526 – Unravel (2016 video game)

spacetime coordinates: 20th century Northern Scandinavia

Unravel is a puzzle platform video game developed by the Swedish company Coldwood Interactive and published by Electronic Arts. It was announced on 15 June 2015 and released in February 2016 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows. The game centres on Yarny, a small anthropomorphic creature made of yarn whom the player navigates through the environment, utilizing the unraveling yarn which makes up Yarny to solve puzzles, avoid dangerous creatures, and traverse obstacles.

MINIMUM SPECIFICATIONS: CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.4 GHz or AMD Athlon Phenom X2 @ 2.8Ghz AMD //  RAM: 4 GB // OS: Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10 – all 64-bit // VIDEO CARD: Requires DX11 class hardware and feature setGeForce GT 450 or Radeon HD 5750 or better, with 512 MB or greater (Laptop GeForce GTX 745M, AMD Radeon HD 8650G or Intel 4400 or better)

https://www.ea.com/games/unravel

512 – Dishonored (2012 video game)

 spacetime coordinates: industrial city of Dunwall  modeled on London and Edinburgh between the late 1800s and the early 1900s

Dishonored is a 2012 stealth action-adventure video game developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. Set in the fictional, plague-ridden industrial city of Dunwall, Dishonored follows the story of Corvo Attano, bodyguard to the Empress of the Isles. He is framed for her murder and forced to become an assassin, seeking revenge on those who conspired against him. Corvo is aided in his quest by the Loyalists—a resistance group fighting to reclaim Dunwall, and the Outsider—a powerful being who imbues Corvo with magical abilities. Several noted actors including Susan Sarandon, Brad Dourif, Carrie Fisher, Michael Madsen, Lena Headey and Chloë Grace Moretz provided voice work for the game.

The game is played from a first-person perspective and allows the player to undertake a series of assassination missions in a variety of ways, with an emphasis on player choice. Missions can be completed through stealth, combat, or a combination of both. Exploring each level opens new paths and alternatives for accomplishing mission goals, and it is possible to complete all missions, eliminating all of Corvo’s targets, in a non-lethal manner. The story and missions are changed in response to the player’s violent actions or lack thereof. Magical abilities and equipment are designed to be combined to create new and varied effects.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS MINIMUM: OS: Windows Vista / Windows 7 // Processor: 3.0 GHz dual core or better // Memory: 3 GB system RAM // Hard Disk Space: 9 GB // Video Card: DirectX 9 compatible with 512 MB video RAM or better (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 / ATI Radeon HD 5850) // Sound: Windows compatible sound card

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steam   wiki

“Dishonored”, HD walkthrough (Very Hard+Shadow+Ghost+All collectables)

0473 – Borgman (2013)

spacetime coordinates: 2010’s Netherlands

“and they descended upon the earth to strengthen their ranks”

Borgman is a 2013 Dutch psychological thriller drama film directed by Alex van Warmerdam.

KINÓWKI.pl

A vagrant enters the lives of an upper-class family, turning their lives into a psychological nightmare in the process. Although never stated in the film, the behavior of Borgman resembles that of an “alp“, a nightmare demon from German folklore.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1954315/

0471 – Coraline (2009)

spacetime coordinates: 2000’s Ashland, Oregon

Coraline is a 2009 American 3D stop-motion dark fantasy horror film based on Neil Gaiman‘s 2002 novel of the same name. It was the first feature film produced by Laika and distributed by Focus Features. The film depicts an adventurous girl finding an idealized parallel world behind a secret door in her new home, unaware that the alternate world contains a dark and sinister secret. Written and directed by Henry Selick, the film was made with Gaiman’s approval and co-operation.

Coraline was staged in a 140,000-square-foot (13,000 m²) warehouse in Hillsboro, Oregon. The stage was divided into 50 lots, which played host to nearly 150 sets. Among the sets were three miniature Victorian mansions, a 42-foot (12.8 m) apple orchard, and a model of Ashland, Oregon, including tiny details such as banners for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. More than 28 animators worked at a time on rehearsing or shooting scenes, producing 90–100 seconds of finished animation each week. To add the stereoscopy for the 3D release, the animators shot each frame from two slightly apart camera positions.

Every object on screen was made for the film. The crew used three 3D printing systems from Objet in the development and production of the film. Thousands of high-quality 3D models, ranging from facial expressions to doorknobs, were printed in 3D using the Polyjet matrix systems, which enable the fast transformation of CAD (computer-aided design) drawings into high-quality 3D models. The puppets had separate parts for the upper and lower parts of the head that could be exchanged for different facial expressions. The characters of Coraline could potentially exhibit over 208,000 facial expressions. Computer artists composited separately-shot elements together, or added elements of their own which had to look handcrafted instead of computer-generated – for instance, the flames were done with traditional animation and painted digitally, and the fog was dry ice.

At its peak, the film involved the efforts of 450 people, including from 30  to 35 animators and digital designers in the Digital Design Group (DDG) directed by Dan Casey and more than 250 technicians and designers. One crew member, Althea Crome, was hired specifically to knit miniature sweaters and other clothing for the puppet characters, sometimes using knitting needles as thin as human hair. The clothes would also simulate wear using paint and a file. Several students from The Art Institute of Portland were also involved in making the film.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coraline_(film)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0327597/

http://www.coraline.com/

0455

spacetime coordinates: 19th-century England, Yorkshire >  the Amazon and its tributaries > the Andes of Peru and Ecuador

Richard Spruce and the Trials of Victorian Bryology

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“Pushing against its scientific reputation as downright boring, moss in particular served to create some botanical, aesthetic sense of a setting that allowed for illicit sexual encounters and for primal yearnings. The reasons for this strange dual identity of bryophytes as both mundane and as primal are relatively clear: realistically, moss provided a soft bed for sexual romps that had to take place outside of stuffy Victorian homes. Serving, perhaps predictably, as a slang term for pubic hair, moss was understood to be consistently moist and jewel-like, glittering like emerald colonies under light. (…) Although tropes of sexual encounters occurring in gardens and forests far predated the nineteenth century, both realistically and literarily, these hidden moss grottoes conjured up an image of something semi-religious, some secret refuge from the trials of urban — and overwhelming imperial tropical — life.”

430 – The Swapper (2013 video game)

spacetime coordinates: abandoned space station Theseus  – remote outpost on uninhabitable desert planet Chori V

The Swapper is a puzzle-platform video game for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It was developed and published by Facepalm Games, a small independent company based in Helsinki, Finland.

The Swapper was a project made by two University of Helsinki students Otto Hantula and Olli Harjola in their spare time – backed by the Indie Fund, the 6th indie game title the fund has supported. Rather than digital textures, the game features handcrafted art assets and clay which forms the various game levels.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: OS:Windows XP SP3 or later, 64/32bit // Processor:Dual Core CPU (2.2+ GHz Dual Core CPU or better) // Memory:1 GB RAM // Graphics:GeForce® 8800 or Radeon® HD4800 series, 512 MB of memory, OpenGL 3.0 support required // Hard Drive:1 GB HD space

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http://store.steampowered.com/app/231160/The_Swapper/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swapper

The Swapper OST ♬ Complete Original Soundtrack

0402 – Drowning by Numbers (1988)

Drowning by Numbers is a 1988 British-Dutch film directed by Peter Greenaway.

The film’s plot centres on three married women — a grandmother, her daughter, and her niece — each named Cissie Colpitts. As the story progresses, each woman successively drowns her husband. The three Cissie Colpittses are played by Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson, while Bernard Hill plays the coroner, Madgett, who is cajoled into covering up the three crimes.

The structure, with similar stories repeated three times, is reminiscent of a fairy tale, most specifically ‘The Billy Goats Gruff‘, because Madgett is constantly promised greater rewards as he tries his luck with each of the Cissies in turn. The link to folklore is further established by Madgett’s son Smut, who recites the rules of various unusual games played by the characters as if they were ancient traditions. Many of these games are invented for the film, including:

• Bees in the Trees
• Dawn Card Castles
• Deadman’s Catch
• Flights of Fancy (or Reverse Strip Jump)
• The Great Death Game
• Hangman’s Cricket
• The Hare and Hounds
• Sheep and Tides

In Drowning by Numbers, number-counting, the rules of games and the repetitions of the plot are all devices which emphasise structure and symmetry. Through the course of the film each of the numbers 1 to 100 appear, the large majority in sequence, often seen in the background, sometimes spoken by the characters. 

The film is set and was shot in and around Southwold, Suffolk, England, with key landmarks such as the Victorian water tower, Southwold Lighthouse, and the estuary of the River Blyth clearly identifiable.

Music

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092929/