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Exploring the slow-burning surrealism of 'The Gateway Trilogy'
The Gateway Trilogy is pockmarked with logic games, spatial puzzles and the echoes of 1960s psychological experiments.
Step into The Dream Machine episode 5 on November 14
The Dream Machine's penultimate episode is due out on Friday, November 14, featuring scenery hand-crafted from moss, coffee grounds and ... are those broccoli trees? Finally, we can pretend to be vegetarian giants during our adult lives. The Dream Machine is a whimsical, eerie point-and-click adventure created with real-life materials and filmed in stop-motion. There will be six episodes total, after developers at Cockroach Inc. decided to split episode four into two pieces because it was bigger than they anticipated. "It took a while, but it's crazy big, featuring strange forests made out of moss, lichen and coffee grounds," Cockroach Inc. founder Anders Gustafsson says about episode five. "We really went balls-out on this one." On YouTube, Cockroach Inc. adds, "In order to differentiate it from most other games out there, we decided to steer as far away from all things polygonal as possible, and are actually building all the environments, props and characters out of clay and cardboard." See a few pretty images from episode five in the gallery, and below check out the release date trailer featuring a behind-the-scenes look at the painstaking creation of these environments. The Dream Machine is available for PC and Mac via Steam and the game's official site.
The Dream Machine chapter 4 wakes up on Steam
The Dream Machine chapter 4 is out now on Steam for PC and Mac. If you're still here, we'll assume you haven't played The Dream Machine chapters 1 - 3 and need extra encouragement to go play chapter 4 right this very moment. The Dream Machine is an award-winning psychological thriller, a cardboard-and-clay point-and-click adventure through an apartment complex that offers a young couple more than four walls and a roof. It's what's in those walls that tells the real story. The Dream Machine comes from Cockroach Inc., a Swedish indie duo that created the series in 2008. It's been more than a year since chapter 3 launched, and with the fourth installment, Cockroach Inc. announced there will be six chapters in total. All parts are available on Steam for $17, or individually for $5 each (chapters 1 and 2 come in one bundle). The entire game is also available via Cockroach Inc. directly. Go.
The Dream Machine chapter 4 enters reality on August 1
Chapter 4 of The Dream Machine hits Steam on August 1, ending more than one year of anticipation for those who've played chapters 1 - 3. The Dream Machine is an award-winning cardboard-and-clay adventure game from Cockroach Inc., which tells a twisted tale of feverish paranoia and mystery. With chapter 4 the game gets a graphical upgrade and, accidentally, an extra chapter in the entire series, Cockroach Inc. founder Anders Gustafsson tells us. "It ended up being far bigger than we originally anticipated, so large in fact that we had to split it up in two parts," he says. "So the game now effectively has 6 chapters instead of 5. Who doesn't like an extra chapter, huh?" Anyone who's purchased a bundle that includes all of The Dream Machine's chapters will indeed receive all of its chapters, including this unplanned sixth one. The Dream Machine is participating in the Steam Summer Sale, and that bundle is half off through July 22, just $8.50. Or, grab it directly from Cockroach itself.%Gallery-193875%
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: The Dream Machine
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, Anders Gustafsson and Erik Zaring explain how hallucinogens and Roman Polanski are making their award-winning PC and Mac title, The Dream Machine, "better than sex with Jesus." What's your game called and what's it about?Erik: Our game is called The Dream Machine and it's essentially a point-and-click adventure game, but we've handcrafted all the graphics using materials such as clay and cardboard.Anders: The story revolves around a young, pregnant couple that's trying to establish a new life in a new city. While they're getting familiar in their new home, they uncover a seedy mystery involving the other tenant's dreams.What inspired you to make The Dream Machine?Erik: Believe it or not, back in 2008 I was driven by some kind of altruism. I sincerely wanted to give something back to the world rather than being on the consuming end all the time. I had a passion for games, handmade objects and lots of pent up frustration to fuel the development of this endeavor.Anders: While at animation school, I read a lot about John C. Lily and his experiments with LSD and Ketamine. He had this notion that he was visiting an alternate reality during his drug-induced hallucinations, a place he thought had a coherent geography. Once he regained consciousness, he would draw maps of what he had experienced, noting down things like landmarks, geographical features and coastlines. He thought that if he had enough map pieces and then spliced them together, he would be able to slowly chart this new reality. To me, that idea just sounded so naïve and beautiful. In our game we approach dreams in a similar way.%Gallery-159185%
The Dream Machine slips into your subconscious this Friday on Steam
The Dream Machine, the award-winning point-and-click adventure from Cockroach Inc., is hitting Steam on Friday, May 11. To celebrate, Cockroach has unleashed the above trailer, which shows off The Dream Machine's cardboard and clay art style, while hinting at the dark secrets buried deep within the game's conscious plot.The Dream Machine has been nominated for IGF, Indiecade, and Indie Game Challenge awards, and has won Into the Pixel and indiePub contests. If you can't wait for the Steam launch or want to give the game a go, chapters one through three are available now via its main site, and all five planned chapters are available for purchase from the same place. Chapters four and five are expected to drop "as soon as they're done," which Cockroach almost-clarifies as being "in a slew of months."
Handmade adventure The Dream Machine available for pre-order
Though even games with multimillion-dollar budgets can claim to be handmade at some level -- those keyboards don't type themselves! -- very few can claim to be made from physical materials like cardboard and clay. It's fair to say that The Dream Machine, a painstakingly photographed point-and-click adventure by Anders Gustafsson and Erik Zaring, is a game with more substance than most. The gorgeous indie adventure will be released in five episodes, and the first two are available now as part of a pre-order program. For 11 Euros (that's after a 20-percent discount for early buyers), you'll gain access to the first two parts and all that follow in the future. The Dream Machine isn't tethered to any specific device -- it's playable online from any computer (Mac, Linux or PC) and stores your save files and inventory safely in that great Cloud in the Skynet. If you're curious, you can try the first episode for free right now. And if you wanted the whole thing for free, remind yourself that two guys have spent over two years squishing clay and cardboard into a game.%Gallery-111737%
'The Dream Machine' adventure game looks clay-mazing
We're currently basking in the warm, soft glow that commonly surrounds us shortly after discovering our newest game-crush. Thanks to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the latest object of our affection is The Dream Machine, a Flash-based adventure game from Cockroach Inc. (composed of developers Anders Gustafsson and Erik Zaring). The reason for our admiration? All of the characters and environments were handcrafted in a style reminiscent of The Neverhood. Only, well, prettier. You can check out a trailer for the clay-and-cardboard indie title after the jump, or play through a brief demo on the developer's website. Should that snippet tickle your fancy, Cockroach is currently accepting applications to get in on a beta for the game's first complete chapter. We are so there.
