When I was a competitive long-distance runner at school, breath control was paramount. We were never really taught this, mind. It was an art you picked up through practice: how to breathe before the race, saturating your blood with O2 without dizzying yourself; when to permit the shorter, emergency breaths and when to apply restraint; when to deepen your inhales and charge yourself up for an attack on a hill.
And then, how to organise your body around your breath, straightening your posture to expand your lungs without tipping back too far and squandering muscle power; how to breath in time with your stride and the movement of your shoulders, so as to firm up your momentum and shave a miraculous-feeling minute off your finishing time. All this, plus various daft psychological war gambits of my own devising. When overtaking or being overtaken, I used to seal my lips shut on that side and breath through the other corner of my mouth, to make it look like I was hardly out of breath at all.
]]>Out 17th October on Steam, Mask Quest is a platform game in which you hold and release a button to refill your character's lungs while dodging police batons, bullets, gas grenades and drones. Neglect to do so, and you'll pop your clogs. It's the kind of mechanical tomfoolery you'd associate with Peter Molydeux, but in this case, it's all the fine work of Stephen's Sausage Roll developer increpare and Quadrant developer undef. The developers have somehow gotten 50 levels out of this meme-ish premise, and it looks like quite an elaborate hop-and-bopper with some less-cheerful political overtones. Here's the trailer.
]]>Fancy yourself a dab hand at Tetris, aye? After over 35 years, who doesn't? Stephen "Increpare" Lavelle wants you to put those skills to the test with his latest free experiment, Schwerkraftprojektionsgerät (Gravity Projection Device, Google Translate assures me). Released this week with the look of a quirky old German toy, Lavelle's devious browser game challenges you to four simultaneous games of Tetris, using the same set of blocks and a gravity-bending twist.
]]>Under the moniker Increpare, Stephen Lavelle has built a treasure trove of lovely little puzzle games. I'd wholly recommend checking out his site - it's a fascinating collection of HTML experiments. I'm sure indie enthusiasts have been lost for weeks exploring countless puzzlescript curiosities.
Every so often, one of these breaks onto shelves with a price tag. Brutal puzzlers with striking visuals like Stephen's Sausage Roll and English Country Tune. This time around, Lavelle's taken a different tune with minimal action-puzzler Hypnocult.
]]>If you are reading this now, you could instead be making your own dungeon crawler. That's the magic of DungeonScript [official site], a fairly simple browser-based game-making tool intended for first-person dungeon crawlers. After a little studying, you could be making your own dungeon crawlers and sharing them online for us all to play. DungeonScript is an adaptation of PuzzleScript, the puzzle-making tool from Stephen's Sausage Roll creator increpare. PuzzleScript's simple tools and easy sharing have given us some fun games (and many more we haven't covered) as well as being used to prototype other games so fingers crossed for some good dungeoning.
]]>Right now I am probing cautiously at a tower of sausages occupying the centre of a little grassy patch of land. I have been doing variations of this all morning because I am stuck on the second island of Stephen's Sausage Roll [official site].
You've probably heard sausage chat on the sausage vine over the last week as Stephen Lavelle's meaty tile-based puzzler has garnered praise from the likes of Jonathan Blow (him off The Witness and Braid) and Bennett Foddy (QWOP, GIRP). It's worthy praise from what I've experienced so far but given that's only two islands of puzzling and I can see whole other sections tantalisingly close on the edge of my overworld map I'm going to talk about the puzzling process so far.
]]>English Country Tune and PuzzleScript developer Stephen 'increpare' Lavelle today released his latest block-pushing puzzler, Stephen's Sausage Roll [official site]. It's a push 'em up about rolling sausages around to cook them properly under increasingly tricky circumstances. He's also the Stephen 'increpare' Lavelle who's released squillions of fascinating free games like Subway Adventure and Slave of God, of course, but strewth, don't go thinking his fondness for vignettes means his puzzles aren't fiendish/delightful/bastard-hard.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Activate the Three Artefacts and then Leave [official site] is a name and an imperative. Fly into the giant angular sphere, navigate the twists and turns of seemingly disordered corridors and hidden passages, then get out before the white noise and buzzing bore through your head.
]]>Leaving from the hospital, I hopped on the metro's blue Trek line, planning to change at College. A passenger rudely blocked me from getting off, so I had to continue on to Climbing Wall then double back, dashing down to the dock to catch the boat connection to the green Apollo line, awkwardly barging past a weeping man holding a bouquet of red roses, and soon I found myself at my destination: on the platform in the gaping mouth of a vast baleen whale.
I've been riding the rails in Subway Adventure [official site], Stephen 'increpare' Lavelle's fine new free game about exploring the Dream World of Sadness Metro.
]]>Bedrooms [official site] is Stephen 'Increpare' Lavelle's most recent game (well, it was this morning, he might have released another three in the intervening hours). It's a curious experience which as you floating around various bedrooms and other spaces in which people are sleeping. You're at a weird angle as you drift around, finding out what there is to do.
]]>My avatar won’t stop pooping on the shower floor. Each time it squats, it releases another suspicious brown shape. Unsanitary? I know. Fortunately, Increpare's Shower Game [official site] allows you to smash your faeces into nothingness with just a click of your right mouse button. (I don’t know what is happening. Tell me what is happening.) It's not all heeling poo down the drain.
]]>Moving Stories by Terry Cavanagh (him off Super Hexagon and VVVVVV) and Stephen Lavelle (Puzzlescript, English Country Tune) is a satisfying little snack of a game I've been prodding at for about 20 minutes.
The idea is you're moving house and only have a limited amount of space in your suitcase so you must choose the things you wish to take with you. Once the case is packed and the detritus shoved into the nearby bin you'll get snippets of the story of why you're moving out.
]]>I don't believe tarot has occult powers, but I do think anything that throws a load of symbols at you to interpret can help get your thoughts in order. Let Your Mind Fall to Rest does this quite literally. The latest from increpare, of English Country Tune and Slave of God fame, it has you roll two dice covered in esoteric symbols and leaves the rest up to you. Dice Man where you figure out the commands after you roll.
]]>Today's sex and/or relationship game is Increpare's puzzle game Striptease. I'd like to point out that this game, though it might seem from its title to be lighthearted titillation, contains depictions of violence against women and addresses issues of sexual assault. If this might trigger or distress you in any way, I'd recommend to take care in reading this, and consider whether playing this game might distress you before playing it.
]]>When I spoke to Stephen "increpare" Lavelle last month, the creator of brainy puzzle game English Country Tune described his oeuvre as "pushing stuff around" games. That's a good genre! It's in my top ten, alongside "making people fall down" games, "staying inside the lines" games and "steering balls into holes" games.
Now increpare has expanded his work in the field by releasing PuzzleScript, an open-source puzzle game engine that makes it easy to create "pushing stuff around" games and all manner of other puzzles. It's easy enough that successful indie designers like Terry Cavanagh and Bennett Foddy can make games in it in between the hundreds of other games they're producing in any given second.
]]>Slave of God is a new, free game from Stephen Lavelle, aka Increpare, he of English Country Tune. It is a game about visiting a nightlcub, with all the attendant music, magic and horror. Young Cara paid it a visit.
]]>At RPS, we're hardy men. Jim can often be seen carrying a shed on his shoulders, packed with all his tools. Alec and Adam run a side business as fix-it gentlemen for logging machines, while Nathan is officially San Francisco's Sturdiest Man. And I once fixed a tap. But English Country Tune is too much for us. (Well, for me and Jim, as we're the ones who tried it.) A really beautiful puzzle game that Quinns once sent a biscuit. But by golly it's hard.
]]>The ever-reliable Indiegames.com notices that Increpare, the devilish mind behind English Country Tune and other mind-twisters, has released MMMMMM, a free spike-laden tribute/alternate take/sequel to Terry Cavanagh's VVVVVV. It's a puzzle game about trinket collection and spike avoidance, with success being reliant on forward thinking and, of course, gravity manipulation. I was playing for about thirty seconds before diagonal surfaces were introduced and after five minutes I'd become intimate with more spikes than there are atoms in the universe. Sometimes the rules of a game create a sort of synthesis with my mental workings; in this case the two were at war and I was caught in the middle, hoist by Increpare's pixel petard. Everyone go and beat it then tell me how rubbish I am.
]]>Being a notorious liar has gave me many opportunities in life: my zeppelin is made of gold, my cat is the last of its species, and I'm typing this from the top of Skull Mountain. But it also made playing increpare's tiny, dungeon crawler Promises really tough, as you need to keep your promises to snatch the keys to complete the game. I don't want to spoil it, as there's only a minute's worth of game here and because I'm essentially a nice person with some flaws, so instead I'll write some more lies. In Promises you fight a mega-copter made of the ghosts of old tanks, and if you Google the name of the game three times in a row there's a small chance the rapture will occur. Look, just play it. I promise I'll tell the truth below.
]]>It's the season of goodwill. Thus there is no better time to play Terry Cavanagh and Increpare's Flash game about a family who start off swearing at each other and wind up somewhere far, far darker. Unutterably bleak yet strangely moving with it, Oíche Mhaith is an emotionally brutal but deeply compelling and occasionally perversely funny few minutes.
]]>Lots of free games! I haven't played everything entered into the latest Ludum Dare because I do not have all the time in the world, but I did want to try out some of the other entries after Alec looked at Minicraft. No doubt I've missed the one game that everyone will be talking about 24 hours from now, the one that forms the basis for Valve's next major franchise and blows the minds of everyone who plays it. I probably skipped past it because it was called 'Alone', which is the theme this time around and therefore the title of 78% of entries. For those who don't know, these are games designed around the set theme and created in 48 hours. Here are some of them.
]]>Walk to the right and talk to dying women. That's my hastily written but accurate tutorial for Increpare and Starfruit Games' collaboration, Pirouette. The animation and backgrounds are rather beautiful and the dialogue is chucklesome in its deliberate formality, with a staged quality that seems to laugh in the face of accusations of pretension. These are people, or ideas of people, who speak like exaggerated versions of the expected types. The end seems to have serious intent, or perhaps pretends to, but I was smiling throughout the 10 or 15 minutes it took to play. Pirouette is free and is also available on iPad, which led to Apple categorising it as a book rather than a game. Perhaps that's a punchline of sorts.
]]>Increpare's brain-jammin' 3D puzzle game, English Country Tune, has been released. The game plays with a bunch of spatial puzzle ideas to create some ingenious challenges. It's had me going a bit hypnotoad with concentration trying to get through the puzzles. There's a demo for PC and Mac on the site. You should play it. You really should.
]]>Stephen "Increpare" Lavelle has sent over a version of his spatial puzzle game, English Country Tune, and I've been playing it. Atmospheric, compelling, and acutely encouraging of the thinking they call lateral, English Country Tune mixes some of the kind of 3D puzzles you might have seen before over the years with some you won't have seen, and then adds in extra layers of impossible videogame physics and Increpare experimental cleverness. I am currently gnawing on early puzzles that include faked "camouflage" gravity... Yes, it's that kind of thing. And it's awesome. That said, despite the name, there are no jaunty folk songs to be found. Not so far, anyway. For gist of the sort of 3D puzzling you'll be expected to face head below to see the trailer. The game itself will be out via the website a week today, apparently.
]]>American Dream is a collaborative browser game from Increpare, VVVVVV's Terry Cavanagh, Jasper Byrne and Tom Morgan-Jones that's made me laugh more than enough to warrant a post. It's a bit like Oliver Stone's Wall Street directed by a wet pocket calculator. Set in the 80s, it tasks you with fulfilling the American dream by making a million dollars, though according to Terry it started its life as a game called Killing Spree about "an assassin who spent all his money on designer furniture". Go play! It's exactly the kind of oddball thing that I play then can't help but wonder how it would have turned out with an actual budget.
]]>I'm not out protesting. I'm sat at home, absorbing a steady drip-feed of political horror off of Twitter. But now, thanks to inexhaustible indie developer Increpare, I can pretend I'm there! Join me as I lock the toilet, open a window, put on a coat and fire up Kettle, a game which casts you as the police trying to effectively bundle a small crowd into a tight space. I got it off Kieron, who got it off Boing Boing. As he says, it really is a neat little puzzler, albeit full disturbing one-liners from a policeman birthed from MSPaint. Thanks, Kieron. Thieron.
]]>Ah, the working week hasn't begun until we've posted a dreadfully sinister indie game. Courtesy of the Indie Games blog, Activate the Three Artefacts and then Leave has you navigating an ominous, claustrophobic environment using your mouse, the WASD keys and by listening out for sounds, though that description doesn't convey the game's nightmarish atmosphere. It plays a bit like the hallucination of a sedated hospital patient who's been left staring at white ceiling tiles. Videogames! Go play.
]]>You know Increpare? Aka Stephen Lavelle? He's one of the hyper-prolific game creators on the British indie scene. We've blogged about a couple of his games before (The historian game Opera Omnia and the Mass Effect 2 parody Starfeld), but he does a whole lot more. His presentation at World of Love basically involved him just talking to everyone in the audience about what they were up to. He also basically worked in the industry as a coder in the games industry and doing it solely as a job - because he saved his creativity for churning out games. Anyway - the reason why I'm posting is that he's just been made redundant and has put up a request for donations. If you've ever dug any of his games, now would be a good time to throw some Internetcoins in his direction. And if you haven't, go to Increpare's site and be bewildered at where to start. I've just played Whale of Noise, based around one of our aquatic mammal sorts learning notes to sing to separate its body into increasingly distantly placed parts. And The Terrible Whiteness of Appalachian Nights features stuff so horrible I can't even show you a screenshot. And the pictured Beatification is just plain odd. What have you found?
]]>I started the day with a micro-webgame which one Mr DMcCool discovered over at the Indie game Blog. "As far as I can tell its a hilarious minimalist critique of Mass Effect," says DMcCool, which sounds so much the sort of thing I'd write, I'm just going to quote it. Tricky moral dilemmas! Memorable characters! Upgradeable characters! Questionable and repetitive gameplay! Shocking twists! It's Starfeld.
]]>I've been meaning to play this seriously for a few weeks now, and it looks as if it's never going to happen with my current work and gaming schedule. So I think it best I draw your attention to it, if it hasn't been already, and sit back. I can't remember if Robert Yang pointed me at Opera Omnia over at IndieGames first, or whether it was Jim - either way, it's the sort of experimental, novel game which really isn't like anything else I can think of. It's a puzzle game based around you playing a historian, trying to create theories which would explain how a situation come to pass. You make simulation models explaining migration patterns, and is based around reversing the usual ways of thinking. As in, how could this have come to pass? Honestly, it's very abstract, very strange and certainly worth playing and thinking about. Get it from here.
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