Buried is the most claustrophobic film I’ve ever seen. It’s almost unbearable at times, and judging by the squirms and noises coming from several people sitting around me in the cinema, I was not the only person who felt genuine pity for Ryan Reynolds: a kidnapped man trapped in a wooden coffin, 6 feet underground in the Iraqi desert, with nothing but a mobile phone and a zippo for company.
As painful as it is to watch, Buried is an excellently crafted film with a solid performance from its sole star. Reynolds nails the panic, anger and sadness his character experiences as he desperately tries to figure his horrific situation out. Considering the film is set entirely within the confines of a cramped wooden box, its surprisingly exciting and relentlessly tense, with the director implementing neat camera angles and clever use of lighting to keep the movie as varied as possible, and with the exception of the moments of total blackness (when Ryan turns his phone off/puts the zippo away, etc), you are completely there in the coffin with him. It’s very unnerving. This was emphasied even more seeing it at the cinema on such a vast screen, and I could see numerous people around me shifting uncomfortably in their seats. If you know you already want to see this movie, then I strongly recommend seeing it on the big screen.
It’s by no means perfect, and a few niggles for me included the fact that Ryan constantly has his lighter lit, thus burning away his precious oxygen, and I’m also quite dubious as to whether you’d get any signal at all for your mobile phone if you are buried underground, but I don’t really want to find out that one first hand. Nonetheless, I’m am inclined to ignore these gripes and its really not that hard because the film is so damn immersive at all other times. To describe anything else of the film would be to ruin the suspense and tension gained from watching it yourself, so I’ll not say any more. You probably already know if you want to see it or not.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
Fighter Ace was a free-to-play Second World War dogfighting game. You just logged in, spawned in a big sky with about 20 or 30 other people and shot the shit out of each other. It taught me that the Japanese Zero was one of the greatest fighter planes of WW2. Sure, it was lightly armoured and went down easily with just a few direct hits, but it was so manoeuvrable, so fast and agile that it could take on pretty much any other plane and come out on top.
It’s difficult to describe the levels of hype that I felt leading up to the release of Half Life 2, and I know I wasn’t alone. This was a generation-defining moment in gaming, the likes of which has never really been replicated, and likely never will, for multiple reasons. Not only was HL2 a huge leap forward for its artistic and technological design, it ushered in an entirely new way to buy games and changed the gaming landscape forever.
Beyond: Two Souls is a paranormal action thriller starring Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe. You’d be forgiven for assuming it’s a Hollywood film based on that description, but it is in fact the latest game from Quantic Dream, the studio behind the equally cinematic Heavy Rain. It’s tempting to compare the two, but Beyond is a different experience, opting to tell a linear story with fewer choices and consequences. As a big fan of Heavy Rain’s dynamic storytelling approach, I expected to be disappointed but as soon as I started playing I realised what writer and director David Cage was trying to achieve and felt satisfied to go along for the ride. Because what a ride it is…
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