Language Is A Virus From Outer Space
There are some really neat video game concepts out there right now.
My favorite active Kickstarter is for Tangiers, an ostensibly stealth/exploration game that looks to me like the Whispering Vault met the Brotherhood of Dada from Doom Patrol with maybe a side of Pontypool.
You play an outsider to the world, an entity with a singular, enigmatic goal - to find and dispose of five other beings. Your arrival here has fractured the world; the city that these other beings resided in is now broken into shards across a broken, bleak landscape.
You must infiltrate these cities, searching to discover your marks - investigating both precisely who, and where.
Keeping to the shadows is to be encouraged - reality here is a fragile place. Your interactions with the world cause it to fall apart. In homage to Burrough's cut-up technique, the world collapses and rebuilds itself the more you interact with it - future areas rebuilt with the fragments and personality of places you mistreated. From this every play-through will, subtly or drastically, be unique to you.
Just the promo material they have is amazing. The landscape is distorted and it's unclear to me whether that distortion is because of the alien perception or because of the reality warping effect, or both. The people are distorted as well. You can steal the very words that people are saying and use them later as weapons or traps. Yes, please.
Another fresh take on stealth mechanics is The Novelist, in-progress on Greenlight, where you play a ghost haunting a house who can read thoughts and step into the memories of the inhabitants and influence their behavior. This one's not on Kickstarter, but the Greenlight page has an interesting link to an article about the economics of being an independent video game developer.
Tangiers is in a pretty good field, too. There's also Lioness, an experimental and existential game with a very stylish for pixel-art aesthetic.
For more solid reality, there's Lacuna Passage has the brilliant mechanic of trying to be as realistic as possible for Martian exploration -- they're using photographs from the rovers for their landscape, and putting actual HUD elements into your character's suit. Peripheral game elements like the camera and journal and map are on a tablet. Sound is attenuated in the thin Martian atmosphere, so it sounds like it will be spooky and lonely as you try to survive after a crash, as well as uncover the disappearance of the first manned mission to Mars.
There's the goofy-yet-charming Dungeonmans, a roguelike with the persistent element that if you survive an adventure you can improve the academy that trains your future Dungeonmans/Lady Dungeonmans. This one features a surprisingly playable alpha demo and has some really fun spell elements; I haven't tried the melee or archer options yet but they also have a skill tree for your character, and progress on one character improves future characters. I'm kind of astonished that this one hasn't hit its goal yet and it has only five days to go; did Rogue Legacy go through Kickstarter, too, causing roguelike fatigue? It seems to me like the two games are different enough and have some differences in the strategic gameplay that would make them distinct.
Liege is a sprawing JRPG-style game with painterly backgrounds and more mature themes, though it doesn't sound like it wants to stray into the grimdark trap, but instead take a more mature and multifaceted look at civil war. It features simple-yet-tactical positional combat that is all on the same map, so there aren't any disruptive cut scenes. I'm hoping this will hit a sweet spot of story and tactics; often a game that's rich in one is short on the other. It is also very pretty in a stylized way, with hand-drawn art and a palette that's more realistic than in most games of this type.
Then there's Project Maiden, which reverses the normal platformer trope by having you start out with godlike powers and choose one to lose at every level. "Like Zelda in reverse." I suck at platformers but this is such a tasty idea and it's a puzzle-platformer and I can sometimes get through those, and it looks like it's going to have a lot of heart, and I like the music. One of the cute things here is the developer will pixel-paint backers into the game as named characters or antagonists. Three days to go on this one, and if he funds then he'll give the game away for free to everyone.
In the games that already exist category, Brad just started playing FTL today and is admiring all of the many things that can possibly go wrong with a spaceship.
My favorite active Kickstarter is for Tangiers, an ostensibly stealth/exploration game that looks to me like the Whispering Vault met the Brotherhood of Dada from Doom Patrol with maybe a side of Pontypool.
You play an outsider to the world, an entity with a singular, enigmatic goal - to find and dispose of five other beings. Your arrival here has fractured the world; the city that these other beings resided in is now broken into shards across a broken, bleak landscape.
You must infiltrate these cities, searching to discover your marks - investigating both precisely who, and where.
Keeping to the shadows is to be encouraged - reality here is a fragile place. Your interactions with the world cause it to fall apart. In homage to Burrough's cut-up technique, the world collapses and rebuilds itself the more you interact with it - future areas rebuilt with the fragments and personality of places you mistreated. From this every play-through will, subtly or drastically, be unique to you.
Just the promo material they have is amazing. The landscape is distorted and it's unclear to me whether that distortion is because of the alien perception or because of the reality warping effect, or both. The people are distorted as well. You can steal the very words that people are saying and use them later as weapons or traps. Yes, please.
Another fresh take on stealth mechanics is The Novelist, in-progress on Greenlight, where you play a ghost haunting a house who can read thoughts and step into the memories of the inhabitants and influence their behavior. This one's not on Kickstarter, but the Greenlight page has an interesting link to an article about the economics of being an independent video game developer.
Tangiers is in a pretty good field, too. There's also Lioness, an experimental and existential game with a very stylish for pixel-art aesthetic.
For more solid reality, there's Lacuna Passage has the brilliant mechanic of trying to be as realistic as possible for Martian exploration -- they're using photographs from the rovers for their landscape, and putting actual HUD elements into your character's suit. Peripheral game elements like the camera and journal and map are on a tablet. Sound is attenuated in the thin Martian atmosphere, so it sounds like it will be spooky and lonely as you try to survive after a crash, as well as uncover the disappearance of the first manned mission to Mars.
There's the goofy-yet-charming Dungeonmans, a roguelike with the persistent element that if you survive an adventure you can improve the academy that trains your future Dungeonmans/Lady Dungeonmans. This one features a surprisingly playable alpha demo and has some really fun spell elements; I haven't tried the melee or archer options yet but they also have a skill tree for your character, and progress on one character improves future characters. I'm kind of astonished that this one hasn't hit its goal yet and it has only five days to go; did Rogue Legacy go through Kickstarter, too, causing roguelike fatigue? It seems to me like the two games are different enough and have some differences in the strategic gameplay that would make them distinct.
Liege is a sprawing JRPG-style game with painterly backgrounds and more mature themes, though it doesn't sound like it wants to stray into the grimdark trap, but instead take a more mature and multifaceted look at civil war. It features simple-yet-tactical positional combat that is all on the same map, so there aren't any disruptive cut scenes. I'm hoping this will hit a sweet spot of story and tactics; often a game that's rich in one is short on the other. It is also very pretty in a stylized way, with hand-drawn art and a palette that's more realistic than in most games of this type.
Then there's Project Maiden, which reverses the normal platformer trope by having you start out with godlike powers and choose one to lose at every level. "Like Zelda in reverse." I suck at platformers but this is such a tasty idea and it's a puzzle-platformer and I can sometimes get through those, and it looks like it's going to have a lot of heart, and I like the music. One of the cute things here is the developer will pixel-paint backers into the game as named characters or antagonists. Three days to go on this one, and if he funds then he'll give the game away for free to everyone.
In the games that already exist category, Brad just started playing FTL today and is admiring all of the many things that can possibly go wrong with a spaceship.