Screenshot Saturday Sundays: Dashing through the snow with good boys, bad guns
Put on your boots
Screenshot Saturday Sundays! Like some sort of digital bake-off, game developers across the land offer up their finest works-in-progress to be scrutinised on a Twitter hashtag. Once more I - the Mary Berry of screenshot judging - must hand-pick some of this weekend's best offerings. This week: Scandinavian snowdrifts, exceptionally talented dogs, and grossly impractical firearms.
Put on your snowshoes, readers. We're starting out with a romp through Röki's glacial woods.
I've seen Röki kicking about for a while, though it's usually framed more intimately. Up-close shots of the main character's delightfully expressive animations and the like. Headed up by former Guerrilla Games art directors Tom Jones and Alex Kanaris-Sotiriou, developers Polygon Treehouse have managed to create some stunning nordic landscapes for their adventure through Scandinavian folklore. Röki is set to release on Steam sometime later this year.
Don't take off those gloves just yet. Claudio Norori and his dogs are taking us for a quiet ride through Arctico.
I've definitely mentioned it in passing on the site (and exhausted my friends by repeating the story over the last seven years), but I spent a long winter training sled dogs way back. For two months in Norway, then another two months in the far north of Finland, I volunteered with two different trainers - taking sixty Greenland racing dogs around the forests north of Oslo, before handling over ninety Siberian and Alaskan Huskies as we took tourists around the wilderness around Levi.
Hard work, sure, but if it was a quiet day we'd be free to take some of the more excitable Huskies out on a 5km loop ourselves. Claudio Norori's game might be a bit further north, but that sunset vista over a frozen wilderness threw me right back - even if I don't expect he's too concerned with emulating the tedious work of chipping frozen shit out of kennels. Arctico is currently in early access over on Steam, though it looks like Norori wants it to release in full very soon.
Sorry, uh. Where were we?
He might not be a good racing mutt, but this dog's still a dang good boy. Immediately, Gameboy Advance-styled action platformer Goodboy Galaxy is killing it with the small details. Look at his wee tongue wagging! Look at that bounce and squash as he jumps!
Developers hot_pengu and exelotl are building from a prototype developed for Ludum Dare last December. It does a few interesting things with disempowering the player through various loops, and is certainly worth a poke over on Itch.
Closing us out this week: that's, uh, certainly one way to clear a room of uninvited guests.
Real talk, I put this here because it reminded me fantastically of those TF2 joke weapons kicking around YouTube - specifically, the Force-Hundred-Nature. Arthur Zeferino's somehow gone one better in Fish Person Shooter. The way everyone in the room drops dead, I've gotta imagine the player's wearing some kinda hundred-barrelled hula hoop 'round their waist.
Bang, bang.