Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A potentially habitable planet has been discovered outside our solar system and, right now, the eXoplanetary Research Institute is looking for volunteers to explore the surface. You’d be controlling a rover and gathering data on the planet and its inhabitants, whether flora or fauna. Sound good? That’s the premise of the new game from Lazy 8 Studios, makers of Cogs. It’s called Extrasolar and it’s nigh on impossible to figure out how it’ll play at the moment since the marketing takes the form of a fictional website for a fictional company. We’re promised a narrative experience and it sounds like players will work together to unveil the planet’s mysteries over time. The website is a good read and there’s at least a polite nod toward actual space science history. Hopefully that will carry through to the game. Trailer/recruitment video below.

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How beautiful, how wonderful can you make a sliding puzzle game? With a steam-punk flourish, Lazy 8 Studios’ Cogs shows exactly how far the genre can be pushed. Comrade Walker – our official master of puzzles – totally adored it upon its release. Now that it’s picked up a nomination for Excellence in Design, we thought it time to talk to their Rob Jagnow about all things indie-games. Footage and chattage follows…
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If you look at a British £2 coin, you’ll notice there’s a motif in the design of one of the circles that shows a series of interlocking cogs. When the coin was originally launched, the Royal Mint declared that these cogs represented “the evolution of technology from the Iron Age to the internet”. Another thing you’ll notice if you look carefully is there are nineteen cogs, an odd number, all interlaced, thus any attempt to use this mechanism would lead to its snapping and spraying bits of cog everywhere. (Unless it were on a Möbius strip, supernerds.) This is the sort of thing you’ll become expert on after playing a Cogs for a while.

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