Moving Pixels Podcast

This week we conclude our nearly year long discussion of Life Is Strange.   Delving into the nitty gritty of episode five, we consider the overall arc of this story, its final choice, and how the game has handled relating its seemingly disparate plot points into one unified whole.

While the concluding episode of Life Is Strange was recently released, we are only just nearing its conclusion with our discussion of the fourth episode of the series.   This week we continue to consider our commitments to certain choices made in the game and our revisions of reality and the consequences of both on the life of Max Caulfield.

Our resident horror game aficionado recommended this game for discussion this Halloween week.   David Szymanski's horror titles, like The Moon Sliver and Fingerbones, seem to be gaining a bit of a cult following among horror fans, and at least some of those games seem to be sketching out the basis for a larger mythos that Szymanski is developing. As part of this mythos, The Music Machine is presented through a high contrast aesthetic and within the context of a Lovecraftian universe. The game tells a story about evil, both of an intentional nature and of a more awful, more accidental kind.

Coinciding with their announcement of Fallout 4, Bethesda released a free iOS version of Fallout to whet their fans appetite for the retro futuristic vibe of the series.   While both games are about surviving in a post-apocalyptic future, Fallout Shelter is more about managing the resources of a community than it is about guiding a single individual's adventures. This week we chat about the game and its commitment to collectivist concern. The needs of the many, after all, outweigh the needs of the few (or so we've been told by a certain pointy eared philosopher from outer space).

With its third episode, "Chaos Theory", Life is Strange gets stranger. Sure, this is a coming of age story that just happens to include a teenager that can time travel and has visions of an impending apocalypse, but the story so far has remained fairly focused on the difficulties of growing up and attending high school.   While that focus continues to be significant to this choice-driven, episodic point-and-click adventure, Max's power in this episode begins to develop in new ways, opening up the game's interest in choices and consequences on an even larger scale.

This episode of the podcast we crawl into the second episode of Life Is Strange.   Last time, we discussed a lot of the mechanics in the game, especially the rewind mechanic, that allows one to revise one's actions in a young girl's life. This time out we get into more of the characters that populate this world and also learn that some of the uglier events of adolescence just can't be revised, much as we might like them to be sometimes. Sometimes we just have to figure out how to cope with what is, no matter how much we would like to rewind.

This week we begin a series of five episodes about the episodic choice-driven point-and-click adventure game Life Is Strange.   By way of introduction, this week we're talking about the first episode but focusing mainly on how the game's mechanics work in contrast to other games in the genre, like Telltale's The Walking Dead, and how the mechanics support the coming of age story that seems to be the game's central focus.

A game whose dominant activity is searching a database may sound terrible. However, Sam Barlow's Her Story manages to use what would seem like basic database management skills to weave an intriguing mystery that explores the nature of storytelling, fairy tales, and identity.   This week we discuss the tactics and strategies of searching databases, solving mysteries, and how to determine the veracity of the stories that we tell ourselves and the stories that we tell each other.

Following up on our recent discussion of The Swapper and the questions that that game raises about the self, the soul, and the body, this week we take a look at another science fiction game with somewhat similar concerns, The Fall.   Instead of using cloning as a means of exploring the meaning of self identity, The Fall raises similar questions as The Swapper does through its consideration of how an artificial intelligence governs itself.

This week, the podcast revisits one of last year's critically acclaimed indie games, The Swapper.   Even through its game mechanics, The Swapper

With the arrival of a number of successful and interesting episodic games, this approach to gaming seems to be growing more and more common.   This week the Moving Pixels podcast discusses the possibilities and limitations of a crime drama in episodic game form, The Detail.

This week, the Moving Pixels podcast crew discuss the high contrast world of White Night.   White Night tells the story of a haunted house and a decaying American economy.

Context matters, or so we are told.   So, this week we consider how thematic, aesthetic, and narrative contexts effect how we understand the mechanics of the games that we play.

Last October on our Halloween themed episode, we briefly alluded to a 20 minute indie horror point-and-click game by Owl Creek Games called Sepulchre.   We admired the game for its moody tone and understated horror, but it seemed too brief an experience to devote a whole podcast to. With the release of The Charnel House Trilogy, Owl Creek decided to build upwards and outwards from that central story into a new triptych of tales in which Sepulchre serves as the centerpiece.   So, this week we spend a little time chatting about what Sepulchre has blossomed into in this new expanded version of the original.

It's a style. It's interactive comedy. It's a game.   Maybe? Even after playing it, it's hard to even begin to describe Jazzpunk.   But we'll do our best.

Action is most often the word that one expects to hear when talking about console games released by big publishers.   Square Enix's effort to release a game focused on investigation rather than on gunplay resulted in what is generally considered a failure, the ghost detective game Murdered: Soul Suspect. This week we consider what went right and went wrong in the resulting product.

For a video game designed within a game genre known for its often less spectacle-driven storytelling, The Cat Lady is surprisingly brutal, violent, and often appalling.   That being said, it is also a horror game that is more interested in the horrors of real life, depression and anxiety, than it is in its gorier and terrifying backdrop. This week we discuss the 2012 indie game and what it might have to say about the kind of horrors that real people grapple with everyday.

Valiant Hearts is not another first person shooter set in World War II. Instead, Valiant Hearts makes players puzzle through the oft forgotten significance of World War I to European history.   This week we discuss its choice of presenting the Great Conflict through cartoon aesthetics along with its puzzles and how these still manage to express the very serious events and consequences of World War I.

The Sims meets nihilism in this life simulator set within a war torn urban center.   This War of Mine is provocative, and this week we discuss the emergent narratives that arise from playing this indie from 11 bit Studios.

Shadow of Mordor features some beautifully designed mechanics, combat, and an innovative and interesting system, the Nemesis system, that approaches the development of your opponents in an innovative way.   It also tells a really stupid story.   Nevertheless, we can't stop playing it.