Screenshot Saturday Sundays: Pastel skateboards for peculiar skeletons
Catch you on the flip.
Screenshot Saturday Sundays! Your weekly, carefully hand-wrapped delivery of wonderful work-in-progress videogame artworks, slammed haphazardly through the mailbox by a careless postie. This week: Chilled-out reverts, celestial boneyards, crash-landing shenanigans and a rather informal shopkeep.
By the time you're reading this post, I'll have probably grabbed my board for a bit of skating myself. So, let's start this week's screenshot rundown in kind with some gnarly tricks.
As much as I'm enjoying tailgrind throwback Tony Hawks' Pro Skater 1 + 2, I'm equally excited for a newer wave of games taking skateboarding to whole new visual styles. Already pumped as hell for was Skate Story's crystalline hellscape, now we have developer Paul Schnepf's pastel-painted half-pipe - a laid-back vert session that seems to ask: Would Monument Valley have been better if it could do kickflips? I reckon so, yeah.
Make sure to wear a helmet, mind. I'd hate to see you all end up like these colossal skull pals hanging around with the tops of their heads lopped off.
I remain obsessed with Dome-King Cabbage's entire vibe, a toy-like dreamscape with incredible physicality. Today's shot is a far cry from jeans and bobbleheads, mind, crafting a very peculiar body-horror cloudscape for Cobysoft's monster-collecting visual novel. But there's still a remarkably tactile look to the whole thing. I can feel my hands running through every cloud and across every surface - and the skeletons, honestly, feel a bit gross.
But, it's time to get our head out of the clouds and crash-land on Blamyvog's barmy bog.
An extraterrestrial point 'n' click from Dry Cough Studios, Blamyvog sees a pair of scientists crash-land on one of No Man's Sky's quintillions of mushroom-addled purple planets. While this week's landscape shot won't show it, a scroll through the developer's feed reveals a screwball comedy with plenty of lovely little puzzles and interfaces to tinker with. And hey, if that sounds up your street, there's a free demo to try out over on Itch.
I'm like, 99% sure the dialogue in our next piece is placeholder. But god, I'm holding out for that 1% to pull through.
The next game from Gun Rounds developer Blabberf carries over many of that deckbuilding shooter's best elements (sharp pixel art and a brave disregard for landscape resolutions). Here, however, it looks like we have a more traditional dungeon-crawler with an oppressive, moodier vibe - a vibe that is delightfully thrown out the window by my thick-browed new best friend.
As one final bonus - animation frames, who needs 'em?
I'm still no closer to working out what it is, exactly, Joost Eggermont is making. But I'll happily watch this artist cobble together hyper-stylish transit and rain-stricken bogs until the end of time.