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Feature: The eerie beauty of the aurora
The coloured lights flaring across the night sky in the frozen Canadian wilderness were one of the most anticipated elements of Hinterland's survival game, The Long Dark [official site]. Since the Kickstarter we've known they would do more than brighten the night, playing a key part in the game's episodic story mode, but now they're in the game I find myself braving the uptick in…
Feature: Design of a slime
I've spent a looooooot of time with my slimes in Slime Rancher [official site] and watching them bounce and coo as they wiggle free of my corrals and wobble off like determined balloon-toddlers has been a delight. But how does one convert a ball into a creature with such a strong sense of spirit? How do you keep their little slime modifications from becoming a…
Feature: A dark bestiary
I'm only a little way into Prey [official site] at the moment but one of the most interesting aspects for me is the monster design. I love pausing the trailers to peer more closely at their glitchy, weird forms without worrying about being killed. The monsters in question are these hostile lifeforms which all come under the bracket of "Typhon" but there are different species…
Feature: How its gorgeous scenes were made
Old Man's Journey [official site] caught my attention before release entirely on the strength of its aesthetic. It reminded me of board game illustrations, of children's books, of a particular Courbet painting, and of colour palettes remembered from trips to the sun-baked south of France. The game itself offered a touching tale told through environment and memory as an elderly man strapped on his rucksack…
Feature: On fish and fairytales
State of the Art: How Edith Finch’s most memorable scene works
EDITH FINCH SPOILERS AHEAD. THIS IS A REALLY OBVIOUS WARNING SO CONSIDER YOURSELVES WARNED! What Remains of Edith Finch [official site] is a home exploration story – an anthology of the lives of Edith's family members – where playable vignettes tell you what happened to each of them. Each vignette is a distinct tale with its own mood, its own rules. Here I sat down…
Feature: With no plan and constant iteration
This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the inner workings of their games. This time, Inside [official site]. Playdead don’t design games in the same way that other studios do. They’re the result of a process where nothing is written down. There’s no script and no design document. No member of the team owns any aspect of what they make and…
Feature: Rays of light
Scanner Sombre [official site] is Introversion's curious LIDAR-inspired exploration game. It caught my eye last year at Rezzed because it had such an unusual art style - the only thing close to it is A Light In Chorus and that does very different things with the specks of colour which make up its environments. In Scanner Sombre you use a scanning gun to reveal the…
Feature: Family gaming
State of the Art: Guild Wars 2’s art passes from father to son
Recently I had the chance to talk to ArenaNet (and thus Guild Wars 2) art director Horia Dociu about his work at the studio. One of the interesting things about his promotion to the role is that he succeeds his father, Daniel. As a result there's a lot in our Q&A which is actually just a touching account of a partnership/mentor/mentee relationship across two generations…
Feature: Pond Life
If you've spoken to me for more than five minutes, chances are I've mentioned Subnautica [official site]. It's an open world survival game set largely underwater on an alien planet. You explore biomes, collect resources and, as updates to the early access project add more content, start to piece together the story of the planet. I played huge amounts of the game before more significant…
Feature: Lovely looking
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Feature: Palettes and pixels
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Feature: Mike Wazowski!
Hello. This is the point where I've come back from a press trip and tell you what I managed to do during my wait for the plane home! This time: The Science Behind Pixar exhibition at the California Science Center!
Feature: Seafaring sketches
Burly Men At Sea [official site] sailed onto my radar at Rezzed earlier this year. Part of the Leftfield Collection, the game offered a beautifully stylised tale about three bearded brothers going off on an adventure. The reason I was particularly excited was, more than any other game, the demo I played seemed to capture the essence of children's story books and translate that to…
Feature: What you'll see Unter the Zee
Sunless Sea's [official site] first expansion, Zubmariner will be released on 11 October bringing with it new ports and cities to explore and tales to be told. Or as developers, Failbetter, put it: "agonising choices presented in beautiful prose." But it wasn't the beautiful prose which caught my eye in recent dev blog entries, it was the undersea (or rather, Unterzee) flora and corals. That's…
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Feature: Time with the neighbours
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"Can games be art?" It's a question I spent part of yesterday complaining about while brandishing a forkful of jacket potato. I used to engage with the debate on those terms but it's so unhelpful - a strange grab for cultural legitimacy by association. When it comes up in such an explicit way it tends to feel like the games industry has smeared itself with…
Our Adam might have enjoyed Pippin Barr's Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment in 2012, but didn't answer one big question: was it... The A Word? Y'know, The Big Chinscratch. The Great Hmmmer. The Old Wallhanger. The Inherited Necklace. Art. Was it Art? There can be no doubt about the free new Let's Play: Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Art Edition Edition. It's got 'Art Edition'…
I like Secret Habitat. I like it an awful lot. I've been playing this latest from Strangethink Software for a fortnight and I keep returning to see more but it's taken me this long to post because I want to do right by it. Oh, this'll have to do! Secret Habitat is wonderful and special, okay? It's a free walking simulator on a procedural island…
Feature: Artist's Block
I have made more progress on my cup of tea in the last five minutes than I have in clicking on the Tate Worlds download link for an André Derain Minecraft map. The map forms part of a Tate project which sees artworks from its collection inspire Minecraft worlds and experiences. The reason for my reluctance is that I've only just stopped crying over the…
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