Last time, you decided that gliding powers are better than Dragon's Dogma 2's Unmaking Arrow. Honestly I'm surprised it was that close (66% vs 33%—don't sweat the rounding), and I'm proud of your ability to weigh a whole concept against a single-game implementation. We are so good at this. Onwards! This week, I ask you to choose between placing things in two very different ways. What's better: a 'put back' action, or standing atop another player's head in an FPS?
]]>Beloved indie outlet Annapurna have made their first-ever acquisition in the video game space, snapping up the studio responsible for co-developing a number of their biggest hits.
]]>Steve Gaynor, the co-founder of Gone Home studio Fullbright, has stepped down from his role as creative lead on their upcoming game Open Roads, following allegations about his treatment of employees. Multiple former staff have come forward claiming he had a "controlling" and "demeaning presence", and fostered a toxic culture that led to a "pattern of women leaving" the studio.
]]>We don’t expect much of a typical video game map. As long as it guides us to our destination (and perhaps looks pretty while doing so) most of us won’t waste a second thought on it. And yet, maps can be much more than tools that make our way from A to B a little more convenient. Some games reject the notion of maps as a tacked-on extraneous layer, and instead treat them as an integral part of their world. These maps can tell us something about their world and its inhabitants that goes far beyond topographical information. Rather than creating distance between us and a game, they root us more firmly in it.
]]>There's not much of a need to add to this news hit. Today, on the ole Itch.io site, I stumbled upon yet another great Ludum Dare 41 entry. If you remember, 41's theme is two game genres that should not be compatible. Jon Remedios took this to one of its most bizarre conclusions: that the walking simulator genre requires a good driving simulator that is not, itself, a driving simulator but rather a walking simulator where you are a car. If you think it sounds like that might not work, well, you'd be right. Especially if that car if forced to experience life trapped within the walls of the rural Oregon home of the Greenbriar family. That's right. It's Gone Home but you're a car. You're a car in the Gone Home house. Welcome to Gone Vroom.
]]>For those who don't know, Humble offers a subscription service, appropriately titled 'Humble Monthly'. For $12 / £10 a month, you get access to a stack of Steam keys each month. The collection of games are only unveiled at the end of each month (save for one early unlock), but are usually valued at around $175, which ain't too shabby. The Humble Trove is a nice added bonus that subscribers to the service have access to, adding a batch of DRM-free titles to the set of games given out each month.
]]>The most recent two episodes of the Designer Notes podcast is well worth listening to if you're interested in game development. In it, podcast creator (and Civilization IV designer) Soren Johnson interviews Steve Gaynor, co-founder of Fullbright Company and designer of Tacoma. Designer Notes is a podcast about "why we make games," and typically charts a designer's career, from the first game they played, to how they got started in the industry and how they ended up wherever they are now. In Steve Gaynor's case, parts one and two cover early forays into level design, working on a FEAR expansion, joining the BioShock 2 team, designing Minerva's Den, going indie to make Gone Home, and finally the challenges of making Tacoma. Check out the podcast's archives for lots more, too - the Amy Hennig episodes are particularly great.
]]>The bohemian sewer of neon lights and indie games known as Itch.io has posted a huge bundle of games from over 100 different creators, pointedly called A Good Bundle. It's got a lot in it. Gone Home is in there, Catacomb Kids is in there, Proteus is there, The Novelist is there, Killing Time At Lightspeed is there. And a bunch of smaller games of note too: NORTH, Windosill, Raik, FJORDS, The Old Man Club, Depression Quest, Capsule… jeepers. The asking price for the whole stash – a potentially overwhelming 151 games – is 20 United States dollars. There’s another motive behind this videogame Voltron though. All of the proceeds are going to the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood.
]]>Oh, Tacoma [official site], where the wind comes sweeping down the nacelles. This is the next game from Gone Home folks Fullbright, and this time we're in space, and there are people. Well, sort of. The below 15 minutes of footage from the start of the game gives a clearer picture of how this is going to work, and its similarities and dissimilarities to the cupboard-rummaging and diary-reading of Gone Home. There's a train ride, a musical interlude, and most important of all, SPACE BLANKETS.
]]>What's your favourite thing about spacetime? Mine is that it goes wobbly. In All The Delicate Duplicates [official site], we are promised that wobbliness will occur. It will tell the story of John, a computer engineer, as he inherits a bunch of strange objects from 'Aunt Mo'. Along with his daughter Charlotte, he starts to notice that the objects - glass bottles, lanterns, illustrations - all have some kind of otherworldly properties. It isn't long before things get weird. Come watch the trailer after the jump.
]]>Given The Fullbright Company's background with 0451 games (its founders were behind BioShock 2's DLC chapter Minerva's Den), their next game going into space makes me a little uneasy. Watching five minutes of gameplay from the Gone Home folks' spaceborne second game, Tacoma [official site], part of me is on edge waiting to hear a System Shock 2 protocol droid mutter "This place is a terrible mess" or hear a midwife's eerie call of "I'll tear out your spine."
That doesn't come, or at least not in this video. Or as far as I can tell, anyway, as two folks from Game Informer are gabbing over the top of it.
]]>A (hopefully) weekly series, in which the RPS hivemind gathers to discuss/bicker about/mock the most pressing (or at least noisiest) issues in PCgamingland right now. Hot Takes are go.
Alec: OMG THIS IS GOING TO BE THE MOST AMAZING HOT TAKE EVER. By which I mean, today we are discussing hype and videogames and if that helps or hurts them and helps or hurts us. The prompt for this is Hello Games’ chat with Pip last week, in which they mourned the crushing weight of expectation placed upon them as a result of having made some pretty good trailers for their space exploration game. I guess we’re going to struggle to avoid a touch of physician heal thyself here, but anyway. How do we feel about how the world feels about No Man’s Sky?
]]>From 2014-2015, RPS's Senior Scottish Correspondent Cara Ellison wrote S.EXE, 29 columns about games about sex, games about love, games about the space in between those two things, games about sexuality, and games about schlongs. Unfortunately the series is on indefinite hiatus as Cara takes a break from writing about games after her spectacular but surely exhausting Embed With... project, but whether you missed it the first time, didn't catch all of them or are simply missing it already, you should absolutely revisit S.EXE yourself now. It's a by turns insightful and funny (and very often both) document of the wilder side of games, the darker side of games, the sillier side of games and a hugely important but often little-seen side of games. Here's the complete archive.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Gone Home opens as Kaitlin Greenbriar returns to her family after spending a year abroad, but rather than a welcome party she finds a curiously empty house and a missing sister.
]]>Earlier this month, Gone Home developers Fullbright dropped a trailer for their follow-up, Tacoma. It's set on a space station! People talk to each other! The gravity ain't all there! There's a toilet! And, er, that's about all we found out. So let's find out some more, by talking to Fullbright's Steve Gaynor. Discussed: micro-gravity, Demolition Man, Chris Hadfield, being 'socially conscious' devs, accidental BioShock inspirations, what of Gone Home can and can't work in a fantastical setting, System Shock, locked doors and whether Tacoma is more or less not-a-game than Gone Home was or wasn't.
]]>Gone Home developers Fullbright have shed a little more light on their so-far cryptic follow-up, Tacoma. The space station-set exploration title is due for release in 2016, but gave away little in its announcement trailer. In a forthcoming interview with RPS, Fullbright's Steve Gaynor revealed that "you can tell from the teaser that it’s in micro-gravity; stuff is floating around. And some of the implications that has for the relationship that the player can have to the space that you’re exploring, that you couldn’t have in a terrestrial setting, is really exciting to us."
]]>Quentin Tarantino has a monologue about Top Gun in the little-known Hollywood metamovie Sleep With Me. In it, Tarantino discusses in his typical teenage terminology how Top Gun, as well as being a romantic Cold War macho-off, is a film about the main character coming to terms with his own homosexuality. Tarantino names this subtextual narrative 'fucking great' and 'subversive'. But it would probably have been much more subversive had it actually been text and not subtext. In game terms, that narrative probably would have been The Fullbright Company's Gone Home. Yeah I said it. Gone Home is a more explicit Top Gun.
GONE HOME SPOILERS FROM HERE ON~
]]>I've discovered a novel way to conduct interviews: tweet vaguely about something you're interested in, then wait for two game designers you like and respect to have a chat about it and send you the logs. I carefully laid my bait: "I use 'walking simulator' warmly and earnestly. I adore walking around looking at stuff and reflecting. Walking is great! Sim it to the max."
The trap snared my chums Ed Key and Ricky Haggett. Ed created walking simulator Proteus while Ricky is working on Hohokum, a dicking-about sim for PlayStations which might, with fewer puzzles, be called a walking simulator. Unsuspecting, they discussed Proteus, the 'genre,' exploring and wandering, and what a "walking simulator" even is. Afterwards they decided "Just email it to Alice," rather than blog about the chat themselves. "She can turn it into 'news,'" they said. Suckers!
]]>SOMA didn't scare the scuba suit off me, but I did find a creeping sort of potential in its soaked-to-the-bone corridors. Amnesia: The Dark Descent 2 this ain't. Or at least, it's not aiming to be. Currently, it still feels a lot like a slower-paced, less-monster-packed Amnesia in a different (though still very traditionally survival-horror-y) setting, but Frictional creative director Thomas Grip has big plans. I spoke with him about how he hopes to evolve the game, inevitable comparisons to the Big Daddy of gaming's small undersea pond, BioShock, why simple monster AI is better than more sophisticated options, the mundanity of death, and how SOMA's been pretty profoundly influenced by indie mega-hits like Dear Esther and Gone Home.
]]>Gone Home was an inspired, beautifully heartfelt thing that clearly had a profound affect on people of multiple codes and creeds. It was powerful, delicate, and... we've probably said everything about it that it's possible for one website largely made up of hairy men to say. At some point, it becomes time to move forward and explore new territory. That's exactly what Steve Gaynor, Karla Zimonja, and the rest of the Gone Home team are doing right now: exploring. They don't know precisely what form their next game will take just yet, but in a lengthy (and frankly, often very silly) interview, they let me inside their creative process. Go below to find out what lies beyond Gone Home for the Fullbright Company.
]]>I'm firing blind to some degree here, as 1) the trailer's in Italian 2) the website's poorly translated and 3) the demo they sent me a) isn't made public yet and b) doesn't include much more than going for a walk.
However 1) That and the cheesy music reminds me of Inspector Montalbano 2) well, this one's no bastion of English grammar either 3) a) most of it's in the below video b) I like going for a walk.
While Dear Esther, Proteus and Gone Home comparisons are likely unavoidable, Forgive Me is more precisely a semi-open world adventure game about suicide, mystery and a spooky, possibly mystical tower in some very pretty but bleak countryside that reminds me a little of Morrowind.
]]>The Novelist is a narrative-led, sort-of-stealth, sort-of-point'n'click-adventure game by Deus Ex: Invisible War, Thief: Deadly Shadows, and BioShock 2 dev Kent Hudson (with playtesting help from a remarkable number of renowned developers, according to the credits) in which you direct and decide the fate of a tormented family who've gone to stay in a remote house for the Summer, in an attempt to resolve their respective career and relationship difficulties. But they are not alone...
]]>Everything starts somewhere. Even the greatest of successes have humble beginnings, and Gone Home's previously known origins were already pretty darn grassroots. That makes this revelation about its start as an Amnesia: The Dark Descent mod double-humble, as far as I'm concerned. What I'm saying is, Gone Home could be in a Humble Bundle all by itself. It is that humble. But anyway. Frictional and Fullbright have unearthed the very, very early Gone Home Amnesia prototype, and you can play it right now. Details after the break.
]]>First-person '90s 'em up, Gone Home, receives a free update on the 22nd of this month, in the year 2013. That's today! Fullbright's tallest developer, Steve Gaynor, explains: "All of the developers on the game, as well as Sarah Grayson (the voice of Sam), Chris Remo our composer, and (in a super weird & cool twist, to me) Corin Tucker from the bands Heavens to Betsy and Sleater Kinney, recorded audio commentary." This is a free update, and it'll work as it does in other first-person games, with triggers around the game where you can hear folks talk about some game-relevant.
]]>As you didn't notice, I've been away for the last three months, to focus on helping raise the child which will one day destroy the universe. In between prising the crushed, partially-chewed remains of smaller star systems from her tiny, iron grip, I managed to play a few videogames. Some for a while, but most only for a couple of hours. Despite myself, it was difficult not to have opinions about them, and to want to write those opinions on some manner of 'web' 'site.' I bided my time. I waited. And now here I am, able to force you to listen to my single-sentence opinions on 13 recent videogames - the likes of Saints Row IV, Gone Home, The Bureau, Papers Please and even that car-stealing thing on console. For the first time on RPS, I have even included a rating for each game.
]]>Level With Me is a series of interviews with game developers about their games, work process, and design philosophy. At the end of each interview, they design part of a small first person game. You can play this game at the very end of the series.
Six years ago, Steve Gaynor started as a level designer at Timegate Studios on the F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate expansion pack. Then at 2K Marin he worked on BioShock 2 and lead designed Minerva's Den, one of the few respectable DLCs ever made. After a stint at Irrational Games to help with BioShock Infinite, he went indie with some former teammates to form The Fullbright Company. They all made a lovely thing called Gone Home that has won oodles of awards and emotional acclaim.
]]>Gone Home has been out for a little while now, and in that time it has captured the heart of literally every human being on Earth. Also Alec, but we don't really know what manner of creature he is. So then, what's Fullbright up to these days? Resting on its laurels? Basking in the motivation-searing afterglow of past success? Finally realizing that - oh crap - they totally forgot to add in all the guns? Turns out, the answer is none of those things, despite overwhelming plausibility. The next immediate step, then, is more content for Gone Home, but not the sort that might muck up the game's musty, lived-in history. And after that? Well, probably don't expect Gone Home 2.
]]>Valve? Making its own OS for living rooms? Madness. Pure, coldly calculated and entirely premeditated madness. But SteamOS' success is far from guaranteed, and it's got some serious hurdles to overcome before it can establish a New World Order. Last time around, I gathered developers of games like Project Eternity, Gone Home, Mark of the Ninja, The Banner Saga, and Race The Sun to discuss who SteamOS/Steam Boxes are even for and the relative "openness" of Valve's platform in light of, er, Greenlight. Today, we dig even deeper, into the strange, nebulous guts of Linux and what sorts of challenges and opportunities Valve's crazy, newfangled controller presents. There are even some hands-on impressions from Dejobaan and Paradox. Read on for THE FUTURE.
]]>You probably haven't heard, but Valve's officially going forward with its plan to launch its own Steam-centric OS, living room hardware, and a crazy, touch-pad-based controller to back it all up. I know, right? It's weird that no one has been talking about it incessantly. But while Valve preaches openness and hackability, it's downplayed an ugly reality of the situation: smaller developers still face a multitude of struggles in the treacherous green jungles of its ecosystem. SteamOS and various Steam Boxes, however, stand to bring brilliantly inventive indie games to an audience that doesn't even have a clue that they exist, so I got in touch with developers behind Gone Home, Race The Sun, Eldritch, Mark of the Ninja, Incredipede, Project Eternity, and more for their thoughts on SteamOS, who it's even for, Valve's rocky relationship with indies, and what it'll take for Steam to actually be an "open" platform.
]]>Entirely understandably, the bulk of the deservedly rapturous reception to Gone Home has focused on its unseen narrator Sam, a teenage girl who gradually and powerfully documents her timeless emotional and social trials. While it was certainly the dénouement of Sam's tale that prompted open tears from me and that will, I sincerely hope, see this game reach a wide audience of human beings, there are (at least) three other stories in this short game, taking more of a background role and enjoying no narrator, or indeed any kind of explicit call for attention.
I found a little extra personal resonance in a particular one of these, and it's that which prompts me to interrupt my sabbatical from work and post about it now. Be warned that here be both spoilers and navel-gazing.
]]>You will be more interested to read about Gone Home after you've played it. And it will be more interesting to write about after everyone has played it. Gone Home is a wonderful game, and one that is fundamentally reliant on its being approached with a clean slate. If this is enough to convince you to give it a go, then perfect. If not, read on and I'll do my best to say as little as possible while relaying why it's so compelling. Here's wot I think:
]]>The Fullbright Company's Gone Home is one of the most atmospheric, interesting narrative-led games I've ever played, and I only got to play the first hour of an IGF build earlier this year. The Riot Grrrl soundtracked-game was enough to have me begging for One More Hour, but Steve Gaynor and his team were cruel and went radio silent. Thankfully they've popped back up to announce that Gone Home is coming out on the 15th of August on Steam and DRM free on the Fullbright site.
I'd advise you to set aside $19.99 to purchase it on that date immediately. It's that good. It's all anyone will talk about for the rest of the year.
]]>There's a weird tension to Gone Home. On the one hand it should be the most normal thing in the world: an American household. On the other, well, it's unusual for games to try and tell stories about everyday lives. But that's precisely what it does, and that's just part of what makes it so beautifully weird.
I met Fullbright's project lead, Steve Gaynor, and talked about that. This is how we got on.
]]>NINETIES CHILDREN ARE OVERTAKING THE EARTH. QUAKE IN FEAR OF THEIR LIBERAL NEW IDEAS AND NOSTALGIA FOR THINGS THAT MAKE YOU FEEL OLD.
For real, though, a new generation's filtering into the upper reaches of entertainment, and their formative influences are quite different from the cornerstones of even just a decade before. It's quite interesting to watch, and yet - for all the recent fascination with the oddities of Western '90s culture - we still haven't seen a game really embrace it. Gone Home, however, is unabashedly rooted in the decade of X-Files and alternative rock, and it's not just for cheap giggles, either. Having played a bit of the BioShock 2: Minerva's Den-borne narrative adventure myself last year, I got this sense that its characters and themes wouldn't really fit in any other time period. It's excellent, then, to see that Fullbright's going the extra mile in realizing the era's eccentricities. See (and hear) youth in Riot Grrrl-flavored rebellion after the break.
]]>Yesterday, we brought you word of many important things about The Fullbright Company's brilliant-looking Gone Home - for instance, how many guns it will have. I also laid eager hands upon it, if you'd like to know how exactly a first-person '90s-family's-hidden-mysteries-uncover-er works. All of which brings us the second installment of my interview with Steve Gaynor and the rest of Fullbright's merry troupe. Today, we discuss a fairly astonishing range of topics - from what it's like to live and work together, to twist endings, to gender issues in Gone Home, to creating female characters who are believable (not just generically "strong"), to Dracula. In the process, we venture into some SEMI-SPOILERY territory, so keep that in mind before proceeding.
]]>I recently had the privilege of putting on my '90s-appropriate detective hat and rifling through all sorts of (metaphorical - and some literal) dirty laundry in The Fullbright Company's Gone Home. It felt a bit like a blend of Fallout 3's environmental sleuthing and BioShock 2: Minerva's Den's brilliantly down-to-earth approach to storytelling. In other words, I resented Fullbright co-founder Steve Gaynor for eventually ending my demo session - with every fiber of my being. So of course, we did what people who resent each other always do: sat down for polite conversation. Along with the rest of the four-person Fullbright team, we discussed '90s culture, how games can be interesting even when totally devoid of action, exploring non-traditional topics in videogame stories, whether or not notes, audiotapes, and things of the like are a storytelling crutch, and of course, how many guns Gone Home has.
]]>BioShock 2: Minerva's Den was quite a special thing. It viewed the wildly fantastical world of Rapture through a surprisingly personal, down-to-earth lens, leading to one of the more brilliantly understated conclusions I've ever seen in a game. It was, then, with tremendous glee that we collectively squealed when we found out that the main thinkers behind Minerva were forming their own independent studio, The Fullbright Company. But what of their first game, Gone Home, which ups the character-driven mystery drama but throws out the undersea cities and drill arms (there's not even one!) altogether? Can the seemingly simple act of exploring a house make for a good game? I recently got the chance to take a closer look.
]]>Last week, I ran the first half of my recent chat with Steve Gaynor, formerly of Irrational and 2K Marin, and now of indie studio The Fullbright Company - who are working on mysterious, ambitious, suburban-set non-combat first-person game Gone Home. Being as I am an investigative journalist par excellence, I decided that it would be appropriate to spend the second half of the interview forgoing questioning entirely in favour of simply shouting the names of other games at him. Games like Myst, Amnesia, Jurassic Park: Trespasser, Journey and Dear Esther. Rather than hanging up in disgust, he offered fascinating, thoughtful replies on the limits of interactivity in games and the sort of scale Gone Home is intended to operate on.
]]>Gone Home is to be the first game from The Fullbright Company, a new indie studio whose formerly mainstream members were previously the prime creators of the excellent BioShock 2 add-on Minerva's Den, as well as working on assorted other 2K projects. I had a chat with Mr Fullbright himself, Steve Gaynor, about their highly intriguing but equally mysterious non-combat first-person game. Why ditch the guns? Why leave cushty industry jobs to do this? How abstract will it be? How much can the physics be abused? I also made some sweeping generalisations about Columbo.
]]>Last week brought very exciting news: I bought a new clock for my wall. Also, that the core team behind the rather good Minerva's Den add-on for BioShock 2 had gone their own way, founding indie dev The Fullbright Company with the full and noble intention of making a non-violent first-person game as their first project. Today brings yet more exciting news: I've just picked up some Euros for my holiday in Greece next week. Also, that the Fullbright Company have just announced and detailed said non-violent first-person game.
It's called Gone Home, and it's all about "exploring a modern, residential locale, and discovering the story of what happened there by investigating a deeply interactive gameworld." It looks and sounds at least 9 intruigings about of a possible 10, even if it yet remains largely as mysterious as a cat's inner thought processes.
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