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Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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Memory of a Broken Dimension may melt your eyes, brain

There's nothing wrong with your computer monitor.

Memory of a Broken Dimension has one of the boldest, most unique aesthetics of any game this year. An unsettling hodgepodge of jagged monochromatic lines, radio static, and cold, unsympathetic text puts one in mind of a world comprised of Joy Division album covers skipping through time.

Indie developer Ezra " Xra" Hanson-White demonstrated Memory of a Broken Dimension recently at the Sense of Wonder Night session highlighting experimental game design at Tokyo Games Show. A recent video shows off Xra's demonstration where we're able to gain at least a hazy notion of what the game is (thanks, indiegames.com).

Essentially Memory of a Broken Dimension is comprised of two parts: a computer terminal where players must input codes into an esoteric programming language to launch files sent from the future, and a first-person part - the bulk of the game - where you explore a surreal, shattered virtual reality. Here you must view things from the right perspective to get various fragments to align and form an image.

Xra noted that he was inspired by tinkering with computers and radios when he was a child. "They seemed very mysterious," he said. "I remember trying to get games to run having to use boot disks and not really understanding what was going on."

I think he definitely captured the "not really understanding what's going on" part. We'll keep our eyes peeled on this one and see what we can find out as Memory of a Broken Dimension starts to take shape.