Getting discovered is often a matter of luck. For Ian Dallas, who headed the student effort that became the award-winning Sony game, The Unfinished Swan, it happened because of a student game festival.

Dallas created a working prototype that he entered in the 2008 Sense of Wonder contest at the Tokyo Game Show. Someone posted the demo on YouTube, and representatives from Sony saw it. They began talks and eventually came to a publishing agreements six to nine months later. And so began the work of taking the student project from prototype to finished game.

Dallas was a graduate student at the University of Southern California’s game design school. He worked on his idea for a game in a class and periodically went to visit a faculty member, Mark Bolas, to show prototypes. One of those days, he showed off “Whitespace,” where the idea was to explore a 3D world that started out with a blank screen. That became the core defining game mechanic behind The Unfinished Swan, which Dallas describes as a “first-person painting” game.

“That segued into The Unfinished Swan,” Dallas said in a talk at the Game Developers Conference today.

Dallas said he signed the deal with Sony because the scope of the project grew well beyond a game that three or four people could do.

“We wanted to make a bigger, prettier game,” he said. “We wanted to focus on making a game, not running a business. And the publisher had goals that were aligned with ours.”

The team at startup studio Giant Sparrow grew to 12 people and the original budget ballooned. It was supposed to be done by five people working for 18 months. But it stretched into several years. Dallas said he had to have a lot of conversations with Sony about that, but the good thing was that the team could show progress on each different piece of the game they were working on.

“And they liked it,” Dallas said.

Dallas said that the important lesson he learned as a relatively small developer was that it pays off to become fluent with game tools such as Autodesk’s Maya 3D rendering program, Microsoft’s Visual Studio, and Ai.

“There is a difference between knowing the tools and becoming fluent with them,” he said. “You want to get under the hood and do things they were not meant to do.”

When it came to making animations run fast, the fluency was important. It was also important because most of your time making a game is spent debugging it, he said.

When Dallas needed to explain what he had in mind for his animators, he did so by creating an animated demo that they could use as the foundation for their own work.

Dallas said that one class that proved valuable was a class on negotiation, taught by John Hight, an executive producer at Sony who worked on God of War. The negotiators could get a lot of work done, Dallas learned, if they assigned points to each item that was important to them. If the publisher really valued owning the intellectual property, they could assign a lot of points to it. That way, it was easier for each side to see what the other was driving at.

Dallas said it helped to have a lot of help from peer groups, to get feedback on his game from festivals, and to work closely with producers who “jump on grenades” in dealing with issues along the way.

When the team grew to more than seven people, it needed to have more formal communication, such as a weekly team lunch or a “daily standup meeting.” They used a Google Doc for task lists, so they could keep everything simple. But it wasn’t just ad hoc.

Of the things Dallas wished he had known earlier, he listed that it was hard to hire people. It also makes sense to fire bad workers early, because they can infect other workers. Overall, it turned out well for Dallas, who had one of the most recognized indie games of the year in 2012.

After the talk, Dallas confirmed Giant Sparrow is working on a new game.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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At this years ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) show at NYU, co-creator of the experimental video game The Buddhist, Bona Kim, said she wanted make people aware of their ”goal seeking behavior.”

At first glance, The Buddhist certainly looks like a game. You play it on a classic arcade cabinet with a joystick and several buttons. But judging by this video, most people at the show who tried The Buddhist seemed to be confused about what they were “supposed to do.”

While some would find it difficult to classify The Buddhist as an actual video game — especially by today’s standards, in which Hollywood-style linear narrative is becoming more prevalent — not having an immediately obvious goal is something that we have begun to see more of in a few recent releases. Journey, for example, does not have a traditional story. We don’t know much about the protagonist, and we have to piece everything together ourselves. In another PlayStation Network exclusive, The Unfinished Swan, the first stage is a completely white screen devoid of color or any text to guide the player.

The Buddhist succeeds in introducing elementary Buddhist concepts by making players aware that most of us are just too goal driven to be truly happy. Sakyamuni Buddha taught that we should not attach ourselves to the past or be anxious about the future but be fully present in this moment. Players with no knowledge of Buddhist teachings would likely keep tapping buttons and trying to move the monk avatar. As seen in the video, these attempts end in a “game over, try again” message.

The first time I played both Journey and The Unfinished Swan, I was overcome not by an urge to figure out what I was supposed to do but instead with a feeling of wonder. I took my time and explored; I enjoyed the music and the scenery; I figured out the controls and had a blast doing it.

Experiments like The Buddhist and lauded indie titles like Journey and The Unfinished Swan show that interactive media can also be tools for teaching players about their expectations and preconceived notions. Several reviewers have compared Journey to a religious experience, and if that has set any kind of precedent, I think we can expect to see more games that make players question their reactions, expectations, and values.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Video games give players the ability to do anything they want with just a few simple taps on a controller. Would you like to do a backflip? We have a button for that. Are you looking for Jason? Games have you covered. How about clearing a room of enemies via a series of increasingly complex fighting moves, including this really cool one that involves a lemon wedge and a stuffed duck? OK, that’ll be at least six or seven presses, but it will happen, and you’re gonna love it.

But sometimes, the interface fails, and we find ourselves wanting to do something that developers never really took into consideration. Here are eight button prompts we would have loved to see in some recent games — even if they wouldn’t all be particularly useful.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Video game trailers are a big deal. Where once big budgets were the exception, they are increasingly becoming the norm. Deep pockets are not always key to creating a stand-out trailer, though. Ingenuity, innovation, and a healthy sense of humor can also go a long way to help sell a game.

Here we present the best game trailers to grace our screens during 2012. They represent a cross-section of the gaming world and feature a variety of styles and budgets. The one thing they have in common? They’re done right.

If you think we’ve missed any trailers of note, feel free to drop a comment below.

Borderlands 2

Gearbox Software gave its first-person role-playing shooter Borderlands 2 (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) a sing-a-long soundtrack that just shouldn’t have worked. The genius is that “Wimoweh” has never sounded as gloriously out of place since its original 1939 release. Even better than Tight Fit.

Watch Dogs

Eschewing both gameplay and prerendered footage, this trailer for Ubisoft’s open-world action-shooter Watch Dogs (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360) brilliantly sets up the game’s premise with a starkly delivered blurring of fact and fiction that sounds eminently believable. Watch Dogs is certainly a title to look out for next year.

ZombieU

Zombies. Are we sick of them yet? Ubisoft doesn’t think so, having created one of the year’s most atmospheric trailers for its Wii U-exclusive survival-horror game. The film succeeds in making ordinary environments look extraordinary by subtly twisting our perspective on the dark streets of London.

Dyad

Independent developer Shawn McGrath unleashed his psychadelic musical shooter, Dyad, on the PlayStation 3 this summer. Its original trailer received an unkindly greeting in some quarters, with PlayStation Blog user Mattsta009 saying of its star: “It doesn’t look like that girl is even playing Dyad, she is kind of just holding a controller, acting badly and smiling vacuously at the screen.” In a stroke of genius, McGrath recast himself in the lead role. Watch from 20 seconds in to see him in action. The original trailer is underneath for a neat “compare and contrast” opportunity.

The Last of Us

Proof of the power of soundtrack, developer Naughty Dog used the Hank Williams song “Alone and Forsaken” to great effect in this trailer for upcoming PlayStation 3 action game The Last of Us. The atmosphere seems even more bleak and unforgiving with Williams’ raspy vocals layering on the tension.

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Indie games are more than inexpensive alternatives to this year’s Assassin’s Creed and Halo; they’re mouthpieces for serious issues, bold experiments in game design, and canvases for discovering new artistic possibilities.

We sorted through 2012′s releases and chose the 15 strongest and most influential titles, in no particular order. Feel free to let us know which ones we missed in the comments. Or tell us we’re completely nuts. Whatever makes you as happy as these games made us.

Fez

Developer: Polytron Corporation
Publisher: Microsoft Studios
Platform: Xbox Live Arcade
Release Date: April 13, 2012

We might as well get the elephant out of the room first: Fez is a smart and challenging puzzle-platformer with bad associations. Creator Phil Fish lashed out against gamers and Japanese developers in the spring, and he won few people over with his personality. Luckily, Fez’s charming style and engaging gameplay are as memorable as his antics, only better.

Fez puts a tiny, two-dimensional hero named Gomez in a world that you can rotate and explore three-dimensionally. The complexity of the space Gomez inhabits is what leads to the game’s many brainteasers, but the peaceful visuals and soundtrack encourage impatient players to slow down and reflect.

Although widely praised, Fez is the center of a big controversy — and host to criticism — because of the game’s glitches and the perhaps inadequate steps that Polytron and Microsoft took to fix them. Should we hold developers and publishers responsible when they fail to issue patches that improve the experience for everyone? Do we have the right to boast that Western games and development are superior to that of another country, especially one that’s contributed so much to the medium? Polytron delivered one of the best indie games of the year, but it also gave the industry something much more valuable: an attitude adjustment. Whether that’s made us better or worse is hard to say. The Japanese, at least, have made the most of the criticism — warranted or not.

Spelunky

Developer: Mossmouth
Publisher: Microsoft Studios
Platforms: PC, Xbox 360
Release Date: July 4, 2012

Before you yell that Spelunky is from 2009, take a look at the screenshot above. Or better yet, fire up your Xbox 360 and behold the differences. Spelunky on Xbox Live Arcade is a completely new model, not only graphically improved compared to its PC counterpart but also with more content. The action-platformer now has 1-to-4 player co-op and deathmatch, new music and zones, and additional enemies and traps.

The appeal remains the same: Explore and survive. Sometimes making it to the next area requires a careful balance of risk and reward, such as a decision to attack the shopkeeper and incite violence or leave the princess safely behind, for example. Sometimes it comes down to plain luck. And part of it depends on whether your friends are reliable or whether they’re all too happy to let you suffer.

Spelunky’s recipe is one of the most irresistible in game design. The promise of randomized adventure and secrets keeps players from setting down their controllers even though they’ve died countless times (and will many more). It’s a game that you’ll love to hate and an excellent case study of how to serve both PC and console crowds without losing what makes the experience exciting and original.

The Walking Dead: Episodes 1-5

Developer: Telltale Games
Publisher: Telltale Games
Platforms: PC, Mac, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, iOS
Release Dates: April 24, 2012 through November 21, 2012

With how big Robert Kirkman’s zombie series The Walking Dead has become — leaping from comics, where it all started, to television and now video games — it’s easy to forget that so much of its success is in the hands of independent creators and developers.

Telltale Games has stirred the emotions of players for nearly a year, fascinating them with a surprisingly well-handled story and, better yet, bringing attention back to the point-and-click adventure genre. All five episodes have set a new standard for interactive storytelling. And the game could give the TV show a few pointers about how to create compelling character performances.

The Walking Dead is also a huge success for a relatively small independent company with a modest portfolio of games, including Sam & Max and Wallace & Gromit. Not all of them have been winners, like Jurassic Park: The Game. But this breakaway hit foretells good tidings for Telltale in the new year.

Retro/Grade

Developer: 24 Caret Games
Publisher: 24 Caret Games
Platform: PlayStation 3
Release Date: August 21, 2012

You could learn a lot from your mistakes if only you could rewind time.

That’s the challenge of rhythm-space game Retro/Grade, where you control a spaceship pilot bobbing his head to the music as you play events in reverse. You’ll need to pay attention to the beat as much as the colorful lasers streaking across your screen, which you “collect” so that when the action moves in real time again, you can dominate the battle. Each burst of energy within these lanes of light is your own ship fire, so when you suck up one of these, you’re also shooting it against the enemy in the present flow of time. You can also fast-forward using your rocket’s fuel to give yourself extra seconds to fix your mistakes.

It’s a clever side-scroller and twist on the shooter and music genres, and equally as engaging is Skyler McGlothlin’s (electronica music artist Nautilis) soundtrack and the zero-gravity, free-flying motions of the course you chart. Just keep an eye on the background as you spin and rotate your way through the awesome regions of space. It’s pretty cool.

The Unfinished Swan

Developer: Giant Sparrow
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Platform: PlayStation 3
Release Date: October 23, 2012

The Unfinished Swan is an abstract tale of loss and our need for closure. You play as Monroe, an orphan boy whose mother dies and leaves him one of her paintings, an illustration of a swan. When the bird escapes its picture, Monroe follows its orange footsteps through a world that you create one glob of paint at a time.

It’s a perpetual visual wonder, but as you progress, the game evolves and redefines the way you interact with it. What begins as paint becomes water, and so on. Discovering the unknown is the source of real magic here, not merely the acts themselves, and the things you find inspire your imagination as though you had stepped into a fairytale.

The Unfinished Swan’s fragmented images and themes might feel incomplete to some — almost like you’re touring Monroe’s mother’s unfinished paintings come to life. But as a whole, it’s one of the most original and artistic games of the year.

Click through for our next five picks.

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If 2012 has shown us one thing, it’s that video game development is truly in the “crossover era.” GamesBeat’s 2012 Game of the Year, The Walking Dead, was first available as a downloadable title, not a retail release. Other downloadables, such as indie-developed darlings Journey and Faster Than Light, garnered plenty of votes as well. And in our staff’s and contributor’s top games of the year lists, we even see mobile releases — like Fieldrunners 2.

Gaming has changed, and it’s nice to see that it’s more than just big-budget console and PC titles that have earned Game of the Year attention. Here are the top games as chosen by GamesBeat staffers and contributors. Let us know what you think about our picks in the comments — especially if you feel we’ve left something off our lists!

Editor-in-chief Dan “Shoe” Hsu

XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Platforms: PC, Xbox 360, PS3
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Firaxis Games

Little green men — yesteryear’s poster boys for mysterious invaders from outer space — are about as menacing as Oompa Loompas armed with toy guns. XCOM’s little gray men, however, are scary as hell. It’s not the ashen skin, bulbous eyes, or creepy-crawly walk. It’s what these Sectoids represent: a greater threat that we are simply not equipped to handle.

In the strategy game XCOM: Enemy Unknown, we mere humans bring dull knives to plasma gunfights. And just when we start to catch up in weapon technology, the bug-eyed bastards bring bigger guns and meaner friends. These jerks even cheat with mysterious mind-control powers. Meanwhile, we’re barely keeping the checkbook balanced between research, manufacturing, facility construction, aircraft, and an ever-decreasing budget due to world nations pulling out of the program if you can’t keep them safe (and you can never keep them all safe).

It all adds up to an incredibly exciting and stressful experience. Each decision — whether it’s which tree to hide your assault trooper behind or which whiny country gets your last airspace-monitoring satellite — feels monumental and permanent. Humanity’s existence is at stake, and we just want to make it to the next month, when a few more pennies come rolling in and a few more traumatized soldiers get out of sick bay.

It’s a desperate fight. And boy will we celebrate when those little gray men are dead.

Shoe’s other picks for best games of 2012: Fieldrunners 2, Dishonored, Journey, Fez

Lead writer Dean Takahasi

The Unfinished Swan
Platform: PlayStation 3 (PlayStation Network)
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Developer: Giant Sparrow

The Unfinished Swan is one of the most creative titles yet for the PlayStation Network. It’s an interactive fairy tale where you lob blobs of black paint at a white screen. As you do so, you uncover part of a 3D space hidden within the white scene. Uncovering each scene is a mind-bending task, as you have to navigate perplexing puzzles. You explore the unknown, and as you do so, you uncover a new segment in a fairy tale about a boy who loses his mother. It is a touching story that will remind of you of the zany Alice in Wonderland. Ian Dallas, the game creator, feels that a child who is abandoned is like an unfinished work of art. But just when you think that the game has become predictable, it changes. In some ways, the story seems unfinished. But the title is a wonderful first effort for Giant Sparrow, a new studio bankrolled by Sony.

Dean’s other picks for the best games of 2012: Halo 4, Far Cry 3, Journey, Call of Duty: Black Ops II

Culture editor Sebastian Haley

Hotline Miami
Platform: PC
Publisher: Developer Digital
Developer: Dennaton Games

Indie sensation Hotline Miami is best described as the film Drive, but in a retro, pixelated and somehow even more violent form, with subtle hints of Rockstar’s Manhunt sprinkled on top. The short-but-sickeningly sweet levels allow you to carefully orchestrate your symphony of murder and mayhem, filling the floors with maimed corpses and spraying the walls with crimson, all while its surreal, Miami Vice-inspired soundtrack beats in the back of your mind. Basically, if you own a Wii or like looking at livestreams of kittens, this is not your kind of game.

Sebastian’s other picks for best games of 2012: Trials Evolution, Far Cry 3, The Darkness II, Final Fantasy XIII-2

Staff writer Jeff Grubb

Mark of the Ninja
Platform: Xbox 360 (Xbox Live Arcade), PC
Publisher: Microsoft Studios
Developer: Klei Entertainment

For these Game of the Year summaries, we’re supposed to look above and beyond the individual parts of a game. We’re supposed to write about why it is important, but in the case of Mark of the Ninja, it’s those parts that make it so special. Developer Klei’s 2D stealth action game for Xbox Live Arcade and PC is a master class in well-executed gameplay mechanics. Whether it’s a soundwave that ripples off your ninja’s feet to indicate how much noise he’s making or a vision cone that indicates where an enemy is looking, Mark of the Ninja is constantly communicating with the player. It then provides the player with a great controlling character to poke and prod the world with.

It’s not rare that a game makes you feel like a badass, but with Klei’s game it’s not about how powerful you are — it’s about how in tune with the environment your character is. You have so much visual and aural information that every moment is an opportunity for experimentation. You can spend 10 minutes laying out a detailed plan that involves deadly traps, or you can play the entire game without a sword.

In video games, we don’t usually get a lot of new ideas, we just get different takes on old ideas. Stealth is an old idea at this point, but Mark of the Ninja distinguishes itself by executing the concept better than any other game before it.

Jeff’s other picks for best games of 2012: The Walking Dead, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Trials Evolution, FTL: Faster Than Light

Copy editor Jason Wilson

FTL: Faster Than Light
Platform: PC, Mac, Linux
Publisher: Subset Games
Developer: Subset Games

I’m low on fuel. My crew raced around my starship like a colony of ants, hastily putting out fires as doors opened to the cold vacuum of space. The Rebels are closing in on me. Do I take a chance and see if I can gain more fuel in the next nebular cloud, or do I make a mad dash for the next sector and hope to find friendly forces instead of angry adversaries? These are just some of the choices the player faces in FTL: Faster Than Light, the indie roguelike that’s swept upon a number of Game of the Year lists in 2012 (including ours!). What makes FTL so compelling to players is that a take on Civilization’s “one more turn” addictive nature — but instead of furthering your game, you’re driven to see if your next attempt takes you closer to escaping the pursuing Rebel forces. And it’s this that makes FTL one of the most interesting, fascinating, and, yes, best games of 2012.

Jason’s other picks for best games of 2012: The Walking Dead, Crusader Kings II, Torchlight II, Dragon’s Dogma

Contributor Rus McLaughlin

Far Cry 3
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Something visceral. Something primal. Most shooters don’t have these. They settle you into a safe, comfortable role. Veteran soldier. Seasoned cop. Career criminal. A hero … or an antihero. But Far Cry 3 makes you run blind through the jungle while murderous pirates hunt you like a piece of prey. You’re just a terrified kid. Never held a gun before. Never seen anyone die before. Now you’re covered in your own brother’s blood and getting high off the giddy thrill of mere survival. Then you’re turned lose to roam two amazingly rich, open-world islands where you can really start enjoying yourself, slowly and cautiously picking your tormentors apart. Before you know it, the elation you get from destroying a criminal empire hardens into a different kind of drug: revenge.

That’s when Far Cry 3 surpasses the standard shooter fare. An aimless twentysomething becomes a killer of killers, as feared as the insane warlords he wants dead. Between coolly tense stealth play and straight-up gunfights, you become the predator, stalking intruders in your jungle and murdering them at will. It all culminates in a moment where you must decide just how much you enjoy that particular power fantasy. Enough to abandon your humanity? Maybe.

Far Cry 3 goes there. Solid gameplay — minus a weak-tea multiplayer — and incredibly detailed environments lift it far enough, but its secret weapon lies in how it takes you into that dark, primal place. And then it dares you to ignore your basic animal instincts.

Rus’s other picks for best games of 2012: The Walking Dead, Fez, Halo 4, Journey

Contributing editor Rob Savillo

Contributor Rob LeFebvre

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you couldn’t tell from all of the horror movies playing on TV or the unobtrusive-but-still-confusingly-present Christmas candy displays at Walgreens (or you don’t have a, you know, calendar or whatever), today is Halloween. If you don’t have any parties to go to tonight, or you’re tired of watching movies about large, scary men with knives, maybe you’re planning on spending some time with your favorite spooky games.

You could stick with the old reliable Silent Hills and (old) Resident Evils, but you don’t have to limit yourself to the horror genre to get a scare this year. Several decidedly non-horror games contain levels that will dampen your pants just as well as any fright-focused title.

1. Half-Life 2: ‘We Don’t Go to Ravenholm’

The Half-Life series has plenty of scares on its own; the first game’s terrifying monsters and claustrophobic settings make for a tense experience. But when circumstances in the second game force hero Gordon Freeman to take refuge in the condemned town of Ravenholm, developer Valve casts the plot’s sci-fi veneer aside and replaces it with absolute horror.

The Ravenholm section starts out slowly, with a few “What happened here?” moments straight out of John Carpenter’s classic film The Thing, but once you figure it out, the level turns into a full-on zombie survivalfest, complete with rooftop standoffs and a climactic showdown in a cemetery.

Ravenholm also introduces players to the dreaded Poison Headcrab, which looks like a giant spindly spider and is capable of dropping your health down to one point with a single hit. It also sounds like a pig covered in rattlesnakes, so that’s pretty scary, too. Almost as scary as the Poison Headcrab Zombie, who is not only tougher than regular Headcrab Zombies but also throws Poison Headcrabs at you.

This level is basically a gas station that only dispenses nightmare fuel.

2. Batman: Arkham Asylum: Killer Croc’s lair

My favorite part of developer Rocksteady’s two Batman games (2009′s Arkham Asylum and the 2011 followup, Arkham City) is how they excel at making me feel like Batman. When you enter a room full of enemies in these games, you don’t think, “How the hell am I going to get through this?” It’s more like, “How long am I going to draw out the horror show for these goons?” As Batman, you have all the tools and abilities you need to take care of whatever the various Arkhams toss at you, and you always feel in control.

Except for that one part. You know which one.

At one point in Arkham Asylum, Batman has to collect samples from a specific plant that, conveniently — or not, depending on how you feel about it — only grows in one place: The sewer system in which the monstrous Killer Croc has made his lair.

All the way at the beginning of the game, Croc makes his position on eating Batman pretty clear (he’s in favor of it, in case you were wondering). Your journey through the sewers is all about taking away whatever control you’ve enjoyed throughout the rest of the story. You have a monster stalking you; loud noises attract him, so you have to be careful how and where you step. Your free range of movement is now confined to a series of platforms running down the center of the tunnel.

Even if you do everything perfectly, Croc will occasionally call out “I see you!” like the damn Sinistar and then come running, like, right at you. You only have a couple of seconds to figure out which direction he’s coming from and fire off a quick Batarang to stop him from nomming on your Bat-bones. While the rest of the game is about Batman putting the fear into criminals, Croc’s Lair pulls the reversal even more effectively than the also-amazing Scarecrow levels.

3. Max Payne’s dream levels

The Max Payne series is all about a self-doubting badass doing and saying badass stuff regardless of how confident he feels about it. It is, in fact, Max’s uncertainty about any course of action he might take that keeps him relatable, like Die Hard‘s John McClane.

Regardless, Max Payne is capable of straight-up murdering entire arenas’ worth of guys with nothing to protect him but a leather jacket, the inexplicable ability to slow down time, and some magical pills that are apparently capable of closing bullet wounds.

But then, in the middle of all of this, developer Remedy Entertainment throws you up against Max’s most formidable enemy: his own mind.

Suddenly, Max Payne ceases to be a shooter and becomes an unsettling journey into the guilt-ridden mind of a drug addict. And it’s a suitably dark place, filled with the screams and cries of Max’s murdered wife and daughter, weird changes in perspective, and platforming built on following trails of blood through a black void. These levels are disorienting and difficult to get through, and not just because the control scheme is poorly suited to platforming. They are genuinely disturbing.

4. The Unfinished Swan: “Nighttime: The Woods”

The PlayStation Network-exclusive The Unfinished Swan presents players with a magical world of wonder — in its first two levels, anyway. Immediately after that, the game drops you into a dark forest straight out of the beginning of Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno. Dark, that is, except for the lanterns that represent safety and the glowing, demonic eyes of the legion of spiders from which those lanterns keep you safe.

Step out of the protective pool of light and your ears fill with the frantic beating of your character’s pounding heart. The camera shakes, and red scratches appear as the arachnid monsters attack. Get to the next lantern and it returns to normal. Fighting the spiders is pointless — and actually impossible; throwing one of the game’s ubiquitous all-purpose spheres at them only causes them to retreat (temporarily) to the shadows above, which is actually more terrifying because you don’t know where they are or what they’re doing.

It’s all video game magic, of course; the spiders aren’t actually chasing or attacking you, and it’s easy to stay within safe zones. But the change in tone is so abrupt and the atmosphere so effective that it gets really spooky, really fast.

And it’s hard to go wrong with giant spiders with glowing red-eyes.

5. Medal of Honor: Frontline — Omaha Beach

War is scary. And by that I mean that real war is scary. War in video games, however, looks increasingly like this:

I mean, how awesome is that? Like, the part where he ran in and threw the thing and then all the bad guys died? I just high-fived myself. Literally, I mean; that’s not a euphemism.

Most war-themed video games are more focused on being fun than creating anything even remotely resembling what actual combat must actually be like. Reality has a weird habit of standing in fun’s way, especially when it comes to subjects like global military conflict and the possible loss of millions of lives in nuclear hellfire. A few games, however, like developer Electronic Arts’ fourth Medal of Honor title, Frontline, have managed to mix some genuine scares in with their improbable story of one-man band of brothers James Patterson.

At the beginning of Frontline, Patterson participates in the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach. The level draws clear inspiration from the start of Steven Spielberg’s chaotic depiction of the same event in Saving Private Ryan. It is not a run-and-gun-fest typical of other first-person shooters (or even later sections of the same game); it is a mad scramble for survival while your fellows scream and die around you and everything explodes. I don’t think this part of the game even has music playing — if it did, I couldn’t hear it over the non-stop explosions and the sound of my own hyperventilation.

My PC gamer friends have always told me that the Omaha section in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is way better than the pared-down console version I played in Frontline, and I’m fine just taking their word on it.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Zynga lays off 5 percent of its employees even though the company’s stock price rose, game developers think the iPad mini is promising, and German studio Bigpoint lets 120 people go.

You’ll also find a review for Just Dance 4 and an in-depth interview the developers behind one of the season’s most intriguing indie games, The Unfinished Swan.

News:

• The DeanBeat: The iPad mini brings out the imagination of game developers
• HTML5 developer Softgames looking to expand after first round of funding
• Tim Schafer to host Rock Band charity night
• 80M people play arcade bubble shooter games on Facebook
• Nintendo’s weekly download report features giant presidential robots, Professor Layton, and New Super Mario Bros. 2 DLC
• Assassin’s Creed III is the most preordered Ubisoft game ever
• Dishonored developer announces three add-on packs
• 2K Games enlists Lineage developer to design Civilization Online
• Utherverse nabs a patent on scalable virtual worlds that can host unlimited users
• Wing Commander creator’s Kickstarter reaches goal in less than a week
• Gree acquires developer Pokelabo for $173 million
• THQ releases newest Darksiders II downloadable content on October 30
• Resident Evil 6 to get improved in-game camera in mid-December patch
• Halo 4 to get 3 multiplayer map packs through April
• DICE Summit shakes up its format for game creator talks and renames industry awards
• Game ratings board creates a no-cost service for putting content labels on digital games
• Borderlands Legends is an isometric strategy game due October 31
• Final Fantasy publisher signs deal to use Gears of War developer’s latest graphics technology
• Aiming to head off Apple, Microsoft shows off Xbox SmartGlass mobile app and Xbox dashboard update
• AMD launches new set of 8-core processors for gamers
• Here’s the first Wii U commercial from Nintendo
• Fight Club, Daredevil studio to help produce Assassin’s Creed film
• GameStop to get exclusive The Walking Dead: Collector’s Edition from Telltale Games
• Shigeru Miyamoto is Nintendo’s other original intellectual property

Earnings:

• Analysts pore through Zynga’s numbers as the stock price rises
• Zynga stock surges as it slightly beats analysts’ reduced targets for third quarter
• Facebook’s Zuckerberg unhappy with Zynga’s 20% decline in payments

Mobile News:

• Founders leave DeNA’s Ngmoco mobile gaming division
• Majesco expands into mobile games with Legends of Loot
• Mobile is now 20 percent of Zynga’s business

Layoffs:

• German games maker Bigpoint lets go 120 employees
• Zynga CEO’s letter to employees: We’ve laid off 5 percent of our workforce
• Zynga lays off almost entire Austin studio

Interviews:

• The story behind the emotional center of The Unfinished Swan (in-depth interview)
• The explanation behind the ending of the Unfinished Swan (interview part 2)
• Playboy’s Miss October talks about gamer stereotypes and breaking into the game business
• Here’s how you become an app store millionaire (interview)

Tablet wars:

• Game developers say iPad mini will be good for gaming
• This week could determine the fate of the digital economy

Reviews:

• Just Dance 4 revels in absurdity even as it loses some of its mojo (review)

Pieces of flair:

• Exclusive images from The Art of Assassin’s Creed III
• GamesBeat’s massive Street Fighter tournament: The semifinals

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Warning: This interview has spoilers.

The story and its ending have stirred a lot discussion among players, who are offering different interpretations of what the game means. We caught up with Ian Dallas, the creative director, to talk about the genesis of this unusual game and its mysteries.

Ian Dallas: It didn’t feel like it was especially open-ended. For me, I have an idea of the way things work. It’s not a dream. There’s a door. He walks into it. It’s a world that exists on its own. But I don’t think that if someone feels like, “Oh, it’s all a dream,” they’re necessarily wrong, either. It’s a stew of a bunch of different related thematic elements, so I think it is open to some interpretation. But I wouldn’t say that I created it deliberately to confuse people or leave things open-ended.

I preferred to keep the story fairly minimal, for different reasons. It’s a minimalist game overall. Any time you do that, like in the drawings of Shel Silverstein, there are areas of the canvas that are white. As an artist, you might have an idea about what’s there, but part of the appeal of that is that players are free to inject their own ideas about that space to make it a more personal experience for themselves.

GamesBeat: If you want to play with this a little bit. … What does this ending mean, then? Who is the queen? Who is the king? Who is the swan?

Dallas: The literal interpretation is that the queen is Monroe’s mother, which is fairly clear, I think. It’s the exact same drawing, more or less, of the mother in the very beginning of the story and then when you see the king’s wife later on. Perhaps a few hours separate that if you’re playing through the game in one shot, so I would certainly forgive players who didn’t pick up on that the first time.

The idea is that the king created this woman, his queen, when he was looking to start a family. Ultimately, the queen leaves. She’s pregnant, and she somehow makes her way to the real world, where she has Monroe. And then Monroe is born and makes his way back. It’s still not clear why this swan decides to jump out of a painting and lead Monroe back to his father, but I think it’s kind of a shorthand for the forces that inevitably bring people closer together.

One thing that is deliberately unclear — I don’t think I know the answer to this — is whether or not the king and Monroe understand that the king is Monroe’s father. It’s fine either way — if the king knows that or doesn’t. It doesn’t change anything dramatically. But, definitively, Monroe is the king’s son.

GamesBeat: One of the interesting interpretations I read is that it’s a story about a father and his estranged son. The father is a creator. He takes pride in his work, and he wants his son to follow what he does more exactly. The son doesn’t do that, and so he has to deal with the fact that his legacy is not going to be continued by his son. Monroe’s style of art is going to be different from the king’s. I guess the question that’s open-ended is whether the king is ultimately okay with that. That was something that somebody else put out there. It didn’t occur to me that it might be what the story is about. Is that anywhere near your mark?

Dallas: Yeah. For me, the genesis of this relationship is a scene in the Iliad, when Hector comes back to Troy and has this dialogue with his son. I think it’s quoted word for word in one of the king’s lines of dialogue. Hector wishes that his son will ultimately be a better person than he is. He hopes that his son will have a great future, although you know as a listener in the Iliad that things do not go well at all for Troy. None of these things are going to happen, and it’s nobody’s fault. It’s just the way of things. Broadly, the king’s story is that he’s an artist, and he wishes that the things that he creates would last forever. He’s going to have to come to terms with the fact that they won’t last forever. Even in a magical kingdom, these things fall apart.

GamesBeat: And not only that, it’s his son who messes them up.

Dallas: It’s a bit frustrating when you see the generation after you making a lot of the same mistakes and undoing your work. But I think it’s Plato who says that children are what is deathless in things that die. The only thing that actually is permanent is the ability to leave children to come after you. Although in the short-term, the irony is that children end up undermining the work that you’ve done. Even if it’s as simple as you go and buy a nice rug, and they spill grape juice on it. But in the bigger view, they’re the one thing you can create that has a chance to consistently outlive you. You just cede control. … If you’re making a painting, you can decide what it’s going to be. If you’re making a child, it’s a much coarser brush you’re working with.

GamesBeat: A lot of this didn’t occur to me. I did wonder why some of the actions related to the queen. … Why did she leave the king at the last minute, before their son was born? Was she frustrated with him?

Dallas: That’s one of the things that isn’t really specified in the game, but not for any good reason other than it’s not the focus. We didn’t get into the details of why the queen leaves because ultimately, it doesn’t really matter for Monroe. The important thing is that she’s gone. When a child has divorced parents, the details aren’t as important to them as the overwhelming fact that their parents aren’t there anymore.

For me personally, it’s an open-and-shut case of. … The king is hard to live with. He’s not a very nice king. I don’t think that he would be a very nice husband. There are some storybook pages hinting at that, with the king trying to impress his wife by spending all of his time creating elaborate gifts for her. It’s really just the king being selfish. His story is about being incredibly self-absorbed. He feels like making gifts is going to be something that makes the queen happy, but in reality, it’s what makes him happy. He’s an artist who likes creating things. The queen ultimately sees what life would be like raising a child alongside someone who is that self-absorbed, so she opts for a different path.

GamesBeat: There’s almost no satisfaction for Monroe as far as reconnecting with his mother. That seems to be something that’s lost and that he has to become accustomed to.

Dallas: The reconciliation that the game offers in the end is that Monroe is following in his mother’s footsteps. His mother creates all these paintings of animals, although she never finishes them. At the very end of the game, Monroe paints his first painting of the swan and finishes it. He’s carrying the torch — in this case almost a literal torch, this magic paintbrush. He starts with his mother’s magic paintbrush, and he ends up with his father’s magic paintbrush. It’s not like he’s never going to meet his mother again, but he’s carrying on with the work that both his mother and father did.

GamesBeat: The story itself — is any of this very personal to you? Do you have any more personal stake in the different events that transpire in the story?

Dallas: I didn’t when the game started. It was just something that. … As a child, I’d always been very concerned that my parents would die. It seemed like the worst thing that could possibly happen. One reason that Time Bandits resonated with me as a young person and still disturbs me when I see it now. … At the end of Time Bandits, his parents just suddenly die. There’s no reason for it. It just happens. I think that’s pretty true to the way that the world works.

As a child, you have so little control. If you look at all the classic fairy tales, they’re about kids in unfortunate situations through no fault of their own. Being a child — or at least this is my memory of it — you’re beset by all kinds of forces that you don’t understand and that are much more powerful than you.

I guess it’s a long-winded way of saying that I centered the story on a boy whose mother has died because for me, that had always been something that resonated strongly. It was a concern that I had as a child, and it seemed like an interesting place to start for an emotional journey. There’s nothing sadder to me than a child losing his parents.

The weird, personal twist on all this is that halfway through development, my own mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness, although she’s still alive. So that gave me more of a personal perspective on the whole thing. As tragic as it is, I’m also a 34-year-old man now. At some point, your parents are going to die. Nobody is going to live forever. I’m really just thankful [for] the time that I had with her, and I’m glad that she was able to raise a child through to adulthood. I can’t imagine how horrible it would have been to not have had all those years.

GamesBeat: There were a couple of other things I was curious about. … You ran the credits within the game itself, before it was actually over. I haven’t seen that before.

Dallas: Initially, it came out of being very focused on the last image of the game. It’s a game about unfinished things, and we felt like when players finished the game, we wanted to have a strong sense of closure to it. Visualizing where the story wraps up, and then you get five minutes of credits and music. … It just wouldn’t have been a very satisfying, clean ending like we wanted.

Going back to the storybook, you can finish a book and then close it. There’s that moment where you’re still on this high of finishing something. All these ideas are whirling around, and then suddenly, the source of stimulus is completely silent. That’s a fantastic moment to reflect. It gives you a chance to think about what you’ve just seen. It’s like at the end of a meal, when you get this lull between when the meal is over and the check arrives. It’s one of the most satisfying moments — when you can look around and remember what you’ve done. We put the credits inside the game so we could end the game on something very sharp, and then we’re out.

GamesBeat: I was also curious about the pacing of the last chapter. It speeds up, and the narration almost takes over in revealing the story, whereas before it seemed like the pace was more gradual. Everything picked up at the end. I wondered if there were points during that ending where you had a choice whether to express it as narration or make it happen in the game.

Dallas: The ending was a very interesting sequence in production. It came very late in development. The last quarter of the game or so was on the chopping block for a very long time. My memory of that period is kind of a blur because it was something I very strongly felt needed to be in the game. But at the same time, the programmers and artists were very concerned that we were taking on too much work and that it would cause problems with the rest of the game. We wouldn’t be able to bring things up to a level of polish that we would be happy with.

A lot of the choices were made, to some extent, for expediency’s sake. We tried to reuse as much as we could from the technology and environments that we had while [at] the same time telling the story that we felt needed to be there at the end. There was a point with something like an Escher room, where you’re walking on the ceiling. Everyone loved it, but it was too much new technology right at the end. It could have broken everything. So we scaled things back and went a little simpler.

When we were able to capture Terry Gilliam, that also changed things a bit. He does a fantastic job of inhabiting this character. There were areas of the game that we were concerned about before, where it might just feel like you were walking along and not a lot was happening. They were really dead when we had our temp actors in. But as soon as we had Terry Gilliam, it came alive. It had this really nice sense of character.

More than anything, we wanted the end of that to feel like the end of the world. Things are getting faster and bigger and crazier, culminating in this final scene with the king’s funeral and afterward. We wanted it to be shorter and faster and bigger than anything that had come before, so it felt like there was a real sense of closure to that sequence.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Warning: This interview has spoilers.

GamesBeat: You’ve got a few dozen reviews up there on Metacritic so far. You’ve got your rating now. How do you feel about that so far?

Ian Dallas: It’s surprising to see the polarized opinions people have about the game. What’s really encouraging is that for a lot of the negative reviews that we get, people still describe things that they like about the game. The game wasn’t a failure — it’s just that they wanted it to be a different game. I think they have different ideas about what a “good game” is.

It seems like, almost universally, the people who have problems with the game wish that it were harder and longer. Which is just not the kind of game we were making. I feel like if I were out in the world reading the reviews. … If I’d seen 60 out of 100 or whatever it is, I would have gotten the game anyway because I would know as a player, “I don’t really mind if the game doesn’t force me to replay the same area over and over to extend the playtime.” So it’s been an interesting process. Metacritic is its own kind of murky mystery as far as how these things work out.

GamesBeat: The thing you don’t catch in the final number that becomes the average is the idea that just about everybody appreciates the freshness of the gameplay. It’s something they haven’t seen before.

Dallas: Yeah. When you have a single number, it’s a little deceptively specific. It’s not whether the game is really good or bad. All the other axes … Whether a game is memorable. … To me, as a player, that’s what I look for. There’s no memorability [with] Metacritic. Everyone’s got their own opinion on what should go into that.

GamesBeat: What do you notice about the polarized comments, then? If there’s one set of negative views and one set of really positive ones, what are they polarizing around?

Dallas: For a game to be kind of a transcendental experience for people — not a distraction, but something that has emotional weight to it — that quality of memorability is what I would look for. It seems like they hit a point in the game, and they’re willing to go along with it. They appreciate that the game is about this sense of discovery and wonder.

You can see it in most of the reviews. When they’re positive, people talk about it in a very different way. They talk about how the game made them feel. Whereas the more negative reviews we’ve gotten tend to be very brass-tacks. They’re talking about the mechanics: “This area of the game should have been longer.” It’s much more nuts-and-bolts about the game. I think that comes out of the way different people approach games, the way they’ve been trained to approach games.

A lot of reviews expected it to be a puzzle game. For a puzzle game, it’s totally fair to judge it based on whether the puzzles were challenging, whether the mechanics were well explored. But that wasn’t really the game we were making. To some extent, it’s our fault for not communicating what this game was about. But that’s also part of what we were trying to do — to let people discover the game for themselves. Maybe we could have been, in hindsight, a bit clearer about that.

GamesBeat: You mentioned a lot of interesting things there. One of them was that some game critics seem to want to take what you have and turn it into a different game. It almost seems like you’ve come up with an interesting new mechanic, and it could be a platform for a bunch of games because everybody wants to throw paint around and have it lead to some different kind of game or story. It seems like a good thing, in some ways.

Dallas: Yeah. One of the comments that we’ve gotten pretty consistently from players is that they feel like this or that mechanic in the game could have been its own game. They’re angry that we only spent 20 minutes on something that they would want to spend two hours exploring in detail. That would be a very different game, though. That’s the way that most games work. Mechanics are difficult to come up with, so there’s a lot of creative and financial incentive to have a game that’s about a small number of mechanics where you look at it from all different sides. People are accustomed to that, and it can be very enjoyable.

This game has a very different approach. We’re more interested in what it feels like to discover a new thing. I think a lot of games are about what it feels like to become an expert in something. Unfinished Swan is about what it feels like to be a child discovering a brand new world. Everything about the game, hopefully, is done in a different way, because it’s got different goals. Unfortunately, the game is being reviewed as if it has the same goals that most games have.

GamesBeat: That’s an interesting direction there, too. When I started playing it, I was thinking, “Hey, this would be a great game to play with the kids.” But as soon as the subject of a mother dying came up, then that kind of ruled out my 9-year-old. … [Laughs] It’s about a bit more than a child discovering a new world. It’s more serious than that. I was wondering why you took that direction when you could have possibly gone toward a more “everyone” type of game.

Dallas: At some level, the game created itself. There was this initial mechanic of being in a white room and throwing paint around. For a long time, we were trying to figure out what kind of game this was going to be. The thing that I liked was this sense of … loneliness. It felt slightly darker. It wasn’t entirely positive to be confronting the unknown like that. It also came out of the initial spark of. … If this was an unfinished world, what is the most unfinished thing I can think of? And that would be, if a parent had a child and then didn’t have a chance to raise them.

It wasn’t necessarily that we wanted to make a game that would be age-appropriate or age-inappropriate. We had these kernels of ideas that felt like they were interesting and appropriate to what we had in terms of the experience of being in this white space [and] throwing paint around. They’re like the seed for a crystal. Everything else grew up around that. Which was challenging because when you’re making a game that you don’t know much about. … If you know you want it to feel different from everything else out there, there aren’t a lot of models to look to. When we found things like this idea of an orphan whose mother has died, that seemed like a place to hang your hat — somewhere to start from and let the game coalesce around that. It was a very organic process.

GamesBeat: So you had the mechanic, and then you came up with the story, and everything else grew up around that.

Dallas: Yeah. Oddly enough, huge chunks of the game did not exist until relatively late in development. When you play the game now, a lot of the world and the story are centered around this king character. The king didn’t exist until maybe halfway or even two-thirds of the way through development. When we looked around and said, “Well, what are you doing as a player?” You’re basically exploring architecture. That’s what this game feels good at.

From there, once we had something we felt happy with, we looked at it and said, “What kind of story would make sense to encompass this stuff?” We had something that was the core of it — what it feels like to wander around this world. That was the gameplay we were interested in. The story was a matter of coming up with something that fit what we already had.

GamesBeat: So that’s a critical turn in development. What were some of the other turns that shaped the game most dramatically?

Dallas: The middle chapter of the game, the Unfinished Empire area, where you’re in this huge city. … Originally, that was supposed to be about a 15-minute piece of gameplay. You were going to find these magic vines, grow up to the top of the tower, and that would be it. Like a lot of projects, and like the key character in our game, things got bigger over time. At one point, I think it was two hours or so to get through that area. It’s been cut down to about an hour. It expanded as we found interesting things to do. The game wanted to breathe at that point. It wanted to be in a bigger space.

That was the area that we took for what we call a vertical slice. In game development, you take an area of the game up to what is essentially the state of the final game, just to make sure that everything else is going to work. That was, for better or worse, the first area of the game that we really sat down with and said, “What is this going to look like as a final experience?” The rest of the game grew up around that.

GamesBeat: Thinking along the lines of characters again. … Did you ever think about throwing in a lot of conversation with characters or lots of other characters in the game that Monroe would meet? An Alice in Wonderland kind of situation?

Dallas: Early on, there were some ideas for interactions with characters. We felt like that would be a good way to communicate information. It would fit with the Alice inspiration. But for various reasons, none of those ended up going into the game. We found that there was a sense of loneliness and isolation the game had early on that we actually liked. It felt different, but it also felt appropriate to the kind of world and the kind of story that we were telling.

Adding in a lot of other characters and dialogue … there’s a whole host of problems. It felt like it wasn’t something that would benefit the game a whole lot, and it would be a lot of extra work taking focus away from other areas of the game. We ended basing most of the story around Monroe, the player, and the king. We tried to economize. There may have been some character interactions that got collapsed into that one character, the king.

GamesBeat: So do you think of it as a first-person painter?

Dallas: Yeah, that’s the shortest description I’ve found for the slightly chaotic mix of experience that is The Unfinished Swan. It’s a first-person painting game.

GamesBeat: How about the sort of fairy-tale-like storybook sessions, where the narrator — I guess your aunt — takes over.

Dallas: That whole story came pretty early on in development. When I was looking around for models in the real world — things that feel like the kind of game experience that I wanted, things that evoke a sense of wonder — storybooks felt like a good source of inspiration. Shel Silverstein, Harold and the Purple Crayon, and any number of other stories were some of the references that we looked at.

One of the things that we liked about storybooks is that they had this hand-drawn feel to them that is very personal but also a kind of abstract quality that invites you to use your imagination to fill in a lot of the gaps. Shel Silverstein does a fantastic job of using a few lines to suggest a much bigger world. The cinematics that we have in the game, with this animated style and the lines moving around, was a way for us to give the game more of a handmade feel, in part.

We found that was difficult to do with 3D models. 3D models, just because of the nature of the technology, have these very sharp, polygonal lines everywhere. With the hand-drawn style, we were able to get a bit more of that feel in the game. It was something that felt appropriate to the broader themes of the game, like the sense of discovery. As you see this line drawing as a viewer, you’re not really sure what it’s going to become. Suddenly, it splits, and it becomes a giant. That felt simpatico with the rest of the game.

GamesBeat: What were some other influences out there on the story or the game in general? I could see a Portal-like section in the game. …

Dallas: I’d say the biggest inspirations were storybooks in general. Alice in Wonderland, Edward Gorey, Shel Silverstein — what those books feel like as a reader. Even just the weight of a book like that. You know when you pick it up that it’s not a huge investment. You can sit there and read it in the bookstore. That’s a core part of what it feels like as an audience member for that kind of thing.

So for Unfinished Swan, we put it into a storybook with very discrete chapters so players can see ahead of time … “Okay, I’m about halfway through.” It had that sense of, when you’re holding a book, you know about how far you are from the ending.

The other big inspirations were a number of filmmakers: Jim Henson — Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal have some concrete reference in Unfinished Swan — as well as Terry Gilliam. Time Bandits was something we looked at pretty closely. Luis Bunuel, also, and a number of surrealists. People who create these spaces that are unlike anything you would encounter in the real world but have this kernel that makes them feel surprisingly real and familiar.

GamesBeat: The story itself — is any of this very personal to you? Do you have any more personal stake in the different events that transpire in the story?

Dallas: I didn’t when the game started. It was just something that. … As a child, I’d always been very concerned that my parents would die. It seemed like the worst thing that could possibly happen. One reason that Time Bandits resonated with me as a young person and still disturbs me when I see it now. … At the end of Time Bandits, his parents just suddenly die. There’s no reason for it. It just happens. I think that’s pretty true to the way that the world works.

As a child, you have so little control. If you look at all the classic fairy tales, they’re about kids in unfortunate situations through no fault of their own. Being a child — or at least this is my memory of it — you’re beset by all kinds of forces that you don’t understand and that are much more powerful than you.

I guess it’s a long-winded way of saying that I centered the story on a boy whose mother has died because for me, that had always been something that resonated strongly. It was a concern that I had as a child, and it seemed like an interesting place to start for an emotional journey. There’s nothing sadder to me than a child losing his parents.

The weird, personal twist on all this is that halfway through development, my own mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness, although she’s still alive. So that gave me more of a personal perspective on the whole thing. As tragic as it is, I’m also a 34-year-old man now. At some point, your parents are going to die. Nobody is going to live forever. I’m really just thankful [for] the time that I had with her, and I’m glad that she was able to raise a child through to adulthood. I can’t imagine how horrible it would have been to not have had all those years.

GamesBeat: I’m finishing the game a second time around with my 12-year-old girl. She’s very fascinated by it. She’s still right in the middle, but the last time I did that with her is when we played Journey together. My kids were all just fascinated with that — both the look and the story in it. They don’t play a lot of games on consoles anymore, so for them to sit down for hours with one of these types of games is a big achievement on the creator’s part. 

Dallas: Thank you, thank you. I’m sorry we didn’t have a chance to playtest more with a younger audience. We did a ton of playtests, but because we’re in the God of War studio, it’s much easier for us to pull 30- to 40-year-old hardcore game developers. Young developers don’t have a lot of friends with children beyond the age of four or five, too, so we just didn’t get many chances to test it.

It was interesting to see when we brought the game to PAX [Penny Arcade Expo] recently, though. Previously, we’d only had, I think, two 9-year-old boys play the game, and neither of them got out of the first room. They were so interested in painting stuff that they would say, “I’m gonna paint this whole world black!” They seemed to have a good time, but it was not the experience we’d expected people to have, so I thought, “Well, maybe this game is too advanced for certain ages, where they don’t have the drive to keep moving forward.” But at PAX, we had people as young as six playing the game and having no trouble at all moving through it.

GamesBeat: I think the first-person painter genre should have more than one game in it.

Dallas: [Laughs] I’d love to play someone else’s take on a first-person painting game. By the way, you mentioned you were playing through a second time. Did you notice the Journey Easter egg?

GamesBeat: No, where was that?

Dallas: I’m not going to give it away, but you have to look through a telescope somewhere. There’s a lot of things hidden in this game.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Right after the GamesBeat staff got back from the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) last week, we started wondering if we were all at the same event. Despite a combined 38 years of experience attending the annual game-industry trade show, lead writer Dean Takahashi, culture editor Sebastian Haley, and I (GamesBeat’s editor-in-chief) came away from the 2012 edition with drastically differing opinions on what we saw.

Here’s what we thought of this year’s E3:

Sebastian Haley, culture editor:

I might be alone on this, but E3 was a disheartening experience for me this year. Sure, I’ll buy and love Borderlands 2, Dishonored, and a ton of other games that were shown off, but everything was just so iterative — from the countless sea of sequels and spin-offs, to even the press conferences that seemed to focus less and less on what gamers like myself actually want.

After years of being the punchline of the Internet, why is it so hard to make a good E3 press conference? Microsoft gave carte blanche to Nike and ESPN to talk as long as they wanted, but when it came time to show off the only three original intellectual properties (IPs) in the entire lineup, if you blinked you would have missed it. And even if you didn’t blink, you’d still have no idea what the games were even about. Then Usher and Joe Montana come out for awkward performances, and that’s supposed to make things better?

The industry more or less seems to be on autopilot, and I can only hope it’s saving up all its energy for a massive 2013. But again, maybe that’s just me.

Dishonored

Dean Takahashi, lead news writer:

The game industry didn’t have such a bad showing at E3. The traditional game publishers showed off new original games such as Beyond: Two Souls, The Last of Us, The Unfinished Swan, Dishonored, Warface, Hawken, World of Warplanes, and Watch Dogs. New technologies such as Unreal Engine 4, facial animation, SmartGlass, the Wii U, and Sony’s Wonderbook were cool. The staple franchises such as Assassin’s Creed III, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Tomb Raider, SimCity, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, and Crysis 3 will keep gamers delighted and busy in the next year.

But like Sebastian, I also have high expectations of game makers in the core console market. And I’m not sure they have done enough to shield themselves from the disruption that is hitting their industry. This E3 was an in-between year. Next-generation consoles are in the works, but only Nintendo showed off its cards, and they weren’t very disruptive this time around.

From the outside, the game industry is under pressure. Apple is one of the driving forces of the real disruption, but it isn’t alone. Samsung announced at the show that it will create its own cloud gaming service in partnership with Gaikai and Nvidia. It will in effect become a fourth major platform for game makers, launching a cloud-based game service that could threaten the core console business. Apple and Samsung could bring cheap, high-quality games into the living room that could compete quite nicely against $60 games that come with the number “3″ or “4″ after their names.

This is a very real threat. At E3, I didn’t see a masterstroke to deal with it. There was innovation, but not enough of it to make a difference.

The Last of Us

Dan “Shoe” Hsu, editor-in-chief:

Last year’s E3 only gave me one stick-with-me moment: the BioShock Infinite demo. It left me near breathless, and even though I don’t smoke, I felt like I needed a cigarette after watching it.

Nothing this year quite matched that, but three games came awfully close, all from my personal top 3 games of E3: Watch Dogs, The Last of Us, and Dishonored. I saw The Last of Us on the last day of the show, and it just put the biggest smile on my face. Right when that amazing, frightening, tension-filled demo finished, it cemented this E3 as one of the best in recent years for me. So I’m quite surprised at Sebastian’s reaction — this show was amazing! When was the last time so many new IPs surprised and wowed us like this? We’re always complaining about the sequel parades (and rightfully so), but it’s up to us to look past the flashy hype of the Call of Duties of the world to champion original games like the ones I just mentioned.

Nintendo Land and ZombiU on the Wii U were both pleasant surprises as well (though the latter proved to me that first-pers0n-shooter controls will take a lot of hand-eye-coordination reconditioning due to the controller’s new layout — a reconditioning I’m not sure I want to commit to). Even the known quantities got me excited again: I honestly thought I was over Halo and Gears of War, but both Halo 4 and the overrun mode in Gears of War: Judgment were a lot of fun to play in multiplayer.

I went into my 16th E3 jaded and thinking I’ve seen and experienced it all. I left a surprised, giddy gamer.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Monroe’s mother never finished anything. Not even the world around you. It’s a flat, blank, white canvas, waiting for you to define what exists around you.

That’s how The Unfinished Swan opens…with nothing but emptiness and a reticule. What happens next opens up a very different door in terms of gameplay. You’ve explored in games before, but Swan — due later this year from indie developer Giant Sparrow as an exclusive downloadable title for the PlayStation 3 — takes things to another level: discovery. Starting right when you launch the game, you play to learn, to solve, to answer. It doesn’t feel like a puzzle game so much as a first-person mystery game. And by playing it, you slowly discover what this game is.

A little experimentation reveals that one button jumps, all others fling a black blob of paint that splatters on impact. Suddenly: a wall. The world takes on form and dimension. Coat the room, and you’ll find a corner, a hallway, a door. Go through it, splash more paint, and you realize you’re outside, on a wharf. You know that’s water beyond because the blobs splash in, leaving ripples on the surface.

No, you can’t plunge to your watery doom. “I thought it was a little too mean-spirited to let people walk into white water at the beginning of the game,” says Ian Dallas, Unfinished Swan’s creative director. “We try to kill people later.”

The plot revolves around a 9-year-old child named Monroe who’s deceased mother left him a collection of unfinished paintings. One day, the subject of one — a swan — escapes from the canvass. Monroe sets off in search of it through an Alice-in-Wonderland world ruled by a mad king. The levels represent snapshots from the king’s life, and as he was also a painter with a magic brush, they often represent his different artistic periods. The early levels are pure Salvador Dali, full of crazy castles and unreal contraptions. And balloons.

Occasionally, you’ll see a splash of color in the distance…yellow footprints made by a goose, the horn of a unicorn station, the crown on a bust of the king. Tantalizing clues sometimes lead to red herrings…yellow bird feet lead to a chicken instead of swan. And the swan itself occasionally flies into view, just out of reach.

Another level mixes it up with blobs of water in lieu of paint, but you’re still filling out the world, growing vines to progress and to discover the history of the stark, thorny castle you’ve wandered into. Each new discovery leads to another, and it’s all incredibly compelling. The swan seems to leads you with a destination in mind. Somewhere out there, the mad king waits.

You might get a slight musical queue, but otherwise Unfinished Swan leaves you alone to figure things out for yourself. You must be curious. You must want to discover. In that way, the entire game constitutes one big puzzle that you’ll only ever solve by playing through to the end.

Time will tell if the answers — assuming we get any — prove worthy of the journey. But even as an unfinished work, The Unfinished Swan feels immensely rewarding. You won’t ever find a better reason to play a video game.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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