Cicerone53

Hand-drawn zombie adventure patterned after LucasArts titles seeks funding for 2021 release.

Is there anything more exhilarating and terrifying than the unknown horizon? The world outside your front door is big and full of possibilities, and stepping out into it might just as easily lead you to unglimpsed vistas and new friends as it could to danger and despair. In some ways every story is about traveling […]

Contrary to the popular Hollywood portrayal of exorcists engaging in knock-down, drag-out spiritual combat with the Prince of Darkness, in the real world an exorcist’s job—in most Christian doctrines, at least—is usually quite prosaic. While dogma holds that direct engagement with demonic entities is possible, Church-trained exorcists spend much more time on investigation, fact-finding and […]

We’ve all had it happen: stuck on a tricky puzzle, you come up with a solution that makes perfect sense. Given everything you have on hand, it absolutely ought to work—but when you try it out you’re told, with no justification, that it doesn’t. You want to throw a rock to knock that beehive down? […]

The Longing tells a simple story: you are a Shade, the lone remaining subject of a weary king whose power is almost spent. With the last of his energy, your liege tasks you to keep watch over his underground realm while he retreats into a four-hundred-day slumber to recover his strength. Once he’s asleep the […]

Sable is a visually striking coming-of-age adventure about growth and development—about going out into the world and discerning through experience just who you are and what you really value. It’s a game about learning by doing, about examining your own actions to try to understand what they say about you, about taking as much time […]

There’s something oddly inviting about a spooky old mansion. The menacing manservants, the cobwebbed furniture, the dusty portraits whose eyes seem to follow you around the room: the less welcoming the place is, the more it practically begs to be explored. It might conceal long-lost tomes of forbidden knowledge, prisoners bricked up in a secret […]

While playing Chasing Static I couldn’t stop thinking of Penumbra, the 2006 tech demo that put Frictional Games on the map. Penumbra is little more than a historical footnote now, overshadowed by its commercially released namesake and the studio’s later successes, but that freeware proof-of-concept paved the way for such classics as SOMA and the […]

The marketing for Ourea describes it as “a cinematic puzzle game about discovering the harrowing past of a long-forgotten world,” in which you “unravel the mysterious history of your people” and “traverse a story-rich environment.” The emphasis is said to be on cinematic shots, environmental puzzles, and an interactive world that will “change and adapt […]

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil Must give us pause… Shakespeare, not surprisingly, had it right. The dread of something after death has always lurked at the back of human consciousness, and it’s no stretch to say that nearly everyone has dreamed of […]