Tag: experimental

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Are relationships worth it or not? Find out in The Door

Your fingers hover above the keyboard, hesitating to type out a response to the enthusiastic bubble that pops onto the screen, asking about your day. It’s tiring, trying to keep up the charade. When did the shift occur? At what point did communicating become a chore as opposed to a treat? A lazy response is sent before you remove yourself, choosing instead to look at the framed photo of him on your desk. He wasn’t allowed to smile when the photograph was taken—regulations said so. The computer pings softly and your eyes dart back to the desktop. /// The Door…
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An unfinished demo provides a surreal meditation on grief

Outside, the waves crash against the shore rhythmically. Inside, a broken robot suit lies sprawled on a bed, one arm yanked off and left dramatically on the floor. It’s accompanied by a keyboard that, upon further inspection, is literally made of gold. You can pick up the broken arm, or attempt to play the stubbornly immovable keyboard, but your cautious avatar doesn’t want to go near the robot. That’s understandable, as she just came to this beach, this cabin, to mourn. This is, more or less, the unfinished demo recently released by Arielle Grimes called Simulus, subtitled Cabin in the…
The Norwood Suite
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The creator of Off-Peak is making another uncanny museum

Early last year, independent game maker Cosmo D came bursting onto the scene with Off-Peak (2015), a bizarre exhibition of artifacts that is museum, musical, and story all at once. It threw you into a train station on the very edge of reality and gave you a task to do, begging you not be distracted by the infinite staircases or the inexplicable, repeating figures. Like lots of games, it was a “love letter to a lot of things,” and like lots of games, it evokes the desire to re-explore. Luckily, Cosmo’s new game The Norwood Suite is being realized in the same…
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Broken Reality wants to take you on an adventure through ’90s internet

So, last time we saw the game—experiment? accident? digital hellbeast?—Broken Reality, it was more of a hyper-animated art collage than anything. A game lurked somewhere behind all the faux-Myspace popups, it was said, but there were no actual details to be found. A vague teaser trailer gave a glimpse of the attitude of the beast, and the game’s Tumblr certainly promoted the aesthetic, but anything beyond that was radio silence. it was more of a hyper-animated art collage than anything Luckily, it seems that Broken Reality has re-emerged from its bizarre technicolor web-cave and has come out with something a bit…
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You guys, Porpentine wrote a game in Google Forms

Porpentine, the matriarch of experimental Twine games, is at it again. Known as the creator of games such as With Those We Love Alive (2014), Cry$tal Warrior Ke$ha (2013), and the XYZZY award-winning Howling Dogs (2012), her trademark is evocative prose and bold subject matter: she often discusses femininity and queerness, and has no qualms about exploring the explicit, the gory or the overwhelming. Her work is generally heavily text-based, though many of her games include strong visual and audio elements. But now she’s breaking the mold—or not, depending on how you look at it. Her latest project, All Your…
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How No Truce With The Furies is pushing videogame writing further

No Truce With The Furies, in addition to being an oil painting come to life, is a game with a very high standard for writing. Developer Fortress Occident boasts a published science-fiction author in its writing team, and the game cites as inspirations text-heavy Infinity Engine games like Planescape: Torment (1999) and the original Fallout (1997). The detail an isometric perspective allows means the studio is able to go significantly more in depth than other games, but the conventions of the medium—long paragraphs of dialogue, often clicking through multiple choices with one character, and passages of narrative removed from gameplay—can be…
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Soft Body helps you find serenity among chaos

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Soft Body (PC, PlayStation 4) BY ZEKE VIRANT The words “bullet-hell” may not immediately call calm and tranquility to mind. But meditative app/game Soft Body is here to fix that. Combining the difficulty of Super Meat Boy (2010) with the serenity of a zen sandbox, Soft Body challenges you to overcome obstacles with a meditative approach. Requiring players to split their attention between controlling two “snakes,” operated by opposite hands, the game helps mind and body focus on accomplishing tasks in tandem. Featuring various color palettes and diverse maps, players…