Monthly Archives: November 2016

TWS Hiatus Questions – On Games!

By playerprophet Posted in Those Without Shadows Tagged

Those Without Shadows, Hiatus Questions episode 2!

Why do you use games along with art and writing as your storytelling medium?

Whenever you meet someone who writes, it’s always interesting to ask why they write. Not as in some spiritual dreamy answer, but what inspired them to start writing. You’ll find that the medium in which they like to work is often (but not always) the medium that originally inspired them.

I am a person who learned to love storytelling with video games. Like your average millenial I didn’t think this through to consider programming as an employable goal. I didn’t want to make games, I wanted to write stories. This is one of the reasons TWS has the format it does.

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TWS: Hiatus Questions – On History and Evolution

By playerprophet Posted in Those Without Shadows Tagged

[Those Without Shadows HIATUS QUESTIONS: episode #1!]

[Why are the animals reptilian?]

All of the animals in TWS that are non-sentient are either based on bugs, fish, reptiles or amphibians! This is because the world is young, and evolution hasn’t had much time to change things.

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Consent, Compromise, and Cost – Ladykiller in a Bind

By playerprophet Posted in Games, Reviews Tagged ,

In 2014, my wife and I binged on Christine Love’s work. I watched her liveblog it between layovers on my way to Helsinki, and once I arrived she made me sit down to read Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus. Those two games remain high on my list of visual novels that I will recommend to anyone. When Christine revealed her next game was going to be a exploring the themes of manipulation in dating games for women, I was thrilled. I’ve been watching the development closely ever since.

Today, I finished every route. I feel like Ladykiller is impressive and should inspire visual novels to come, but LoveConquersAll Games has bit off more than it could chew. The theme of this review is going to be an apocryphal line by Samuel R Delany:

“If you’re going to fuck the dog, put it all the way in.”

(The review below contains spoilers, discussion about rape, and nudity.)

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Chapter 6 Update and Game Prep Hiatus

By playerprophet Posted in Those Without Shadows Tagged

Hi everyone!! I hope you’re enjoying chapter 6 so far!

As you see in the subject line, this will be the last update for this chapter until the next game segment is ready. It isn’t very long, but it does have some new features we have to figure out. Please bear with us!

As with last time I will make the offer: if my patreon reaches $50 per month, I will post the entire second half of Chapter 6 when the game is posted. What do you say?

Thanks everyone!

-Dawn & Team TWS

Save the Past! – Storytelling in The Silver Case

By playerprophet Posted in Games, Meta, Reviews Tagged ,

I’ve been starving for adventure games for a long time now, and I’ve been particularly interested in Suda51’s adventure past since playing Super DanganRonpa 2. In October we finally got one of Suda’s long lost adventure games in English for the first time: The Silver Case, and I dropped the full price for it on release day.

For The Silver Case, I’m not going to talk about the story. Elements of it have been harvested into pop-culture which may lessen the blow of the plot on modern readers. In spite of that, there are other structural features in the game that we can still learn a lot from. I want to talk about how the medium tells the story in The Silver Case, with art direction, the Film Window, localization, and the Transmitter/Placebo separated narratives.

OKAY maybe I’ll talk about the story a bit, but more about it’s construction than it’s contents.

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