Soul Searching
News

Fleeing the conflicts in Turkey and the personal game about it

“Making Soul Searching has been a way for me to make sense of what’s happening,” Turkish game maker Talha Kaya told me. He’s talking about his latest videogame, his biggest to date, which explores the theme of leaving your homeland and parents behind—a journey that’s inspired by the real-life drama of Kaya’s personal life. As Kaya described it, the situation in Turkey has been getting more and more depressing over the past 10 years. He told me that the nation is fighting with itself and, not so dissimilar to the perceived future of America, has a government that empowers the…

Review

Masquerada is about as enjoyable as a dictionary

Delivered in the middle of Big Game season, Masquerada looks at first like a welcome relief from war, VR, and Watch Dogs 2’s emoji mask. The masks in its world are a different kind of grotesque. They separate the haves and the have-nots in a rigidly stratified sorta-Venetian society, granting elemental powers to elites who dress like every day is carnival. The conceit feels fresh, and the city of Ombre is boldly drawn, with heavy black borders around tents and troops to set off freehand suggestions of grass blades and thin ruled lines of stone. The protagonist, Cicero Gavar, dashes…

No Place for Bravery
News

Is there enough room for another pixel-art RPG?

There’s a close-knit cloud of terms frequently cropping up in the discussion of action role-playing games lately. “Atmospheric,” “minimalist,” “roguelike,” “pixel art,” et cetera. Hyper Light Drifter established its appeal almost entirely on the back of these signifiers. Titan Souls did the same last year, and the upcoming Children of Morta is looking to bring in the same traffic too. But for every new (or, in this case, old) aesthetic enjoying the apex of popularity, there comes the inevitable point of exhaustion. Such as might become the case with No Place for Bravery. It is pitched along the lines of being a 2D roguelike action-RPG…

News

Hey, perhaps don’t set your game in “fantasy primitive africa”

Where and when is the “fantasy primitive africa” of upcoming survival game Voodoo? “You will be one of the founders of civilization,” says Brain in the Box, the Italian studio behind it. Bear in mind that the first humans popped up in East Africa around 250,000 thousand years ago, and civilization has its roots in Mesopotamia and Egypt around 14,000 years ago—not much fantasy there. The trailer for the game also includes the bow and arrow, metal tools, and tribal masks. Having these all in the same place is a collapsing of time that we haven’t had written history long enough to…

News

Undungeon’s pixel art makes the fantasy genre fresh again

A point of honesty: I still have yet to play more than the first hour of The Witcher 3 (2015). Not because the game is bad—in fact, I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen so far—but because at this point, I’m just too exhausted with fantasy to have much interest in delving any further. How many hours have I spent playing as men in armor swinging their swords at lumbering dragons? Or, in the case of science-fiction, playing as a space ranger swinging his light sword at insectoid queens? Granted, there are fantasy stories that work to subvert these tropes, as we’ve…

Guildlings
News

Threes! creator unveils mysterious new project

Guildlings is a new mobile fantasy adventure game from Sirvo Studios, the team behind 2014’s mobile puzzler Threes!, that might explore some of the lesser-seen sides of fantasy. Game designer Asher Vollmer and the Sirvo team have released sparing details for this new project set to be out in 2017, which we’re happy to wait for as Threes! was one of our favorite games of 2014. Though deceptively simple, the amount of meticulous design behind Threes! is staggering, both in terms of the actual puzzle design and the seamless user experience. But even with the success of Threes!, Vollmer wasn’t satisfied…

Review

Between Me and the Night makes childhood last forever

The past can be an unclear place—definable through facts, yet easily clouded by emotion. Whether from nostalgia, personal interest, or error, humans have a pronounced ability to mis-remember or poorly represent their own history. In a sense, this defines us: as a populace, we live with the potential to build our lives on a set of experiences which may not be quite as precise, or as true, as we might want them to be. It is typical for creators in any medium to draw on the experiences that shaped them when they were young. We tend to mythologize the art…

SCORN
News

Now this is a videogame worthy of Beksinski’s haunting paintings

If you look upon the mournful, decaying figure sat atop that webbed plinth above and don’t immediately think of Zdzisław Beksiński then you aren’t familiar with his work. And if that’s the case then you might not fully realize the appeal of Scorn, the videogame that this concept art informs. Time to change that. What Beksiński did with bone haunts. He was a Polish artist, best known for his many paintings, especially the gothic fantasy that dripped from his brush during the 1970s and 1980s. But Beksiński’s gothic fantasy isn’t like any other: forget about crows, full moons, and vampires. He rarely spoke…