We already give you piles of free games every week, but I know you always want more, clamouring like a chick and opening your maw, waiting for us to regurgitate yet more free experimental interactivity into your beak. It’s disgusting. Anyway, open wide, here’s five more bright young gamethings from creators like Tale of Tales, Cardboard Computer and Pol Clarissou, all clumped together in one neat globule called the Triennale Game Collection.
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While most MMOs are quest-based and involve some sort of conflict and grind, The Endless Forest [official site] simply isn’t. Instead, The Endless Forest is about playing as a carefree magical deer spending time doing deer things with other deer. Each deer is another player, and this antithesis of modern MMO design has attracted 170,000 registered players in its 10-year existence. Now developers Tale of Tales want to take the game further as it enters its second decade, and they’re asking for your help. Read the rest of this entry »
After twelve years in games, it looks like Tale of Tales are calling it quits and looking to new artistic pastures. The duo behind such games as The Endless Forest, The Path, and Luxuria Superbia had hoped their latest, Sunset [official site], would have more mainstream appeal – and financial success. It sold only around 4,000 copies in its first month, not enough to cover costs.
ToT said over the weekend, “we don’t think we will be making videogames after this. And if we do, definitely not commercial ones.” I’d be sorry to see them go.
RPS Feature House and home
I like Sunset [official site] for its sense of place, for its lighting, for its drip feed of story, for the emphasis on subtle change and human scale in an event games tend to deal with via guns and power fantasies and super tech. But when it comes to the relationship building which lies at the centre of the game Sunset can stumble. Here’s Wot I Think.
Peering through telescopes is one of those little in-game activities I enjoy a disproportionate amount; peeking through the viewfinder and switching to a porthole framing previously distant objects and people. The telescope peeking in Sunset [official site] was infused with meaning when I played a preview build and I hope there’s more to come when the game releases in full on 21 May.
RPS Feature Roaming the gloaming
Sunset‘s [official site] preview showcases a game of guiding and shaping rather than explicit storytelling. It’s about gently influencing a relationship with an unseen person according to your own interests against the backdrop of a South American revolution in the 1970s.
RPS Feature A good clean fight
Sunset is the latest game/project from Tale of Tales, creators of Lego Star Wars The Wolf Among Us many artistically minded offerings like The Path and Fatale. It’s already doubled its Kickstarter goal with its promise of a very different perspective on war; not a man with a gun in the field or some faceless general, but a woman with a feather duster in a luxurious apartment, given one hour a day to both make things tidy and make a difference. I spoke to creators Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn to find out more about their subversive take on modern warfare, and the challenges of making a very different kind of experience to their usual projects.
