amanita design
Amanita Design built a dystopian city out of real cardboard, then digitized it
Every set in the anti-authoritarian adventure was cut and glued in paper first—a handcrafted city where the Leader rules through loudspeakers.
adventure game
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Murakami-inspired adventure game Memoranda gets a release date
How real are our memories? Many of Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s works meditate on this question. We remember the past a certain way, but are those memories true to life? His novels and short stories muse on memory, time, love, and human isolation, with characters put in strange settings that ar
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Karma. Incarnation 1 doesn’t hold back on the psychedelia
In AuraLab’s Karma. Incarnation 1, I’m controlling Pip. Or rather, I’m directing Pip along his journey. Pip is a worm-like creature, but he wasn’t always that way. Once upon a time, he was merely a lost soul. After his lover gets captured by an elusive Unknown Evil, Pip ventures off alone into a sur
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Figment will turn dream spaces into an interactive playground
At last, several months after first revealing concept art and screenshots for its dreampunk game Figment, Danish studio Bedtime Digital has more to show. It comes in the form of a three-minute long video, which features not only the game in action for the first time, but also lead designer Jonas Byr
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Time to take in the trash: Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is out this week
After nearly two years in the works, Sundae Month’s lo-res sci-fi adventure Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor has a release date; it’s September 16th, and will be available on Steam and itch.io. Yes, there’s about to be a new trash person in town. As an Alaensee woman with a municipally-subsidized tras
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Harold Halibut’s handmade world is a celebration of vintage animation
Like so many of the best ideas in history, the idea for Harold Halibut came from a dinner table conversation. Onat Hekimoglu and others were discussing their love of old stop-motion films. Films like Jason and The Argonauts (1963) and The Valley of The Gwangi (1969). Hekimoglu, the lead writer, des
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Creating voice-driven interactive fiction just got a lot easier
Interactive fiction has seen a resurgence in the past few years. From Chris Klimas’s freeware hypertext software Twine, to the visual novel Python engine Ren’Py, branching narrative stories are more popular than ever in videogames. But most interactive fiction games rely on written text, usually thr
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A videogame tribute to one of the best worst movies of all time
What happens when Johnny goes to work? What happens when he buys the red dress or makes love to his fiancée Lisa? If you’ve ever wanted to know, there is an answer: The Room (2003), the best worst movie of all time, now has an adventure game adaptation. A 2D adventure game, The Room Tribute “is a to
Review
Zero Time Dilemma cuts like a knife
Zero Time Dilemma wants to know how it feels to kill someone. To take someone’s life, whether it’s to ensure your own survival, or someone else’s. What it’s like to be driven mad when you end up in a situation like its protagonists—trapped in an underground shelter, where initiating six acquaintance
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Today in GIFs: Get a look at Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor’s strange world
It’s been too long since we last checked in on Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, the game about exploring a grand sci-fi universe through the viewpoint of a lowly municipal worker rather than a more standard space marine hero figure. Since my original post covering the game, the team has been hard at
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Two game artists share the Japanese yōkai that inspire them
After living in Japan’s seaside city of Niigata for a year, French artists Cécile Brun and Olivier Pichard learned, among many other things, an appreciation for the island nation’s mythology and art. They’ve told us about their visits to Buddhist spiritual sites on Japanese mountains, and as we’ve w
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The horror of living under martial law in 1960s Taiwan, now coming to videogames
Like a lot of the clashes between capitalist and communist factions in the early days of the Cold War, the Chinese Civil War was complex and multi-faceted. Even today, Taiwan calls itself the Republic of China, and China calls itself the People’s Republic of China. When they attend the same internat