FeatureThe doors close on The Chinese Room - for now
"We're done with walking simulators."
Just under a year after the launch of Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, a "walking simulator" about dealing with loss in Shropshire in 1984, it won three BAFTAs. For its developer The Chinese Room, it seemed things couldn't get any better. Fans anxiously awaited the studio's next big project. They're still waiting.
FeatureThe Chinese Room: A look behind Britain's boldest studio
"Never so sure our rapture to create..."
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture's co-director Jessica Curry is not your typical video game developer. Having a background as a film composer is one detail that sets her apart from the pack, but what's probably more important is that she's co-directed three successful commercial games without being a gamer herself. How did this happen?
Meet Adrian Chmielarz, the Bulletstorm guy whose world was turned upside down by Dear Esther.
"Why is Nathan Drake a mass murderer?" Oh I don't know, but it's the question not the answer that's important. It symbolises a seismic shift in attitudes towards games that may mean, "possibly even for the very first time", that the next generation of consoles also becomes "the next generation of game design".
FeatureWhen Is a Game Not a Game?
Why imposing a definition can prove problematic.
The release of two very different games in the last month, Asura's Wrath and Dear Esther, has sparked up one of gaming's evergreen topics: what is and what isn't a game? More than just a question of semantics, it's a pernicious and pervasive poser that can lead to all kinds of nastiness.
FeatureProteus Preview: A Musical Odyssey
In a beautiful place out in the country.
I had a friend who had synaesthesia. Sounds would form a iridescent fog over her vision, with different sounds creating different colours, and multiple sounds layering over one another; blue could be shot through with silver, or pockets of red would flare in a brown malaise. Most of the time, she said it was actually quite pleasant, as though she was seeing an extra layer to sound that was unique to her. Most of the time, it made her feel special.
Sometimes, when there was too much sound, or too many that conflicted, it would overwhelm. It would make it difficult to see, and difficult to think, with this violent storm of colour covering everything. It was only at those times that she ever claimed to 'suffer' from synaesthesia.
Proteus, a procedural exploration game by Ed Key, doesn't let you see what you hear. It lets you hear what you see.
FeatureGame of the Week: Dear Esther
Are arts game?
If there's a semantic argument even more aimless than "are games art?", it's "…but is it a game in the first place?" The question has swirled around a couple of our reviews this week, and will no doubt rear its head again next week on the release of CyberConnect2's gloriously unhinged Asura's Wrath - a madcap interactive anime whose superficial resemblance to a technical action game has wrong-footed a lot of people.
Uncharted terrain.
Plenty of revered games started their lives as mods for existing titles. Counter-Strike began as an inordinately successful Half-Life mod, while Killing Floor and The Ball both tagged onto the back of Unreal Tournament installments.
