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.
For a studio which makes such quiet and contemplative games, Tale of Tales have been bafflingly controversial. Along with the likes of Phil Fish and Jonathan Blow, the team behind Bientôt l’été and The Path have been Two Minutes Hate figures for people incensed that anyone might suggest video games aren’t perfect just the way they are. Tale of Tales have also become more video game-y, though. Luxuria Superbia had scores and all, and now they’re making a “first-person thriller” with influences including such–gasp–video games as Gone Home and Dear Esther.
Sunset is a fascinating idea. It’s set in an apartment in a fictional South American country going through civil war in 1972, playing as an immigrant housekeeper who revisits to clean then gets to know its resident by exploring his stuff. If you’re petulant enough doubt whether it’s a video game, look, it must be: they’re running a Kickstarter.
RPS Feature Beyond The Joystick
If I’m going to be dull and reductive about it, playing videogames works like this: we tell a game something through an input device – say, a gamepad, motion contoller, touch screen or keyboard – and get a response back in the form of images or sound. It’s like a conversation, but it’s shaped by the devices we use to talk. Without the Wiimote, there is no Wii Sports. Without the touch screen, there is no Fingle or Bloop.
If I don’t own the relevant controller, then I can’t play these games. But what if the controller doesn’t even exist? Many games are impossible to conceive of because we don’t have the hardware to act as muse. Are we living on a junk diet of gamepads and mice – or a rich land of controller plenty?
Let’s have a chat with a few developers and see wot what they think.
RPS Feature A Digital Romance
Many of Tale of Tales’ games have erotic undertones, and you might begin to wonder exactly why that is. You remember I wrote about Tale of Tales‘ FATALE earlier in this column, of course. And after winning the Nuovo Award for Luxuria Superbia at the IGF Awards a few weeks ago, Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn explained in their acceptance speech that they did a lot of ‘research’ together for their award-winning game. Because Luxuria Superbia is about touch, pleasure, and joy, and can make you blush when you play it, you can imagine the sort of research they were referring to.
Well, the erotic undertones are because Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn are married and have confessed they are good at two things: making art, and f**king.
RPS Feature Tale Of Tales tell tales
Every second year, the RPS hivemind startles awake from its eternal slumber. “Hrmm? Oh, we should talk to all the people making PC games who are nominated for this year’s IGF.” And then we do that. And now we’re doing that. First up, the similarly hivemind-ish team from Tale of Tales, Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn. They’re nominated this year for Luxuria Superbia, a “simple game of touch, pleasure and joy made for fingers”, in which you glide through a tunnel and make its walls explode with flowers and marine imagery.
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RPS Feature You've Got The Look
Shakespeare’s Helena once said ‘Love don’t cost a thing’… Hang on, that wasn’t it.
She said, ‘Love in an elevator, living it up when you’re going down…’ No, that can’t be right. That is somewhat anachronistic.
No, it was ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind. And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.’
But what about desire? What about lust? Isn’t lust directed by sight? By the act of looking? Can looking be… dangerous? When someone looks at you in a certain way, is that your power, or theirs? When you behold something, can it manipulate you? Maybe Cupid can’t tell us about that. But the Tale of Tales game FATALE is going to show you. Read the rest of this entry »
If you’re trying to find a link between them, let me put your mind at rest. The two games could hardly have less in common, but as both came out around November last year, and both have just turned up on Steam in the last few days, it seemed oddly compelling to put them incongruously together in the same post.
RPS Feature Core mechanic
Luxuria Superbia is by Tale of Tales, the duo behind The Path, The Graveyard and Bientôt l’été. Luxuria Superbia feels like a gentle departure for them. Yes, it takes players on a metaphorical journey, but it’s colourful, not maudlin. Yes, it has artistic ambition, but there’s a goal, a scoring mechanic, and more of the trappings of a traditional game.
It’s also set inside an infinite ladygarden. Here’s Wot I Think.
Tale Of Tales – whose Auriea Harvey featured in the first installment of our new Level With Me series – have teased a new game called An Empty World. It’s got a duck in. Possibly many ducks.
It’s odd. See below.
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RPS Feature "it's surrounded by woods"
Level With Me is a series of interviews with game developers about their games, work process, and design philosophy. At the end of each interview, they design part of a small first person game. You can play this game at the very end of the series.
Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn make provocative games and game-like artworks as Tale of Tales, based in Ghent, Belgium. Together, they’ve made The Endless Forest, The Graveyard, The Path, Fatale, and Bientot l’ete. Their most recent project is Luxuria Superbia.
If you like bamboozling investigation in the outer wilds of electronic entertainment but don’t like paying for it, your happiness processor might respond to the news that reliably obtuse devs Tale of Tales have a made a major element of their latest, Bientôt l’été, free and browser-based.
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I dunno about that Citizen Kane of videogames nonsense, but one thing we definitely have is the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of videogames. Bring up the name Tale of Tales, most renowned/notorious for The Path, and you will be sure to spark a war. A war between those who believe games can be anything and those who believe games have to stick to a strict definition of games. It’s a very boring war and I don’t understand why people object to the existence of things they do not themselves enjoy, but THE INTERNET. Personally, I’m not quite sure ToT’s games have always lived up their promise or the concepts they explore, but this does not preclude me from being grateful for their existence, and for their continued dedication to experimentation.
So, their new game software product Bientôt l’été. It’ll be out later this month, all being well, and appears to be an even more overt departure from traditional game objectives and systems than before.
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The work of arty developer types Tale Of Tales tends to divide people. I would argue that The Endless Forest is probably their best work – an ambient forest MMO in which players take the role of man-faced deer. There is minimal interaction, and just a few odd puzzle things to do, but that’s hardly the point: it’s simply a strange, shared internet space, and the kind of oddity that makes our vast series of tubes worth exploring. Anyway, it seems that is doomed now, since it lost its backing. The studio are appealing for donations to keep it alive: “This is not just a question of finances. It is also a matter of principle. We believe that an artist and their audience can have a symbiotic relationship that does not require any interference from the outside. So in a way, we are taking this opportunity to prove a point. Please help us do so.”
So, will you?
In one of the more strange press releases I’ve seen, Tale Of Tales have announced that the Day Of The Dead bundle of their games – The Graveyard, The Path, and Fatale – is to be “pay what you want” for the next five days. Because, um, they want us to think about death. Which is cheery! It’s all in aid of funding their next project, codenamed The Book Of 8.
