Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 68

Zoe Quinn’s making an erotic-comedy FMV game, includes sexy unicorns

Chocolate milk cowboys. Velociraptor billionaires. Unicorn butt cops. Bigfoot pirates. These creations are the basis for the works of erotic novelist Chuck Tingle. “The Tingler”—the name Chuck gives to his erotic books—are also the foundation for the newest game from Depression Quest (2013) creator Zoe Quinn.

What type of game do you make when you’re inspired by the works of a man who wrote the sensationally titled Pounded By the Pound: Turned Gay by the Socioeconomic Implications of Britain Leaving the European Union, or the Hugo-award-nominated Space Raptor Butt Invasion? An FMV game, naturally.

You can’t just Tingle the body. You’ve got to Tingle the soul.

Tentatively titled “Project Tingler” while they await the inspiration that will surely be needed to craft a Tingle-esque title, the FMV project is an erotic comedy dating sim. Early footage shown in a Vice mini-doc shows sexy unicorns and Bigfoots galore, so it seems in keeping with the source material.

The game is meant to capture the goofiness of the high-cheese FMV genre, as well as the sensual absurdity of Tingle’s own works. Tingles works are best known for their bombastic covers featuring, usually, a well-oiled male chest with a unicorn or ape head. They’re also known for their bizarre subject matter—including characters being pounded by living objects, the latest news item, or imaginary creatures. They’re earnest and a bit silly—the perfect fodder for the FMV genre. As Quinn says in a direction to an actor set to don the outfit of a Bigfoot pirate: “You can’t just Tingle the body. You’ve got to Tingle the soul.”

The game is serving as a prototype for a larger FMV title that Zoe Quinn and her team is working on called FailState. Both FailState and the aforementioned Tingler are related in terms of camp, but Quinn stresses that the larger project is also a “FMV love letter to passionate failure.”

Will Project Tingler feature any Handsome Sentient Food? Will we all be slammed sexually by our own concept of linear time? What is FailState? Only time will tell. For now all we know is that Love is Real.

Images below are concept art for FailState.

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The future of romance games is queer

Human culture exists because of sexual intercourse. From the reign of Cleopatra, to the formation of the Church of England, to the Stonewall riots, human experiences of love and sex make up the fabric of our history. Even if we try to narrow our gaze to media, the bright red handprint of sex is everywhere in the history of almost all mediums. There are cave paintings depicting sexual intercourse, and ancient sculpture frequently represented people with massive pendulous breasts and club-like penises. Some of the first handmade and distributed mini-comics (known as Tijuana Bibles) were porn-parodying popular media. The romance of Helen of Troy was the catalyst to one of the greatest mythological epics in history, the Trojan War. Art emulates life—and life has an awful lot of sex. Videogames are, of course, no exception to this.

The earliest erotic videogame, Softporn Adventure (1981), was a text adventure for the Apple II with far-reaching impact. The first entry in the Leisure Suit Larry series, recently remade in 2013, was said to be a graphic adaptation of Softporn Adventure. Some of videogames’ first controversies came from these early games with sexual content, such as Custer’s Revenge (1982), which depicted General Custer raping a Native American woman. The 1990s saw the rise of eroge (a portmanteau of erotic and game) games in Japan, culminating with Leaf’s To Heart (1997), a game so popular that its music could be found in karaoke bars across the country. Eroge developed into romantic visual novels, a new kind of game altogether. The development of erotic games stirred up controversy, but it also created classics, and whole new genres.

the bright red handprint of sex is everywhere

Sex and romance have continued throughout the years to be twisted up into the fabric of games. The infamous Hot Coffee mod from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) may come to mind first for sex in games, mostly because of the controversy it induced. But sex and romance flourished before and beyond. From the sex mini-game in God of War (2005), to its place in the simulation of life in The Sims (2000), to the ever-present marriage mechanic in Harvest Moon (1996-2015), and the many explicit porn games across the internet, sex is here to stay. So what is the next step for sex and romance in videogames?

The answer might be found in queer games. As LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) people make gains in civil rights and acceptance, they are increasingly being represented within games, and are creating games to represent themselves. Although there are exceptions, and those exceptions are increasing, the vast majority of sex and romance in games are straight. Many of the games that aren’t exclusively straight turn out like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), wherein you can have a partner of any gender, but the NPCs don’t seem to have preference. It’s as if everyone is queer—but this isn’t really acknowledged or reflected in the fabric of the game outside of the marriage mechanic.

Although being able to marry characters of any gender is a great step forward, that’s not what I mean when I say queer games. I mean games that are explicitly, in full, or in part, about relationships between LGBTQ individuals. It’s an important distinction. Games with characters that break the cultural norms of gender and sexuality are already complicating our ideas of what romance and sex can be, and perhaps because of this they are able to complicate the mechanics of sex and romance further than most. In gender and LGBTQ theory, to queer something is to break it out from the rigid expectations of sex, gender, and sexuality. Queer games, in some ways, queer the mechanics of romance and sex. By virtue of already breaking barriers, they are in a different space; they are able to go further and question traditional mechanics of sexuality.

The Mass Effect series can be read as queer simply by its inclusion of the Asari, a mono-gendered race (“male and female have no meaning”) that can have sex with anyone, regardless of gender or race. When played in a culture with strict gender expectations, and when not adhering to the binary often presents serious risks, the Asari race is revolutionary. Not simply because they are mono-gendered, but because they are essentially the strongest beings in the galaxy. They were the first to settle the place where all sentient species now gather and work together. They are viewed as peacekeepers and the wisest of all the species. Some may argue that the Asari are still women—they use ‘she’ pronouns, and call their leaders matriarchs after all. And their sexual characteristics are clearly modeled after human women—isn’t their design just another sexy blue alien lady? These are fair criticisms, as these fictional aliens can’t be separated from the real humans who made them, and their culture. But if we imagine them within the universe of the game, they may be using female terminology because that’s what other species understand. If male and female truly has no meaning to them, ‘she’ could mean the same thing as ‘they’. Matriarch could mean the same as ruler. Alternatively, the pronouns they use in their language may just not be translatable. To understand the Asari in this way is to accept a species that has no gender binary, and their place in the galaxy affirms that this significant break away from our expectations has done their society no harm. By allowing the player to romance and have sex with an Asari, Mass Effect is asking players to completely accept beings outside the gender binary as legitimate and worthy of respect.

a species that has no gender binary

Mass Effect also allows players to enter into straight and queer relationships with other humans, and straight relationships with members of some other alien species. However, the series has received some criticism for not allowing same-sex relationship between human men until its third installment. Some argued that the relationship female Shepard could have with her yeoman Kelly Chambers in the second game was only included to appeal to its straight male players. But, by the third game, there were male and female humans who would only be involved with members of their own gender, as well as humans who could be romanced by female or male Shepard. One of the men that could be romanced by male Shepard was even a character in the first game who could only be romanced by female Shepard, demonstrating fluid sexuality. Mass Effect presents a universe where all sexualities are accepted. Not only that, but the many different options the player has for romances throughout the series can lead to conflicts with old flames, requiring difficult conversations and decisions. The game doesn’t simply allow you to seduce whoever you want. You must address your past and the possibilities of your future. By doing so, the game again complicates expectations of what romance entails in games, and pushes the romance not only further towards a better representation of reality, but also towards healthier ways of expressing love and sexuality than are often depicted.

One queer game that is almost entirely about communication is Hurt Me Plenty (2014) by Robert Yang. The game seems relatively simple—you get a call from a man, you meet the man, you shake the man’s hand, and then you spank the man. But one quickly learns that there’s more to it than that. On my first play, when I realized that I got to spank someone in a game, I excitedly moved my mouse as fast as I could. The man did not appreciate this, and the spanking quickly ended. I gently rubbed his back. This was different from any erotic game I’d seen before. I tried again, this time actually paying attention. The handshaking is a time for discussion and negotiation, establishing how hard the man would like to be spanked, a safe word, and what he would be wearing. After this, I was much more thoughtful about what I was doing, even apologizing out loud when I caused unwanted pain. The post-spanking scenes where I was rubbing the man’s back revealed more positive conversations. As soon as you pay attention, the game is very intuitive and quickly teaches the importance of communication before and after sex.

One of the biggest ways that Hurt Me Plenty reflects real life in its depiction of this kind of sexual encounter is in the waiting mechanic. If you seriously violate the man’s consent, completely ignoring his safewords, he won’t call you when you try to play again. He won’t answer your calls. Then he will text you, expressing in symbols how seriously you violated him, and how hurt he is by this. When I tested this mechanic, I found myself faced with a timer of nearly eight days. Because I had so thoroughly broken the rules in our exchange of power, and completely violated his consent, I would not be allowed to play the game at all for over a week. Hurt Me Plenty is the antithesis to the sex mini-game in God of War, or the Hot Coffee mod. Those games imagine sex as a simple matter of hitting the right buttons, ending in orgasm. Hurt Me Plenty presents the man you are spanking as fully human, and makes it clear that you need to listen to him, or there will be serious consequences. Beyond that, it’s not easy to spank correctly—you can be too hard or too soft, or too fast, and you often need to just stop while your spankee catches his breath. Hurt Me Plenty presents sex as the real, messy, and honest interaction that it is. By focusing on the before and after, and making the interaction finicky, and even blocking your ability to play at all, Hurt Me Plenty removes itself from the traditional mechanics of sex in games. Rather than being about achieving an orgasm, it’s about communication and consent.

When talking about sex and romance in games it’s almost impossible to ignore the genre of visual novels. With their evolution from eroge games in Japan, it makes sense that romance thrives in the visual novel genre. But even in just three visual novels, in which the primary objective is furthering relationships with women, you can see drastic differences in the mechanics of how this objective is met. Take the dating sim HuniePop (2015), which, despite having puzzle elements, falls back on the most basic mechanic of eroge games: complete the objectives and be rewarded with sex. Although you do have the option to play as a woman, your interactions aren’t meaningfully changed to reflect this, leaving the experience more akin to lesbian porn made for straight men, rather than actually queer. Like so many erotic games, HuniePop isn’t really about sex or relationships, it’s about the player getting off.

complete the objectives and be rewarded with sex

More of a pure visual novel and less of an eroge is Analogue: A Hate Story (2012) by Christine Love. Despite some elements that are reminiscent of dating sims, and a relatively simple path to “getting the girl,” the game eschews the expected reward of sex. There isn’t even any nudity. The most explicit the game gets is logs of exchanges between a long-dead lesbian couple. In some ways, reading these logs sets up an expectation for the player that they may encounter a similar scene for themselves by the game’s end. But even if the player is able to end the game with an AI they’ve confessed love to, riding off in their space ship with them, there isn’t any sexual content to be found. Although some players may feel frustrated by this, it’s clear that this is a story about empathy and compassion—and to make the relationship sexual would be a break in tone.

Landing somewhere between those two games is the visual novel Kindred Spirits on the Roof (2012). Although there was hubbub around its release as the first adult game that wouldn’t be censored on Steam, the game is not nearly as explicit as reporting, marketing, or even the game itself would imply. I myself played for 15 hours before I ran into any sexual content. In the game, you play as a young high-schooler trying to help get lesbian couples together at your school, at the behest of two ghosts. The ghosts are a couple, who say they can’t move on until they become one “body and soul.” But they don’t know how, and want it to be perfect, so they need the girls who are secretly in love with other girls to make their feelings known and have sex… so they can watch and figure out how to do it themselves. This may sound silly and imply that there’s a lot of erotic content in store but, as the official translator tweeted, sexy scenes make up less than five percent of the script. The focus is much more on the development of all the individual characters and the natural progression of their relationships.

Eventually there is sex, yes, although nothing more than M-rated depictions. Despite the rallying cry of the ghosts to make the school a “yuritopia,” the game is much more interested in ideas of identity and having the girls discover theirs. Sexuality is just a part of that. If anything, the promise of lesbian sex seems used only to hook the player in—by the time anything truly sexual is happening, the reaction it evokes is more akin to endearment than titillation. Kindred Spirits on the Roof may be one of the most honest romantic visual novels out there, ghosts and all. This is on account of the realizations of sexuality being similar to many real stories I’ve heard. The fears of rejection, of homophobia, of being imagined as a sister rather than a lover, of destroying friendships for relationships, all seem as though they could be directly lifted from real high-schoolers’ diaries. Even the sex itself feels honest. Remarkably, the game challenges expectations of romance in games by simply being an incredibly good romance—and it works because it’s about growth.

The rise of LGBTQ games mirrors a similar movement in indie comics. Queer comics, like queer games, have existed for a long time, becoming progressively less buried and niche over the years. For so long, queer was considered a slur; queer meant strange and different. But in many ways queer communities reclaiming this word has also reclaimed that idea. By being unafraid of their difference, queer folks are able to challenge norms, because they already do by existing, and in doing so revolutionize their mediums and genres of choice. Queer games have gone from being traded on underground gay message boards to genre-defining hits like Gone Home (2013). Similarly, queer comics have gone from small self-published issues that were banned from being sold anywhere but head shops to the Eisner nominated TJ and Amal (2015). The independent educational comic series Dr. Rad’s Queer Health Show by Rad Remedy and Isabella Rotman covers important parts of sexual education that are completely ignored in mainstream sex ed, in the same way Hurt Me Plenty does. There’s a reason these stories are reaching these heights now: they’re fundamentally changing culture. Queer artists are done being ignored, and they’re aggressively pursuing better representations of themselves, and as a consequence, better representations of sex and romance. They’re making it about more than the reward and the climax. They’re bringing them inch by inch closer to meaningfully imitating life.

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Style Savvy is a much-needed dose of beauty therapy

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Style Savvy (Nintendo 3DS)
BY SYN SOPHIA

What if I told you that a magical place existed where the makeovers flow like wine, and boutique shopping lives in a world where strip malls don’t exist. The place is Beaumonde City, and the game is the latest installment of Nintendo’s 3DS fashion sim, Style Savvy. Like past titles, you are a boutique manager helping every customer who walks through the door find exactly what she needs to put her best fashion foot forward. Aside from a slew of a thousand or so new articles of clothing, the latest edition also adds a few jobs to your list. You are not only the clothing manager, but also a hairdresser and makeup artist. While the new mechanics take some practice to master, it pays off when watching your masterpieces walk around town decked head-to-toe in your unique stylings.

Perfect for: Fashionistas, Kim Kardashian Hollywood fans, dollhouse enthusiasts

Playtime: Dozens of hours

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Kill Screen now has a mixtape of our favorite music on Spotify

Spotify recently introduced another category to help people sift through its gargantuan catalog of music. That category was “Gaming.” You’ll find a bunch of game soundtracks and playlists that have been curated with a view to provide an alternate soundtrack to whatever game you’re playing.

With this effort from Spotify to lay a bridge across mediums came an opportunity for us, as people into both videogames and music, to do the same. That is why Kill Screen now has its own Guest List over on Spotify that you can follow. Simply put, it’s a mixtape of music we like, and we’ll be looking to update it fairly regularly (once a fortnight, perhaps).

weave some new memories into these beats

This first round of music that we’ve chosen comes from the mind of three of our most tasteful writers. First up is Clayton Purdom, who leads the charge with some of his favorite rap and hip-hop, then there’s Caty McCarthy with a stream of bubbly J-pop and cute, uplifting sing-songs, and finally Dan Solberg finishes off the mix with a resonant puddle of deep electronica.

We, of course, reckon you could listen to our mix while playing some videogames. But, we also recommend plugging it into your head as you stroll across the asphalt, or, equally, while laying back on your bed with nothing else to do. Experiment—take this playlist to unexpected places, weave some new memories into these beats, we’ll appreciate it.

 

CHECK OUT OUR GUEST LIST ON SPOTIFY RIGHT HERE

 

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A videogame dedicated to the stray dogs of Russia’s subways

In the Mendeleevskaya station of the Moscow Metro there is a bronze statue, often decorated with flowers, titled “Compassion” which was erected in 2007. This statue is of Malchik, a stray dog that lived in the subway and was a friend of the railway workers. Malchik is the most famous, but to this day there is a population of stray dogs in the Moscow Metro in search of food. Russian Subway Dogs by Spooky Squid Games draws inspiration from these dogs in all their adorableness and complexity.

Originally made as an entry for the GDC Pirate Kart game jam (which you can still play here), Spooky Squid Games is now running a Kickstarter campaign to expand Russian Subway Dogs. Although it’s no surprise that there are stray dogs in the subways of Moscow, their scavenging strategy certainly is. The dogs are said to be able to identify specific stops where they can find the best street food, and have tactics for tricking people into giving them their food.

barking to get commuters to drop their food

The in-game pups take inspiration from the real ones, barking to get commuters to drop their food, with different kinds of commuters drop different kinds of items that give you bonuses. But those items can also give the rival dogs (and occasional bears) the same bonuses, adding extra incentive to catch the food as soon as possible.

One of the major changes Spooky Squid Games is hoping to bring with a successful Kickstarter is a campaign mode. Featured in the campaign mode is your delightful kitty commander Proletaricat, who gives missions and sub-challenges for every station you stop at. All these stations will be depictions of the real stations in the Moscow Metro, celebrating the unique and beautiful architecture of the subway system.

With a soundtrack by Gaucamelee! (2013) composer Peter Chapman, and the promise of more playable puppies (defined loosely, as this includes Cerberus and a goat), as well as a possible bonus level referencing Spooky Squid’s previous work, They Bleed Pixels (2012), Russian Subway Dogs has a lot to offer. And with a face inspired by Malchik, who could say no?

You can support Russian Subway Dogs over on Kickstarter

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Castles Made of Castles lets you easily create complex architecture

There’s a sort of serene pleasure that comes from uniform design schemes. Whether it’s a car with two identical sides, a train that could be perfectly split in half, or a skyscraper in an evenly cubical shape; orderly architecture gives off a sense of harmony and pleasure to the viewer. These endeavors are testaments to the power of organization and stability. But why should we be confined to simply enjoying these designs as onlookers? Why not create our own?

Nico Disseldorp’s online project Castles Made of Castles is a love letter to orderly architecture. Described as a “geometry toy,” Disseldorp’s work combines fractals and voxels, allowing players to build their own unique designs—or castles—inside the toy.

gigantic geometrical contraptions

Disseldorp’s project starts with a plain blank cube, and the ability to add an additional cube onto the structure. With each cube the user adds, the castle’s individual pieces mirror itself. This leads to a geometrical structure where, as Disseldorp explains, “the pieces are the same as the whole.” While simple at first, designs quickly become complex three-dimensional objects, leading to gigantic geometrical contraptions that are as sophisticated as they are beautiful.

Of course, Disseldorp’s interactive geometry project isn’t just confined to a single browser session. When users are satisfied with their design, they can copy their castle’s URL and share it across the internet. This allows players across the world to exchange their work, showing off the amazing structures that can be created with a careful bit of planning. For a few examples, take a look at this structure created by digital artist Loren Schmidt, or this triangle designed by illustrator Vondell Swain.

Castles Made of Castles was originally commissioned for the Now Play This festival at London’s Somerset House. The project is available free online, and sharing castles is highly encouraged. For more of Disseldorp’s work, check out sciencevsmagic.net.

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Style Savvy, Frank Ocean, and taking a break from reality

Life’s been busy and stressful. I have little time to unwind, well, aside from my nightly rounds of Overwatch. But this weekend was different. I had finished up most impending work and my partner was gone for the weekend, off on a spontaneous road trip with his best friend. For once, my apartment was quiet, at a standstill. The world was my oyster. So I spent my Saturday night the same way any twenty-something with rare free time and a 3DS might: by cracking open a beer, playing the newly-released Style Savvy: Fashion Forward, and, as luck would have it, listening to the new Frank Ocean album.

I don’t remember the last time I really sat down and soaked in an album. Gone are the days where I’d sit alone in my room listening to whiny emo bands complain to each other through songs. Now, my time’s divvied up between many things at once. I’m never just listening to music. And hell, half of what I listen to nowadays are podcasts. But, on Saturday night, that briefly changed. Well, sorta.

Style Savvy is a simple game. In it, you become an accidental boutique owner where every customer is extraordinarily nice to you, even when you fuck up (the polar opposite of the reality of working in retail). Suddenly, it’s your job to curate the fashion of the town. Somewhere along the way, you inherit the magical abilities of a makeup artist and hairstylist. So, fittingly, you start helping the town’s citizens with their beautician needs too. Style Savvy’s world becomes a world of your own making. Every person in town is stylable to whatever you find suits them best—or, according to their personal tastes at least (but the clothes themselves are up to you). And man, it feels pretty damn good. Most of all, it’s inherently relaxing, just as Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer was last year.

I was already in the midst of styling my way through Style Savvy when I saw online that Frank’s album finally dropped. What was once entitled Boys Don’t Cry was now officially Blonde. After years of teasing a new record and a “visual album” of Frank building stairs with artist Tom Sachs, New Frank was finally here. New Frank that existed beyond the occasional gasp or two when he surprisingly popped up on a song—like Kanye West’s “Wolves”—due to his scarce features. Frank’s never been a blessing in disguise. He’s purely a blessing.

Style Savvy’s world becomes a world of your own making

When Frank’s Channel Orange was released in the heat of summer in 2012, his smooth vocals were like a cool glass of lemonade. Channel Orange was the deserved calm amid the chaos of recovering from my first year at university. I listened to it constantly (and still do, to be completely honest). While Channel Orange posted Frank onto everyone’s radar, I was familiar with him before the groundbreaking album. I was a fan of Odd Future, the wildly-energetic (and often blatantly offensive) hip-hop collective he was once a part of, whose mantra of “kill people, burn shit, fuck school” resonated with my angsty “I hate my absent dad, too” side. It’s strange to remember that Frank, a man who now sweetly croons about ex-lovers, once danced around the idea of necrophilia (even though it was tongue-in-cheek).

But Blonde is no Channel Orange. It’s surprisingly low-key, a stark contrast to the album that arguably put him on the map. There’s no jaw dropping tracks like “Pyramids” or “Super Rich Kids.” Instead, it’s all a singular mood. A melancholy one, at that. As I styled a returning customer in Style Savvy according to her “bold” whims, the reason for Blonde’s melancholic tone hit me. Frank didn’t want to create a new Channel Orange, he wanted to create a new Frank Ocean album, a Frank post-Channel Orange. That means doing what he does best: singing about all the boys and gals who broke his heart, or whose hearts he broke.

Style Savvy and Frank Ocean might seem like a weird pairing. Little did I know, it’d be a sublime one. When I set out on my quiet Saturday night alone, I imagined merely catching up on all the podcasts I had fallen behind on (an impossible task), maybe watching some anime. But then Frank happened, as he does. My night became a date of sorts. A date with the cute girls in my Style Savvy town, soundtracked by Frank’s blissful voice. I adorned them with fancy clothes and we ate crepes in a nearby city as Blonde carried me through its heavenly melodies. It felt nice. Before I knew it, hours had flown by. Probably too many. But I was enjoying my pleasant date with Frank and Style Savvy. And what a rare, rare thing it was. An unusually tranquil night caught in the midst of a perpetually busy life, all thanks to a little fashion game and some surprise velvety tunes.

Here’s my wholehearted recommendation: take a break from life for an afternoon. Download Style Savvy: Fashion Forward and curate the cutest boutique of your dreams. Eat a nice snack. Drink your favorite beverage (alcoholic or not, who cares). And most important of all, listen to that sweet Ocean as he washes over you, because it’s probably gonna be awhile ‘til we get the next one.

Bottom image: Frank Ocean, via Tumblr.

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Indirect combat is all you’ll have to tackle ENYO’s labyrinth monsters

In an industry that likes to stab stuff almost as much as it likes to shoot people, an “indirect combat” game might seem a little out of place. In fact, the concept has more in common with puzzles than fighting games, as the inability to directly attack your opponent means that the player is forced to use the terrain and any abilities they might have to their advantage. It’s the same idea as forcing a spider to fall off a cracked wall in Lara Croft GO (2015): if you can’t approach them directly, lure them to another doom.  

drag to a fiery grave or impale on spikes as you please

Game designer Arnold Rauers, whose studio Tinytouchtales is currently busy with the card-based stealth game Card Thief, has been working on ENYO, a tactical roguelike that has you fight with a shield and a hook, not a sword. It was born as a quick jam idea and initially named Hook & Shield, and was based on this idea of indirect combat. Hook & Shield didn’t feature any direct attacking options, and instead relied on pushing and pulling people into lava or spikes.

In the few months since that game jam, Rauers has been working with BADBLOOD (2015) creator Winnie Song to polish and re-release Hook & Shield, now known as ENYO. Enyo is the Greek goddess of war, and her task is to descend a labyrinth and retrieve the artifacts of the gods. The game keeps Hook & Shield’s variable skills and adds new enemies like minotaurs and cyclopses that you can drag to a fiery grave or impale on spikes as you please. Hook & Shield’s low-key art style has been upgraded thanks to Song, who has brought the same emphatic colors and bold lines that were on display in BADBLOOD to ENYO, and the soundtrack was a collaboration with New York-based artist Craig Barnes.

ENYO’s finished product looks a lot like Rauers’s original jam game, but cleaner, brighter, and quicker. It will include a “Daily Game” for paid users as well as a scoring system that tracks how different moves are used, and is set to be released on iOS and Android on September 7th.

You can read about ENYO’s launch here .

 

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A game about pretending to play chess is all about performance

It really is as if you were playing chess, except Pippin Barr’s newest game It is as if you were playing chess doesn’t include a chess board. There are no pawns, Kings, or Queens. No pieces at all, really—just instructions. Move this dot here. Look here. Now here. Tilt your head and cringe. Move again. It is as if you were playing chess makes a game of pretending to play a game. “To the observer, it should look as though the player is genuinely playing some kind of game,” Pippin Barr writes. “In this case, the idea is for them to look as though they are playing a game of chess, making appropriate motions, facial expressions, eye movements, and so on.”

You weren’t a chess master before you started It is as if you were playing chess—and honestly, you still aren’t. But the people around you might think you are! Chess actually underlies the whole game, even if you can’t see it. You’re not playing chess as much as you are performing it. All moves made in It is as if you were playing chess are not only legal moves, but they make sense, too. “The game contains the moves (for white) of three classic chess matches, such that when you make the abstract moves there’s a sense in which you’re ‘really playing chess,’” Barr writes. “But also not, since nowhere in the game are the moves for black.”

“That kind of authenticity is, I think, oddly powerful”

It is as if you were playing chess is full of “pointlessness,” yet is still grounded within the confines of a “real” chess match. “I like the idea that even in a deeply meaningless-looking interface there can still be seriousness below the surface,” Barr continues. It’s a reference back to another one of his games, Best Chess (2015). There, a player makes a move—and waits for the computer to make its own. The computer is processing the best possible move to make, evaluating every situation in the game. That takes a long time. Best Chess could just be feigning its thought process, showing random numbers to look like the computer is processing information. But that is just a facade in itself—Best Chess isn’t just pretending to solve chess. It actually does. That’s why It is as if you were playing chess doesn’t just simulate chess moves; it draws those moves from actual chess games, thereby creating a consonance with the abstract values of on-screen moves.

“That kind of authenticity is, I think, oddly powerful,” Barr writes. “Do I have a point? I’m not 100% sure I do, but I do like the internal authenticity and ‘responsibility’ in games, games that don’t just pretend something is happen[ing], but ‘do the work’ beneath the surface, even if it’s invisible.”

Pippin Barr’s  It is as if you were playing chess  is part of a larger project called  It is as if you were playing a videogame . It’s the first piece of the project. Play it here, or head over to Pippin Barr’s website and Twitter for more information.

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Deus Ex: Mankind Divided can’t wait to be interrupted

There’s an apartment in Golem City littered with dead bodies. Normally, I’d be the one to put them there, but not this time. One of them was probably named Ana, at least according to the emails in a computer nearby. The messages are from her doctor informing her that she’s pregnant. This would normally be good news. But Golem City’s daycare was recently shut down, the doctor informs her, and infant mortality is through the roof. Without actually coming out and saying it, the doctor seems to suggest that Ana should get an abortion. Given what I’ve seen so far of Golem City, I’d agree.

But how did this apartment—more of a cargo container with furniture, really—end up as a mausoleum? Navigating the blood stains, I loot each body for extra information and some pocket change. I find a PDA that has a message on it from Ana’s husband. “I will not bring another child into this world,” it says. At least I think it was Ana’s husband. Or was the message from Ana to her husband? Either way, it seems someone took the news very badly. The child will not be born in Golem City after all.

These are people I’m too late to help or save

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is home to many tragedies like this. The bodies only ever tell part of the story, with the rest hidden in nearby computer terminals or PDAs. If you’re anything like me, the details don’t stick half as well as the general impression they create. Email addresses and names, many of them Czech, are strewn about Mankind Divided like confetti. Every person in the game has a unique story, but the precise shape of their life always seems to elude me. One couple in Prague is trying to get a permit from the government for … something. To open a shop, maybe? Or escape the city altogether? They’re debating whether to take their life savings and seek help from the local mob. A few blocks away I come across a well-dressed man lying face down in the sewers and wonder if it’s him—the man I’d been reading about.

The apartments you break into in Mankind Divided are almost always empty. Maybe the people are at work, or fled the city, or worse. Either way, the game seems to have swallowed them up, leaving behind a sea of digital residue to sift through. An ebook sitting on someone’s desk, movie posters hanging on the wall, painkillers sitting in the medicine cabinet—each object builds the sense of a life caving in under the pressures of Mankind Divided‘s world. These are people I’m too late to help or save. I can only witness the fragments of their pre-programmed existence and move on to the next apartment. The result is a world that feels fuller and more textured, not because it’s populated with choice and possibility, but because of their very absence.

This is one side of Mankind Divided. The side that tries to lure you into strange places and take part in people’s most intimate secrets. Despite all of the hacking mini-games and LCD screens, it’s very analog. On a computer, the game only lets you read email or control home security settings, but in the rooms themselves it invites you to take showers, flush toilets, fiddle with radio knobs, or even turn the oven on. One apartment I doubled back to late in the game still had the same front burner on from when I ransacked the place days before.

When elements repeat, it feels thematically significant rather than lazy. From my time spent hop-scotching around Mankind Divided’s scattered European locales, I discovered three constants. Whether in London or Prague, the people of this world are all alcoholics, consummate book collectors, and in love with cereal. I cannot tell you how many times I had to empty bottles of wine or cans of beer from my inventory to make room for more important tools. Boxes filled with “Augmentchoo” next to empty bowls are a harrowing reminder of how agnostic brands connect strangers across time and space.

In Golem City—peering out through the chaos, oppression, and late-capitalist squalor—is a beautiful outdoor bookstore. No one is buying and I can see why: the volume at the end of the row closest to me is labeled “The Manager’s Handbook.” Still, it shows civilization can blossom anywhere, even in an internment camp.

But there’s another side of Mankind Divided. The one that trades in crude analogies and allusions to contemporary politics that have all the subtlety of a prosthetic arm punching you in the throat. In the wake of the “Aug Incident,” an event in which people with augmentations went on a “psychotic killing spree,” people with mechanical implants have been separated from the rest of humanity. This part of the game charges Adam Jensen, now a member of an Interpol task force, with stopping augmented terrorists while trying to uncover who’s really behind the violence.

As we approach the 15th anniversary of 9/11, few things feel more played out than our popular culture’s milquetoast treatment of the politics of terrorism. In the decade it took us to go from the Sum of All Fears (2002) to Zero Dark Thirty (2012), the specter of terrorism was used to do everything from sticking a fusion reactor in Iron Man’s chest to blowing up the White House. Like Tony Stark, we learned to empathize with the agents of terrorism even while decrying their actions. Those responsible for the conditions that might lead to terrorism were not bad institutions, or bad systems, but bad actors. If only we could all elect enlightened leaders there might be peace. Give a rich Western billionaire a power suit and he will save the world.

This is the soft consensus that bleeds so many political parables dry, and Deux Ex: Mankind Divided almost gets around it. Climbing up through the towers of Golem City, I eventually encountered the political leader of an Aug rights group called Talos Rucker, who was trying to ease humanity’s fears. With the sunset behind us, away from all the shooting, we argued over ideology and political tactics. The dialogue wheel was only built for two, even though there are three of us in the room, and so while I can try to persuade the activist, or ridicule him, I can’t befriend him. A pacifist, Rucker was adamant that his ideals could be achieved without violence. Jensen thought Rucker was a pawn being manipulated from afar for corporate and political gain. Every time I looked to bring my protagonist around, his skepticism and realist posturing got in the way. By the end, even Rucker seemed to be more convinced by Jensen than I was, but more shooting started before we could discuss it further.

rivals anything Tom Cruise will accomplish in his lifetime

In this way, the game employs action setpieces to change the subject. Instead of prolonging the conversation tree and seeing where it leads, Mankind Divided lurches back toward the militaristic paradigm of shows like 24 (2001) and MI5 (2002) where it seems most at home. If Jensen is fighting on the wrong side, the game doesn’t want you to spend too much time thinking about it. You might not approve of Jack Bauer’s methods, or agree with the government’s self-serving agenda, but who has time to offer an alternate when so many innocent lives are at stake?

It’s here that the usual suspects are given room to rear their hackneyed heads. Viktor Marchenko is the political militant whose grievances are justified but whose methods are not. Jim Miller, an ex-military spook who heads up the Interpol task force, would prefer to focus on the counterterrorism mission at hand rather than investigate its causes. And then there’s Adam Jensen, dutiful company man, trying to negotiate between both extremes. The trio ends up being adequate purveyors of these myths. Each is sympathetic in his own way. Each is also a monster. And, of course, all three are men. If this side of Mankind Divided seems reactionary, given the current political climate of pre-election America, it’s because it is. The game puts Jensen in-between a rock and a hard place, between state-sanctioned terrorism and its anarchist counterpart, and in so doing stacks the deck in his favor. When you find yourself wishing for the pre-crisis days of Human Revolution (2011), you know you’ve lost.

For being a cyberpunk ode to the potential promise of transhumanism, the missions around Mankind Divided‘s central narrative feel terribly familiar. A firefight in a sandstorm on a high-rise in Dubai. A bank heist in Prague. The escape from a secret science facility in the Swiss Alps. They could all be ripped from the storyboards of 90s Bond movies or the next Mission Impossible. And, indeed, the way Mankind Divided gracefully shifts back and forth between air-duct stealth and a festival of automatic weapons probably rivals anything Tom Cruise will accomplish in his lifetime. But Adam Jensen will never have the charisma to make something so abundantly familiar as doing three double silent takedowns in a row work on its own terms. It all feels a bit like Gap’s version of Transhumanism; #normcore draped in a unisex trench coat.

When I finished Mankind Divided, I started a New Game+, but not to retrieve data from the Palisade Property Bank without killing anyone, or to see what would have happened if I had finished my investigation into the most recent train station bombing. Instead, I did it so I could fly back to Golem City and discover what really happened to Ana. The Illuminati’s convoluted schemes and a byzantine labyrinth of MacGuffins to be chased could wait this time. Contrary to what much of Mankind Divided would have you believe, if there’s any hope for salvation in the game, it won’t be found by unraveling a conspiracy.

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