Review: Knee Deep

A Hollywood actor is dead, and there’s a media-frenzy around it. There’s also intrigue and danger and a blogger, a print journalist and a private detective are Knee Deep in it!

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Episodic Nightmare – The worrying trends of Episodic Gaming

Over the past couple of years, along with the rise of crowdfunding I’ve seen another trend emerge in gaming, one that will slowly reach the same level of shenanigans: Episoding Gaming. Episodic Games come in seasons, their story split into multiple chapters with their own price tag and of course the usual season pass, and over the course of potentially many years.

It used to be that episodic games were the domain of independent developers, those struggling to make enough money to meet development costs. The episodic nature would let them earn money on small bits of the game while they work on others. It also helps them by splitting the development into defined chunks, something useful I believe when they’re juggling day jobs with the game development responsibilities.

But while that is still somewhat true, there is a growing trend of full-time and highly successful game studios releasing games in the episodic format as well. Some have done it for ages and see no need to change now, as the business models suits them best, knowing how to take advantage of new episode releases to boost sales. Others use “episodic” as an excuse to cover up a delayed development and some just want to milk the trend as much as they can. Then there are the episodic titles released by major publishers, those that have no need for this type of content save for feeding the marketing fires. This last one has another side effect that I hope doesn’t become a common occurrence: releasing full games as episodic, splitting it up haphazardly in “post-production.” Continue reading Episodic Nightmare – The worrying trends of Episodic Gaming

EGX Highlights – Knee Deep

One of the developers I was most keen to see at EGX was Prologue Games. I always enjoy talking to them, mostly about crazy Florida stories with Wes Platt, Writer and Designer for Knee Deep, and some interesting stories from the game’s development with Colin Dwan, the Overlord…I mean owner.

This time around they were joined by Cory Farris, Senior Artist for Knee Deep—a part of me wants to believe they dragged him along for him to know how your body feels AFTER an expo—and while we waited for people to finish playing the demo I started talking to Wes, hoping to get some insight into the story-craft behind this episodic swamp noir. Continue reading EGX Highlights – Knee Deep

EGX 2015 – Day Three

I will be honest. I wasn’t looking forward to EGX Day 3. I was tired and aside from the interviews I had planned, I had pretty much seen everything I had wanted to see at EGX.

But I did make a promise to the Great and Legendary Ben to try out one of the AAA games for him, to brave the long queues and give it a whirl. But because this was a bigger day, Saturday after all, I could only do Just Cause 3. As someone who’s never played a Just Cause game before I have to say I loved it. There was so much freedom to do as you wished and the potential for creative destruction is outstanding. Continue reading EGX 2015 – Day Three

Rezzed 2015 – Knee Deep

I love Noir—the style, the tropes, the characters, everything. It’s one of my favourite genres. So when I saw Knee Deep on the Rezzed floor I had to take a shot. Also, someone I know with really good taste in adventures recommended it, so you know, double shot. Continue reading Rezzed 2015 – Knee Deep