A chess game? With an awesome trailer? I’m as baffled as you are.
As the name would suggest, Pure Chess is an upcoming videogame simulation of the centuries-old, cerebral board game. It’s in development by the largely unknown VooFoo Studios, will be published by the equally unknown RebelPlay Ltd., and is scheduled for release on the PlayStation 3 and Sony’s imminent PlayStation Vita handheld. To most gamers this nebulous pedigree would suggest a budget-priced title destined for the bargain bin.
Then you watch the trailer and suddenly, inexplicably, confusingly find yourself excited for an upcoming videogame based on a pasttime that, in most mainstream media, serves as cultural shorthand for “boring nerd.”
Not that the trailer is full of bombastic action or high-stakes tension between characters — this is still a game where you slide pawns one-space-at-a-time across a checkered board — but it’s almost Gran Turismo 5-esque in its classic aesthetic appeal. Did you see those rooks? Straight up, those were some gorgeous rooks (and I say that as a guy who considers himself purely a “bishop man”).
I still don’t have much faith that Pure Chess will knock Modern Warfare 3 off the top of the sales charts, but I gotta hand it to the development team. If the goal of a trailer is to convince viewers to keep an eye out for the day your game actually hits shelves, this clip is a smashing success.
Now I just hope they can find a way to nerf the Queen. That eff-bag has been OP since day one.
