Tag: Literature

Diluvion
News

Diluvion is aiming for all the undersea peril and wonder of a literary classic

Outer space is what currently holds the global population’s active imagination. The big breakthroughs in science that wow us are made up there, and so our popular stories follow suit—whether it’s space disasters directed by Hollywood (Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian) or videogames that promise us the universe (No Man’s Sky, Stellaris, Elite: Dangerous). Popular culture’s current output sells the idea that we are infatuated with life and death beyond our home planet. But Leo Dassey, creative director at Arachnid Games, hasn’t turned his head to the skies; he’s looking the other way. His team’s upcoming game Diluvion is an undersea adventure…
The Franz Kafka Videogame
News

You know what you’re getting with The Franz Kafka Videogame, right?

What I think I like the most about The Franz Kafka Videogame is that it isn’t faffing around. With a title like that you know what you’re gonna get when you play it. An all-singing, all-dancing pixel-art rendition of Franz Kafka’s works? Oh yes, I’ll take that, thank you very much. But, actually, that isn’t quite what this upcoming point-and-click adventure is. Speaking to the sole creator, Denis Galanin, he told me that he uses “literary works as a basis for [the] realization of [his] own ideas.” Back in 2012, he made a game called Hamlet, which as its description rightly puts…
Review

Pavilion and the maze as metaphor

When I was younger, I got lost in the works of Jorge Luis Borges. In my hubris, I assumed I “got” him in a way that would let me use the tools of literary study to recognize patterns, symbols, and themes. His hermetic prose held secrets that I thought I had unlocked in my sophomoric self-satisfaction. I assured myself that knowing Borges’ favorite subjects, like mazes and infinite libraries, are actually metaphors for the text itself was a revelation that only I and a few select others could hold dear. I was wrong, of course. Not about the obvious readings,…
News

Quote, an upcoming literary RPG about destroying knowledge

Ignorance is bliss, or so the clichés say. It’s true that there’s a certain appeal to that innocence, but we as a society have decided that proverb is mostly bullshit, right? Knowledge, for lack of a better motivational poster, is power, and those who champion the cause of the opposite are generally suspected to have ulterior motives in mind. That’s what makes Fahrenheit 451 (1953) such an enduringly captivating dystopia; that’s why shelves are built down into the ground in the streets of Berlin on the sites of book-burnings; that’s why modern-day arguments of censorship carry so much weight. We like knowing…
Universal Harvester
News

John Darnielle’s next novel is a horror story about fragmented video tapes

In the music he writes for the Mountain Goats, John Darnielle tells intensely specific stories. One song describes a breakfast of boiled peanuts the morning a parther leaves for good. Another, from the band’s most recent album, Beat the Champ (2015), mournfully describes a wrestling match in which the loser has his head shaved with a “cheap electric razor from the Thrifty down the street.” Darnielle’s first novel, Wolf in White Van (2014), is layered thick with references that situate it not just in a particular time or place, but inside a particular cultural niche, full of Conan the Barbarian comics and b-movie…
News

New book lets you play your way through Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been adapted to numerous genres and mediums since the 18th century and finally we might have an adaptation to rival Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film, Romeo + Juliet. The classic story has now been adapted into a choose-your-own-adventure book by Ryan North, aptly titled Romeo and/or Juliet. North is creator of Dinosaur Comics, and the writer behind Marvel’s The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and was first inspired to tackle Shakespeare’s work with To Be Or Not To Be: That Is The Adventure. That project was crowdfunded through Kickstarter, and by its conclusion had become the highest-funded publishing project ever. Romeo and/or Juliet serves as the sequel…
Feature

Literature games and the future of book publishing

It was called “the end of days” for literature. Bold doomsaying letters across headlines predicted that with the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the era of books would meet its untimely end, and the larger publishing world would be rendered obsolete. But traditional books didn’t die—they simply fled into the digital world and returned with new forms, the technologically-savvy ebook and digital story app. The need to diversify the medium that arose during this era is, in part, what may have kept sales of books rising through the apocalyptic flames. It pushed against any stubbornness in the publishing world and proved…
High-Rise
Feature

High-Rise; a very British psychopathology

The first time I saw the Barbican Estate in London I was entranced. The layered terraces of pitted concrete, the crisscrossing walkways, those monolithic towers that seemed—as with Petra or Al-Hijr—like they might have been carved out of natural stone. It is rare, especially in a city like London, as layered and complex as a geological event, to walk into such a large space that feels so designed, so ordained. Yet, setting foot in those 20 acres of roughened concrete, I somehow felt that I was stepping into an idea, or an ideal, and out of reality entirely. Even now,…
News

An Edgar Allan Poe classic is now a game

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. The Pit and the Pendulum (PC) BY PAPER PIRATES AND SOKOLAB Given that Edgar Allan Poe focused on sensation to communicate the terror of torture in his 1842 short story The Pit and the Pendulum, it would have been wise to further etch that out in the videogame version. In particular, the hissing of a swinging blade as it descends upon the narrator’s flesh could have been realized with actual sound, yet it is lacking in this digital adaptation. Forgoing that, what this game does…