Maggese Games‘s Don’t Make Love has been nominated for Best Student Game at this year’s IGF awards. Artist Nina Kiel was kind enough to chat with Cliqist about inspiration, romance mechanics, and the essence of the tragedy at Don’t Make Love’s core. Blossoming Romance Cliqist: Hi…
Nic Reuben
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Nic Reuben likes to pause games every five minutes to ponder the thematic implications of explosive barrel placement. When he's not having an existential crisis over CAPTCHA verifications that ask him to prove he's not a robot, he's reading sci-fi and fantasy short stories, watching cartoons, and mourning the writing standards in Game of Thrones.
Nic Reuben
2 Min Read
The verdant land of Kingdoms and Castles is vacant of civilization when I arrive. I have the peasants build a towering keep to my magnificence. They don’t yet have homes, or food to eat, but that can wait. A man can’t be expected to feast…
Nic Reuben
1 Min Read
Here is a nice poem about design: Design, Design. All up in your mind. You use your mind, to make designs. Beautiful. I literally cannot stop crying. Here’s the nominees for the IGF 2018 Excellence in Design category. Into the Breach In our hands-on preview…
Nic Reuben
1 Min Read
Here is an example of a bad story: Once, there was a frog that wanted a bowl of cereal. The cereal he wanted was expensive, but he had no money because he was frog, and frogs are staunchly anti-capitalist. He stole the cereal, and had…
Nic Reuben
1 Min Read
We all know the scene by now; Moonlight bleeds through a crack in the blinds, catching steadily rising smoke. A half-abandoned cigarette rests on the lips of an ashtray. Pensive Jazz leaks from an old radio, interrupted by bursts of thunder. A dapper detective with…
Nic Reuben
1 Min Read
I started listening to the soundtrack for Eden’s Last Sunrise the other day, straight after I finished the demo. I haven’t stopped since. There’s game music that feels half-hearted; there because it’s expected. Then, there’s music that is so wonderfully evocative of a certain era…
Nic Reuben
2 Min Read
Steampunk Survival RTS They Are Billions is spreading with all the ferocity of a staggering, lurching, festering horde of dancing squirrels (You thought I was going to say zombies, didn’t you.) Unlike the animated corpses that inhabit its apocalyptic world, however, this intense strategy game…
Nic Reuben
1 Min Read
Breaking News: In a Kojima-esque act of postmodern subterfuge, and following in the clandestine footsteps of Frog Fractions 2, it turns out that Pigeon Dating Sim Hatoful Boyfriend has a brand new entry to the franchise. Yep. That’s right. The sequel to 2015’s Hatoful Boyfriend:…
Nic Reuben
1 Min Read
Being a website, Cliqist doesn’t need sleep – but if it did, it would have nightmares of you running out of stuff to play. Since Jay started highlighting some of the best short indies around in her Weekindies section, it seemed right to do an…
Nic Reuben
1 Min Read
There’s an odd sadness to the twee, fuzzy notes that greet you on starting The Onus Helm. They ripple up from darkness, sweet but heavy, scraping themselves along the torchlit stone walls. There is an unsettling spaciousness to the room, too. Cavernous and claustrophobic at once,…
Nic Reuben
2 Min Read
Any grizzled greenskins among you long enough in the tooth to recall Warcraft sans World might remember desperately defending the hamlet of Hearthglen against the undead scourge. Surrounded on all sides by a thick fog of war, a 30 minute timer heralded your salvation from…
Nic Reuben
1 Min Read
Hear that sound? That is game designer Andrew C. Wang’s front door splintering under the boots of the Disney Copyright Death Squads. As they drag him off to the Cinderella-themed Gulags, he will gaze up toward the late-afternoon sky, and see the first twinkling star of the…
Nic Reuben
3 Min Read
Rumu loves cleaning. Wine. Toast. Ada the cat’s paw prints. It doesn’t matter. Anything to keep the house sparkling for David and Cecily – the smartest, clumsiest humans in the world. David might leave his shirts lying around. Cecily might drop her teacup. Rumu doesn’t…
Nic Reuben
1 Min Read
It is a truth universally acknowledged that scavenging the floating wrecks of dilapidated space freighters is going to result in at least one conflict with space pirates. That’s just the rules. I didn’t make the rules. H.G Wells made the rules, then Asimov and Delany…
Nic Reuben
1 Min Read
What have they done to you, Santa? Why are you so thin, and so smol? Why have you been forcefully awoken from your slumber and made to travel through time and space to bring in another hellish twelve months? Why can’t pop culture dredge up…
Nic Reuben
1 Min Read
Do the dreamers of this world give form to the dragons, or do dragon dreams form the world? If you want to know, Storyseeker might have some answers. Then again… You wake to the buzz of television static, its granulated greys pierced through with audible…