Quadrilateral Cowboy's Brendon Chung: 'People use game mechanics to be themselves'

Quadrilateral Cowboy was built to facilitate the 'electric feeling' of taking something apart, and putting it all back together again

In 2013, Brendon Chung's short, sharp game about a heist gone wrong, Thirty Flights of Loving, was listed as one of the finalists for the Narrative Award at the Independent Games Festival. Before that, the game had been discussed by critics as one of the "very best narratives" in video games. Its use of the jump cut, borrowed from film-making, was a novelty, and Chung used it to great effect, tying together vignettes to tell a story that hurtled by with the kind of confident pacing that video games rarelyachieve.

You might question, then, why Chung decided to move away from all this fanfare with his next game, Quadrilateral Cowboy. While working on it back in 2013, he told IGN that he "wanted to go in a very different direction from Thirty Flights [of Loving] and let the player experiment in a sandbox and figure out their own solutions to problems".