Just Look At It: For Each Our Roads Of Winter Trailer
Trailers for their own sake
Noctuelles make monochrome glitchscapes littered by ghostly megastructures. Hunting Anubis married that to far future dogfights, but their next project is called For Each Our Roads Of Winter and it's about Myst-inspired episodic exploration. As much as it needs to be 'about' anything. Come watch its prettiness.
There's an instinct as a game journalist - or there should be - to put each new videogame under the microscope and start dissecting. What can you do in it? Is that good and why? I'm interested in systems and mechanics and enjoy the process of breaking them apart to see how they work. I'd like there to be more insightful work focused on doing that.
I'm also torn by the impulse, because the other thing I like is worlds. I enjoy spaces, places, architecture, landscapes, and I don't need all of it turned into an obstacle course to enjoy being somewhere. I don't need to look at every video and screenshot and ask, yeah, but what do you do? (Not every video and screenshot).
Noctuelles' are so far undecided and/or coy about what you'll do in For Each Our Roads Of Winter:
For this type of game I'm not sure puzzles are the best choice. I understand the need for something for the player to do that will shape how they see and think of the world, and to drive them around both the environment and narrative (I've done experiments to this end and found that horror works really well for this, but I can't reconcile horror with what I want to do with this game), so why not instead of puzzles: riddles?
But that hardly seems to matter. I've enjoyed spending time in each one of their self-described "strange places" purely because they were strange places. I enjoyed watching this trailer and looking at its screenshots purely because, gosh, look at it.
You can follow the game's development at TIGSource, find a lot more high-res screenshots on Flickr, and hear in-progress tracks from the game's soundtrack at the Orihaus's Soundcloud page. Oh to be so multi-talented.
You can also read Duncan's interview with Orihaus here.