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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I didn’t much care for pirates before playing the latest Assassin’s Creed. Seafaring and swashbuckling, plundering and raiding were all concepts alien to me, as well as being experiences still relatively untapped by games. It’s only now, after playing Black Flag, that I realise the joys of pirate life and what I’ve been missing out […]
Starbound’s garishly colourful 2D pixelart and intriguing blend of creation, survival and exploration automatically draws comparisons to 2011’s Terraria – but does this particular incarnation further develop the formula? Developed by indie studio Chucklefish, Starbound is a procedurally generated sandbox where you beam down onto planets, dig deep underground, mine ore and uncover lost treasures […]
What makes the ideological constructions in the City and the City so effective? The legal apparatus bring into focus the strange mental conceptions that work to sterilise any of the cultural or political tensions that would normally be present in such a place. The cities are part mental construct, a visual and ideological architecture (upheld […]
Japanese developer FromSoftware’s Dark Souls makes no grandiose statements of hope or heroism. You begin the game as a wanderer, clinging to life in a new dark age, with civilization all but collapsed and humanity broken. The land has been scarred by the flames of untold wars and disaster, and now a blanket of darkness […]
“Escapism” is a word/concept often used to describe fantasy and science fiction. In the most simplistic sense, the term seems to appropriate a field of distance or extension between the text, those engaged with it, and our actually existing reality. The word seems to attribute to readers a certain passivity and disengagement towards the […]