Screenshot Saturday Sundays: Low-fi forests, brutal inky towers and an ASCII glitch rave
Don't look down.
Screenshot Saturday Sundays! Pull up a nice armchair, pour yourself a hot cuppa, and spend an afternoon perusing the finest screenshots, gifs and video clips the game development landscape has to offer. This week: Secret alien worlds, 3D printed skyscrapers, the ultimate game of frisbee and whatever the hell the bloke from Jazzpunk is making these days.
Taking a break from 199X-styled FPS Effigy for just a minute, developer Nate "Redact Games" Berens has started teasing something altogether more enchanting.
Look, I actually didn't mean to add another HauntedPS1 creator in this week's list. But far removed from Effigy's dark caverns and gruesome monsters, this new shot teases something whimsically enticing. Its alien fauna and bold colours are reminiscent of something like Anodyne 2: Return to Dust. I'm curious to see where this work goes - and who this mysterious collaborator turns out to be.
Before we move on - nobody here's afraid of heights, right?
Set entirely on a massive concrete rectangle that looks like someone tipped Cumbernauld Town Center on its side, Dead Ink is a slow and heavy hack n' slash where everything - weapons, baddies, and yourself - is 3D printed out of ink. So like, some sort of brutalist Dark Souls slash Splatoon, I guess?
That tower is the star of the show, really - a winding, labyrinthine structure that can be poked and prodded at from any direction. There's something particularly special about games that commit to creating a single, super-dense location to slowly untangle.
If Dead Ink goes tall, then Exo One's ultimate space frisbee is going very, very wide.
Jay Weston's disk-tosser has been zipping about for years. Its motions are hypnotising, bolting the momentum play of Tiny Wings or Tribes onto worlds that come across as ultra-glossy, incredibly realised No Man's Sky planets. Somewhere within, Exo One also cites the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Dear Esther and Carl Sagan as drivers of its dreamlike cloud-surfing. With no release in sight even now, Exo One is definitely one to watch over on Steam.
Finally - remember Jazzpunk? The quirky espionage sketch-show that was more of a gag-delivery device than adventure game? Well, co-creator Luis Hernandez has been posting something emtirely new as of late.
It's, uh, something of an ASCII nightmare.
Going from his Tweets, Hernandez is driving this look from old Cyberpunk concepts and book covers. The hell-site's compression does the monochrome look no favours, though I do think I caught a moving figure in all that noise. Who could say? Into it, either way.