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Memories of a failing relationship are made beautiful in Ephemera

Plenty of things in life have expiration dates: cartons of milk, your passport, antiperspirants. After a week in the fridge, you should really retire that open bottle of wine. Relationships, on the other hand, don’t usually come marked with an end date. You might see the end coming from a ways away, but the ‘when’ is, in most cases, unclear. Not so in Ephemera (French: Les éphémères), a new narrative experience currently in development by Interim Studio. Designed by Lazlo Bonin and animated by Jazz Eladas, Ephemera is a “notgame” in which you have one fleeting summer to spend with your love…

Oxenfree
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Teen ghost story Oxenfree to get new endings in upcoming Director’s Cut

Originally released for Windows, Mac, and Xbox One back in January, teen horror adventure game Oxenfree is now coming to the PlayStation 4 on May 31st as Oxenfree: Director’s Cut. It’ll come complete with a bevy of new features to find in its New Game+ mode, including new dialogue, new areas to explore, and new alternate endings to discover. While the PS4 version will already have all of this content included at launch, Steam and Xbox One players need not worry, as they will also receive the New Game+ mode in an update on the same day. “Upon completing the story once,…

Wood for the Trees
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Lose yourself in the looping puzzles of a beautiful low-res forest

The first paper note in Wood for the Trees asks: “don’t you just love reading notes on lamp posts?” Images and icons present in other first-person Unity games like Slender (2012) or Andrew Shouldice’s Hide are on display here too. The same note makes reference to “a missing beloved one” addressed by some of the internal monologue, also presented as text on the screen. Built in two days for the 35th Ludum Dare game jam (the theme of which was “Shapeshift”) Wood for the Trees is pervaded by the awareness that it isn’t a game of entirely new ideas—but it’s better…