Wow, it’s been a while since the last time I wrote about any life stuff. Anyways, I’ve visited Kyiv Comic Con for the past 2 years, our local biggest pop culture convention, and wanted to show some cool pics I’ve done because I’m vain like that. Additionally, I wanted to give a couple of thoughts on the upcoming The Sinking City from Frogwares (the team behind the Sherlock Holmes games) – an action adventure horror with heavy Lovecraft influences, which was demoed on the convention floor.
First, though, somewhat unrelated paragraph where I wanted to say about other life stuff I’ve done since my trip to some Western Ukrainian places last year. First of, the last year Kyiv Comic Con. Didn’t visit a single presentation, but had a fun time anyway and made some cool pics. Then, I had a work-related trip to Saint Petersburg, but despite the work-iness of it, still was able to get a lot of cool pictures of the city. And finally, just a month ago I did another trip to the western parts of Ukraine, again visiting Uzhhorod, but additionally managed to visit Odesa on the way. Realized just how much I’ve missed the look of a sunrise over the sea. Probably should go to some watery place with beautiful sunrises later this year.
Anyways, back to business – Kyiv Comic Con 2018! Yet again, I’ve slept while all the interesting talks and presentations were happening, so all I was left with was the main floor and people cosplaying. Fun fact – I’m not actually that interested in cosplay usually, but I can appreciate the work and passion put into it. And there was a lot of really good cosplay happening, some rather simple but still cool, some really impressive. It was somewhat funny to see the famous Tanya Croft still doing her Lara Croft cosplay with such dedication after… how long has it been now? 9 years? Or even more? Kudos to her for dedication, though. But what truly excited me was seeing some Night in the Woods cosplay, finally! I was so excited I could barely cohesively ask the person for this picture, actually. As it turned out, that wasn’t even the only cosplay of NITW on the show and I’ve missed more awesome people! Wonderful folk at Kitchen Riots not only found more of Mae (and Angus!) cosplay, but joined the cause with their own Mae. Kinda funny how despite being years out of the whole “gaming journalism” scene since the Ave Gamers! days (apart from the time at GOG, I suppose), I still get to cross paths with the “old acquaintances”. :D
But apart from some really awesome cosplay this year, I had a chance to check out The Sinking City. It’s a super early dev demo made for GDC a few months ago and it had a very rough feel to it, but I gotta say, I’m very interested already. Imagine an adventure exploration game with action bits, set in a, well, sinking city in the 1930s US, where most of the streets are flooded, buildings are half-collapsed, but society still somehow somewhat works. It’s not really survival horror or survival action per se, but has a lot of similar basic hooks and ideas – being action adventure, it’s doesn’t feel like a shooter, with (at least for now) more rare and more tense action bits, not overpowered weaponry, healing that takes time and ammo that is tight. In fact, the closest comparison I can think of is Alone in the Dark 2008. The difference, however, is in the fact that AitD (2008) tried a lot of truly amazing ideas, but most of them simply didn’t work or were not fun on the most basic level of implementation, while here, despite the roughness of the demo, I could already feel invested in the game and having fun.
Now, before they release it, there’s a lot to work on. Camera was too claustrophobic, gunplay was a bit too mushy, sound design was all over the place, the navigation is confusing with a lot of helper concepts being more of a distraction than help, and the adventure elements and piecing your investigations of cases so far feeling very vague, but again – the game still has plenty of time to be worked on, have things improved, fixed, more quality of life ideas introduced. The game already has a very good understanding of what it wants to be – a smart mix of city to explore and survive in, investigations to perform, mysteries to solve, horrible things to witness, all built on the brilliant experience they had with Crimes & Punishments (a lot of concepts and elements from that game are clearly smartly reused and updated for this game) and understanding on how to make a really beautiful and moody environment. Hope the game turns out to be as good as it can be.
Oh and, err, fun life fact about Frogwares – I once went to get interviewed for the job there. Except I thought it was for the wrong position, so we had a very long and really cool talk with their CEO about the game journalism, the objectivity, their games, and after this long talk I felt bad for wasting their time because I had to explain that I didn’t want the position that was actually offered >_<. What a weird day that was.