Oleomingus will continue their run of making some of the prettiest video games around in Under A Porcelain Sun. Last week the two-person Indian studio announced this next journey into Somewhere, their strange and wonderful cross-game look at stories about searches for a mythical city. It's a big tangle of stories within stories within storybooks within virtual museums within games within true stories within fake…
Somewhere
2 years ago
The wonderful Studio Oleomingus last night launched A Museum of Dubious Splendors, their latest Borgesian blast of hot explore-o-fiction. It's another fragment of their mythical game Somewhere and, like many of the others, is itself made of fragments of stories and fictional histories built around stories. In short: you get to read some nice short stories and look at lovely little rooms. Oleomingus are making…
3 years ago
Oleomingus's work is some of my favourite stuff to gawp at. For several years, they've been working on Somewhere, a surreal first-person metafictional doodad about the search for a missing city, inspired partially by the winding tales and worlds of Borges and Calvino. As Oleomingus have released prototypes and short spin-offs, Somewhere has gone from stealth to story to... I increasingly suspect that it's a…
I feel like we should have an official policy on posting periodic reminders that the work Oleomingus are doing is strange and wonderful. While I draft the wording on that policy here's a non-scheduled reminder as the two-person studio is back to working on their sort-of-anthology game Somewhere [official site]:
4 years ago
Here's a provocative declaration for you: Studio Oleomingus are making the best-looking games in all of videodom right now. Flicking through pages of storybooks and stepping into tales as they're being told, their games overfill surreal sets with knick-knacks and bric-à-brac, books vases and teapots and skulls and jars and flowers and taps and televisions and giant toothbrushes. They're colourful and weird, and I want…
5 years ago
Feature: Awfully pretty
The fine folks at Oleomingus have released another curious little free game, Menagerie [official site]. Based on a script and performance by Prayas Abhinav, Vidisha Saini, and Agat Sharma, it's a gorgeous room filled with replicating men and deteriorating conversation. Pip and Alice had a look. Pip: Alice, I feel like we've both drooled over Oleomingus screenshots and teasers and game snippets independently. What say…
I've read more dev blog posts than you've had hot dinners. That might actually be true. Let's pretend it is. Speaking with my newfound authority as someone more familiar with dev blogs than you are pie and mash, I'll declare that few delight me as consistently as the Oleomingus gang's. Each load of work-in-progress screenshots and art is a ray of loveliness in my RSS…
A first-person explore-a-stealth-o-chat game about stepping into books and other people's heads to see different sides of a story sounds right up oh so many of my alleys, so I've been keeping an eye on Somewhere. I cooed and gushed about how pretty it was looking in July, and today I heartily enjoyed poking around that surreal house myself. Developers Oleomingus have released a free…
If I could be anywhere right now, it'd be Somewhere. Look at this video game! Now listen to the song which plays on that radio. Now listen to that song while continuing to look at Somewhere. It's a first-person "exploration and stealth" game (with leaning and everything) about different perspectives and incomplete understanding, possessing people to see the world through their eyes and turning the…
6 years ago
Feature: My Log Saw Something That Night
When I was first following along with videogames on the internet, there were these things called .plan files. They were essentially blogs, or Twitter before Twitter, but they were updated by game developers like John Carmack, Cliff Bleszinski, Randy Pitchford and more before everyone grew too busy, too old, or too ensconced in the PR machine to speak so openly and frequently. They were great,…