They say the camera never lies, but that doesn’t mean it always tells the whole truth. So accustomed are we to the concept of a side-scrolling platform game whose viewpoint exists purely as our window into a world that it’s a shock to discover it might be someone else’s perspective too, someone keeping tabs on our every move. Fortunately, in American Arcadia, that someone is on your side, under your control even, along with the little running man at the centre of your screen.
It may have been no small feat to collapse first- and third-person views together like this, but for Madrid’s Out Of The Blue Games, the idea felt like a natural next step. While still developing their first game, Call Of The Sea, the studio heads decided they needed a second project that could be lined up to follow soon after. “For a small studio like ours, it’s good to keep doing games and not wait after you release the first one,” Tatiana Delgado, studio co-founder and creative director, tells us. They called a meeting of the design team and the core of what would become American Arcadia was spawned in that session. “Sometimes the magic flows,” as Delgado puts it.
Initially, they were keen to make a side-scrolling game, a desire that merged with a shared interest in dystopian escape films such as The Truman Show, Logan’s Run and The Island, and TV series The Prisoner. Yet their experience with the firstperson Call Of The Sea also led them to wonder if they could incorporate that perspective somehow. “We thought, ‘OK, what if you have someone inside this dystopia and someone outside helping that person?’” Delgado recalls. “And everything came together.”
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Denne historien er fra June 2024-utgaven av Edge UK.
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Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles
Anyone familiar with the concept of kitbashing is already halfway to understanding what Tomas Sala’s open-world builder is all about.
Children Of The Sun
René Rother’s acrid revenge thriller – an action game with its limbs broken and forcibly rearranged into the shape of a spatial puzzler – is at once a bonafide original and an unlikely throwback. Cast your eyes right and you wouldn’t blink if we told you this was a forgotten Grasshopper Manufacture game from the early PS3 era (we won’t be at all surprised if this finds a spot on Suda51’s end-of-year list).
Post Script
What does Rise Of The Ronin say for PS5 exclusivity?
Rise Of The Ronin
Falling in battle simply switches control to the next person up, and then quick revive fixes everything
Post Script
The pawn and the pandemic
Dragon's Dogma 2
The road from Vernworth to Bakbattahl is scenic but arduous. Ignore the dawdling mobs of goblins, and duck beneath the chanting harpies that circle on the currents overhead, and even moving at a hurried clip it is impossible for a party of four to complete the journey by nightfall.
BLUE MANCHU
How enforced early retirement eventually led Jonathan Chey back to System Shock
THE MAKING 0F.... AMERICAN ARCADIA
How a contrast of perspectives added extra layers to a side-scrolling platform game
COMING IN TO LAND
The creator of Spelunky, plus a super-group of indie developers, have spent the best part of a decade making 50 games. Has the journey been worth it?
VOID SOLS
This abstract indie Soulslike has some bright ideas