Relax-em up: Alternative games take centre stage

The second annual Horizon conference took place alongside the much larger gaming industry event E3. Hosted at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Horizon explores the more offbeat and artistic side of game production today.

The stand-out game from the event was Mountain, created by developers David O’Reilly and Damien Di Fede, who also created the 3D, profanity-laced game sequence that Joaquin Phoenix’s character plays in the film Her.

Mountain is a mountain simulator. ‘You are a mountain. You are God,’ says the tagline. O’Reilly calls the game a ‘relax-em-up’. Gamers answer questions in the form of drawings, which help create the floating mountain that each gamer will experience. Gamers can then control what goes on around the mountain by playing music on their keyboards.

Another game at Horizon, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, is a story-driven exploration of the post-apocalypse, set in rural England in the 1980s.

Many Horizon selections were similar to games featured in LS:N Global’s Game Imitates Art microtrend.