for the little things you might have missed
It's as if the player is walking over an anthill, unaware that this complex and convoluted warren exists beneath their shoes. And over the course of the game, this conceit will be used again and again and again, sometimes with added flourishes or small tweaks to its simple formula. Every level is circular, just as the game itself is, with the end of each circle adding a final revelation.
About an hour into Night in the Woods, a modern adventure game from a small team called Infinite Fall, Mae Borowski reuintes with her high school bandmates for practice. Since she'd left for college, their drummer—Casey—had disappeared, and their guitarist and singer, Gregg and Angus, had recruited another old classmate named Bea to take both … Continue reading You Might Have Missed: Night in the Woods
Now, where Bastion really comes in is in the second half of that law: the isolated system. If a process is kept in a vacuum, entirely alone, its entropy will only ever increase. However, we can decrease entropy locally by various methods—mainly by bringing in other sources from outside that system (like eating food, which our bodies then convert into other forms of energy). If you've played Bastion, you might now realize where I'm going.
There has been a recent spike in interest for what people sometimes refer to as "art games"—a subgenre of gaming that includes legitimately interesting pieces like Campo Santo's Firewatch, flawed yet thought-provoking experiments like Davey Wreden's The Beginner's Guide, and walking simulators of questionable intent like Dear Esther and Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. But more often than not, the implications behind … Continue reading The Minimalist, Ethereal Storytelling of Hyper Light Drifter
Sunset Over Ithaca 