#indie
#indie
By Amr (@siegarettes)
I started Airheart captivated by its beautiful world. A land set in the clouds, rendered in painterly style, populated with appealing mechanical designs. The story seemed intriguing too, setting up a journey through the clouds to the top layer, with revelations waiting for me. Instead I was surprised to find that Airheart was almost free of direction. Ascending cloud layers and upgrading my machine provided an implicit direction, but after the tutorial it was largely free of objectives or guidance. So I wandered the clouds, fishing, fighting bandits, and scrounging up enough money to try and push higher each time.
For a while this provided a pleasant grind. Flying about the clouds and catching fish almost put in the same mindset as thatgamecompany’s Flow. There was a similar relaxed vibe, and a back and forth between the layers that recalled the same changes in intensity. That all changed after the first plane crash.
by Amr (@siegarettes)
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Vaporwave often celebrates the commercial aesthetic–the highly polished corporate art, turned kitsch by time and changing tastes. It’s both a reclamation of, and a celebration of, art as a capitalist tool.
Celestial Hacker Girl Jessica draws from the other side of vaporwave’s turn of the century obsession. It’s sincere and positive, almost naive, in the way the early internet felt. It evokes feeling of a space constructed by young people with newfound access to the world and new tools to express themselves. It’s like something you’d make with a trial of Jasc Paintshop Pro and some basic modelling software–using every available brush and filter to create the most maximalist expression of an emotion.
And it’s brilliant.
By: Omar (@siegarettes)
With so many apocalypses going on in videogames, we’ve become friendly with the fall of humanity. It’s almost comforting to know the world’s end has come before you arrived. It takes the pressure off, what with all the times we’re asked to save it. Still, we rarely languish in the beautiful ruins, there’s always something urgent to pull you along. So that’s where The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human appears.
By: Omar (@siegarettes)
There’s always room for improvement. That’s the philosophy behind Pentavera’s shoot-em-up, Hangeki. Eschewing the typical complex scoring systems of the genre, Hangeki grades you on only one thing: how fast you complete the stage. To get through each of the ten stages you’ll be given a host of weapons, with more unlocking as you gain experience and level up. It’s a curious mix of a traditionally Japanese dominated genre and the Western progression sensibilities that have become popularized by the Modern Warfare series. It’s an approach that’s apparently intended to create more of a sandbox approach to completing stages and remove the high knowledge requirements of scoring systems, multipliers and secrets that are involved in modern shoot-em-ups.
By: Omar (@siegarettes)
Second Opinion by RJ (@suppadoopa)
There’s a certain sense of a remix culture taking place in the games space. AAA titles have become a parade of sub-systems and mini-games in polished containers. A simple look at the last generation of games will see a whole lot of derivative titles that can be described as “game X meets game Y” as popular games become continually borrowed from. In another space are the independent developers, remixing genres and styles from titles past to create new takes on them. Velocity 2X would be one of these. The first Velocity mixed the genre up by introducing a short range teleport, changing the focus from shooting to navigation and puzzles. 2X builds on that, introducing sidescrolling sections and story segments.
