Horizon E3 wrapup: Cats, cowboys, monsters, mountains
"You are a mountain. You are god."
That's not Peter Molydeux's latest satirical game idea – it's the conceit of Mountain, a game from filmmaker and artist David O'Reilly, the guy behind the video game in the movie Her and Adventure Time's "A Glitch Is A Glitch" episode. As O'Reilly explained during E3's Horizon conference, Mountain is a mountain simulator, and as he showed, it's way cooler than you think.
Mountain is meant to exist on your desktop as an interactive window into another world. It begins by asking you three "questions," individual words that you answer in drawings. We saw "sickness," "afterlife" and "beauty." These drawings propagate in some fashion on your mountain, which appears in a windowed field – it has weather cycles, things grow on the cliffs, and you can impact the world around the mountain by playing music with the keyboard. Mountain should launch for PC, Mac and iOS in a week or two for about $1, O'Reilly said.
Mountain was one in a lineup of wacky, pretty games at the E3 Horizon conference. Check out all of the goodies below.
Night in the Woods
Infinite Fall's Scott Benson and Alec Holowka showed off Night in the Woods, a hilarious adventure-narrative game that Holowka describes as "A game about the inevitability of death. And pizza parties."
The cutest aspect of Night in the Woods was the pause mode – rather, the "paws mode." The main character is an anthropomorphized cat, and between story segments, you enter a screen that is a pair of paws playing with things relating to the current setting. We saw those paws paw at a bulletin board with flyers and doughnuts. Adorable.Metamorphabet
Feed the Head and Windosill artist Patrick Smith's latest game is an interactive alphabet for all ages. It offers letters that transition in peaceful, seamless motions into the things they represent, and then allows you to prod at those images. "A" grows antlers, then turns into an arch, which then ambles toward the screen. It's a peaceful alphabet experience.
Metamorphabet is due out on PC, Mac, Linux and iPad late this year.
Gnah
KO-OP Mode gave us a closer glimpse at Gnah, a monster-head-turning puzzle game. It's inspired by toys that create miniature worlds, such as Polly Pocket or Kinder Surprise eggs, and it rewards playful curiosity. Each monster head has a mini scene embedded in its backside, and messing with that area changes the face, and vice versa.
Gnah launches in 2015 for PC, Mac and Linux, and it will be on Steam.
Fledge
KO-OP Mode showed a quick teaser for Fledge, a game "about birdsongs and flight." It'll be out soon on Steam Early Access.
else { Heart.break() }
One of the strangest presentations came from Niklas Akerblad and Erik Svedang's else { Heart.break() }, via a video of Akerblad describing the game on a bed. It's a point-and-click adventure set in a futuristic, slightly noir, cyber-infused world with gorgeous art. It's set to hit late this year for unannounced platforms.Quadrilateral Cowboy
This one still looks like heaps of fun. Blendo Games' Brendon Chung played a section of Quadrilateral Cowboy that involved hacking, engineering and turning your bones to jelly – he solved puzzles with digital time travel that created a jazzy co-op single player.
It's due out this year for PC, Mac and Linux.
Everybody's Gone to the Rapture
I still don't know what this game is about. Everybody's Gone to the Rapture comes from Dear Esther developer The Chinese Room, and it's due out for PS4 in 2015. The tiny teaser showed a field of tall grass blowing in the wind, and then a glowing, golden orb.
The game is open-world and it centers on exploration and uncovering the story. It's set in rural England in the 1980s.Panoramical
Panoramical is the first game in Fez studio's Polytron Partners program, and it's a stylish audio visualizer due out in 2015 for PC and Mac via Steam. It comes from Proteus composer David Kanaga and independent game designer Fernando Ramallo.
