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Take a look at Rollovski, the adorable Simogo game that never was

Recently made available for free over on their blog, Simogo’s Rollovski is adorable, clever, and unfortunately, only four levels long. The game, an unreleased prototype, stars a round, limbless detective of the same name, following him on his journey to infiltrate a strange hotel made up entirely of circular rooms. Along the way, players must avoid capture from spotlights and, like in the Sonic the Hedgehog series, build up enough speed to roll around the environment’s many loops. Unfortunately, like its ball-shaped main character, it was never quite able to get off the ground. Rollovski‘s story begins in 2012, when shortly after releasing…

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Surprise! Simogo’s new "quiet" videogame isn’t what you’d expect

SPL-T isn’t what you’d expect from Simogo. Sure, the studio has certainly delved into puzzles before. You could even say puzzles are a staple of Simogo’s house style as some of its best games included particularly memorable ones: Beat Sneak Bandit, DEVICE 6, and Year Walk especially. But the Swedish pair have never made a “pure puzzle game.” This is how Simon Flesser (the “Sim” in Simogo) describes SPL-T. “‘It’s just you and the game’ was a phrase we kept coming back to, and we didn’t want to compromise on that ever,” he tells me. “We wanted a quiet game”  To this…

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Simogo channels its Swedish folk-horror into a scary children’s book

Eerie adventure game Year Walk is headed to the Wii U, but rather than celebrate with a spin-off, or DLC, or other things game companies like to put out before a new release, Simogo has published an eBook called Year Walk Bedtime Stories for Awful Children to mark the occasion. Bedtime Stories for Awful Children is a collection of five gruesome short stories inspired by both the folk tales of Simogo’s native Sweden and the creatures that haunt Year Walk. With the gloom of Edward Gorey and art by Johanna Meijer, the Year Walk storybook includes such charming tales as:…

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Simogo announces four-part "podcast mystery," is just the coolest

“Deep breath.” /// Swedish pair Simon Flesser and Magnus Gardebäck, the two personalities that form Simogo, have proven their talent in producing air-sucking audiences. Year Walk was a creepy folk-thriller that you gasped along to. DEVICE 6 used text as a path to weave a tale of regular staccato; you took sharp inward breaths at every knife-twist and solved puzzle. Then, with The Sailor’s Dream, we rowed along a sea of lost places, caught in a meditative reverie. Here, you could breath with the rhythm of the waves, which were a reliable return location from each journey into the game’s…

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Dream of this week’s playlist pick

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. THE SAILOR’S DREAM (iOS) BY SIMOGO Simogo’s previous games Year Walk and Device 6 put richly detailed spins on recognizable frameworks: point-and-click adventure, interactive fiction. But The Sailor’s Dream is something new, a mingling of short story and art installation. There are no tangible puzzles to speak of, only a nonlinear narrative that relies on your initiative to piece it together. It’s like a pitch for a new kind of ebook that combines the comfort of prose with the intimacy of touch interaction. And with Simogo’s signature attention to aesthetic,…