What The Cthuck? It R'Lyeh Is A Magrunner Trailer
'A Bit Portalish' is a genre that I have in my head. It's not brimming with games, but there are a few interesting ones in there nonetheless. The most interesting of all is Magrunner: Dark Pulse, a game that ran the gamut of crowd-funding acceptance or rejection and came out with a pile of money. How did it part people from their money? By taking the strange route of being 'A Bit Lovecraftian'. Madness follows hither.
It feels like a cut and paste accident in a game developer design document: it starts as a fairly normal puzzle game, where you're part of a lab experiment testing out a magnetic glove's capabilities. The glove charges up positive and negative states, that you use to fling cubes, open doors, etc. Puzzles, eh? We know how they work.
But the greater mystery of magnets and their inner workings, as posited by Nobel Prize winning rapfessors Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, leads to tentacley intrusions into the surprisingly crisp and clean testing environments. Having played the game a little of it elsewhere , I can tell you it's pretty neat, and they get a lot out of the polarity switching mechanics. And there is also a robot puppy.
It's out "after twenty-two years of nightmare and terror", which at least means the upcoming RPS interview with developers 3AM Games will be before that.