Season's reapings

Welcome to Blue Tea's Third Annual All Hallow's Eve Roundup. It took a while, but I managed to scrape a few things together. I hope you enjoy.

Art

Feeling funereal? Cemeteries, a Flickr photoset by talented photographer Burza-snieta, who has a lot of other very worthwhile galleries not appropriate to our theme today.
Via La main gauche.






Mia Mäkilä Lowbrow and Horror Art should give you plenty of dark, lurid stuff to look at as you while away the long Halloween hours. Not much else to say...go and feast.






Kris Kuksi does a lot of different kinds of work, from botanical renderings to fantastic painting to realistic portraiture, but what I'm interested in today are his stunning, outrageously detailed mixed-media sculptural works. You'll find them under the category "the grotesque" in his eclectic gallery, and they will hold you in thrall. These thumbnails don't do them justice.
Via Dark Roasted Blend.






Dark, surreal paintings by David Ho. They are technically excellent and wonderfully evocative. If I weren't posting this for Halloween, I'd pick some of the dreamier or more magical pictures, but today I'm plumbing the gallery for the grimmer, hellish, even Boschian scenes. Try especially the "Contemplation" series, which "dwells upon the spectrum of human emotions, desires and needs", or, for a modern fairy tale, the series of "Candace the Ghost".
Via The Lumper.







I haven't yet done Ray Caesar, which is a shame. His portraits of wicked, elegant, creaturized women and menacing, haunted-looking girls inhabit their own world of cold, detached, refined grotesquery.





Swan Bones Theater is the gallery of artist Kelly Louise Judd, and features a nice array of paintings as well as illustrations and dolls in a fairy-tale-inspired, pop-surrealist tradition. Gloomy forests, brooding ravens, and pale maidens in pearls and lace and wolf's-skin clothing abound.






Games

It looks like Exmortis 3 isn't ready for Halloween this season, but in the meantime you can enjoy a little slice of spooky with Ben Leffler's macabre minigame, Purgatorium. Only he could make a baby's nursery such a dreadful place. Not for the faint of heart! If you liked that and haven't already played his excellent Exmortis series, make that your next stop.





Project Pravus is a classic haunted house game, a lights-down speakers-up after-dark spookfest. You are a real estate agent investigating a house for sale at a suspiciously low price. The locations are moody sepia-toned photographs, the sounds are low and rumbly, the sights are gore and ghosts and secrets revealed. Short and dark.
Walkthrough at Jay Is Games.





Eternal Darkness is a short, goth flash game that's light on substance but scores high marks for style. You play a teen girl who goes to a nightclub, falls in with a bunch of vampires, and has to save the world. As far as gameplay goes, there are only a few decision trees to navigate, but in between you can enjoy the fully-voiced characters, punk soundtrack, slick animation, a nice credits sequence, and even some "outtakes" at the end.

I also hope you enjoy this screencap from the credits, by the way. You don't know how hard it was to get. Incidentally, if you're really bored, I discovered that you can right-click on the flash player about where I took this cap and uncheck "play" -- the action will freeze, but the people keep dancing in the background. But remember I said only if you're bored.






Devil's Triad is described by its author as a "cutesy, evil vs. evil thing", with "multiple endings, an RPG-style battle with Satan, and lots of cute characters to interact with." You can play as a vampire, witch, or ghost, and your task is to unite with the other two characters to defeat Satan. A little longer and with some more depth than the typical casual game offering, this one will take a little time to play through. Quite nicely done.





Video

The music video for Emilie Simon's "Flowers", a wonderful gothic-cute, Burtonesque animated gem.


Nightmarish Boschian imagery remixed and brought to hellish life in this comic-grotesque music video for Buckethead's "Spokes for the Wheels of Torment".


Delightfully dark and super stylish music videos by My Pet Skeleton. Click "music videos" on the menu to the left, or have a look at the 2006 Reel for a quick and tasty sample of their work.

Four epic RPG webcomics

Sometimes I don't quite succeed in keeping this blog ungeeky, so today I'm presenting a selection of exceedingly geeky webcomics based on role-playing games.

I just recently discovered The DM of the Rings, which explores what Tolkien's classic work might look like as a D&D campaign with a bunch of easily-distracted players and an exasperated DM.

Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign.

The comic is assembled entirely from movie stills, and hits all the right comedic notes. Great stuff.
Via The spectacularly obtuse blog.





Two more nice RPG comics can be found at Giant in the Playground, both silly and fun: there's the graphically impressive Erfworld, a parody in the most overwrought high fantasy tradition, and the minimalist stick-figure comic The Order of the Stick, an AD&D "metagame" comic where the characters argue over xp, stats, and rolls.

EDIT: Now that I've gotten deeper into reading it, I just had to amend this post to add that the Order of the Stick is the best thing I've seen in a long time. LOVE it. I wasn't nearly enthusiastic enough about it at first, but it's really something.







Reading these, I was reminded strongly of that other geeky favorite of mine, 8-Bit Theatre, the epic webcomic that retells, more or less, the story of the original Final Fantasy game in a highly irreverent fashion, taking swipes at roleplaying, rpgs, and the whole fantasy adventure genre along the way. (I originally mentioned the comic in my "Excellent webcomics: strips and dailies (Part 2)" post.)

This is part of the first strip. Looking back, even though it's all based on the same remixed 8-bit graphic set in all its primitive glory, the graphic design has come a long way in the current strips. Creator Brian Clevinger has certainly had a lot of practice, with over 900 strips and counting.





Dear me -- revisiting the archives, I've just realized that this is in fact my third time posting this comic. And the last, I promise. With a bookmark stash like mine, there's no excuse for reruns.

The latest in Samorost-style games

Things are looking good. First of all, there is a new project from Samorost creator Amanita Design: it's not Samorost 3, but a new game, called Machinarium. And boy, does it look good.

It's due in late 2008, and you can hang out at the new Machinarium forum for a dose of hype to hold you over until then.





I realize I haven't actually presented any of Amanita's non-Samorost games here before, so in case you've missed them, you'll want to check these out:

The Quest for the Rest is a promotional game created for the band The Polyphonic Spree, in which members of the band go questing for their missing fellows. It's a lovely little game, with all the ethereal beauty and whimsy of the Samorost series.





Rocketman VC is a very short game promotional game made for Nike, in which pair of scientists work to power up a pair of basketball shoes. Despite the un-magical premise, Amanita's signature style and flair make it worthwhile.





The Pantry is not a game, but an interactive toy. Play with the things on the shelves to trigger strange effects.





Now that those are out of the way, some games that are actually new:

Haluz Games, the development studio of Tomas K., who brought us the delightful Samorost-inspired Haluz (see my original post on Haluz here), is back with a nicely redone site and a splendid sequel: Haluz2. Samorost's influence is even more apparent in this game, which is a little less cartoony and more magical than its predecessor. Fans of Samorost will feel right at home among its photorealistic mossy, mushroomy landscapes (drawn from photos of sites in the Carpathian mountains), drippy caves, growing flowers and assortment of birds, bugs, and woodland creatures. Other influences the creator has named include Shift and Wogger.

Taking another page from Samorost, Haluz Games has adopted Amanita's Samorost 2 distribution model -- the first few levels of Haluz2 are available to play online for free, with the remaining levels and soundtrack available to purchase. The full game can be downloaded for offline play with or without the soundtrack, and the soundtrack is also available for purchase as a CD. (Unfortunately, there is no game and soundtrack CD package.) I bought the full bundle, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it. Haluz is a worthy newcomer to the burgeoning Samorost-style genre, and deserves support. I'd love to see a Haluz3 someday.

Haluz2 walkthrough at Games on the Web.





Automaton is a very cool steampunk game that follows the adventures of a telekinetic automaton and his creator. Nice plot and scenery, and great steampunk atmosphere, including a nice historical montage by way of exposition. The text could have used a good editor, though. The game can either be played online or downloaded for offline play.
There is a walkthrough at Jay is Games if you don't like the one that comes with the game.
Via Brass Goggles.





Curious certainly is. It's a promotional game for the University of Salford in Manchester, and it's a nonsensical, kind of cartoonish photo collage of random events set vaguely in and around the Salford campus. Except for the pictures, it doesn't seem to have much to do with the university, except I suppose the spirit of playful discovery desirable in a prospective student ("limitless possibilities" is the tagline). Typical Samorost-style gameplay: help the character progress from one side of the screen to the other through a series of levels. It's quite cute. Just curious, is all.
The game provides its own hints, but you may want this walkthrough at Free Games News.