developed by Zachtronics (Redmond, WA)
first published January 1, 2011, for Windows/Mac/Linux, $20
[trailer 1, trailer 2 (explanatory, worth watching)]
[original website, current website]
~280 MB

Have played up to, but have not yet completed, the final puzzle in level 7 (of 9), in 13 hours, 2/26/15–3/3/15. Plan to continue to the end, eventually.

[It’s a design-your-own-solution game, so it doesn’t really lend itself to being watched passively on YouTube — pure solution videos go by too quickly to make sense to a non-player, and realtime play session videos are all about the player’s thought process rather than the game content. But if you search you’ll find plenty of both. Here, here’s a guy’s solutions to the first half of the game, with some videos where he talks through trying to build a more efficient solution; I guess any of that will do to give a sense.]

Okay, I’ve decided that posting placeholder entries is needless even by my standards, so I’ll just put it here: there’s one further not-quite-game from the Frozenbyte set, but I’m skipping over it until I regain access to a computer with a 3D card that can handle it, unlike the lower-end machine I’m using at present.

That brings us to the end of the games in the Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle at time of purchase on 9/30/11. However, on 10/5/11, one last game was retroactively added: SpaceChem.

I really love computer puzzle games. I have, in the back of my mind, a semi-serious case I could make for why their special potential for elegance and depth merits their being considered not just as a genre of game but as a distinct artform to be considered alongside traditional artforms. For the present I am not going to make that case; just mentioning it as evidence of my enthusiasm.

The puzzles I have in mind, though, are all puzzles with unique or tightly limited solutions. Then there’s a whole other category of puzzle game, to which Crayon Physics and SpaceChem belong, where the puzzles do not have unique solutions. They’re really just assignments, made non-trivial by constraints. These are not actually puzzle games to my enthusiastic taste. They are rather what I would call “engineering games,” the crucial spiritual difference being that in such games, responsibility for elegance and depth is on you, the player.

(That said, I am still basically okay with calling these “puzzle games,” because they have discrete pre-designed problems in them. I absolutely do not condone the now-standard usage of “Puzzle” as the category name for any post-Tetris abstract solitaire. Bejeweled and its ilk are clearly not puzzle games, despite what the iTunes store might say. That genre should properly be called “Procedural.” I guess that doesn’t sound very appealing. But people could learn to love it, just like they did with cop shows.)

Being good at engineering and being good at puzzles with unique solutions are two very different things. Interest in design is not the same as interest in necessity.

I’ve never been very good at design because I’ve always feared the absence of authority implicit in its freedoms. That’s a psychoanalysis, of course; what I thought was going on was that I was seeking an elegance that eluded me. But I had confused elegance with necessity. There’s boundless opportunity for elegance in all problem-solving, but you have to accept that the problem won’t be its source; you will. That can be hard to accept.

The premise of Oulipo (the constrained writing movement) seems to be the appeasement of a psychology that fears freedom. Necessity is a drug and we’re all addicts; if we get our fix, it stabilizes us enough to be creative again. Yes, but wouldn’t a cure be better? Schoenberg came up with the twelve-tone system for the same reason: actual freedom terrified him, so rather than bearing that fear until it subsided, he decided he needed to be straitjacketed so that he could go back to finding freedom appealing again. So he made up an Oulipean straitjacket system and started writing Oulipean straitjacket music, and then eventually the straitjacket was mass-produced because there was so much demand.

“Necessity is the mother of invention” is, I think, not actually true; just look at all the splendiferation of unnecessary stuff that litters the internet. Glorious surplus! It turns out that people are actually much more inspired to create when it comes to useless stuff that nobody asked for. You’re the man now, dog!

The reason necessity seems to be the mother of invention is that when an invention happens to meet a general necessity, it goes on to fame and ubiquity and takes up a lot of our mental space. It sure seems like the telephone got invented because we needed a telephone, but actually it just got famous because we needed a telephone. It got invented for the same reason that everything else happens: that’s just what people do.

This is the same distinction as one must make in understanding evolution: nature doesn’t “come up with solutions to problems,” it “constantly does random crap”; when some of it happens to solve a problem, it ends up persisting as a result. “Selection pressures” do not create life; they kill it. But all the same life, uh, finds a way. Remembering this difference is important when it comes to trying to motivate ourselves. Necessity is in fact the scourge of invention. But we’re so inventive, we get by anyway.

Anyway, I dipped my toe in SpaceChem a few years ago but I felt the old chill right away. “Oh dear,” I thought. “I’m going to have to freely make things up?” I only made it through two or three puzzles before the sense that I was somehow an idiot became overwhelming and I had to stop.

But this time it went differently. Realizing that necessity isn’t a necessity is a big one for me, and I felt like my success with SpaceChem this time around represented my having gotten over a big one.

Basically, the game gives you some raw materials and tells you how they need to end up, and then you build a machine that will turn the input into the output. The premise is that the materials are molecules, and you’re doing chemical conversions, but that’s just a skin — beyond being named after the elements and being bondable to one another, the pieces aren’t anything like atoms, and what you do to them has nothing to do with chemistry. They’re essentially just abstract game pieces; your job is to construct a system that will shuttle them around and pull them apart/stick them together as needed. It’s a programming game. Here are the available resources, here’s the program specification, here’s the language: write something that works.

The pride of the programmer is a special kind of pride, combining the pride of satisfying authority (the superhuman authority of the computer’s needs) with the pride of having willed something as an authority. To many, this dual pride is the ideal pride. And perhaps something like it can be for me now, too. Finally.

When I was younger I could not find any pleasure in programming. I managed to pass untouched through a lot of “but you really seem like you’d be into this” encouragement. Programming wasn’t authoritative enough to offer me a gold star of correctness (there was no “right answer”), but it was far too needy to gratify my pent-up desire for freedom from authority. If I want the pleasure of making things up, why would I seek it in this hyper-demanding anal-retentive robot?

And yet in the abstract, thinking about myself from the outside, it does seem like I ought to have been attracted to exactly what it offered, the balance of doing both at once, of being simultaneously authority and subject to authority.

I think the bottom line was that my loss of hope that I could ever put real trust in any new authorities (i.e. from beyond the safe zone of my parents) happened very early. By the time I was supposed to learn to program, I was already a skeptic in my heart, and the tutorializers who were trying to step me through initializing arrays and declaring variables seemed as suspect as my teachers at school. Why should I have to “declare” anything, and have to decide in advance whether it’s likely to be “floating point” or not, just to add x+y? That sure doesn’t sound like something I’d do! It all seemed to fall into the same category as the tedious and manifestly meaningless pro forma homework assignments that were my official occupation at the time.

Furthermore, the idea that I could do anything really cool with programming seemed intuitively impossible. Yes, maybe some faraway other people had figured out how, and had somehow made the games I played, but of course they had all those many and enormous advantages that seemed to inhere in otherness and farawayness. Whereas when I went dutifully to try to learn programming, it was clearly a different story, and that was the story I needed to work within. It was more like: “Suppose you have a shoe store and you want to keep a database of all shoes sold, and their prices. You’d use an array.” This was a real example in the book I more than once tried to push through. That’s all I could see from where I sat.

I won’t lie: I do still carry with me a subtle feeling that SpaceChem is actually for “natural programmers” who “feel at home with this stuff” and that I am “just somehow managing to stumble through it, but not the way you’re supposed to.” But that feeling is understandable, because these things die hard; or more accurately, these things don’t die, they just grow or shrink. And there’s no question that this one has shrunk since a few years ago when I couldn’t even wrap my head around the third puzzle in the game because I felt so completely overwhelmed. Now I just feel a little sheepish occasionally: for example, after I make an elaborate plan and spend 20 minutes building it piece by piece, and finally set it going, and only then realize that it’s all premised on a weird dream-logic oversight in my assessment of the situation, and doesn’t accomplish anything remotely like what it’s supposed to, and that I have to start from scratch. Stuff like that makes me feel a little red. But not beet red, not red-alert stop-the-game red. Good news!

And the compensation is, when you build a thing and it does what it’s supposed to: there it is! You get to watch it go zoop, vip, zoop zoop, wait, wait, zoop zoop, ding! And then back to the beginning to run again. Is it elegant? Usually no. But anything that goes without stopping tends to feel right. The extreme busyness of inefficiency can actually enhance that effect.

I’m starting to think that part of the personality of a programmer is really just attraction to things that go without stopping, things that go zoop, vip, zoop zoop, wait, wait, zoop zoop, ding!, regardless of what that “ding!” represents. I guess I am such a person — I certainly like marble runs, factory tours, and Rube Goldberg machines. It’s really just that connecting that attraction to the constraint of meeting specified goals is still very new for me, still a very rickety rope bridge. The circumstances need to be just right for me to dare cross it. That was my cranky complaint about Crayon Physics: you didn’t put me in the damn mood!

SpaceChem did a lot better. Unlike Crayon Physics, its system is tight and 100% reliable. Unlike Crayon Physics, it is not trying to sell me a bill of nostalgia. And most importantly, it goes zoop, vip, zoop etc., where Crayon Physics kind of just went murrrrrrrhhh. I’m not talking about sound effects, just general feel. We think we’re in it for the problem-solving, but we’re really in it for the zoops. SpaceChem has an extremely barebones nerdy left-brain design sense, but the actual actions of the mechanisms are sufficiently zoopy.

Though I do think it would have further calmed my embarrassment had it all been a little tastier and more tactile. That aesthetic whiff of MIT — or in this case, of Redmond, WA — always puts me into a certain cagey place, socially: bracing myself to be both outsmarted and outdumbed. It’s an old cage, and one that I have had some good experiences while inside, but I’d like to put it behind me. Neither being outsmarted nor being outdumbed ought to require me to brace myself.

It struck me as a clever innovation that the game has “boss battles” which take place on a time scale where your designs are running at hundreds of cycles per second. This of course is how programming works in the real world, but I think it’s the first time I’ve seen that kind of timescale-stratification built into a game.

The presence of “bosses” in a puzzle game is justified by a kooky bureaucracy-plus-horror story that gets doled out in dry vignettes between levels, which I guess added a little bit to the atmosphere of the gameplay, though not much. Telling a slight story while people are solving puzzles is a good idea in theory, but is also inherently a goofy thing to do, and this was fairly goofy. I will undoubtedly have opportunity to talk about this general issue again in future games, and this entry’s already awfully long, so enough about that.

The game has a “cinematic” soundtrack, where “cinematic” is in quotes because what it sounds like is the adjective “cinematic,” rather than like actual movies. (Well, not like good ones, anyway. I guess a lot of movies do feel pretty “cinematic” these days.) It’s full of “drama” and “sweep” and mostly feels nothing at all like sitting for a long time solving one of these puzzles. There are also some peculiar horror-movie effects in there, I guess inspired by the peculiar horror-movie touches in the storyline. I could imagine that the designer said: “Since the game is so cerebral and nerdy, probably the music should help counter that by being dramatic and cinematic.” But that’s silly; the music needs to support what’s actually going on. I don’t like to turn off music in games, but in this case I had to turn it off.

This game is very hard. Most people who start it do not finish! I would like to finish it and think I can. But I also started the next game to give me something easier to do at the same time, and I’ve already finished that one, so the time had come to post. If the game has a really really great ending I’ll come back and say so between these next two lines.

“Zachtronics” means basically Zach Barth made this, with help. Turns out his wife wrote the story. The entire credits as they appear in the game (with joke intact):

Design and Production: Zach Barth
Programming: Collin Arnold
Anti Programming: Keith Holman
Visuals: Ryan Sumo
Music: Evan Le Ny
Sound: Ken Bowen
Narrative: Hillary Field

Splot
developed by Frozenbyte (Helsinki, Finland)
first published October 23, 2014, for iOS, $3.99
[trailer 1, trailer 2]
[website]
~630 MB

Played to completion of “bronze” mode (and exhaustive completion of “Farm” level) in 1 hour, 2/27/15—2/28/15.

The first of two bonus not-quite-games in the “Humble Frozenbyte Bundle” as included within the “Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle” that I bought on September 30, 2011.

At the time, this was called a “preorder” of a game still in development, the implication being that the finished game would be showing up for Windows, Mac, and Linux alike within a matter of months, at which time I would own it. Until then, I could download and play a work-in-progress version. I never did; here’s video of what it apparently looked like.

The finished game, however, did not show up any time soon. Frozenbyte proceeded to work on Splot for three more years, during which time it metamorphosed from being a Trine-like physics platforming game to being a cute-bomb iPhone ka-ching-ka-ching game. These things happen.

Despite no longer having any intention of releasing the game for anything but iOS, they were nonetheless obligated to honor the hundreds of thousands of computer “preorders” sold three years earlier, so they very quietly made a Windows version available to Humble Bundle purchasers, identifying it as a “beta.” As far as I can tell, it is completely identical to the finished iPhone version, and is called “beta” only because they want to be clear that they know it’s not a viable product in this form. “Hey guys, we’re giving this to you only as a way of nominally keeping our promise, which we should never have made. Just please understand: it’s no fun. Nobody wants to sit at a computer with a mouse and play a ka-ching-ka-ching iPhone touchscreen game.”

But I did, for an hour. Because I swore I would. Wait, did I swear I would? Actually I think I didn’t swear anything. So maybe this was unnecessary.

Dammit. I always screw up free will. I get it backwards a lot. Oh, FREE will! Gotcha, gotcha. Okay, next time for sure.

The biggest difference between an iPhone game and a computer game is a difference in the level of attention to self. (I’m using “iPhone” like “Kleenex,” as a generic. “Smartphone” is stupid.)

An iPhone game is usually designed for people who are hoping to take some of the edge (which is to say some of the substance) off of being alive and conscious. This is what “casual game” really means; “casual” as opposed to “present and aware.” If you don’t want to play a game “for real,” you just want to play “casually,” what you’re saying is that the game is valuable to you primarily as something to water down your awareness of your actual concerns, even as they remain your actual concerns. It’s negative space to help keep the positive space from taking over.

It probably sounds like I’m knocking that. I’m not at all! I’m just saying that a game that functions as cultural/cognitive negative space is different from one that functions as positive space. A game like Machinarium is decidedly “figure” where Splot is more or less “ground.”

In a bigger-picture sense, maybe I am knocking it a little. It’s much healthier to completely detach from stress, by committing yourself positively to a fantasy, than it is to stay plugged into the stress but flood your mind with jangly “distraction” to temporarily numb the pain.

I guess technically Splot is a platforming/racing game, but that’s incidental. It’s really just pure reward-stimulus nonsense. Jonathan Blow (the guy who made Braid) has been saying for a while now that all the standard ka-ching-ka-ching game mechanics are “Skinnerian” and should be seen as bad for humanity. That’s a noble position to take and one that has made an impression on me — though I’m a bit more ambivalent about the ethical status of such things, for consumer and purveyor alike.

Splot is definitely such things. Achievements, upgrades, puzzle pieces, collectible skins, and the constant blup blup blup of pellet-devouring: the works! Do essentially nothing and be continuously rewarded. But is that so bad? That’s the heart of a healthy childhood, after all: you are good and things are happening! Up on the refrigerator with your latest! Why shouldn’t I, as an adult, be able to get some of that kind of warmly inclusive encouragement? And why not from Splot?

In theory that sounds fine. But in practice, the manifest valuelessness of the “achievements” is dispiriting, at least to me. One can scroll down and see that there are hundreds of them, enough to be doled out steadily for hours and hours and hours, and many of them don’t correspond to things that could ever possibly be experienced with real pride. “Played for 10 minutes! +50XP!” One wants to feel achievement, even if ever so faintly, in the moment that one is being praised for next to nothing. All games are false achievements, after all, but we want to fall for it in good faith, not just by dulling ourselves and listening for the ka-ching.

Playing this game at my computer felt like having a dream of being a researcher watching video of myself sleeping and having that dream. “Yes, I do sometimes will myself into hypnotic submission to this kind of thing and I suppose I’m in that state right now… but I’m also aware of visiting it from the outside, wondering what I think of it.” The state does not itself have thoughts about itself. Ka-ching! Ka-ching!

This is the first game in my current gaming streak that belongs to the happy cutesy-poo Miyamoto school. I approve of such stuff, at least at face value. In fact it cheers me that it’s so ubiquitous. It’s good that this kind of clean, sunlit imagination space is in wide circulation, good that the common culture has room for this set of clean, sunlit archetypes: stories of easily saving the baby chicks from being eaten by the buffoonish blob villain who huffs and puffs each time he’s bested again. Silly rabbit. It’s good that we all still know what this is and don’t have to fight for it: it’s right here.

But I had to qualify that with “at least at face value,” because it doesn’t feel like it’s content to just be itself; it doth protest too much. Such things so often doth. There’s almost always something oversold about cuteitude that makes me feel sad, because it suggests that they don’t really believe in it. Things like Bubble Bobble and Hello Kitty tend to make me feel sad for Japanese people. Why not real, lived innocence? Am I the only one who feels this as full of suppressed pathos? It’s always given me this urge to cry out “it doesn’t have to be this way!”

Now a digression about a different game.

I played a game a few years ago (from a later Humble Bundle) called Little Inferno, which is essentially a satire of all such mind-numbing nonsense as described above (catalogs! upgrades! achievements!). The game of Little Inferno is: there’s a fireplace on screen, you light things on fire in it, and when they’re all burned up, some money comes out, and then you buy more things and light them on fire. That’s pretty much it — done up with a ridiculous array of catalogs! upgrades! achievements! unlocks! It’s obviously a critique, and while I was playing it felt sort of like hypocritical and sour one at that, since after all it is this game, and you are playing it.

But then at the end, after a couple hours of such gameplay, there’s a surprise. Spoilers follow! Eventually, you manage to burn down the whole house, and, in a sort of “allegory of the cave” moment, we suddenly see the person we’ve been “playing as” all this time, a stunned-looking little guy, who stumbles out into the creepy, snowy, empty, Tim Burton-y world around him that he’s been ignoring. He makes his way to the headquarters of the Big Company that sells the fireplaces and issues the catalogs and has been managing this whole mind-numbing, time-wasting endeavor, and then heads up to the top floor to meet the mastermind behind it. Here’s where the commentary becomes interesting. All along, the face of the company has been presented as this tremendously cheerful and bubbly woman, “Miss Nancy.” Then at the end, when you finally see who’s really been in charge all along… Surprise!! There is no conspiracy: it’s just Miss Nancy in the flesh, exactly as depicted, completely sincere and tremendously cheerful. She tells you she hopes you loved your fireplace, and she also hopes you explore the world and enjoy everything there is to enjoy in life. She blasts off in a rocketship to further adventures, and the game ends with your character heading off in a balloon to see the world — snowy and empty though it may be.

I took this to mean: yes, it’s generally better to turn away from such mindless things as this game and open yourself up to the world, but the things themselves aren’t inherently bad, nor are the people who offer them up. They are trying to make the world a better place by making things for people! There is no enemy; there is no error. Little Inferno, in my reading, ended by saying, “Yes, it turns out this game was a legitimate way of spending your time; so are other games; so is everything! It’s up to you to decide how to live!” I appreciated that, and it felt like a meaningful twist at the end of what had seemed to be a bitter satire: the transcendence of of the satirical impulse.

(That said, I still have pretty mixed feelings about Little Inferno as a whole — exactly because I’m glad I saw the ending, in fact! If I completely regretted the whole experience, it would be easy to recognize that it was, after all, my free choice to play it, as per the game’s message. But I’m actually glad I played it, which becomes the framework for being annoyed with it for spending so much time deliberately wasting my time.)

Anyway, that’s basically the attitude I take toward all this ka-ching-ka-ching stuff. Just because it has the potential to be addictive doesn’t make it evil. It is what it is and we’re all free to enjoy it if we can; it’s up to us to know the world and know ourselves.

Knowing ourselves is hard, but that’s not Splot‘s fault!

Interesting to consider this as the output of the same small office space in Helsinki as Shadowgrounds and Trine. While they might well share technical components, they don’t seem to have vision in common — in fact I’d say what they share is a reluctance to engage with the problem of having vision at all. Each one is really just an archetypal exercise. I think that’s the biggest thing keeping videogames from getting truly mature as an artform: the overwhelming predominance of archetypal thinking over humanist thinking. I already said it here seven years ago, but apparently I have to say it again, because has anyone done anything about it?

I had a bunch of notes for other things to write about but I don’t need to. It’s just Splot and I’m tired.

The credits are just a list of names. I can’t even tell who wrote the music.

Tero Rickström, Lauri Hyvärinen, Antti Alkkiomäki, Teemu Laine, Sami Martiskainen, Sauli Lehtinen, Alexei Alander, Samuli Raivio, Tuukka Pensala

And then more.

Shadowgrounds: Survivor
developed by Frozenbyte (Helsinki, Finland)
first published November 14, 2007 (online) by Meridian4, for Windows, $19.99
[trailer]
[website]
~1 GB

Attempted to play for >1 hour, 2/26/15.

The third of the four-or-so “Humble Frozenbyte Bundle” games, as included in the “Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle” that I bought on September 30, 2011.

I can’t get Shadowgrounds: Survivor to work.

It shows me the intro, and then at the point seen at the 1:00 mark in the video above, it freezes the entire computer, forcing me to power down. Freezes the entire computer! That’s some serious crashing.

It seems from the Steam and Frozenbyte forums alike that there are wide variety of crash problems associated with this game. I followed the official FAQ advice: installing various things it thought it might need, then reinstalling the game, then validating the downloaded files, etc. etc., at each stage of which I was encouraged to try it out anew. I got to see my computer freeze to death four more times. After a while I feel like a sucker. Fool me once, shame on, shame on you, fool me, you can’t get fooled again.

Okay then! I’m not gonna run at this football anymore without a signed document.

I’ll type up the credits here if I ever play the game. Be sure to check this entry every day for the rest of time, to see if I came back and played the game after all!

Shadowgrounds
developed by Frozenbyte (Helsinki, Finland)
first published November 4, 2005 by dtp entertainment (Germany/Austria/Switzerland) & November 9, 2005 by Plan 1 (Finland), for Windows, €29.99
first published in the US April 25, 2006, by Meridian4, for Windows, $29.99
[trailer]
[website]
~800 MB

Played to point of exasperation in 2.5 hrs, 2/15/15–2/24/15.

The second of four-or-so “Humble Frozenbyte Bundle” games, as included in the “Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle” that I bought on September 30, 2011. (Actually, it was the third in the pictured order — which I’ve been taking for the order in my spreadsheet because why not — but the second was its sequel, so naturally I’m playing the original first.)

The whole “in space no one can hear you scream” ambiance of Alien works on me: it’s unnerving! So I don’t really understand Alien-head fans who obsessively return to that environment like it’s a clubhouse — not just to have that particular nightmare but for other kinds of fun too. Such as this game, which puts on the whole Alien show like it’s just one of the pre-installed desktop themes, like ‘Autumn’ and ‘Brushed Steel.’

I mean, in the world of pop culture clearly it is just one of the pre-installed themes; this thing that I’m claiming to find bewildering is a very very old phenomenon, basically going all the way back to the 1979 release of Alien. The influence of Alien on videogames is, I daresay, second only to the influence of Tolkien. (I dared say it but I didn’t think too hard about it so feel free to knock that down in the comments.)

I further will note that I am perfectly sympathetic to the idea that “a haunted house” can be a fun place to have a birthday party or play checkers or whatever, so why not Alien?

I see haunted houses as representing the stratum of fear implicit in all houses; a haunted house is the shadow side of the good feeling of home, and it secretly brings some of that good feeling along with it. What is the good feeling that casts Alien as its shadow? I guess something similar, some kind of cozy snowed-in feeling, which I suppose I can get behind. But the presence of the organic-nausea Giger stuff spoils that for me. Flesh and sex are not good things to be afraid of! I get disturbed by “body horror” elements in movies and games not so much because they are close to home for me personally, but because they feel like being inside someone else’s dysfunction, and I am scared of the threat other people may pose to me if they are addled by such stuff. The thought of H.R. Giger himself is far creepier than any alien.

The game started out kind of engaging, despite the completely schlocky/campy writing, acting, and animation. The shadows and sense of foreboding were effective enough to make me want to walk around and fix the panel, get the keycard, shoot the bugs, whatever. But after about an hour of play it had become clear that as far as dramatic vision went, that was nearly all there was going to be: despite the ostensible storyline, the game was mostly going to consist of occasional new weapons and occasional new enemies to match. As I’ve said repeatedly, the “buy upgrades” paradigm is of no interest to me; neither is ammo-rationing. Nonetheless I was still willing to stay the course and play it all through, just to get the benefit of one more game’s particular offering of flow-state reverie.

That plan, however, is contingent on a game being a reliable collaborator in the effort to maintain the flow state, which this game proved not to be.

The character movement is just a tad clumsy, such that my guy would often get accidentally pinned to some detail in the environment, the corner of a crate or something, while trying to back away from the oncoming hordes of identical aliens, and get mauled. This alone is frustrating enough, given that shooting it out with aliens is the game. But worse is that the game has no proper save mechanism — it lets you die up to 5 times while trying to finish a level, but die one more time and you’ll have to start it over from the beginning. Each level is about 30 to 45 minutes long, which means that if you are near the end of a level and die that sixth time, you are being rather severely punished. Any new content is hereby withheld until you go back and do another half-hour’s service to this stupid game.

Like I said a few entries ago, I want to learn my lessons while moving continuously forward. There’s a hateful mindset out there that would call such an attitude “spoiled” or “entitled,” but I see it as enlightened about the true nature of practice and learning, which is that they are a continuous progression. If a video game is supposed to be a potted hero’s journey, that journey shouldn’t be the onscreen character’s but mine, the player’s, in which everything I do is moving me further toward my goal. So what kind of aesthetic sense does it make for my journey to consist of watching my avatar reenact the same piece of the narrative over and over?

When the impediment in the game is a puzzle, my state of stumped-ness contains its own hidden forward motion, as I mentally work my way toward a solution. But when the impediment in the game is having my character’s physical progress stolen out from under my feet because I didn’t do it well enough, that’s the game admitting that the narrative journey in the game really has no intrinsic relationship to the player’s journey. Being punished for exposing this fact has a kind of petulant tyranny to it: “No! no! no!, that’s not how you’re supposed to play this game! The way this works is, by this point, you’re good enough to defeat this boss, and it’s satisfying. But you screwed up the plan, so go back and do it again, my way!”

(Such petulance is implicit in schoolteacherdom, when students are chastised for having failed to learn from the teacher who is doing the chastising. “No! no! no!, that’s not how this is supposed to work! The way this works is, I’m a great teacher, and then you know the material! But you screwed up the plan, so go back and do it again, my way!”)

Anyway, you can imagine what all this is getting at: Near the end of level four, I found that I’d died my final death and was faced with the choice between repeating an already-indifferent 30 minutes of this game I don’t care about or particularly enjoy, or just declaring the game dumb. (I meant to type “done” just now, but this way works too.) I was in no rush to decide so I figured I’d let the matter sit for a few days.

Somewhere in that time I read online that the game had a “twist ending,” so I figured, fine, I’d just suffer the repetition and push forward to see that ending. However, during the interval, the laptop computer on which I’d been playing had to be commandeered for other purposes and ended up being taken far away from me, thus making it impossible for me to continue from the same savegame. Having already steeled myself for boredom, I was able to accept that fate had sent me back to the start of the whole game — fate, which has none of the petulance of a schoolteacher and so doesn’t offend me — and so I just began again on another computer. I figured I could be back to the place I’d died in level four, and on my way forward into the rest of the game, within 90 minutes.

However. After about 45 minutes of play, I had reached the end of level two; while the screen was showing the loading screen for level three, I closed the game and took a break. A few hours later, upon returning and starting it up again, I found that apparently, since I had not actually entered level three, my game had been saved with level two considered to be incomplete, and so I would have to do that level all over from the beginning yet again.

Just to be clear: this is not how games should work.

So that was the last straw. Especially considering that the next game at bat is the sequel and appears to be more of exactly the same. I don’t need this!

The game has its charm, but so do literally thousands of games out there. In such a landscape, there’s no reason to settle for masochism if it’s not my bag, and I’m proud to say it’s less my bag than it’s been in a while.

Compiling all the links and release data and whatnot for these entries is masochistic enough for me, thanks!

I read what the twist ending is, and then watched it on Youtube. The attacking alien monsters actually came to save humanity, by preventing us from using a weapon that unbeknownst to us would have destroyed the entire solar system. Think of that!

Now none of you need to play either. You’re welcome.

Most of the same Finns as last time.

Lauri Hyvärinen: project lead
Juha Hiekkamäki, Jukka Kokkonen: programmers
Ilkka Kuusela: cinematics/scripting/writer
Joel Kinnunen: writer
Ari Pulkkinen: composer/sound designer/writer
Timo Maaranen: lead artist
Tero Rickström: level design

Trine
developed by Frozenbyte (Helsinki, Finland)
self-published July 2, 2009 for Windows, $29.99
[trailer 1, trailer 2, trailer 3, trailer 4]
[website]
~800 MB

Played to completion in 8.5 hrs, 2/9/15–2/11/15.

[video of a complete 5-hour playthrough (once again, disregard the captions!)]

The first of four-or-so “Humble Frozenbyte Bundle” games, as included in the “Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle” that I bought on September 30, 2011. (Finnish developers “Frozenbyte” and the game Frozen Synapse by UK developers “Mode 7” happen to have the word “frozen” in common. Is that why they were bundled together? Who knows. There is no other connection.)

From the trailers one sees clearly that in the eyes of the developers, the selling points are the physics and the freedom of approach. But those were exactly what I didn’t care about. “Physics” in games is going to be looked back on as an awkward techno-fad, like FMV was for years: it sounds cool in theory but in practice it just means that instead of interacting confidently with things that respond reliably, you’re struggling awkwardly with things that respond approximately. Great. And the freedom to choose your “play style” from among three different characters with different powers is meaningless to me. Like I’ve said, if I wanted freedom I wouldn’t be playing a video game! It might be interesting to watch different people play the same area different ways, but how is it interesting to be just one person and play the area just one arbitrary way among many? It’s not.

“Replay value” pssh. A book doesn’t have re-read value just because you can turn the pages from the top OR from the bottom; the value depends solely on the content. In a platforming game, you may think that the value can’t possibly be in the content because it’s so self-similar (another platform! more skeletons!) but nonetheless it is, at least to me. This is why I like platforming games, in fact: because they retain the simple imaginative core of their original 80s forebears, in that very slightly different arrangements of environmental elements are to be experienced as genuinely meaningful, emotionally distinct spaces. The fact that the world you traverse is so self-similar is in fact its essential mystique.

(Wouldn’t it only increase the weirdness if this kid passed the same stuff twice? This piece of animation is a proto-platformer, except of course for the denouement where he returns from whence he came, something that no platform game has yet been spiritually ready to attempt. Yeah, Braid made some gestures in that direction, but they were basically about oh-so-clever abuse of convention; I’m talking about a game that fully embraces that after one goes right for miles, one might well find oneself going back left. In these 30-some years of gamery, has there ever been any such game? Some “There and Back Again” adaptation of The Hobbit?)

Anyway, I didn’t care about the gameplay, nor did I care about the half-assed characters or dialogue (just as the developers clearly didn’t). It’s always the other stuff that makes a game: floaty time in a spacy nowhereland Lord of the Rings/Keebler elves world, lush with skeletons and candles and sunset haze. The vagueness of the stupid story is the story, to the player: this nowhere is where I am. Why and who and what are all cozily, expansively imprecise, lit with daydreamy sensuality. I’ll tell you where you are: the castle and the mine and the forest and the ruins and the lava. The standard catalog, the taster’s menu. (No desert and no ice on this particular outing, but there’s always Trine 2.)

Music is exactly in keeping. When Howard Shore squandered those movies on this kind of crypto-Celtic cotton candy, it was a damned shame, but now that it has come to be the foundation for a whole school of bullshit secondhand make-believe, there’s actually something almost sweet about it — so insincere you can get truly lost in it again, like all the hypnotically terrible Saturday morning cartoons of my youth. Don’t you feel drawn toward some deeper, calmer spiritual level of existence by the irredeemable disinterestedness of, say, this clip? Doesn’t it actually leave a wider gap through which to experience the mysterious under-surface of image and sound and imagination, the mystic truth, beyond the petty, meddling reach of human intention? I am 100% not joking.

(I seriously am finding that clip incredibly soothing because it defies my ability to attend. That wouldn’t have been true a year ago! I have struggled mightily to return to this point, heading to the left this time! Try to remember everything you passed, but when you go back, make the first thing the last! Behind your face, there is a place, and so forth. Hence my return to the Snorks.)

Anyway, Trine did sort of that kind of thing too. It was too stupid to see as stupid, so I saw it not at all and simply experienced the dreamlife of computer games. It helped that the whole game looks and sounds like it might take place under the covers with a flashlight. Who really cares what goes on? You jump and jump and jump, and draw a bunch of planks and boxes and shoot arrows and kill hundreds of identical Harryhausen skeletons. And keep shooting some kind of grappling rope thing and it doesn’t hook quite where you want and you fall. For 8 hours, under the most gratuitously luscious lights, through completely extravagant intricate 3D backgrounds of no functional significance whatever.

The 3D-for-2D thing was very familiar to me, from having already played Donkey Kong Country Returns and Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams, both of which post-date this game (and at least the latter of which was pretty obviously influenced by its look). I think if nothing else, Trine was significant for really cementing the idea that even 2D games should invest heavily in flamboyant 3D settings.

And I have to agree: one way or another, looking around and feeling you’re really there in nowhereland is the point of these traveling games, so you can’t go wrong giving the player a ton of stuff to look at, no matter how silly and irrelevant.

This might sound like it goes against what I said back in Half-Life 2, that I don’t want to be in an tinsel look-but-don’t-touch reality. But it doesn’t! The important difference is that unlike in Half-Life 2, in Trine (et al.) there’s no chance of missing the forest for the trees because the trees are quite literally out of reach. You can’t get lost in the useless scenery behind it because you can’t stray even an inch toward it; that axis of movement is unknown to you. Even when there is very explicitly a rope bridge heading from your location off a cliff toward a platform in the far distance… sorry, you simply can’t go there! I dare you to try!

It is the extreme narrowness of your freedom that allows the surplus decor to be meaningful, and not confusing and discouraging. Narrowness of freedom is good in games.

Last July the developer re-released the game in a new, ahem, Enchanted Edition, free for anyone who already owned the game, which has even fancier, even mistier lighting, and seems to have had all the levels cleaned up graphically and otherwise. (Side-by-side comparison video.) When I first started it up, that’s the version I was playing. But I felt funny about that, like I feel funny about all after-the-fact Special Editions and Director’s Cuts and so forth. I want to play the thing that people loved so much in the first place, not the revised and repackaged thing made to cash in on that love. In most cases, contrary to the marketing, the revised thing is almost certain to be inferior. “Han shot first,” and all that. (It really bothers me that you can’t watch Yellow Submarine without “Hey Bulldog” anymore.)

So, even though it may well be that the Enchanted Edition is in fact superior, I played the original, non-enchanted edition of Trine.

Ah, but who cares? You’ve got me there.

A bunch of Finns made this.

Jukka Kokkonen: producer, programmer
Lauri Hyvärinen: design director
Kim Juntunen: gameplay/level designer
Joel Kinnunen: writer
Santtu Huotilainen: art director
Juha Hiekkamäki, Oskari Nyman: programmers
Ari “AriTunes” Pulkkinen: composer, sound designer

Plus maybe 10 more people, and four voice actors.

Frozen Synapse
developed by Mode 7 Games (Oxford, UK)
pre-order/public beta first available April 19, 2010
self-published May 26, 2011 for Windows/Mac, $24.99
[trailer]
[website]
~230 MB

At time of posting: have played for 12 hours and completed 30 of 55 levels, 2/6/15–2/11/15. Will probably continue.

[7-minute video that gives a sense of what gameplay looks like]

The next event in my game purchasing history is the expenditure of $5.00 USD at 3:40 PM on September 30, 2011, for the “Humble Frozen Synapse Bundle,” which at the time of purchase consisted of: Frozen Synapse, TRAUMA, and for those who beat the average price (which my $5 did) the complete contents of a prior bundle, the “Humble Frozenbyte Bundle,” which had originally been offered in April 2011, containing: three full games, one “pre-order” for an upcoming game, and a playable prototype from an abandoned project. So depending on how you count that stuff, I got somewhere between five and seven games for my money. (And a few days later another game would be added retroactively.)

As I recall, I bought it mostly because I was interested in TRAUMA, which looked like my kind of thing. I played through it in a single sitting a little while later. It was more of an art piece than a game, kind of like a student short film. I was fine with that. Then secondarily, Frozen Synapse, which I hadn’t heard of before, looked pretty interesting. The rest seemed harmless; most of it has remained untouched.

I was tempted to write this the obsessive false-audience way, where I “tell you” about the game and “explain” what’s significant about it, but I’ve just cut and pasted that draft out into an .rtf file of oblivion that I keep around to make oblivion seem less cold and lonely. (“Oh hey, guys!” says the abandoned draft, finding itself with a lot of other abandoned drafts that I will never reread.)

The idea is supposed to be: if you wanna know about Frozen Synapse, go look it up. That should come easy to me, if I can just relax enough to go with the actual thoughts I have.

I watch a lot of YouTube videos where people represent themselves in various assumed authority voices. “Hello, and welcome to this video where I’ll be discussing…” There’s generally a cadence and even a timbre that goes with the phrasing, all imitative. “Well hello everybody!” In my ears, the sound is always of a kid playing at being the teacher or the TV announcer. I get sad when actual teachers and actual TV announcers sound like that.

Well, I used to get sad, anyway, but now I’m trying not to, because it turns out there’s way too much of it going on. I can’t afford to be sad about stuff like that; I’m surrounded.

The point is, “blog journalism” runs a distinct risk of being the same, a lot of make-believe (“Deet deet deet di-deet, we come to you now with a breaking report!”) that has come to believe it is an actual point of view. The part of me that wants to “explain Frozen Synapse and what’s so distinctive about it” to you (to “you”) is a compulsive phony part of me that thinks it has to save me from the lonely, soggy, weirdo subjectivity of my actual thoughts. Not so, not so.

Now here’s a game that isn’t soothing at all. I like it in a way that has nothing to do with the escapism of fantasy. I respect it. But it is exceedingly stressful. At least if you fear getting shot, like I do.

The constant pausing for computer-calculated moments of truth (“The shapeforms are deliberating” … “Scenario data is being assimilated” …) is what grinds one’s nerves. Ten seconds is a very rough interval to wait for a moment of truth: not long enough to recover one’s sense of equanimity; not short enough to remain in the flow of thought. “And the winner is… … …” Look at the faces of the nominees while the presenters are joking about how hard it is to open the envelope, oh I can’t do this you do it you have nails, oh but then who will say it? should I say it? am I supposed to say it? Should we say it together… Ha ha ha.

Now multiply that by hours upon hours of gameplay. That’s my Frozen Synapse experience!

Is this game too hard?

(I mean the single-player campaign; the multi-player is only as hard as your opponent is good. OCD Archivist, the part of my personality that assembles the data for the tops of these entries, here inserts his long nose to clarify my activities: “I actually played a fair amount of this game when I first got it, but head-to-head against a friend. I started the single-player campaign but found it comparatively unrewarding and unappealing, and didn’t get very far. These past few days I have played no multiplayer.” Thanks, OCD Archivist. Fare thee well, poor devil.)

There are a few levels that I played for nearly 2 hours apiece, failing over and over and over in scenarios that seemed designed to put me at a considerable disadvantage, gradually becoming ashamed: surely it’s not supposed to be this hard; I’m just impatient and inattentive and not very good at the game. Then when I finally succeeded, a sense of great accomplishment. But at what cost? Or rather: in what context?

The bubble wrap analogy. One wants a puzzle to pose a challenge that puts up a little resistance and then gives way. One wants to pop bubble wrap because it resists, then pops. If a bubble is so tough that it takes two and a half hours and an axe to pop it, is that more rewarding than an ordinary bubble, or is that a category error?

How much resistance creates satisfaction? It varies person to person. (Perhaps any affection for resistance is unenlightened. I put this in parentheses because it’s purely theoretical; fact is, I like games and puzzles.) I want my games to offer a certain choice amount of resistance, then relent. If something offers more than expected, that creates a certain kind of story, which can itself be satisfying. But it’s not inherently a more worthwhile story than if it offered less than expected. They’re both just stories, and as they get more extreme, they become unrewarding stories.

What I’m saying is that hard is not the boss of easy. Hard does not dress in ermine while easy wears rags. They’re identical cousins.

This game sure is hard!

A lot of computer games over the decades have wanted to be Millenium Falcon chess, a worldwide fantasy since at least 1977. Obviously, any stupid animated chess meets the basic requirements, but I like to think that Frozen Synapse, despite not having monsters or much in the way of animation, actually comes closer to the underlying fantasy: the players apply chess-like tactical turn-based play to a living animated world.

Or at least that was my understanding as a kid, since the claymation is unbroken, and manifests in all the monsters at once. Looking at it now, though, I see that they probably just meant most of the motion to be the breath of life in otherwise idle pieces, while single pieces alternate making chess-like grid moves. But you know how kids see what they see. I saw a continuous cartoon world that somehow was also a board game. How could that work? Frozen Synapse, finally, shows a way.

There is a cyberpunk story being sprayed all over your face while you play the single-player missions, where characters like “Nix” and “Belacqua” and “Soulsby” and “Shand” are constantly saying the names of fake stuff like “Enyo: Nomad” and “Markov Geist” and “Petrov’s Shard” and “Charon’s Palm.” At least one of those per line, truly. This is characteristic of unconfident or unpracticed writers: they think that by repeating the fake thing they give it body and reinforce it, make it less fake. Effectively the opposite is true.

A resident of The United States of America only very rarely has occasion to say “The United States of America.” Even a politician probably goes days without saying it. The residents of Markov Geist, on the other hand.

Just now watching that Star Wars clip I thought about the embarrassment that Harrison Ford must have had to overcome to say “Wookiee.”

This just goes to show how much more embarrassment there is left to drain from my system. So that I don’t end up like Harrison Ford.

I had played Frozen Synapse (which the UK developers pronounce “sigh-naps,” good lord) for about 7 hours when I decided it was probably time to crack open the next game. It’s not that I wanted to stop playing Frozen Synapse; I just wanted something less nail-biting and frustrating, something a little more welcoming, to be going at the same time.

A few days later and now I’ve already reached the end that next game, and Frozen Synapse still yawns on, with 25 more levels left in the campaign. If the 30 so far have taken me 12 hours, that’s gonna be 10 more hours of play. (Putting me, incidentally, right on par with howlongtobeat.com‘s estimate of 21.5 hours.) Meanwhile, naturally, I want to post about this other game and move on to the next one still. And, just as naturally, I could never simply post about them in the order I finish them, because dammit that’s not how a checklist works. You check them in the order they’re listed!

Oh. Wait a minute. That is how a checklist works — you don’t have to check them in order.

But I AM DOING THIS IN ORDER!!!!!!!

Hence this entry. If I have more I simply have to say when I’ve reached the end, whenever that happens, I guess I’ll stick it in here somewhere. Maybe between these next two horizontals.

[reserved]

It’s a very good game, and, I think, an important one. If I had written the version of this entry where I explained why (“Hi-ho, Kermit the Frog here”), you’d know why.

The single-player campaign isn’t really the point, but it’s okay too. The AI is a worthy opponent.

Music sounds just like you’d expect for British cyberpunk thinking music. A little silly but gets the job done. Of course, given all the angst this game puts me through, I might prefer something a little more spacious and confident. The electronica sounds are all anxious sounds.

Colors are officially divided into warm and cold, and then less officially everything else is too. I feel like this is just a way of talking about the two zones of the mind: R is warm, L is cold. (A warm way of talking about it.) I know the game is Frozen Synapse and the composer probably had the word “cold” in mind while he was writing the music, but I feel like it’s cold in a further and more consequential sense, which is to say uptight, anxious. It’s not impossible to write warm music with cold sounds, warm music about cold problems.

Three people this time.

Ian Hardingham — concept/design/programming
Paul Taylor — production/art/writing/music/sound
Robin Cox — level design/testing

If you’re looking for it, the game does feel very British.

Computer games are a splendidly international form of culture, much moreso than books, TV, or movies. Of the twelve Humble Bundle 3 games that I ran down at the end of the last entry, we had USA x 5, UK x 2, Finland, Russia, Austria, Czech Republic, Canada. It’s like the Olympics out here. Or, perhaps more to the point, it’s like the internet. The question then becomes: why aren’t books, TV, and movies more like the internet in their internationality? I think we’re headed in that direction, just slowly. American movies are already very likely to farm their special effects to foreign countries; somewhat less likely to co-produce with foreign countries; still less likely to simply be imported movies that were fully produced in foreign countries. But it’s gradually trickling up, I think.

Atom Zombie Smasher
developed by Blendo Games (Culver City, CA)
self-published January 23, 2011 for Windows/Mac/Linux, $15.00
[trailer]
[website]
28 MB

Played until having completed (but lost) one full campaign, in 3.5 hours, 2/5/15–2/6/15.

[1.5 hr video of a successful campaign, in 4 segments, with commentary.]

By the end of Wednesday, August 3, 2011, my “Humble Indie Bundle #3” purchase contained eleven games (six of which I’ve just posted entries about). On Friday 8/5/11, Atom Zombie Smasher was added to the bundle, bringing the total to twelve.

Hey, he likes it! I liked it. Even though I lost and didn’t want to play again right away. It’s only 28 MB; it’s no problem to just keep it around and play again if the whim strikes me. 28 MB is the smallest game I’ve played so far (in this streak I’m on), and definitely the most value-per-byte. (I would say Steel Storm, at 930 MB, offered the least value per byte.)

Obviously, it’s no problem to just play anything when the whim strikes me, because this stuff is all on my permanent accounts with Steam and Humble Bundle and GOG and wherever. But I still think of local files as being more truly in hand than cloudborne files; and I also can’t help but think about hard drive space in miserly terms, even though all our computers have terabytes worth of space just sitting open. I still feel like I’m talking Star Trek talk to even refer to “terabytes.”

I had started up this game a couple years ago and managed only about 15 minutes of displeasure before I wrote it off. This time I was just as quickly put off, but soldiered through for a full hour. It didn’t help. I considered just stopping there, but I knew that I hadn’t really gotten my head around the real sense of it yet. Watching YouTube videos of people playing (like the one linked above) is what finally got me to understand what kind of a game this was.

This is a problem with the design! In retrospect I see it’s actually a very superficial problem, but to me it’s a serious one: there is way too much whimsical window dressing. The in-game help, which is supposed to explain what’s going on to those who don’t know yet, is all cuted up with ambiance in a way that makes it completely ineffective. I understood immediately that a lot of what I was looking at was mere decor, but that doesn’t mean I understood immediately which part was which; the task of sifting through it was pretty significant.

For example, when a game event occurs that I would implement as “YOU GOT A NEW UNIT: SNIPERS! Click to continue”…

…what actually happens is text pops up that says “REWARD: MERCENARY” and then an image of a piece of paper appears onscreen that says e.g. “NUEVOS AIRES MERCENARY CONTRACT / Department of Hearts & Minds / Contract 1 of 7 / 430 Wrath Plunders / Snipers. Long-range sharpshooters. / CLICK HERE TO RENAME / IN WITNESS WHEREOF, the parties hereto have executed this Contract to the Agreement for mercenary services. / _____ / broom” where “430 Wrath Plunders” is by far the largest text. (This example taken from the guy’s video, though it’s blurry.)

It turns out that “430 Wrath Plunders” is only prominent for cutesy reasons: it’s just an arbitrary generated name for the unit of snipers, of no significance whatsoever to gameplay, and “CLICK HERE TO RENAME” is just inviting you to replace it with your own cutesy inconsequential name. The rest of the text is just performance of the game-world premise that the player’s units are mercenaries working under contract to fight a zombie plague in some vaguely South American country. Clicking on the blank line will animate a scribbled signature and thus function as “click to continue.”

That’s not so bad, you might say, but this is just one example; every aspect of the game has been “skinned” this way, with real information couched in joke information. (And then there are occasional comic-book style vignettes that are a skin for nothing, and in fact barely even have to do with the game’s premise: they’re just whimsy.) Once one knows the ropes and is playing fluently, all that skin for the underlying game becomes transparent, and in its transparency starts to function the way it’s intended to, as flavor and atmosphere. But to a newcomer, all that stuff seems like genuine confusion about purpose, like the game has been eaten up by its style.

This is the essence of design as a discipline: how to put appearance and function in sympathy with one another, rather than at odds. It’s fine that Atom Zombie Smasher has some goofy story/aesthetic ideas, but I didn’t like that figuring out how it all fit together was up to me. Or up to the people on YouTube who somehow figured it out for themselves.

Once again, I’ll grant that maybe this was only hard for me because of my deeper gaming proclivities. To wit: I don’t enjoy games based on catalogs/leveling up/experience points. (You’ve heard it here before and you’ll hear it here again, a lot.) I think what happened with me and this game was that my blindness to the “sense” of that very basic gaming concept also blinded me to the sense of the way it had been decorated.

Why don’t I get “leveling up”? To me, “leveling up” feels like I’m being patronized and bullshitted; a game tries to give me the experience of getting better at something without having to actually get better at anything. “Oh, you earned the mega-cannon! You’ve gradually climbed your way to being really powerful!” But I don’t want to watch my avatar “get better” at things: I want to actually get better at them myself. Games where you get more and more stuff (but so does the enemy) feel like some kind of Escher staircase, for people addicted to the idea of going up up up, who nonetheless expect their level of struggle to remain the same, or, if anything, increase, as their supposed power rises. This feels terribly wrong to me! Expecting to struggle constantly while getting fancier and fancier medals is an unhealthy ideology! Greater experience creates greater ease, and it’s not doled out from on high; it’s accrued in the form of experience. I guess I don’t like experience points because “experience” is something that a game is perfectly capable of actually providing; it doesn’t need to be modeled.

That’s why I like puzzle games. They get harder and harder for real, and the player has to get better and better for real.

What leveling up and experience points and whatnot actually resemble is finance. The more money you have, the bigger the scale of both your opportunity and your risk. It’s a kind of geometric growth rather than the linear kind that makes sense to me. I don’t like to think of myself that way; in fact I kind of find it nauseating to think about my self and my world remaining the same while at the same time everything “scales” around me. It’s like a dolly zoom (of Vertigo & Jaws fame); it makes me feel wrong. And yet for many people it’s clearly their bread and butter; they fantasize it in games and live it in their businesses and finances. And my fear of such things has obviously put me at a real-life disadvantage. So I think it would probably be for the best for me to learn to love RPGs and other fantasies of scaling up.

But what can I say: it runs really deep. It goes down to the very core of my psychology, it feels like. Why am I like this? I don’t know. I’m also learning that knowing why is never really that important.

This isn’t really one of those games, it just has that stuff in it. I guess “real-time strategy” is the genre, but who cares about genres. The overarching campaign plays sort of like a board game — you vs. zombies on a Risk-type map — and then each turn consists of a city grid: set up whatever weapons you’re allotted, and try to airlift out the innocent yellow dots before they get touched by the purple zombie dots and turn into purple zombie dots themselves. The infectious chain-reation nature of zombie-ism is the most interesting game element — once you’ve herded the innocents together, the whole cluster will be lost in an instant if even a single zombie reaches them — but there are several good ideas here working in sync. I got it; I liked it. The strategy board-game playing part of my brain turned on.

I lost because it’s very hard. You can’t really afford to have even a single bad turn. I tried hard to hold myself to a very high standard in the first half so that I’d have a chance of holding out to the end (which is why my game took nearly 3 hours) but eventually realized the standard needed to be even higher. Final score was 5333 to 6000. That I blame my own skill (and not the game’s many, many elements of cruel luck) is a compliment to the integrity of the game. It’s good! But don’t try to figure it out by yourself, because it’s unhelpful. Watch people play it on YouTube.

On which subject, isn’t learning how to play games a drag? For videogames, I admire the intentions of the in-game tutorial approach, as gradually standardized over the past 20 years, but it has the drawback of making the initial stages of the game kind of asinine, such that the real gameplay design doesn’t get underway for an hour or more, sometimes, which can be itself kind of discouraging (“So everything up until now was all tutorial? But I thought that was what the game was like!”). And a lot of game designs can’t be broken down into constituent layers, such that if you learn layer one and then add layer two and then three, etc. etc., you will eventually build up to the gameplay proper; the best gameplay tends to exist as an interlocking unit, not a layered stack.

There can be no in-game tutorials for board games, of course, and don’t we all agree there’s always been something humiliatingly wrong with the pedagogy of instruction-manual reading? The natural way to understand a game is to learn it like learning a language: watch other people play it for a while and come to understand not just what they do but the spirit in which they do it. YouTube is good for this, though of course one would rather emulate nice, pleasant, intelligent people.

I saw that some new board games come with links to YouTube tutorials, which seems like a cool idea. The idea of a perfect video nugget of education, such that nobody could watch it without coming to understand something as intricate as a game, is exciting to me. I don’t think such a thing is possible, but I still like to muse about how one might get close to that ideal.

Have I gone far enough off topic?

The window dressing in Atom Zombie Smasher is some kind of deliberately obscure/wacky cold war 1961 South America comic-strip absurdist pseudo-political-satire thing, accompanied by surf guitar. I got kind of a wannabe Glen Baxter vibe. It’s sort of dry, sort of pointless, sort of self-indulgent. It turns out surf guitar isn’t a bad match for this kind of play. I’ll give the guy points for dumping his own idiosyncratic blend of stuffola in the mixing bowl, though I’m not sure it baked into anything. Still, I’d rather half-baked geeko-hipster quirk than half-baked mainstream comic book crap, any day. No contest.

This game was made by just one guy, Brendon Chung. This time I can believe it; the scope of the game seems about right for one guy working for 3 years or so.

Let me here wrap up by saying that Humble Indie Bundle #3 was $5 very well spent.

Out of 5:
Crayon Physics Deluxe: 2
Cogs: 3
VVVVVV: 5
Hammerfight: 3
And Yet It Moves: 3
Steel Storm: Burning Retribution: 1
Braid: 5
Cortex Command: 2
Machinarium: 5
Osmos: 4
Revenge of the Titans: 3
Atom Zombie Smasher: 3

Hey, where’s a good game recommendation engine I can plug this stuff into? I really do believe the Netflix engine gets things right, so I have faith in the concept. But I’ve never had that kind of success with anything else. Googling about it now. I’ll let you know if I find anything good.

Revenge of the Titans
developed by Puppy Games (London, England, UK)
first public beta released May 24, 2010; self-published March 16, 2011, for Windows/Mac/Linux, $27.72 (about the pricing)
[trailer]
[website]
~350 MB

Played until deciding to move on, having completed 29 of 50 levels, in 4 hours, 1/30/15–2/4/15.

[Video of a complete 5.5 hr playthrough, in 50 segments (one per level)]

Fifth of the five “Humble Indie Bundle 2″ games retroactively added to my “Humble Indie Bundle 3″ purchase on August 3, 2011.

A nice sturdy sort of indie game: not too flimsy, not too vain.

Genre hybrid: “tower defense” plus “real-time strategy” (or “a tower defense game with RTS elements” or “an RTS game disguised as a tower defense game”). But this, the customary way of describing games, is just a needless commitment to categorization (a tendency characteristic of the gamer mind). All cultural development is recombination, reshuffling of what exists; anything new descends from what’s old. The question is what it has descended to be. The game is interested in being itself, and I am interested in playing it as itself.

Also I have no long history with either the “tower defense” or “RTS” genres, so I have no natural inclination to evaluate this particular game that way.

On the other hand, sometimes that kind of thinking drives the development process, and when I step down from my throne of neutrality and ask questions like “but why is this supposed to be fun?”, they can only be answered by tracing the genetic lines of descent: “because it’s a tower defense game with RTS elements!”

My attitude is: if I have to know the thing’s ancestry to like the thing, there’s something lacking about the thing.

But that’s a digression (mostly), because Revenge of the Titans makes its own kind of sense (mostly). The look and feel have been crafted with care, and the gameplay rests pretty comfortably inside that aesthetic shell.

At first glance you might say this is visually “retro pixel-art,” but I’d say it’s something more durable, less nostalgist than “retro.” It’s art independently governed by the same aesthetic ideas explored in the pixel era: implicit orthogonal order, the reassurances of brick-like abstraction. Are Legos “pixel-art”? Are alphabet blocks? Moorish tessellations? Ancient mosaics? Yes and no.

Of course, on top of that, Revenge of the Titans is in fact passed through a layer of genuine low-resolution pixelization, which is hard to explain as anything other than nostalgia. But on my screen it hardly registered. The diagonals didn’t seem particularly jagged to me; had they been high-resolution crisp diagonals, I think it would have been exactly the same game.

(There are legitimate non-nostalgist functions for low-resolution, too, such as the menacing quality of imprecision, but that’s not really applicable here.)

The nostalgia element didn’t grate for me, I think because it didn’t really have a wistful component, or at least not a conscious one. The music immediately establishes the muddled spirit with a nicely done Wendy Carlos/Stanley Kubrick homage, the techno-classicalia here signifying only a) power and portent, tongue-mostly-in-cheek; b) the awesomeness cred of the homage itself. Yeah, hiding somewhere inside there is some nostalgia, but I don’t think the developer has conscious access to it as such.

Things I like about the game. It feels good: all the zoiping and gloiping is right on target. The amount of information onscreen generally matches my level of interest (i.e. no point values spewing from enemies, no status spreadsheets hovering over everyone’s head — mostly just zoips and gloips). Doing more or less what you intend reliably results in more or less what you intended, and then watching it all play out has some primal appeal (“the reassurances of brick-like abstraction,” as I said earlier).

The drama of the gameplay is meaningful. “Better get ready as best we can! Okay, here they come! Uh-oh, here they are!” Each of these stages has its own emotional tone and corresponding gameplay imperatives. This is the core of the game and it works nicely.

Things that feel like they’re not for me. Any game with a catalog element, from which you very gradually get to buy everything, always annoys me. Unfortunately this is a fairly common element in games! I’ve never liked the pressure and decision-making involved in actual shopping; I take no pleasure in seeing a sea of options after every level. I’d much rather have the new stuff doled out to me at some rate that the designer has deemed rewarding. Whatever the chef recommends!

Related point: I’d much rather have there only be a few tools in the game, with which I must work resourcefully, instead of an abundance of tools from which I’m encouraged to develop my own “style of play.” “Express yourself!” I know that some people like to say “Look at this wardrobe full of clothes! What shall I wear?” but a menu bar in a video game is never going to make me feel wealthy so I’d rather it not try. Constraints are what make games rewarding, not freedoms!

The amount of interstitial blah-blah-blahing about new enemies etc. etc. This is essentially a game with fixed gameplay from the start, not one that develops. The more protesting the game does about how things are supposedly constantly changing, the more it calls my attention to how much they’re staying the same, and makes that seem like a liability. Staying the same is okay! No need for all this briefing/debriefing cover-up. (Or else make it more interesting.)

I wish I could have zoomed in and out as a way of keeping tabs on the action, instead of scrolling around worrying that something bad is happening where I can’t see. That didn’t contribute in any way that I could relish.

The thing that made me stop. You carry over your amount of money from one level to the next. Eventually you realize you don’t have enough money to beat the level you’re on, because you didn’t play earlier levels efficiently enough. So you have to go back and do them again, if you want to proceed. But the levels are already all kind of the same; the only thing that makes continued play feel worthwhile is the modicum of progression through the game content that each level affords. I won’t learn any lessons by actually going back and retracing my steps; I’ve already learned my lesson in the moment I realize what I have to go back and do. What I want to do now is apply it while I keep moving forward. Unfortunately that’s impossible.

So I think I played enough. 4 hours always seems like a nice 2-movie’s-worth investment, appropriate for a game. I really went there and learned some of the language.

I wonder what kind of terms professional game reviewers set themselves. Longer than that, I should hope. If I was doing this full-time and being paid for it, I would feel obligated to see it through to the end. Sometimes the moment that most alienates you is just the pains of growing into the actual mindset the game rewards. Perhaps if I had pushed through I would have found my way to something even better. But I don’t want to be dangling that carrot in front of myself all the damn time anymore. Generally, if a thing is gratifying, it is in fact gratifying, which becomes an easy way of identifying such things and setting them apart. I never considered stopping playing Machinarium. This I considered stopping, so I did. There you have it.

No hard feelings. It’s a good game! But you know what they say: “I like ravioli, but I don’t eat it all the time.“

Design and Programming: Caspian Prince [way to go, Mr. and Mrs. Prince!]
Art: Chaz Willets
Music: Dave Sunerton-Burl, Steve Legget
Sound: Michael Manning

Machinarium
developed by Amanita Design (Prague, Czech Republic)
self-published October 16, 2009, for Windows/Mac/Linux, $19.99
[trailer]
[website — an in-browser playable demo, comprising the first three scenes of the game. Go for it.]
~350 MB

Played to completion in 4.5 hours, 1/28/15.

[80 min. video in 8 parts of a complete playthrough (sorry about the occasional stupid superimposed text, but the other options weren’t high resolution)]

Third of the five “Humble Indie Bundle 2” games retroactively added to my “Humble Indie Bundle 3” purchase on August 3, 2011.

First things first: how do you pronounce Machinarium? In a Czech-language interview I found on YouTube, the designer pronounces it “Mah-khi-NAH-ree-oom” (with a soft palatal “kh”). In this talk in English, he pronounces it “Mash-in-AIR-ee-um,” so that’s how I’ll be pronouncing it. This information is not easily googled! You’re lucky you have me.

This is more like it! I said games are good for the mind because fantasy is good for the mind, and this is such a fine fantasy. Care has been put into exactly what counts about games: the touch, the feel, the sound, the space. Machinarium is an adventure game and it’s entirely traditional as such (its clearest antecedents are The Neverhood and the Gobliiins series), but its aesthetic roots are in the world of art animation, stuff in the Annecy Festival / National Film Board of Canada / Academy Award For Best Animated Short tradition — which I think is a pretty great tradition: very comfortably neither high nor low, just art.

The nature of animation is so painstaking and intensive that it takes serious institutional power to make animation that isn’t loving and personal. That’s why basically all cartoons prior to around 1950 are pretty good, and almost any artsy Annecy-style short is at least interesting. Video games used to be the same way! Making them was too difficult, and too much of an adventure into the unknown, for the product not to have soul. This I think is the source of a lot of the “remember the good old 80s?” gamer nostalgia: those 80s pixels had feeling to them because they each cost; feelings really had been invested in them. For a nostalgist now to try to imitate the pixels but not the feelings, in this era when pixel-handling is simply beneath the authentic level of attention of a designer, doesn’t work.

But by going the handmade animation route, Machinarium manages to keep real feeling in it: the loving artistry of its materials can be nothing but exactly what it appears, could be made no other way. We live in a time when the technical side of a game about a cartoon robot is available prepackaged, so the only thing to care about is not the gadgetry of the game, but the cartoon robot itself. And this game cares! It’s a good cartoon robot!

Sometimes at the bookstore I like to go to the new children’s picture books and flip through them, solely because the continued show of attention to aesthetic experience is heartening. They’re not as good as they used to be — the design and typesetting side of things is frequently clueless and ugly, and a lot of illustrations make it to the stores that wouldn’t have been considered up to snuff, 30 years ago — but the spirit is still alive, there.

Adventure games and their design are one of my standard subjects for compulsive internet reading, so even though I hadn’t played this game until now, I had a pretty strong sense of it already. I was thus rather surprised not to have heard anywhere about the ingenious hint system, which I’m about to go on about.

The game is languageless in a classy internationalist way; characters express themselves only in speech bubbles containing images or cartoons. At nearly any time, there is a “give me a hint” option available, which immediately results in the protagonist issuing a speech bubble containing a hint image. That isn’t itself so innovative, though there’s something satisfyingly indirect about seeing a hint in picture form, which makes it less humiliating than reading a text hint (and less humiliation means less occasion to resent the game).

What’s really brilliant, I think, is that in addition to the hint, each screen of the game actually comes with a complete solution/walkthrough — depicted, also wordlessly, as pages in a Codex Seraphinianus-like book drawn in a charming Da Vinci notebook/alternative comics style — and access to this explicit walkthrough is available at any time… but in order to look at a page of it, one must first beat a stupid, tedious, unrewarding minigame. This strikes me as a completely ingenious solution to the spiritual (yea, spiritual!) problem posed by the need to make answers available for puzzle games. With this system, one no longer has any temptation to break out of the game and resort to the internet for answers, because attractive and official answers are always within arm’s reach, inside the confines of the game itself… but one is genuinely reluctant to seek them because it’s annoying.

Previously the only reason not to flip to the back of a puzzle book to read the answer as soon as one felt stumped was so-called “self-restraint,” which I have come to feel is actually a destructive force in the world, since it diminishes the integrity of the self and leads to resentment. If one is posed a problem, one wants to be able to throw one’s whole self into solving it! That is the pleasure of being a whole self. When the answer is right there for the looking-up, one has to partition off the part of the self that knows it, because “that’s not the point; that’s not how I’m supposed to solve the problem.” Those aren’t genuinely self-interested motivations; they’re in bad faith. (I know I’m sounding like Ayn Rand here but don’t worry it’s almost over.)

What’s wonderful about Machinarium‘s system is that it offers a completely self-interested disincentive — namely, that the process of unlocking the solution is tedious — so that one never needs to leave the zone of authentic motivation. Conquering the problem in any way you like is now organically more likely to mean actually solving it. In beating the game, I twice resorted to the walkthrough, but I felt an unashamed integrity about doing so, such as I’ve never felt before in looking up an answer. I only resorted to it when my own personal cost-benefit analysis tilted in that direction, and since the game had chosen exactly the terms of that analysis, I was able to feel that it approved of my choice and that I wasn’t being cheated — or cheating myself — out of any amount of satisfaction. “If trying to solve a puzzle without help becomes so frustrating that you feel tempted to play through the stupid walkthrough-unlock minigame, feel free to do it! We never want you to be that frustrated.”

Gauging the exact level of lameness and tedium of that stupid minigame so that this would all work out required great sensitivity on the designers’ parts. I think they did an excellent job. The minigame demands one full minute of vigilance, and offers next to no aesthetic gratification — only just enough that it uses the game-playing part of the mind. It calls on one’s memories of playing badly-balanced, irritating LCD games. Nobody wants to do that, but everyone knows they can if they have to. The decision about whether to peek becomes not “do I really want to look up the answer,” but “do I really have to play that damn game.”

This don’t-peek-at-the-answers thing has been a problem my whole life, and these guys finally solved it! Why isn’t everyone else doing this already?

The game is a Best Animated Short dream, with only just enough plot to give a sort of musical shape to the proceedings. For this reason it is able to incorporate true abstract puzzle-puzzles (sliding block, etc.) in a way that is done in lots of adventure games but usually feels much dumber than it does here. Here it makes simple aesthetic sense: this world is a game and a puzzle, so of course there are games and puzzles in this world.

The selection of what kinds of puzzle-puzzles to include has been done with taste; or, I should say, with taste that corresponds to mine. The designer is clearly like me a fan of clickmazes.com.

In googling to see if anyone else had pointed this out, I came across this tweet from Andrea Gilbert, the puzzle designer behind clickmazes.com, saying, basically, that Machinarium infringes on her intellectual property.

It’s a little bit of an unpleasant subject for me to think about ownership of such things, since a great part of the appeal of abstract puzzles is that their rules feel objective and necessary, like nature, like math. I have always enjoyed that the head-to-head social element of puzzle solving is beneath the surface, that the designer’s presence is discernible only from mysterious indications, like a ghost. Having to acknowledge that the surface rules are themselves not natural at all but overtly the designer’s doing — are arbitrary and social, and copyrighted to a single person — kind of cuts against that.

Of course I want the world to validate the makers of things I like for doing what they do. But it just feels good that puzzle types should be free, that sudoku should be free or crosswords should be free, the way it feels good that the game of baseball is free, or the idea of “brunch” is free. It gives me a good feeling of human brotherhood, and that ends up extending to the feeling I get from the cultural stuff itself, in this case puzzles. Is the vigilant defense of exclusivity rights the only way to be a part of a society that gives Andrea Gilbert “her due”? Does inventing, say, BoxUp puzzles (as seen in Machinarium) really need to give her exclusive authority over the future of BoxUp puzzles? Isn’t it simply that she has birthed something good into the world and thus deserves to be treated well by the rest of us, who benefit? And isn’t it natural for us to want to? And aren’t there many ways of treating a person well? Of using that natural fellow-feeling as the source of our social decency, rather than enforcing that decency by prohibitions on our enthusiasm for taking up one another’s work? (Am I starting to sound like a communist? I thought you said I sounded like Ayn Rand! Make up your mind!)

It’s a complicated subject, at least for me, and that it arises in a sweet-natured game like this accentuates the difficulties. The pleasure of a work like Machinarium is in entering a mystically asocial space, in which the benevolence and hostility of the world needn’t be described in terms of interpersonal misunderstanding but are simply facets of individual subjective experience. Abstract puzzles, as I said, fit nicely into that existential mode. It is very important to me to hold to the idea that this innocent world of sensation is compatible in its substance with real life, and doesn’t simply need to be shuttled around like currency, defended by professional lawyers.

Of course, I say this because Machinarium is a nice game, made well. Meanwhile there are thousands of quick-and-dirty clones of original puzzle designs to be found in the iOS App Store, and those do seem to me exploitative and unworthy. To be an idealist is to be irrational, and I accept that. My irrational gut tells me that Machinarium has a couple of BoxUp puzzles in it because BoxUp puzzles are and should be free; whereas meanwhile a direct clone of Andrea Gilbert’s BoxUp app is sleazy and she deserves protection against it. And my irrational gut will not be denied, because it is me and I am it.

The soundtrack is great. This is the first game since L.A. Noire where I came away actually wanting to sit and listen to its soundtrack album.

In these entries about games, I haven’t been talking about the music, even though incidental music is one of my fixations. It just happened to work out that way. Half-Life has effective enough scoring in a “kick ass and rock out” style, but nothing really interesting to me on its own terms, and then Opposing Force and Half-Life 2 and its sequels follow in the same vein. Crayon Physics, as I mentioned, had just three pieces of weak-tea music. Hammerfight‘s soundtrack is 8 minutes of eccentric homebrew Slavic exoticism; not bad. Steel Storm‘s soundtrack sounded like what I would have written for it had I been given the assignment in college, which is to say, a conscientious amateur impression of Star Trek music; it’s okay, though it doesn’t exactly blend with the action. Cortex Command has very competent, confident “post-nostalgic/post-chiptune” indie game underscore that, like Half-Life, wisely hangs back so as not to become irritating but thereby also never really becomes interesting.

Which is fine, of course. Movie music tends on the whole to be more independently interesting than game music because it only has to accompany one moment at a time and thus can make stronger choices; game music has to withstand being heard hundreds of times under varying dramatic circumstances, so generally it can’t afford to have too strong a profile. If you’re the type who deliberately chooses music for its mood-altering function, game music is a pretty rich area to explore.

Anyway, I think Machinarium has a superb score (by Tomáš “Floex” Dvořák). It consistently worked both ways for me: as something carefully crafted and interesting to listen to, and as effective mood-altering background. The game is its atmosphere, and the music is fully half of that. Its catchier passages work with musical ideas that have been hip in the past 15 years, but this Prague hipsterism never gives me a sense of posturing self-portraiture, the way so much Brooklyn music in the same vein does. Nor does the, shall we say, “philosophical” ambiance of the Thomas Newman-derived stuff feel spiritually contrived, the way it usually does to me when I hear it in movies these days. I think Europeans are just generally less anxious as people and as artists, and somehow the purity of the intention comes across. There’s a classical mindset underlying the vibe, which makes all the difference to me.

Here’s a version (missing the last track) on SoundCloud and on Spotify, where unlike the composer’s store page above, the whole album will play continuously once you start it. (Or here’s the fullest possible version, on YouTube.)

Design and Direction: Jakub Dvorský
Graphic Art: Adolf Lachman
Music: Tomáš ‘Floex’ Dvořák
Animation: Václav Blín (with Jaromír Plachý)
Programming: David Oliva (with Jan Sušek)
Sound Design: Tomáš ‘Pif’ Dvořák

That’s basically it. Good show, guys! Thanks for a lovely 4 hours. And then a less lovely 4 hours grinding out this entry, but that’s my fault.