Paris Archives

Night Call will bring you stylish French noir from the back of a taxi

Night Call‘s shade of noir-infused drama seems to be one part Drive (2011) and two parts Taxi Driver (1976). Upcoming for PC, iOS, and Android, Night Call will have you playing as a Parisian taxi driver who hopes to find the killer who has orchestrated a number of recent murders around the city. But you don’t do this in the usual videogame way—shootouts in industrial wastelands, chasing a black figure across a rooftop—the whole game takes place inside your taxi. the game uses a real city map for you to drive around Monkey Moon and BlackMuffin Studio, the two French…

News

Oh damn, a game inspired by Albert Robida illustrations is on the way

Zipping along an elevated restaurant and opera house, there are flying cars, buses, and other ships. The sky is teeming with these vehicles, transporting Victorian-garbed folks to and from their destinations. This is the futuristic world envisioned by 19th century artist Albert Robida in Le Sortie de l’opéra en l’an 2000. This is the same world inspiring Voici, an upcoming game being created by Rotterdam-based designer Joost Eggermont. Under the backdrop of a retro-futuristic city, Voici oozes the same kind of playfulness and charm as found in many of Robida’s prescient works. Two years ago, while looking for visual inspiration,…

Feature

The class war and canapes of HITMAN’s Paris debut

I’ve been to my fair share of parties. I don’t mean the plastic-cup-and-pizza apartment hang-outs, or the police-baiting all-night warehouse raves—I mean vaulted ceilings, black tie dress code, and free champagne. Parties where I leant on neoclassical statues while distant arty bass droned on, where tungsten yellow courtyards were transformed into ice-white future bars, and fountains and conversation tinkled nearby. I mean exactly the kind of party that HITMAN offers up for its opening act. It’s a party that is so familiar, in fact, that I was met with an odd sense of deja vu as I wandered through the…

News

Virtual reality doors tease you to enter new dimensions

I’ll tell you this much about Paris’ Institut du Monde Arabe: its windows are impressively clean. I can tell you that much because many moons ago I walked into one of the buildings glass walls while on a guided tour. In my defense, the glass really was quite clean—transparent even—and is the measure of a good window not whether someone oblivious dope walks into it? Is that the standard by which we should judge DOORS, an interactive installation by French creation studio THEORIZ? DOORS does what it says on the tin; it is a virtual reality installation in which you…

Article

Playing Paris like a game

I have never been to Paris. In my provincial life I’ve never even left the United States. Despite or, perhaps, due to my localism, I was beguiled by the vision of the city given by Luc Sante in his 2015 book The Other Paris. Sante provides an underground history of the city, of its crime and prostitution, its low-wage work and lowbrow entertainments, its intoxications and insurrections. As fluent as he is with tales of murderous gangsters and wayward streetwalkers, what really comes across in The Other Paris is Sante’s deep mourning for the lost topography of the city. The…

News

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…

News

How temporary structures inspire architectural innovation

In many ways, the architecture of modern metropolises largely consists of simply lining each city block with minor variations on the same massive, contemporary rectangle of a skyscraper. The sheer size of these structures is impressive at first but, after a while, their similarity can leave a city feeling drained of personality. It’s difficult to blame corporations for choosing “safe” designs on multi-million dollar buildings that are meant to last decades, but once the initial impact of their size wears down, these soulless monoliths fail to leave much of an impression. So what happens when architects are given the freedom…