Tag: 2d

News

Balthazar’s Dream reveals what good boys dream of, and it’s ruff

A soft whimper causes you to look up from your work. It’s your dog, who is sleeping peacefully in bed. Is she dreaming? Her legs twitch slightly. Maybe she’s running around in a field, chasing a squirrel. She’s too old to do that now, but you like to think that the tiny mammal stood no chance in the dreamscape. “Wow.” You think to yourself. “She’s doing such a great job laying there.” You rouse yourself from the couch and tiptoe over to the sleeping dog and carefully drop to your knees and place your face mere inches from her nose.…
News

Post Apoc Dating Sim will let you make sweet, sweet love to a toaster

“If I ever had rust, would this bother you?” You’re halfway through a second glass of wine at this point. Tina is sitting on the table across from you, anxiously awaiting a response. Her body is shapely—mainly square, but boy do those four corners look sharp. The shiny chrome of her skin reflects the sun, bright and hot. The two slits located at the top of her form contain soft, delicious pieces of bread just begging to be warmed up. Tina is a toaster. You don’t judge. There’s no room to be picky in the post-apocalypse, and this was starting…
News

Beard Blade might be the manliest videogame of them all

Inspired by SNES, Genesis, and GBA classics, Beard Blade is an eccentric 2D platformer that follows the adventures of a farmer as he struggles to rid his town of troublesome imps. After an encounter with a magically-skilled barber, the farmer takes on the pseudonym Beard Blade, and his beard becomes not just a physical manifestation of his masculinity, but also his greatest weapon in battle. The Kickstarter trailer for Beard Blade begins with an animation of the pirate-like imps attacking the farmer’s village with cannonballs, but he saves the day by catching a projectile with his beard and using it to…
News

GoNNER wants you to cheer up a sad whale by dying over and over

GoNNER creator Mattias Dittrich—who goes by Ditto—describes his game as “tough as hell,” and he’s not wrong. It’s one of those games where I ask myself just why I keep clicking continue; death after death, I am thrown back to the beginning of the game. That is, unless I have enough currency to buy my way back to the level I died in—which I never do. GoNNER is a 2D platformer by creator Art in Heart with serious roguelike elements, not unlike The Binding of Isaac (2011) or Downwell (2015). It’s almost as punishing, too. But that’s not to say GoNNER is unfair or impossible.…
Review

Mother Russia Bleeds is a little groggy

VHS cassettes were the ideal vessel for horror. The seams between fiction and reality were somehow hazier, hidden behind scanlines and stretched tape, allowing my imagination to magnify the terror of Gremlins (1984) and the murderous doll in Child’s Play (1988). A film like Ringu (1998), in which those horrors literally came out of the TV to kill you, was inevitable. As VHS tapes warp and degrade they sully the story contained within, but also gain individual character. No two copies of the same film play exactly the same on VHS, especially as time lurches on. Eventually, the horror that…
Slain!
Review

Slain! is a disappointing death growl

Heavy metal is the musical and theatrical manifestation of mankind’s lizard brain. It’s an auditory siege that rifles through our ancient and violent nature that was once necessary to survive. This music transmutes those base emotions through myth, metaphor, and performance through modern instrumentation, impossible without electrical amplification. The costumes vary from latex to bullet belts, corpse paint to standard issue black, and on the stage the lights are kept low or flashing. Every note and image is calculated and well-rehearsed, because metal thrives in the extremes and requires complete attention to maintain the shared illusion for everyone at the…
Seraph
News

An upcoming shooter doesn’t let you aim your guns

Seraph is a shooter in which you don’t aim. It’s set to hit Steam Early Access this month and PlayStation 4 at a later date. But if you don’t want to wait until then to find out how it works, here, it’s simple: it’s a 2D side­scrolling shooter that aims and fires your guns for you, leaving you to focus on skillfully dodging enemy attacks with increasingly flashy, acrobatic moves. “The idea came from my love of the movies The Matrix (1999) and Equilibrium (2002). I wanted to deliver a gaming experience that truly delivered on how awesome these films…
News

Playlist: the papercraft classic Yet It Moves comes to iOS

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. YET IT MOVES (IOS, MAC, PC, LINUX)  BY BROKEN RULES  You might call Yet It Moves a sidescroller, but that would be doing the game a grand disservice. Yes, you can only work in two dimensions, but you’re going to do a lot more with them than you usually do. In Yet It Moves, you play as a paper cutout of a guy just trying to get from A to B while wandering through a world that feels not a little bit like a dream sequence from…