Concept: Idea

This picture was added later (after I finished the game).

One Liner: Me Without Us is a 3D Experience Simulator which revolves around redemption and recuperation from the death of one’s family.

Tagline: The world is an empty shell without them, their memories give you sustenance. But living like this has no future, will the world ever regain its coluor? Will you ever be able to move on?

Concept: Me Without Us is a realistic 3D First Person Perspective Experience Simulator which focuses on exhibiting a particular feeling and its concurrences. The game aims to project the feeling of loss and everything that comes with it – sadness, depression and regret.

The story revolves around our character who has lost both their partner and child to an accident. It makes the player go on a journey of redemption and recovery by reliving different moments of the past.

Through different moments in the game, the player can experience special moments designed to be relatable and to induce a level of sadness. Through the different moments, the player is pushed into a state of mind wherein they have to make a decision. To either move on – or not…

Genre: The Game is a 3D Liner Story Driven Walking Simulator (Experience Simulator / Feeling Simulator)

Target Audience: The game is targeted towards players of age 18 and above. As the game tackles hard hitting topics, it is a prerequisite for players to be of an age to understand and accept the tones of the storyline.

Gameplay: The game is a typical walking simulator with a focus on emotions. These targeted emotions are played out through a series of interactions and linear scripted events. But since this game is only focused on making the player feel something, it’s preferable to call it an Experience Simulator.

Pillars: The game stands on a few pillars to produce the intended emotions with utmost gravity.

- Game Feel

o See – The game focuses on beautiful visuals to bring forth a sense of awe when interacting with the supernatural.

o Hear – The game is heavily dependent on music to introduce another dimension fixated on bolstering what the player sees and feels.

o Emotion – The game is based around making the player feel a certain group of emotions. And everything like the story, gameplay, music and visuals have been targeted to make the emotions come across stridently.

- Connection – One of the main goals of the game is to make connections between the player and the character and make the player draw parallels with the character. And feel what our character is feeling in the first person.

- Healing – Path to recovery is always different for different people. Some can cope, some cannot. Some choose vengeance, some choose reprieve. Some move on, some join. This is another angle I wanted the story to cover. The story of recovery and how it’s different for everyone.

Inspiration – Fragments of Him, Firewatch, Last of Us 2, God of War, Heavy Rain, Firewatch.

Tags – 3D Single Player Experience Simulator Unity Heavy Emotional Tones.

Trigger Warning: Death, Grief and Suicide.

Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist

Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald A Whirlwind Heist story is something that popped up on steam. You may be asking how can you review something where the title is longer than the game and the reality of it is the shortness of this game is what makes it so good you get the kind of experience that you would from the Stanley parable or the beginner's guide except in a much more condensed experience not to mention the fact that it's free. You can download this game off steam in a couple of minutes without paying a single penny and then go through the game and experience everything it has to offer which is actually a fair amount within under half an hour. They could have easily dragged out the concept of the game and the really engaging narrative it has over a longer period of time but they didn't need to, so they didn't and that's great, there's a pristine level of Polish in it's sound design, the narration and the graphics. Everything just works together to create this nice little neat packaged product, the only frustrating part is if you want more you can't get it it's that short, before you do get this is a great little one off adventure that I cannot recommend enough.

The Beginners Guide

Steam Image

The first question that propelled itself forward for me is one that I've seen quite a few other people raising and discussing so it is the first we will address, the question of coda. Is coda real the narrative just seems so neat each of his games that we play through seem to progress one into the other so organically that it's hard to imagine that they were otherwise intended. Everything is so transparently and unsubtly loaded so seductive and compelling and effortless to analyse. It's like every hack games journalists wet dream it turns out at least in the narrative that these meanings which are so ready to jump out of Coda's work a misplaced. It seems so obvious to Davey and I dare say to most people playing that these

scenes of products of a shaken and disturbed mind of loneliness and creative starvation. Most of the time we're playing through this or we're really interested in is reading coda and

as we find out in the tower we're wrong, there is no illness or self-harm here it's all projected by the narrator. It's an extreme case but Davey has gone so far in pursuit of this cannibalistic

obsession with finding, exposing and devouring the soul of the creator that he has crippled Coda. I'd like to plant a idea here and I will come back to it later, it doesn't matter whether Coda is real or not it is an interesting question and one that I think is worth talking about whether he's real whether he's an invention of Davey Wreden or even an aspect of Wreden himself are fruitful discussions but the truth of the matter is not essential and the hunt for the true Coda will distract and narrow our appreciation for the beginner's guide. As much as it did the narrator Davey's appreciation for Codas games but let's examine the analytic instinct that drives his obsession. For all the history of the written word with which I'm familiar and even today, most readers even professional readers that give themselves titles like critic or reviewer and presume to be better at discerning meaning than others almost everyone approaches artistic and literary objects in the same way, because if you see something in a game, or a book, or a film, or a painting that wasn't consciously and deliberately put there you must be mistaken, you must be talking shit right? so when you do say something there you want to know that the composer intended it. Because that confirmation will somehow make it legitimate, well I'll give you an allegory in 1963 a high school student named Bruce McAllister mailed a survey to a number of notable novelists questioning the conscious intent and methods of symbolism in their work, those that categorically denied consciously placing any kind of symbols in their work included Jack Kerouac, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury does this mean that the works of these writers are devoid of symbolism? and the meaning which attends it. You might say but there's the subconscious and the preconscious of the creator surely if we're clever enough we can work back through not only what they intended but also what and how they think and feel what causes of joy, and pain, and passion, and fear, and rage and then we can box in their soul with no chance to protest or escape. All of this in a little takeaway box and then we can gorge ourselves on it until we're all happily bloated and sick. Let's say we do this, let's say we perfectly discern and catalogue everything the creator places in their work both consciously and subconsciously we've learned everything about the Creator and nothing about ourselves. Are we done? do we stop there? do we throw everything else out and move on? have we gained everything we can from the work? these are of course hypothetical questions.......... but I hope you can see why they need asking the truth is many if not most critics still subscribe to this attitude. They cannot or will not take responsibility for their own compulsions. They run and hide like our narrator Davey they would sooner proclaim that they have found the author buried in the viscera of a work than can see that they have in fact found a grubby little mirror. In this I see equal measures of arrogance and cowardice, this attitude does not only affect the potential value and impact of a piece of work it also affects the creator. If the reader of viewer or player sees something shitty or abhorrent in your work they may well decide that your shitty or abhorrent person. This is what Davey did to Coda in the extreme and to be fair coda offered material to encourage it in the extreme but I'm quite certain that this is an anxiety which attends everyone that publishes or publicly displays their work, pretty much all the time. When you're intimate with your audience not only can they potentially find all of your own real weaknesses and insecurities as they dig around they'll also blame you for their own damn reflection and all the shitty things they find out about themselves. Unless you're a narcissist or some kind of magical self motivating machine enough of this pressure will cause you to withdraw in order to protect yourself and you'll start resenting your audience. The quality of your work will suffer and you'll stop feeling satisfied with what you produce because it's no longer personal it's cold and reluctant and contrived. The hunger for self-expression which used to drive you will remain unsatisfied and you will no longer have the inspiration or the confidence to satisfy it. Coda sees this happening in his work so he shuts down before it can completely destroy his creative integrity.