Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Did you know that the word ‘book’ is actually an ancient Sumerian greeting, short for: ‘can I have that book back I lent you eight months ago you said you’d have finished in like, two? This is going to be another one of those, isn’t it?.’ Truly, language’s many permutations are a font of limitless wonder. This week, it’s Pony Island, The Hex, and Inscryption maker Daniel Mullins! Cheers Daniel! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
]]>After the deadly (and delightful) card game of Inscryption, creator Daniel Mullins is returning to his happy land of little horses. Today he announced Pony Island 2: Panda Circus, a new genre-shifting curio described as "a phantasmagorical voyage through time, myth, divinity, and video games." I like that this description is likely wholly earnest and accurate. This news came during the pre-show for Geoff Keighley's Shopping Hour and if a game like this is relegated to the pre-show, I can only assume the main event will include Half-Life 3, Elden Ring 2, and Deus Ex 5.
]]>Inscryption is, without a doubt, the best game I've played this year. It's creepy, surprising, and superbly fun, and now you can play the best part for as long as you please. Developer Daniel Mullins has released a "mini-expansion" in beta on Steam, which (minor spoilers ahead!) makes its animal-based card game a standalone roguelike experience. Named Kaycee's Mod, it's slightly tougher than what you might have played already, and adds new challenges too, so you can keep going back in for more.
]]>Daniel Mullins says he's not sure that "horror" is the most accurate way to describe his gruesome new card battler Inscryption. He immediately follows this up by telling me a friend of his had nightmares because of the menacing figure you play cards against, so yeah, maybe it's a bit horror-like. But I kind of understand his point.
At the start, Inscryption is like a hostage situation, where you're forced to play a card-based roguelike against a sinister games master. Then, just as you start getting the hang of things, the game evolves into something way more complex. If you've played Mullins' other games you'll know his work can go to some weird, meta places. I won't say more above the cut, because I'd hate to spoil it. But for those of you who've already played, read on for more detail on how Mullins created an excellently unsettling world.
]]>Be afraid. Inscryption is both a love letter to card games and a twisted, jocular caricature of their numerical excess. It had me grinning ear to ear, sometimes nervously, sometimes with the joy of someone who simply loves thumbing through new cards, even when a rustic antagonist with big hands is reaching for my throat. This is not your average deckbuilder. It's a card game with an escape room built on top, and other sinister secrets buried beneath. The depth of its rabbit hole isn't apparent at first. It starts off as a familiar card battler, if a little darkly themed. You are in a cabin, playing cards against a face shrouded in darkness. It seems like Slay The Spire or Hand Of Fate.
Then the cards start talking.
]]>Inscryption is the next game from Pony Island and The Hex creator Daniel Mullins, and having spent two hours playing its new demo this week, this creepy deckbuilding game has immediately shot up the list of my current game of the year contenders. It's dark, it's spooky, it's compelling, and in typical Mullins style, there's a heck of a lot more going on here than meets the eye. For starters, why the heck are my cards talking to me, and why is there one with my own name and face on it?
]]>Inscryption is reportedly "inky black card-based odyssey that blends the deckbuilding roguelike, escape-room style puzzles, and psychological horror into a blood-laced smoothie." It's also from Daniel Mullins, the makers of Pony Island and The Hex, which means it's probably a few other, secret genres, too. It's coming October 19th, but there's a demo available now and a new trailer below.
]]>Spooky deck-builder Inscryption has drawn and played another trailer to tease you into its weird mashup of card, critters, escape rooms, and like five other genres probably. Brewing up a genre stew is apparently something of a thing for developer Daniel Mullins Games who you may know from past games Pony Island and The Hex. A new trailer for Inscryption lets on that it'll be just as wild a ride when it launches in 2021.
]]>Screenshot Saturday Sundays! It's time for our weekly foray into the swamps of Twitter's screenshotsaturday hashtag, fishing out the juiciest gifs, videos and in-development jpegs we can find for the afternoon's pleasure. This week: moon's haunted, but we've also got concrete gardening, low-fi adaptations, and crunchy cosmic billiards.
]]>Twice-annual online game jam event Ludum Dare is wrapping up this evening so let's check out some of the nifty things that have been submitted so far, shall we? These are all games made from scratch over the course of the weekend, so there are plenty of odd bits and bobs built to Ludum Dare 46's theme "keep it alive." Among them are a time-based line puzzle, a coal and heart-powered train ride, and a horrifying lovecraftian Katamari-like thing.
]]>Looking at that header, Inscryption (official site) seems predictable enough. A decent deck-building dungeon crawler, not too dissimilar to Slay The Spire, eh? It's even got some of that extremely-online black humour going on. But this is developer Daniel Mullins we're talking about, the bloke wot brought us harrowing genre-busters Pony Island and The Hex. Don't expect Incryption's "inky black card-based odyssey" to play nicely.
]]>We ask the tough questions here at RPS. We’re like Jeremy Paxman but in a very long bear costume. We once asked 15 developers what they’d do if they were stuck in a room with a clone of themselves. This is important stuff.
Today, we ask another question: What would you gift the games industry for the holidays? We put this query to a bunch of game artists, writers and designers to see how charitable they were feeling. Today, you get to open these presents. Happy holidays!
]]>If there was ever a tale for Cyber Monday, this is it - the kind of stuff that magazines would spread rumours about, now made real. The Hex, if you missed John's cheery review, is the genre-hopping successor to Daniel Mullins' Pony Island, and a clever little thing you should probably play now. One moment it's a Fallout-parodying tactics game, next it's Hotline Miami. It's also about secrets, and it took a full month for its players to crack its greatest one. As with Pony Island before it, there is a second, hidden ending. In another game.
]]>Pony Island was one of my favourite games of 2016, a Trojan horse of astoundingly clever ideas and arch critique, and incredibly funny. So clearly I was interested to see where developer Daniel Mullins went next. I'm very delighted to report it's the extraordinary The Hex. A game that defies me to tell you anything about it, not that I'm convinced you'd believe me if I did.
]]>The creator of cult favourite Pony Island has announced that his next surprise 'em up, The Hex, will launch on October 16th. The Hex is a murder mystery trying to discover which of six video game protagonists in a bar is planning a murder and, as you'd expect from the Pony man, it's not straightforward. We'll have to play through some of their memories, see, dancing across their different genres. Here, have a look in this new trailer below.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
I will fight to the death anyone who tries to stop Pony Island entering the RPS Advent Calendar this Christmas. This extraordinary oddity could potentially be misunderstood as a gag, when it is in fact one of the cleverest, most peculiar and splendidly delivered games of the year.
]]>Daniel Mullins, the developer behind Pony Island, has announced his next game - The Hex [official site]. This time around, it's a murder mystery game dabbling in a number of different video game genres.
]]>2016 has its first must-see game, already. Pony Island [official site], about which I had heard nothing before seeing it on Steam's new release list, is something special. A sinister, peculiar game of... well, blimey, even describing the nature of it feels like quite a hefty spoiler. Although it's fair to say it starts off deeply weirdly before it even tries to bluff innocence. Before you can get past the menu screen, you find yourself faced with a bizarre options screen, falling text, and loading screens that berate you for progress. And happy jumpy ponies!
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