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Ephemerid: A Musical Adventure is a game about getting laid. Technically, it’s about the cycle of life, from birth to death. But when you’re a mayfly with a life that spans only a handful of hours, getting laid becomes a pretty important thing. How else is the species to survive?
SuperChop Games’ brief, colorful adventure is referred to in the iOS App Store as a “rock fairy tale,” and that feels like an accurate description. The whole thing lasts no more than an hour, and while there are video game-y tap-and-swipe sequences that keep you involved, there’s no reward, no failure. There’s only the story and your unchanging path through it.
Each stage of play amounts to a new track in SuperChop’s stirring prog-rock opera. This notion plays into the presentation of the level select screen, which is a spinning record split into 12 sections, one for each level. There’s even a turntable-style slider at the bottom of the screen that allows you to futz with the speed of the music (and, by association, the play).
The piece as a whole is an audiovisual delight, with environments and the objects & beings that inhabit them built primarily out of hand-drawn and papercraft creations. Some nice particle effects, used to lend additional flavor to select sequences and call the eye’s attention to different parts of the screen, further enhance the presentation. All of it is backed by the melodic scream of electric guitars and thumping kick of double-bass drums.
The levels play out in chronological order, following the mayfly at the heart of the story from birth to death. Cleverly, the cycle repeats automatically when you reach the end; the spinning record continues to turn, transitioning seamlessly from the last level back into the first one. The mayfly explores the world, overcomes adversity, rescues its mate, and ultimately procreates before slipping free of its mortal coil.
Ephemerid: A Musical Adventure is a game about getting laid.
To its credit, SuperChop sticks to a minimalist focus in not including any sort of tutorial. There’s some satisfaction to be had in poking and prodding the screen to figure out how to get the music rolling, even if there’s ultimately no apparent meaning attached to those interactions. It’s all very intuitive and easy to puzzle out – again, challenge isn’t this game’s forte – but the “figure it out yourself” approach lends itself well to Ephemerid’s playful, lighthearted tone.
In the end, all of your efforts to guide this little mayfly through life lead it to a final act of procreation. The two insect lovers fly off into the heavens, their tiny bodies transposed with the ghostly Chinese dragons that they so resemble. It’s an ending that is also a beginning, a spoiler that spoils nothing. Ephemerid is about the cycle of life; we all know where the beginning and the ending are. It’s the journey that ultimately matters.
If you’re looking for challenge or hooks or gameplay that involves any sort of deductive reasoning, you’ve come to the wrong place. Ephemerid: A Musical Adventure is built as an experience that strips the life we know to its foundations, presenting the journey from birth to death from the perspective of a creature for which every brief, too-fleeting moment matters.
This game was reviewed on a second-generation iPad Mini using a code provided by the publisher.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.