Once More, With Stealing - On Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist (2015)

From the designer of The Stanley Parable, comes Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terrible Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist! It’s free! It’s short! I’d recommend playing both games first before reading this!

Now, onto our main attraction!

Footsteps to Follow: On Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons and Ico

Imagine you are the younger of two brothers. You will not get to forge your own path through childhood, because there will always be an elder sibling that came before you. Your parents and your teachers will always look at the two of you, and they won't be able to help but compare. Your own decisions will be flavored by the choices your older brother made before you, and at every turn, there will come a question: will you emulate, or differentiate? Will you invite the comparison or run in the opposite direction?

Brothers:  the story is about two brothers trying to cure their ailing father

Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons is a story about two brothers, trying to find a cure for their ailing father. And it is a game, one that is consciously trying to follow in the footsteps of an earlier game, Ico. The shadow Ico casts is long: it is considered a classic, a game that pushed the medium in new directions upon its release in 2001 by Sony Computer Entertainment.  Developed by Fumito Ueda and team ICO in Japan, Ico is a name that is likely to come up when you try to discuss Games as Art, for its style, for its storytelling, for its innovation, and for its imagination.  Brothers, released 12 years later, developed on a different continent by Swedish developer Starbreeze Studios, and directed by filmmaker Josef Fares, embraces the influences of Ico proudly and eagerly, and because of that you can't help but compare the two as you play through it.  (here's a link to an interview where Fares says Ico influenced his game:  Shack News - Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons creator talks inspiration and a grander world)

Medium Expectations: On Gome Home (2013)

Sam's bedroom

Five minutes: that's how long it took Gone Home to let me down.  It wasn't a big thing, really.  The game starts you off at the front door of a house, luggage at my feet and a locked front door beckoning.  I was Katie, a young woman back from a trip to Europe, and I'd arrived at night, with darkness enveloping everything beyond the porch.  A steady torrent of rain beats down, punctuated by occasional thunder and lightning, which lent a sense of urgency to the proceedings: don't you want to get out of the rain and cold?  I'd just figured out how to unlock the front doors, and now I was inside the lobby.  It was an actual relief entering the house and putting walls between me and the raging storm outside.  I took a look around, the first glimpse at the eerie, creaky, antiquated house that my younger sister Samantha (or Sam) and my parents were living in, although most of that was probably was the dark stillness, and the house would be more welcoming in the morning.  None of them were here apparently for my homecoming; the note on the door from Samantha had said as much.  My parents were on holiday, my sister had something to deal with.  So, I contemplated the wooden staircase in front of me, and the doors to either side.  Then I turned around, went back outside, and tried to pick up my bags, still on the porch, to bring them inside.  No dice.  Trying to pick them up had been one of the first things I'd tried to do when the game started, but left-click had done nothing, and neither did the spacebar, e, or u keys.  Perhaps now that I had the front doors open, Katie would logically have a better reason to want to pick them up, and the game would let me move them inside, away from the outdoors, but unfortunately, the bags still proved unresponsive.  The game wasn't able to interpret what I was trying to do, what I felt was a logical thing to do, and what I felt was a logical thing for my character to do, and that brought me out of the moment, if only for a bit.  This was a small thing, of course, that I was being bothered by, and you can forgive small things.  But it’s often these small surprises and disappointments that can stick with you, long after you finish a game.