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‘For Each Our Roads of Winter’ is like Myst, but photographic and hauntingly beautiful

Not a lot is known about the haunting, mysterious, and handsomely titled For Each Our Roads of Winter, but we’ve seen enough for our jaws to hang open and a little spittle to form in the pockets of our lips. It is without question a gorgeous and vividly photographic first-person adventure game. That much is sure. The ultra-real depictions of rope bridges over precipices and ocean rendered in high-contrast black-and-white are to die for, somehow clearer and more accurate than if you were standing before these scenes in real-life.  The creator Orihaus, who is using the power of the hot…

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It doesn’t get much creepier than controlling this ultra-detailed face with your mouse

This is not my face. I am at least as handsome, but far less demented-looking than that. As for this guy, he’s just some highly creepy head model rendered in filmic tonemapping, a graphic technique we see in games like the Uncharted series, which explaining could get complicated. What you really need to know is it’s used in making this awful web toy by AlteredQualia that lets you control the glower of the most vicious looking convict on earth by wiggling your mouse. And that once you do so you won’t be able to sleep a wink tonight.  Go ahead,…

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How the small team behind The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter outdid Crysis in photorealism

The amazing thing about The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter is how nature looks more gorgeous in it than in whatever gorgeous game you have in mind: Far Cry 3, Crysis, Skyrim, Battlefield. So you might be surprised to learn that it was made by a small and unknown independent team. How’d they do it?  Well, in an article on Indie Statik today, it was revealed that they’re calling the technique photogrammetric, which is a no-nonsense approach to photorealistic graphics. What this means is that instead of crafting thousands of tiny polygons in the shape of a tree, they instead take…