Tag: Survival

News

Did Rust just become the first transgender MMO?

Unlike many other online multiplayer games, Rust doesn’t give players any control over what their character looks like. Instead, it randomly generates a set of features and ties them permanently to the player’s Steam account. This means that, even if they leave the game, their character will look the same when they return. It’s a fitting choice, given how primal the world of the survival-based Rust is. Just as in real life, Rust doesn’t let you choose what you want to look like, but instead spits you out naked into its world with a body you had no say in, and tells…
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No Man’s Sky finally revealing its mysteries when it launches this June

It’s been a little over two years since ambitious space exploration game No Man’s Sky, with its “planet-sized planets” and “universe-sized universe,” was first announced back in December of 2013. Since then, the game’s trailers and various press showings have been great at capturing the imagination, but haven’t exactly shown us too much of just what this game is about. What’s there to do in this massive universe? What sort of creatures and people live in it? What’s this all leading up to? As with J.J. Abrams and his mystery box, part of the excitement of No Man’s Sky comes…
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New writing app deletes your work if you don’t concentrate

I’ve never been a writing-within-hours-of-the-deadline type of person. In college, I was probably an anomaly of a student. I’d write my papers in advance, then pop into my professors’ office hours for feedback before turning in a final draft. Some peers called me an overachiever. Others had no idea how I could ever not write a paper the night before it was due, fueled by Five Hour Energy Shots and Totino’s Pizza Rolls. The answer was always simple: I set myself early personal deadlines because I’m easily distracted, and needed the extra time to slowly gnaw away at a project. That’s…
News

Creators of The Novelist want you to avoid freezing to death next

Orthogonal Games, the studio behind 2013’s The Novelist, has announced its next project, called Near Death. It presents a simple premise: Your plane has crashed in Antarctica. You’re cold, you’re alone, and it’s dark. There’s an abandoned research station within walking distance. Try not to die. It’s an effective hook, evoking the excitement and immediacy of the first BioShock‘s (2007) opening sequence, in which the game’s protagonist finds himself half-drowned in the middle of the Atlantic only to see a mysterious lighthouse in the water nearby. The major difference is that Near Death has no Rapture (the game’s underwater city) for its protagonist to…
The Flame in the Flood
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The Flame in the Flood’s post-disaster journey begins on February 24th

Boy, videogames sure do want out of the narrow, crate-filled corridors of their youth, nowadays! First-person hiking simulator Firewatch has been receiving critical praise all week, in no small part because of its beautiful renditions of the American Northwest. Now The Flame in the Flood, a game about a little girl surviving a post-disaster America, is also striking out for the wilderness with a release date: it’ll be out on February 24th for Windows, Mac, and Xbox One. But it isn’t emotional hardship behind Scout, the young protagonist of The Flame in the Flood; it’s torrential rains, which will be…
Road in Maine
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Overland envisions Edward Hopper’s America as an altogether filthier place

America as depicted in the work of the American realist painter Edward Hopper is almost unbearably quaint. The majority of his paintings and prints involve remarkably calm, perhaps lonely, people leading blissfully mundane existences in vintage diners, full service gas stations, and excessively tidy drawing rooms. It is easy on the eye, but you can’t help but despise these privileged, perfectly normal human beings who had nothing better to do with their time but sit gazing out of windows, halfway nude, at skylines and crap. Thankfully then, Finji is introducing these quiet, placid Americans of our national heritage to the…
News

Before continues to take shape as the prettiest prehistorical survival game

Cavemen games seem to be the next big thing, a natural evolution of the survival genre. Now that the post-apocalypse is becoming a little tired, it makes sense to reach way back to pre-civilization for something fresh. Big titles like Far Cry Primal and WiLD may be the ones people are talking about, but the first recent example that comes to my mind is Before. Before had its biggest public debut during The Game Awards last year, but its creators over at Facepunch Studios (behind Garry’s Mod and Rust) have been posting updates here and there on the game’s progress…
News

Kôna invites you to investigate an abandoned town in 1970s Canada

The most striking thing about the new trailer for Kôna, an upcoming surreal mystery game from Parabole, is its narration. It has this really odd, stilted intonation that I can’t quite place; the boom and quirk of old timey radio announcer meets the uncanny poetry of The Residents. Whatever it is, I like it. It sets such a strange tone for the rest of the video, which is just as good: as we learn from our dramatic narrator, you play as a Korean War veteran named Carl Faubert who ventures into the Northern Canadian wilderness to investigate a bout of…
News

Overland turns the post-apocalyptic road trip into a series of delicate dioramas

Overland has the look of something you could feasibly prod. It comes across as a series of cartoon-coated dioramas that are made to be admired up close. This is no accident. As designer Adam Saltsman explains in a new video about Overland, by having “clear, obvious visuals composed on a single screen,” what is usually an inaccessible genre—squad-based tactics in this case—is made “available to a new wider audience without sacrificing depth or challenge.” The idea is to help a group of people survive a hellish road trip across a ravaged America. The most obvious threat are the sound-sensitive beasts…