Textbook of Gaming

Black Mirror has come a long way from its edgy days on Channel 4. It feels as if Charlie Brooker’s modern day Twilight Zone has grown up an awful lot since 2011, when we watched the British Prime Minister screw a pig on national television, to displaying some of the most touching and terrifying critiques of our interconnected world. Now the show that delves into the darkest aspects and potential for technology has gone interactive with its latest episode, Bandersnatch . Its interactivity makes Bandersnatch a very different experience, meaning the viewer is now a player, which also means I can finally write about this amazing series. The whole episode revolves around the game development experience, following a young man called Stefan in 1984 as he completes a video game adaptation of his favourite choose-your-own-adventure book – the titular Bandersnatch . In perhaps an obvious choice for an interactive experience deriving from the choose-your-own-adventure genre, Bandersn...

Welcome, to the spoooOOOoookiest entry into the blog so far! This Halloween I’ve put on my big boy pants and actually played a horror game, and that is Soma , the other game that Friction Games developed after their cult hit Amnesia: the Dark Decent . In case you repressed those memories, Amnesia was a sensational survival horror game that came out at a time when all the major publishers were spouting the same line: that survival horror games just weren’t profitable enough to make. Frictional Games made sure that they knew that they were wrong. Amnesia scared the ever loving Buh-Jesus out of pretty much everyone who played it . One the downside it also made PewDiePie famous, proving that behind every silver lining there is a cloud. Soma is the studio's follow up, and still deals with Lovecraftian horror but via different narrative vehicles. The game centres on Simon, a man with a brain injury that is slowly killing him. After sitting down for an experimental treatmen...

Obvious content warning is obvious. Cover your sweet, innocent eyes, children! “Why are there so many naked people in art?” This is a question a friend asked me not too long ago whilst wandering around an art gallery, looking at an exhibition on Japanese photorealism. It’s something that I’ve wondered myself, because nudity is everywhere in the art world, from fine art, to film, to the cynical “sex sells” moto of advertising. But the problem with nudity in art is that, like most things in art, it is subjective. Sure, the viewer may simply be stood staring at a still life study of the artist’s spouse, but it is up to the viewer if the nudity is a metaphor for something; purity, innocence, divinity, beauty, debauchery, vulnerability, or any other descriptive noun. Sometimes the meaning behind the nudity is more overt; it may be titillating, amusing, intimate, or even disturbing depending on the presentation. As I mentioned above, advertisers love to link sex to an inani...

2011 was a stellar year for gaming, especially if you like action games. Batman: Arkham City received 10/10 ratings from numerous outlets; Skyrim released for the first time; Uncharted 3 , Gears 3 , Dead Space 2 , the list of critically acclaimed releases goes on and on. But there is one game that is missing from that previous paragraph, and I feel its exclusion is unjust, ironically. It’s a game that was praised for its ground breaking animation work, for bringing together such a wide range of game genres in such a stylish, atmospheric, and cohesive manner , and for its attention to detail. That game was L.A. Noire – a third person action adventure game set in the titular Californian city in the 1940s. The game comes from Team Bondi and Rockstar games, and like many of Rockstar’s other games, L.A. Noire is an open world affair. But instead of causing mayhem, the player is tasked with undoing it. They step into the shoes of Cole Phelps, an LAPD officer and former Marine, an...

In May 2013, a studio owned by a publisher received a rebranding. There’s nothing unusual about that, apart from maybe the renamed studio, which had just moved onto name number 4. You see, this studio had been making games since the 1990s, and was originally started by none other than the legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg. It made some bold moves early on in its life, creating a franchise that had as much of an influence and impact on the first person shooter genre as Doom and Wolfenstein . It cemented World War II as the staple setting of shooters for a decade. In 2008 this franchise was recorded by Guinness as the world’s best-selling FPS series, but then it simply faded away into nothing. “So are you going to tell us what the hell you’re blathering on about?” I hear you asking, despite my love of being cryptic. Well, I’ll tell you now: ladies and gentlemen, this is the story of Medal of Honor . The History Part Medal of Honor started its life in 1998, in the hand...

I’ve bagged on Ubisoft’s inability to deal with the politics within its own games for, well, some time now. Swinging casually from utter ignorance to dangerous complicity, Ubisoft’s unique brand of open world adventures sell well but ultimately try to stay far away from making any point that might drive customers away. Apart from one of their newest and smallest franchises. So let’s talk about Watch_Dogs . Watch_Dogs was a wonderfully unique pitch back when it was first revealed in 2012; the incredible graphics, contextual heads up display, and the gameplay were like nothing gamers had seen before. Drawing influence from the emergent online hacker culture, DarkWeb sleaziness, and the way that people’s metadata was being collected and traded, Watch_Dogs promised to be a truly unique experience about a 21 st Century vigilante. Players step into the shoes and “iconic” hat of Aiden Pearce, a criminal hacker whose involvement in a hotel robbery not only gets his niece killed,...

It’s time to don your cloak, pick up your truncheon and whistle, and ask “What’s going on ‘ere then?”, because we’re off to the East End of London Town in Vampyr ! A tale of plague, murder, and secret societies, Vampyr puts the player in the shoes of Jonathon Reid, a man whose name never looks correctly spelt, as he struggles to cope with becoming a vampire and the difficult choices he must make to survive. Dontnod’s vision of London circa 1918 is a dark, foreboding place. Very dark. Actually, maybe too dark, to the point where I’ve barely been able to see enemies right in front of me in the sewers. But I guess this is correct for the time: London’s slums were very real, still relying on gas lanterns and sewage laying in the gutters, was an awful place to be at night. Crime was rampant in these part of London, and the number of grisly murders had been well documented since the Victorian era. The music also really sets up the atmosphere to imitate the game's clear inspiratio...