And just when I’d had enough of one game, there was Brough, releasing another, this new addition somehow more life-consuming than the last.įrom 2009 to 2012, Visual Concepts had a four-year run of annually outdoing itself in its cultural-phenomenon NBA 2K franchise.
What I thought would be a short weekday break somehow stretched into hourslong diversions. If I have one complaint, it’s the number of times these games got me in trouble over the past 10 years. It helps that Brough’s work is widely available for smartphones.
He doesn’t lard his work with tutorials, and his alien art style can be downright intimidating, and yet, games like Zaga-33 and 868-HACK are immensely accessible - warm, even. Nominated multiple times for the IGF’s Nuovo and Excellence in Design Awards, Brough focuses on the roguelike genre, simplifying its notorious complexity with confined stages and limited abilities. If creator Derek Yu is like early Terrence Malick, publishing a new masterpiece every decade or so, then Michael Brough is like late-career Malick: a fearless, productive, and intensely focused creator, releasing something new nearly every year of this decade.
