Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 70

Multibowl is every competitive two-player game in one, basically

What do Super Mario Kart (1992), Vectorball (1988), and Frogs and Flies (1982) have in common? The answer is that they’re now all the same game. Bennett Foddy’s new experiment, called Multibowl, is a “collage” of these and hundreds of other two-player games, thrown together in quick succession in a reflex-heavy sequence reminiscent of WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$! (2003). Foddy, who is best known as the creator of the infamous QWOP (2008), teamed up with game maker AP Thompson to create the ultimate 2-player competition, one that will garner the same nostalgic feelings evoked by many games of the 80s and 90s … by being them.

Multibowl replicates the WarioWare formula with emulated multiplayer games

Very little information has been released about the project, but the general gist is that it takes the WarioWare formula of flipping quickly through minigames, and replicates it with emulated multiplayer games like Hippodrome (1989), King of Fighters 94 (1994), or Wild Guns (1994).

Whether a point for that “round” will go to Player 1 or Player 2 is determined differently for each game: in Cuby Bop (1990) you have to score 600 points, in Rampage (1986) you must stay off the ground, and in Party Mix (1982) you have to win a game of tug-of-war. Some of the games, like Vs. Excitebike (1984), last for the duration of a race, and others, like Xybots (1987), you can move on from within seconds.

The game never reaches quite the level of frantic clicking that WarioWare often did, but that’s fitting, because with Multibowl there’s more to enjoy. Instead of a collection of colorful but comparable minigames, Multibowl feels like a temporal showcase. Familiar faces from childhood are accompanied by the games you never got to, an illustration of consoles and eras you may have missed, playing fields you might have seen and then forgotten.

With “hundreds” of games to experience and their names written cleanly before each round in 8-bit font, you may even stumble across one that you choose to find and emulate on your own time, dissatisfied with the 15 seconds of fame it was given before you got your face kicked in. It has the potential to function as a curator, a runway show of multiplayer games for the history buff whose attention span has been wizened away by Twitter.

But, of course, before you do any of that, you have to play to win. That part stays familiar.

Multibowl will be debuted at XOXO Festival in September. You can watch a gameplay clip here .

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Cilvia challenges architects to treat planning as more of a game

Urban planning is a rules-based game. Participants in the planning process have goals they wish to accomplish and constraints governing how their objectives can be achieved.

Nowhere is this more the case than in London, where a complex series of regulations and protected sightlines have conspired to create ungainly clusters of misshapen towers. (The Shard, anyone?) Architects are already playing the planning game, but they are playing it clumsily. That, in effect, was the conclusion the Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright and Monica Ulmanu came to in their interactive visualization of the city’s future skyline (come to think of it, that also looked a bit gamelike):

With all these projects coming at once (bringing over half a million sq m of floorspace) Richards realises clearer guiding principles must finally be set out. For the first time, he has begun to model what all the City’s constraints actually look like in 3D, developing a kind of “jelly mould” for all future developments. He began by drawing a mountain-shaped dome over the cluster, then went around the distant viewing points one by one, “chipping away at the foothills”.

Within this general lumpy mould – which has the look of a mauled blancmange from some angles – he has started slicing away more specific areas. He talks of “ski slopes” swooping down towards St Paul’s and the Tower of London, how buildings must “ramp up” to the peak of the cluster, and how Gotham City is the “bookend” to the east, beyond which it’s unlikely more towers will be allowed (within the City limits at least).

The system that Wainwright and Ulmanu describe, however, is still somewhat piecemeal. After years of fumbling around with vague guidance, the journalists note that city officials, developers, and architects alike are still feeling their way around planning issues.

potential to improve citsyscapes through game mechanics

Cilvia, a speculative planning videogame by Royal College of Art graduate student Johnny Lui, imagines a future wherein the planning game is formalized into a system that all parties can simultaneously use—an urban MMORPG of sorts. The system has two main functions: it turns all the rules that architects must accommodate into a playable system, thereby eliminating some trial-and-error, and it creates a collaborative interface wherein lots of creators can work on the city at the same time. The former is, in a narrow sense, the more useful function. The latter, however, has a greater potential to improve citsyscapes through game mechanics.

The main problem with the current city-plan-as-a-game approach to planning is that it looks at individual buildings in something of a vacuum. If you protect sightlines and whatnot, your building is broadly compliant. A cluster of compliant buildings, however, is not guaranteed to work well together. (That is a nicer way of saying the City of London is an architectural morass.) But this is all to be expected when rules are set up to protect the past more than they are to meant to ensure a harmonious present.

Instead of splitting up these two aspects of planning, Cilvia has the potential to bring them all together and address some of the planning horrors that created London’s abominable clusters. While one might wish to challenge questionable planning regulations more forthrightly, Cilvia is a system that makes the best of an imperfect situation. This approach to architectural gaming—as opposed to the glitz of Bjarke Ingel’s “our buildings’ envelopes are shaped by restrictions”-routine—is a potential way forward for other cities. If planning systems have to be gamed, they might as well be gamed for good.

Find out more about Cilvia on its website.

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Moblets will let you catch creatures way cuter than Pokémon

You may have seen Rebecca Cordingley’s adorable videogame Moblets on Twitter. She’s got quite the following on there, with eager fans clamoring for more glimpses of the game, which she describes as a mixture of Harvest Moon (1996) and Pokémon. Twitter is Cordingley’s main form of marketing for Moblets, and it seems to be working: “I think people are interested in being a part of the development process and I love getting their feedback and encouragement,” she said.

Veering away from the Pokémon-esque design, Moblets is more of a team-driven videogame. After all, “mob” is in the game’s name. “The name Moblets comes from the concept of videogame mobs, which are basically interactive creatures in a game environment,” Cordingley said, “like zombies and skeletons in Minecraft [2011] or Diablo [1996].”

“Throw a face on it”

Sure, you’ll be able to collect a flock of creatures (some might even say a team of good boys) to challenge local trainers much like the veritable pocket monster series, but Moblets‘s emphasis on “team mechanics” sets it apart. There’s a much bigger focus on open world, too. You won’t be stuck to a linear path through one town—Cordingley said there will be lots of varied environments, from magical forests to charming little towns.

Cordingley seems to ask one question when creating new Moblets to add to her charming world—is it cute? If the answer is yes, then throw a face on it. “‘Throw a face on it’ is a big part of the Moblets design philosophy,” Cordingley said. Adventure Time is a big influence in that; like the animated series, Cordingley wants to impress more mature and realistic themes into her game. She hasn’t said exactly what those ideas will be—the game is still in fairly early stages of development—but they won’t be overbearing in any way.

Moblets will have a story, but it’s more to add context to the world, instead of to provide a relatively narrow path. Cordingley wants you to interact with the world at your own pace. Want to focus on your farm? Good! Want to run a seed shop? You can do that, too. Only interested in exploring Cordingley’s charming world? Also acceptable.

Moblets doesn’t yet have a release date, but you can keep track of its development by following @nonplayercat on Twitter, or by checking out the Moblets website.

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Here’s a dating sim about The Rock falling in love with a boulder

“What the hell did I just play?”

I pause the game after it’s finished and lean back in my chair, utterly confused. The Rock and The Rock promised five minutes of entertainment and it certainly delivered, although it’s taking longer to process what exactly took place.

Created by Kevin Roark Jr., The Rock and The Rock is labeled as a small game/interactive film aimed at telling the story of the inevitable and natural attraction of two rocks. You’re given the option of switching back and forth between the perspective of former WWE wrestler and well-loved actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, or as the beautiful geographical marvel that is a giant rock formation confined to the desert.

a never ending internal monologue of “what the hell is this?”

After spending $1 and downloading the game from itch.io, it was time to see how the love story unfolded. Upon pressing play, my ears were bombarded with an amalgam of sound clips from songs and snippets of conversation that completely overwhelmed me as I tried to take in what I was seeing. The interactive film starts from The Rock’s perspective, the camera providing a terrifying view of the 3D model’s eyeballs and gums reminiscent of the glitchy horrors of other videogames when broken. I found myself preferring to watch as The Rock, providing a bird’s eye view of the situation.

The Rock runs past (and through) a section of the desert where a bunch of televisions show random clips that feature himself (The Rock) and other newscasters. Paired with the constant buzzing of random sound clips, it’s disorienting. But all’s fair in love and war, and the assault on my ears would soon cease and be replaced with something far more sinister. After passing the valley of TVs, The Rock begins to pant. He starts to breathe heavily with a vigor that leads me to believe he hasn’t worked out in years, despite appearances. The gasps for air replace any other sounds, flooding my earphones as I switch back and forth between perspectives.

Eventually, The Rock reaches The Rock and looks up in awe before climbing up the length of the rock hard surface. What happens after he reaches the top is pure insanity, that not only warranted a genuine laugh but also a never-ending internal monologue of “what the hell is this?” This abstract experience is very similar to YouTube videos like Sausage Groove  or Rebirth.

Granite, The Rock and The Rock is the strangest experimental dating simulator I’ve ever played. For fear of spoiling the conclusion, I’ll say this: a pile of rocks are waiting for you (and you don’t need to be an igneous rock to think that’s hot).

You can download the game yourself here .

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The creators of Rime are also working on a murderous masquerade ball game

I have never attended a fancy socialite soirée before. On the chance occasion that my mind wanders as to what such experience would be like, my imagination inevitably concocts a scenario not unlike Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death (1842) mixed with a particularly fiendish round of Clue. A grand celebratory occasion equal parts bacchanalian and cockamamie. A new puzzle adventure announced by Tequila Works, called The Sexy Brutale, does little to disabuse me of this admittedly far-fetched fantasy, instead choosing to go all in on the inherent absurdity that permeates the glossy allure of high society.

Set at a lavish get-together held at the game’s titular English mansion-turned-casino funhouse across a single perpetually-recurring day à la Groundhog Day (1993), the game’s premise is not unlike Anthony E. Pratt’s aforementioned murder mystery game. Players assume the role of Lafcadio Boone, an elderly priest who must foil the deadly machinations of the estate’s mysterious Marquis and save the lives of all those in attendance.

To do this, Lafcadio must hide, listen, and learn the stories of each of the game’s nine guests and hopefully, by doing so, orchestrate their safe passage through the mansion’s deadly traps set by the Marquis’ murderous staff. Only through cunning, guile, and patience will you be able to see the party and yourself safely through the night and unearth the terrible secret that lies at the heart of the Sexy Brutale.

“I immediately knew we had to be part of it”

Conceived in middle of the protracted development of Tequila Work’s previously announced Rime, The Sexy Brutale is the studio’s first collaborative project with newly-formed UK developer Cavalier Game Studios. “When Cavalier asked for our feedback on their build of The Sexy Brutale, I immediately knew we had to be part of it,” said Tequila Works CEO Raúl Rubio. “By combining the unique talents of both our teams we are proud to have created a genuinely intriguing and unforgettable experience for players to enjoy.”

With the promise of occult capabilities, a conceptually mutable puzzle premise, and a darkly humorous murder plot, The Sexy Brutale seems poised to set itself apart from the crowd when it releases early next year.

The Sexy Brutale is coming to PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in early 2017. Find out more on its website.

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Death Road to Canada is not sorry about eating you

The only things moldier than a zombie’s jeans are complaints about the ubiquity of zombie-themed media. And yet, like a skeleton draped with liquified cold cuts wandering through the chapped streets of Any City, USA, here I shamble.

The zombie—a thinly-veiled metaphor for the monstrosity of humanity, and even more translucent excuse to commit acts of violence on human-shaped targets “guilt-free”—is worn past the point of darning. The subtlety of any pertinent commentary on race, morality, or the depths and heights of the human spirit in the face of such an insurmountable threat has long ago been cast aside. The iteration of the zombie these days is merely to render flesh more viscerally on screen, or to further debate the minute rules of viral infection, zombie land speed, time between bite and transformation, etc.

This isn’t to say that there might not still be marrow to be found in the bones of zombie fiction, but rather the messages have been subsumed by the medium—the undead have cannibalized themselves into a meaningless morass of putrefied symbolism. When surrealist poets realized they were in a similar situation, they took to randomization and games to reinvigorate their work, most notably in the parlour game (appropriately titled) Exquisite Corpse. Like all the finest early 20th century salon entertainment, exquisite corpse often carries house rules, but the basic idea involves a group of creative-adjacent revelers building a poem line by line without reading what the previous person wrote. This usually results in awkward, terrifying, ribald verse that draws giggles that can’t be replicated in successive readings because you really “had to be there” to get the full effect.

a meaningless morass of putrefied symbolism

In the early 2000s, the lingering memory of these nutrient-packed exquisite corpses fed the growth of avant garde Flarf poetry, a collaboration between writer and computational machine in order to disrupt one’s own habits of thought. There is something to be said for escaping the preconceptions of your mind to approach a greater truth, or at least a different perspective. Flarf poetry allows a poet to backhoe the richest soil of language, reaching new depths of linguistic inspiration that might never have been approached otherwise. Like the exquisite corpse, the majority of flarf is at best a springboard for further creative expression and, at worst, a pile of rancid unreadable garbage—no more meaningful than if the complete works of Emily Dickinson were electronically encrypted, but the key lost to the ravages of our upcoming zombie dystopia. For such work to carry weight requires something beyond the mere delight of strange new word combinations or surprising juxtapositions that lose their lustre after the first reading.

Which brings me to Death Road to Canada, a pixelated zombie story blended with The Legend of Zelda (1986), and other top-down adventure games. Given the utter disdain for both zombies and undirected literary generation I’ve outlined above, one would presume that Death Road made me instantly expel a dark ichor of disgust from deep in my lungs. But this game does not aspire to be anything other than playful and silly in the face of unrelenting destruction. Zombies are a dark frame for a playful jaunt, maintaining the decrepit aesthetics but forgoing some of the artificial gravity that weighs down self-serious zombie media. It’s not that zombie fiction needed satire or cheekiness to be rejuvenated, the problem with the classification is that it’s been transposed into nearly every form and genre, which has plucked its teeth. It’s those gaping sockets that Death Road plays in and around, foregoing any grander reading than a horde of zombies as the literal and figurative manifestation of death’s ceaseless march against us all, and seeing what kind of chortles we can get in the meantime.

The main mode of the game assigns the player a random pair of zombie-apocalypse survivors, who hear tell of the relatively undead-free realm of Canada, so they hop in a car and spit gravel to the north. Your time is split between passively driving (or walking the road if your car gives up the ghost) to advance relatively disconnected story beats and more actively exploring ruins for supplies, survivors, enduring a siege of zombies, or trading. Though you can adjust the rarity of events and companions, every playthrough will be entirely distinct—each beat is disconnected except as much as they are somewhat plausible scenes in a overarching doomsday narrative. Essentially, you are assembling an exquisite corpse Romero film, where the only direction that matters is forward.

Of course, it isn’t all mayhem, as characters have their own quirks and foibles that aren’t necessarily apparent but can be sussed out and will affect the adventurous choices you are tasked to make, primarily while driving. There are stats for strength, morale, fitness, and more, but these are only slowly revealed and improved upon as you go on, and they feel comically unintuitive based on the little information you are initially given for each partner. So like flarf’s search term-based poems, with little input and a lot of colorful noise you make the best educated selections for how successfully a person might react, based on their in-car interactions or previous feats in the face of erratic challenges. Yet, you will probably play so many rounds that these traits will blend together and you’ll either have to take notes or say “fuck it” and shoot from the hip, hoping something lyrical and saucy is teased from the noise.

you are assembling an exquisite corpse Romero film

Each character dies just when they start getting fleshed out, as per the requirements of zombie escapades. Sometimes this happens on accord of a mishandled encounter in the car, as per the rules of an exquisite corpse poem it is sweet chaos (and up to you, the reader, to make the connections): an injured moose that you probably shouldn’t have tried to either heal or kill pummels you, bandits steal your shit, you become exhausted from extraneous berry-picking, or interpersonal conflict shatters the team. There’s also my favorite of these unexpected events so far—a demonic possession out of nowhere, during which I sacrificed my companion for a Satanic muscle boost. We all died shortly after that anyways, without crossing over to the True North, but it was worth it. That said, possibilities such as that also make it hard to care about characters that are as disposable as the narrative framework requires.

The part of Death Road where you wander around swinging pipes and shooting uzis is fine, if nothing groundbreaking. It’s slow by design, meant to lend a sense of verisimilitude to the 16-bit survival-horror atmosphere. The momentum often stumbles to a crawl as your companions are at times unintentionally rendered computer-dumb and will get themselves stuck on the corner of a table or old junk car. Swinging a weapon also feels leaden due to its unreliable timing. The game sashays between a plod and a romp, where the charming silliness is put on pause for mostly dour foraging, which—if you’ll allow me to beat a dead lyrical device of a horse—is pretty much how reading an exquisite corpse poem works.

The few times I clawed close to the border of the Great White North, somewhat predictably, 75 percent of my group was consumed by the horde because I had the bad luck of drawing a particularly difficult siege of furious zombies before I was prepared. C’est la vie, and then it’s on to the next group of random survivors. And the next, and then the next. What matters is not the destination but the journey; not the finished poem but the act of getting weird with words at a party. There are alternate modes which allow you to reuse friends you’ve already found, offering an opportunity to better understand and remember them (and their stats), but you’ll want to avoid this at first so you can find as many of the super-powered and small-time weirdos as possible.

Death Road to Canada tells many small slapstick stories that end the same way. When it comes out on iOS it’ll be best situated for capsulated playthroughs and short mirthy smirks thanks to the low stakes. The joy in it, as in writing directionless poetry, is in the process rather than the explication. It doesn’t exactly crack open the full literary potential of randomly-generated story beats, but it does use it to an enjoyable-enough cutesy effect, which is pages more than most flarfy corpses have ever achieved.

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

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Weekend Reading: This Is Not My Repugnant House, But That Is My Messy Life

While we at Kill Screen love to bring you our own crop of game critique and perspective, there are many articles on games, technology, and art around the web that are worth reading and sharing. So that is why this weekly reading list exists, bringing light to some of the articles that have captured our attention, and should also capture yours.

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McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture?, Worst of McMansions

Wish you had better ground to criticize McMansion houses beyond them being the thematic villain of Poltergeist and the assumptions that its inhabitants only listen to EZ rock? Well, your sorrows are over, as over on Worst of McMansions, whose whole thing is ripping these carbon copy abodes apart, there is a detailed breakdown of the architectural offences of of these estates.

We get to feel small, but not out of place at all: How the endless quest for a Canadian identity elevated The Tragically Hip, Calum Marsh, The National Post

After Gord Downie announced that his terminal brain cancer in the spring, The Tragically Hip, Canada’s manifest rock band, scheduled their final tour. Cataloging their long stride across the country, Calum Marsh (a Kill Screen contributor) wonders at what point this feverous shared moment becomes a funeral.

Photo by Cait Oppermann

Joanne The Scammer Lives For Drama. Brandon Miller Is Just Trying To Live., Patrick D. McDermott, Fader

Joanne The Scammer was born in 2015, a character who loves to steal, lie and, especially, scam her way online with a loud, glamor stride. Brandon Miller, the man under Joanne’s blonde bob, is 25, resides in Daytona Beach and easily lives a more humble life than his alter ego. Patrick D. McDermott profiles Miller to find out how you go about when your drag persona becomes a phenomenon.

Walmart’s Out-of-Control Crime Problem Is Driving Police Crazy, Shannon Pettypiece and David Voreacos, Bloomberg

Walmart has a crime problem. Not just shoplifting, according to reports an average of one violent crime occurs a day in one of the mega-retailer’s locations in America. In an extensive report, Shannon Pettypiece and David Voreacos discover what corporate decisions have led to the chain becoming a magnet for criminal activity, and the people who are forced to deal with it.

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A new autobiographical game that will be set in and around Doom II

I’ve never met JP LeBreton but I know him because he knows the original Doom series. He wrote what is probably the most insightful design analysis of the game back in 2010; before he became a level designer for BioShock (2007) he learned the craft with Doom‘s level editor (and then demade his BioShock level “Arcadia” in Doom II); and more recently he had the opportunity to talk at length with one of the original Doom creators John Romero about his work on the game.

It does not surprise me when LeBreton tells me “Doom is this thread running through most of my life.” It’s exactly what I expect him to say. This is why his latest project, Autobiographical Architecture, makes a lot of sense. It’s to be a multi-part interactive story about LeBreton’s life, all of it made inside Doom II with its modding tools. It was born out of LeBreton’s realization that he “could talk about [his] life experiences from within the game itself and let the two resonate meaningfully.”

LeBreton’s life is to be reenacted through those very pixels

If you watch the trailer for the game below you’ll get a taste of what LeBreton is going for. You’ll see scenes typical to many people’s lives: graduation, riding a BMX, a homecoming dance, a psychotherapy wing, a fire in the middle of a dark blue woods. But all of it is made with the crude textures of the Doom II engine—gnarled trees, steel block walls, sci-fi doors that open vertically. Right at the beginning of the trailer, the camera zooms into a PC playing an even more low-res version of Doom. It’s an appropriate gesture, telling us that LeBreton’s life is to be reenacted through those very pixels, refashioning the classic icons of Mars colonies and Hell to a childhood obsessed with them in Texas.

He won’t say what storytelling techniques he’ll be using as he doesn’t want to spoil the experience. But the trailer suggests to me that LeBreton will do more than recreate real spaces in a virtual engine. The parts seen in the trailer that intrigue me the most are the more abstract corridors and arenas, some of which are taken directly from Doom (1993) and Wolfenstein 3D (1992), others seemingly original. There’s a blurring of real and virtual architecture, as if the paths sprinted through in the game are just as important as those walked in reality—this is a parallel that is, of course, made deliberate through the means of production, but it seems it could also be a bigger theme that will have many layers to it. And the sight of M. C. Escher’s classic 1953 print “Relativity” to the side of one of the desks only cements this idea; that there are multiple interrelated paths at play, different centers of gravity to the many strains of LeBreton’s life. Or it could simply be representative of his growing interest in architecture as he grew up. We’ll have to see.

The idea for Autobiographical Architecture came to LeBreton years ago but only now does he have the time, as well as enough bank between his Patreon and his savings, to actually commit. This opportunity also seems to have come at the right time. He’s at a point in his life at which his feelings about past experiences are becoming more complex and nuanced. He struggles to put them into words. “I’ve spent much of my career speaking the language of game levels, and it gives me ways of expressing ambiguity, interconnection, bittersweetness that feel true,” he said. This is why trying to communicate those feelings through a game works and makes sense for him.

There is another motivation. Having spent much of his career making things for other people has meant he has almost zero ownership over his previous work. He’s proud of it, of course, but he says that this work has “not enriched [him] in proportion to what they took out of [him], and other people can and will re-decide that they mean something else.” He adds that that’s the nature of the business, though, and he knew that going in.

Autobiographical Architecture, then, is something of a statement. “I exist as an individual voice now. This is me.” That’s how LeBreton describes it. When asked how he thinks his game will compare to other autobiographical games—most notably Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia (2012) and Nina Freeman’s Cibele (2015)—he says he doesn’t know. A comparison, it would seem, is not the way to approach this. In fact, LeBreton’s answer is one that he applies not just to this one game but to any comparison between autobiographical games. “[T]he process of making this is more about digging deep into myself, singing words only I know,” he said. “It’s instinctual and everyone’s way will be different and that’s exactly why it’s valuable.”

Autobiographical Architecture will be released in three parts. Volume 1 is mostly about growing up in Texas, while the other two will deal with other points in LeBreton’s life, specifically “times of crisis and identity (re)formation.” Volume 1 should be available to download later this year—and yes, you will need Doom II to play it.

Look out for more info on Autobiographical Architecture on its website.

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Emotional upcoming platformer turns words into architecture

A child is standing on a scrap of paper. “This diary belongs to Izzy,” she says. As you move her across these words and to the next page, another set of words appear: “I never knew my mum. It was mostly gran who brought me up.”

This is Lost Words. It’s a story-driven platformer being created by UK-based studio Sketchbook Games. Led by Mark Backler, a veteran designer who previously worked at EA and Lionhead Studios, the game explores the story of a young girl as she copes with life’s struggles including the illness of her grandmother.

In Lost Words, Izzy’s words become platforms for her to stand on. She runs, jumps, and falls through them. As she tells her story through the diary world, her words become platform puzzles: where you move words to form staircases, re-arranging them to create bridges, or dashing through them before they quickly fall.

A fantasy world conjured up by Izzy also exists. Here, she tells the tale of a would-be knight while using the world as a way to “deal with the difficult things going through her life.” With parallels to her real life, the fantasy world allows Izzy to feel “empowered” in a way she may not feel in the real world.

This portion of the game echoes Daniel Benmergui’s Today I Die (2010) in that interacting with the words themselves can affect the environment. In one of Lost Words’ most memorable scenes, you see this at work when you guide the knight out of a darkened cave with nothing but the word “hope” (which has been transformed into a light-emitting object). Similar to narrated games like Thomas is Alone (2012) and The Stanley Parable (2013), Lost Words lets you “live” the tale as it is told.

“I thought, ‘That’s really cool!'”

Backler says the concept for the game came three years ago during Ludum Dare 26 (with its “minimalism” theme). Initially wanting to create a Tetris-type word game, a happy accident led to the “words as a platform” idea.

“When I ran the game, I didn’t have any physics on the words yet,” he explains. “But, as my character dropped down, landed on the words in the middle of the screen, and just stayed there, I thought, ‘That’s really cool!’ … [That seemed like] a much better idea than the game I was trying to make.”

During the next few years, the game would expand from its original prototype (“a white screen and a sprite of Mario [who] just slid around”) to its current version with the diary and fantasy world. Backler says they are still about a year from finishing the game—with plenty of work left in terms of adding levels, an overarching story, and details like sound design and particle effects.

For such a narrative-driven game, the story plays a pivotal part in creating the “strong emotional element” Backler hopes players will experience. With Rhianna Pratchett (of Tomb Raider fame) penning the story, this aspect of the game appears to be in good hands. Speaking of this recent addition, Backler confesses he thought Pratchett “wouldn’t be interested in a small project like ours.” But, as Pratchett recently explained, joining projects like Lost Words is “more of a case of someone coming to me with an interesting project that excites me with its imagination and creativity, and I genuinely believe I have something good to add to the world.”

Lost Words is currently in development with a planned 2017 release date. For more information, follow it on Twitter or visit its  website .

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All photos courtesy of Sketchbook Games.

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A sad, upcoming platformer turns words into architecture

A child is standing on a scrap of paper. “This diary belongs to Izzy,” she says. As you move her across these words and to the next page, another set of words appear: “I never knew my mum. It was mostly gran who brought me up.”

This is Lost Words. It’s a story-driven platformer being created by UK-based studio Sketchbook Games. Led by Mark Backler, a veteran designer who previously worked at EA and Lionhead Studios, the game explores the story of a young girl as she copes with life’s struggles including the illness of her grandmother.

In Lost Words, Izzy’s words become platforms for her to stand on. She runs, jumps, and falls through them. As she tells her story through the diary world, her words become platform puzzles: where you move words to form staircases, re-arranging them to create bridges, or dashing through them before they quickly fall.

A fantasy world conjured up by Izzy also exists. Here, she tells the tale of a would-be knight while using the world as a way to “deal with the difficult things going through her life.” With parallels to her real life, the fantasy world allows Izzy to feel “empowered” in a way she may not feel in the real world.

This portion of the game echoes Daniel Benmergui’s Today I Die (2010) in that interacting with the words themselves can affect the environment. In one of Lost Words’ most memorable scenes, you see this at work when you guide the knight out of a darkened cave with nothing but the word “hope” (which has been transformed into a light-emitting object). Similar to narrated games like Thomas is Alone (2012) and The Stanley Parable (2013), Lost Words lets you “live” the tale as it is told.

“I thought, ‘That’s really cool!'”

Backler says the concept for the game came three years ago during Ludum Dare 26 (with its “minimalism” theme). Initially wanting to create a Tetris-type word game, a happy accident led to the “words as a platform” idea.

“When I ran the game, I didn’t have any physics on the words yet,” he explains. “But, as my character dropped down, landed on the words in the middle of the screen, and just stayed there, I thought, ‘That’s really cool!’ … [That seemed like] a much better idea than the game I was trying to make.”

During the next few years, the game would expand from its original prototype (“a white screen and a sprite of Mario [who] just slid around”) to its current version with the diary and fantasy world. Backler says they are still about a year from finishing the game—with plenty of work left in terms of adding levels, an overarching story, and details like sound design and particle effects.

For such a narrative-driven game, the story plays a pivotal part in creating the “strong emotional element” Backler hopes players will experience. With Rhianna Pratchett (of Tomb Raider fame) penning the story, this aspect of the game appears to be in good hands. Speaking of this recent addition, Backler confesses he thought Pratchett “wouldn’t be interested in a small project like ours.” But, as Pratchett recently explained, joining projects like Lost Words is “more of a case of someone coming to me with an interesting project that excites me with its imagination and creativity, and I genuinely believe I have something good to add to the world.”

Lost Words is currently in development with a planned 2017 release date. For more information, follow it on Twitter or visit its  website .

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All photos courtesy of Sketchbook Games.

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