By John Walker on December 6th, 2012 at 9:00 am.
Back last year, while rooting through the IGF entries, I found Parallax – a game that made my brain all hurty. In a good way. It describes itself as “a first-person puzzle platformer with overlapping spatial dimensions.” I describe myself as “a bit scared by how complicated this looks.”
“Weave back and forth between black and white,” they say, “as you try to be in the right place, in the right dimension, at the right time.” I’m incredibly poor at being in the right place at the right time with this one dimension. Just look at it!
It looks a bit brilliant, right? And so damned pretty. It’s currently in the cockfight for Steam Greenlight attention, when of course Valve should just be doing their job and asking for it to be on Steam themselves.
06/12/2012 at 09:05 GallonOfAlan says:
No relation to the C64 shooter then.
06/12/2012 at 09:20 Maxheadroom says:
Bah beat me to it. I wanted to sound all knowledgeable (read:old) by mentioning that
06/12/2012 at 11:13 I Got Pineapples says:
I got it confused with Uridium for a moment.
I WIN AT OLD!
06/12/2012 at 11:32 SuperNashwanPower says:
I had a C64 and don’t remember those titles. This brings a sadness to my day
06/12/2012 at 11:38 GallonOfAlan says:
It was a sort of Time Pilot effort IIRC. My turbo tape copy rarely started.
06/12/2012 at 11:41 I Got Pineapples says:
You flew around an open world map and rescued scientists. Or possibly drugged and kidnapped them. It was awesome cause you could get out of your little spaceship and walk around on foot.
Uridium was a side scrolling shooty thing that was notable because it had fake parallax scrolling which was like the cutting edge of computer game graphics in the day and which the C64 actually couldn’t do.
06/12/2012 at 12:03 nickylee says:
I remember Parallax, but don’t recall being able to leave the ship. Mind you I was more of a fan of the top-down shooter where you were trying to stem an alien virus by blasting it to bits. Can’t for the life of me remember what it was called now.
06/12/2012 at 12:09 Llewyn says:
You don’t remember either Parallax or Uridium? What exactly did you do with that C64? Admittedly they weren’t Sensible Software or Andrew Braybrook’s best titles, but nonetheless Sensi and Braybrook new releases were events, although I chiefly remember Parallax for the 9 minute Martin Galway title tune which I seem to remember listening to far more than I actually played the game.
06/12/2012 at 12:12 nickylee says:
Lemon64 helpfully shows me the game I was thinking of was Mutants, which also bore somewhat of a resemblance to Hunter’s Moon. Both great games that I’m pretty sure I got free on the cover tapes of Zzap64. Them’s were the days.
EDIT: Also you people have got my head in C64 space now, dammit! :D
06/12/2012 at 12:35 Llewyn says:
I did wonder about Hunter’s Moon but I couldn’t remember whether its ‘story’ matched what you were looking for. Beautiful game though (by the standards of the time!)
06/12/2012 at 13:15 I Got Pineapples says:
Screw this game, let’s just talk about C64 games.
Actually, to hell with that.
Let’s just hum the ocean loading music.
06/12/2012 at 18:45 elevown says:
Here is a youtube vid of what made Parallax famous :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igVxjCecmEg
The game was good too! But I’d rate only hubbard as better in sid music than martin gallaway who did this- maybe his best.
06/12/2012 at 09:14 WHS says:
Can’t really believe a game exists that looks like this.
06/12/2012 at 09:16 Xzi says:
“a game that main my brain all hurty.”
Apparently it really did mess with your brain.
Looks like my type of game for sure. I’ll be voting for it and following its progress. But I do agree that this isn’t the type of game that should have to go through Greenlight at all. It’s too polished and well-realized.
06/12/2012 at 09:20 SuperNashwanPower says:
Is this the game that was antichamber? I like non euclidean spaces. I want one in (and also not in) my living room
06/12/2012 at 09:22 Llewyn says:
And vice versa.
Edit: Damn, I’m sure that parenthesis wasn’t there when I clicked…
06/12/2012 at 09:35 SuperNashwanPower says:
Heh sorry yeah I must have edited it at the same time. Great minds etc :)
06/12/2012 at 09:32 baby snot says:
Different games. I wonder if devs from either project were responsible for the HL2 mod Dual Reality.
06/12/2012 at 09:36 SuperNashwanPower says:
Cool. Perhaps this is the birth of a genre.
06/12/2012 at 16:20 Karuji says:
Antichamber, originally ‘Hazard: The Journey of Life’, was originally an Unreal mod done before the days of UDK. Mr. Bruce has mostly worked in the unreal engine so I doubt he is responsible for the mod.
I can’t really comment on these devs in relation to the mod.
But the game does look fantastic.
06/12/2012 at 22:35 LTK says:
From what I read about antichamber, these share almost no similarities. Parallax still takes place in Euclidian space, just more of it.
06/12/2012 at 09:38 The First Door says:
Oh, my! That looks utterly lovely. Well, apart from the bits that made my brain go a little funny anyway.
I’m really impressed how they’ve conveyed so much information with just black and white too.
06/12/2012 at 10:55 Ephaelon says:
I’m reminds of Echochrome in the sense that they’re both black and white and distort reality. Not the actual gameplay.
06/12/2012 at 13:06 particlese says:
Just what I was thinking!
Playing Echochrome wasn’t quite the joy I imagined it would be, but it sure did look nice. I hope Parallax doesn’t suffer from its 1st-person platforming, because it also looks cool and potentially fun. …Bah, who am I kidding? I’ve enjoyed plenty of 1st-person platformers. *shakes mental fist at Mirror’s Edge while hugging it* Officially looking forward to this one.
06/12/2012 at 11:03 stahlwerk says:
*rewarms “dimension” vs. “alternate reality” semantical debate*
Black and White? Pah, I manage quite well with 4 dimensions, thank you.
06/12/2012 at 12:53 The Sombrero Kid says:
I just want to be in the world, fuck the puzzles.
06/12/2012 at 13:23 meepmeep says:
I could really go a Guinness now.
06/12/2012 at 17:53 Baines says:
It looks really nice, but the gameplay looks to just be switches and doors. The “overlapping spatial dimensions” looks to be a gimmick. Each “door” (the round circles) has a passable and impassable side, which switches whenever you switch worlds (pass through a door). To make things more puzzle-ly, there are switches on the map that you can press to rotate certain doors
But it does look really pretty. (And, to be fair, many games can be boiled down to just “switches and doors”.)
06/12/2012 at 18:59 Snakejuice says:
This game better use Parallax Occlusion Mapping or I’m going to be REALLY disappoint!
06/12/2012 at 22:34 LTK says:
Bam, voted. This is how you do Greenlighting: you show people something awesome that they’re going to want to play. This has potential.