After finishing The Pedestrian, a game that channelled Pixar dreams, I decided to take a light stroll through the internet to my favourite game cataloguer. According to the blurb: “You play as the Pedestrian (aka the male bathroom symbol) who works in a restroom sign standing beside his beloved (the female symbol). When she disappears, you must escape your day job and embark on a perilous journey where you progress by piecing the “sign world” back together in search of the one you love.” I left with astonished denial. I didn’t recall this, surely it couldn’t be right? I rattled my brain like an empty piggy bank – there’s a vague opening: you’re a whiteboard stick-figure capable of travelling in and out of signage, check. You’re working with a real and four-limbed person, evidenced, but never seen, check. Closer to the end and still without a decent theory, check…wait. Remember Pixar? Illogical and magical? Maybe, just maybe, that it was true!
Those romantic umbrellas, cooking rats and floating houses! They make you blissfully ‘ahhhh’, and lovingly, The Pedestrian hurtled me back to Toy Story. It’s a big city! Multiple crest-capped storeys! Zooming commuters! Unmanned machines! No place for toys, nor dangling stick figures, but take a breath, nobody ascends in these films (first stage of loss) and our spritely squiggle is safe within the domain of public signage. Let the familiar 90s soundtrack of harmonious animated jazz cradles and sprinkled sparkles float his and your perilous journey. It’s adorable!
Public signage – it’s everywhere! Unobtrusively and a teeny bit sus, groups of placards, crossings and even restaurant chalkboards sit on ignored walls and tucked frames of girders and dusty maintenance room fences. And the absent person, I think, fixed magnets, so the signs are adjustable for moving around and planning the next linkable part of your route. They have such succinctly succulent clicks, like the plop of a suction cup when repositioning a sign, and the pop of a typewriter when stretching a connecting line towards the symmetrical crescent outside another board. The little guy pitter-patters through a board’s doorway and into the next one’s – it’s a lovely cue from the controller’s speaker – but where does it go in between? It’s simply magic. I can’t ask what type because this world is unspoken, but I know it’s one that enables altruism like Woody and Buzz are devoted to.
So, we’ll pull back a few streets and enter our first challenge. Each collection of signs is a chopped-up bridge blocking progress, and per sign is a room of super-simple black and white symbols – use ladders, walkways and trampolines to navigate your way in and around them. The platforming is barely vanilla-rising, but it’s neat and springy! When you want to move the stick figure through (Sampson – well he is now), you press a button to switch back from board-shuffling mode where Sampson was harmlessly paused, oft-comically in mid-air as you contemplate. There’s always an entrance and spawning board, represented by a curving refreshing arrow like the one in buffering videos, and an exit board with two parallel arrows pointing to an open door-shaped space. There are so many pleasant shapes…
Finding the correct route towards the exit is the key, literally, sometimes you need keys. The wispier puzzles make you link together single-use boards for the linear route, then come a rise of obstructions and lifts activated through triggers mostly in other boards, then along poke slight threats such as lasers and spiky cogs that need stopping. Admittedly, but not to bother, the true tests were latecomers, but it all feels so genius anyway! And who am I kidding? Even the simple connect, jump, climb-then-runs had me flummoxed (but never overwhelmed). Though imagine what I felt like when I needed to revisit signs to link electricity, or figuring out I had to commit stick-death on purpose to advance a puzzle – puzzles are abstract and elaborate escape plans! Oh, and if you sever a used connection, your active trigger states, other links and the little guy will be erased. He respawns! Phew. I’ll figure out the satisfying solutions in no time and he’s alive, no one is taking him away. I’m nowhere near a landfill where toys go to die.
In its brevity the only hitches, or blots of ink at most, meant a little fiddling with connections to ensure a stable angle required for opening doors, and spacing of them and boards to prevent overlapping and obscurity. I was never really sure of the correct angle, and sometimes I’d block off a hidden solution as I questioned what sign I needed, or what connections were complete. The sudden and higher concept ending seemed unnecessary too, nevertheless, like the complete journey, it was short, and honestly clever, if again too wire-crossing for an incapable brick like myself.
It’s a thoughtfully tactile and reusable game in the slower lanes. Some signs need to drop you into others, some need physically connecting to external electrical plugs to remove inner obstacles, and some have doorways with multiple correct counterparts at different stages within the puzzle. I loved how my beginning tactics of mentally appraising the default strewn layout, spreading the signs, then back to hands-off devising to trace a route before actually executing the plan, was sometimes mind-knotting. Damn, I need to test this out, push a few blocks to reach platforms, brain-fart and fail, tinker with some more boards, scratch out some links untraveled until, bam, the trick came to me and it was full of moments like that! All that was missing was a scribbling marker to jot down little speech bubbles over the figure’s head, as we leisurely plotted our journey.
Because it feels so casual as if there’s a certainty to the destination at the day’s end. The stickman gleefully glides through each board and I never worry when he disappears over large chunks of a neighbourhood. During, the lethargic camera stays, simultaneously zooming, panning and moving through the city to the disappeared figure’s next stop. Finishing an industrial zone culminates in a train ride that’s operated by the ink-wizard itself, and it’s silly how nobody notices. Yet, people are never visible, which realises an odd but modern desire for an empty and relaxed city trip. There’s obviously a significant goal at play here, with human-slapped sticky notes guiding a component hunt for a D.I.Y Gameboy taped to each major stage’s junction, yet it resonates like a fun project of a hobbyist’s cosmic discovery.
Or, it could be a bored child’s wandering mind as he crosses the street. He holds his mother’s hand and ponders what other dainty playthings can animate, as he’s forgotten Buzz Lightyear. I remember pretending two fingers on my hand were a small action hero assailing the assault course of the supermarket fridges; I absently pushed the trolley to whatever unimportant item my Mom course-corrected me towards. Man, I wish that little stick figure was my pal. Oh, I’m twenty-seven…But it’s Pixar, and in the short running time, we all believe, right?
Death’s Door wants to veil it’s solemn world in a wisp of mystery. From the ancient stone-sleeping history of it’s central lands, a dark arts in it’s disembodied doors-system, and a reluctance to reveal any of it’s secrets, there’s a peace – be it unnatural – and a slowness in the atmosphere. There’s a wind of an ordained duty blowing through the wings of your crow-protagonist, and so it feels special to pause. Yet, when you reach the heart of it’s Zelda-dungeons and your final quarry’s presence pulsates, the tempo gently places dignity aside and begins to race. When this dormancy comes alive, everything Death’s Door does so well, hit’s a thrilling peak.
It gets there with reverence to two stellar franchises, and the handiwork is mostly practically and overtly so. Unlocking doors through freeing spirits, trumping cult-foes, hitting mechanisms, and revisiting chambers reveal pathways to major abilities and bosses. It’s all bread and butter. The other callout is more like a tribute, and it’s refreshing to see an understudy borrowing and not brick-building with it’s Souls-like crumbs! It’s an aesthetic! Death rings out with a bold graphic on a black background, specked transparent letters expose the scene; a here-right-now thud accompanies the text introducing a boss; retainable souls for buying upgrades – it’s all otherworldly! My favourites of it’s own twists include muffles of audio upon wounds, almost as if your life is being snuffed, and many scenes exist in a stifled black and white. It’s all just a stamp of intimidation, as even with these sleeve tattoos, Death’s Door refuses to be stoic and ruthless. A challenge, yes, but I was glad that it very much liked progress.
Say, when you’ve always got the advantage over enemies. Playing as a cute and flinching crow tapping underfoot, dodging and attacking is forthright. Your weapons are mostly agile and attacks are sustainable, not stunning, but felling in a few hits. Even the bloated and bashing mini-bosses that eventually normalise by joining the rank and file are no speed-match when you add in the dodge. I didn’t get too cocky though – opposing attack patterns aren’t chums, ignoring a creeping missile or sprinting creature can defile your health in moments, and recurring oafs require sharp reflexes. Otherwise, your winning tactics are characterised by nabbing at enemies, rolling to the next, then reversing the manoeuvre to whack them for good.
Many creatures aren’t easily finished without combat upgrades. Each collectible weapon – which are missable – is split by stats of damage, range, swings and swing time, and can be upgraded. The differences aren’t thick, but the performances are worthwhile. You can change what you’ve equipped within a menu, which sounds jarring or sticky, but it’s actually a swift change. It’s good practice to switch weapons for slamming or flurrying swarms of creatures that spontaneously flood in through ethereal pink doors.
Avoiding heat would be less fun if you had to wait around – call in the magic! The resource is intrinsic to progressive tools, reducing every time you fire a spell off the d-pad – which can be charged – at an enemy or object. Gladly, refilling it is the exact opposite of a drain. Clusters of sporadic mushrooms, brittle objects or mechanisms for dungeon-access neatly restore your power in an instant with physical smacks. And aren’t they plentiful! They quickly sprout, doling out juice like snacks and aiding the pace of the fights as you flexibly dash around. The magic system retains your exciting energy through ranged peppering, and without excessive abuse. Rather than flicking through menu-potions or sucking-in sources like other games would have you do, your arcaneness is snug, and anyway, it’s fun to club things for no real reason other than tactility, and satisfying my silly needs.
It’s not a punishing day out either when the treatment of loss is a mere stroke of failure: when you die, you simply respawn through the alluring white void of a door. The latest checkpoint is the most recently found archway, and you’re always a hop away on a straightforward path – that’s flush with ladder shortcuts courtesy of progress – to the scene of the crime.
And healing is another component that’s delightfully weightless. For your starting green blocks, single seeds are found and accumulated across the world, mainly along true pathways, for you to plant in equally convenient and regular pots. Always, health is sitting outside a boss room to replenish, and a prepared flower can greet you as you tolerate flak upon retracing your steps. Because exploration is incentivised through souls, shiny collectibles, secret health and magic boosting shrines, you’ll find an abundance to plant for later consumption. It’s not so much a conscious choice, but a happy routine: oiling the routes along hewn-rooms was a nice reminder that progress wouldn’t be supressed. I did say Death’s Door wants you to slide along, and I meant it!
What is the zenith of the challenge though? It’s the bosses – so few, but so persistent. Your initial targets and bulk of the game reside in the giant’s souls, which inhabit those stubbornly aged and demonically evolved. The cartoonish witch and Guardian of the Doors that were advertised are uniquely slapstick or bleak, which in no order colour the styles of the big threats. The former’s comedy-appeal is used more as inviting intervals, broadly speaking, and doesn’t rub against the latter.
Antagonistically, there is little time to admire. The scarce pauses between their projectiles and leaping attacks create tense sprints to slash and evade in that window, and the dutifully timed fights frame your squished health bar as something to avoid tampering with early on. I was on edge! Loving it! Learning their patterns through a handful of restarts gave me the edge to respect their brutality, as their surfaces cracked in a consuming pink glow that pervades this world and it’s spawn, and signals their demise.
The sword-wielding crow’s reason to be in this stale world is that of employment, shrouding a hushed and unquestionable system of eons. The reaping commision headquarters, your address as a reaper of souls, is filled with other crow-colleagues ruing the bureaucratic and unending (they’re literally immortal) life, and is a conduit to a non-descript world through it’s system of door-portals. Your voiceless crow is handed an assigned giant soul for hunting, which is promptly stolen upon it’s owners defeat by another larger, and much older crow. Tracking him down to a realm where creatures live beyond expiry, meaning you age and feel mortal, you encounter the final door of death.
That touchpoint sends you into a forbidden land of silent, sterile history. There’s an odd contrast in a realm free from mortality but spilling a dearth of actual life. Of course, this makes sense in all of the climates you trek, and there are plenty of creatures whom I assume are indigenous, yet the isometric world feels robbed. The viewing perspective shares this emptiness, as elevated stone gangways and staircases that you journey under stretch across earthen floors, reappearing as the missing link with you as their passenger. The interconnections are deftly crafted in every place, and I was surprisingly rarely lost, with what extra pathways available immediately having a sense of locality to them, and that sections open up into digestible, memorable sizes.
The mystery you unravel is quite short, and unlike it’s fantastic first dungeon foray, my curiosity wasn’t fulfilled and extended through much of side stories, worldbuilding and detailed backstories. The build-up to the Witch is great! Her residence, side-story and meddling with sorcery isn’t dense, but it’s so clearly structured and attentive that it seems where the developers have focused their collaborative forces the most. The final descent towards her dwelling and conflict is chaotic and rhythmic, a smooth curve with a strong motive that showcases the best of Death’s Door. Not that it’s contributing feats are sinkers and stinkers elsewhere, it’s just a shame that the small studio couldn’t bulk them out or lengthen the game. Between the beginning and the end, the story is quiet, and then the answers come all at once, but for the size of the project, my expectations were probably a tad too high.
Nevertheless, the land untouched by death is spritely, with one-off, fantastically quirky, and outright strange and reappearing characters. Absurd features make you wonder how on Earth they got this way, and silly designs have fun backstories to find. The brevity of the game highlighted the pleasure of meeting these characters that, might be in their few, but leave memorable impressions.
And the theme of death that eludes this cast makes for melancholic, but not prolifically deep, spread and studied moments. It’s not really a game with messages; I thought early on that it would cover many tragic attempts to escape the coffin’s nail, but I was premature. Though, I can still feel the early soundtrack: a sense of an honourable task, ultimately undertaken through the reaping of life. Plus, when significant chapters closed, nice thematic touches can reframe your opinion of a boss, and the actual ending brings about the notion that change will be revolutionary, but incredibly intimidating.
The experience would of been greater through more of these personal moments during the journey. There’s a spark that it loses in it’s pacing and weighting after the starting flourish, although, I’m happy that it’s tidy, and in parts deserving. The same can be said about the small and unassuming crow. It’s overreaching talents are put towards a grim and unrewarding job, and, like the robust systems, it’s sword-clutching wings work best under pressure.
Letting go of control can be a blessing. But sometimes you can’t dispose of it definitively. It’s about placing it behind you, locking it away, doors slightly ajar. Run away just for an hour or two. It’s okay, I promise. Being wound up so tight paralyses your perspective and roots all the pieces into a non-negotiable mess, sprawling expansively, towering upwards, shadowing and leaning over you and crumbling and, before you know it, closing you off from a frictionless space. If that all sounds so familiar, then so does stepping out into the world and letting something just take you somewhere.
A Short Hike’s teenage-or-so bird, Claire, is a little worrisome. So this is just what nature ordered. Her Aunt has taken her away on vacation to Hawk Peak Provincial Park, but ever since she arrived she’s been withdrawn. She’s awaiting an important call inside her log cabin, without any reception, so Aunt May suggests she climbs to the summit of the island. Within a handful of minutes after agreeing, we decided to take a detour, and another, and just one more, and before we knew it, everything felt clearer.
Hawk Peak pushes everything aside – it’s the relaxing type of losing yourself from a problem, and travelling is the teddy bear it clings. Movement reminds me of the senselessly fun style of 3D Mario games, with it’s underlying purpose playing second-fiddle willingly to fun. But here, there is no failure, making actions even purer. Lithely hopping and scurrying around is delightful, flourished by Claire’s legs motioning in mid-air, and it’s possible to bound around the entire island, a small open world, from the get-go. Golden feathers – collectibles that increase your stamina for flapping and climbing – wait on mounds, cliff faces and in treasure chests across the mountain. Feathers are how you make movement more exciting on top of something instantly so enjoyable. Rocky hills and forestry gaps very quickly deny your spritely hop for mounting higher and higher, but whatever direction you head to from the beginning, it’s nigh-impossible to avoid feathers. From one onwards, you’re sprinting off like a puppy to instantly scale the mountain, if that’s what inspires you. And from one onwards, I was enamoured.
Climbing precipices lasts much longer with each feather. That action conserves your stamina better, but the surrounding countryside isn’t finished with you. After you’re done shimmying up a bumpy slope, a little ridge below or just to the side or a new pathway or a pond that has a dig spot to climb to, will glint. This platformer utilises the two commandments: jump and climb, but to relax, sightsee and escape your head.
So, wing-flaps. You’re a bird…Does that mean, you can fly? Not only that, but you can soar! It’s the least expensive method of travel too! Some treasure chests of coins are trapped on rising columns, so you’ll dive off a ledge and glide with sheer pleasure into a downward plop. Flying over the island to survey or appreciate the steps you’ve made, adds to a sequence of movements that even a bump into a wall or a depletion of stamina can’t spoil. I just wanted to explore, see what shape the mountain forms around the corner, fly over to it and reverse my steps for no apparent reason. Any movement system would typically ask you to prove your worth before it lets you put your head out of the car window. A Short Hike, is your day off.
Meandering is wholesome, and it naturally bobbles towards that aforementioned goal. It’s not obligatory to have all feathers, but a sufficiency will ease the freezing finale at the peak. You’ve probably spent most of your time with the fairies up until then, but that’s the point! If you are struggling, there’s a population of animal-crossing kindred along the way, coasting in recreational activities or chilling. Their tools are handy for assistance, and from spades to running shoes, the rewards from fetch quests will ease your serendipitous hunt for more feathers. Let the idyllic atmosphere whisk you away and do what you want to, but the feelgood vibes lifted me towards their cute causes and activities regardless.
They’re isn’t a stream of them, nor to the relative depth of other cosy-type games such as Stardew Valley, but from fishing (yes you can) to an improvised ‘not-so-volleyball’, their slip-in-slip-out lengths perfectly fit your stride towards the summit. You’ll discover other holidaymakers and residents enjoying themselves around pathways of beaches and woodlands too. Some are wandering, camping. Some are a little worried, striving for something higher, but everyone is charming. There isn’t a catch here, light-heartedness and friendly tones protect this kind world. Like one island-hiker mentions about collecting feathers, they make you feel weightless on the way to the top.
Claire’s worries begin to disappear on the multifaceted route there, and it’s trimmed with decorating pixels of such an outstandingly modest art-style. What moves: bushes, trees, flowers, streams, shadows – they’re so loveable! Everything is outlined by jagged pixelated edges. Some rise and fall so smoothly, despite their angles. The outdoors tilt metronomically by wispy streaks of wind, and they trail your zig-zagged wings as you glide over handsomely skipped sections. Even the weather systems are children playing on holiday. The edges of most shapes fizzle and flicker like a static tickle, and there’s a quaint weirdness to the undiscernible causes of them on shadow-less rock walls. I’m not sure how, but the geography is a real place, digitised with the swipe of a hand.
A Short Hike certainly lives up to the power in it’s name. And like that breath of fresh air from an aimless walk, the cleansing of a fogged up mind isn’t a conscious moment. You can coast through A Short Hike, and probably still absorb it’s comforting themes, but if I may dictate one thing – get lost in the island, and let that something, take you somewhere.
Severing a connection to a digital world usually involves turning everything off, or quitting. But those aren’t our options in the outside life. We can’t always avoid the first-hand pain that gets too close. And empathy – it’s at the other end, but a simulation of feeling can be overwhelming. But what if you were literally attached to someone with the senses for those experiences, yet unable to receive her world? The only access to it, is through an approximation. You’re an A.I. here, bound within an ocean.
Imagine your favourite sci-fi ship, with systems on screens that seem like an intelligible square of geometrical readings. The minimalist interface of In Other Waters is a simplified trim and smoothing out of that, neatly coloured in teal, turquoise and yellow. Pleasant triangles and circles within bigger circles and curved rectangles represent the systems you monitor and control as an intelligent computer, in Dr Ellery Vas’ dive suit. Oxygen and power must be monitored and refilled, ocean-sampled life is placed in it’s gridded storage, flipped through beside other utility menus. The most important guiding shape, a radar, opens an equally frightening and fascinating marine world, of myriad dots and diversely looped lines. It’s initially all nonsense, but like I said, it’s an approximation. And it’s a fast-woozing engine for imagination.
The alien ocean of Gliese 7cc – unlike it’s sterile name – is abundant – and sometimes barren – with mesmerizing life. It’s behaviour of animals, plants and micro bacteria is paradoxically fixed and amorphous in my mind, yet not once did anything but mainly symbols and evocative descriptions constitute their appearances. The writing of Ellery’s observations – tucked into your effortless interface – ignites a material vision of the abstraction. Complex anatomy, functions, and the dynamic social interactions that impossible species seem to mutually rely on, propagate inches beyond your technological veil.
Once you’ve assimilated into her style of language and the constructed world it flourishes, it’s a devious work of black magic. The shapes start to defuse from their written dependencies, and almost independently inspire a highway of nature in your head. Almost, because when you descend through the depths, the handful of colours fade and darken to amplify the ghostly reduction in life, or the reverse, to it’s explosion. The music similarly deserves a lofty accolade for the reverberating presence it contributes to this too. It emphasises the serenity and mystery, and punctuates your discoveries. This concise team synergises for emotional communication far above it’s largely primitive weight.
To explore the waters, you’ll be scanning your immediate surroundings a lot, which pings-up new points of interest on the map. They’re comprised of aquatic life, (some which are locomotive and require quick-twisting of the scanner), sample-spots and features of the liquid-scape. You bubble yourself and Ellery along by swimming between these automatically at the click of their circles and triangles. Movement isn’t completely unlocked nor is the map free-roam, but it never bothered me. Rather, it kept the narrative pristinely focused. Navigation and detection is all a matter of spinning the analog stick, aligning the rudimentary compass by spinning some more, and then clicking and reading the wonderful unfolding scientific theories of the inquisitive doctor. A system that’s ridiculously unextravagant becomes mechanically slick quickly. It aptly reflects your nature, and facilitates your excitement to zip-on and catalogue new curiosities.
Your other main activity is extracting samples of biological material, which is another brain-resting twist and tap. Gathering samples is for a dual purpose. The other: Ellery can’t persist submerged without propping up her tanks. It’s the only challenge in the game, and only ever gets hairy a few times, as the game knows you want to stop and read everything she spots. Your inventory holds a number of samples, which although suggested, never actually encroaches into annoying forever-adjusting territory. The contents can fuel your oxygen or power and display the relevant increase-percentages for highly-visible bobbing meters. Otherwise, because eventually sections of the gigantic reef you follow can be revisited or exited, items are deposited in your base’s lab storage.
After a brief analysis, the samples can be sent back to your suit. Then you can read-up on excellent confirmations and evolving knowledge of what you’ve retrieved, in her personal taxonomy. I wanted to relax in Ellery’s compositions at expense of an instant return to the uncharted wings of the reef. Her on-the-fly remarks whilst on a dive implied her proud expertise. Her short lines expressed precision achieved from years perfecting her clinical understandings in biology, to a point where she uses logic to reach a believable conclusion pretty quickly. Then, when you read her taxonomy, her findings feel less like summaries but wonderful unfinished cliff-hangers. This is a scientist who is incessant to learn and feel smaller in this orchestra of an ecosystem. Her enthusiasm reads through but her maturity is tame enough that it doesn’t surrender her true goal.
The taxonomy is the only place where you’ll see visualisations of the mysterious world in the form of Ellery’s sketches. I never thought I’d ever wish to stay in my own head after seeing a sketch that gives an idea some finality. The taxonomy clarifies some obscurity of the glorious lifeforms you encounter, but pictures merge the stones and liquid into concrete you can no longer mould. It’s like Ellery’s and your A.I perspective forge two different worlds. I wanted to close my eyes to her pencilmanship (no offense) because they felt so decisive. And the more and more I saw, the more it wet my appetite for the lustful ambiguity of thousands of meters underwater, and more writing.
If the reading sounds dull – there’s quite a bit in relation to other actions. You can skip it all. But don’t. It fosters in it’s entirety an incredible relationship with a mysterious drip-fed story and inextricable world. I can’t pinpoint anything specific other than the premise, which starts with Ellery landing on the planet spurred on from a vague message from her old colleague, Minae Nomura. She goes hunting for her whereabouts, and it reels in moments of sadness, starkness and ominousness. I really want to divulge on her influence on Ellery, and every beat the estranged scientist Minae inadvertently creates to accelerate the hunt. I won’t. It’s all so expensive to the journey.
But Ellery’s connection to you is another mystical cave mouth underwater. It’s an intimate knot that contracts and is fed light, despite you only being able to respond through more shapes! A binary choice of a circle acting as a ‘yes’, or one that looks like a restrictive road sign for ‘no’, asks further questions. They revolve back around and are integral to the story. Like how intelligent are you? Where were you found? Are you helping? In the end, what struck me the hardest wasn’t my own effect, but the drive I injected into Ellery’s cause through an ambiguous companionship. She needs you on this lonely rock, whatever your exact sequence of processors and allocated transistors is.
At times, in the sand-whipped gloom or bacterial streams, there’s a remembrance of what you actually are. And In Other Waters is a spectacular example of keeping not only secrets, but visuals to a minimum. It’s down-to-essentials interface uses symbolism as a conduit for a blinded A.I, to a world so real but alien in the fantastic writing of Ellery Vas. For something so low on bombast and wealthy production, there’s a huge amount of the great unknown in this ocean. And it’s far more than a missing person mission.
Employees from across Ubisoft also stress new complaints regarding sexual harassment claims
Ubisoft are reportedly building a live-service Assassin’s Creed platform that evolves over time, according to Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier.
The codenamed project will leave space for future updates of more settings, is pretty far away, and is being co-developed by a fused team of Ubisoft Quebec and Montreal. Each place will have a distinct feel and appearance, but will be connected in some way.
The inside information is from members asking to retain their anonymity, though a Ubisoft spokeswoman acknowledged that the project isn’t a myth.
Their is still an atmosphere of discontent, in regards to revelations of sexual harassment claims throughout the publisher revealed last year. Staff have taken to internal message boards to express dissatisfaction at some accused managers remaining at the company. Employees have also reported other claims of racism and sexism to human resources “without anything being done”.
The same spokeswoman had this to say. “Any employee that had allegations and remain at Ubisoft has had their case rigorously reviewed by a third party and were either exonerated or underwent appropriate disciplinary actions.”
“Employees who have been under investigation would not remain at Ubisoft if results of investigations warranted termination.”
It seems like we haven’t heard the last of rocking allegations inside Ubisoft.
Let’s celebrate the styles and traits of indie-game developers, shall we?
From ThatGameCompany’s golden-baked sands of Journey, to the industry monolith of Supergiant Games Hades, there are thousands of hatching studios and small-timers stamping their magic on the cosmopolitan banner. Part-timeline and part-comparison, this new series will aim to highlight the history, and particularly, the birthmarks that follow through established studios. Be it a mechanic that found life in the walls of a rented one-bedroom house, or the glowing aesthetic within a dusky office space, back-catalogues are adorned by familiar marks. Now, it’s time they were bridged together in a nestled article.
Welcome to Eyes Wide Open. This week, I’ve dived through the digital windows of Night School Studio, the developers of inaugural hit Oxenfree. Without directly naming for the most part, there are practically spoilers, so beware!
“It just so happened at that time we had a pretty specific idea that we wanted to create or deliver, and it was really this concept of how can players interact with stories in ways that other studios aren’t letting them do it. That’s the beginning of Night School.” Sean Krankel, one of the Creative Directors and co-founders of Night School, was unemployed after parting from Disney, and finally realised the long-gestating idea of birthing a studio with his cousin, Adam Hines. Adam’s blood obviously stirred with the pigments of his previous life at the old Telltale Games, responsible for lighting up the scene of choice-based adventures in the 2010s. Formed in 2014, Night School Studio belong to that same legacy as Campo Santo, critically acclaimed makers of hit Firewatch. Like so, Adam’s narrative-stamped CV lived on through his own projects. In 2016, a collaborative work with Telltale Games released the awkward to read let alone pronounce, Mr. Robot:1.51exfiltrati0n, a mobile text adventure based on the hacking TV series. Developed by a microscopic team of four, with added music from composer Andrew Rohrmann, it was a bigger print from the same year that identified the studio.
Sean Krankel and Adam Hines
“We never take control away from you. We never put you in a cutscene. We never stop the player so that they feel like they’re just watching a TV show”. The scenic chatting Sean references is known in an internal pitch – and what colours most identifying articles after Oxenfree’s exposure – as “walking and talking”. Dialogue will bound onwards whether or not the player is ready in most scenarios. And what a mural on a skyscraper it is. The adolescent cast of Oxenfree saunter nonchalantly without pressure for you to join in, but it’s ironically graceful to interrupt, and answering creates different pathways. Believe it or not, it’s possible to blank, for the entire game if inclined! Destination travelling aside, or moments of real-life loitering, there is very little available to squeeze the flow of the slow-burning story, but a start button.
It’s a system that demands your full-time attention. Rarely is anything filler. Three options appear in bubbles above Alex, the player-character, and your window to reply coincides with their fading. It reads like an emulation of conversation without eccentricities, but with slight concessions of a videogame. Players need at least some time to react, so many lines have a perceptible gap. A concise palette of options support a flow that needs to roll onwards in a chatty fashion; events can’t encourage an analytical stance or complicated puzzles – all skill levels need parity. Extremely gamifying would of been an antithesis in thought – many elements need to cooperate to ground and lubricate the flow of talking. Damage systems and hiding from enemies would stutter and create slowdown. Instead, the adroit plot incentivises regular movement that makes sense. The ensemble have reasons to regularly move, and during standing-beats the player-character can wander the near-environment. An unfortunate truth is that steadier pacing breeds fleshed out relationships and arguments – it’s an achievement that important narrative stoppages maintain a flow without outstaying their welcome. The ensuing dialogue moulds in time a protagonist of your choosing, one with teenage attitude, and a hidden heart behind her retorts.
“Sean and I, really liked the promise of a story of a coming of age tale that you can kind of choose how you come of age, so we thought it would just be fun to play in that space and see what would come out of having a very, often times benign tale of these kids just going to party on a beach, but then resting on top of that is supernatural madness and insanity, and kind of more gainy systems you’d want to play with…” Adam touches on the more light-hearted energy that cushions throughout a veiled mystery, climbing towards a dreadful zenith. Many of the game’s character’s have turns of phrases and social quirks, that could murmur from a college or university campus. They’re all well-defined. Oxenfree only dabbles but humour is a pinpoint trademark that sparks when Night School rings. Broader encompassing pop-culture wouldn’t merge into the writing until follow up project After-party and iOS exclusive Next Stop Nowhere, but trims of dry, witty humour and mocking sarcasm course strongly for levity. There’s also a strong dose of sardonicism, with grudge-bearing Clarissa’s resent towards Oxenfree’s new step-brother acquainted Alex.
This expressive speciality of Night School recurs in all subsequent leads. Serra and Lola, incredibly witty and double-edged women, retain Clarissa’s dryness. They’re resistant to the banal, pretend to be allergic to other humans; not easily impressed. Inside them though are insecurities that ooze with a self-aware, self-deprecation. Compliments don’t come easy, and Lola, one of two condemned to Hell in Afterparty is definitely backhanded. She’s made with the wool of a black sheep – many of their characters love to goad and prod and provoke to get a reaction.
Hugging tight to that building reputation, fun, insulting writing was cranked to a direct degree in the funny-by-premise second game. An alluring bar crawl in neon nightclub hell was certain to pucker cheeks, if not succeeding as sensationally like the mess it promises. Everything from historical quips ranging from more Polish in existence if the Titanic survived, to your spank-bank being converted for the brains need for torture memory space is on the cards. It’s up there with Portal 2 as the funniest game I’ve played. But even here, there’s a sobering real life and desperation beyond death at the end of punchlines. Fame hunters garner adoring wannabees through charisma, mirrored by the musical celebrities pitched like statues to decorate bars. They muse on their shallow but unregretful clamour for the devotion living crowds gave them. Surrounding bitterness is higher too, less so from important characters but from busy and judgemental demons. They’re just as preoccupied with the everyday values as the rat race above.
So, the nine circles of Hell speak crueller, but nastiness is waxed by humour, which seems content in the limelight over it’s character’s woes. Comedy speaks directly to the audience, without making eye-contact. It’s genuinely fun down here in your downtime (after lashings). Heck, people even sneak into Hell through comas!
True darkness belonged to Oxenfree. There’s self-torment in Alex’s grief for her deceased brother and it aids a drastically different tone. The hell-stricken character’s desired resolution of escaping the lava-lakes and horrific torture – an implication that tone keeps far from discomfort – rarely seems unattainable. A playful example of that contrast comes early on as a bartender with a death wish. He teeters tongue-in-cheek on blatant tutorialism by pointing out that more options should appear when you drink, and it’s clear the writer had a comedy-itch to scratch this time around. There are a number of slapstick gags on ironic underworld social media platform, Bicker – purposed to show ‘Tweets’ only about the user – about organs lost and requested to be found.
The main mechanical novelty is “how can you make drinking fun in a game?”. At varying plot points, bars will offer alcohol that can humorously steer your personality! Drinks are free in Hell by the way. The opening frat party encourages a whimsical approach to choice selection – an establishing start, yet they’re not as critical to amassing a team to take on Satan’s liver, as the ominousness that Alex encounters. She construes like she doesn’t have a emotional coat of armour like the chalk and cheese Lola and Milo. That causes a progressively rising hesitation to choices as her night unfolds. You enthusiastically yank at filling Lola and Milo’s shoes to be ruder and teasing as it feels inconsequential, but everybody loved to annoy their siblings as a child. Oxenfree thrives on tension comparatively, racking the atmosphere by trapping you in time loops and locking doors for claustrophobic control stealers. You can actively embellish the malign suspense with offhand fire-stoking comments about it feeling “evil”, and though Serra’s bounty hunting like-sisters suffer an on-screen death, the road-trip through space doesn’t drain the plucky adventure of Next Stop Nowhere, Night School’s last production. For mood and atmosphere, Oxenfree’s Edward’s Island is victorious in consistency.
Not as consistent, but intentionally, Oxenfree had photo opportunities where the art style changed from the norm in the finished product. Next Stop has textual introductions to chapters, that include photos retaining that style. I like it when studios make winks rather than snatches at their freckles continuity. Recurring jokes on Gregorians and conquistadors started in Afterparty, after meeting actual singing friars locked in medieval stocks. Serra reprises, when she’s asked what her hypothetical restaurant would play. In the bigger picture, Hell is a radical turn from similarities. So is the vacuum of space in Next Stop, with it’s multiple space-debris-latched venues like apartments and service-stations. It’s probably my unfortunate least favourite in Night School’s timeline of out-there settings. I hope they continue to reinvent. There’s a junkyard that aptly comes to mind that solar-mail man Beckett and hitchhiker Serra visit, when I think of space as a used setting. Maybe it’s the creeping dullness of recent Star Wars overload, or the lustre of space that I might of lost in my twenties. Even so, the trio of games sit on a podium made of jewels.
Warp-drives and asteroids can’t surpass the sleepy bluey-greens of a World War Two steeped island. Heather Gross, was the lead artist responsible for the creation of indoctrinating art you traverse off the coast of America. Alex and best friend Ren wander, circle and hike over a sense of history. It’s forever bolted in the implied depth of 2D military walkways. It’s a painted canvas in a broody kids storybook, and the zoomed-out perspective of a side-on beach pier make every layer come across as one whole background. The characters occasionally split off and meet around winding hills, and you stop to wonder if that staircase is in your way. It’s impressive, not jarring. Imagine – if you’ve had privilege of seeing – the purgatory of Downside from Supergiant Game’s Pyre, but if a rainbow was sedated and snored in mainly Z’s of monochrome. Animation for characters could be jarring, instead it’s like giving endearing puppets freedom of a stage. Next stop polished them, and possibly loses some love in the change. The small running time in Oxenfree of around six hours manages to recycle it’s concise world, without feeling stretched, to carve out a surprisingly morbid tale in moments.
Hell followed with an overall jump to a static kind of 3D, that helps the ridiculousness pop against demons with a nine-to-five job of torturing, bemoaned like the standard human commuter on hustle. There’s a cool seediness to the bars; dirty vices. Denizens gas, and fill whatever passes as a fiendish bladder. Blurry foregrounds create illusions of nuanced interactions, highlighting the stars of the show. “Welkin Way” and “Little Rantalia” are neighbourhoods placing a picture of camaraderie in a supposed place of austere punishment.
Long periods of silence on the sticky floors of Hell might be symptoms of a budget, but vastness hits home in the estranged relationship of Serra and son, Eddy. A flexible camera that flies above this time is a palpable move that accommodates all of the empty distance surrounding them too. Beckett’s A.I infused ship, is the strongest intimacy in the same lonely universe. It’s an uncanny gaming trope for Night School’s DNA so far: a HUB. The onboard jealous computer Cody follows Serra and Beckett around through speakers, and each room is a worn home, complete with DVD player. This abode is where bonding happens the most. My favourite moment is when Eddy’s girlfriend Nix spray-paints Beckett’s living quarters: she reveals her and Eddy’s idealistic plan to run off to a utopia called The Apple Orchard. She’s a calming and refreshing observer in the dysfunctional family, humbly noting Eddy’s need to be normal. You can’t feel too familiar in Oxenfree or Afterparty, but the ship brews those warm connections. I felt at home there.
The HUB is one aspect of the game in terms of an odd one out. The aforementioned camera angles, with wider and still shots, deviate from the closeness of the on-rails experiences. When I say sacrilegious, I mean it in jest, but a studio that prided itself on seamless conversation by explicitly mentioning wanting to circumvent cutscenes, added a few in here! Really short, mind.
“Immediately after shipping Oxenfree, it was hard to parse out what was working and what wasn’t, because we were still finding an audience and figuring out what are the things that people were attached to. The two main things that we’ve latched on to are having characters that have, generally speaking, very relatable backgrounds so that the player can embody them fairly easily. The other one was the naturalistic dialogue system. We definitely want to continue to build on that. All of that said, I don’t think we want to just be the studio that consistently puts out games with dialogue bubbles over people’s heads. So that is going to continue to shift. And we want to keep adapting that.” Speaking in an interview with Digital Trends back in January, and though five months after it’s release, I think Sean’s outlook sheds light on the extra equipment that pins Next Stop. Lightweight exploration and puzzles, investigation and an inventory, also gently open the curtains of their channelled experiences. Adjusting story techniques too brings a couple of memorable distraction-based scenes on an asteroid-diner. Focus flips between Serra occupying a waiter, whilst Beckett mooches through the off-limits staff sections for clues of Eddy’s whereabouts. It constructs a wider circumference when simultaneous events show the existence of working characters out of shot. The second time, Beckett scrambles to douse a fire in the underbelly of the ship. We jump back regularly to Serra’s updates as she commandeers the vessel as an ad-hoc deputy. It all totals up to the largest and most ambitious game yet.
All of the designed three worlds, whether in dusk, green or 4am drunken hues, admire or embrace the strength of personal connections. Lola and Milo’s bond isn’t so much dying, it’s a stronger broadcast of symmetry to the siblings in the other games. Antagonists across the catalogue attempt to sow disunity by putting flames under friendships. In a game about demons, villains aren’t multiplied, but Wormtail, the assigned personal demon of anxiety and embarrassment comically places wedges between the students. She creates whisked-away theatrical caricatures of childhood memories that form their suppressed issues. The performances provoke the two into questioning their support of each other. Forces of space and time, literally, but in a much more profound way before in Oxenfree, ram impasses by manipulating a hatred to the point of tipping over. It’s also done in a more rooted way throughout the supernatural ambling. Character’s fail to keep their calm under the grave goings on, and the poisonous arrows have a wider arc at the cast.
Serra and Beckett’s take on friendship is a blossoming reverse, a straight-up getting-to-know each other. Her past slowly opens up, enamouring a recent stranger into a stalwart friend. Beckett can be guided into an understanding, non-preaching companion; Lola and Milo’s interactions find lessons about where life after university should lead. Despite the running feeling, rainbows and kittens don’t tie off everyone’s final chapters. Separation rings through with an ambivalence; easing, not severing. The three games drift off with unspoken maxims: in Serra’s actions, she subtly accepts her secret yearning and second chance for a family life, from a life of dangerous thrills. Vocal reaffirmations of fun and adventure echo from Alex and Ren. During the highs of their distress these are essentially snippets of the final message. It’s emphasised upon even stronger collisions in further playthroughs, and felt in the other titles too. You should live life to the max, even without knowing what events lead to. Chances and regrets.
Wormtail
Make Satan salty
Perhaps the future will be less rosy. An optimistic attitude isn’t an interruption of fate, so comes Oxenfree’s sequel due this year. Lost Signals will return to the kooky island that changed Alex and companions forever, and who knows what ending might befall it’s new lead. “Five years after the events of OXENFREE, Riley returns to her hometown of Camena. What she finds is more than she bargained for.” That premise suggests to me a heavy burden returning to the type of stories that Night School make. Afterparty switched for more transparent goings on, Next Stop hoisted it’s own plot closer to it’s characters, but both charted a course for more laidback worlds. Partially putting a finger over Next Stop, they’ve all been teen-focused so far too – will the age be preserved, or take on a seasoned spirit?
Suffice to say, Night Studio’s original game is their most indelible, as seen in the reflections of it’s community. Maybe it’s touch was the best match for a dialogue system that in later outings paused for more breaks than ‘walking and talking’ suggested. Anyhow, regarding Oxenfree, Sean “wouldn’t have it any other way”. Five years of experience, I trust, certainly inspires the belief that similarities will be refined and enhanced. Though, without stopping when walking and talking, it’s impossible to truly appreciate what you get given.
Some of the quotes in this article were gathered from a five-part Skybound Entertainment webseries available on YouTube. It’s full of great interviews with Night School on the development of Oxenfree.
Oxenfree and Afterparty can be bought on all major console platforms except next gen. Next Stop Nowhere is an ios Apple Arcade exclusive, and Oxenfree is also on ios and Android.
There’s a gratifying parallel between Jorj’s ascent up a laborious mountain, and the rewards at the end of his corporate-serving day. The tougher his job becomes: the sweeter the sweat of his brow. Jorj’s life and liberties are closed off to the public eye. Only his humble & familial dream – a purified essence to initially push you and him along – glimpses what he strives for. Yet, it’s just as inanimate and nebulous as the key to bottling that thunder. The barren Scandinavian-tailored snow plains where Jorj, for all purposes and intents, works alone, is a straight and unobstructed walk to-and-forth from disguised indenture. Enter a cave, slaughter the block-chain infestations, return Grindstones for your employers, and presumably, after tragic taxes and non-subsidized recovery, beat the drum once again. Jorj’s monotonous job is security. But for me, it’s a brutal shot of pleasure.
There are safer ways to cross the road
Besides the traditional absence of controllable characters in matching-tile type games, I also struggle to recall such a primitive urge when collecting gems, candy or trinkets. For all the similar riches Grindstone showers on you, it’s the visceral navigation of it’s alternating levels of ‘monster’ boards – plundered through Jorj’s lustfully normalised violence – that usurps order and tidy patterns. The obvious themes of innocence and self-defence fade carelessly into the background as Jorj’s accelerating might splatters through hoards of red, green, yellow and blue creeps. And though your only form of ‘negotiating’ passage contains dense sustenance from even a small chain, the hollow cravings of an addict ring. You feel cool about it too, like a calm, trendy cool. It it weren’t for my awareness of the player’s undermining of Jorj into a glorified and souped-up queen on a chessboard, I’d happily don shades over his bloated and overworked pupils, and nod to the beats of the award-winning wordless lo-fi.
The chain itself requires a minimum of two sequenced critters with matching colour and an absence of health. Maximising the bloodied scale to attain your objectives eventually requires severing the lesser populated but tougher ‘Jerks’, and destroying obstacles such as boulders and wood. Grindstone’s levels are technically puzzles, with multiple hand-crafted and slightly differing routes with an excellent tilt between lenience and hairiness. Often, it’s not choosing the wrong pathway, rather your modest hesitation that delivers the whip. Every ten kill-streak unearths a slot machine colour-flipping Grindstone gem, which along with certain enemy types allows you to switch over to another hued-critter if collected within a chain. When you aren’t championing by piling up high streaks, the board can pop nefariously into a prickly cesspit due to coloured creeps converting hostile in turns. Monsters attack within a highlighted range if you’re undefended. The impetus can grossly contort in favour of the blobby adventure-time-gore-plushies if you take sips and nibbles, instead of streaky serpentine feasts. Add leaping, growing, resurrecting and gestating enemies, and losing Jorj’s three hearts will bash his face battered blue before you can finish his neglected leg day. What steadily and pleasantly follows cutting the ribbon into gorging unexplored territory asks a more methodical outlook in later levels.
Making strong headway into Grindstone would bring a lot of resented slowdown in other games because of it’s thicker pauses, but it’s the inactivity that keeps the beat-ups you crave taut. A revitalised Jorj awaits, expressing a honed rage and ready to be unleashed. Part of your reward from releasing the trapped warrior is seeing his foaming face burst into a searing canvas, bending upon every strikethrough. At first, an accidental hold of a button created a false belief that I was in control of Jorj’s rampage, speeding up the longer I held alongside extra entrails submerging the board. The audible rising pitch and tempo of the galvanising chaining psyches you up as it climbs to it’s pulverising slam. The tone begins at a low-estimation of your slaughter, something else that causes numbness but equally acts to incentivise with deeper progress. A bit of patience to survey the incumbered square and ways to loop around the oft permanently block tiles will tally this cathartic build-up into a crescendo. But that’s the thing, it’s intentionally not enough. The sound never seems to run out, the pace always wants to go faster, and Jorj belies a deeper rawness to go nastier; the final explosion always leaves an insatiable gap.
My therapist told me these aren’t crunchy leaves
Add items into the mix to forge avenues where there aren’t any and it’s dartboards that have seen less holes in them than these claw machine critters. What was once locked behind IOS Apple Arcade is now a touch-screen fit for the Nintendo Switch, besides Mac OS and Windows Platforms. Whatever the screen, you’ll be mimicking the ascending blows like Saturday night at the MGM. Just don’t let go of the lawnmower.
A renaissance painting, by nature, has a permanent scowl, a dignified stance, an almost ghostly protective spell preserving it’s invulnerability to the inferiority of society it sees slug on by. It demands a social ranking as high as many of it’s privileged and uncomfortably dressed subjects, depicted throughout the centuries of famine, disease and holy wars. It’s why we see them, the subjects, afforded a good metre or two’s viewing distance in global museums like the Louvre – despite some lacking barriers and protective glass – because they command personal space with their pigeon chests and infinite wealth! Can you imagine the woe of Mr.Clean and superior up there, huffing and puffing, risking diseases and infections from the petty and poor peasants of the 21st Century who gawp at his protruding gluteus maximus? “Ewww!”, he cries, as the third toddler waddles by untethered from it’s soiled pram, licking it’s salty fingers only to then blindly smack head-first into a marble column (thankfully not of St. Peter’s Basilica! Oh no! Hold me as I weep classical tears!). That’s my interpretation anyway! It seems the Earls and the Popes haven’t got time for silliness up there, but I’ve got time for loads, and you can stuff your Last Supper invite if you aren’t buying from Dominoes anyway.
Thankfully, I’m not the only one, as the uplifting and ridiculous characters in The Procession to Calvary’s paintings, marvellously drawn by Michelangelo and Rembrandt to name a famous few, seem to want a break from some of that exhausting decorum. The Procession to Calvary is in fact designed entirely from Renaissance paintings, in which the aforementioned seriousness is undressed beyond the initial first glance at the stately composition, through exaggerated animations of single body parts, anachronistic speech above heads and a healthy treatment of slapstick scenarios. Look closely, and the cracks of ageing are maintained in these works of art – accompanied by classical music too by the way – and the original losers of Kings, Queens, monks, boats, harps and scholars mostly retain all the information a historian would die for. Yet simply, if shockingly you can’t see it, a naked man is spun around a spit-roast, a woman fit for the globe theatre loses her garments to reveal a tower of hiding men, and a bloke with Jesus vibes appears to pull tricks with a deck of cards saying,”Is this your card?”, all without facial expressions save a flopping mouth to denote speech. It’s bloody fantastic.
If the developer Joe Richardson, puppeteer behind previous similar melodrama ‘Four Last Things’ within the same fictional world, hadn’t described the title as “Pythonesque” on it’s website, I doubt the indulgent amount of Monty Python found here would of gone uncredited. I’ve watched a side-splitting amount lately, and the disjointed madness and surrealism of the legendary comedy troupe led by Messieurs Cleese, Idle, Palin and Jones etc. is a beautiful, nonsensical parade. The collage stop-motion animation built by Terry Gilliam, another member from the Flying Circus TV series and often director, is the most obvious, direct inspiration for the game, lending it’s goofy Medieval scenes lots of subversion, flippancy and bloody stupidity as scene below.
The Procession of Calvary
A Monty Python stop-motion scene (live-action was otherwise the norm)
The remaining boys (now old, unapologetically wise-cracking men) whacked together such a crazy bunch of styles that it distinctly became, like the jokes, one single unique style of incoherence, spontaneity and randomness, hence the “Pythonesque”. They would break contemporary large scale TV traditions of credits – rolling them after the intro. They would transition out of sketches by breaking the fourth wall to reveal film sets, continuing into a new scene having broken immersion and have somebody waltz in and denounce the integrity and funniness of a gag, purely for the sake of it. Some scenes would appear to ridicule and parody public life; cross dressing was rampant, but other times satire was abandoned as easily as explaining why all this absurdity was happening in the first place. A lot of the time, it was a sticky paper spitball known as ‘stream of consciousness’.
Whether The Procession to Calvary, a point and click adventure which promises that “the puzzles make perfect sense! (or at least adhere to a consistent internal logic)”, can mimic so well such constant jumps from an unrelated theme or setting without upsetting the difficulty, or will even bother to, we will found out at some point later this year. In terms of general gameplay befitting the genre, a “verb-coin” system inherent to point-and-click adventures will assist in solving puzzles, which can also be skipped by “optional murder”, but the Steam page warns of “repercussions”. It’s certainly guaranteed that the cut-out collages will provide a hilariously surreal lack of gravity throughout (Isaac Newton hadn’t released that yet).
Here’s the latest trailer complete with music from classical composers adding to the absurdity, that so spoils the sophisticated air!
A special Nintendo Direct solely revolving around Pokemon just aired and it flung a host of ‘catch em all’ information our way. Straight off the bat, a remake of the popular mid-2000’s spin-off, Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team, renamed Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX was announced for the Nintendo Switch, with water-colour style enhancements and 3D improvements. A demo is available later today before a March 6th full release, and it allows users to transfer their early progress over to the full title.
However, Nintendo or specifically Game Freak, did not skimp on a barrel-load of information conveyed mainly through concept art for two expansions made known for mainline titles, Sword and Shield, which at the combined price of $29.99 will be downloadable through an expansion pass, and presumably without at a later date. They can be pre-ordered now.
The expansion passes are named Isle Of Armour, themed after “Growth” and based in a yet unexplored coastal area of the Galar region, and The Crown Tundra, with a distinct snowy and frigid setting with a theme of “Exploration”. Each new block of of content sounds hefty; they were announced under the implication that the traditional third mainline title such as Emerald or Platinum will be a thing of the past, and save data from the base titles will be reused to start new adventures in DLC regions, unlike the old third games. The first expansion is coming at the end of June, and the 2nd sometime in Autumn. New Pokemon and people will be discovered, and stories of apprenticing a Dojo gym leader on the Isle, and being appointed the leader of an exploration team through the snowy Tundra sound pretty cool. Like the original Journey throughout Galar, owners of Sword or Shield will be entitled to different exclusive new Pokemon, including legendaries – also new rivals, gyms, returning old Pokemon, equipment and clothing accessories.
These new expansive additions to the full game are plenty for fans to be stoked about, including the trading cloud-app, Pokemon Home which was stated for a release in February. It looks like fans upheaval of the full list of Pokemon being limited in Sword and Shield will be attenuated somewhat, as many powerful modern favorites were glimpsed, and in Crown of Tundra specifically a co-op mode called Underground Dens where players explore the underground tundra, potentially allows all past legendaries to be allied and several caught. Apparently overall, each expansion will contain 200 Pokemon, and more to see than the entirety of Sword and Shield’s wild areas.
It seems the first of lots of content excitingly added to the mix throughout the year, and another dense and bumper-successful year for all Pokemon development teams, as Pokemon Go will surely receive the 6th Generation, Game Freak are working on other unannounced projects, and more unrevealed details for the expansions and Pokemon Home are to come!
There are birds that are huge in the forest down the road and they like to eat apples – huge apple-eating birds inhabit the local forest. The second statement is a shortcut through the first one, did you notice? I shaved off over half the words by navigating a smoother route. Yet the shortcuts in Lonely Mountains: Downhill (which I’ll abbreviate up ahead to, you know, save time) are treacherous and sneakily less noticeable. It’s the sneakiness that I admire, because I always associated a shortcut with cleverness from the player and whatever chosen mode of travel, be it car, bicycle or on foot. There’s a cunning mind daring to do despite potentially throwing a preserved race position and an even braver one trading preparation for foolish improvisation. But the racing games in my recent memory, whether providing individual time-trials, or multiple contestants racing simultaneously, haven’t executed shortcuts quite as confidently, and in their rawest state, as Lonely Mountains.
Beautiful jagged scenery, no time to fantasise
The kart racers, the Trials series and the Burnout: Paradises all have their caveats that inform their overall choices. An idea is developed at the cost of another, ultimately the abandoned one features but doesn’t become integral to the whole, whether it be for accessibility, style or the type of experience targeted. Mario Kart would never sacrifice it’s broad appeal to a hardcore clan, so it’s alternative routes are visibly clear; they’re signposted, man-made and zoomed through with cute, and minimal risk. The arcade racer prefers it’s forks in the road with fictional billboards and unmissable repeating structures sitting on a prong – each to their own I say. But what if shortcuts could truly separate the wheat from the chaff and be more than a switch to mindlessly flick, never lose their menacing spark on repeat flirtations, designed just achingly tight and anxious enough to swipe an ego or rhythm away from any player?
Lonely Mountains I should add is a mountain biking game. It features four fearsome vertical mountains, four trails each, and a handful of push bikes to navigate with hesitancy and often blind power. A trail is divided into timed sections, and retrying them is instant, but the agility and speed forced upon you across the frighteningly flowing course isn’t as forgiving. You’ll retry them countless times as jaunting rocks trip, cliffs swallow and water gurgles, and though your enthusiasm and energy revive seamlessly, slamming into a twenty ft conifer, has something to say. It’s a blocked out green and grey wilderness saying less is more; it’s pale dirty rock paths bleed cubes of mud torn under the rush of tyres, and it’s angular white boulder faces coldly reject your bike and discipline your direction through claustrophobia, but invite you to hop down their prehistoric stairs regularly. It’s here where you realise there’s a free-form illusion on offer to truly conquer tracks. Shortcuts come in – from you’re own discovery – but aren’t visible to the leisurely eye. Welcome the no-blinker; the high-stakes guy – shortcuts are ‘everything in my life is wonderful’ when your front wheel gracefully re-grips the main path.
Veer right into blurriness and hope for the best?
Shortcuts are natural and earthly here – a maze of gaps between trees plotted on undisturbed ground (the main trail is telegraphed for the most part) or an unobstructed discoloured patch there – yet no discernible linking passage beyond thanks to a wonderfully framed and tracking camera. Mountain biking isn’t my speciality, nor is biking! But I imagine this mimics the professional biker’s gambits with Death’s door – a flick of the handlebar or weight thrown or spread over too far could mean doom of another type of bodily distribution, because they tried to sculpt their own, ‘kind of’ path. Lonely Mountain is a solitary game, if you ignore trail leaderboards. It’s a battle of your own wits, yet skidding a rock slope feels like cheating the mountain! But it’s crudely spiral tower of blocks and stumps and ridges is incapable of verbal revenge, unless it archways tunnels and sediments bellow as you part ways with your bike. Slipping behind and into blurred out routes gathers a hefty stopwatch advantage, but I was certain I wanted the sheer bounded thrill and pleasure sometimes instead.
There are scruffy layers to each trail that composite terrain, and the lure of shortcuts encourage sniffing out nature’s blended environments more than I think I may have cared for in any racer, often purely for sake of discovery, and I’d lie if it wasn’t for obsession. Maybe my newfound keen eye will disappoint me in the next big arcade racer, that doesn’t synergize the alternative avenues with the mainstream, but until then, I’ll carve some paths on Titan Peak – residency, Mount Riley, and hope I remember my distress flares.
thejagpalbros 