Month: March 2018

Australian game developer Anthony Tan has released the first trailer for his new game Way To The Woods–and it looks beautiful. The story is about two deer–a doe and her fawn–trying to find their way home in a post-human world. To survive and get home, they’ll need to find food and shelter, and get answers about some kind of cat god. You’ll also bash things with your antlers, of course.

What’s perhaps most striking about Way To The Woods is its gorgeous art, which was drawn by hand. If you’re getting Studio Ghibli vibes, that’s no accident. Tan said on the game’s website that Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke were major inspirations, along with Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic game The Last of Us. The music is stirring as well.

Way to the Woods, which has been in development for more than two years, is being made using Unreal Engine 4. The art was produced using Photoshop, Maya, and Zbrush. And the music in the trailer, which is haunting and beautiful at the same time, was composed by Tan.

All the more impressive is that Tan is just 18 years old. More impressive still is that Tan worked own Owlchemy Labs’ VR games Job Simulator and the developer’s Rick & Morty game.

Way to the Woods is due out in early 2019 for PC and potentially consoles. Needless to say, this is one we’ll be watching.

During a White House press briefing last week, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said President Trump will meet with “members of the video game industry” to discuss video game violence in the wake of the Parkland, Florida school shooting. At the time, the ESA–which represents some of the industry’s major publishers–said it had not heard about any meeting with the White House. Now, the ESA has confirmed it will attend a White House meeting this week, but there are still quite a few unanswered questions about what will happen and who will attend.

In a statement to Kotaku’s Jason Schreier, the ESA suggested its conversation with White House officials will extend beyond video games alone. “Video games are plainly not the issue: entertainment is distributed and consumed globally, but the US has an exponentially higher level of gun violence than any other nation,” the group said.

The ESA did not say if representatives from any of its members will attend the White House meeting this week. Some of its members include huge, powerful gaming companies such as Activision, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Electronic Arts, among many others. At the very least, we would expect ESA president Michael Gallagher to attend the meeting.

On the other side, we don’t know if President Trump himself will meet with the ESA or if it will be Vice President Mike Pence or other elected officials. We have contacted the ESA in an attempt to get more details about this week’s White House meeting.

After the Parkland shooting, Trump hosted a meeting at the White House to discuss school safety, and among the subjects that came up were the level of violence in video games and movies. In his White House meeting in February, Trump said he has heard from “more and more people” that “the level of violence in video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts.”

After the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, then-Vice President Joe Biden met with members of the video game industry executives such as then-EA CEO John Riccitiello to discuss the link between violent video games and gun violence as part of a wider task force into gun control measures. Gallagher, the ESA president, was also at this meeting.