Trailer Tuesdays: Life is Strange: Before the Storm

I’ve been hearing whispers about a new Life is Strange project for a while, though I couldn’t figure out how the developers would do it. A sequel was out of the question since the ending of the game is set up deliberately to take the story in two completely different directions, so making a direct Life is Strange 2 would surely be impossible unless they wanted to make two completely different games. Lo and behold, it turns out the new Life is Strange game is a prequel, focusing not on Max and her time powers but on Chloe a few years before the events of the original story. This is, all things considered, the sensible choice, though I’m intrigued and cautiously optimistic about how it will turn out.

“This Town Is Full of Ghosts!”: The Power of Atmosphere and Landscape in Night in the Woods

(via ZAM)

You first meet the protagonist of Night in the Woods, twenty-year-old Mae Borowski, when she arrives at her hometown’s bus station after dropping out of college. She remarks that the bus station is probably the newest and fanciest building in the town of Possum Springs, all the better to give people coming through the best first impression possible. However, we soon see that the bus station, with its shiny floors and glorious sunny mural advertising prosperous life in Possum Springs, is just a façade, and as soon as Mae arrives in the town proper, we see that it’s crumbling inside and out.

As Mae explores her childhood home, the game’s use of color, landscape design, character dialogue and atmospheric music all help to build a rich, vivid, sensory picture of this once-great but slowly dying coal town, injecting so much personality that the setting almost feels like a character. Which not only makes it a fantastic backdrop for the unfolding story, but a neat metaphor for what’s going on with Mae herself. And… also a little bit of something deeper and darker.

Spoilers for the end of Night in the Woods ahead!

Trailer Tuesdays: GameLoading: Rise Of The Indies

I don’t think anyone would disagree that last year was a hard year for gaming, both in terms of titles not reaching their assumed potential and various controversies surrounding the problematic portions of gaming culture. By no means am I already writing this year off, but on the more mainstream side, this year is already getting off to a rocky start with game developers being exposed (further) for their shitty practices and ridiculous DLC offerings like that of Evolve. Though I’m still looking forward to the no doubt good things this year has yet to bring (such as No Man’s Sky), I’m tired. I’m tired of people still thinking Gamergate is a legitimate soapbox to stand on; I’m tired of female developers being harassed out of the business; I’m tired of companies shilling out the same fucking game with a different skin and a different white scruffy dude with brown hair—as voiced by Troy Baker—protagonist. Luckily, I can still find hope in the indie scene.

Is Madotsuki in Limbo? A Review of Yume Nikki

Fanart by yunare

I’ve never been an avid gamer, but there’s one game that’s always had a special place in my heart: Yume Nikki. Though it’s meant to be psychological horror, it has an almost calming effect on me. The game itself isn’t very scary—rather, it’s just very bizarre—but there are events in Yume Nikki that have made me cringe. There are many theories about these events, as there is no narration given. I’ve read a great deal of them, yet there never seems to be one that I completely agree with. Is it possible that some of these theories are true, but for different reasons? I took the time to play through the game again and came up with my own conclusion: what if the world of Yume Nikki is Limbo?

Spoilers, a trigger warning for sexual assault, and a seizure warning for those with epilepsy after the jump.

Sexualized Saturdays: The Path, an Indie Horror Game about Women

The Path is one of those games no one quite understands, including myself. I’ve tried watching different Let’s Play videos and reading up on the development of the game, but nothing eased my countless queries. During my research I found this quote from one of the producers of the game, Auriea Harvey, which says:

…The Path doesn’t just give girls a female avatar to play boy games with and it doesn’t paint everything pink with smiling faces and hearts. The Path is a game that is about things that can be deeply important to women and it is played in a feminine way. (source)

While making a game for women might have been the developers’ intention, I’d argue that anyone can relate to this game, regardless of their origins.

Spoilers and a trigger warning for rape and murder after the jump.

What We Can Learn From the Ashes of Polaris’s GAME_JAM

In any type of entertainment, advertising is one of the necessary evils of the trade. In the more indie scenes like YouTube—although I hesitate to call it indie these days—making the decision to monetize one’s channel is almost treated like an offense against the purity of the art. No matter what viewers may think, people do like getting paid for their efforts. And for the most part, advertising affiliates and subsidiaries don’t actually impact the quality or content of the videos they pay for. However, sometimes things can go wrong. In the case of Polaris’s newest venture, dreadfully and horridly wrong.

For fans of Let’s Players such as Game Grumps, Markiplier, and TotalBiscuit, the monetized conglomerate of gamers and gaming news on YouTube known as Polaris isn’t anything new or particularly amazing. It’s almost frightening how quickly the group gained power and popularity, to be completely honest, but not entirely surprising. (With the sudden Let’s Play boom, companies would have to be stupid not to try and capitalize on the audience.) I’m not a fan of the channel itself per sé, but its content is usually good, if not entertaining. In fact, it’s really one of the main places where viewers can see an equal distribution of male and female gamers. And get this, they even interact with each other. It’s fucking amazing.

If nothing else, Polaris is clearly comprised of people that do their damndest to make sure all types of gamers are presented, and given their subscriber count of 500,000, this can have a dramatic impact on the perception of gamers as a whole (it’s not just a sausage fest, isn’t that obvious by now?). The channel doesn’t go out of its way to promote equality; it just happens. So when higher ups at Polaris decided to create a show about indie game development—dubbed GAME_JAM—that happened to include two very talented women in the industry, the point was clearly to showcase these ladies’ talents as developers, not to have token females.

Giants of Our World: Terry Cavanagh

The video game industry is packed full of talented and creative people. With dozens of AAA titles hitting shelves every year, even more AA titles, and ever-more independent developers taking their creations to the net, it can sometimes be difficult to know where we should be paying attention. It’s even harder to look outside of our comfort zones to find something new. That’s why I would like to begin highlighting some of the most gifted men, women, and studios that should get us all excited. They’ve been able to make lightning strike twice, and we heighten our understanding of our medium by better understanding them. All of that being said, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather kick this all off with than Terry Cavanagh.