Tag: playdead

News

Playdead teases new title with mysterious image

Earlier today, the Twitter account of Playdead, creator of Kill Screen’s #1 game of 2016, emerged from its slumber to drop something special on this day of days. Thanks for your warm reception of INSIDE. Since release, Playdead founder Arnt Jensen and the team have been working on the next adventure. pic.twitter.com/RfejnH39mR — Playdead (@Playdead) January 20, 2017 And away we go! So short, so sweet. Let the speculation commence. Although one fan has already named it: "Outside" — Devon | #ActiBlizzWalkout đź’™ (@Devon_Wiersma) January 20, 2017 We’ll reach out to Playdead for more info.
THOTH
News

Inside’s puzzle designer has an experimental music game out next month

Some visual styles become particularly entrenched in games. The continual quest for photorealism drives graphics technology towards lots of different ways to light scenes and throw particles all over the place. Different engines and art teams end up producing something like house styles—DICE’s Frostbite engine means the upcoming Battlefield 1 is lit a lot like Battlefield 4 (2013), CryEngine’s lush environments look pretty similar in Far Cry 3 (2012) and Far Cry 4 (2014), and in games more far afield like Monster Hunter Online (2013). THOTH suggests that the arcade resembles a gallery Even in games that come out of much smaller studios, certain lo-fi looks…
Feature

The mad science behind Inside’s soundtrack

Without giving anything away, there are definitely some freaky experiments going on in Inside, the latest game from Danish studio Playdead. At times, these experiments are depicted through the game’s eye-popping stagecraft, but in other instances, players take the helm as experimenters, tinkering with switches, valves, and other, squishier, things to puzzle out solutions in a manner that would make Dr. Jekyll proud. Inside’s music composer and sound designer, Martin Stig Andersen, conducted his own unorthodox experiments to create the game’s unsettling soundscape. More interesting than the bizarre nature of Andersen’s experiments, though, is why he conducted them and what…
News

Inside is coming to PS4 after all

We are very fond of Playdead’s Inside, the Danish designers’ follow-up to 2010’s Limbo. It’s bolder, more gut-wrenching, and alive. Until today it was only available on Xbox One and PC, which means most of you probably played it on PC. But Playdead have just announced that on August 23rd, Inside is coming to PS4! That is very soon. Inside‘s arrival on The People’s Console hopefully means a resurgence in attention, sort of like how Hyper Light Drifter‘s debut on PS4 meant exposure to a whole new audience. You should play this game. I suspect, come December, it’ll be sitting high up on Kill Screen’s best-of-2016…
Inside
Feature

Let’s obsess over what Inside is all about

This article contains lots of spoilers for Inside. /// When I got to the furnace I thought that was the end of Inside. Immediately my heart stopped. “Oh my god they didn’t,” I thought. But the momentum of the moment and all the crashing glass and shrill screams that had come before urged me on. The King of Limbs (as some are now referring to it) slunk closer to the wall, both of us transfixed by the flames. The blob of mangled flesh and synaptic impulses is a tragic abomination, but did the game’s creators really want it to die?…
Inside
Review

Inside wants to devour you

Everyone who has ever played Éric Chahi’s Another World (1991) remembers the “Beast.” Emerging from a pool of water, you see a four-legged silhouette perched menacingly on a nearby ledge. The creature then exits to the right. On the next screen it appears momentarily in the background, but you’re distracted by the poisonous worms crawling towards you. By the third screen you may have forgotten about it altogether until crossing an invisible threshold triggers it to appear. It snarls. You run. It chases you. But you didn’t run soon enough, and it catches you, kills you, and sends you back…
Inside
News

The next game from the creators of LIMBO goes full-on George Orwell

It’s been six years since black-and-white sidescroller LIMBO (2010) came out. It might not feel that long—it doesn’t to me—due to it having lingered with an almost ghostly presence over the world of videogames. Small or large, it didn’t matter, many games have since adapted LIMBO‘s foggy chiaroscuro and quiet, morbid world for their own stories. You might think then, given that length of time, as well as the lasting paucity of LIMBO, that the studio behind it, Playdead, would have moved on. Plus, surely, the two-tone 2D landscape was made out of necessity; don’t they have wilder dreams to realize off the…
News

Meat Boy, Mario, and the perfect platformer jump

“What actions are ideal in a jump curve?” asked Playdead level designer Martin Fasterholdt to a sizeable crowd for his panel at the Game Developer’s Conference. In a discussion that stemmed from Fasterholdt’s own master thesis, the “You Say Jump, I Say How High?” panel explored the varying degrees of the best and most dynamic of 2D platforming jumps. His primary examples for the talk being the frenetic Super Meat Boy (2010), the classic Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988), and the precision-driven Limbo (2010) from Fasterholdt’s own Playdead (a game he claimed he was incidentally “too young” to work on…
News

Playdead’s sophomore effort somehow looks even more sinister than Limbo

Where do you go after opening with a haunting, beautiful, universally-praised smash like Limbo? Brilliant initial offerings are always notoriously tough to follow up, but it looks like there will be no sophomore slump from Playdead. Judging by the hot and hyperbole-worthy debut trailer for Inside, the Copenhagen developer is sticking with the creeping feeling of dread, the arthouse grain-filters, and the chiaroscuro.  So what’s new? Well, it looks like the horrific fairytale motif of Limbo—you guided a young boy past murderous figures and buzz saws—has grown up into a maturer expression of existential dread: we see legions of mindless…