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3 months ago
Feature: Dopamine mine
"Under the hood, too many games are just primarily about finely-tuned reward systems. Nothing more than expertly crafted dopamine injectors which often border on, if not fully embrace their Skinner box-like qualities." Kris Piotrowski didn't want to create a game like that. As the creative director and co-founder of Capybara Games, he and the team spent years working on Below, a roguelike in which you…
5 months ago
Feature: Curse the darkness
A weird thing happened after I’d been playing Below for a few hours. See, the thing about Below, which I spose is a basic feature of all underground things, is that it’s dark. Your little adventurer has some species of magic lantern, but it’s powered by crystals collected from dead enemies, and upon your death it’s left with your body for the next you to…
It's the RPS/Gamer Network annual day of chest-thumping/excessive consumption/enforced PowerPoint-watching, so we'll all be offline when Capy's much-anticipated rando-dungeon-runner Below launches this evening. Hence, let's say this now: Below's out today! Somehow! After half a decade! Is that even a long time in games development any more? I don't know I've been here 11 years so it feels like Below only got announced like, last…
6 months ago
Below is out at last next week after five years (what a surprise)
Very pretty/entirely menacing rand-o-dungeon-o game Below has been tantalising us from a distance for half a decade. "It'll never happen!", bellowed Derek Misery from a Twitter account with 12 followers, sometime in 2016. Well, suck it up, Derek - all of a sudden, the closest thing there is to a follow-up to peerless adventure/musical odyssey/exploratory crisis Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is out in seven…
8 months ago
Feature: Don't let us down
As we stare into the weary, craggy face of the final quarter of 2018, there is still a glimmer of hope. The games are not yet done. They will never be done. And the impending release of them, some close, some a little further away, stirs something within us. The delicate, easily crushed butterfly of excitement. We may catch it yet, to keep in our…
1 year ago
The video game Below is absolutely going to happen. I know you can't read my tone here but I am using my most Serious Voice. It's probably coming out now. It may already be out. Who knows? Maybe we've already played it together and had a wonderful time. Do you remember that night? We all shared secrets and ate crisps. I had too many beers…
2 years ago
Feature: A golem-populated SF city
Fresh on Kickstarter is a science fiction IF piece called Alcyone: The Last City. A look at the screenshots will suggest something familiar to dedicated IF fans: it looks a lot like StoryNexus, the Failbetter engine that powers both Fallen London and (behind the scenes) Sunless Sea/Sunless Skies.
3 years ago
Feature: IF engines that aren't Twine or parser-based
Newcomers to interactive fiction tend to distinguish just a couple of IF formats — Twine and parser, often, depending on whether you're clicking or typing. Those with a little more experience might also recognize ChoiceScript and inklewriter, as options for creating games with a classic choose-your-own-adventure-style interface and some of the qualities of a gamebook. But in fact there are many other possible interfaces for…
Every day for eight weeks you've leapt out of bed beaming. "Hello, birds!" you trill to the stump-legged pigeons fighting over a kebab wrapper on your windowsill. "Hello, sky!" you cry to the clouds. "Hello, fork!" you yell, waving at the fork you've just trodden on. Nothing can put a dent in your day: it is summer, which means today could be the day Below…
Sword & Sworcery is one of my favourite games ever, and Super Time Force was great fun, so I'm terribly excited for Capy's next project, the dark and mysterious explore-em-up Below. [official site] Jim Guthrie (Sword & Sworcery, Indie game: The Movie) providing the soundtrack is really just the icing on this delicious cake. And a new trailer reveals we're going to be able to…
5 years ago
We've been pleasantly puzzled by Below since Capy announced it. The game's beautiful, but what is it? The Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery and Super Time Force folks have spoken vaguely about it being a roguelike-like with plenty of exploration and permadeath--and a game suited for PC--but watching the Gamescom trailer demonstrates an important detail. You can carry a shield and hit things with a sword…
Feature: Microsoft's Loss Is Our Gain
Below, the gorgeous, mystery-dripping roguelike explorer from Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery collaborator Capy, is looking tremendous. It's got a uniquely dreamy vibe about it and atmosphere that hits like an 18-wheeler driven by a throng of stampeding rhinos. It was set to be an Xbox exclusive, but Capy managed to wriggle loose from Microsoft's iron grasp and set about working on its first ever day-and-date…
I wouldn't be writing about Below on RPS if it weren't coming to the PC, because in spite of the many, many, oh-so-very-many emails from marketers and PRs about iOS hidden object games (and the occasional moment of writer's prerogative), this is mostly a PC site. So we haven't mentioned Capy's Below until now, because it was tied up in Xbox Xclusivity. That's changed, as…
