sci-fi Archives - Kill Screen

Sunless Skies promises a gloriously Victorian sci-fi tale

Rejoice! The stars are right! The stars are right because they are being murdered. Sunless Sea (2015) introduced players to the lonely madness and terror of an underground sea. Its expansion pack, Zubmariner, is set to take players to the claustrophobic depths of that ocean on October 11. Now, the sequel to Sunless Sea has been announced—named Sunless Skies—and promises to take its blend of well-written prose and pensive cosmic horror out into the actual cosmos. Fallen London is going to space. Sunless Sea begins with an epigraph from Joseph Conrad, expressing the central theme of the game: “The Sea…

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One last tour of Destiny’s Cosmodrome

Heterotopias is a series of visual investigations into virtual spaces performed by writer and artist Gareth Damian Martin. /// There’s a set of stairs in my childhood house that I still climb like I was eight years old. It’s not something I do on purpose; it’s something ingrained, so that the moment I step on the first step my hands come instinctively down and I scramble up the carpeted ledges like a dog. It’s as if, through repetition, the space has ceased to be something true, objective, and has transformed into a series of emotional and psychological triggers, arranged in the precise configuration to…

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Expect to gather round Djur’s bonfire for a sci-fi fable

The campfire story has been resurrected in videogames recently. A rush of independent games have taken their own spin on the sit-around-and-talker, and the idea of making a game out of a fable is currently being tested by upcoming games like Forest of Sleep. The recently-announced game Djur expands this area of thinking, and aims to combine the quiet calm of fantasy worlds with sci-fi, and explore the meaning of myth and humanity through folk tales. it attracts the uncanny So far we don’t know much about Djur besides the unusual moniker of “sci-fi fable.” But that’s okay, because the little…

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The challenging design of Event[0]’s insecure AI

One of the big games coming out this week is Event[0]—available for Windows and Mac on September 14th. It’s a sci-fi game set in an alternate retrofuture reality in which humanity built a starship in 1985 and has since embraced artificial intelligence even more than we have now. The events depicted in the game take place in 2012, on board a starship, where you, the player, are left alone with an insecure AI known as Kaizen. The idea is to explore the ship (which requires completing some hacking puzzles) in order to gather items and information. With this, you can then talk…

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There’s more Tacoma footage and it just keeps getting better

IGN has released the first 15 minutes Fullbright’s next game Tacoma, and it’s looking astonishingly good. We’d already gotten glimpses of its ship as Amy, the protagonist, slipped around in zero-gravity, transferring from surface to surface to navigate the empty ship, and we’d seen the first echoes of those that used to inhabit it: colorful human-shaped holograms, going about their lives on loop as Amy stayed quiet and watched. we watch them converse and lament, joke and flirt and worry But with this new footage we get an even closer look at the AR ghosts that drive Tacoma’s plot—we watch them…

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Welcome to the age of videogame beards

Let’s face it: the renaissance of the full beard has been a thing for a while now. It came from fashion and now it has arrived in our videogames. It’s nothing to scoff at, either. The power of the beard has worked to change a 20-year history of smooth-faced Street Fighter characters: Ryu now has as much facial hair as Zangief. The same thing happened to Geralt in The Witcher 3 last year, and now the bald protagonist of God of War too: Kratos’s minimalist goatee has grown to a full beard for his next game, putting him in a list that I,…

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The Fall Part 2 promises to plummet further into its AI nightmare

We were exposed to the first part of the sci-fi videogame trilogy The Fall over two years ago now. It’s about time some more info on the second part arrived—and that it has, and with a trailer to boot. You can expect it to arrive during first quarter of 2017 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Wii U, Windows, Mac, and Linux. The Fall Part 2: Unbound, as it’s called, will continue the journey of ARID, the AI onboard a high-tech combat suit that players will control. The trailer for The Fall Part 2 picks up right where the first game left off,…

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Stare wildly at the mutated giraffes of a game set in far-future Africa

“Set in a distant future in an evocative African landscape … he is not from this place or time …” states the tantalizing blurb on Beautiful Desolation‘s website. Those are the only hints regarding the narrative of the next adventure game from The Brotherhood, the team behind bleak sci-fi horror adventure Stasis (2015) and its upcoming side story Cayne. Implications of dimensional and time travel aside, it’s the isometric landscape of distant future Africa that intrigues the most. It’s a world years in the making, first conceived before and then developed during the creation of Stasis. heads bulging with lumps…

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Take in the quiet, robotic wastelands of The Signal From Tölva

Big Robot, the studio behind the quirky “tweedpunk” survival game Sir, You Are Being Hunted (2013) has returned with more robots. This time, however, the tone is a little more serious, with the newly announced The Signal From Tölva, which imagines a future when space-faring groups of robots spend their time searching through what’s left of long-dead civilizations. The game takes place on Tölva, where something has been found, and you must follow the signal to find it. As such, you play as a lonely robot explorer trying to discover what that something is. But that’s not entirely true. As…