Category: Press

The Path preview on Eurogamer

For those of you who can read Dutch, there’s a (sort of) preview of The Path on the Eurogamer Benelux site. The game was not exactly finished when we showed it to Philip Cremers, but it’s interesting to read his impressions.

The Path is anders dan je doordeweekse spel. Toch speelt sterven een belangrijke rol, al zal het niet gebeuren doordat je personage doorzeefd wordt door kogels. Eens je het huis van grootmoeder hebt doorlopen, sterft Roodkapje namelijk. Hoe en waarom dit zo is laat men bij Tale of Tales liever in het duister, en als we eerlijk zijn willen we het ook niet echt weten. The Path maakt zich voor het grootste deel sterk door het mysterieuze aspect en het gevoel dat je zelf krijgt bij het doorlopen van het spel.

Read it here.

Survival Horror is (not) dead

So whatever happened to our imperfect, psychologically damaged heroes, our creepy little doll rooms, our feeble switchblades, our crawling dread? And why have they been replaced by gun-toting professionals and space marine types – as if gaming needed any more space marines?

Leigh Alexander answers this question in a very rational yet disappointing manner.

Perhaps the Silent Hill series might have attained still more widespread appeal if it had, to be blunt, made just a little more sense

Because contemporary games cost more to make, the size of the audience needs to grow and thus the content needs to be adapted to the tastes of a larger audience. And of course you choose the hardcore gun-toting-space-marine-loving crowd as your larger target audience, because they present the lowest risk factor.

There is another solution however: find a way to make these games cheaper. And stop compromising your vision. And don’t hide your lack of vision behind economic arguments.

Long interview on GameSetWatch

We’ve been interviewed by Alistair Wallis for GameSetWatch.

Possibly one of the more interesting things that came up during this interview with Belgium based indie development duo Tale of Tales was the idea that they are, effectively, experimental outsiders in the games industry simply because of their focus on story based, artistically motivated work.

Isn’t that weird? Can you imagine what the film industry would be like if narrative works were substantially less popular than action based films?

If you have half an hour to kill, have a read!

Big in Germany

Art games are on the rise in Germany. They’re even introducing a new name for it: “emogaming”. Though we have a feeling that the term will go the way of the “handy” (the German word for cell phone) in the rest of the world.

Neverthelless, the interest is genuine.

Last week, we participated, by video chat, in a symposium, taking place in Munich, called Emotional Gaming, about the “relation between gaming and emotionality”.

A few days ago, we were interviewed about The Graveyard for Zündfunk, a Bavarian radio show. The theme of the show was “emogaming”. They even had a professor talking about love in games. Have a listen, if you understand German:

[audio:Zundfunk-BavarianRadio-Emogames.mp3|titles=Zündfunk-BavarianRadio-Emogames]

And finally, also in German, is a long article about our work, how it is art and how that’s a good thing we need more of, on the popular Krawall website, entitled Spielekunst.

Die meisten Entwickler würden die Frage, ob Spiele Kunst seien, reflexartig bejahen, denn der Kunst haftet in unserer Gesellschaft schließlich ein positives Image an. Die Firma Tale of Tales macht Kunst-Spiele hingegen aus voller Überzeugung.

(rougly translates as “Most developers would answer the question whether games are art with “yes” by reflex, since art has a positive image in our society. Tale of Tales, however, make art games out of determined conviction.”)

Meanwhile, in the USA, Pullitzer prize winning game aficionados cast their doubts in mainstream newspapers about the artistic value of best selling games:

Narrative art of that caliber is distinguished by its ability to re-organize our preconceptions, to shift us into a world that’s always been there but that we’ve been afraid to acknowledge, and I’m not convinced that GTA IV pulls off that miracle.

and

Successful art tears away the veil and allows you to see the world with lapidary clarity; successful art pulls you apart and puts you back together again, often against your will, and in the process reminds you in a visceral way of your limitations, your vulnerabilities, makes you in effect more human. Does GTA IV do that? Not for me it doesn’t, and heck, I love this damn game.

Maybe we should invite Junot Díaz to have a look at our “emogames”… :)

Reviewing games as products

We’ve mentioned it before on these pages, but Chris sums up the problem quite nicely on his excellent Survival Horror Quest blog: reviews of games often focus on technical features and rarily on content. And he illustrates his point with some amusing faux-reviews of works in other media.

Part of the problem with game reviews, I think, is that game journalists often try to offer objective analysis of the games that they review. It’s easier to be objective about something if you just stick to the obvious facts, which is maybe why games get treated like products rather than works of art.

I don’t think journalists are entirely to blame for this situation, though. Developers and publishers often think in terms of features and numbers of levels and hours of gameplay as well. Mostly, I think, because it is what their marketing departments know how to deal with. And I have seen several reviews of our own games that exclusively discuss content. So perhaps, it’s also a matter of developers taking the content they create a bit more seriously. A simple trick would be to remove all “features” so that there is nothing to talk about but content.

But then there’s of course the gaming audience. I’ve seen many remarks on forums and in blog comments from people who did not find the extra feature in the full version of The Graveyard (the added possibility that the protagonist can die) worth the money (5 USD). Someone even made a list of features that would be required for him to spend that money. The fact that the element of death drastically changes the emotional experience did not seem to be valuable to most players.

Players too seem to think of games as products. So journalists are just giving them the information they apparently need. The question remains: why? Why are games being judged as products, while books, films and music are not?