Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I love horror and partake of it in all its forms – games, films, books, the news, my bank balance – but I usually find myself disappointed by what’s on offer. I’m very particular about how I want to be scared and precisely how much sadistic unpleasantness I’ll tolerate. I’m always more interested in spooky stuff that is happening in place that are at least slightly familiar and, having worked in an office, I immediately felt at home in One Late Night’s environs, haunted by the whirr of a photocopier and marked by a furrow ploughed between my desk and the coffee machine. Of course, this office is also haunted by a ghost. I hid under a table and pulled a sad face until it went away. You can do the same by downloading the game. It’s free!

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Failbetter’s collection of ‘immersive fiction’ continues to grow via its Storynexus platform but I haven’t found anything in the collection quite as gripping as the bizarre demon-Dickensian sprawl of Fallen London. Until now! Black Crown, the first published work from author Rob Sherman, has found life as a Storynexus experiment thanks to a collaboration between Random House and Failbetter. It’s free to play, although some (presumably) optional branches require the purchase of Nex, the currency shared across the Storynexus platform. I’ve only spent an hour in the word labyrinth so far, but I’m hooked. As well as being adept at squeamish body horror, Sherman shows the mark of a supreme builder of strange worlds.

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Before crates became the favoured furniture and fortification of first-person army-men and space marines, they were referred to simply as ‘blocks’ or ‘cubes’ and hung around on puzzle game backlots, hoping to be hired as extras. Occasionally an evenly sided box with no distinguishing features would land a role in Tetris but mostly they made up the numbers in the likes of Chip’s Challenge or the word’s saddest game, Sokoban*. That brings me to Cubetractor. The demo threatened to chase me from its confines almost immediately – it’s a game about pulling blocks into new positions – but it quickly won me over, revealing that it is in fact a puzzle-action tower assault game, with turrets, explosions and disobedient robots. That demo is available on Steam.

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On paper, Fallout: Project Brazil sounds like the stuff irradiated, scorpion-coated dreams are made of. It’s a ridiculously ambitious, fan-made prequel mod for New Vegas spanning a new vault, an entire new wasteland the size of Fallout 3′s, and multiple story-driven, highly choice-oriented episodes. The team that assembled it, meanwhile, comes from various corners of the professional entertainment world, which is – in part – the reason it took so long to finally see the sepia toned light of day. But now it’s here, in the gnarled, glowing ghoulflesh. I am kind of maybe excited a little a lot. But what’s actually in this installment? Wellllll…

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Music is the epitome of sonic pleasure, so naturally, we’ve spent eons trying to see it because we will never be satisfied. Games are no stranger to that pursuit. The likes of Audiosurf, Symphony, and their ilk have interpreted music through the lens of various genres, but Frequency Domain might be the most direct attempt I’ve seen. The goal? To turn every aspect – each pulsing beat, humming strum, and snaking synth – into boundless neon volcano dance floors of rolling color. You speed along – a blur, a performer, an emotion – ramping off jutting spikes of sound and then cannon-ball colliding into the senses-engulfing tidal wave of music below. Sound dips in and out, other melodies soar about like dragonflies. Is Frequency Domain a “game” in the traditional sense? I don’t care. It gave me goosebumps, and you should absolutely try the free, four-song demo.

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Why wait until the increasingly plausible cyberfuture for life-extending augments, nano enhancements, and modifications? Our PC games are getting them right now, as they have been pretty much since the inception of our humble hobby. Case in point: Deus Ex. It still sees the occasional hugely ambitious mod now and then, and it’s more than a decade old. Deus Ex: Nihilum, especially, fits the bill quite nicely, lining its worn but hardly ragged trench coat with more than ten hours of content, 2200 lines of new dialogue, an entire, completely new soundtrack, and tons of nooks and crannies to explore and hack. It’s a labor of love that’s been several years in the making, and you can finally download it now.

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You must watch the trailer for Bill Borman’s Scraps immediately, just to hear the music. It wins a million points for being ’2013′s Trailer Music Most Far Removed From Dubstep’, an award category that I’ll keep an eye on throughout the rest of the year. As for the game, it’ll look familiar to anyone who has played Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. It looks like a vehicular combat game but it’s also something far more important and the final scene in the video sums it up perfectly. Scraps is a stage on which to act out physics-based farce. This looks jolly good and there’s an early version of the vehicle builder available right now.

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Everyone, Flying Wild Hog is remaking Shadow Warrior! Upon hearing that, a decent number of you probably tilted your heads so hard that confused dogs could hear and replied, “What’s a Shadow Warrior?” That’s understandable. The ’90s were 7,000 years ago, after all. But maybe you saw the reboot’s teaser trailer and went on a needlessly gruesome excitement rampage, or perhaps Hard Reset’s uniquely incoherent brand of robo-shootyblasting won you over. Either way, background is always nice, even when it’s kinda littered with festering piles of racism and misogyny. That’s why Devolver Digital saw fit to dust off the original Shadow Warrior and slice its price tag to confetti. Oh, and thanks to a fairly gigantic promotional slip-up, they’ve just decided to make it free “forever”.

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I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting much out of City Quest. It certainly doesn’t look like much, and “retro”-styled games are a dime a trillion these days. But I also spied loving odes to the LucasArts and Sierra adventures of yore on its website, so I decided I’d have a go at its free demo anyway. I’m quite happy I did. City Quest is that rare brand of adventure that plumbs the scummiest depths of tastefulness, yet manages to emerge not covered in, well, crap. It’s an unrelentingly witty little thing, constantly rewarding exploration and “what if…?” thinking with scrumptious details and rapid-fire joke flurries. They’re not all winners, but the hits far outweigh the misses. More info and a trailer after the break.

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