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Bird lawyering game Aviary Attorney to flock to Steam next week

You might remember Aviary Attorney as the only lawyering videogame that features a crack team of attorneys straight out of Animal Farm. Set in 1848 Paris, the game only uses public domain drawings from that time to depict the trials and tribulations of bird lawyer Monsieur Jayjay Falcon. All characters have been lifted from Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux (Scenes of the Public and Private Life of Animals), by French caricaturist Jean-Jacques Grandville. As Aviary Attorney creator Jeremy Noghani told Kill Screen after the Kickstarter launched a year ago, “It was amazing how much of the humor carried across from…

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The Charlie Hebdo debate arrives in the videogame world

You’re not against free speech, are you? This interpretive trap awaits anyone attempting to publicly wrangle the legacy of Charlie Hebdo. In late April, the PEN American Center announced that its literary gala would honor the French satirical newspaper. In response, a series of authors including Junot Díaz and Joyce Carol Oates penned a letter arguing that PEN missed the distinction between “staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable, and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.” This furore goes back to January 7th, when two gunmen open fired in Charlie Hebdo’s office. Twelve people died in the attack. A further eleven were…

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The mysteries of Solyaris to find new life in a French exploration game

“We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors,” says Snow in Stanis?aw Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris. Part science fiction, part philosophical meditation, Lem’s book inverted the usual tale of extraterrestrial exploration. Rather than focus only on the strangeness of another world, Lem used its insurmountable mysteries to deconstruct humanity and its own limitations instead. Quartier Rouge, a first-person exploration game from the Paris based collective Le Chant du Cyne, is trying to do something similar. Inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinematic adaptation of Solaris, and Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama series, Quartier Rouge is set to take place in a…