#adventure games
#adventure games
by Omar (@siegarettes)
I love spaces. One of the most beautiful things about games is that they create spaces that can’t exist, then imbue them with a physicality through participatory friction. My favorite games lie in that illusion, in the intersection between the digital worlds in front of me and the physical contact of play. With Lumino City, State of Play has found another intersection, one between the digital and the real.
By Omar (@siegarettes)
I made a decision and a man died. I didn’t have to. I knew that it might happen before I made it, I had the chance to back out but I still went ahead. I did it because I was selfish, because I wanted to get to where I needed to be faster, not because it was the only way. I hovered over the “LOAD GAME” option and realized that I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t fair. I knew what could happen, and now I needed to live with it.
This was the moment that defined my experience in Vagabond Dog’s Always Sometimes Monsters. Monsters is largely built around giving you choices void of “correct” choices. Even so, in this instance I was wrong. My moral compass told me I had betrayed the vague sense of values I’d lived by. I deserved to live with the consequences. Even then, the game never came out to punish me for it. Somehow, that made it worse.
By Omar (@siegarettes)
Does RIchard & Alice need to be a videogame? Visually rough, running on the conventions of nearly archaic adventure games, its presentation speaks of a more handicraft approach in a landscape where indie megaliths are quickly approaching the visual flair and polish of their big budget counterparts. By contrast R&A’s artwork is basic, representational. The soundtrack is part composed works and royalty free, and I suspect that a version of Adventure Game Studio is running underneath.
What’s left to hold it together then, is its writing, an element that videogames have often been anemic of good examples.
