Screenshot Saturday Sundays: Paper cars, messy lives, spiders and the great outdoors
Screenshots? Screenshots.
Screenshot Saturday Sundays! It might be a weekend for eggs, sun, and supernatural resurrection, but that's not stopped those dang game developers from pushing more fabulous visuals for us to peruse. This week: Unconventional driving, a crowded kitchen, the terrifying vastness of open wilderness, and spiders.
As regular readers will have pieced together, it's become harder and harder to filter through all the retro-PS1 horror games flooding the #screenshotsaturday tag lately. Oh, I think they're all fantastic, but there's only so many crunchy, low-poly meat factories I can dump into this column.
That's why Becalm developer Colorfiction's landscapes struck me so hard. Haunted PS1's first wretched weekend jam is simply about walking, and Colorfiction have created a hauntingly barren badlands far removed from the movement's norms. Is it horror? I can't quite tell. But it's desperately lonely in all the best ways.
Keeping somewhat within Haunted PS1's sphere of influence, Adam Pype (one of the developers of last year's fantastic No Players Online) has a rather unusual take vehicular locomotion.
Hearing about other people's dreams sucks - unless, as with Pype's Car Game, it involves an outlandish self-construction of how vehicles work. He translates this subconscious ramble into one of his ongoing monthly games, introducing a bizarre mouse-driven approach to driving by first teaching you how to walk. It's novel, and it's free, and you can play it right now in your browser here.
Walking into Emre C Deniz' kitchen feels immediately comforting. Settle down, listen to a story, and let the steamy scent of the pot prepare your stomach for a well-earned dinner.
Currently working under an unnamed prototype, this kitchen projects such warmth and liveliness in its brief frames. Rendering his 2D scene in Unreal Engine 4, might upset purist pixel-artists, but it's fascinating to watch nonetheless. The rest of the thread goes into deep detail on how Deniz uses tricks like volumetric lighting and cloth simulation to breath extraordinary life into this simple scene.
We've got one more screen to wrap things up this week. Unless you're an arachnophobe - you can call it quits here. I won't judge you. It's cool.
Holomento is an "indie permadeath RPG with roguelike elements" which, sure, we've seen plenty times before. But I'm really taken by the procedural spider-play on display - the last few posts on the game's twitter have shown giant spiders, swarming spiders, spiders that explode, spiders that break visual cohesion.
Nothing I'd like to find lurking in the bathtub anytime soon.