stephen lavelle | Line Hollis

Awkward Attachments

August 19, 2011 / 0 comments

Just a few short reviews this week. I had the bad luck to run into a few more buggy/unplayable games than usual. Comes with the territory, that. On to the games that worked! Block Push Championship Another great puzzler from Stephen Lavelle. One of his favorite maneuvers in these type of games is to put you in…

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A screenshot from Storyteller, showing two panels of a fairy-tale-like comics story in 8-bit style.

Pieces of Story

July 19, 2011 / 0 comments

Telling good stories in games is hard. Interactivity screws up a lot of the things we associate with good storytelling, such as pacing, control of the audience’s knowledge, and and suspense. This fact, though generally agreed upon, provokes a variety of reactions. Some argue we’d be better off not telling stories with games altogether; others,…

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Triptych (2009)

April 18, 2009 / 0 comments

In Stephen Lavelle’s brief but dense Triptych, a decontextualized internal monologue similar to those he used in Mirror Stage (review) is broken to pieces by two intrusive elements. First, there is a quasi-adventure game-style series of actions the player can take to explore a room. The feedback for these actions is interleaved with the sentences…

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Signifier (2009)

March 9, 2009 / 0 comments

Interaction in games can be roughly divided into two major parts: the actions that can be performed and the control scheme used to trigger those actions. Intuitively, we often consider the ideal control scheme to be one so natural that it becomes invisible, so that your intentions lead to in-game actions without any thought spared…

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Mirror Stage (2009)

February 27, 2009 / 0 comments

Stephen Lavelle’s Mirror Stage is a trim and elegant little piece about exploring kaleidoscope patterns. While there’s not much more to it than that on paper, the aesthetic effect outstrips the simplicity of the premise by a surprising amount. The game builds up a lot of appealing disorientation through the design of kaleidoscope levels full…

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