Month: May 2019

Lucas Pope is an important name in modern gaming—not only did he help bring us Uncharted and Uncharted 2, but he's also responsible for the indie smash hit Papers, Please, which managed to pack a surprising amount of storytelling and emotion into what is effectively a document stamping simulator.

But we're particularly fond of Pope's 2018 murder mystery Return of the Obra Dinn, where players must figure out what happened to all 60 souls aboard a ship that has turned up in port bereft of life (think sort of a mash-up of Clue and Event Horizon). The game's low-fi monochrome graphical style is meant to evoke 80s- and 90s-era Macintosh adventure games, and it works stunningly well—the stark polygonal shapes and 1-bit stipple-shading are instantly evocative of the era. (For me, firing up Obra Dinn triggers powerful memories of hours spent at my high school computer lab, eschewing real work to play a seemingly endless pile of HyperCard adventures. Though I fought on the side of the IBMs in the Great BBS Platform Wars of the early 90s, I just couldn't keep my paws off of those damn Macs.)

In Obra Dinn, players use a small device on or near each of the ship's 60 bodies to show them a brief moment in time where that person died, and the player must then make sure that the means of that person's death is properly recorded in a logbook. It's a mechanism that mixes together elements of logic puzzles and text adventures, and while Pope put a lot of time and thought into the pick-a-word sentence builder and the various semantic structures players might use to frame their murder-theories ("Tom knifed Bob" and "Tom stabbed Bob" and "Tom cut Bob" all have to be interpreted by the game as holding the same underlying meaning), there was one monster he wasn't prepared to face: localization.

Enlarge / The Stark children during happier times? (Back in April when the final season of Game of Thrones premiered in Belfast and no one else knew what was coming.) (credit: Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic for HBO)

Like many workplaces, the Ars Orbital HQ has been filled with many Game of Thrones proclamations these last six weeks. With the series finale now behind us, we've compiled other staffers' final thoughts below. For a full review of the series' final season, head to Jennifer Ouellette's thorough analysis. Warning: It's all spoilers from here on out.

A matter of time

HBO is well-known for canceling beloved series before their time, occasionally offering as recompense a couple of movie-length “episodes” after the fact to tie up loose ends for the diehards. If not for its mammoth budget and record-breakingly bombastic set pieces—plus, of course, the fact that the show is one of the biggest cultural touchstones of the past decade—the final season of Game of Thrones would have felt much like one of those hurried cancelled-show denouements, the kind where writers frantically check off boxes and smash round plot points into square holes.

Over much of its existence, Game of Thrones was nothing if not unhurried, occasionally to a fault. The show felt like something that was always going to be there, and conceiving of an ending to its many slow-moving plot threads and character arcs generally seemed so far away that it wasn’t worth speculating about. It was always going to be an unenviable task to bring such a mammoth work to any sort of conclusion, nevermind a universally satisfying one, and we have little reason to believe that the broad contours of the show’s ending differ drastically from George R.R. Martin’s vision. In fact, if the ending had been given time to breathe (at least a full season, but more realistically two), we might have had a successful ending (assuming some of the more galling decisions were also left on the cutting room floor).

Enlarge / Are you telling me you don't pack remote-detonation explosives, a dozen clips full of bullets, and a silenced pistol on your family kayak trip? Phantom: Covert Ops, a VR stealth game coming later this year to Oculus Quest and Oculus Rift, would like to have a word with your camping-trip organizer. (credit: Oculus Studios / nDreams)

SANTA MONICA, California—I could not stop giggling.

I had just watched a pitch for a new single-player stealth video game from Oculus Studios, titled Phantom: Covert Ops, and was intrigued. The video looked like an interesting game's opening sequence, in which players slip into a defended terrorist compound by paddling beneath its steel belly in a very quiet kayak. That's a cool, REI-style way to begin a VR version of Metal Gear Solid, I thought. I was sure we'd soon see a hero hop onto land and get down to VR-espionage business.

Then the 30-second video ended, and a producer for the game gestured to a series of Oculus Quest demo stations while talking at length about this "military kayak" system and how it enabled "free and comfortable exploration" within the confines of VR.