#Project Robot

[olvaheiner]

Project Robot (TBA)

[landsoflightanddark]

I almost can't believe there's a full image of this. How long has it been?

[mysticode54]

What a character design. They look so atypical, and yet, its very clearly a Fumito Ueda concept.

[demifiendrsa]

Announcement Trailer For a New Upcoming Game From genDESIGN

genDESIGN's untitled project is in development for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Epic Games Store. A release date was not announced.

[selene-lunette]

Can y'all tell I'll never be able to recover

[icology]

I love that just by looking at it, you can totally tell it’s a fumito ueda game just based on the vibes. absolutely UNMISTAKABLE

[laughingpinecone]

OH

(with readable credits if anyone cares)

[sekainofantasy90]

Personal Top Announcements ❤️

[gebo4482]

genDESIGN Teaser for Latest Title | The Game Awards 2024 (English subtitles)

Website

[schismusic]

In the shadow of the horns: meditations on Team ICO's works – 2. ICO

[Disclaimer: as always, spoilers for ICO are to be expected, and so are spoilers for Shadow of the Colossus since we've already discussed that one. Reader's discretion is advised.]

This one I wrote in a massive rush, because I only realized that I hadn't written anything about ICO yet right about when the time came to actually post this piece on here. I wanted this to be out before Christmas, see, not for any specific reason – I just wanted to make sure I was writing stuff that makes sense, more or less. I'm still taken aback by how much time it's taken, considering my Shadow of the Colossus piece was written more or less entirely between Colossus 2 and Colossus 6. As such, that particular piece contains a glaring mistake, that Tumblr user @crooked-mantis thankfully pointed out. Mantis's intervention is as follows:

While I did know the voice when Wander is transported back to the Shrine was supposed to be Mono's, I did not remember her calling Wander by name, specifically – and after reaching Colossus 9 and Colossus 14, I was pleasantly surprised to hear exactly what Mantis mentioned. So, again, thank you for pointing this out, and I'm glad you still enjoyed this piece that I titled after a song by Darkthrone just so I could make a stupid joke.

The beauty of Ico lies in the fact it seems to disregard the conventions of an average videogame, if you're not looking too hard. The first thing I did after completing ICO again was to put on some Kraftwerk – Computer Love, to be exact – because that same exact comment could be made with regards to their post-Autobahn production almost as a whole. Trans Europe Express and Radio-Activity, at least to an extent, tinker with that divide between their profoundly poppish writing style and that weird, destructured, post-1968 thing where even a pop song's structure can be broken down into something more than just function and role. All the same, ICO (Kraftwerk's music) is tightly designed, with recognizable hooks and welcoming moments that allow the player (listener) to immediately understand what they have to do. Here's a bubbly cursed boy. Here's a girl who's spent her whole life in a cage. They're trapped in a castle and evil shadows want to kidnap the girl. Have you done the math yet?

Right before I went back to the game myself, I happened to catch a friend of mine – @alexswordsman – as they streamed part of their first playthrough on Discord. I was struck by the realization that I had absolutely no recollection of a lot of moments from the game; but what truly surprised me is just how much of the game I did keep in my memory, and not just story bits (that would be easy, considering the campaign's length) but also entire rooms' worth of environmental puzzles, fights against the shadow children, the genuine sense of dread when leaving Yorda alone or when hanging from some iron pole, a good hundred meters above any solid ground. As I spent some time thinking about this, and a good couple of weeks after actually going through the game again in something like two and a half sittings, I realized that it really did take me a loooooong time to realize just for how long ICO was a game about the story, for me. The answer was of course quite a fucking lot – a whole year after my first playthrough or something, specifically. I remember telling some girl in my class about it, back in 2019, because I was an insufferable bastard who felt really alone but could not relate to other human beings on any fundamental level. Poor girl, I think she actually did feel some modicum of attraction towards me, but unfortunately I was very much not prepared to return it. The point being: for the longest time, apart from when I replayed it back in 2020, I genuinely thought of ICO as a story to be told, something to be read off of a Wikipedia page a billion years ago. As the previous piece (and, if you've read them, my other pieces about Team Ico, the Italian ones) might have clarified, of course, coming back to the games with a slightly more informed outlook has worked wonders for me.

Where Wander's core moveset would focus preeminently on violence and hostile action, Ico's was softer, less specialized, harder to describe. R1, which you have to hold down, allows you to hold Yorda's hand (or call to her, if she's away from you – much like Agro and Trico after her, buttons used notwithstanding); Square swings whatever blunt – or edged, or spiked – object you've got in your hand, but Ico is canonically like nine, so it's safe to assume he's not a fighter, or a climber, or a horserider. The one thing he can convincingly is seek out human contact: the one thing he is denied, as a horned kid. Yorda, on the other hand, has no such preconceptions: she may actually have no preconceptions, period, apart from her knowledge of a certain power and a certain purpose assigned to her. At the same time, Yorda starts out basically clueless but learns very very quickly: you explode the pillar holding the bridge up, then next room over you have to blow up some wood planks blocking the way forward and – assuming you've seen the bombs and the open flame right near the entrance – Yorda runs up to them and points at them, which is very clever foreshadowing of the second act's climactic moment. If Yorda is seen by her captors as a machine, built entirely as a means to an end – becoming the Queen's new body – then it has to be a fully functional one, shoutouts to Lieutenant Commander Data, but this has the side effect that she can learn trust. She can learn affection.

No surprise then that R1 would be the key to hold Yorda's hand and call out to her. R1 is where the important stuff is in Team Ico's games. You hold R1 to core-mechanic your character into winning, i.e. into exerting emotional stimuli over the player, and it's no surprise that as such every time you're doing the R1 stuff the games tend to give you incredibly strong and constant sensory feedback. The controller vibrates, almost mimicking a heartbeat, as you're holding Yorda's hand. Alessio called it a "sensory nightmare" and deactivated the feature: not that I blame him, it can get annoying, but I actually sorta love it myself. It's the closest thing they can do to allow the player to perceive warmth, touch, life on their very skin. If Shadow of the Colossus is "a game about letting go", then ICO is a game about holding on. As such, it is necessarily much shorter than SotC: something you can quite literally burn through, like a friend you mad on that one week by the seaside when you were nine and had no mobile phone so you have no idea where that friend is now, what they're up to, what they're doing. You can only replay it, understanding its actions and words a bit better everytime but forever retrospectively, forever crystallized.

It's a short and immensely sweet experience that ends on a bittersweet note to say the least (Fumito Ueda himself refers to the post-credits scene as a dream that Ico has going back to civilization, which means Yorda did not of course escape the crumbling castle) and yet manages to conjure deep feelings of beauty and warmth. It doesn't make any fucking sense to discuss the plot of this game, because honestly as narrative-driven as this game is, it already takes the shape of an experience that prefers player stories as the driving principle for the player to go on with the game, more so than its own narrative. I mean, Shadow of the Colossus is probably better at this – considering the even more bare-boned nature of its plot and the open ended lore that the player is left to to toy with – but something has to be born once already, in order for it to be reborn.

P.S.: yeah, I'm assuming I might have to write something about that TGA trailer, you know the one. Since I'm most likely not going to be able to play it on release – because I will not be buying a PlayStation 5 just for one game, not right now anyway – I figured I should at least put something out analysing the thirty seconds flat of footage we've got. I'll see if I can squeeze out some coherent thoughts after fangirling for another while and report back once I do.

[thatonegamenerd]

Ueda-san's departure from Japan Studio

I just had a crazy thought as I woke up in the middle of the night, so this is probably nothing. But I can't stop thinking about it.

In the reveal trailer for genDESIGN's Project: Robot, we see a humanoid climbing a colossal robot as a shockwave rapidly carries destructive debris their way. I don't have any lore speculation, rather a thematic hypothesis as to one of the subtle meanings behind this trailer and possibly the game as a whole.

I believe that the humanoid piloting the head of the robot as it violently detaches itself from the body could be seen as Ueda-san and other key staff leaving Japan Studio during production on The Last Guardian (even though they technically "stayed" on to complete that game before fully "detaching"). And the visual of the remaining robot body is Japan Studio, which we watch get completely destroyed (perhaps how not too long after the departure of Ueda-san, Japan Studio would essentially be shut down save for Team Asobi). Even the flying head and pilot seem to be swept up by the destructive wave, potentially implying that genDESIGN's future is also uncertain.

I know, I'm probably reading too much into it, but I think it could be an interesting lens to view this new work! Or it could just be random sleep thoughts that got jumbled together into something resembling an epiphany.

[anothermtroubls]

1:15

3:56

1:55 funny singularity in common unconscious...eh carl jung

[landsoflightanddark]

Here is the official Youtube upload.

[lmaverick123]

Top 8 Most Anticipated Games With No Release Date

I’ve talked about how there are so few games that I am excited for anymore, and that isn’t entirely true.  There are lots of games that have my attention, but are completely in the ether.  Some more than others.  I know what you’re thinking, and no, The Wolf Among Us 2 is not going to be on this list.  Telltale game is hemorrhaging people and money.  They are going to die, and they will still…

[the-faxx-macheen]

Okay so like has anybody like brightened the video up enough to see what that thing was? At first I thought the trailer just started out solid black but it looks like there's something actually moving maybe? I can't tell if it's just the player character or if it's whatever is making that breathing/rumbling noise because once it brightens up it looks as if it quickly panned over to a blurry shot of player character's head

Of course I guess it could also be just them having been moving somewhere until they get to the robot? What do you guys think?

[rorynni]

I’m rereading all of the VBS stories right now and Toya must have looked so out of place singing on Vivid Street before he met Akito and started getting his outfits picked out and styled by him.