Tag: dark souls

Death's Gambit
News

Death’s Gambit finds the humor in its deadly medieval world

Death’s Gambit, the upcoming medieval action game from developer White Rabbit, likes to wear its influences on its sleeve. Like the recently released Salt & Sanctuary, it’s part Dark Souls (2011) and part Castlevania, sending players into a brutish world that could not yell “here be dragons” any louder. And yet, according to the latest post on the game’s development log, it also seems to have a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor amid all the danger. The post itself is short, simply reminding players that the game is still alive and letting them know that they can expect a new trailer soon. With…
News

Japanese hashtag reimagines videogame covers using adorable clip-art

#いらすとやさんでゲームパッケージを再現する, or as Google Translate tells me, “#To reproduce the game package in Irasutoya’s,” is a hashtag currently making its way around Japanese Twitter. It’s dedicated to taking videogame covers and recreating them with royalty free clip-art, specifically from the Japanese illustration blog Irasutoya. With its soft pastel colors and cute, cartoonish proportions, Irasutoya’s art challenges the hashtag’s participants to take titles such as Dark Souls (2011) and look at them through the candy-colored lens of Hello Kitty. While the idea of recreating images from games and movies using clip art isn’t entirely new—there’s already subreddits and Tumblrs dedicated to doing…
News

Artists pick out their favorite critters from upcoming game Necropolis

It is well-known that upcoming dungeon-delving game Necropolis looks ludicrously stylish. Its stark angles, moody lighting, and cartoonishly exaggerated characters give it an aura that lies somewhere between art deco and fairy tale; as if Red Riding Hood were the emcee for a big-band show. It’s a striking aesthetic, and it does an admirable job of setting Necropolis apart from the gothic horror of its major influence, From Software’s Dark Souls (2011). However, part of what’s allowed Dark Souls to be so successful is its memorable cast of baddies, their gruesome appearances helping them to linger in the minds of its players. Necropolis, too,…
Article

In praise of the “bad” design of Tharsis

Tharsis begins with an event of astronomical improbability. Somewhere in the interplanetary medium, a meteoroid floating through space at 25 miles a second occupies the same bit of spacetime as the spaceship Inktomi, which is hurtling towards Mars at 11 miles a second. The ship and its crew have been travelling for weeks; the meteoroid, millenia. And there, in the emptiness of the cosmic void, they somehow meet. An impact; a burst of compressed air; a body blown into space; a crippled vessel drifting toward Mars. What remains is a quartet of crew and a fistful of dice to navigate…
Review

How do you follow up Bloodborne? Apparently, you don’t

The River of Blood, the Beast Cutter, the Surgery Altar, the Astral Clocktower, the Blood of Adeline, the Nightmare Church, the Underground Corpse Pile, the Holy Moonlight Sword, the Beasthunter Saif: the settings and armaments that furnish The Old Hunters will certainly sound familiar to veterans of Bloodborne. So too will its macabre menagerie: the Bloodlickers and the Parasites, the Winter Lanterns and the Nightmare Executioners. One can well imagine a brainstorming session at From Software, the developers trying to think gloomily as they thumb a dog-eared thesaurus. The Despairing Cutlass? The Infirmary of Sorrow? You half-expect to wander into…
News

Dark Souls III’s new trailer shows us the face of death

There’s a giant skull fella leering out of the darkness towards a pale light in the new Dark Souls III trailer. As it has no flesh, you can’t tell if the facial expression it might pull as the torch-bearing knight walks up to it would be a sneer of anger, or a less hostile and quizzical one. All we can see is its enormity; it’s as if a colossal icon for death. It’s this that the trailer seems hell-bent on showing us, over and over. This is undoubtedly a post-Bloodborne effort.  We get it: everything is dying in Dark Souls III. “Only…
News

The Witness gets the Limbo treatment

Just as photographs generally look good with a black and white filter, no matter the subject matter, it’s become increasingly apparent to me that stripping a game of its textures almost always produces a cool effect. One of the artists working on The Witness seems to agree—she was able to produce these moody screenshots by tinkering around with the game’s depth editor, turning the usually bright and colorful island into a stark and foggy shadowland. The obvious comparison here is to Limbo, Playdead’s gloomy grayscale platformer that borrowed its look heavily from the sharp monochrome of German expressionist film. It’s…