Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’m scared. Here’s what I fear: I fear The Void is going to be the subject of unjust moral outrage because it features female nudity.
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[It seems to have gone through nearly as many name alterations as the Sugababes have line-up changes. It's the sequel to RPS-championed Russian existentialist minor classic Pathologic, the game Walker described as Oblivion with cancer. It's finally translated to English. It's time to send the man who Butchered Pathologic to see Wot He Thinks of The Void...]
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And now, in a feature I like to call Forbidden Discourse: The Oily Fruit of the Broken Heart, we present an interview with Ice-Pick Lodge CEO Nikolay Dybowskiy and all-purpose Ice Pick developer Aleksey “the LxR” Luchin. Ice-Pick are of course the Russian studio responsible for the award-winning Pathologic and The Void, two fascinating PC games.

I could give this chat an introduction about how the attitude that comes across in it gives me hope, but screw it. Instead I’ll just say that this interview proves just how much these guys are Doing It Right.
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Let’s play a little choose-your-own-adventure game. Okay, ready? You’re a small Russian games development studio located deep in the grassy guts of your enormous nation. It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue. In your inventory is: Some designers. Some computers. Two jars of instant coffee. Some asshole has drunk all the milk.

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As kindly linked by one of Pathologic’s developers in our comments thread, here’s the latest trailer for Tension, Ice-Pick’s intriguing next game. Er – it may be a bit NSFW, depending on whether you sit near to anyone who objects to soft-focus polygon boobies.

The hook is battle via painting, rather than gunplay, using a gesture system apparently similar to Black & White – though it seems rather more expanded and based on a system of visible, physicsy results in Tension’s dreamlike world, rather than simple spell-casting. It’s a fascinating, and at times beautiful, trailer, even if it doesn’t tell us all that much about what we’ll be doing. There’s perhaps as much to scoff at as there is to coo at, but given Quinns’ epic wordgasm about Pathologic, it’s safe to say this is a game we’ll all be following with some interest.

I was going to say something like ‘artful eroticism’, until it got to the tree-humping and giant wood phallus bit at the end. Still, it seems more dignified than the Witcher’s boobie content, eh? Second trailer beneath the cut.
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