New Year’s Wish List: Kurt Indovina

The Holidays are in full swing, and the New Year is almost upon us.

The Holidays are in full swing, and the New Year is almost upon us. As we progress year after year, the medium of video games continues to expand as developers further push boundaries and expectations of what can be done with the platform. My anticipation for what this New Year holds for video games is impeccable! Here is a list of my most anticipated titles:

Hands down, my favorite game of all time. Arguably the game that, in fact, shaped me into the individual I am today. Upon its release in 1998, it was received critically as one of the greatest adventure games of all time, but was all-in-all a commercial failure. The game went out of print, making it nearly impossible to find (legally). After the closing of LucasArts and the rights being picked up by Disney, Double Fine had managed to attain the rights, giving them back to its original writer/director, Tim Schaffer. With the help of Sony, Double Fine has remastered this macabre epic of crime and corruption, and are resurrecting it from the dead for Mac/PC/Linux and the PlayStation 4. In short, you are Manny Calavera – a travel agent for for the recently deceased; It’s his job to give them a travel package through the land of the dead to their final resting place. It isn’t until he meets Mercedes Colomar that he must travel across the land of the dead himself to save her. Grim Fandango rises from the grave on January 27th.

As far as I’m concerned, The Chinese Room can just about make anything and I’ll buy it. I also think that their games would only be half of what they are if it wasn’t for the heart wrenching, and gut gripping composition of composer Jessica Curry. For me personally, Dear Esther breathed a new life into the gaming medium. Long after my first play-through of Dear Esther , I still think back to my first time wandering the beach, listening to eulogy-style diary entries narrated by Nigel Carrington. Everyone’s Gone To the Rapture seems to be something of a spiritual successor to Dear Esther . Though information about the game is still vague, it seems you’ll be exploring a rural English town that was once inhabited. As the tagline for the game goes: “The story begins with the end of the world.” Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is coming to the PlayStation 4 sometime in 2015.

Playdead Studios’ Limbo captured a horrifyingly eerie, but ever so intriguing, atmosphere unlike any other I had experienced to date. The game was so perfectly ambiguous, while being equally addicting and gripping, purely on visuals and mood. Playdead Studios seems to have once again captured a strangely haunting but intriguing world with their upcoming title, Inside. Again, Playdead is playing the ambiguous card. The only information to gather from Inside is from the only trailer the studio has released; it seems as though you’ll be maneuvering through a dystopian-esque world filled with mindless individuals marching in singular order together. I also anticipate that Inside will feature brilliant and dark puzzles in the same vein of it’s predecessor . Inside will be making it’s debut on Xbox One sometime in early 2015.

Sure, Grim Fandango is a remaster of a game that was once released by a major studio, but nothing says indie like a developer leaving a major studio to create his own studio. That studio not only outlived the one he left, but he also got the rights back to his own game, and remastered it on his own terms. It’s also thrilling to see several games coming out this year which are successors to massively popular independently made video games. 2015 may very well be the most exciting year thus far for indie devs.

As for a resolution, I hope it’s to continuously support your indie/local game developers.