I am a spruce beetle. I call to two other spruce beetles nearby and now I am all of them. I tell them to dance and they begin to skitter of their own volition, making concentric circles and infinity signs and all manner of patterns. Each time a circle fills at the top of the screen – the only visible UI element – I press A in order to spawn another spruce beetle which joins in the dance. I do this for seventeen minutes, until there is a thrumming mass of spruce beetles. Eventually I’ve had enough and so I become a snowball.
Back in 2014, we were all given a miniature Mountain [official site] of our own (or became mountains?). We were delighted as household items rained from the skies, days and weather passed, and our pet rock thought little thoughts. Then Graham murdered his mountain and suddenly we became hyper-aware of mortality. I took care of my own mountain for days but as its thoughts became darker and more confused, I worried its end might be near and… I have not visited it since. Well, today I met a new mountain, as creator David OReilly has launched a big update refreshing Mountain. Read the rest of this entry »
This is a post with a very clever title! The last game featured in our RPS Cave of Wonders at Rezzed this week is Everything, David OReilly’s gorgeous interactive nature simulation where you can skip up or down in scale to make discoveries and roam an entire universe. BUT! It’s also a good point to remind you of everything that will be joining Everything in the cave, so read on for, well, Everything and everything: Read the rest of this entry »
Everything [official site] is the new game from David OReilly, artist, director and creator of RPS’s favourite Mountain. We’ve already heard whispers about Everything, notably that it is coming to PS4 before Windows and Mac. Now, along with a lengthy new trailer, the release date has been announced. It’ll be coming to PS4 on March 21st and to Steam on April 21st.
But what is Everything? I’m not entirely sure, but I am in love with every single one of these animals and their outrageous methods of locomotion.
Working with Double Fine, David OReilly has announced his next project following 2014’s RPS-adored Mountain. And it’s called Everything [official site]. And appears to be promising… everything. A game in which you can play as everything in the game.
Announced as a PS4 exclusive, we poked Double Fine with the patented Rock, Paper, Shotgun Really Pointy Stick (RPSRPS) until they confessed that “exclusive” means “for a bit”, and that it will be coming to PC some time after the dangerously angular console. There are details and a trailer below.
Most PC games are about terrain, but Mountain was the only monadnock this year to cause the RPS chatroom to feel empathy, to mellow, and to excitedly compare notes.
Alec: Passive game-viewing is the new game-playing, apparently. I’m not quite ready to leave the homeland and sign aboard the HMS Twitch myself, but Mountain made for a happy medium. The game that plays itself. The game that tells me when something of note has occurred. Hell, the game which tells me which emotion to feel. A simple line of text and a tiny musical sting evokes so much more than an impeccably-rendered CGI face trying to show love or regret while orchestral strings swirl, it turns out.
I think about my Mountain often, though I haven’t visited it since July. The time we spent with our virtual pet rocks was wonderful, but as my mountain entered what I think is old age, I grew concerned. Its musings had became awfully existential and it started babbling, gibbering. It’d fall silent for long periods. At times it seemed at peace but others… was my mountain dying? Not in the way that Graham murdered his either–something inevitable. I didn’t want to find out.
But as Mountain arrives on Steam (only £0.99!), I’m feeling curious. Hello, old friend.
Team RPS recently adopted pet mountains. Or befriended mountains. Incarnated as mountains, possibly. We’ve been playing a lot of Mountain, in short. It’s a “mountain simulator,” a little ambient game released today by David OReilly. Mountain will sit happily in a window in the background then occasionally chime to offer you a mountainous thought or alert you to a glorious sunrise. It’s only $1 so I shan’t explain more right now. You should buy it and see for yourself.
Should you demand more inspiration–or wish to play along with us–here, listen in on snippets from the RPS staffroom chatter as we discovered the joys, wonders, and mysteries of mountains. We hadn’t expected biplanes and giant chairs. Or tragedies, Graham.
Movies don’t really ‘get’ video games. Their adaptations are dreadful, and the idea that anyone would even adapt these games into movies is a bit daft. Video games within movies are rarely better, real games played weirdly to make clear to viewers that they’re video games or bombastic fictional games. One I would actually play was in Spike Jonze’s Her, a walking simulator with a sweary alien child. That fictional game’s creator, David OReilly (also behind Adventure Time episode ‘A Glitch Is A Glitch‘), is making his first actual game and it’s pretty novel too.
“Mountain is a mountain simulator,” he’s explained. “You play as a mountain, and you get to do all of the things that a mountain does, which I’m sure appeals to all of your darkest and most disgusting fantasies.”
