Along with showing off a bunch of upcoming games during its showcase on Thursday, Annapurna Interactive announced some developer partnerships. One of them is with a new studio called Ivy Road from powerhouse indie developers Davey Wreden and Karla Zimonja.
I am thrilled to announce that @zusty, @C418 and I have started a new video game studio called Ivy Road! We are working with @A_i on an unannounced game, and I can't wait until we're able to finally show it to all of you. pic.twitter.com/N5j5BFv4rV
Wreden is best known as the writer and designer of The Stanley Parable. Zimonja previously worked at Fullbright and is the co-creator of indie hits Gone Home and Tacoma. They're now combining their talents at Ivy Road, which is based in Vancouver.
The duo didn't reveal any details about the first game they're working on for AI. However, they did note that composer Daniel Rosenfeld (aka C418), of Minecraft fame, is part of the team, along with severalotherdevelopers.
The last time Jessica Mak released a game was in 2012 when they worked with Sony’s Santa Monica Studio to create Sound Shapes. The game went on to become one of the PlayStation Vita’s standout gems, in part thanks to an unforgettable soundtrack that featured contributions from Shaw-Han Liem of I Am Robot and Proud fame, Indie Game: The Movie composer Jim Guthrie and Beck.
After nearly a decade since the release of Sound Shapes, Mak is working with Annapurna Interactive on a new project, the publisher announced on Thursday during its developer showcase. The game doesn't have an official name or release date yet, but Mak shared some details about the project.
Like Everyday Shooter and Sound Shapes, music will play a central part in the experience, and part of the reason Mak took a break from making games was to become a better musician."The music, for me, is very much as important as the game part of it," Mak said. They went on to describe the game as an action-adventure experience that they hope will surprise players.
How do you create DLC for a game whose very purpose is to offer a confined, looping world? Honestly, after watching the trailer for Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye, I still have no idea. Outer Wilds was one of our favorite games of 2019, building an enthralling mystery into a non-linear exploration game that effectively restarts every 22 minutes.
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye, the game's first and final DLC, will build on the game with new narrative threads and locales. Not much is known beyond that, but based on the strength of the original, I'm down to play an expanded version. Hopefully, the expansion will persuade more people to try out this gem of a game, which, as Devindra Hardawar wrote in ourFavorite games of 2019 article, "demands patience and an adventurous spirit," but "promises adventure like nothing else." Echoes of the Eye will be available September 28th for PS4, Xbox One and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store for $14.99
The last time we saw Stray was in the form of a cinematic trailer Sony shared in 2020 that highlighted the game’s futuristic neon-soaked setting and adorable feline protagonist. At the time, we didn’t get to see the game in action, a fact that Annapurna Interactive has now remedied. The publisher shared a slice of gameplay footage from the title during its recent showcase and said it would release Stray sometime in early 2022.
In the opening moments of Stray, our feline protagonist finds himself injured and separated from his family. Gameplay involves using his physical abilities as a cat to navigate the environment and solve puzzles. In the time-honored tradition of duos like Ratchet and Clank, partway through the adventure, you’ll meet a drone named B-12. They will allow you to converse with the city’s other robotic inhabitants and interact with certain objects in the environment. The cat has a playful side to his personality, and you can do things like scratch furniture, interact with vending machines and rub up against the legs of the robots you meet. Good stuff.
When Stray comes out next year, it will be available on PlayStation 4, PS5 and PC. Developer BlueTwelve Studio promised to show off more of the game before then.
Annapurna Interactive is making lots of announcements today about its future, but the publisher hasn't forgotten its roots either. What Remains Of Edith Finch, the very first game AI released, is coming to iOS on August 16th.
The first-person mystery, which was developed by Giant Sparrow, debuted on PC and PS4 in April 2017. AI brought it to Xbox One and Nintendo Switch later. It's a well-reviewed game that encapsulates much of AI's ethos of releasing "personal, emotional and original" games. Perhaps the iOS release will help it find a whole new audience.
Brendon Chung knows what people expect out of a first-person shooter. Guns? Check. Strafing? Yep. Ammo drops in strategic yet predictable locations? You betcha.
A sneezing system? Uh, sure. Noxious green clouds that follow you when you're smelly, giving away your location? Um. Actually, yes.
Skin Deep is the latest project out of Chung's studio, Blendo Games, and it's his first-ever FPS title. He's known for developing clever first-person action and puzzle games including Gravity Bone, Thirty Flights of Loving and Quadrilateral Cowboy, and visually, Skin Deep fits perfectly into his repertoire. The only difference is the gun.
"I'd never done one where you just have a gun and you straight-up shoot people," Chung said. "I thought, you know what? This is something that I love. This is a game genre that has been so important to me for a long time... This is kind of my attempt at making a bunch of little things that I like in first-person shooter games, and putting them into a game that I think will be funny."
Annapurna Interactive
Chung started coding back in elementary school, when he would spend hours between classes customizing levels in FPS classics Doom and Quake, and he continued modding as titles like Half-Life, Quake 2 and Doom 3 hit the scene. He got a job at a mainstream studio in Los Angeles, but continued working on his own projects and eventually went fully independent, picking up a handful of accolades in the process.
Despite a deep personal connection to the FPS genre, Chung hasn't released a shooter of his own — but that's going to change when Skin Deep hits Steam. The actual release date is still up in the air, a fact that may be concerning for anyone who remembers waiting for Quadrilateral Cowboy, a game that was "six months away" for well over three years. (On the Skin Deep FAQ page, one of the Qs reads, "Is Skin Deep going to take 4+ years of development time like your previous game Quadrilateral Cowboy?" and the accompanying answer is, "I hope not.")
Regardless of a release date, today publisher Annapurna Interactive showed off a new trailer for Skin Deep. A new, extra-smelly trailer.
Skin Deep is a non-linear espionage shooter set on a spaceship and played from the perspective of an armed, cryogenically frozen insurance agent whose job is to protect the vessel from invading space pirates. The game looks lighthearted yet sophisticated, in classic Blendo fashion; it involves shooting, sneaking and solving puzzles, and all of it is animated in Chung's signature cubist style. This ties back to FPS history, too — Skin Deep and most of Blendo Games' titles are built on a modified port of the Doom 3 engine, idTech4.
"I've played like a bazillion FPS games because I just really enjoy them, but I feel like there's so much that can be explored and that I wish these games would explore," Chung said.
One of the many odd mechanics in Skin Deep is a sneezing function that appears in particularly dusty or peppery environments.
"If you're crawling through a dusty vent your little sneezy air level will increase, then you'll do a big sneeze noise," Chung said. "And there's a bag of pepper that we have. If you shoot it, a big cloud of pepper flies out. You can pick up a pepper bag and throw it at someone and they'll start sneezing."
And then there's the odor system, which leaves literal clouds of stink behind the player, alerting the space pirates and generally causing problems. There's logic to this system: The player becomes smelly only once they're expelled from the space ship's trash chute, fish bones and all, and then they climb back aboard. The smell clouds disappear once the player figures out how to wash up. All of this falls under a mission titled, Protocol 832: Being Smelly And What To Do About It.
Annapurna Interactive
"I love it when games just do things that you don't expect," Chung said. "Like for me, one of the big games that was important for me back in the day was Far Cry 2, back in 2008. That game did so much cool stuff for the first-person genre that was not technologically advanced, but they just made design choices that were just interesting and funny. Like you had this map that you had to pull out but it didn't pause, and you had to look at a map while getting shot at with guns. And so I thought, there's so much space to do stuff like that. Why not make people smelly?"
All of Chung's games are part of the same cinematic universe, so to speak, and Skin Deep is closely tied to Flotilla, a space-based battleship game he published in 2010.
"They all kind of talk to each other, they all kind of share characters," Chung said. "We're still figuring out details, but right now the character that we're playing as in this game is the character from a game I made before called Flotilla. It's fun to make these little connections between the different games and have them all kind of share things between them."
There's no word on which of Chung's future projects will receive the smell clouds from Skin Deep.
As a kid, Alx Preston spent a significant amount of time as a member of the audience, watching his brother sing in choir and opera groups. One night, he found himself sitting in a pew at the heart of a large, elegant church, letting the sounds of yet another performance wash over him. He was tired. He also happened to be playing a lot of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time at home.
“I kind of fell into a dream state,” Preston said. “I was playing a lot of Ocarina of Time at the time, and so the vocals of that mixed with this kind of fantastical vision of going through a forest. I think for me that Ocarina of Time was one of those formative games that really allowed me to see what was possible within the medium.”
Preston was the creative energy behind Hyper Light Drifter, a pixelated 2D title that helped define a generation of neon-coated indie hits in the mid-2010s, and he’s the founder of LA-based studio Heart Machine. He and a growing team of developers have been working on their sophomore release, Solar Ash, since late 2016. It’s a third-person, 3D game set in a dreamlike sci-fi space called the Ultravoid.
Annapurna Interactive
To put it in terms of Zelda titles, Hyper Light Drifter is A Link to the Past, and Solar Ash is Ocarina of Time.
“[Ocarina of Time] was really the game that felt so much bigger and limitless in its scope and scale and adventures,” Preston said. “It built a believable world that I could live in and it was 3D, and so of course I always had some idea I might jump into 3D.”
Today, publisher Annapurna Interactive announced Solar Ash will hit PC and PlayStation platforms on October 26th, five years after Heart Machine began working on it.
“Hyper Light was a way for me to get started, it was a way for me to be more grounded and put together a crew and understand, can I do this? Can I actually make games?” Preston said. “And so having answered that question, then the natural next step for me was something in 3D. Can I put something out there that really opens up the world and makes you feel like you can truly escape into something, a creation that is otherworldly, that you otherwise wouldn't have the experience of? A lot of my childhood was spent escaping into those bigger experiences.”
Hyper Light Drifter was a deliciously difficult 2D action RPG, and at first glance, Solar Ash looks like the third-person, 3D interpretation of that same game world. It’s bright and ethereal, with an emphasis on massive enemies and rapid-fire mechanics. The protagonist, Rei, is a slender assassin on a journey to save her home from the Ultravoid, a supermassive black hole hungry for whole planets.
Even though it’s 3D, Solar Ash looks so similar to Hyper Light Drifter that Preston has had to clarify whether it’s a sequel a few times over. To be clear, it’s not. But to be fair, Preston has personally contributed to the confusion.
Annapurna Interactive
“I did ambiguously say it's in the same universe,” Preston said. “Not like Marvel Cinematic Universe, but literally in a universe. So a million galaxies away, technically sure. It's still in a universe. So it's kind of a goof way of saying it. I would say that there are connected threads between the games, because I am who I am as a creator, as an artist... but it's its own game, it's its own identity in many ways. It's not trying to say ‘I'm a sequel’ or anything like that to Drifter.”
Solar Ash is an action platformer with Heart Machine’s DNA baked into its code. It doesn’t attempt to do too much, and the team instead has focused on implementing a handful of core mechanics and making them feel as perfect as possible. Solar Ash is filled with radioactive environments and grotesque enemies, and it's all about fluidity and agility, surfing through the ruins of lost civilizations at the center of a black hole.
There are about 25 people on the Solar Ash team, including Hyper Light Drifter and It Follows composer Rich Vreeland, otherwise known as Disasterpeace. That’s a bigger dev team than the original Hyper Light Drifter crew, but then again, Solar Ash is a bigger game.
“For Drifter and for Solar Ash, there are similar threads of really focusing on the core elements that are impactful and getting as much mileage out of those as we possibly can,” Preston said. “Because we have a small team making a big-ass project, and the team has been excellent in carrying through on everything that we could. Everyone's done incredible heavy lifting and worn a lot of different hats, as you have to do on this scale of team, for this scale of project.”
As Heart Machine’s second game, there’s a lot riding on Solar Ash. Preston has established his brand as an innovative, thoughtful developer, and Solar Ash is his chance to defend it — not only in the court of public opinion, but in his own mind.
“Audience expectation absolutely factors into it, but for me I'm my own worst critic,” Preston said. “Like any artist, like any creative person, you hate your own work until you don't and then you let it go. I mostly focused on, how do we feel we're succeeding internally? Rather than, what is the audience going to expect out of that? Or, what kind of score will you get on Metacritic?”
Of course, if Solar Ash ends up feeling like a trippy sci-fi extrapolation of Ocarina of Time, it should be a success on all fronts.
The Artful Escape is an idealized vision of everything the music industry could be, straight out of the brain of Australian rockstar Johnny Galvatron. In five years of development (at least), The Artful Escape has transformed into a psychedelic adventure game with a living soundtrack of original folk and rock music, a cast of ridiculous characters, otherworldly environments, and a roster A-list voice actors, including Jason Schwartzman, Lena Headey, Michael Johnston, Carl Weathers and Mark Strong.
The Artful Escape is set to hit Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, and PC on September 9th, priced at $20. It'll hit Game Pass at the same time, and it's being published by indie hit-maker Annapurna Interactive.
Galvatron is the frontman of The Galvatrons, a high-energy Australian rock group that toured the continent and opened for bands like Def Leppard and Cheap Trick in the late 2000s. However, for the past few years, Galvatron has been a game developer first and foremost. In the 2010s, he used YouTube videos to teach himself how to create a game in Unreal, building off the 3D animation and coding courses he took back in college, right before Warner Music signed him. He then founded a studio, rented some office space, secured a deal with Annapurna, and somewhere along the way, he ended up in a recording booth with Jason Schwartzman.
"We just hung out and spoke about David Bowie and Bob Dylan and video games and stuff," Galvatron said. "And it was just like, it was a moment for me. He came into the studio and he had like a cape and he had a dressing gown and like an umbrella and a little tiny Korg synth. He brought all these things and he put them all around him and he would like, do the line with the cape and then he would throw the cape around another way, and then he would hold the umbrella and do the line. I was just on my feet the whole time."
Annapurna Interactive
In The Artful Escape, the main character, Francis Vendetti, goes on a multidimensional journey to discover his true stage persona — which seems to be a David Bowie-esque shred machine — while at the same time reckoning with the legacy of his late uncle, a Bob Dylan-style folk icon. He travels through strange and trippy worlds, playing music and hunting for his true sound.
To give a sense of the game's oddball vibe, Schwartzman plays a giant brain perched atop a pile of discarded fish parts.
"He’s a really funny comic support character," Galvatron said. "Like a very lofty British alien, like a brain floating in an aquarium on a flotilla of goldfish fins. It'll make sense when you see it."
For Galvatron, The Artful Escape is exactly that — an escape. His career as a mainstream rockstar was ultimately unfulfilling, filled with red tape, stagnant bureaucracy and awkward interactions. In between shows, he often found himself curled up in the corner of the tour bus, reading Dune or writing his own novel, watching the continent fly by.
As a game developer, he's building the industry he actually wanted to be a part of, one line of code at a time.
"It's kind of what I dreamed the music industry would be, this world of magical doors and these great experiences, instead of like drinking Melbourne Bitter at an RSL in Wollongong, trying not to get beaten up because you look like you're in Poison," Galvatron said. He laughed and, without missing a beat, added, "Can you use that quote in its entirety?"
Sure thing, Galvatron — but only because that sounds like a solid premise for a sequel to The Artful Escape.
Black Widow star Scarlett Johansson is suing Disney over the company's decision to release the movie in theaters and on Disney+ simultaneously. Johansson claims that the move constituted a breach of contract, as The Wall Street Journal reports.
In the suit, Johansson says Black Widow was supposed to be released exclusively in theaters, per her deal with Marvel. As is often the case for movie stars, a large portion of Johansson's salary was tied to its box office success.
To watch Black Widow on Disney+, viewers need to fork over $30 for a Premier Access pass. Disney initially estimated that the film generated $60 million in revenue on Disney+ from its opening weekend earlier this month, along with $80 million in domestic and $78 million international theatrical revenue.
The move may have impacted Black Widow's performance in theaters (though it's worth bearing in mind that many cinemas around the globe are still closed amid the pandemic). The total worldwide box office tally is currently $319 million. As Variety points out, that puts it on track to become one of the lowest-grossing Marvel movies to date. Only one of the six other Marvel movies released since early 2018 has made less than $1 billion in theaters.
Johansson's representatives tried to re-negotiate her deal after news emerged about the new Black Widow release strategy, the suit says, but Disney and Marvel were allegedly unresponsive. Releasing Black Widow on Disney+ simultaneously could cost Johansson over $50 million, according to a WSJ source.
In 2019, before COVID-19 changed everything and with Disney+ on the horizon, Johansson and her team contacted Marvel for confirmation that Black Widow would still be a theatrical-only release. According to an email from March 2019 that's cited in the filing, Marvel's chief counsel Dave Galluzzi confirmed that. “We understand that should the plan change, we would need to discuss this with you and come to an understanding as the deal is based on a series of (very large) box office bonuses,” the email states.
Movie theaters around the world were forced to close their doors following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Distributors scrambled to revamp their release strategies. Warner Bros. has adopted a hybrid format this year, with its movies coming to both theaters and HBO Max on the same day (aka day-and-date releases). It will return to theater-first releases next year.
Disney adopted different tactics. Several of the movies it has released day-and-date (including Mulan, Raya and the Last Dragon and Cruella) were initially locked behind that $30 pass on Disney+. Artemis Fowl, and Pixar movies Soul and Luca skipped theaters entirely in many countries and went straight to Disney+ as part of the regular library.
We knew it was coming, but the War for Wakanda expansion for Marvel’s Avengers now has a street date. Square Enix will release the free DLC on August 17th, the publisher announced today. Billed as the largest content update to Marvel’s Avengers since the game came out last September, fans can look forward to playing as Black Panther, with God of Waractor Christopher Judge there to lend his voice to the character.
Additionally, the expansion will add two new villains and a host of enemies for players to challenge, as well as a brand-new environment to explore. When you add the expansion, the game includes about 25 hours of single-player story content.
Crystal Dynamics will share more details about War for Wakanda during a Twitch stream the developer has planned for August 16th. In the meantime, if you’ve been on the fence about Marvel’s Avengers, now is a good time to try the game. Until August 1st, you can download and play it for free on PlayStation 4, PS5, Stadia and PC via Steam. And if you decide you want to continue playing it past this weekend’s trial period, it’s currently 40 percent off.
