Author: Chris Priestman

Chris is interested in videogames, architecture, and data errors. You'll find him rummaging around in lesser known corners of the internet.
Bokida
News

If you don’t know about Bokida yet, it’s not too late

I have bizarrely fond memories of playing around with Bokida when it was first released back in 2013. Bizarre because, at the time, the game was only a limited prototype. But there was something about its openness and the toy-like expressions its world allowed. It gave you a vast white landscape with only a few landmarks to break it up—a trench and a temple-like structure, if I recall—but you could place colorful cubes, cut them up, and push the slices around to create a right old mess. It was like a properly physics-based take on Minecraft (2011) that invited you to delight in…
KAMI 2
News

KAMI 2 will let you create your own origami puzzles in 2017

State of Play is known for creating videogames out of physical materials. Their biggest to date is Lumino City (2014), an adventure game set across a mechanical metropolis that the team actually constructed out of paper, card, wood, miniature lights, and motors. Outside of that are smaller titles like INKS, which turns pinball into a form of painting, and KAMI (2013), a puzzle game made out of origami squares. The next game from State of Play is going to be KAMI 2, which once again is built from tiny pieces of colored paper, scalpels, and glue. Patience was also a crucial ingredient that went…
Star Swim
News

CeMelusine’s journey to make videogames more like music continues in January

Vancouver-based artist ceMelusine has been working on the East Van EP for the past couple of years. It’s a collection of four games that ceMelusine has been steadily working on in order to grow as a game maker. The effort goes towards trying to make games more like music by packaging them in a similar way—as in, an EP—but it also drives ceMelusine to make games that are “extremely experiential (moody, readily interact-able, aesthetic).” The first of the games in the East Van EP was ΘRAΩLE, back in 2014, which was about playing as an oracle and seeing surreal images that acted…
Pocket Kingdom
News

Pocket Kingdom might be the start to some epic pixel-art games

The pixel artist who calls himself “08–n7R6-7984” probably has too many projects on the go. The one that has caught the most attention is RE5734L3R, which follows a robot that makes its way up the class system of a mechanical cyberpunk city by stealing the social chips of other robots. It’s the pixel art and animation that steals your eyes: megacities sit in fuschia horizons, lightning-blue interfaces glitch and garble, bulky spaceships fly through metallic scenery at a blistering pace. It’s been four of five years since the game first hit my radar and it’s still only a piece of tantalizing vaporware.…
Toryanse
News

Toryansé and the storytelling advantages of short games

Nick Preston decided to call his upcoming series of short adventure games Toryansé after the Japanese folk song of the same name. The song is traditionally sung as part of a children’s game—Warabe uta, which is very similar to the English nursery rhyme game Oranges and Lemons—but has surprisingly dark lyrics thought to relate to a period of high infant mortality in Japan’s history. But it wasn’t only the song’s background that appealed to Preston, it was also the fact that it’s often played at Japanese traffic lights to indicate when it’s safe for pedestrians to cross. “I loved the idea…
Diluvion
News

Diluvion is aiming for all the undersea peril and wonder of a literary classic

Outer space is what currently holds the global population’s active imagination. The big breakthroughs in science that wow us are made up there, and so our popular stories follow suit—whether it’s space disasters directed by Hollywood (Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian) or videogames that promise us the universe (No Man’s Sky, Stellaris, Elite: Dangerous). Popular culture’s current output sells the idea that we are infatuated with life and death beyond our home planet. But Leo Dassey, creative director at Arachnid Games, hasn’t turned his head to the skies; he’s looking the other way. His team’s upcoming game Diluvion is an undersea adventure…
Girls Make Games
News

Girls Make Games ran a workshop at the White House last week

Where do you go after teaching girls how to code and make games with workshops, summer camps, and game jams across 38 cities worldwide? The White House, apparently. Last week, on December 7th, Girls Make Games ran a two-hour workshop inside the White House with a bunch of girls from ages 11 to 14. (Which, as has been mentioned to me, is something that might not happen again for a while given the change of administration at the White House next year.) There were interactive lectures and time for some hands-on coding too, which each girl given a playable prototype at the…
FRESCO
News

Paintings literally change the world in upcoming puzzler FRESCO

The years after Portal came out in 2007 were tiring. An influx of first-person puzzle games broke like a tidal wave over the horizon. All of them flaunting what their creators deemed to be the next big “mind-bending” idea. They simply hoped to wow people. But many of these games were were dull, uninspired rehashes. The genre was quickly saturated to the point that it became unbearable. I’m hit with surprise, then, that upon seeing FRESCO, an upcoming first-person puzzle game, I haven’t held my hands to my face and screamed until my throat was hoarse. Maybe the fallout of 2007 has…
Sunless Skies
News

Sunless Skies doesn’t take place in outer space as we know it

It’s no surprise that outer space in Sunless Skies isn’t the terrifying vacuum that we know lingers above our heads. After all, the sea in the game’s predecessor Sunless Sea wasn’t the blue ocean of our Earth—it was the Unterzee, an underground sea populated with its own terrible creatures and peculiar folktales to pursue. In a blog post, Failbetter Games outlined what will likely come to define the High Wilderness, which is the name given to space in Sunless Skies—note: Failbetter has said that this is all in the early stages and “we might revise it, change it completely.” The studio starts…