QCF: Nairi: Tower of Shirin

 believe that I may have spent more time thinking about writing the review for Nairi: Tower of Shirin than I had played the actual game itself. Not that the game is easy, at least in my opinion; its puzzles had me scratching my head on several occasions. However, the reason for the delay in writing this review is that although I genuinely like this title and its blending of point and click adventure and visual novel, glaring issues in controls, game design and it’s anti-climactic wrap-up has me thinking twice about recommending it to Switch owners.

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GDC 15: Dissecting Narrative Design with Jurie Horneman

f there’s one thing that you can count on GDC delivering year after year, it’s the consistent distribution of new ideas and creative approaches shared from variety of talented game developers and visionaries in attendance.

Programmers and upstarts from around the world strive to share their ideas among their peers in hopes of improving the climate for video games, even when it comes to established philosophies and subjects in the field of design.

Jurie Horneman is one of these people, as he takes the stage at GDC 15 to challenge the climate of narrative direction in gaming, and how developers can be more conscientious with gameplay mechanics resonate with the plot and world of the experience in a way that can overcome the all too common issue of ludonarrative dissonance that currently plague modern gaming.

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