Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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Until Dawn actors hint at a sequel, but there’s reason to be sceptical

I loved the original Until Dawn – a spruced-up horror take on those old FMV adventure games, with just the right mix of B-movie self awareness and creature feature scares. I was very close to buying the recent remake, actually, until I watched the extended prank scene online and realized, oh no, they’re taking themselves seriously now. They prestige-ified it. It insisted upon itself, Louis, so I didn’t bother. I still wouldn’t say no to a sequel though, and based on a couple of (admittedly vague) hints from two of the game’s actors, one might already be in the works.

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What’s on your bookshelf: Remedy Entertainment, Bioshock 2, and Gone Home’s Johnnemann Nordhagen

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I need to start getting a ‘Gene Wolfe referenced’ reaction image for these things, I swear – although this reference is at least hidden behind a couple of links. Which links? That’d be spoiling the layered environmental storytelling that keeps you coming back. This week, it’s Senior Technical Narrative Designer at Remedy, previously of Fullbright, Bioshock 2, and Where The Water Tastes Like Wine fame, Johnnemann Nordhagen! Cheers Johnnemann! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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There’s a future where you and this bucket that fits over your head decide what a game meant to say, not the useless idiots that made it

It’s not far away, you know. The promised land of never having to experience a game the way it was intended again. That long sought after holy grail of sticking your fingers in your ears and going wahwahwah. But it’s not going to be something created by people with talent, vision, expertise, drive, a dream, or a story in their hearts. No, as with everything in our imminent future, it will be achieved by putting a bucket over your head.

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Europa is out now, offering a Ghibli-inspired world in which to fly and solve puzzles

“Studio Ghibli” is a genre of game, in the same way “Aliens” and “Blade Runner” are genres of game. Blue skies, wind rustling grass that’s a just-so shade of green, a preoccupation with flight? Welcome to Ghibli town, friend.

You’ll find all of the above and several other familiar pieces of iconography in Europa, a puzzle and story-led adventure that’s out now.

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Keep Driving is a sumptuous and sleepy RPG roadtrip, inspired by Jalopy and FTL

“Post Void is a masterpiece of compulsive motion and hypnotic, irresistible sounds,” wrote Sin of YCJY Games’s “orgiastic” shooter. “It does something to my brain that I’ve never experienced before.” The developer’s just-announced Keep Driving seems a lot less inclined to scramble your grey matter, though it’s partial to the old rose-tinted goggles. It’s a droll, backward-glancing and slightly ominous 2D management RPG in which you drive to a music festival on the other side of the country. Along the way, you will pick up hitchhikers, upgrade your car, fill your boot with random junk, and participate in turn-based, non-lethal “combat” with dawdling children and obstinate tractors. Here’s a trailer.

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In Starless Abyss, you play hex-based battleships with a fleet of eldritch space monsters

After a hard day’s editing articles about three Disco Elysium spiritual successors – each more politically outspoken than the last, in a kind of Sophisticated Pooh collage of escalating Marxism – I like to kick back with a nice chill game about Lovecraftian space monsters.

That game is Konafa Game’s Starless Abyss – a roguelite tactical deckbuilder published by Descenders and Yes, Your Grace outfit No More Robots. It puts you in command of a fleet of upgradeable spaceships, who must chase away invading Eldritch aliens hex by hex… and also, hex by hex. This is both hex-based and a game in which you can cast hexes, you see. Oh, don’t look at me like that. I had to distil several manifestos into an article half-an-hour ago. I need this.

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Sure, why not – third group of former Disco Elysium devs announce “revolutionary new RPG studio”

Those two other Disco Elysium “spiritual successors” were but filthy pretenders, or at best, the thesis and antithesis resulting in this afternoon’s triumphant synthesis.* The real Disco Elysium spiritual successor is whatever they’re making at Summer Eternal, a just-announced “art collective/RPG studio” founded by a group of, once more with feeling, former Disco Elysium developers.

The press release for this particular Disco Elysiulike has the most actual names on it of the three we’ve learned about this week. It is also, by some distance, the most outwardly socialist of the lot. It accompanies a website featuring some blood-red all-caps political manifestos and a fairly exhaustive breakdown of Summer Eternal’s worker cooperative structure. Amongst other things, the studio will let people who buy their games form a non-profit within Summer Eternal that gets a share of the revenue, and has a say on company direction.

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