Tag: magical realism

Lonely Star
News

Lonely Star brings a lo-fi apocalypse to the Weird West

“FAIR FIGHTS ARE GOOD, IF YOU ARE IN A MOVIE, OR WOULD LIKE TO BECOME DEAD.” This is told to me by a crystal in the middle of a desert, surrounded on all sides by dust and cacti and one single, solitary highway. It’s the third of these I’ve found, sprouting carelessly out of the cracked earth, there for no other reason than to give advice, vehemently and repeatedly. Their surreality never comes into question. Lonely Star, it seems, doesn’t like to spell things out. I found the first crystal one map south of the demo’s introductory map, a conclave…
KRZ teaser
News

Kentucky Route Zero Act IV gets a mysterious interactive teaser

Oh, it’s coming. Kentucky Route Zero Act IV currently sits out-of-sight—somewhere among the hot haze of a distant horizon—but, rest assured, it is heading this way. No, we don’t have a release date still, but there is yet another teaser to polish with your eyeballs. Last time, we had only an image. It was static, domestic, mundane. A person leaned on one of the many balconies of a high-rise populated by air-con units and washing that’s been hung out to dry. We don’t know the person in this image. We can only see that they hold a telephone to their ear.…
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…
News

Between Me and the Night promises magical realism with spooky undertones

When you’re a kid, monsters aren’t just something you entertain as a distant possibility—there are times when you’re, like, 90 percent sure they’re actually there. I can remember several nights lying awake in bed in my childhood home, unable to close my eyes because of my deep conviction that something on the other side of those slatted closet doors had it in for me. The “something” changed over the years (it was Chucky from Child’s Play until I saw The Exorcist for the first time), but my sense that it was more than possible that those fictional characters had tracked…
News

The magical realism of Japanese author Murakami gets its own videogame

You’d think videogames and magical realism would’ve found each other by now, but the pairing is still a tragically rare sight. Kentucky Route Zero is one of the few games I can name that embraces elements of magical realism without evolving into full-blown fantasy, but another project called Memoranda—also a point-and-click adventure—could soon join the list. Memoranda is inspired by the fiction of Haruki Murakami, whose works are often set in surreal realities that find a dreamlike charm in mundanity. In Memoranda’s case, the setting and the time period may be unclear and contain dissonant elements, but most of its…