The sound design and graphical arrangement is minimal, the (often randomly chosen) texts are written greatly – they are highly poetic, beautiful, fey ...In „A row of chairs abandoned on the beach“, humans do consequently become coast, night, and sky – but the world is turned into a living, equitable, and vivid instance in return.
The "Adventures from a mythic shore" area of my website just got a major update (because, whenever I'm a bit ill - and thats what I'm atm -, I use the time to curate my pictures :D).
Nearly 2000 CC-BY-SA low-res photos for you to discover. Now with random function.
I also basically never participate in game jams, but the "Fuck Capitalism Jam" is an exception to the rule :).
The underground game manifesto was released as an entry there, and I'll surely contribute something this year as well. Also, I found various great underground games on the last incarnation (many of them interactive fictions), and will surely keep my eyes open this year as well!
PRAXIS FIGHTER X shows pretty well both the chances and limits of following a traditional formula as a single game developer: It is rock solid in any aspect, and even good in some – but within a genre that is so rich of great and colorful games, many of them more experimental in both gameplay and sound, a bit more boldness in design-decisions on every layer might have been better – and ironically this is underlined by the very fact that it does everything it actually does probably as good as one can possibly expect from an underground game production. If you don’t mind the formulaic gameplay the likeable story, the very well polished gameplay, and the overall high quality make it a great pick for underground gaming enthusiasts and shoot ‚em up veterans alike.
Still public domain, still a free wizard! If you want a version with trannsparent-bg just use the one I posted yesterday, it actually is pretty when not upscaled by Mastodon :3.
Wonder where he and the flower will up over the time ^_^.
Just updated the graphic with better visible question marks; here is the old version and a upscaled with transparent background for good measure.
Arcane Cache: Review by Adrian (my partner in crime at underground game development) to "Nox Archaist", an rather obscure commercial retro CRPG playable on Apple II Hardware.
The biggest highlight of the game is the open world that you will explore during your about forty hours of gameplay. It feels less British than Ultima’s Britannia, and feels slightly less medieval, mostly due to the heavy inclusion of piracy, towns that are not called Britain, and gigantic ships built to cross entire oceans. But, in the best sense of the word, it retains the distinctive quaintness of these old titles. There is a lot of cozyness to be found between old ruins in the middle of deep woods, between small hamlets in which simple people live off the land, all framed by large mountainsides with deep dark castles and towers that hide powerful magic.
arcane cache: Review to "Absent minded", a short, hard hitting hypertext story with a design and writing full of dreamlike atmosphere and some cool utilization of gameplay design for storytelling.
The Liberation is a short hyperlink fiction game done with the Twine-Engine.
The story is about a revolutionary who is sitting in an embassy, isolated from the outside and cut from his comrades since many years. He is pining to walk, and if it is for the last time, on the nearby street, knowing that this would be his certain death...
Arcane Cache: Review to Carcosa, a faithful rendition of a poem as video game.
This game holds an elegant, hypnotic beauty and goes down the path of minimalism in a bolt and consequent way that makes it rather unique – the playtime is probably around one minute. It is an adaption of a poem that doesn’t really attempt to refresh anything, and isn’t interested in re-contextualization; this is an approach that bears the risk of gliding into a uncritical relation to the source material, and of getting a bit dusty – the game plays very much like a game that was released when the poem came out could have looked like, like a forged relict from an era that predates the medium; and looking at the developer and their affiliation with goth this might have been exactly what they wanted to do.
Arcane Cache: Review to the games and works of Ondřej Throň. Their games and digital poems play with the limits and possibilities of the medium and utilize interactivity as a mean of narration - very unique and interesting.