Monthly Archives: October 2019

Neo Cab Developer Q&A (Hosted by Evolve PR)

Recently, Evolve PR hosted an open Q&A session with the Creative Director of Neo Cab, Patrick Ewing. We’re sharing it with you in its full transcript to find out the great details about Neo Cab, just released this week!


Patrick: So I’m Patrick Ewing, the “Creative Director” and founder of Chance Agency… basically what this means to me is that I had the initial idea for the game and built our first prototypes, and I then assembled the true Neo Cab team so that we could make something real and good- making a game is a deeply collaborative process- it’s nothing without a strong multidisciplinary team that can speak the same design language.

When I was first working on the idea that would become Neo Cab (then called “Getaway”) I was at Campo Santo. We had just shipped Firewatch, on which I did coding, game design, and a some story work.

I was eager to make another narrative game for adults- like Firewatch, a story that engaged with some tough human issues while also being entertaining, soothing, and beautiful.

Before Campo Santo I was an early engineer at Twitter, working on the Twitter website. I was one of the first 100 employees there, working from 2009 – 2014… a lot of Neo Cab’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technocratic culture comes from what those years

I’m originally from Brooklyn, NY and I’m a film school dropout / self-taught software engineer. I think that about covers it for me!

Neo Cab Key Art

Evolve PR: So Neo Cab is based around the life of a Rideshare driver. Did the team have to use the service’s a lot as research as both a driver and passenger?

Patrick: Great question! Before we started writing, we set up some interviews with “Rideshare” drivers and other gig workers- friends of friends, mostly. Lyft, Uber, Zesty and Postmates were the folks we talked to right off the bat.

We also read through a few of the unofficial online forums where gig workers gather to share tips, make jokes, and ask for help. We learned a ton from these meetings- it was apparent right off the bat that every driver has at least one amazing story to tell.

This combined with a bunch of ad-hoc conversations with cab drivers over the past few years gave us a lot of insight into the stories, the game-mechanics, and the lingo of rideshare drivers. For example “pax” for passenger or “deactivated” for fired… all of that is real rideshare terminology.

 

Evolve PR: The FeelGrid system is an excellent idea to help players gauge what to say in a conversation. What was the thought process behind creating this system?

Patrick: Thanks! The idea of a wearable device that shows your emotions dates back to a short story I wrote nine or ten years ago. I’m fascinated by the ways we all, as humans, are unaware of our own emotions, sometimes purposefully ignoring or repressing them to fool ourselves into feeling differently. The story wasn’t particularly good, but the idea resurfaced in the early days of writing Neo Cab.

Because we were modelling the experience of a real Lyft/Uber driver, we knew that the player would be judged at the end of each ride by a stranger, and that this rating would be crucial for preserving their job. But I could see right away that this would make a very easy AND boring game- you would just be incentivized to be “nice” all the time to get 5 stars.

So the wearable bracelet idea from 10 years ago came back to me- with this, the player could immediately see Lina’s emotions, and be forced to deal with them, and to see how they react to player choice.

By making emotions visible, it could become a real gameplay system, and interact with the “star rating” mechanic- creating “tough tradeoffs” between doing well at your job and personal wellbeing- the kind of choices all of us have to make every day, but amplified because your whole job is riding on that 5 star rating.

Feelgrid Neo Cab

Evolve PR: Since Neo Cab has somewhat of a “multiple paths” system in play, how many different endings does the game have?

Patrick: In terms of the framing story – the top level mystery and what you must choose once you unravel it- there are three endings.

Each has a distinct flavor, and also a large scale story effect that stems from the choices you’ve made along the way, and the emotional skills you’ve shown off in the final scene. There are also per-character endings for certain pax who you’ve formed deeper relationships with.

 

Evolve PR: How deep can your relationships with your Pax’s become?

Patrick: That’s a tough one because it some ways it arrived fully formed? haha

Even though in retrospect I’m sure it snowballed over time. The idea of having a lot of choice has always been core to me, and so thinking of a dark, neon lit map filled with strangers to meet was incredibly exciting- it’s like a framework where anyone could be your next ride. Plug that into the worries about automation and the gig economy that San Francisco (my home) is in the midst of right now, the weird dynamics of being rated by strangers, and the emotional landscape of absorbing whatever needs these strangers have when they step into your cab, and I knew we were on to something.

Our amazing Art Director, Vincent Perea, was the person who most suggested we try to NEVER leave the cab… to focus on that experience.

He’s got a great mind for embracing constraints and making a game feel highly polished though that kind of discipline.

Neo Cab Meet Pax

Evolve PR: How would you describe your outlook for the future of the real world, particularly regarding automation and AI?

Patrick: I think automation, in MANY jobs, is inevitable- it’s just a matter of when it happens, and how prepared we are as an economy & society to make that transition. In the world of transportation that our game explores, long-haul trucking will be the first to go fully automated, AFAICT.

As a job, long-haul trucking is terrible on your health, a real risk in terms of accidental deaths, and keeps people apart from their local communities and families… so it’s not a job that I think inherently deserves to exist forever. That said, it employs a huge number of people in this country, and was once a solid middle-class job you could raise a family on… so if Tesla and Uber were to sweep in and eliminate all of those jobs in a short period of time, that would be a disaster. It’s these sorts of gray areas that we wanted to explore in this game- we wanted to look at the future of automation and labor without dystopian OR utopian goggles on.

Similarly, I think it’s troubling that sometimes when an AI eliminates a whole profession, it doesn’t actually do what it promised it would, in terms of e.g. making the service cheaper or better.

In many cases, automating something like an insurance worker’s job leaves everything exactly the way it was… it’s just that all the money is going to a smaller number of people (the folks who own and operate the algorithm) instead of a lot of people (the many humans who were individually doing the calculations before)

In the best possible scenario, automation could lead to safer streets, less human drudgery, shorter work hours with the same quality of life. We could make it a goal to gradually have humans working less and less, and filling their remaining time with more fulfilling pursuits.

Instead, it seems like we are seeing the working week stay at a fixed length, jobs continuing to be drudgery, and wages stagnating… it’s not promising right now

 

Evolve PR: Why are video games, a medium that emerged from  computer technology, better suited to point out the potential risks of the same technology (in this case: human redundancy) they found their origins in?

Patrick: I think it might be Ian Bogost who first pointed out that what games are uniquely good at doing are exploring systems. A book can tell you one story, but a game can offer you the ability to explore that story from many angles, to poke and prod at parts of it and see how it responds, and this means it can be about more than just one person’s story, one person’s experience

We’re mostly focused on one tiny sliver of the overall systems of tech automation and centralization, of course, but the threads are in there, I think… by putting yourself in Lina’s shoes and having to choose to take an emotional hit just to get those 5 stars and get a little ratings bonus… I hope people feel like they’re plugged into this system

 

Evolve PR: The effect of emotions on communication is very important in this game. What did the developer team read/search to do this well in dialogues?

Patrick: A great book on this topic is “How Emotions are Made“.

Hearing an interview with this author, and then reading the book, was the final piece of the puzzle for making the Feelgrid work as a mechanic. We had known for a long time that the system needed to exist, but not how it should actually work.

It’s a balancing act between an emotions system that’s so simple that it feels dumb and non-human, or one that’s so complex that it’s impossible to understand or too complicated to write dialog for.

“How emotions are made” introduced us to the Circumplex Model of Human Affect, which was the basis of the Feelgrid.

It also gave us the insight that all emotions start in the body… there’s a baseline way that you feel “in your bones” that’s universal

That was the right level of detail for this game- the 4 main colors and the gradations between them.

In dialog, then, the player can see that Lina is “red” (worked up, feeling badly) but then they get to put their own meaning onto this (is she angry? anxious? scared?)

The book suggests that in a sense this is what we are all, always doing. Emotions start vaguely but intensely, in the body, and then we apply our own mental models on top of that feeling to become specifically “jealous” or “angry” etc.

Our designer Laura Sly did a really nice talk on the specifics for those who are interested:


Evolve PR: This year seems to be the taxi videogames one: Night Call first, and Neo Cab then. Which has been the inspiration for you to create such a game?

Patrick: I feel like I’ve spoken a bit about the initial inspiration on our team, but I can say that (knowing the Night Call team… we’ve gotten to hang out a bit since we discovered each others’ games in mid-production) I think both our teams are first and foremost storytellers.

And we both saw that a late-night cab ride is a uniquely powerful storytelling moment- two or three strangers crossing paths for a brief moment, anonymously, an opportunity for honesty and intimacy… or perhaps danger… or deception etc.

Shows like Taxicab Confessions or movies like Night On Earth or Collateral are so powerful in terms of the stories they tell in such a constrained setting.

 

Evolve PR:  This is a very intimate version of a cyberpunk tale. What led you to choose this kind of setting?

Patrick: Intimacy is sorely lacking in games! I don’t know about y’all, but I can only save the world so many times before it gets boring

I find it much more relatable to meet somebody who is having a bad night, or a bad year, and seeing if we can connect over that and maybe help them turn that around.

In a very crowded games marketplace that felt like a missing space. Brie Code calls this impulse to help people in crisis “tend and befriend”, it’s the complementary stress response to “fight or flight”.

Nearly all games trigger your fight or flight response. We wanted to make a Brie Code game to possibly balance that out!

 

Evolve PR:  The interaction between the protagonist and her passengers is very human, also thanks to the possibility of the player to give multiple answers. How complex was it to manage all the emotional aspects of the dialogues?

Patrick: VERY COMPLEX haha

I highly recommend speaking to our Writing Lead, Paula Rogers, about the techniques she had to develop to manage a story that branches in two ways- on choice, and on emotion.

On a given ride, there is 2x-3x more writing in that ride than is possible to see in one playthrough, because of all this branching.

It also is a real superpower to write a character who’s mental state is simultaneously in 2 or 3 different states. It’s pretty mind-bending and takes a ton of practice.

Neo Cab DashCam Camera

Evolve PR: Relationships and humanity are very important in Neo Cab, and they are presented as threatened by big corps. Where you afraid that people might understand the game’s critique as technophobia instead of a hard critique of technological development as a false idea of progress?

Patrick: Yes, we definitely didn’t want to fall into the trap of “We live in a society!” critiques… technological change is never all good, or all bad. and humans manage to keep a lot of the best/worst parts about us steady through it all

That’s why we steered clear of things like “phone addiction” or “i’m becoming a cyborg” type stories and focused more on societal things, and universal social things

Dating through an app, for instance, isn’t more or less awkward than dating by phone, or through singles ads in a newspaper. But it is differently awkward when the app starts interfering more directly in the courtship process (this is an example from the Fiona storyline).

But yeah, we made a point that our biggest radicals in the game, Radix, are “anti-car, not anti-tech”.

We didn’t want to caricature any person or political position.

 

Evolve PR: How did you come up with this setting – are you afraid the world will turn out this way?

Patrick: I would refer to the earlier questions about Automation, for the most part. We started with the cab-driver setting, and then began thinking about how Uber (and Lyft) have the stated goals of firing every one of their drivers and replacing them with AIs. That’s in the paperwork, it’s what their stock price valuations are entirely based on… so in that sense, this future does feel less like sci-fi and more like the plan of present day Megacorps. Capra, our automated giant that is Lina’s former employer, is a company I can very much imagine existing.

Uber (for example) has menaced journalists who’ve looked into them, worked with stolen technology from other companies, covered up internal harassments allegations (allegedly, allegedly, please don’t sue our indie game company Uber)

So yeah, if you picture a world where companies continue to gobble up smaller fish, tech keeps getting centralized, and industries are disrupted by AI… all of that money and power flows up to the biggest fish. Uber wants, Lyft, Tesla, Google… all of them want to be that fish.

 

Evolve PR: Why did you choose to make the game without voice actors?

Patrick: Primarily we made this choice because we wanted people to play this game on the go. We targeted Nintendo Switch and iOS from the get-go. When travelling especially, players want to read and progress quickly, so they can take a “ride” in Neo Cab on their morning commute, or before nodding off at night.

Having no voice acting makes the game feel more like a good book- it progresses as fast as you can read it, and you can hear your favorite characters’ voices in your head.

Neo Cab Scenery

Evolve PR: Why did you choose a narrative focus?

Patrick: Narrative games are in our bones! Coming off of working on the Firewatch team, and as a lifelong lover of classic adventure games (LucasArts especially) and modern narrative games like 80 Days and Papers, Please… this was the only type of game we considered for our first game as a studio.

 

Evolve PR: It’s obvious from the game’s aesthetics and music that you guys are big cyberpunk and synthwave fans. What media has been the most inspiring for the creative direction of this game? Any movie or artist in particular?

Patrick: Ahh, I wish Vincent Perea was here to chime in on this, but we’ve talked about this at such great length I can just say what he would say :p

We were massively inspired by the street photography of Liam Wong  (who is also a game designer!)

For the shots and storyboarding, we were inspired by The Night Of, Taxicab Confessions,  Taxi Driver and Collateral

Film-wise, we borrowed some animation techniques and moments from Ghost in the Machine.

And of course the original Blade Runner and Syd Mead in general, that’s inescapable.

 

Evolve PR: What made you all make the decision to do a soft launch on Apple Arcade first?

Patrick: Well, when we first heard about Apple Arcade, it was still a complete secret, but the idea was immediately appealing to us… so many people getting a chance to try our game for (almost) free? It’s a super exciting moment.

Especially for a pure-story game, which is a niche that can sometimes struggle to find an audience. So as soon as we were chosen to be part of AA, we were more or less on their schedule.

We were going to launch when AA launched, you know? And had to work out our other dates around that date… our others platforms could launch anytime, but not BEFORE AA.

That’s about all I can say!
Evolve PR: Managing your life as a driver is very similar to real life. Filling up your car with charge, different prices and even having different places to sleep around the city with some being “better” than others. Are there certain factors of that loop that you wanted to add that were canned?

Patrick: Great question!

So yeah, in any game design you have to avoid simulating too much. If it’s not worth the players’ attention, it shouldn’t be on screen. If the mechanic doesn’t slot in with the overall story of the game or the tone of the world, it should be canned.

We cut all sorts of things, little and big. Originally charging stations were going to be discoverable mid-ride, but the risk of running out of fuel in the middle of nowhere wasn’t worth the challenge of having to find stations.

We used to simulate weather at random too, which boosted surge pricing… I still like that mechanic, we mostly cut it because of performance reasons on mobile (ran sims are hard to do well with our graphics style)

Neo Cab Map

Evolve PR: I noticed some non-binary/trans representation in one of the characters in your game. How was the character design process when planning on the different Pax’s that you’d drive around?

Patrick: Paula Rogers (Managing Editor / Writing Lead) gave a good example of how we create a Neo Cab character (in this blog post).

With Azul, we made sure that we understood their own view of their gender first before we started with the character design.

It was also essential that one of our team members is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns- I don’t think we could have felt fully comfortable with the representation without having them to talk to during the design process.

This was one reason we also decided to make the fact that Azul is nonbinary implicit- Lina just picks up on this from the way Azul dresses and carries themselves, and naturally switches out of respect. Turns out she’s right and they don’t even need to discuss it.

Despite all the dystopia of the economy in Neo Cab, this was one aspect that felt like a hopeful, and very Californian, near-future… gender expression that’s not a strict binary doesn’t have to be what defines Azul’s character arc. It’s just a part of their character, not the whole of it.

 

Evolve PR: Where can we find you and the team on Social?

Patrick: Our game is @neocabgame on all platforms, I’m @hoverbird on all platforms, and more info about the game (like our dev log, press kit etc.) is at neocabgame.com

Neo Cab launched on October 3rd.

Atari VCS Enters Pre-Production Ahead of the First Backer Shipments

Atari VCS News

The Atari VCS is on the way, and they’re shooting to transform the TV-centric home entertainment experience, with their ever-expanding library of games. This will include classics, and remastered favorites, streaming media and so much more. With that, the Atari VCS has entered pre-production, and the first wave of units are scheduled to ship to Indiegogo backers in December. They released a project update on Medium that went into greater detail on the project proper. If you’d like greater details on the technology and visuals that are going into this powerful console, you can do it in the link above.

The Atari VCS lineup of systems, bundles, and peripherals are available for preorder at GameStop.com, Walmart.com, and AtariVCS.com, for shipments starting in March 2020. Pricing starts at $249.99 USD for the Atari VCS 400 (4GB) Onyx Base model and goes up to $389.99 for one of three Atari VCS 800 (8GB) “All-In” system bundles that include the Atari VCS Classic Joystick (available separately for $49.99) and Atari VCS Modern Controller ($59.99), which were created in partnership with PowerA. Atari will announce international presale dates soon.

Antlion Audio Announces ‘ModMic USB’

ModMic USB and UNI

Antlion Audio revealed a pair of new projects coming off the back of their first full revamp of their “ModMic” products, and they are the ModMic USB and the ModMic Uni. The ModMic USB is the first wired USB attachable mic. Antlion Audio are using new mic capsules, a dedicated mic pre-amp, and a premium ADC chipset. They aimed to create the easiest to use, best quality, wired ModMic ever. Plus, it has that sweet digital mute tech from the ModMic Wireless.

For those of you that prefer the 3.5mm connection, the ModMic Uni is just what you need. You can plug it into any 3.5mm port, or use their USB/XLR adapters as needed. They gutted the original, from the pop-filter to termination, and offer the same premium mic capsule. It also has new RF shielding, wiring, and a new mute switch.

DOOM Eternal Delayed

As confirmed earlier today on Twitter, id Software has announced that DOOM Eternal will have its launch date delayed until March 20, 2020.

In addition to the delay, id Software has announced that Invasion Mode will launch as a free update after launch, that the Nintendo Switch release will come after other console releases, and that DOOM 64 will be a pre-order bonus, playable once DOOM Eternal launches.

 

Green Hell Review

By Terris Harned (NWOrpheus)

It’s kind of hard to play Green Hell without your mind making connections to the 1987 Guns N’ Roses hit “Welcome to the Jungle”, especially if you’re an old fart like me. Much like in the song, this survival game, set in the Amazonian jungle, is full of things that will make you bleed and quite probably scream. I found the game to be quite enjoyable, in a very edge of your seat “is that going to kill me?” kind of way.
 

 
Like many survival games Green Hell tends to be difficult until you learn the tricks and then all the difficulty fades away entirely, even if the suspense doesn’t. I found it to be an engaging game all the same, with a story fraught with mystery that drives you to keep playing. The game has a brief tutorial which introduces you to the game’s mechanics and hints at some of the story. In fact, there are some clues in the tutorial which come into play later in the game that can be vital to discovering the “better” of the two endings.

While you can skip the tutorial, there is a sequence after it that shows how you came to be in the jungle without any supplies (except your backpack, long range walkie talkie radio, and smartwatch). Given the likelihood of death as you first learn the game, coupled with the sequence being unskippable, I recommend leaving the first save game slot, which the game auto-creates immediately after the sequence, as a starting point.

In order to save the game at all you will need to build a shelter structure: either a palm shelter, a frame and a roof, or some other form of roofed covering. A simple palm bed on the ground will allow you to rest and recuperate energy, but it will not allow you to save the game. When you’ve established yourself one of these structures and can save, just move down to the second save slot, and you’re good to go -unless you’re on permadeath difficulty, in which case your saves are deleted when you die!

Before you get started you’ll be able to adjust a number of settings related to the difficulty of the game. You can toggle whether or not natives will appear, as well as a wide variety of animals that can sting, bite, claw, poke, or otherwise make your trip through the jungle an unpleasant one.

You can also adjust how quickly your macronutrients will deplenish. If it’s your first play through, you might want to consider at least turning this setting down, so that you’ll need to spend less time gathering food and water, which will give you more time to learn the rest of the game’s mechanics.

 

Adjust the settings to your preferences and enjoyment level.

Food and water are your primary and constant concerns, even with the rate turned down. Most of the bodies of water in the game are brackish or contain parasites. Parasites will cause your macronutrients to deplete quicker, meaning you spend even more time focusing on food and water, and getting too many parasites can quickly lead to a death spiral. Parasites are relatively easy to cure, once you’ve discovered the method. I’ll leave it to you to discover what those methods might be (either by gameplay, or Google).

The one thing I will say in regards to keeping yourself hydrated is that coconuts are your best friend. Finding them is always a joyous occasion. Coconuts, when eaten, also provide both carbohydrates and fats, which are two of your three food based macronutrients, lacking only protein (the fourth item on your smartwatch simply being hydration).

 

Really though, protein and carbs are easy to get in the early game. It’s fats you’ll be scrounging for.

Learning how to supply each of the macronutrients is a core part of learning the game, which I wouldn’t dream of spoiling for you, so we’ll leave that for the time being. Suffice to say, the jungle provides everything you need to survive.

Your smartwatch does more than just monitor your hunger levels. It is also a useful tool in tracking your location via GPS coordinates as well as keeping track of the time. Without a torch, the jungle can be a very difficult place to navigate at night. Being away from your camp, especially in the early game, can be a risky endeavor.

Resting is a core part of the gameplay, and a good way to pass the night hours. Falling asleep on the ground can have consequences, aside from just making you dirty. Sleeping on a bedroll, and near a burning campfire, helps reduce the chance of discovering you have a lovely little parasite when you wake up.

Worms and leeches are just two of the many ways that existence in the jungle can tax your sanity. Provided you care for them quickly they’re not a great concern. Left alone they will cause your mind to break down, which will eventually lead to hallucinations, and this is yet another way that you can death spiral. Keep an eye out for the magnifying glass in the lower left corner of your screen. This will tell you when you’ve sustained a malady of some sort, be it a falling injury, parasite, bug bite, or gaping wound from a jaguar.

 

Never underestimate the usefulness of a fishbone. Also doubles as a toothpick, in a pinch.

If treated properly, there are very few things in Green Hell that are instantly deadly. Infection is a very real danger if a wound is left unbandaged. But even infections can be treated through creative game mechanics.

Bandages, leaf beds, shelters, and cook fires are all things that you obtain through crafting. Green Hell actually has several different distinct crafting methods, as well as more than one way of obtaining crafting recipes.

The first and most commonly used crafting method involves targeting an item, either in your backpack or on the ground, right clicking, and then clicking where it says “craft”. This opens a special window where you place objects on a large stone and combine them into something else. This method is used for creating bandages, tools, weapons, and other simple objects.

 

When crafting from within your inventory, you don’t actually need to know the recipe. You can learn a recipe by picking up objects, by crafting them, or by raising your crafting skill.

There is a crafting skill, and the higher it is, the greater durability of the items you create. Similarly each type of item (axes, blades, spears etc) has a skill that determines how effectively you use those items. A higher axe skill with the right sort of axe can reduce the number of swings it takes to fell a tree. A higher quality spear, combined with a high spear skill, can make defeating the jungle’s dangerous denizens easier.

The second method for crafting is by opening your notebook and finding the object you wish to create. The notebook will list the item, as well as everything you need to construct it. You then click the item, and place it in the ground or wherever it is appropriate in the world. A white ghost of the object will appear. It is now up to you to place the objects listed in the notebook into the ghost of the object, in order to construct it.

 

For objects that you have to place, you’ll typically unlock a recipe by finding an ingredient for that recipe (such as mud) or by finding an example of the item in the world, like a stone circle fireplace, or drying rack.

I rather enjoyed the feel of this style of crafting, even though carrying larger objects felt like a chore at times. I think feeling like a chore is exactly the point. Having to chop down a tree and carry several logs, as well as a number of long sticks, then using ropes from my inventory, gives this a feeling of it actually being a task that requires effort. In other games I might just have all the pieces in my inventory, and place them wherever I like, which isn’t terribly realistic.

The final method of crafting items is in interacting with the world or with other objects you’ve placed. Cooking on fires is a great example of this, as you can place a piece of meat near a fire and it will cook over time. Making mud bricks is a second example. In this case, you must first use the notebook method to create a brick drying area. You then place mud and campfire ash together and form it into bricks.

This actually segues nicely out of crafting, and into the game’s graphics; in particular, the animations of Green Hell. I noticed that when crafting bricks, your hands move around a bit, and do some stuff… but it feels very arbitrary. It doesn’t seem like the movement of the hands and what is being made actually go together. For a game otherwise focused on realism, I found this disheartening. It pulled me out of my immersion, and is one of the ways I was disappointed with the game.

The second area where I felt there was a lack is when you interact with water. You can hear a splashing sound as your feet move through rivers and such, or if you jump into a deeper body of water that you can swim in, but there is no observable splash. You don’t seem to make any impact on the water itself, whatsoever, and this too draws from the immersion.

The final issue I had, graphically, was the fact that some hitboxes seemed way off. When placing the roof on a structure, you have to aim at the center of a structure, rather than its top, otherwise the roof won’t snap to the right location. When picking up some objects, especially fish after having speared them, you have to aim away from the object in order to interact with it.
 

I really don’t understand what’s going on here, but eventually you get used to it.

Otherwise, the graphics of the game are great. As I said elsewhere in the review, I frequently found myself literally on the edge of my seat, leaning forward and excited. It’s a fun feeling trying to anticipate where a snake might be. When you hear the skittering of a spider or scorpion in the underbrush, you might react by jumping and turning to run quickly away.

Green Hell isn’t the most challenging survival game I’ve ever played; I honestly think The Long Dark holds that title for me. But it is fun, relatively unique (The Forest is the closest game, but there are plenty of differences), and engaging. The story is far better than people give it credit for, and I would tell you more about it if I could do so without spoiling it for you. Plus, after you finish the story mode, you can play survival (which drops you into a random area on the map), or complete one of the many challenge modes the game has.

With a $24.99 USD price point on Steam the game definitely gives a good value for the amount of play time you’re likely to spend in it. I have a couple problems with Green Hell, but nothing that makes me shy from recommending it overall. I give Green Hell 4 out of 5 coconuts (85%).

Note: A game key was provided for review purposes.

Chivalry: Medieval Warfare Releases New Letter to the Community

Chivalry Medieval Warfare Letter

Back in 2012, Chivalry: Medieval Warfare launched from Torn Banner Studios, and it’s been a fun seven years of highs and lows. Today, Torn Banner Studios released a lengthy “Letter to the Community”, where they look back on where Chivalry came from, and where they are going from here.

They discuss the first moments of Chivalry as a gritty, visceral style of game that had not been seen, so it truly stood out on PC. They also point out they are looking to provide that next great “moment” that Chivalry 1 provided. The team spends a great deal of time on the successes and failures of Chivalry, and are open about what they got wrong. You can find the full article here.

Profane Brings Twin-Stick Shooting to Steam Soon

A new twin-stick shooter is coming to Steam, developed by OverPowered Team, and published by Alternative Software: Profane. It will challenge players to defeat their enemies before the clock runs out. Time is money and health, so split-second decision making is imperative to success. In Profane, players embody “Talaal”, with the last of an ancient Gods seven masks. Tlaaal tasks you with helping fight against her siblings that hunt her to absorb the mask’s power. But now you’re trapped, in a battle that isn’t your own, stuck in a cycle that seems impossible to break. But is it?

Profane recently received the coveted “Best Action Game” in Tencent’s “Game Without Borders” program, seeing off competition from hundreds of developers worldwide, where gameplay, visual style and narrative were key elements in the judging process.

Profane features:

  • Customizable ability loadouts allowing players to optimize their game style.
  • Competition-focused gameplay enabling you to challenge friends and beat hi-scores.
  • Multiple game modes, including Rogue-lite.
  • Twitch compatibility allowing viewers to affect the game, upgrading and refreshing the game experience.
  • Full gamepad and controller support

Space Robinson is Now Live on Steam

Space Robinson Trailer 2019

Space Robinson, the latest title from Luxorix and Alawar Premium is now available on Steam today, for 9.99, with a week-long 10% discount to celebrate. As an engineer of VAST, it’s up to you to perform maintenance on a distant planet. There are countless enemies to face though, as this is not a safe, friendly place to be. Space Robinson is a hardcore RPG with plenty of procedurally generated levels to explore.