Screenshot Saturday Sundays: Snowboarding simians, neo-noir diners and an actual mystery
Who is P. Michalski, anyway?
Screenshot Saturday Sundays! Our weekly fishing trip through an ocean of game jams, prototypes and passion projects. After noticing a particular palette in my screenshot tenure thus far, I've decided to veto the colour orange this week. Had to be done, I'm afraid. Instead, we've got snowboarding simians, time-hopping detectives and a real blast from the past.
Kicking things off... I don't suppose anyone's got a couple quid I can borrow for the arcade?
Modus Interactive is a familiar name to anyone who frequents the retro indie scare scene, appearing on the Haunted PS1 Demo Disk with drug-fuelled cat horror Neko Yume. They're not only interested in spooks though - pegged as a "don't shoot 'em up", their latest game is a stylish side-scroller about gathering intel and keeping your craft safe from an onslaught of enemy fire. It looks - and sounds - effortlessly convincing.
For all the cold and wind and rain we've suffered the last few months, we've had a pitiful amount of snow up north. Still, I'm not convinced any of Slopecrashers' simian snowboarders are wrapped up well enough to be spraying powder like this.
I've a real soft spot for snowboarding games, even when they're not pushing a zoo down a cold hill. I somehow never ended up playing SSX back in the day, mind. Instead, my brother and I replayed the same demo of TransWorld Snowboarding on Xbox, which I'm just learning was developed by arcade kings Housemarque. Huh!
Byteparrot's zookeeping-on-ice affair looks like it'll focus more on racing than freeform score-attacks, but it's scratching the same itch to get back on the virtual slopes.
After all that excitement, I think it's time to sit back, grab a drink, and watch eight hours pass in the blink of an eye. Wait, what?
Neo-noir detective game Shadows Of Doubt is being developed by Cole Jeffries. Not normally the sort of thing I'd go for, honestly, until I caught an earlier #screenshotsaturday post showing some phenomenal seat-scooting. Now those are the sort of mundane details masterpieces are made of. Shadows Of Doubt will be joining us at EGX Rezzed in a few weeks - one to check out if, like me, you're unreasonably excited by a small chair-shuffling animation.
Finally, we've got a real enigma here.
This Twitter account has been posting pictures of something called PRDXCL - along with truly bizarre, cryptic nonsense - for half a decade, under the development from definitely-real human being "P. Michalski".
The running theory is that this is the next game from Lone Survivor developer Jasper Byrne, despite him reportedly canning then-titled "New Game Plus" in 2012. PRDXCL's social accounts popped up in 2015. They've posted a new image of this hazy, 3D-with-sprites styled RPG a scant handful of times each year, along with truly cryptic nonsense. I honestly can't tell if this is a long play or some next-level shitposting.
Another mystery to keep an eye on, then.