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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The original 1979 Ridley Scott sci-fi horror film has always stuck with me. It’s dark simplicity has never quite been matched by any of the sequels. It is the first time we are thrust into the unknown depths of space to witness the brooding violence of the Xenomorph. It is these original, glimpsed images of […]
Rise of the Planet of the Apes shows us a twisting double helix of evolution and revolution, yet despite some faint cinematic moments and some well rounded character development, it feels all-too simplified and, disappointingly, all too human. The prequel, set sometime in an early 21st Century San Francisco, sees the hubristic tampering with Mother […]
“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 […]