This week, Somerset House houses a selection of avant garde games on the theme of liminality

For a week or so every year, Somerset House in London becomes home to a mini-festival of experimental video games: last year’s were all on the theme of love . Now Play This has been running for 10 years, and this year’s theme – liminality – is especially well-suited to the medium. Video games are in-between spaces: they are fictional worlds in which real-world relationships are made; they are an art form that exists across and between technology and culture. You could make a case for the inclusion of plenty of games in this selection, and the ones that are here explore the theme from some unexpected angles. There are games here about transition, expansion, life and death, borders, and skateboarding through cyberspace.

The variety of interactive experiences here is, as ever, huge, showing the full range of what games and digital art can be. There are relatively conventional pieces of interactive entertainment here – such as Ed Key and David Kanaga’s Proteus, in which you walk through a procedurally generated dreamscape – and Sad Owl Studios’s Viewfinder, a superb game about perception and photography. And then there’s Labyrinth, a lattice of interconnected ropes that light up bright LED cubes when they touch, and a playable suitcase (Pamela Cuadros’s Moving Memories). In one room a film about journeying to the broken, glitchy edgelands of the game Cyberpunk 2077 plays opposite a game (Crashboard) where you wear 3D glasses, stand on a skateboard and tilt your way through an obstacle course of pixellated imagery from the early days of the internet.

Continue reading...

[Deal du jour] Alors que les nouveaux Galaxy Book 4 viennent de débarquer sur le marché, les précédents modèles de Galaxy Book profitent de promotions. Le Galaxy Book 3 Pro, l'ultraportable haut de gamme de Samsung, est presque à moitié prix.

[Deal du jour] Samsung frappe fort et casse le prix de son PC portable Galaxy Book 3 sur Amazon. Soit une belle promo de 35 % pour le concurrent des MacBook Air d’Apple.

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC; Pieces Interactive
The stars are lost in a swamp of poor writing and buggy combat in this wearisome reimagining of the 1992 survival classic

It’s fitting that this latest Alone in the Dark game should choose a generational curse for its premise, as the series that pioneered the survival horror genre hasn’t been good in about 30 years. Its various misadventures include the disastrous 2008 game of the same name, which among many strange design decisions included a button dedicated to blinking. Yet at least it was terrible in an interesting way, which is more than can be said for this dull and derivative reimagining of the game that started it all.

Set in Louisiana in the early 20th century, Alone in the Dark sees Emily Hartwood (Jodie Comer) visiting her uncle Jeremy at the Derceto Manor convalescence home for mentally ill people after receiving a worrying letter from him. So worrying, in fact, that not only has she hired private detective Edward Carnby (David Harbour) to accompany her, but one of the first questions she asks Carnby is whether he’s brought a gun, as she expects he might have to “wave it around a bit” in order to see her uncle.

Continue reading...

Près d'un an après leur sortie sur PlayStation 5, les aventures de Clive Rosfield s'apprêtent enfin à s'exporter sur PC.

Canteen/Playtonic Friends; PC
From working in your ‘lifelong role of sample sorting’ to playing mandatory video games when you clock off, this sinister, retro-futuristic game will have you questioning your freedom

As a lab technician at the Orwellian megacorp Ringo, your job is to sort strangely unspecific genetic samples into four different tubes – all day, every day. Each sample is identified by a specific shape or pattern or some other rudimentary icon, but whatever it is, you need to make sure the right ones go in the correct tubes or your pay is docked. Oh, and the exact shapes and patterns, as well as other bewildering requirements, are altered on a daily basis by your faceless masters. Welcome to the world of CorpoNation.

Those spotting a similarity to the award-winning Papers, Please are not mistaken. But while that game dealt with the cruel vagaries of immigration, this is all about the dehumanisation of workers within a systemised corporate environment where the staff are quite literally prisoners in the capitalist machine. But sorting stuff isn’t all you do. Each night you get to crawl back to your pod apartment and log in to your 1990s-style computer to read banal Ringo news stories, swap bants with other workers via instant messaging and play state-sanctioned video games. There’s a catalogue to buy customisations for your room, and regular emails encourage you to put all your pay back into the economy. The vintage Mac OS-style interface and glib humour work really well to establish the sinister retro-futuristic atmosphere of the game, and, as with last year’s excellent Videoverse , discovering snippets of narrative through chats with fellow workers is a pleasing exercise in techno-nostalgia.

Continue reading...

PlayStation 5 (version played), Xbox, PC; Visual Concepts/2K
Visual Concepts pulls off an incredible reversal on this formerly beleaguered series, just in time for Wrestlemania’s big 4-0

It’s a storyline worthy of a WWE superstar: washed up, widely ridiculed, apparently on its way to obscurity, WWE 2K20 was video game wrestling’s lowest ebb. Not five years later, presumably having performed all manner of off-screen training montages in meat lockers, the game returns revitalised, with a twinkle in its eye and, much more pertinently, controls that not only function but actually put a smile on your face.

Conceptually, wrestling has always been hard to translate to a game. Why not just keep leathering your opponent in the face until they’re too stunned to resist a pin? Because that makes bad television, and if you hadn’t already guessed by the smell of body oil and hairspray, you’re in the world of sports entertainment here. No, being “good” at WWE 2K24 or its predecessors is about putting on a show. And boy, does it know how to let you do that.

WWE 2K24 is out 8 March; £59.99

Continue reading...

Ubisoft nous offre un plongeon convaincant dans l’univers de science-fiction imaginé par James Cameron. Test.

Test Avatar Frontiers of Pandora : Ubisoft prouve qu’il n’est pas un bleu

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments