It’s episode 12 of Indiescovery and this week we’re being a bit cheeky as we dive into which indie game characters we’d love to do a pub crawl with. Who are we getting sloshed with? Who’s not making it past pre-drinks? Who are we sharing our end-of-night chippies with? All that and more this week! Summer has well and truly arrived here in the UK, but wherever you are, grab your sunnies, sip a pina colada, kick back, and have a listen.
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]]>You may know Deconstructeam from their cyberpunk bartending story game The Red Strings Club, but they've made other games. Several other games, actually, which they're pulling into a colleciton called Essays On Empathy. Essays includes a bunch of previously released Deconstructeam story romps along with their new game De Tres Al Cuarto about a couple comedians trying to make it big together. Essays On Empathy is launching on May 18th, and you can snag a peek at what it includes in a new trailer.
]]>Now that Cyberpunk 2077 is delayed again until December 10th, what are you to do? You've grown a lurid blue mohawk, your leather jacket is almost worn in, and your prescription mirrorshades are ready for collection at Specsavers - but for what? You might as well use this time to explore all games cyberpunky, from edgy and nihilistic griping about how the future sucks to wacky cyberjapes that make you wanna jump up and shout HACK THE PLANET. I have some recommendations.
]]>In The Red Strings Club, a corporation believes it holds the keys to happiness, and it's preparing to slip them down the throats of everyone in the world. It's a chemical end: to discrimination, to suffering, and to freedom.
So what. A little brainwashing never hurt anyone.
]]>I spend a lot of time thinking about the past and future, and the little moments which rely on them. I mean, maybe it's just inherent in the contemporary state of Being Alive™ that we spend so much time thinking about time: setting alarms, making dinner reservations, meeting deadlines, missing deadlines, scheduling due-dates, planning for investments and interest rates... A 30-year mortgage? Will I even be alive then? I mean, I wasted a solid ten minutes between writing the first and second sentences of this very article marvelling at what I imagine must go into the infrastructural maintenance for the Wikipedia entry for "time," so who's going to trust me with a mortgage? Sometimes it seems like the whole concept is one big existential prank we've conned ourselves into playing along with. Time, that is. Not mortgages. Hell, you know what, them too. It's around this time that I'll probably fix myself a drink. It's five o' clock somewhere, right?
]]>The doors have been opened, the games inside have been devoured, and now it's time to recycle the cardboard. Below you'll find all of our favourite games from 2018, gathered together in a single post for easy reading.
]]>2018 is the year I played Symphony Of The Night for the first time. Can I just rave about Symphony Of The Night for the whole article? No?
Fine. Here are some other games that aren’t too shabby, either.
]]>Hurry, hurry. There are only 37 Steam sales each year - miss a bargain now and you'll regret it for the rest of your days. (Until the next one).
As always, the latest Steam Autumn sale is a sensory overload of cut-price delights. We're here to guide you through the white noise and make a few informed choices.
]]>Even before its recent public gameplay unveiling, Cyberpunk 2077 was the target of a very particular piece of criticism. Perhaps sparked by the transphobic joke made by the game's Twitter account, many online have been calling out 2077 for presenting yet another future that, despite its overt themes of transhumanism and body modification, falls strictly into the gender binary. Despite the gender diversity already prevalent in our own world and time, players in 2077 are asked to choose between a strictly male or female character. Many online have been saying that this is at odds with the very genre from which the game gets its name and ideas. “Cyberpunk shouldn't be cis!” is more or less the argument. This criticism has dogged the game for weeks now and will probably follow it all the way to release. Yet it doesn't quite ring true to me.
]]>Over the past several weeks I have sent a lot of interesting people who work in the games industry an email containing the following scenario:
"You enter a room. The door locks behind you. From a door opposite another you enters. This other you is a perfectly identical clone, created in the exact instant you entered the room, but as every second ticks by they are creating their own distinct personhood. The doors will unlock in 90 minutes. Nobody will ever know what happens in the room. What do you do? (assume the materials you need for whatever you want to do are in the room). Please show your working, if able."
]]>We're just about halfway through 2018 (which has somehow taken both too long and no time at all). As is tradition, we've shaken our our brains around to see which games from the last six months still make our neurons fizzle with delight. Then we wrote about them here, in this big list feature that you're reading right now this second.
And what games they are! 2018 has been a great year so far, and our top picks run the whole range, from hand drawn oddities made by one person, to big mega-studio blockbusters that took the work of hundreds. And each of them is special to us in some way. Just like you are too. Click through the arrows to see the full spread of our faves so far. Better luck next year to the games that didn't make the cut this time.
]]>All right, picture this. There's five podcasts tied to a train track, and you're on a train speeding toward them. On another track, there's just one podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. Do you swap tracks and kill one podcast to save the other five? Or do you forge ahead? Take your time, it's a difficult moral choice - exactly our topic this week. Think hard about it. No, listen, you should think about it very carefully. No, listen--
I know, but--
You can't just p--
Ha ha, okay, stop the train. Joke's over.
Stop the train.
STOP THE TRAIN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP THE TR--
]]>No. Let's not be ridiculous. But there are so many examples of bad survival games that it’s important to remember the good ones. So that’s what we are doing on the latest RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. We're breaking stones over the heads of rubbish survival games, but cooking, salting and eating the delicious ones. Adam wraps himself up in The Long Dark but reluctantly sets Project Zomboid on fire to stay warm. Matt gets sea sickness from Subnautica but wants to swim again anyway. And Brendan freedives into Subnautica too, in an attempt to escape from all the mediocre survival games set on red planets.
]]>The Red Strings Club is a narrative driven adventure game that explores transhumanism, AI and morality against a cyberpunk backdrop. If you asked me to choose three things that I like to talk and think about, there’s a good chance I’d pick out those three - so Deconstruteam would have been hard pressed to not keep my attention even if they’d somehow failed to take their subject matter anywhere interesting.
Oh boy, is the Red Strings Club interesting.
]]>There’s a BOGOF on neon negronis. At least, that would be the glowing sign I’d hang outside, were I in charge of the hot pink bar of upcoming cyberpunk adventure The Red Strings Club. It’s a game of social engineering, body-hacking and clandestine mixology from Deconstructeam, the makers of Gods Will Be Watching. They’ve sent electronic words to say it’s coming out on January 22.
]]>Guns can only get you so far in cyberpunk. To thwart a megacorp in newly-announced adventure game The Red Strings Club, a little more subtlety will be required. It'll have us playing as a bartender mixing drinks to manipulate emotions and squeeze information from people, as a hacker armed with a phone using social engineering to bypass security, and even sculpting genetic implants to whack into executives and change their personalities. Intriguing! It's coming in January from Deconstructeam, the makers of Gods Will Be Watching, and published by Devolver Digital.
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