Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
the cowgirl simply can't keep from shooting everything; when you have a verb right at your
fingertips, it's hard not to use it. When a game—like so many action games—affords you only
one meaningful way to interact with the world, it's hardly surprising that stories are shaped by
the structure of the game and end in blood.
Platform
: Web
Price
: Free
h t t p : / / s c o u t s h o n o u r . c o m / c o w g i r l /
Company, 2013)
Scenes, Story
Gone Home
communicates its narrative entirely through exploratory story elements: the eldest
daughter spent a year abroad and then arrives back home to find her large family house empty.
To solve the mystery of where everyone's gone, it's necessary to look through the house for
scraps of paper, notes, letters, and other bits and pieces of information that slowly reveal the
story of what happened during the time she was gone.
Gone Home
's story isn't just commu-
nicated with words; the game also uses the environment of the house to convey what kind of
people lived there and what their daily thoughts and preoccupations were. It even contains
mundane items like boxes of topics and bottles of hair dye so you can interpret past events and
the state of the family.
Platform:
Windows, Mac, Linux
Price:
US $20
h t t p : / / w w w . g o n e h o m e g a m e . c o m /
Verbs, Scenes, Resistance
Like many other platform games, the primary verb of
Mighty Jill Off
is “jump,” but this game
explores a specific variation of that verb: when the player jumps, her avatar can float slowly
down while drifting left or right. The player jumps up a tall tower through a series of rooms,
each of which has been carefully crafted to develop jumping in a different and increasingly
challenging way.
Mighty Jill Off
also expresses a theme that's of personal importance to the
creator, since the protagonist (Jill) is a lesbian submissive trying to please her queen, who
kicked her down to the bottom of the tower and waits for her to ascend to the top. When the
