Little secrets

Game development is a matter of both the macro and micro: about sweep and scope, certainly, but without the nuts and bolts, games fall apart. Provided the dev team does its job correctly, players need only pay attention to the bigger picture, which is being powered near-invisibly by the finer details; we think of how to climb the building, not of the thousands of frames of animation and countless physics calculations that are getting us up there. There are exceptions to every rule, of course, and this month’s Hype crop yields a couple of games that don’t just allow us to get a little closer to the subject matter. Rather, they insist on it.

UK developer Fireproof is an old hand at this stuff: The Room series has been a smash hit on iOS precisely because of how intuitive and entertaining it is to fiddle around with literal puzzle boxes on a touchscreen. With The Room VR: A Dark Matter (p26), the Guildford studio takes that concept even further: we are more up close and more personal with these intriguing little devices than ever before, and it’s all the better for it.

Meanwhile, Receiver 2 (p40) kicks off the new decade with a very different take on one of gaming’s most popular tools. Despite their ubiquity, we think of videogame guns only in the abstract: we move a sight and press a button, and our target falls over. Receiver 2 is having none of that, examining the firearm with the closest of eyes, and insisting we treat it in kind. In the process it makes us think more closely about this timeworn videogame staple, and asks uncomfortable questions that most gun-based games would prefer us not to think about.

We find signs of deeper thought about established conventions elsewhere: Drake Hollow (p36) is a survival game where your charges can literally die of boredom, for instance. If this is the sort of thing we can expect to see more of as we head out into the 2020s, then the new decade is off to the finest of starts.