Tag: Survival

The Flame in the Flood
News

Die along a river when The Flame in the Flood arrives on PS4 this month

If you haven’t played The Flame in the Flood yet then consider this a second chance. Today it was announced that it’ll be coming to PlayStation 4 on January 17th. And not only that, it’ll have some extra goodies to boot in order to justify calling it the “Complete Edition.” There aren’t too many extras to get excited about in this new package. It includes a director’s commentary, avatars, and a dynamic theme. Oh, and “gameplay enhancements,” which could mean anything, but given that the creators are being vague it’s likely just a bunch of small improvements that even people familiar with…
Soul Searching
News

Fleeing the conflicts in Turkey and the personal game about it

“Making Soul Searching has been a way for me to make sense of what’s happening,” Turkish game maker Talha Kaya told me. He’s talking about his latest videogame, his biggest to date, which explores the theme of leaving your homeland and parents behind—a journey that’s inspired by the real-life drama of Kaya’s personal life. As Kaya described it, the situation in Turkey has been getting more and more depressing over the past 10 years. He told me that the nation is fighting with itself and, not so dissimilar to the perceived future of America, has a government that empowers the…
News

Practice for the impending apocalypse with The Wild Eight

If 2016 has been an utter trash heap for you, as it has for so many, you may have fantasized at times about striking out to build a new life away from all this terrible bullshit. It can be hard to care about games when the real world is falling apart at the seams. But if you’re looking to get away, an upcoming game is on the horizon that may help ready you for that long awaited escape. The Wild Eight, due out this fall for PC, PS4, and Xbox One, is a Northern survival game set in a procedurally…
News

Jason Rohrer’s next game is a twisted take on child rearing

Jason Rohrer’s last game, the home defense MMO The Castle Doctrine (2014), revolved around protecting what’s yours: your family, your wealth accumulated through rounds of burglary, your carefully designed web of traps and defense. It was a ruthless world, a merciless place where your measure of success is how good you were at dismantling other’s work and stealing their goods. So it seems ironic that his next game (working title One Life) starts you off as completely defenseless and reliant on the kindness of online strangers. Enter the world in Rohrer’s currently unnamed MMO, and you find yourself birthed to…
News

#Everest asks if you’d die for the selfie that gets you famous

First you tested your Olympic skills from your seat, now you can summit Mt. Everest from the safety of your home—and take some bomb selfies along the way. The latest from independent game studio Team Dogpit, survival sim #Everest challenges you to climb the highest mountain on Earth and get internet famous along the way. Equip yourself and your guides with everything you need to make it to the top and look awesome doing it. Your objective is simple: rack up a high score by getting as many social media likes on selfies taken during your ascent as humanly possible. But…
Review

Near Death is a little too numb

Near Death begins when a woman crashes at the abandoned Sutro Station in the Marie Byrd Land region of Antarctica. There is no ceremonious setup, only the bare-bones facts of her situation: the temperature, the location, the condition of polar night, and the wind chill. She fumbles through the dark with the dim glow of a flashlight before finding one of the buildings of Sutro Station and uses a small personal heater to circulate warmth. Her situation only worsens as her contact cannot extract her in extreme conditions, and she resolves to find some way to survive or escape before…
News

Hyaline plans to bring more empathy to the survival game genre

A collection of game creators from Australia are trying to build a new planet. Nothing as expansive as No Man’s Sky has promised, but instead taking cues from survival games like Don’t Starve (2013) to create a world that is as dangerous as it is beautiful, and full of life that you can’t just hack your way through. Producer Gabriel Morgan has been working on Hyaline—the planet, not the game, though it will spring from the same world-building effort—for the better part of 10 years. According to the game’s website, it’s a “super-Earth that orbits a G0 star,” with rocky rings…
Overland
News

Overland is the road trip from hell, but it’s okay, there are dog friends

Finji showed off a new trailer for their upcoming game Overland yesterday as part of the PC Gaming Press Conference at E3. In order to be both accessible and complex, Overland has pared the tactics genre down significantly. It plays out on a series of nine-by-nine grids, where your squaddies have around three health tops, can usually perform two actions per turn, and—whether it’s a machete or a medkit—can carry only one item at a time. There’s a lot of tense counting out steps Each turn feels like a puzzle—how will we keep quiet and still collect the gas we…
News

Before gets NSFW in its latest update (but it’s still beautiful as heck)

Before is a new spin on the survival game from Rust developer Facepunch Studios where, rather than controlling a single character, players must lead a whole tribe of cave people to survive in an intimidating post-Ice Age world. Up until now, we’ve had a few opportunities to gawk at the game’s naturalistic vistas and see early glimpses of how the player’s tribespeople interact with both the environment and each other. But thanks to a new update over on Before’s blog, we now have a better idea of the specifics on how they’ll live and fight in this still young society.…