Within the landscape of video games Skyrim is a mountain. An open-world pioneer that helped define the desire for the arctic and alpine, it’s hard to think of mountainous terrain in games without thinking of The Elder Scrolls V. Like many a mountain, Skyrim seems an unconquerable prospect. Its map is a symbol-strewn patchwork of […]
No, this hasn’t become an Assassin’s Creed blog. This is my attempt at a short diary series which explores video games’ greatest mountains. Mountains have long gripped our imagination, and, reaching beyond the crests of any city, call to us with a primal urgency. Why do we climb them? How do we feel when we […]
“In the midst of far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling.” It was a rare day on the Isle of North Uist – a winter afternoon that was neither wet nor windy, as is most common. The atmosphere was cold and clear, the sun was coming down, and the sky was a […]
Paratopic is a delirious game-as-trip, most resonant at one o’clock in the morning after a late night coffee you should never have had. Narratively disjointed, temporally muddled, its fuzzy-VHS jump-cuts are a welcome shock to the gentle amble of the walking sim. The game moves from one clip to the next, one mundane space to […]
“That looks a bit crap,” my dad said whilst looking over my shoulder. I was playing some pixel-art throw-back, all blocky and two-dimensional. He wasn’t commenting on the subject or mechanics of the game, simply the visual fidelity – how it looked. My dad isn’t a regular player, but he’s seen games through the generations […]
Every work of science fiction has what the Croatian literary critic Darko Suvin called a “novum”: a hypothesis or premise, some new technology, being or social organisation that radically divorces the fiction from reality. Elite: Dangerous’ novum isn’t difficult to identify—you sit inside it for the entire game’s duration. Your spaceship forms the focal point […]
In 1941 Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess set off from Germany in a Bf 110 aircraft. His mission was to negotiate peace with Britain. He flew alone and without Hitler’s acknowledgement under the false identity of “Alfred Horn.” He eventually parachuted out from his plane, landing with a broken foot in a farm in Scotland. Still […]
There are a few different definitions of “investment”. One is time, energy, or their representation, money, spent in the hope of accruing some future benefit. This is a definition that easily fits the kind of exchange involved in one of the world’s largest crowd-funding platforms: Kickstarer. Kickstarter is a website that allows companies or individuals […]
You can’t help but stop and admire the view. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is an astonishing looking game. It uses a visual technique that transforms photographs taken of real objects into digital 3D assets. I found myself in partial imitation, stopping every few paces in the game world to take my own digital photos, […]
A lot of recent RPGs appear to be obsessed over creating these large, cinematic experiences with vast empty landscapes that take forever to traverse. Larian Studios’ Divinity: Original Sin presents an alternative to this, one conscious of the genre’s history but unafraid to modernise. Isometric in viewpoint, turn-based in combat, and with an emphasis on […]
Transistor throws you into the deep end from the get go. You play as Red, a pop-music sensation in the futuristic city of Cloudbank whose night has taken a turn for the worse. Red comes into the possession of a mysterious weapon, the Transistor. No sooner as she does, a flood of robotic entities known […]
At first glance, Hack ‘n’ Slash looks incredibly familiar. You play an elf with a green tunic and a cartoon quiff. There’s an evil wizard, a small floating companion, and a colourful but corrupt land of forests and dungeons. It looks like Zelda, but appearances can be deceiving. The sword you begin your adventure with […]