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A creator of SOMA on the surprising merit of Until Dawn

Sometimes, a big budget game comes along that, despite an almost Duke Nukem Forever-esque level of development redos and challenges, finally reaches your videogame system only to impress rather than disappoint. It’s so rare that it almost feels like magic when it happens. But the question is: how come a game like Until Dawn—originally created for the PS3 and with the expressed intent of tricking you into believing Playstation Move wasn’t useless—transforms into a beautiful butterfly while games like Duke Nukem Forever turn into steaming piles of shit? It must be those fickle videogame gods at it again, arbitrarily deciding who goes to heaven and who is Duke Nukem Forever. Of course that isn’t…

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Profiles of the Forgotten is "a videogame within a movie"

“Have you ever loved someone so much, that you could step out of time?” These are the words that introduce Profiles of the Forgotten, a project that lies somewhere between a traditional game and a film. The first project by Los Angeles developer Pablo Leon-Luna, Profiles of the Forgotten is described simply as “a videogame within a movie. A gothic fantasy.” The cinematic experience follows Jason, a young man returning to his family’s lake house to visit his stepsister, only to find that she refuses to speak to him any other way but through computer. As his attempts to reach…

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Deus Ex Machina: The 30-year-old arthouse videogame that time forgot

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Mel Croucher’s Deus Ex Machina is how unremarkable it is. Although, that’s not quite true. Created way back in 1984, it’s among the first videogames to give rise to the “is it a game?” debate, while its author asserted its position as a piece of art and an “interactive film”—two concepts that had yet to be explored at all. When it was released 31 years ago, it came spread across two chunky cassette tapes; one containing the game code, the other its soundtrack. And this soundtrack wasn’t only a sequence of music: it was…