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Generate tiny ominous landscapes with this procedural generation toy

Mirror Lake is a strange little thing. Made in a week for Procedural Generation Jam, it creates static black-and-white landscapes, nestled inside a giant patterned bowl and suspended in space. Sometimes the space is dark, dotted with stars and the occasional sun or moon or comet; sometimes it’s a vast white nothing, like a blank page. The tiny scenes inside the bowl change too, sprouting branchless trees and rolling mountains across wide meadows, shining grey lakes, and bright white salt flats. A few times, I didn’t even get a landscape at all. I’d click away from a particularly full terrarium…

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Adam brings an unusual perspective to bleak black-and-white horror

It’s rare to see an isometric horror game. The 3/4 perspective affords more visibility than what is conducive to most horror scenarios, where the possibility of things lurking in the darkness or just around the bend helps heightens the tension. But in Adam, at least what’s shown in its only available trailer, ceilings are cutaway to reveal the contents of other rooms, like an old RPG or adventure game. A halo of light illuminates the titular character, emphasizing the darkness around him, but we can still see. In place of the mystery another perspective might offer, Adam must find its…

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Long-lost N64 game Freak Boy has been rediscovered, and it’s so 1996

Videogame enthusiasts are pretty good at preserving their beloved medium’s history, even if it goes against the wishes of some industry trade groups. Emulators and ROMs, while technically piracy in most cases, allow old games that would otherwise be left to rot on cartridges or discs to live on in more durable digital formats. But that’s only when hobbyists have access to those games. In the case of unreleased abandonware or canceled projects, there’s little hope left. That’s what makes this recent development in the story of Freak Boy, a long-canceled Nintendo 64 prototype from 1996, so exciting. According to…

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Found footage horror continues to stutter its way into videogames

I’m a sucker for found footage films—the good, the bad, and the ugly, I’ve tried to watch them all. The same goes for horror games. So when something like The Tape comes along, a found footage-style horror game with a focus on “creating heavy atmosphere instead of cheap jump scares,” you immediately have my attention. According to The Tape’s Steam page, the game follows a detective as he investigates a missing girl in suburban America. He’ll travel to an “abandoned house,” find a bunch of unpleasant stuff—the usual. I’m not holding out a lot of hope for the story, but…

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Before continues to take shape as the prettiest prehistorical survival game

Cavemen games seem to be the next big thing, a natural evolution of the survival genre. Now that the post-apocalypse is becoming a little tired, it makes sense to reach way back to pre-civilization for something fresh. Big titles like Far Cry Primal and WiLD may be the ones people are talking about, but the first recent example that comes to my mind is Before. Before had its biggest public debut during The Game Awards last year, but its creators over at Facepunch Studios (behind Garry’s Mod and Rust) have been posting updates here and there on the game’s progress…

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Somber will explore post-WW2 chaos and cults in small-town Argentina

I need more historical games in my life that aren’t pure strategy games or Assassin’s Creed, so when I heard of Somber, a game set during the political turmoil of mid-50s small-town Argentina, I was immediately interested. That’s primarily because Somber isn’t a game directly about war, which seems like the only thing most historical games are interested in. It’s set in the years following World War 2, and uses the country of Argentina and its recent coup as the backdrop for a rather strange tale: as the residents of a small city called Dale, you and a few friends…

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Kôna invites you to investigate an abandoned town in 1970s Canada

The most striking thing about the new trailer for Kôna, an upcoming surreal mystery game from Parabole, is its narration. It has this really odd, stilted intonation that I can’t quite place; the boom and quirk of old timey radio announcer meets the uncanny poetry of The Residents. Whatever it is, I like it. It sets such a strange tone for the rest of the video, which is just as good: as we learn from our dramatic narrator, you play as a Korean War veteran named Carl Faubert who ventures into the Northern Canadian wilderness to investigate a bout of…

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Pathologic Classic’s new trailer is how videogame trailers should be done

Pathologic Classic HD, the remaster of Ice-Pick Lodge’s classic horror game, is out and along with it, a brand new trailer. It’s exactly what a trailer for a game like this should be: a long, slow montage of people and places, monuments and landscapes recognizable to loyal fans, but foreign to those who have yet to step into its world. It’s ominous, inviting, it shows, but doesn’t tell, it raises more questions than it answers, and most importantly, it makes me want to play. The HD remaster was announced earlier this month as a separate game from the Pathologic remake…