The MIRAGE is about to start. Get ready.
Mediterranea Inferno (dev. Lorenzo Redaelli), 2023.
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trying on a metaphor
Claire Keane
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@santaragione
The MIRAGE is about to start. Get ready.
Mediterranea Inferno (dev. Lorenzo Redaelli), 2023.
Wheels of Aurelia (Santa Ragione, 2016)
Developed/Published by:Â Santa Ragione Released:Â 20/09/2016 Completed:Â 16/07/25 Completion:Â Completed seven endings and unlocked every checkpoint.
Wheels of Aurelia is being delisted from the App Store on July 25th because of Appleâs anti-art App Store requirements, and as itâs been made free by the developer in response, I thought I should pick it up and play it through. While Wheels of Aurelia will be available on other platformsâand if youâre reading this after itâs been delisted, you can pick it up thereâitâs not exactly a preservation issue, it really does speak to the complete devaluation of creative work in our tech industry-led culture. Companies like Apple expect apps to be updated regularly, but of course, a game can just be⊠what it is (never mind the fact that a lot of apps donât really need to be updated or changed much, if at all, either.) And letâs not forget the cultural vandalism of binning off everything from the old 32-bit App Store rather than working to keep them accessible.
Apple are cunts, basically. And I think this matters in the case of Wheels of Aurelia for the same reason I wrote about Despelote in the context of our AI slopscape: Wheels of Aurelia is a genuine attempt to make a human work, but one that is still, specifically, a video game.
Set in Italy in the 1970s, the player is cast as Lella, a woman taking a road trip to France for mysterious reasons, accompanied by Olga, who she met only the night before and has her own reasons for taking the trip. In some respects, the game could be described as a visual novel, but I think thatâs a little reductiveâIâd call it a âcar conversation simulatorâ, because it captures the feel of something any driver will know wellâwhen youâre engaged in a conversation while driving and are able to split your attention seamlessly between the conversation and the road.
Here itâs cleverly provided by making the driving as simple as possible. You head forward automatically and can switch lanes to overtake and speed up (a bit) by swiping but thatâs really it. While youâre driving, the conversation flows, and you can choose between a few different responses each time youâre prompted. So as you drive, youâre mostly listening, or thinking about what youâre going to say next, only occasionally making a point of taking active control of the car.
I really have to emphasise that this is the ideal video game interpretation of the car conversation. If the driving was literally any more complicated, Iâd have to think about it, and when Iâm driving, I donât think about it. Iâm just⊠driving!
Something else I appreciate about this is that it doesnât tell one long narrative. It actually does the one thing I always want games to doâmake it impossible to see it all in one playthrough, make each playthrough short, but make each playthrough tell a whole story. Wheels of Aurelia, if you play it once, is very shortâless than twenty minutes. But as you play, you can pick up hitchhikers. You can change your travelling companion. You can choose which town to head to next. And you can always choose to say something different.
I thought Iâd be done with one playthrough, honestly, but through the dialogue the game doesnât just progress a narrative, but paints a portrait of Italy in the late 70s. Like Ecuador in the early 2000s, itâs nowhere I know anything in particular about, and the game (cleverly, I think) gives you encyclopedia entries (sourced from Wikipediaânow thatâs some savvy effort-saving) to fill out anything in detail that you likeâthough I was happy to let it just flow, to feel immersed in my lack of perfect context.
The thing I would say surprised me most is that I actually wished it was a little longer per playthrough! I appreciate that the game doesn't shy away from serious, adult topics, but the endings feel a little sudden, like you havenât spent quite enough time with the characters to get totally comfortable with them. While you draw more of them out each playthrough, it feels like youâre just capturing a snapshot of someoneâs lifeâand the endings imply a little too much by comparison. It can feel unearned. And if youâre a completionist, I suspect that trying to see every ending here will get pretty repetitiveâbetter to just play it until youâve had your fill and leave some things unknown.
Sometimes there are just games that just⊠do what theyâre trying to do. Wheels of Aurelia is one of them. Thereâs no âupdateâ that they could make that would be worth it to make Apple happy: it deserves to exist, and be played, as it is.
Will I ever play it again? There are many endings I havenât seen. Ironically, this is kind of a perfect iOS gameâI can imagine picking it up and giving it a run through to get an ending I hadnât seen at some point in the future while Iâm in a waiting room or something.
Final Thought: I was interested to read that one major inspiration for this was the Italian film Il Sorpasso, as the movie it immediately put me in mind of was the Italian film Rabid Dogs. Though that is tonally incredibly differentâŠ
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You are a martyr.
MEDITERRANEA INFERNO (2023) ⣠dev. Eyeguys
Saturnalia will be playable for the first time ever at #DayoftheDevs on 11/10 in San Francisco! RSVP now on dayofthedevs.eventbrite.com (at The Midway SF) https://www.instagram.com/p/B4h4ZtNpiPN/?igshid=1dyfy4rfwqxqe
Announcing our next game! Saturnalia is a 3rd person survival horror adventure: play as a cast of characters exploring an isolated village of ancient ritual â its labyrinthine roads will change each time you lose all your characters.
Coming 2020! Platforms TBA. More info soon!
Meanwhile: www.saturnaliagame.com
Wheels of Aurelia - App Store launch trailer
Our latest game, Wheels of Aurelia, is vailable from TODAY on the App Store! We hope youâll enjoy đ€ Head over to http://wheelsofaurelia.com/ for all the infos!
Best,
NicolĂČ, Pietro and Paolo
General Assembly of photography - Reggio Emilia, May 5th at 11 am
Weâve been invited to talk at the General Assembly of Photography - Reggio Emilia. NicolĂČ is taking part at the round table âPhotography, information, post-truth: digital revolution and social mediaâ on May 5th at 11.45 am - Teatro Cavallerizza.Â
All infos on: http://www.fotografiaeuropea.it/
See you there? đžđ
2013 Interview for Lee Witney (never published)
1. Why have you chosen to create with this medium, what are you trying to communicate and why is it important to you?
The answer is a complex one, because what we end up doing in our lives is often a result of many different experiences. The obvious, uninteresting answer is that we've always been fascinated by games and video games, as most kids are. As friends (we met when we were 17 and 20, respectively) we were enjoying discussing our different play experiences, analyzing them, and imagining how we'd have done things differently. It started as a fun exercise of thinking "what ifâ we had a voice in the making of our favorite games, and as naĂŻve sense of discovery about how things work. When we grew up and began to feel like we had something to say for ourselves, games were naturally the medium we had invested lots of thought in, and we had matured a genuine belief in its expressive potential. We decided to actually start making games with the intention to create something that wasn't catering exclusively to the games world, but was also aimed at a non-gaming audience, who share our sensibilities for themes and aesthetics. We are interested in seeing how things that are typically communicated with other media look through the medium of games and video games (like politics, for example, in our 2013 game http://finalcandidation.it that we designed for the Italian elections).
2. The term 'Game' seems quite limiting for a tool that allows a person to interact with another's ideas. Do we need a word that articulates the medium accurately, that embraces protean experiences, if so could you suggest one?
It could be argued that words like "game" and "play" are not limiting in themselves. They accommodate many different meanings that keep changing based on locations, players, social interactions, narrative content, and more. Games may be perceived as puerile, because they represent concepts and actions that are deeply rooted in our human nature, but are typically experienced for the first time during infancy. We've found that trying to define the meaning of the term "game" or "play" could be as hard as defining the meaning of the term "art". We like to consider play as a behavior and to think of games as tools that enable a play behavior. This way we do not have to think in terms of restrictions such as goals and rules. Instead, we focus on what, to us, are more important design challenges like âinspiring actionsâ.
3. It is important to respect history but not be constrained by it. In the mediums inauguration developers innovated because they basically had a blank canvas. Where are we now, are we bound by our history or enriched because of it?
As you say, in art, history certainly has this dual effect -- it simultaneously restrains and frees the artist. This might be true for every medium, and it might simply depend on the approach. Surely, games themselves suffer from an excessive dependence on the history of video games. We wonder if it is because game-making was for so long only relegated to engineers. On the other hand, even people with different backgrounds today choose to make âretro gamesâ. Â For instance, pixel-art is extensively celebrated, often merely out of custom or tradition, without considering the implications. There is nothing inherently wrong with making games about old games, but it is a little saddening when this celebration is all that creators are interested in participating in. Imagine if every movie was like Michel Hazanaviciusâs âThe Artistâ.
4. How can you sell diversity to risk averse consumers, especially when the work of the imitator is embraced more than the risk taker?
There was a very interesting talk by Nathan Vella at GDC China in 2012, called âPerhaps a Time of Miracles Was at Hand: The Business & Development of #Sworceryâ that explains how Capybara Games managed to have a successful product by relying on a completely niche market. If the question is about surviving while making the games we want, then Nathanâs talk possibly has the answer: there is always a niche market large enough that shares our mindset, and fortunately, contemporary distribution models enable us to reach them. We, personally, do not worry too much about the ârisk averseâ consumers. They will eventually turn to things they are more interested in as they develop their passions and taste. What is more important is to reach people that are interested in diverse entertainment or culture that resonates with them. The interesting part is that these people may not be familiar with games, or may have never considered that games can satisfy their need for low-fi, political science fiction worlds, and the challenge is to reach those people.
5. What responsibilities do consumers have? Their demands for the videogame to be respected contradict their buying habits; which support the same immature themes over and over again.
It is tempting to say that consumers have a responsibility. When people keep buying the third or fourth chapter of the same game with more than two hundred updated guns for $69.99, well, itâs very tempting to point fingers. But developers have really as much of a responsibility -- to do whatever they can to make the games they want to make, without starving. Letâs face it: nobody is in the game industry because âitâs an easy jobâ. It isnât. Crunches, sacrifices are way too common, and it is mind boggling how so many devs are willing to go through that to work on games they dislike. Some of them might be trapped in some financial loop where they are stuck in producing the most profitable game possible, but that canât be the final goal for people that want to express themselves through games. Another responsibility game creators have is to enrich oneâs own life with enough diverse experiences. Itâs hard to be original in making games if we do not have personal, deep, original experiences to draw from. Finally, itâs really disheartening the amount of sexist, misogynist, overly violent, homophobic, and transphobic content there is in games and it is our responsibility to do better. We face the problem of an audience approaching gaming as pure entertainment and not as a medium capable of convey meaning, and we, as developers, should focus on ways to change that.
6. As new concepts are explored surely critique needs to evolve, especially when trying to define experiences that do not fit into our current forms of measurement. Is there an alternative to how games are currently evaluated?
The technical focus, for instance, could shift to accessibility. Instead of telling us if this or that game is making the best use of a technological expedient, critics could tell us whether it was built with a degree of accessibility appropriate to the audience the game is addressing. Â It could also be interesting to see mention of relevant media to contextualize the overall experience offered by a game. If you are playing a game about fairy tales, how does your experience relate to different works by Hans Christian Andersen or the Grimm Brothers? Why are these themes treated aesthetically differently in the game with respect to early 20th century illustrations? The tendency to evaluate games only from the game prospective and not refer to the rest of human culture and history can be limiting.
7. What happens to an idea that could advance the medium but fails to tick the boxes under our current review system. Is it left in obscurity or maybe refined by someone else. If so what is the originators role; a sacrificial stepping stone for others?
I like the idea of failures as sacrificial stepping stones. We've been inspired by our own past failures as well as by various unsuccessful game productions from obscure developers in the '90s. Thereâs nothing wrong with failed projects and going back to see what was good in them. It would be unfair to say that projects fail just because they donât tick all the review or feature boxes -- there are so many factors to a gameâs success.
8. Please explain your definition of quality? Does it reside in a score, an accolade, sales, mass consent, personal opinion or is there something else?
This is a tricky question. It is helpful to distinguish between what we consider a successful execution of the design we set out to realize vs how well-received the final product is. In the first case it is really a matter of scale. Not all projects are born equal, and we always put this into perspective when evaluating the quality of what we create. What was the budget? How much time did we have? The quality is the ability to forecast the scope of the project based on these values and do the best you can under the circumstances. If we couldnât have made anything better (or, should we say, more interesting), within those constraints, then the project is successful. If, instead, we are discussing success in terms of âenabling us to work on more projects through salesâ, for us success can be measured based on whether or not the revenue will allow us to work on a bigger project than the one we just finished. This is especially true now, because we are very small, and we feel we still do not have the funds to work on projects with a big enough scope to let us experiment in the ways we would like. For example, we would love to hire artists and engineers to work with us and add their vision to our projects.
9. The crash of the videogame in the 80s was due to excessive poor quality and saturated plagiarism. Do you think the market could fall again and would that necessarily be a bad thing, especially given that the videogame could be reinvented without the limitations they face today.
Back when video games rose from their ashes, the industry welcomed a new approach to game development, championed by Nintendo, that set the standard for the modern industry until this generation of games. Around this time, the whole developer kit and seal of approval model was invented, in part, to prevent plagiarism. It created a safe environment where customers could finally have fewer but better games, but it also made designing games prohibitively expensive from the start (the sky-rocketing royalties to print cartridges and the cuts Nintendo would take from the sales). The result was fewer, better games on the market but also a culturally sealed world, with not much variety of exp. Today, easily accessible platforms and big online markets like Steam or App Store, things are similar to the 80s somehow, but the medium and the consumers are open to developers with different backgrounds. Â Meanwhile, thanks to new accessible frameworks like Unity, Game Maker, etc, the barrier to entry is much lower. New generation consoles so far also seem to go further in this direction. The difference might be that we now have the capacity to create independent networks that filter or curate content for end users in efficient and particular ways, so that the public wonât be as lost as it was in the early 80s.
10. How do we pursuit other forms of emotional content if there is always this expectation of fun? What is the most significant hurdle in creating work that might not be accepted commercially or critically?
The separation between âfunâ and âemotionalâ content is not always so clear cut. Many recent games find spaces between these two areas, where interesting, elevated, or even touching content can be experienced through an entertaining series of interactions. Of course there are productions that try to distance themselves from âfunâ as much as possible. But there are also many productions that stay somewhere in between these two extremes and could serve as a bridge for players from one type of content to the other. It is also fundamental to understand that fun in itself is not intrinsically related to âlaughsâ or âdelightâ. Greek theater was undeniably a form of entertainment, hence âfunâ, but its themes go certainly beyond those of comedy.
11. What needs to change in the developer/publisher/consumer/critic relationship to encompass new ideas. Does any one group hold more influence than the others?
Yes, consumers have the biggest influence, as well they should. They are spending their hard-earned money, as they say, and they certainly have the right to get what they want. It is our job to reach out to consumers, critics, and publishers that have a sensibility akin to ours. If publishers and critics are responsible for slowing down the maturing of the medium, it is because they are sometimes slower at capturing the new trends, the new needs of the consumers. Some game experts can fail at seeing how a certain phenomenon, apparently non-game related, is eventually going to radically shape the way games are made. It took a while for everyone to understand, for instance, the potential of tablet/portable/mobile games as a legitimate, expressive platform for games -- Â the first to understand this were certainly the consumers.
12. In your ideal future what would a videogame represent and how would it be perceived?
As a medium capable of conveying meaning, not just tied to the entertainment industry, we wish for games to be part of an interactive literature, to put in Espen Aarsethâs terms. We hope people will mainly approach video games for what they communicate, rather than for just killing some time. Cinema has a great diversity, from Sundance to Cannes to the Oscars, for example, these are events that celebrate different ways to use the medium, differentiating content and other aspects, all the way down to the duration of the movie itself. We should hope for this kind of diversity for video games in the future. We would also like to see the indie community outgrow what sometimes looks like an elitist behaviour. Self-referencing groups are not bad, per se, and they are pretty common in fields where the research goes beyond the common knowledge on a topic (for example, scientific publications are often aimed at an Ă©lite for a reason). But we think itâs not good when our community scorns those who believe that games can also evolve in different directions outside the âindie manifestoâ. It feels like we are going against our own goal, which is to explore the communicative power of games. The recent interview with Kurt Bieg (developer of Circadia, Twirdie and SwordFight) at penny-arcade.com addresses this problem in a very critical, but interesting way. It is definitely an important issue, and we cannot afford to lose the voice of talented and passionate developers like Kurt.
Wheels of Aurelia Original Soundtrack by Santa Ragione
Wheels of Aurelia is a narrative road trip game set in the roaring Italian 70s, it tells the story of Lella, a restless woman driving on the roads of the western coast of Italy.
Now on Steam! http://store.steampowered.com/app/508740
Launch trailer for Wheels of Aurelia! Now on Steam! http://store.steampowered.com/app/508740/
Thank you for coming to the first Milano Game Festival. We had a wonderful time and I hope we managed to demonstrate that a different kind of video game event is possible! The picture above is by Alex Camilleri and you can find more HERE.
Learn more about the Milano Game Festival and its selection on the Official Website.
See you in 2017!
Wheels of Aurelia is finally coming to Steam on September 20th!Â
Here is a new gameplay trailer:Â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z6pWll6KKM
WoA is also coming to consoles, Xbox One and PS4 on October 5th thanks to our friends at MixedBag Publishing!
Yay!
We announced the Milano Game Festival! Come join us this September in Milan.
Five evenings to play five games (three of which unreleased), one per evening.
Two slots: 6PM to 9 PM and 9PM to 12AM
60 seats per slot, 30 stations all playing the same game for ~2 hours.
Play solo or bring a friend, then drinks and Q&A with the authors
This is the first and only game event with this format
Location: IULM Contemporary Exhibition Hall in via Carlo Bo 7 Milan Italy. 8th to 12th of September 2016.
Online registration + XXI Triennale ticket OR Milano Film Festival pass are REQUIRED.
Audience members receive a Steam key for the game they are playing!
more info:Â http://milanogamefestival.com/
Launch delay apology + new music track! We have to delay Wheels of Aureliaâs launch by a few months (originally promised it would come out before end of Spring 2016) because we've got a little carried away with adding new content and we want everything to be perfect before we ship. As an apology we are releasing a preview for the new soundtrack of the game, you can listen to the new exclusive song "I Limoni" (Lemons) here:Â https://santaragione.bandcamp.com/album/wheels-of-aurelia-original-soundtrack As it says on Bandcamp: "At launch the game will be available on Steam standalone OR bundled with the soundtrack, so if you'd rather wait for that, please do! The game + full soundtrack is coming out this Summer 2016" Now before I go back to polishing our narrative driving game, let me write some of the features of the release we are preparing:
16 different endings (+ 6 from the beta)
16 Illustrated epilogues!
New 3D art, more unique buildings with story and dialogue.
10 new illustrations by Patrick Leger
New dynamic soundtrack with 3 new songs written and composed for the game
Improved and revised control system
Playable intro
Cards and Achievements!
Secret mode, and much more...
Available to answer any question here or on twitter.
Cheers!
Pietro & NicolĂČ
Check out our latest effort! Santa Ragione produced the Triennale Game Collection, a downloadable virtual exhibition of video games created for the XXI Triennale by some of the worldâs most renowned independent game designers, showcasing these artistsâ experimental approach to interactivity.
The collection, curated by Pietro Righi Riva, features work by Mario von Rickenbach & Christian Etter (Dreii, Plug & Play), Tale of Tales (Luxuria Superbia), Cardboard Computer (Kentucky Route Zero), Pol Clarissou (Orchids to Dusk), and Katie Rose Pipkin (Mirror Lake).
Official website w/ iOS & Android download links:Â http://www.milanogamefestival.com/collection/