This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, Quadrilateral Cowboy [official site].

Quadrilateral Cowboy is a firstperson puzzle game about a group of hacker friends who stage heists across a set of increasingly challenging missions. Together they tell a surprising and affecting story of professionalism, friendship and rising threat through Blendo Games distinctive tight cutting between interactive scenes, flipping the action from a hoverbike chase to the gang s return to their hideout. It s clever, pacy, and rich in detail and nuance. Pretty much, in other words, what you d expect from Blendo Games.

But it s not what Blendo Games – which is to say, Brendon Chung – expected to make. Quadrilateral Cowboy s entire structure and form is completely different to what he originally envisaged. The way in which his game changed over the course of its development is a model for how a game is shaped by the realities of production, and how ideas can be far too big for their own good. (more…)

As anyone who watches their feeds knows, we live in a constantly evolving cyberpunk dystopia. They’re connecting toilets to the internet, for heavens sake. If this Gibsonist world is just too REAL for you, we have put together the ten best videogames about hacking, programming and computing so you can escape into meta-dystopia. Which I’m sure is a much better place.

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

Super-cool micro-Hitman, getting on for a decade old but feeling as fresh as ever.

My memories of Gravity Bone [official site] turned out to have been a little scrubbed by those of its successor, the more stylish, showy and cut-up Thirty Flights Of Living. I’d forgotten that, unlike 30 Flights, Bone is a fairly involved affair – jumping puzzles and death-traps and target-hunting. It’s all very active – you are the agent, not a mere witness to events. (more…)

It’s time to use to our radio voice. The RPS Electronic Wireless Show has historically been our not-very-regular podcast where we gather to tell each other how wrong we are about videogames. But this month it has mutated into something different. In the lead-up to this year’s Independent Games Festival, we interviewed a whole bunch of developers, all of whom have been nominated for some kind of award this year. We’ll be talking to them about sex, politics, and other things we’ve never understood.

In part one, we’re talking science fiction with the makers of Duskers, Quadrilateral Cowboy and Event[0]. Click onward to listen here, or find it on Soundcloud directly. … [visit site to read more]

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And so this cosmic dance begins anew. The finalists for the Independent Games Festival awards 2017 have been announced. Out of 650 games examined by the giant gang of 340 judges, a final 30 have been selected for a bunch of categories. There s plenty of familiar names among them, including Inside, Stardew Valley, Virginia, Hyper Light Drifter and Event[0]. But also some other boyos worth giving some attention. Come on over here and let s take a look at them all. … [visit site to read more]

As December approaches like a runaway sled and we prepare to say our goodbyes to 2016, it’s natural to reflect on the year as a whole. Those reflections could easily take the form of laments but we’re keeping our focus firmly on the world of PC games, where we’ve identified ten trends that may not have defined 2016, but have certainly helped to shape it. We delve into Sorcery and synthwave, DOOM and Danganronpa, and much more besides.

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Quadrilateral Cowboy is built on the Doom 3 engine, which was released long ago under GNU General Public License that states that derivative works must also be released under the GPL. The result? Quadrilateral Cowboy is now open source, meaning you can hack at the source code for the first-person hack-and-heist sim.

… [visit site to read more]

Hacking-fueled heist-em-up Quadrilateral Cowboy [official site] came out last week and opinion has been a bit divided about it. Graham, for instance, thought it was a stylish but disappointing romp. Whereas I reckon it’s a delicious retro-futuristic snack. But most reviews agreed on one thing – that there wasn t enough> of it. Well, get your 56k modem jacked in folks. The 20th Century Cyberpunk adventure will receive new levels in a free post-release mod, the game s designer has said.

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I’ve lined up my suitcase rifle, sawed open my escape route, and written two lines of code to control a small robot when I blink. Blink once and a set of lasers turn off allowing me to enter through a space station maintenance tunnel without triggering any alarms; blink twice and a second set turn off, allowing me to exit cleanly. It’s only a few moments later, as I stand in the vacuum of space, that I realise I left my deck – the computer by which I write scripts to control suitcase rifles, small robots, lasers and more – back in the maintenance corridor.

Quadrilateral Cowboy is a game about breaking into buildings to raid vaults, steal safes and hack coma patients. It’s a stylish, retro-futurist love letter to computing, engineering and ’90s videogame level design. It also feels like the prelude to a better game.

… [visit site to read more]