Now, I’ve never known anyone to take a cat for a walk, but this Vermillia lass seems to be having a real time of it. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings — Gerardo Gutiérrez (@Maaambo_uh) September 12, 2020 Sucker as I am for warm desert sunsets, artist Gerardo Gutiérrez has immediately pulled me in with this whimsical scene of a girl chasing down a wild cat. Following a similar aesthetic thread as games like Gris and Alto’s Odyssey, Vermillia (both the game and the lead’s name) follows said kid delving into the underworld to rescue her loved ones, by way of some slick sandy platforming. I’ve seen more hellish underworlds, is what I’m saying. I’ll readily admit I don’t quite know what’s happening in Collin Eye’s Changes. It’s awfully pretty, though. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings — Collin Eye (@collin_eye) September 13, 2020 As is often the case when dredging up beauties for this weekly column, it’s surprisingly hard to find info on Eye’s elusive puzzler. Relatively new to this whole twitter lark, his feed is a progression of shimmering tiles, rippling geometry, William Blake excerpts and cryptic quotes suggesting there’s something quite alive in this recursive, grid-bound ecosystems. Without some proper context, though, all I can really say is “gosh, that’s quite lovely innit?” Next up, a quick city-break to the Balkans where something’s gone quite terribly wrong. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings — Dark-1 Games #skopjegame (@Dark1_games) September 12, 2020 An open-ended, roguelite-ish shooter set in an alt-history Yugoslavia, Skopje is drawn in a gorgeous comic book style. While it’s all rendered in 3D, the brutal capitol’s warped inhabitants skew more Void Bastards than Borderlands, shambling through a dismal, apocalyptic world painted in terrifically bold palettes. Strange as it is, there’s a delight in grounding the game in a real-world city - even if entire blocks shift and change after each death. Skopje is heading to Steam “soon” via early access, and the devs reckon it’ll linger there for about two years before being done. Finally, we’re closing off this week with a sight that’ll be familiar to anyone who’s ever dipped into Half-Life 2 mapping. An odd quirk of Valve’s Source Engine is that if you forget to put a skybox around a level, the world will repeat itself over the blank spaces - smeared across the space where the void would be. In a brilliant move, mapper and indie dev Tea has gone and turned that into a chill artscape. Shards of colour paint themselves upon the void, rooms collapse inwards upon themselves. Broken, haunting, brilliant stuff.
