Screenshot Saturday Sundays: Paper towns, grocery golf, and endless photography
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Screenshot Saturday Sundays! Pack your bags, put on your wellies, we're heading out to see what screenshots, videos, gifs and such have been put together by the game development community over the last few days. This week: shopping under par, hand-drawn cartography, infinite photoshoots and the trouble with witches.
We're starting this week's trip with a spell down in Logan Forman's cauldron. Did you check the recipe? I don't think it called for an entire human skeleton...
I've wandered into Forman's (as-yet-untitled) forests a few times over the course of running this column. There's a lovely simplicity to the stacked 2D style, a calming hike that suddenly flashes into a blood-tinted elsewhere. While they're clearly very different games, there's is something quite Proteus about the bold, flat colours of Forman's low-resolution woods. Except, I gather, they'll be used to frame quirky skeletal adventures, rather than crying over the passing of the seasons.
Here's a thought - have you ever, in your life, finished a grocery trip under par?
I don't know if Dale Winton was an avid golfer. But if he was, I'm sure he'd more than approve of Supermarket Strokes, a Supermarket Sweep-inspired golf 'em up that has you trying to complete your shopping trip in as few strokes as possible. It's currently free to mess around with over on Itch - which is both cheaper and more socially acceptable than hurling a trolley down the cereal aisle at Lidl.
While I don't usually go for games about commerce and trade, it turns out that all I need to pique my interest is a masterfully-sketched township in need of some grain.
Might Of Merchants almost feels too blunt a name for something so delicate. Yes, the game is ostensibly about "trade, wealth and dynasties" across a medieval kingdom - but it's drawn so carefully, townships and castles folded upon a canvas and lightly inked. Monochrome spaces are given a sense of season and time with varying lighting setups, and I almost worry that any given scene would wash away in a dash of rain. Remarkable stuff.
Let's end today's roundup by taking the "screenshot" part of this column's title to heart, eh? Say cheese, Shutter Stroll.
Releasing on Itch earlier this month, Shutter Stroll is a procedural photography trip. Rather than the dense photography labyrinths of Umurangi Generation, developer Jannik Boysen has created a No Man's Sky for shutterbugs, serving up endless, vivid landscapes to capture on digital film.