haulers, is the closest the game comes to capturing something more than superficial. It portrays collectivism as more than a purely negative system. Elsewhere, having to share collected resources means some jerk might build an unnecessary structure or fail to pull their weight generating energy for the town. Still, even as it grasps toward making its depiction of Soviet life felt rather than simply reproduced, The Tomorrow Children never quite manages to form any kind of statement to justify itself.

Videogames are mostly bad at portraying history, understanding well how to capture what a period of time might have looked or sounded like while failing to offer a reason for the player to care that it happened at all. Too often, the past is used as exotic set dressing for stories that could very well take place at any time at all. In a bad entry to Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed, the audience is presented with a sort of time porridge in which the exact same gunfights, chase scenes, and story arcs they might enjoy in a sci-fi thriller or current-day action game are grafted onto the battlefields of Second World War France or Victorian-era England, with no regard for the culture and sociology of their chosen era.

The Tomorrow Children is yet another game in this mold, eager to replicate an era without anything in particular to say about what it meant. It teaches very little other than that the Soviet Union was a place where communal governance was both a good and bad thing—that everyday tasks were more difficult and that propaganda masked the kind of hypocrisy where money and status still mattered an awful lot despite official egalitarianism. This is not enlightening and the experience of engaging with The Tomorrow Children’s abstracted recreation of these phenomena does not impart any greater lesson. In the end, it’s kitsch. It’s a Soviet-themed Lego set that renders a monumental socio-political phenomenon into little else but a toy. And an exceptionally boring one at that. This would all be harmless enough if the aesthetic it borrowed wasn’t one of paranoid violence and a complex unraveling of a utopian dream for all humanity, but, that’s what the USSR was. The waxen, dull-eyed and stiff-limbed toys that fill The Tomorrow Children are not representatives of the world they’re drawn from. They’re the outward face of the kind of malign simplification that characterized the Cold War.

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