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Feature: Music to your ears
The best game soundtracks you can listen to for free right now
Another month, another big video game publisher puts a great big dollop of video game music online for zero pennies. This time, it's Bandai Namco, who have just uploaded every single Tekken soundtrack onto Spotify because, well, apparently everyone loves Tekken. I've never partaken in a Tekken, but with track names like "Massive Stunner" and "Lonesome City Jazz Party 1st", I'm already 100% convinced the…
Feature: Crying wolf
Weird artsy games were once hard to find. The Path came out in early 2009, just as the indie game renaissance was kicking off, and although we'd seen games Trying To Say Something before, I hadn't seen anything as experimental and dark and vague as this.
Feature: Can housekeeping be atmospheric?
I really wanted to love Tale of Tales’ borderline uncategorisable experience that is and was Sunset, more so after the hubbub surrounding their eventual departure from the industry (they gave up making games after selling only a few thousand copies of this one). The team had become known for unusual, thought-provoking experiences like Bientôt l’été, The Path and The Graveyard, so playing as a house…
Feature: Crunchy leaves and cold air and hot cocoa
Since moving to California, I find myself missing the seasons. I grew up in Virginia, where the leaves change colour every September. When living in England, there was a yearly rotation of scarves and heavy coats to mark the coming of autumn. It seems silly to complain about the year-round temperate climate that blesses the beachy shores of SoCal, but it gets pretty boring here…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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.
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.…
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