short Archives

Need a break from the world? Chill out on a virtual island

Don’t you ever wish you could escape to a remote island just to get away from it all, even for five or 10 minutes? If so, check out ROM, a “short experimental experience” created by HTW Berlin students Paul Schnepf, Rainer Windolph, and Friedemann Allmenröder. Created as part of the Game Design BA curriculum, ROM allows you to explore a desolate island and take control of its environment. Revive its ancient machines to alter the weather and bring the island back to life. Activating one machine causes snow to cover the land; another brings on a sudden driving rainstorm accompanied by…

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You may not eat your greens ever again after playing this food horror game

I’m struggling to eat bananas these days. It’s Facebook’s fault. The damn thing is ruining my diet. I logged on one day to an auto-playing video of a spider breaking its way out of a banana. The devil of a thing pierced the skin from the inside of its fruity carriage and crawled out of it, into my nightmares. Now every time I bite into a banana I expect to feel hair and legs in my mouth. This is a problem I have now. Luckily, I’m not such a big eater of carrots. For if I were I think playing…

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Glitch Noir looks into the corporate drone hell of our near future

The Candidate, director Michael Ritchie’s 1972 political satire, depicted an exaggerated political milieu in which even the most earnest of candidates is shallow and ultimately believes in nothing more than getting elected. Ritchie’s exaggerated world, in other words, is the world we now live in. Therein lies the risk and perverse beauty of genre cinema: sometimes a filmmaker’s transgressive vision becomes our everyday reality. Writer, director, and animator Cody Healey-Conelly’s Glitch Noir is a genre short whose dystopian future may imminently be upon us. It is about streams of information and the use of drones. More specifically, a major company’s…

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New game about sketches mirrors a classic Looney Tunes episode

Have you ever been watching a cartoon when suddenly the screen goes white, the main character is standing there alone, and the animator’s pencil drops down into screen to mess with the world? It’s a classic fourth-wall-breaking gag that’s all over the place in animation—from the classic Looney Tunes short Duck Amuck to the more recent Animator vs Animation series of viral videos—and now it’s coming to games. an unfinished sketch looking to discover what it was meant to be Usually, this trope is played for comedy, but new 3D platforming game Unfinished – An Artist’s Lament seeks to use…

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Profiles of the Forgotten is "a videogame within a movie"

“Have you ever loved someone so much, that you could step out of time?” These are the words that introduce Profiles of the Forgotten, a project that lies somewhere between a traditional game and a film. The first project by Los Angeles developer Pablo Leon-Luna, Profiles of the Forgotten is described simply as “a videogame within a movie. A gothic fantasy.” The cinematic experience follows Jason, a young man returning to his family’s lake house to visit his stepsister, only to find that she refuses to speak to him any other way but through computer. As his attempts to reach…