Edge Guard

Startling encounters, body horror, and Cronenberg-ian themes, oh my! This week Blake and Jordan play Paratopic, a narrative game about smuggled VHS tapes, beings from another reality, and just feeling kind of uneasy for 40 minutes. We talk about why this game is so effective at unsettling you and lament that more games don’t use retro, PS1-style graphics.

 

Download the game here: paratopicteam.itch.io/paratopic

And follow the creators on Twitter:

@oysterFAKE

@ForgetAmnesia

@Lazarus_Audio

Join us this week as we let the intrinsic pleasure of reading take control! That’s right, we’re getting all educational over here with “Method of Action”, a collection of games intended to teach the player some principles of graphic design. We dig in to the sometimes tense relationship between gamification and education, where gamification is seen as an easy way to keep pupils engaged, but fails to use the full breadth of what gaming can do to enhance the learning experience. We also get into the weeds a little bit, waxing nostalgic over the edutainment games of our childhoods.

Play the game over  at method.ac

 

Then head over to twitter to check out Method of Action: @methodofaction, and while you’re there, go ahead and follow us too @EdgeGuardCast

Look, I don’t even know how to describe this one: we play “Softfriends,” Thomas Newlands’ game that he calls a “textural adventure game.” That’s texture, not text. It’s a game about moving little tiny bumps in an abstract texture space into each other and causing the texture to change. Yeah. It’s both a relaxing and disorienting game, which is probably why we eventually agree that it’d be fun to play stoned.

 

Download the game here: https://thnewlands.itch.io/softfriends

And follow the creator on Twitter: @thnewlands

Blake and Jordan play Jason Rohrer’s newest game, titled One Hour, One Life. Certainly one of the most original and inventive games we’ve played for the podcast, Rohrer’s multiplayer game is an experiment in collective world-building: dependent on other real people players for gameplay, you play as one human being in a civilization vastly more complicated than what you could create alone. We talk about how remarkable it is that players have been cooperating as much as they have been, and Blake tells the oddly touching story of one of his most meaningful in-game lives.

 

You can purchase the game here: http://onehouronelife.com/

And follow Jason Rohrer on Twitter: @jasonrohrer

This week, Blake and Jordan try out their #masterhacker skills in -c-i-t-y-, a game by Aran Koning, another member of our favorite videogame commune, Sokpop Collective. It’s a resource management game about powering a city, but it comes with a twist: the entire game interface is a command line. If you play the game, here’s an exclusive cheat code from Aran himself: try typing “sokpop” into the command line.

 

Download the game here: https://arankoning.itch.io/-c-i-t-y-

Follow Aran on Twitter: @AranKoning

 

Blake and Jordan play Raft, a survival game by Redbeet Interactive in which you play as a hapless schmuck stranded on a raft trying to scrounge for resources and avoid getting eaten by sharks. It’s a game with a surprising amount of depth, despite its simple surface: even though you are stranded in the ocean, you can cook fish, grow potatoes, farm palm trees, and even build extra levels on your raft (Jordan’s raft had 4 floors, while Blake’s had a measly 2). Amazingly, we were able to get through this whole episode without making a single “Wilson from Castaway” reference.

 

Download the game here: https://raft.itch.io/raft

And follow the creators on Twitter: @RaftSurvivaGame

Our hosts play the mobile game Florence, the new release from the succinctly-named Australian studio “Mountains.” This lovely narrative game really breaks new ground when it comes to using mechanics to express emotion and plot, including a very clever use of puzzle pieces as a conversation mechanic. Really though: we feel like this could be the birth of a new genre, which Blake has dubbed “feelioware.” You heard it here first, folks!

 

The game’s website is here: http://florencegame.com/

And follow the creators on Twitter: @mountainsgames

The aliens are here! In their brief encounter with humanity, they fell in love with casinos and decided to recreate the experience as best they could on a comet. The result is a charming game by Grace Bruxner, descriptively titled Alien Caseno, which Blake and Jordan played for this week’s episode.

 

Download the game here: https://fisho.itch.io/alien

And follow the creator on Twitter: @gracebruxner

Another interview episode! Blake and Jordan are joined by Carter Lodwick and Ian Endsley of Turnfollow, the game design duo behind a game we played in an earlier episode: the verbosely-titled Packing Up The Rest of Your Things on the Last Day at Your Old Apartment. Ian and Carter talk a little bit about their own experiences moving and how that informed the game’s design process, plus reveal that the way one of us played it was not even an intended feature of the game (talk about emergent gameplay!). Stay tuned until the very end for a brief sneak preview of Turnfollow’s next project.

 

If you haven’t already, make sure to (turn)follow them on Twitter:

@_turnfollow

@carterlod

@iendsl

Our two illustrious hosts attempt to transcend their lives as lowly peasants and become kings of all the realm in Royals, a strategy rogue-like management sim* by Asher Vollmer, who you may know as the designer of the iOS game Threes. Blake and Jordan discuss this game’s surprising union of the rogue-like and turn-based strategy genres, but unfortunately only Jordan is able to claim the throne.

 

Ith.io: https://old.audacityteam.org/help/faq_i18n?s=install&i=lame-mp3
Asher Vollmer on Twitter: @ AsherVo

 

*genre name copyright Blake Beckett, 2018.