Review – Injustice (2021). On an alternate Earth, the Joker tricks Superman into killing Lois Lane, which causes a rampage in the hero.
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Introduction Hey folks and welcome to the first ever written BGCP creator interview. We are lucky enough to be chatting today with Chris Evenhuis. Chris Evenhuis is an incredibly talented artist from the Netherlands. He has worked in the comic book industry since the late 1990s. His credits include: Darkness: Resurrection Wynonna Earp Monstro Mechanica GI Joe And concept art for Overlord 2 As well as multiple other cool titles that you can find over on his socials: Insta: https://www.instagram.com/chris_evenhuis/?hl=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/chris.evenhuis Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChrisEvenhuis?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Interview BGCP: Hi Chris, thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Would you mind starting off by telling us a bit about yourself, your educational background and your career? Chris Evenhuis: Hi there, I’m Chris Evenhuis and I’m a comic artist and illustrator based in The Netherlands. My education wasn’t art-related (I started out as an Environmental Scientist), so as an artist I’m self-taught. BGCP: How did you go from studying Environmental Art to becoming a full time illustrator? CE: I’ve been drawing comics ever since I was a kid and had some indie shorts published by age seventeen. However, teachers convinced me to also pursue a ‘real job’, something with better career prospects. So, I ended up graduating as an Environmental Scientist instead. But by that time, the social climate in The Netherlands had shifted and jobs in that field kinda dried up. This meant that I ended up mostly jobless anyway. Thankfully I was able to move on to video games, where I worked as a concept artist for several years. Until I moved on again to Franco/Belgian comics, and eventually US comics as well. BGCP: Who are your main influences when it comes to your art? CE: This one’s difficult to answer because for a large part it depends on what type of project I’m working on. I do tend to see influences from Alphonse Mucha and Steve Dillon in my own work, but I’m not sure others would agree? BGCP: You have a really distinct art style in all of your work. Did you intentionally hone this style or is that how you have always drawn? CE: Thank you so much, that’s one of the nicest things I could hope for as an artist. It’s a combination of gradually developing a style that all at once feels natural, tells a clear story and helps making deadlines. Over the years I’ve found myself mostly looking for things to remove from my rendering, trying to find a style that has the least amount of ‘distraction’. It used to have a lot more details and cross-hatching, things like that. Lately my focus has shifted more to bold lines and shapes, and clear movements and emotions. It’s an ongoing process which I really enjoy. BGCP: Do you have a favourite part of the illustration process? CE: My favourite parts are coming up with ideas and then at the end, finishing them. Everything in between is usually a terrible struggle and oftentimes almost like solving math problems. BGCP: I have always been amazed at how talented comic artists like yourself are able to capture detailed expressions and convey complex emotions in a still frame. How do you go about tackling this? CE: Thank you! This is possibly my favourite aspect of drawing comics. First of all, I’ll ask the writers I work with as many questions as feels appropriate about what their characters are like other than what the scripts says about them. Anything could be helpful: favourite breakfast, pet peeves, weird habits, taste in music, type of friends etc. Everything else I will then make up on my own. So I’ll just imagine how each individual character would move and react to different situations. Sometimes, I’ll physically act out scenes on their behalf to figure out the expressions, gestures, movements across a sequence of panels and such. What I’m hoping to achieve by this is to create characters that – just from the way they look, move and express themselves – reveal parts of their personal stories on top of the one that’s in the script. BGCP: Out of the multiple different comics that you have worked on, which was your favourite? CE: I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with some of my favourite writers in the industry. I’ve gotten the chance to work on some of the most fun books I can imagine. I have loved every single one of them, and also did some of my proudest work in each of them. Especially Wynonna Earp and GI Joe, but overall my favourite is probably still Monstro Mechanica. This is my creator-owned series with G.I. Joe writer Paul Allor and colour artist Sjan Weijers. The series is about Leonardo da Vinci, his female apprentice and their wooden robot bodyguard. There’s something special about getting to create every single thing from the ground up. BGCP: When it comes to working on a licenced comic such as GI Joe, do you have to stick to a certain art style, or is your own unique art style embraced? CE: The art style can be pretty flexible; GI Joe had already seen quite a diverse range of styles throughout its different runs at IDW before I came on board. The most important thing is how well the art and writing style mesh together and I think Paul and I make a pretty great team in that regard. BGCP: Are there any comic book titles that you would like to work on in the future? CE: I’ve always felt Paul and I would do a killer Rocketeer run. Another dream project I can think of would be a licensed comic series based on the 2001 video game ‘Clive Barker’s Undying.’ BGCP: You have also worked as a concept artists on a couple of videogames, how did that come about? CE: I had made a few friends in comics who later started a game developing studio and were looking for artists. Both the comics and games
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of Blue Box Game Studios, Hideo Kojima and Silent Hills, let me take you back to late 2012… Gangnam Style was still in the charts, Django Unchained had just dropped in cinemas and cryptocurrency was still just a weird obscure thing that only sweaty nerds your paranoid uncle cared about. Then, – completely out of nowhere, – a trailer appears on the internet teasing a new trippy-looking game called The Phantom Pain. It is from a developer that nobody has ever heard of called Moby Dick Studios with some weird dude covered in bandages called Joakim Mogren at the helm. The code-cracking began in YouTube comments and on gaming subreddits. The conspiracy unfolded and eventually it turned out to to be a complex hoax that led to the unveiling of Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Then, a few years later, Kojima does the same thing again when he releases the red herring that was the P.T demo, which wound up being a “playable teaser” for the much anticipated, (sadly since cancelled,) Silent Hills. Could the same thing be happening once again with the upcoming PS5 exclusive Abandoned from unknown devs, BLUE BOX Game Studios? Could this title actually turn out to be the long-awaited resurrection of Silent Hills? Because it’s either that or a very clever marketing strategy from a small-time developer riding the Silent Hills hype train to promote their title. Either way, there are too many parallels that can be drawn for this whole thing to be a coincidence. Don your tinfoil hat and join me friends as we head down the rabbit hole together. I hope you all have your whiteboards and string at the ready, as I am about to blow your mind. Part 1: Previously unheard of developer BLUE BOX Game Studios announces ‘Abandoned’ On the 7th of April 2021, a post by Hasan Kahraman appears on the PlayStation Blog unveiling a teaser for a PS5 exclusive, first-person survival horror game titled; Abandoned. Kahraman is the Game Director at BLUE BOX Game Studios. The sleuths over on Reddit have since pointed out that if you go to the 49 second mark in the video above, you will see the image below showing writing on an outside wall that reads; “Kill The Trespassers.” A tree blocks a couple of letters of the text. Those letters being blocked just so happen to be “T” and “P,” or PT. Other than that though, upon first glance, the post appeared to be just like any other PlayStation Blog post announcing a new title. These kinds of posts certainly aren’t rare on the blog and initially nobody paid much attention to the post other than some negative reactions criticizing the amateur sounding VO work and the complaining about the poor frame rate. A few months down the line, BLUE BOX Game Studios announce that Abandoned will receive its very own PS5 app which will allow gamers to watch the game’s trailers in real time on their PS5 console. This is a notably odd thing for a studio to implement and it is certainly not something that is normally done by first-party PlayStation Studios whilst promoting their upcoming game. Therefore, this strange announcement left more than a few people wondering why this small, unknown game studio are the first to pioneer this marketing strategy. The app was initially slated to go live this Sunday on the 20th of June. However, another tweet from the developer states that the app will in fact go live on the 22nd of June. This date is probably the correct one as it is a Tuesday, which is normally the day that new games and apps go up on the PlayStation Store. Part 2: Why this could actually be Kojima leading up to the announcement of Silent Hills Shall we go deeper down the rabbit hole? A couple of days ago BLUE BOX Game Studios Twitter account posts a tweet suggesting that “Abandoned” isn’t actually the title of their game. They tease fans to “Guess the name, which begins with an S and ends with an L. This tweet perks up the ears of gaming conspiracy theorists all over the internet rumours start that Gaming’s God Of Mischief himself, Hideo Kojima is in fact behind this account and this title and Abandoned is yet another ruse concocted to lead up to the re-announcement of Silent Hills. The developer panics and quickly back-tracks to shut down any rumours that may have started based on this tweet. This back-pedalling only becomes more frequent over the next day in comment sections etc. This inevitably leads to the Streisand effect taking place and more people across the internet begin to take notice. In a later tweet, the developer refers to “Abandoned” in quotation marks, further suggesting that Abandoned is not the true title of the game. In yet another tweet, they confirm that Abandoned is simply a working title for the project. In another, it is stated that teaser that dropped back in April was only ever intended to be an announcement that the game was in development and that “the game itself has never been shown.” If we look again at the game’s title, the choice to use the word, “Abandoned,” could also be a reference to how Silent Hills and by extension Kojima were abandoned by Konami seven years ago. If this false project is actually an elaborate tease for Kojima Productions to eventually announce that they are in fact returning to work on Silent Hills, then Abandoned would a very apt working title under which to restart development on the game. Are you still with me? Because this is still just the tip of the iceberg. Part 3: You Wanna Get Nuts? Let’s Get Nuts! Strap in Alice, because we are past the point of no return. We shall begin with the logo for BLUE BOX Game Studios. Look familiar? That is because it is pretty much the exact same as the PlayStation Studios logo, right down to the font. Another parallel that can be drawn, is how the
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Review – Fallout 4 Developer: Bethesda Game Studios Publisher: Bethesda Softworks Genre: Open World RPG Director: Todd Howard Release Date: November 10th 2015 Almost six years on from its initial release, I decided to go back and revisit Fallout 4 for review. This is also the first time that I have played the game in over half a decade. It was an interesting experience to see how the game has aged in that time and how different my modern perspective on it to the hype-ridden thoughts that I had at the time. When Fallout 4 dropped back in late 2015, it was a pretty huge deal for me. I love Fallout 3 and New Vegas, so the idea of an updated experience from a Bethesda who were riding particularly high at the time, was an exciting one. Ultimately, I was largely let down, not because the game wasn’t any good, but because the game couldn’t possibly live up to all of the hype it had garnered prior to its release. Fallout 4 was exactly what we had been waiting years for, but that’s just it. This game was exactly what fans were hoping for and nothing more, which felt fairly underwhelming at the time. A great deal has happened since Fallout 4 dropped six years ago. Bethesda released one of the worst received games of all time when they dropped Fallout 76 in late 2018, and in late 2020, Microsoft acquired Bethesda’s parent company, Zenimax in a move that is set to shift the entire paradigm of the videogame market. Therefore, playing Fallout 4 in 2021, it actually feels like you are getting to step back to a simpler time. Playing this game for the first time in years feels like slipping on an old pair of comfortable slippers. The controls all come back to you immediately, the charm of a Fallout game is immediately present and it feels like you are right back at home. The world is vast, beautiful in parts and grotesque in others and I’m not just talking about the intentional aesthetic ugliness of the game’s world. Stretched textures, dated character models, stiff animation loops, clipping, short draw distance and technical glitches are just some of the problems that come with Bethesda using the dated Creation Engine to create their open world games. The best thing graphically in this game are undoubtedly the lighting effects and the more vibrant colour pallet that was chosen. When the rays of sunshine hit the trees of Sanctuary Hills at the right moment this game can actually look quite beautiful, but that is immediately lost when you turn around and see the eerie face of Mama Murphy. So the presentation could be better, but I feel that’s to be expected from a Bethesda game and that is still a problem to this day. This standard of quality shouldn’t have been acceptable even from a game in 2015. If CD Projekt Red and Kojima Productions could put out large scale open world games in the same year that didn’t look like they were developed for early PS3, then there is no real reason that Bethesda couldn’t. The fact that we had to continually endure these flaws right up until as late as November 2018 is frankly ridiculous. The shooting still feels just as clunky as it did at the time, but I am a big fan of the VATS system and it feels really good to re-experience the feature after it was butchered in Fallout 76. The crafting system in this game is also a great addition. It obviously has its flaws and it is far from the smoothest crafting system I have ever used, but in a game like Fallout it just makes so much sense and it is truly astonishing that Fallout 4 was the first game in the series to feature this mechanic. I’ve never really been into the weapon, armour, chemistry or cooking crafting stations, but the ability to build your own settlements is still awesome. The companions in the game are all quite interesting, even if there is a strange lack of female options for companions. The worst companion though by far, is Dogmeat. He is the worst programmed and therefore the most broken. Constantly blocking corridors and doorways, not fetching items for you when they are within reaching distance and just being a general annoyance. He goes from being cute to extremely irritating in a couple of short hours. The voice acting in the game is also something that varies vastly in quality. Both the male and female protagonists are voiced excellently, (even if it is a Caucasian man and woman doing the voices, which means if your character is any other ethnicity, they will still strangely sound white.) However, the other voices of NPC’s etc are wooden and downright awful in places. Certain areas in the game are really cool, helping add to the tone and the immersion of the overall experience. The sound effects and score help with this too, but there is a level of polish that is clearly absent here. It lets the game down as a whole and is clearly the thing that stopped reviewers from giving the game a perfect 10 score at the time. People on the internet have given the game’s dialogue system a lot of hate over the years and while I can see where that is coming from, I’ve always personally thought that it functions perfectly fine. Fallout 4 was never going to break any major ground, it was never going to change the gaming landscape on any grand scale and it does feel like a 10+ year old game rather than just a six year old game. In hindsight, I’m okay with all of that, because at the end of the day, it is more Fallout and that was all that I needed it to be. Sure, it would have been nicer if the game had looked a bit prettier and some of
Review – The Evil Within 2 (2017) Developer: Tango Gameworks Publisher: Bethesda Softworks Genre: Survival Horror Director: John Johanas Release Date: October 13th 2017 I recently revisited the criminally underrated Evil Within 2 for review and I loved almost every second I spent in this insane world. The Evil Within 2 does what all great sequels should aim to do, which is to take the best concepts and systems from the first game and expand on them, while adding in some fresh concepts and discard a lot of the excess fat that dragged the first game down. This game is a much more streamlined action-horror adventure than the first entry and while it starts out with some creepy and uneasy moments, it focuses more on the action element than the horror side of things in comparison with the first game. I do however feel that the game finds a nice equal balance of horror and action, in a way that feels reminiscent of the modern classic, Resident Evil 4. Even though Shinji Mikami didn’t direct this game as he did the first entry, this one actually feels more like a traditional Shinji Mikami game. The villain that torments you for the first third of the game is brilliant, he is engaging, threatening and over the top in all of the best possible ways. The one issue I have with him is that he is sadly killed off far too early and replaced with a more bland, less entertaining villain. There is also some ropey voice acting present in the game, the actor who plays Kidman has been changed from the first game and the new VO artist isn’t quite as engaging in her performance. The actor playing the protagonist’s daughter Lily, is also quite awkward and stilted sounding. There are also some strange lines of dialogue that don’t feel very natural and come across a bit pantomime, but it should be remembered that this is a Japanese game, written in Japanese and then translated into English. I did experience some technical issues whilst playing through the final third of the game, mostly to do with the use of the radio transmitter and I experienced one slight hiccup with the in-game physics. Unfortunately, although these weren’t game-breaking issues, they are still present 4 years after the game’s initial release, meaning I am forced to knock a point off of my overall score. In summary though, this is a damn good time for any horror fan out there. The fact that this game is a great deal easier than the first may bother some of the more hardcore gamers out there, but for me it was fine as I mostly play games for the story anyway rather than the challenge. The optional first person mode is also a nice addition and adds a cool incentive to play through the New Game Plus. [yasr_multiset setid=5] [yasr_visitor_multiset setid=5] Read Dan’s thoughts on an inferior horror game here in our review for Vampyr. Buy tickets for BGCP Comic Con in and around Glasgow Scotland – BUY TICKETS Check out all of our Comic, Movie, Television and Videogame Reviews HERE and our Podcasts/Interviews HERE If you want to be part of the BGCP community, Join us on Discord, Twitter, Instagram etc then click HERE
