Tag: Puzzle

Pavilion
News

Pavilion gets eye-tracking support to better support disabled players

Visiontrick Media has revealed that its “fourth-person” puzzle adventure Pavilion is getting eye-tracking controls. The studio teamed up with eye-tracking specialist company Tobii to develop a way for the game to be played solely with your gaze—no keyboard or mouse needed. This is, obviously, a big help for people who have disabilities that make using a keyboard or mouse difficult. The only catch is that you will need a Tobii EyeX Eye-Tracker device in order to play Pavilion with your eyes. But the good news is that the device does work with a bunch of other games including The Division, Watch Dogs…
Infini
News

Barnaque’s next game is about the burden of being hopeful

Barnaque is one of the most interesting freeware game studios to have emerged in the past few years. Comprised of the Montreal-based duo David Martin and Émeric Morin, Barnaque has made games that are often described as “batshit crazy” and “psychedelic,” mostly because the pair want to mess with players through game form, art, and mechanics. “What we’ve been trying to do since the beginning of Barnaque is to mess with people’s expectations by establishing patterns and breaking them,” the pair told me over email. “Infini is our strongest attempt at this.” Infini is the pair’s next game and it will…
Dark Train
News

Dark Train is a mystery made of paper worth unfolding

Paperash Studio has done everything creative you can do with paper, except put words on it. The studio’s textless adventure, Dark Train, is made entirely out of papercraft and code—a carefully folded world of bats and belfries, soccer fields and sleazy hotels. Its title flirts with the idea of being a long-lost piece of ’90s cinema directed by Alex Proyas (responsible for The Crow and Dark City), and to be fair, that’s not a bad analogy. While the camera sticks like cement to the titular train, it is but a vessel for your viewpoint as it moves through the city; a…
Small Radios Big Televisions
News

Small Radios Big Televisions finds the beauty in machine glitches

Small Radios Big Televisions, a game about the joys of broken analog tech, is coming to PlayStation 4 and PC on November 8th. Mostly, it wants you to collect cassettes and play them in a tape recorder: special attention is given to the tape sliding into the tray, the chik of it being locked in, the reel slowly spinning to unwind its contents. For someone who remembers doing this over and over as a child bored in their room, it’s a sensual few seconds; the familiar choreography plugging straight into the spectral residue of fond memories. But that’s only the beginning.…
News

SUPERHYPERCUBE is here to make VR worthwhile

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. SUPERHYPERCUBE (PS4) BY KOKOROMI In this new dawn of virtual reality, people will try to port all sorts of things into VR that shouldn’t be there. Yet for every egregious Until Dawn DLC, there’s a SUPERHYPERCUBE to remind you that matches made in heaven still exist. Comparable to the look and pacing of Tetris, in SUPERHYPERCUBE you must rotate and arrange a cluster of cubes to fit through an impending wall. Despite sharing some DNA with 2D classics, SUPERHYPERCUBE feels like a beast of its…
Review

Pavilion and the maze as metaphor

When I was younger, I got lost in the works of Jorge Luis Borges. In my hubris, I assumed I “got” him in a way that would let me use the tools of literary study to recognize patterns, symbols, and themes. His hermetic prose held secrets that I thought I had unlocked in my sophomoric self-satisfaction. I assured myself that knowing Borges’ favorite subjects, like mazes and infinite libraries, are actually metaphors for the text itself was a revelation that only I and a few select others could hold dear. I was wrong, of course. Not about the obvious readings,…
News

Get ready to prod GNOG’s monster heads in early 2017

Australian milk packaging from the ’80s, designer toys made from wood, illustrations of otherworldly science-fiction landscapes. These are the sorts of images you’ll find neatly organized on GNOG creator Samuel Boucher’s Pinterest board; the sort of things that he cites as inspiration for GNOG’s monster heads—most of which are almost done. After three years of work, GNOG is almost ready for release. Yep, it’s been announced that, in early 2017, GNOG will be released on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR. And a Steam and iOS release will come soon after. Until then, Boucher and his team at KO-OP will be refining the…
News

Aww, a game about lonely robots evokes the best children’s animation

A young boy, seen through a viewfinder, discusses the ocean with his mom. The screen buzzes; the boy disappears; two eyes blink open. They belong to a little metal carapace that scrambles around an empty room, tugging at switches and saying, “Hello?” The boy is nowhere to be found, but the bot keeps looking, earnest and determined. This is Abi, a new story-focused puzzle game from Grant&Bert Studios. It resembles WALL-E (2008) in its story, which similarly follows a pair of robots wandering around the remnants of Earth after human beings’ mass exodus. You play as two droids that used…
ReCore
News

ReCore downplays its robot dog, which is all we care about

When ReCore’s first trailer premiered at E3 2015, the protagonist Joule and her scrappy robot dog charmed everyone with their expeditious tag-team adventure. Evoking Rey’s lone scavenger vibe from Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), the brief blast of combat at the trailer’s end promised creative, cooperative action—and a canine companion with the trick of interchangeable bodies, so you never need worry about the dog dying. Joule and co. seemed sweet, despite their attacking prowess, and the idea of an open desert to romp through and explore was tantalizing. weird, hidden garages full of violence Pre-release material has since hinted…