Daniel Fries
Kill Screen
Philadelphia, PA, United States
Contact Daniel
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Past articles by Daniel:
Hackmud brings back the hacker fantasy of the '90s
A handful of plucky AIs are looking to escape their virtual prison. They start by making a run on a couple of vaults. They’re not really recruiting, but the player stumbles onto their team. Hackmud is a heist game, but the characters are all teenaged computers. It’s wrapped up in cyberpunk ideas and computer culture of the ’90s—the first place the gang goes for advice is “Faythe’s Fountain,”… → Read More
Inside's designer has an experimental music game out next month
Some visual styles become particularly entrenched in games. The continual quest for photorealism drives graphics technology towards lots of different ways to light scenes and throw particles all over the place. Different engines and art teams end up producing something like house styles—DICE’s Frostbite engine means the upcoming Battlefield 1 is lit a lot like Battlefield 4 (2013), CryEngine’s… → Read More
Twitch Plays Chess is only the latest in a long history of chess-playing "machines"
Last Friday, Ripstone Games ran a promotion last Friday for their upcoming cross-platform title Pure Chess, inviting chess grandmaster Simon Williams to face off against Twitch chat. Viewers would suggest a move during a designated “voting period” and the most popular move would be played. Ripstone was billing it as a rematch of the 1999 game “Kasparov … Continued → Read More
The Final Station finds the rare beauty of zombie fiction
If we understand the “zombie movie” as a particular set of plot beats and characters, George A. Romero’s films are what brought that to the mainstream. There’s a mysterious disease, followed by lots of killing and running from zombies, then—in Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985), at least—some number of our heroes escape by helicopter. Valve’s Left 4 Dead series ends up making… → Read More
Hey, perhaps don't set your game in "fantasy primitive africa"
Where and when is the “fantasy primitive africa” of upcoming survival game Voodoo? “You will be one of the founders of civilization,” says Brain in the Box, the Italian studio behind it. Bear in mind that the first humans popped up in East Africa around 250,000 thousand years ago, and civilization has its roots in Mesopotamia and Egypt around 14,000 years ago—not much fantasy there. The trailer… → Read More
Work this new roguelike out and you can be a time-travelling historian
After wandering around for a few years in the wilderness of The Only Shadow That The Desert Knows, I stumbled into a city. ASCII characters, caves, and poison toads led me to believe that the creator of the game, Jeremiah Reid, had made a fairly traditional roguelike for 7DRL 2016. But when I stepped into Hiast for the first time, I was handed a pile of books—biographies, histories, maps—and a… → Read More
You can Play Deus Ex GO while you wait for Mankind Divided
Even though the board is bared to both players, chess is a kind of stealth game. Each piece is moved in plain sight, but a successful chess player is hiding her intentions from her opponent. That opponent understands that her goal is to force a checkmate, but spends the game trying to deduce and block the path she plans to take to accomplish that. Similarly, games like those in the Deus Ex… → Read More
Wobbledogs is even more ridiculous than it sounds
My favorite Dwarf Fortress (2006) update briefly describes the elimination of a bug wherein cats were ”dying of alcohol poisoning after walking over damp tavern floors and cleaning themselves.” The causal logic that leads to an issue like that is both immediately understandable and completely ridiculous. These sorts of unintended consequences are at the core of games that rely on random… → Read More
A wooden book filled with puzzles is the coolest new toy
The Codex Silenda is a set of intricate wooden puzzles that quickly reached its funding goal on Kickstarter many times over. It’s the kind of object you’d expect to be hand-carved by a slightly eccentric artisan, but it’s laser-cut, and one of the reward tiers gets you the pieces, which you would then assemble into the puzzle yourself. As it turns out, the laser-cutter can do for the mechanical… → Read More
The Rocket League Championship Series was esports for everyone
Esports often miss out on the feats of physical grace that make for great SportsCenter clips, or, at least, giffable moments. With great punt returns or rim-shaking slam dunks, there’s no need for a nuanced understanding of football or basketball to gawp. Only on rare occasions are esports so immediately and viscerally astounding; something like … Continued → Read More
John Darnielle's next novel is a horror story about fragmented video tapes
In the music he writes for the Mountain Goats, John Darnielle tells intensely specific stories. One song describes a breakfast of boiled peanuts the morning a parther leaves for good. Another, from the band’s most recent album, Beat the Champ (2015), mournfully describes a wrestling match in which the loser has his head shaved with a “cheap electric razor from the Thrifty down the street.”… → Read More
The Station brings urban legends alive with cute pixel art
One of my favorite urban legends as a child centered on the sewers of New York City. As the story goes, it suddenly became popular in New York to have an alligator as a pet. The giant lizards were kept in fish tanks and then in bathtubs, until owners were horrified to discover that an alligator outgrows even a bathtub, at which point some great number of alligators were sneaked to the sewers,… → Read More
Chat with lonely ghosts in Indigo Child
In the 80s and 90s, “indigo children” were a topic out of New Age philosophy that gained some mainstream popularity. The idea was that certain gifted children might possess unusual or paranormal abilities. It’s the kind of thing that would have made for a good X-Files episode, or if you’re developer Metkis, it makes for a good short game. Indigo Child is about talking to ghosts, but it has an… → Read More
Don’t let Quadrilateral Cowboy slip through your fingers
When Brendon Chung described Quadrilateral Cowboy to IGN in 2013, he framed it as a departure from his narrative-focused work in Thirty Flights of Loving (2012) and Gravity Bone (2008). “I wanted to go in a very different direction,” he said, “and let the player experiment in a sandbox and figure out their own solutions to problems.” This third game about the seedy underbelly of Nuevos Aires—the… → Read More
Nintendo's new mini console relies on your memories of the '80s
Between Humble Bundles and Steam sales, everyone loves a good collection of cheapo games. In the spirit of bundle-based generosity, Nintendo has announced a kind of physical manifestation of their Virtual Console in the form of the “NES Classic Edition.” The size of a 10-dollar sandwich, the NES Classic Edition will have a fixed library of 30 NES games, 28 of which are currently available on the… → Read More
Stop everything! Kentucky Route Zero Act IV is out right now
Just like last time, Kentucky Route Zero‘s next act—that is, Act IV—has dropped with a soft thump into the world. If you already own it then this new act will be available to download in your Steam library right now. Did you hear it land? Nor did anyone else. Alongside this sudden arrival, Cardboard Computer posted an “Observational Trailer,” which is the most pleasant three minutes I’ve ever… → Read More
Card Thief brings medieval stealth to the card game format
Card Thief is an upcoming game from the Tinytouchtales studio headed by Arnold Rauers. Inspired by Thief (1998) and Sage Solitaire (2015), it will see players extinguishing torches and sneaking past salivating dogs to string long chains of cards together as the obstacles mount up. Tinytouchtales’s last effort, Card Crawl (2015), also used a more-or-less standard deck of cards to blend dungeon… → Read More
The steady process of restoring a long lost MMO
If you want to grow up to be a conservator—someone whose job it is to ensure a museum’s art is protected against the ravages of time—it involves a huge amount of schooling and preparation. Aside from art history, conservators learn chemistry to manage the precise makeup of clays or pigments used in paintings, they use x-rays and other imaging technologies to see works great artists painted over… → Read More
Get ready to jack in to Quadrilateral Cowboy later this month
Quadrilateral Cowboy, the next game from prolific game maker Brendon Chung, is coming out for Windows PCs on July 25th. That is very soon. Unfortunately, if you’re running Linux or OSX you’ll have to wait until September this year to get the game. Still, that isn’t too long… right? Chung is probably best known for the two-game bundle made up of Gravity Bone (2008) and Thirty Flights of Loving… → Read More
Somewhere is back, and it has new, surreal images to show you
The two-person Studio Oleomingus has resumed work on Somewhere, their first person exploration game set in an alternative Colonial India. To demonstrate, they’ve given us a new peek at an environment in their surreal polygonal world. The first screenshot shows off a car, maybe from the early ’60s, but made of wood paneling and with giant antlers poking out the top. The following slides feature… → Read More