Given The Fullbright Company’s background with 0451 games (its founders were behind BioShock 2’s DLC chapter Minerva’s Den), their next game going into space makes more a little uneasy. Watching five minutes of gameplay from the Gone Home folks’ spaceborne second game, Tacoma [official site], part of me is on edge waiting to hear a System Shock 2 protocol droid mutter “This place is a terrible mess” or hear a midwife’s eerie call of “I’ll tear out your spine.”

That doesn’t come, or at least not in this video. Or as far as I can tell, anyway, as two folks from Game Informer are gabbing over the top of it.

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A (hopefully) weekly series, in which the RPS hivemind gathers to discuss/bicker about/mock the most pressing (or at least noisiest) issues in PCgamingland right now. Hot Takes are go.>

Alec: OMG THIS IS GOING TO BE THE MOST AMAZING HOT TAKE EVER. By which I mean, today we are discussing hype and videogames and if that helps or hurts them and helps or hurts us. The prompt for this is Hello Games chat with Pip last week, in which they mourned the crushing weight of expectation placed upon them as a result of having made some pretty good trailers for their space exploration game. I guess we re going to struggle to avoid a touch of physician heal thyself here, but anyway. How do we feel about how the world feels about No Man s Sky? … [visit site to read more]

From 2014-2015, RPS’s Senior Scottish Correspondent Cara Ellison wrote S.EXE, 29 columns about games about sex, games about love, games about the space in between those two things, games about sexuality, and games about schlongs. Unfortunately the series is on indefinite hiatus as Cara takes a break from writing about games after her spectacular but surely exhausting Embed With… project, but whether you missed it the first time, didn’t catch all of them or are simply missing it already, you should absolutely revisit S.EXE yourself now. It’s a by turns insightful and funny (and very often both) document of the wilder side of games, the darker side of games, the sillier side of games and a hugely important but often little-seen side of games. Here’s the complete archive. … [visit site to read more]

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Gone Home opens as Kaitlin Greenbriar returns to her family after spending a year abroad, but rather than a welcome party she finds a curiously empty house and a missing sister.

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Earlier this month, Gone Home developers Fullbright dropped a trailer for their follow-up, Tacoma. It’s set on a space station! People talk to each other! The gravity ain’t all there! There’s a toilet! And, er, that’s about all we found out. So let’s find out some more, by talking to Fullbright’s Steve Gaynor. Discussed: micro-gravity, Demolition Man, Chris Hadfield, being ‘socially conscious’ devs, accidental BioShock inspirations, what of Gone Home can and can’t work in a fantastical setting, System Shock, locked doors and whether Tacoma is more or less not-a-game than Gone Home was or wasn’t. … [visit site to read more]

Gone Home developers Fullbright have shed a little more light on their so-far cryptic follow-up, Tacoma. The space station-set exploration title is due for release in 2016, but gave away little in its announcement trailer. In a forthcoming interview with RPS, Fullbright’s Steve Gaynor revealed that “you can tell from the teaser that it s in micro-gravity; stuff is floating around. And some of the implications that has for the relationship that the player can have to the space that you re exploring, that you couldn t have in a terrestrial setting, is really exciting to us.” … [visit site to read more]

Quentin Tarantino has a monologue about Top Gun in the little-known Hollywood metamovie Sleep With Me. In it, Tarantino discusses in his typical teenage terminology how Top Gun, as well as being a romantic Cold War macho-off, is a film about the main character coming to terms with his own homosexuality. Tarantino names this subtextual narrative ‘fucking great’ and ‘subversive’. But it would probably have been much more subversive had it actually been text and not subtext. In game terms, that narrative probably would have been The Fullbright Company’s Gone Home. Yeah I said it. Gone Home is a more explicit Top Gun.

GONE HOME SPOILERS FROM HERE ON~

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I’ve discovered a novel way to conduct interviews: tweet vaguely about something you’re interested in, then wait for two game designers you like and respect to have a chat about it and send you the logs. I carefully laid my bait: “I use ‘walking simulator’ warmly and earnestly. I adore walking around looking at stuff and reflecting. Walking is great! Sim it to the max.”

The trap snared my chums Ed Key and Ricky Haggett. Ed created walking simulator Proteus while Ricky is working on Hohokum, a dicking-about sim for PlayStations which might, with fewer puzzles, be called a walking simulator. Unsuspecting, they discussed Proteus, the ‘genre,’ exploring and wandering, and what a “walking simulator” even is. Afterwards they decided “Just email it to Alice,” rather than blog about the chat themselves. “She can turn it into ‘news,’” they said. Suckers!

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SOMA didn’t scare the scuba suit off me, but I did find a creeping sort of potential in its soaked-to-the-bone corridors. Amnesia: The Dark Descent 2 this ain’t. Or at least, it’s not aiming to be. Currently, it still feels a lot like a slower-paced, less-monster-packed Amnesia in a different (though still very traditionally survival-horror-y) setting, but Frictional creative director Thomas Grip has big plans. I spoke with him about how he hopes to evolve the game, inevitable comparisons to the Big Daddy of gaming’s small undersea pond, BioShock, why simple monster AI is better than more sophisticated options, the mundanity of death, and how SOMA’s been pretty profoundly influenced by indie mega-hits like Dear Esther and Gone Home.>

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Gone Home was an inspired, beautifully heartfelt thing that clearly had a profound affect on people of multiple codes and creeds. It was powerful, delicate, and… we’ve probably said everything about it that it’s possible for one website largely made up of hairy men to say. At some point, it becomes time to move forward and explore new territory. That’s exactly what Steve Gaynor, Karla Zimonja, and the rest of the Gone Home team are doing right now: exploring. They don’t know precisely what form their next game will take just yet, but in a lengthy (and frankly, often very silly) interview, they let me inside their creative process. Go below to find out what lies beyond Gone Home for the Fullbright Company. >

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