Man oh man this is a long one. Nobody’s gonna read all this. That’s okay.

Remember, in addition to not reading all this, you can and should pop the videos open to full screen when you watch them. That should go without saying but I felt the need to say it. Don’t want you straining your eyes.

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2/14/14: As a Valentine’s Day sale promo, GOG gives away free copies of:

• Dungeon Keeper Gold (1997): Bullfrog Productions (Guildford, UK) [played 3 hrs]

A classic that I’m glad to have sampled. I like how it combines murk — subterranean shadows, infernal clanking, weird distortions — with the satisfactions of little-computer-people toddling about, blithely building and destroying their marzipan palaces. A cozy and gratifying proportion of order and disorder; comfort dressed as threat. Which is what I’m here for. But SimCity-likes have never held me entirely transfixed — I think maybe the role of overseer is a little too impersonal for my needs — plus some aspects of this 20-year-old game are inevitably awkward by modern standards. So maybe I’ll return; maybe not. But I enjoyed the visit, both in its own right and for my improved game literacy. Now I’ve played Dungeon Keeper!

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2/18/14: I buy into “Humble Indie Bundle 11” and get six games for $5. A week later, three more are added, bringing the total to nine, two of which I happen to own already. Another one, Antichamber, I play to completion right away. (It’s great.) That leaves six on the list still awaiting my attention. Here they come, one after another:

• Guacamelee! Gold Edition (2013): DrinkBox Studios (Toronto, CA) [16 hrs]
• Dust: An Elysian Tail (2012): Humble Hearts (= Dean Dodrill) (Highlands Ranch, CO) [13 hrs]

We’re deep into the post-pixel era and games are now heir to the visual arts in their entirety, without limitations. Something like Cuphead plainly demonstrates that anything in the century-long history of animation is within reach. Thus games now can and should be held 100% accountable for their actual aesthetic value; we don’t need to be handicapping. (So where’s my Vermeer game already???)

Point is: I’m past saying “wow this looks amazing FOR A GAME.” How does it look FOR LOOKING AT?

Guacamelee! looks pretty snazzy! It’s got honest-to-goodness art direction and conveys a genuine aesthetic sense of fun, something that goes beyond just imitating other games. The animation is a little slippery-weightless, Flash-slick, but they’ve made it work; it ends up being a good match for the vibrant angularity of the illustration style. I usually hate fighting in games but this one does it really well, with a snappy, pared-down version of a Street Fighter-style system. I actually enjoyed myself! The game as a whole I would describe as “Cartoon Network goes to a Mexican restaurant.” Did I mind that it was littered with indefensible hipsterisms and reflexive gamer references? To be honest: not really. I was there for the look and feel. Structure and level design were cheerful and functionally okay — mostly smooth sailing with a few well-balanced challenges dropped in — and okay was good enough. Maybe they’ll aim higher in the sequel. [ed. from six months later: reportedly they didn’t aim higher.]

Meanwhile, Dust… is an impressive? accomplishment? by one man with a vision. He did all the art and animation himself! He designed and programmed it! He really did the whole thing! And it’s so substantial and so polished! Can you believe it? Yes, of course I respect that. But here’s where the “no handicapping” rule comes into play: can we acknowledge that this thing he made looks and feels like a straight-to-DVD animated movie about bible stories that you’d find in a bin at Walmart? And thus IS that? Like all furry-adjacent culture, the psychology here is painful in its transparency. The squeaky, neotenous (but round-hipped!), pupil-less sidekick plushie that floats over his shoulder is clearly his wife. The hero’s eyes are perpetually obscured and averted because of his dark inner life. Etcetera. Ugh. The whole thing is so blinkered and emo and hopeless; it makes me squirm no end. Also is the game actually balanced? I found it extraordinarily easy, and I’m not a very skillful gamer. The intricate piles of different “items” and “power-ups” and “crafting” and blah blah blah turned out to be immaterial; you could get past pretty much every enemy, including the bosses, by just using your most powerful attack over and over and over. No prob.

Nonetheless I played the whole thing. I’m not sure why. I guess it had enough of a sheen — and the intrinsic draw of the Metroid-style “locked door, come back later with the key” design — that I kept being curious to see what else it had in store. Answer turned out to be not much. I should have known.

• The Swapper (2013): FacePalm Games (Helsinki, Finland) [4.5 hrs]
• Monaco (2013): Pocketwatch Games (San Diego, CA) [played for 1.5 hrs]

The Swapper is a beaut. A real aesthetic vision: clay miniatures put through a digital burn, in heavy, murky darkness. Functionally it’s the same old Alien derelict spaceship environment (you know the drill: “oh god, what happened here? what killed them all?”), but the fuzzy handmade texture imparts a special softness, a dreamy interiority that changes its meaning. The script is a little clumsy, overwritten and under-explained, but in this atmosphere it still manages to have the spooky game-poetic impact it’s going for. The puzzles constitute a good smart tour of the mechanic — which is self-cloning and body-swapping — and they don’t waste time on redundancy. 4.5 hours is SO perfect for a game of this kind. This deserves double praise: it is exactly the right length.

Monaco is a heist game, which is a great and natural idea for cooperative play. Fake pixels aside, the design seems smart and I’ll bet it really does have a lot to offer with a group. Divvying up the responsibilities of lurking around corners, knocking out guards, cracking safes, whatever. Coordinating, holding your breath. I’m all for that game. I, however, heist alone. For a solo burglar, this is just a typical run-around-the-map-and-don’t-get-caught affair. It’s jangly and old-fashioned, and it got repetitive fast. The whole selling point is the idea of a TEAM; I have no team. I certainly didn’t care about grabbing the McGuffin; it wasn’t designed to make me care. So 90 minutes was enough.

• Starseed Pilgrim (2013): Droqen (= Alexander Martin) (Toronto, ON, CA) [played for 2 hrs]
• Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians (2013): Threaks (Hamburg, Germany) [played for .5 hr]

Starseed Pilgrim makes a fine poster child for the whole culture of self-conscious modernist indie game design. There’s a hipster code-llectualism going around out there that prides itself on delving deeper and deeper into the theory of “fundamental game design principles” and “emergent gameplay” and this sort of thing. I like the spirit of experimentalism, curiosity, and seriousness, but the culture also brings with it certain tics. For one thing, these people tend to have a fixation on shufflers and randomizers — to them, dealing with a situation generated algorithmically is inherently juicier than dealing with a human-authored one — and also, their fascination with design itself means they have a tendency to overvalue things that are “interesting,” even though it’s not always clear whether the interest in question is for the player, the programmer, or just some third-party cultural commentator. In other words, it’s not so different from what happened in the arts in the 20th century, as the mindset of the critic began to be subsumed into the mindset of the artist and art became accordingly more and more arcane.

I’m wary of the tendency, but I can also enjoy the arcane, and Starseed Pilgrim is indeed “interesting.” A big part of what it offers is that the gameplay is hard to describe, and it doesn’t try to give you any guidance, so you have to experiment in a state of confusion for a while, developing a wordless sense of things. Which is a pure and rewarding experience. Then once you do understand what’s going on — though you’d still probably have a hard time putting it fully into words — you have to actually develop a nimbleness at deploying the weird set of tools at your disposal, and juggling them on the fly as the randomizer dishes them out. “Interesting,” certainly. I spent two hours with it, which is about the duration of a visit to the modern art museum. Not nearly long enough to beat the game — but then again who ever really beats the modern art museum? It’s undefeated.

Beatbuddy is clearly someone’s half-idea for a game (“everything is synced to music, and you have to move in time with the beat!”), which they then couldn’t figure out how to execute (“so for example maybe there are these, uh… balls?… that are dangerous? … and there’s, like, a row of them?”), and should have had the integrity to admit wasn’t as much fun as they’d imagined (“Yeah I guess you’re not actually moving to the beat THAT much, mostly you’re just sort of swimming around trying to avoid spikes.”) But they’ll be damned if that’s going to stop them! So here’s your game, everybody! The first level (which I completed) is set to that post-Triplets of Belleville sampled-early-jazz kind of stuff that really rubs me the wrong way — a phony idea of culture combined with a phony idea of fun. The player character is like a little lump of Jell-O. This whole game seemed like a no-go after half an hour, so that’s that. (Simple tip for making any title worse: just add “Tale of the Guardians” to the end. Never fails. “Middlemarch: Tale of the Guardians.” See?)

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6/18/14: GOG promotes their summer sale by giving away a free game. All you have to do is click. I know nothing about this game but you better believe I clicked on it.

• Magrunner: Dark Pulse (2013): Frogwares (Kiev, Ukraine) [11 hrs]

An unabashed Portal wannabe about magnetizing things, with a pea-brained story tacked on about Lovecraftian god-monsters (step away from the Lovecraft, game people!) and a nefarious all-powerful Social Network run by one KRAM GRUCKEZBER, repeat, that name again is: KRAM GRUCKEZBER. Consider that this is a game with voice acting, which means that real live human beings are made to pronounce the sounds of “KRAM GRUCKEZBER” aloud, with their voices, many many times during this script. Please look closely: that is GRUCK-EZ-BER, not GRUCKZEBER, which would be marginally more name-like. Nor is it BRUCKZEGER, BUGZERCKER, ZUGBRECKER, or any number of other pronounceable permutations. GRUCKEZBER. Listen to that poor voice actor in the trailer. His “dignified British” delivery is a food processor and “GRUCKEZBER” is a big chunk of wood that some moron shoved in there with no regard for the blades. Will it blend?

All that aside: yes this has “second-rate” stamped all over it, yes it’s derivative in every molecule — but it’s also a perfectly acceptable puzzle game, made with an acceptable degree of polish, and offers a perfectly acceptable puzzle-game experience. I wasn’t enthralled but I was diverted and I willingly stuck with it to the end. It certainly didn’t deserve to be so utter a flop as to be given away for free within a year of release.

It’s a place! I actually went there! Computer games are fancy pieces of machinery and they offer strange transport. How was all of that free?? I still have a hard time reconciling my notion of value with the way these things are treated like just so many restaurant napkins. Grab one, grab twenty, whatever.

If this is free, why can’t I have a free house? It doesn’t need to be a great one!

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7/2/14: After reading some kind of article about it, I decide I’m interested enough in the artistic aspirations of the newly released Mountain to spend the $.99 they’re asking.

• Mountain (2014): David OReilly (Los Angeles, CA) [observed for an hour or two]

This isn’t really a game, it’s an art piece. It’s by the guy who animated the futuristic computer game in Her and it shares some of that movie’s air of techno-tender angst. It’s basically an existential Tamagotchi: when you boot it up it does a neat trick to get you in an emotional frame of mind, and then it shows you a pretty mountain floating in an infinite void and says “this is you, this is a depiction of your soul.” And that’s all there is to it. It’s there for as long as you care to leave it onscreen, close it, boot it back up and check in with it some more. The weather comes and goes, every now and then a piece of clutter falls from the heavens and sticks to you permanently, you occasionally utter a few words of contentment or uncertainty, and eventually you die (apparently). There are a couple other aspects to it but really not much.

I admire what it’s trying to do and be. It reminds me of the little animated metaphors that the Headspace meditation app offers to illustrate and concretize experiential states, philosophical stances, etc., except that Headspace has a self-help agenda and Mountain has the opposite of one, it seems to me. By all appearances its intention is to charm you and distress you in equal proportions. That’s a far cry from real enlightenment, but hey it was only $.99.

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Yes, this entry keeps going! For a while! I told you it was long! It’s a six month dump!

9/22/14: Humble Indie Bundle 12, $8 to beat whatever the average was at the moment, so that I get Papers, Please, which I play right away, and which is great. Nostalgia for olden C64 Carmen Sandiego aesthetics put to real experiential use rather than just waved like a flag. A brief, well-defined experience, with actual ideas in it, carefully made, memorable. Huzzah! Glory to Arstotzka.

Also, I eventually try one of the other eight games in the bundle, Race the Sun, which has an appealingly stark look to it but turns out to be much harder and much less engaging than it ought to be. Don’t need to return to that one now; I know what it’s like.

One of the other games I already own (it’s Monaco, see above), so that leaves six games that have been waiting patiently in the backlog for five years. Here come all six of them! Starting with:

• SteamWorld Dig (2013): Image & Form (Gothenburg, Sweden) [played for 2 hrs]
• Hammerwatch (2013): Crackshell (Stockholm, Sweden) [played for 1.5 hrs]

SteamWorld Dig is a cha-ching cha-ching game, where you dig cha-ching for ore cha-ching and then cash it in cha-ching to buy “upgrades” cha-ching to dig some more. There are little obstacle course rooms along the way and you gradually expand your set of abilities, but mostly you’re just drilling down down down through cutesy caves. I did that for two hours, which from my point of view is a very long time to be doing that.

Hammerwatch is basically the long-ago game of Gauntlet, which never had much appeal for me. I like imagining I’m in an endless dream-dungeon as much as the next guy, but hordes upon hordes of creepy-crawlies swarming at me while I collect the same three dumb keys, over and over, isn’t my dungeon dream of choice. Much like Monaco, this is a game designed to be fun as a team effort, and then sold as “and you can play it single-player, too!” Small print: “If you don’t mind incredibly repetitive tedium!” But I do! I mind. In the 90 minutes I played, I got the Steam achievement for killing 2500 enemies. 2500! And that’s apparently the first achievement everyone gets because that’s just the kind of game this is. Then I defeated the first boss — an enormous room-sized grub much like the person-sized grubs I’d been killing endless hordes of for an hour. Then the second level started and it looked like still more of the same. Seemed like a good place to stop.

• Gunpoint (2013): Suspicious Developments (=Tom Francis) (Bath, UK) [2 hrs]
• Luftrausers (2014): Vlambeer (Utrecht, Netherlands) [played for 2 hrs]

Gunpoint is cute. It’s a 2D stealth game, comparable I suppose to Mark of the Ninja, but I found it much more amenable. It just felt more like it was coming from my kind of people. Ultimately that’s what we’re really responding to, I think, in all culture. It’s still a little guy sneaking around in repetitive 2D environments — which look a lot like Elevator Action (1983) — and trying to dupe guards with his couple of tricks, which in this case are mostly to do with rewiring switches to do things the guards don’t expect. But where Mark of the Ninja was heavily invested in its smarmy idea of cool, Gunpoint is clearly unconcerned with cool, and goes instead for a kind of lazy briskness (or is it brisk laziness?) that I find endearing. (What do I mean by brisk laziness? Think of, say, The Electric Company.) The whole thing feels like a mere whim, executed with an inborn respect for whims. That speaks to me. It’s even nostalgic, in its way: that spirit used to be the essence of computer games and now it feels rare. It’s the opposite of e.g. Beatbuddy, which couldn’t bear to admit that it was a mere whim and accordingly white elephant-ed itself into worthlessness.

“Luftrausers” is a more or less meaningless fake-German word (“air-scrammers,” I guess), which is an indication of the sort of “cool before school” attitude that drives this game. (I just made up that expression; feel free to use it constantly from now on.) These developers clearly wanted first and foremost to make something nifty, and then second and thirdmost to make a game worth playing. It’s a retro-chic miniature, which is to say a free flash game. And it probably should have stayed that way, but I guess you can’t blame them for trying to sell it. The gameplay idea is to have a flying-and-shooting game where 1) you can only shoot in the direction you’re moving and 2) you have to fly against gravity to avoid crashing but 3) there are enemies on the ground. That’s interesting — in the sense of “how would that feel? what would be the strategy?” But once you’ve figured out the strategy (fly upward, then cut the engine as you turn around and shoot downward through the top of your parabolic motion, then turn back upward again before you fall too far) I’m not sure there’s really all that much more worth doing here. Yes, yes, the Gameboyish sepia palette is charming enough. The music is not.

• Gone Home (2013): The Fullbright Company (Portland, OR) [2 hrs]
• The Bridge (2013): The Quantum Astrophysicists Guild (=Ty Taylor) (Seattle, WA) [5 hrs]

Gone Home is supremely indie: a game-as-narrative-art-piece, with campus-literary-magazine depth, that purports to be a three-dimensional portrait of a teenage girl’s first love but mostly resorts to cliches. (Also… quoth the game: “Oh by the way, that first love? It’s homosexual!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What? What are you talking about? What exclamation points? We didn’t use any exclamation points. Why would we use exclamation points? It’s the most normal thing in the world. Dude it’s 2013, you need to grow up.”)

All that said: it’s a pretty effective piece of work. I was truly moved by the atmosphere, if not by the specifics, and that’s part of the intention. Beyond the story, in the format itself, the game makes a profound equation between haunted houses and real lives. The player wanders around in an empty mansion on a rainy night, pushing through worrying darkness to find lightswitches, hearing ghostly creaks and shuffles as well as lightning and thunder, wondering WHAT HAS BEFALLEN the missing residents — your family! — and yet this genuine spookiness is just form, not content: the story, such as it is, is all about domestic normalcy, and ultimately warmth. I was stirred by that, because it’s true. In both directions. Wandering alone in haunted darkness is just a dream-shadow cast by a normal life; and likewise all everyday security is, under the surface, haunted.

I played this on a night when I was feeling thoroughly distraught and wanted something to change my mood for me. It did just that. By the end I felt that I had traveled through inner spaces that represented outer spaces that represented inner spaces that represented outer spaces etc. etc. in infinite regress — and had thereby been in some respect cleansed. A house is a house is a house. Even when some voice actor is doing a mannered “heartfelt” reading of fake-o diary entries in your ear. It didn’t matter; all that house-ness more than compensated. It evoked some of my earliest “transcendent” computer game feelings, which were brought on by pure text games. What are these spaces? What does it mean to be “in” them, as I feel myself now to be? How quiet are they? Is anyone in here with me? Sometimes during Gone Home I felt like I was in the house in Deadline. That’s meant as high praise, or at least high thanks. There’s a charmed childhood half-sleep implicit in there somewhere and I’ll take it anywhere I can get it.

The Bridge is another indie attempt at artiness, but still shallower, more on the high-school-literary-magazine level. A fancy private high school, mind you! Basically it’s an obvious Braid-alike, which means everything here feels rather sophomoric, Braid itself having been fairly private-high-school itself. The idea here is “what if Escher’s “Relativity” were a game?” Sounds nice but ultimately I’m not sure how fertile an idea that is. The Bridge does the best with it that it can. The world-rules have been worked out reasonably enough and some fair puzzles have been extracted from the system. And there are only 48 puzzles total, which is correctly brief. The little guy (a drawing of poor M.C. Escher himself, I think, who didn’t deserve this) moves quite a bit slower than I would have wanted, and god knows the music (a couple of short tracks by royalty-free royalty Kevin McLeod) is grossly insufficient. It aims to be tactile and atmospheric and satisfying and meditative and it’s not quite as much of any of those as it ought to be. But at least those are, to me, sympathetic goals. This has “my type of game” written all over it. I guess what I’m saying is, I prefer games that haven’t been written all over.

Really, it’s fine. It offers some nice-enough imagery and gameplay to match. And when the game wasn’t getting in its own way, the pencil-and-paper texture did have something to offer.

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Meanwhile: non-backlog games also played these past six months.

On August 17 (of this year!) Steam told me a game on my wishlist was very cheap: $2.24. Fine, I said.

• Toki Tori 2+ (2013): Two Tribes (Harderwijk, Netherlands) [played for 16 hrs]

This was on my wishlist because I admired the original Toki Tori and read somewhere that the sequel was a completely different design and full of inventive ideas. It is that. It’s built with care, like a fine toy. It gives off a distinct sense of goodwill. The design is based around a very charming, toylike concept: that the player only ever has two possible actions (1. whistle, 2. stomp), but the menagerie of creatures that populate the environment all respond differently to these actions, and their responses interact in various useful ways. So there’s simultaneously the feeling of confidently knowing all of your options, yet also of constantly discovering and learning more about how things work. That’s a fine, bright-eyed set of feelings. The game is invigoratingly tutorial-free — figuring out how to do stuff isn’t a prerequisite to the game; it IS the game — and like its predecessor manages to assemble genuinely tricky puzzles out of the clear and simple elements. I recommend. My one quibble is that after winning the main game — a smooth and pleasant ride all the way — returning to solve the bonus puzzles that you missed is about as annoying as possible; neither the map nor the navigation nor the level design makes for easy retraversal. A shame. I really wanted to go pick up everything but I still haven’t because it’s kind of a drag.

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• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 9. Complex Complex (2009): Rasmus Björling [43 hrs]

The DROD charge continues. This one was really, really, really tough stuff. Hard. Really. Very. Really, really, really hard. Honestly a little too hard for me. (WHAT? HOW CAN THIS BE?) I had to take quite a few hints. God bless the nice man on YouTube who narrated his thought process as he played through the whole thing. I absolutely wouldn’t have made it to the end without his virtual companionship.

Some puzzles frustrated me a bit for executing truly clever concepts in unnecessarily demanding ways; I would have preferred to experience the exact same challenges in more streamlined forms. But I can’t deny the overall quality was excellent. Having had a couple months away from DROD, upon return I had the same reaction as always: this game is such a gift! It allows for such unlimited inventiveness!

(Okay but seriously this one was kind of grueling. 43 hours over many months! This is the first one where I ducked out without finishing the “post-mastery” extras. Let’s be reasonable here. Word on the web is this is the hardest one. Good.)

• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 10. Suit Pursuit (2009): Jason Fedor [6 hrs]

A charming grab-bag of ideas, from easy to mildly tricky. Varied, approachable, never too convoluted. A few sittings to get through the whole thing. That’s more like it.

• DROD: Gunthro and the Epic Blunder (2012): Caravel Games (Provo, UT / various) [20 hrs]

The fourth of the five full-fledged commercial DROD games, promoted as being easier than the others and thus a good place to start, for newcomers. The puzzles are certainly more varied and lively than in the first game in the series, and the unveiling of new mechanics is much better paced. But my lingering sense of embarrassment — fond embarrassment, but still — at the story elements of these games, the writing and voice-acting, means I am unlikely to point anyone here for their first DROD experience. Witness that trailer and tell me you don’t sympathize. I personally feel charitable toward the dorkiness — but that’s because these games and I, we grew up together. When I first met this series it wasn’t into that sort of thing yet, and that’s still who I think of it as, deep down. It’s the first impression I think it still deserves.

• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 11. Finding the First Truth (2011): George Wanfried [17 hrs]

Oops, I slipped up in my chronologizing. This one was supposed to come before the preceding game. Luckily it makes not a bit of difference. Another excellent add-on collection; this one probably the closest in spirit and quality to the “real” games.

I have deep and distinct experiences with each of these games, but when translated back into written language those experiences return to a state of close mutual resemblance; too close really to be worth expressing again and again. The specifics that make each experience different are musical, in the sense that puzzles are music: formal, structural. The doings of imaginary objects that live on imaginary grids constitute a whole field of interest in itself. That field has no language. I could call these things by their game names — roaches, snakes, mirrors, soldiers, whatever — but that feels like an even worse misrepresentation than not talking about them at all. I spend hours in there doing something, something that is to me fairly fascinating. I assure you the thing I am doing is NOT “fighting roaches.” There is no name for the thing I am doing.

• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 12. Flood Warning (2012): “TFMurphy” (Tom Murphy?) [8 hrs]

Another excellent one; of modest length. See above for why there’s not a lot more to be said.

This was the last one in this series. All that remains is the fifth and final commercial game. Which is by all reports the longest, hardest, and most involved by far. I intend not to start that for some months at least. Gonna take a DROD break before diving in.

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And that’s it! I promise to write about movies or books or anything other than games next time. Promise.

“Humble Bundle: PC and Android 8” continues.

• AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! …for the Awesome! (2011): Dejobaan Games (Cambridge, MA) / Owlchemy Labs (Boston, MA) [played for 1 hr]
• Jack Lumber (2012): Owlchemy Labs (Boston, MA) [played for .5 hr]

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAA!!! is silly stuff. Mildly diverting for the one sitting I allotted it, but then what? Tongue-in-cheek dada-punk stylings leave me mostly cold but I don’t actually care; my real problem is with the basic idea that a “falling down past buildings” game is somehow different from a “flying forward past a bunch of random junk, with very sluggish controls” game. Is it? I’m not sure it is.

Jack Lumber is “Fruit Ninja but better,” and I’ve got to hand to them: it’s Fruit Ninja but better! They nailed it! The problem is nobody wants to play Fruit Ninja with a mouse. This is fundamentally a touchscreen game. And my computer, I’m proud to say, doesn’t have a touchscreen.

• Hero Academy (2012): Robot Entertainment (Plano, TX) [played for .5 hr]
• Anomaly 2 (2013): 11 bit studios (Warsaw, Poland) [played for 1 hr]

Hero Academy is a “tactics” game, which means that it’s not for me, at least as I am now. My attitude is: why would I ever choose to play a strategy game with a big ugly pile of rules and variables — a whole lot of different character classes with different strengths and powers and weaknesses and power-ups and power-downs — when I could play 1) a simpler and more elegant strategy game that’s just as deep, or 2) a full-on action game? Apparently there are great answers to this question, because lots of people love these types of games. Other people.

Anomaly 2 is “reverse tower defense.” I’m able to get some satisfaction out of the core task of keeping a system chugging along happily. The game is fine, truly. If the aesthetic were at all palatable, I’d play it. That is, if this exact game were reskinned to be monkeys throwing coconuts at alligators, with a string quartet playing in the background, I’d probably have played the whole thing. But did you see that trailer? This is a game that repeatedly plays a clip of a guy saying “I love the smell of napalm in the morning!” in the middle of the action. I’m not sure the writers fully understood what napalm is, or indeed, where that quote comes from and what it signifies. Sorry boys, no time to think about that because we’re goin’ in — in three… two… one… LOCK AND LOAD, BABY!!!

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That wraps up the games purchased on 12/18/13. Except it doesn’t, because a week later, on 12/24/13, the same bundle got three more games retroactively added to it:

• Solar 2 (2011): Murudai (= Jay Watts) (Australia) [played for 2.5 hrs]
• Bad Hotel (2012): Lucky Frame (Edinburgh, Scotland) [played for .75 hrs]

Solar 2 is a simple zone-out-and-float-around game. I like the scale of the thing: it’s just this toy; this is all it does. That’s how video games used to be: poems in one stanza. Limitations invite investment; they also give the experience of depth more immediately and quickly. My two and a half hours felt nice and full. I floated around listening to the nice music, getting bigger and smaller, growing little spaceman civilizations and then losing them, smashing into things, devouring the universe, and so on and so forth. Lovely, sweet. Not necessarily memorable.

Bad Hotel is a very literal tower defense game with a cheerfully conspicuous visual style (one which I would characterize as “so lately I’ve really been getting into graphic design”) and a music-generating feature (: the blocks go plinket-a-pop bip!, plinket-a-pop bip!, plinket-a-pop bip! until uh-oh two of them exploded; now they go plink-a smerr, plink-a smerr, plink-a smerr… and so on and so forth). It’s not exactly balanced but it’s perfectly playable. It’s also clearly an iPhone game, meant to be played with one finger, not with a mouse. And also not played for very long. 45 minutes isn’t me getting fed up; it was just the right amount of time.

• The Bard’s Tale (2004): inXile Entertainment (Newport Beach, CA) [played for .75 hrs]

Yes, I agree, the trailer makes this look unforgivably tacky, but in action I got the impression that it might well divert me in spite of itself. Unfortunately it’s not properly compatible with modern controllers, and the keyboard controls struck me as ungainly. So I’m passing. Sorry, bard. (As a bonus, it’s also got ye olde 80s “Bard’s Tale” games embedded in it on an Apple IIGS emulator, but those would be fairly punishing to play now, I think, so I’m not even trying. I’m bad enough with RPGs as it is.)

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Okay now I’m done with that bundle. Those were mostly-unwanted games that I played quickly, and now have logged pretty much solely to check them off my list. Here come the ones I actually spent time on this month.

Moving down the spreadsheet. On 12/21/13, I bought the delightful Escape Goat on sale for $1.49, then immediately played it to completion, so it needn’t be replayed now. (I exempted myself from the vicious-beyond-all-reason bonus levels that become available at the end. I think everyone does.)

That’s it for 2013!

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This next game on my spreadsheet is listed as 1/14/14 because that’s when the first part of it became available to play. But the actual date of purchase was 12/11/12 ($30 for access to the ongoing documentary tracking the development process, plus an eventual copy of the game). I played the first half when it was released in 2014, but when the rest came out, 4/28/15, I never actually opened it up. So just now I played the whole thing start to finish.

• Broken Age (2014–15): Double Fine Productions (San Francisco, CA) [10 hrs]

A wonderful, beautiful, transporting, misguided, frustrating, undercooked adventure game. The documentary is truly fantastic and I recommend it to everyone. It’s a fascinating look at a contemporary workplace, the subtleties and good intentions of time and resource mismanagement, and the rewards and challenges of a collaborative artistic production process. It’s also a great piece of pure peoplewatching. I have very fond memories of watching each new episode as it was released; I have a distinct and personal sense of each of the member of the creative team. The game is exactly the heartfelt/confused thing I saw them making.

The core of the problem is that given a budgetary windfall in advance, they decided to spend it on more lavish and elaborate stuff — art, music, voices, animation — rather than on more time to iteratively test and refine the actual game script and design. And then they compounded their error by repeatedly forgetting to give themselves enough buffer to deal with the additional production complexity entailed by that new lavishness.

So that’s what you get: by far the highest aesthetic production values of any point-and-click adventure game ever made. It’s a gorgeous and enveloping storybook. But what’s it like when you actually sit down and read that storybook? How’s the game itself? It’s, uh… well-meaning? A little weak? Seems like they kinda improvised the story, didn’t actually know where they were going, lost their own thread somewhere halfway through… then, finding themselves under the gun, fell back awkwardly on boring cliches that “explained” everything, and threw together a shrug of an ending. The end product is simultaneously a marvel and a damned shame. I’m rooting hard for it. I still am! Even now that I’ve seen it all and sighed my way through. Hey, maybe I got it wrong! Maybe it’s really actually a great piece of work, a big success! I sincerely wish it.

Part of the reason the documentary is so great is because it documents that, the creation of a thing neither very good nor very bad. It’s a thing. It’s a thing people worked on and made. Your relationship to the emotions of hope and disappointment is your own; it’s something you bring with you. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Good luck out there.

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On 1/21/14 the following game goes on 90% sale, for $1.49. I’ve been curious about it for a while and can’t resist that price.

• La-Mulana (2005/2011): GR3 Project / Nigoro (Kurashiki, Japan) [55 hrs (plus maybe 1 or 2 more…)]

This is a marvelous and terrible game. I know, I just said something similar about the previous game. Well, it’s a thing that happens in video games. But where Broken Age was quietly marvelous and subtly terrible, La-Mulana goes BIG. In every way. It’s a masterpiece AND maybe it’s unplayable and shouldn’t exist. For better and worse I spent a lot of time inside it.

While playing Metroid-style action-adventures, a certain type of mind can’t help but entertain fantasies of ever more baroque mazes, ever more dense with secret panels, ever more intricately constrained and interwoven. Ever more more more. Wouldn’t that imagined game, that more elaborate game, be so astounding, thrilling, splendidly overwhelming! Well this is it! La-Mulana is the realization of that fantasy; it is this type of game “taken to its logical conclusions.” It is willfully, aggressively, flagrantly overvast and overcomplicated and overcryptic; it takes many tens of hours to complete; it sprawls through about 450 rooms; it requires the player to keep track of a book’s worth of maps and hints and symbols. It’s also pretty hard on a screen-for-screen level — the individual boss fights are often really, really tough. It is extraordinarily generous in scope and extraordinarily nasty in particulars. And that’s all awesome, as long as you can clearly distinguish between awesome and satisfying.

The fantasy is of being completely enveloped in a puzzle-womb, from which escape is theoretically possible, but only upon fulfillment of a maniacally overwhelming gauntlet of ordeals, indefinitely prolonged. The fantasy is here achieved and it is exactly as healthy and rewarding as it sounds. Its marvelousness and its terribleness both arise from doing such faithful service to a troubled compulsion. It’s a platonic ideal of something, which means it has a lot to answer for.

I am so close to being ready to love this, in all its grotesque hugeness — I’m even ready to embrace all the prankish sucker-punches — but there’s one thing I cannot fully embrace: that there’s no way to distinguish between “come back to this area later, it’s currently impossible,” and “push through this area now, it’s hard but doable.” When you’ve discovered 25 different blocked passages in various places and 100 cryptic fragments of text, you really deserve some kind of help in deciding which ones to focus your attention on and which ones to leave alone. I wanted to try my best to play without online hints but this aspect defeated me. That’s where my personal puzzle-compulsive psyche gives out, anyway; your proverbial mileage may vary. Whatever kind of person I am, I’m the kind of person who loves figuring things out for myself but who doesn’t love searching for needles in haystacks. Well, I mean, I kind of like that too… but it depends on the size of the haystack. This is a mile-high haystack. This is the Lost Temple of Haystack.

It has a lot in common with Aquaria — which I suspect was somewhat inspired by the original 2005 version of La-Mulana — which I played all the way up to the final boss only to discover I didn’t care enough to finish. In this case I’ve played all the way up to the final boss, died many times, and am currently ambivalent about whether to grind it out and get the “you did it” achievement on Steam. One way or another, I’m pretty much done here.

Is it coincidence that both of these games culminate in destroying your own ancestral creator-god, depicted as an alien maternal figure fallen from the heavens? Obviously no, it’s not. (Spoiler: The vast ruins of La-Mulana ARE the Mother God.) Maybe reread the description of the game with Freudian glasses on.

La-Mulana 2 is coming out any day now.

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2/10/14. Tipped off by a post on the “GameDeals” Reddit forum, I obediently go through some kind of promotional rigmarole involving “liking” the Facebook page of some game retailer — maybe “Bundle Stars”? — in order to earn a free copy of game about which I know almost nothing, but which looks kind of attractive:

• Pid (2012): Might and Delight (Stockholm, Sweden) [12 hrs]

An exceptionally pretty jumping-around game. For some reason the sensitive soft-focus aesthetic made me think this was going to be a gentle one-sitting indie bonbon. Not hardly! It’s tough and it goes on for quite a while. Maybe a little too tough and maybe a little too much of a while. The basic mechanic — plant little anti-gravity beams and then jump in them to float around — never really enchants. It just sticks around and wears you down. But the hazy, dreamy, murmuring vibe is as sweet and rewarding as it looks. I zoned into this with pleasure. The music is real and smart and human. As is the sound design. The rain patters on the windows of the game and you’re somewhere cozy inside with it. This is a tasteful and cared-for thing, of significant scale. And yet it has almost no presence on Youtube/Twitch/wherever. It has its flaws but its obscurity is unmerited. Glad I played. Wish it had been half as long.

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Meanwhile in free play:

• DROD RPG: Tendry’s Tale (2008): Caravel Games (Provo, UT / various) [14 hrs]

Next up in the DROD chronological marathon, even though it’s not a true DROD. Sure, it quacks like a DROD, but it plays like something else entirely, something very odd. It’s an example of what I propose to call a “trading maze,” e.g.: your goal is to get 100 Cs and you start with 10 As. Your current options are: 1) Trade 3 As for 1 B. 2) Trade 9 As for 2 Bs and a C. 3) Trade 1 B for 4 As. 4) Trade 5 As to open up a subtree of seven new possible trades. Etc. That’s all there is here — the graphics and monsters and movement and stuff are superficial. But the design invests in that surface in a strange way. You can’t see the whole map, so you don’t actually know what’s your trading options might be — what’s behind door number 3, as it were — until you invest some of your coin in sheer exploration, in the process of which you usually learn retroactively that you did things in the wrong order and have to try again. Which is a classic example of bad game design (don’t punish the player for failing to have information you didn’t give them yet!). The wrinkle here is that this game knows exactly what it is, and is cheerful about it, and wants you to be cheerful about it too. “Save and restore often! Try, fail, then try a different way!” Okay, so… hm, is that fun? It defies some of my intuitions for what constitutes an engaging game. But maybe those intuitions could benefit from being defied?

My experience with this was genuinely fun-confused. Hitting the point of “ugh, so apparently the last 45 minutes have been for naught, I have to redo them” would invariably make me feel irritable and consider quitting for good… and then I’d take some time away from the game, come back, and find that redoing the same stuff with the benefit of foresight was actually rather satisfying. In fact, over the whole 14 hours of the game I developed a deeper instinct for how to make blind gambles wisely, alternating with deliberate and efficient save/restore scouting missions, such that I was able to do the last few areas pretty smoothly, without any major backtracking. That was a satisfying feeling — a feeling of actual increased competence. But the thing I had become more competent at seemed like a meta-game, not the game itself. I recognize that maybe that’s a mental block but there it is. Even having finished, it feels to me like the game itself was the place where I had been unfairly hung out to dry many times over. Then I learned how to steel myself against that intrinsic unfairness, and that became a point of pride. Which is apparently what the designers wanted to offer me in the first place. So again: is that “fun”? I still don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter as there won’t be any more DROD RPG games. (Unless I download the user-made ones.)

Ever onward, ever onward. I know how much you all cherish these entries.

• DROD: The City Beneath (2007): Caravel Games (Seattle, WA / Provo, UT / various) [54 hrs]

Picking up from last time, after playing hundreds of hours of DROD: I proceeded to play even more DROD.

Third full game in the series, and the last one that I’d already played; everything from this point on will be brand new to me. My first playthrough of this one was only 4 years ago, but damned if that helped at all. Some of the hardest stuff, toward the end, seemed vaguely familiar when I got there, but a substantial portion of this felt like I was seeing it for the first time. That’s not a reflection of how interesting it is — this is in fact the kookiest and most eventful of the games thus far. It’s mostly just an indication of the degraded state of my memory-formation in 2014. Pretty sure things have improved on that front since.

Story-emphasis gets even more extreme in this one. On my previous pass I found that off-putting, but this time I was into it. Bring on the folk-art weirdness, I say! For whatever reason, I’m eating it up. Meanwhile the puzzle elements branch out in all kinds of wacky directions. This is a game that experiments and expands on its own design right before your eyes. There’s something thrilling about that.

Also, after a decade of defiantly unschooled and unpolished music by the game’s designer — which, I grant, was fairly engaging in a gawky “outsider” sort of way — this one suddenly has a soundtrack by an actual established synth musician. And it’s pretty good! (It better be, if you’re gonna spend 54 hours with it.)

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• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 8. Devilishly Dangerous Dungeons of Doom (2008): Roger Barnett [8 hrs]

I promise: this is the last one for now. A few interesting rooms here but overall I found this set of puzzles tended toward the irritating. Ah well. You better believe there’s more DROD to come but I think it’s time to mix it up again.

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• Fish Fillets 2 (a.k.a The X Fillets II) (2007): ALTAR Interactive (Brno, Czech Republic) [50 hrs so far…]

Yes, I know how it looks. But contrary to all appearances, this is absolutely terrific. If you can set aside the chirping nonsense of the trappings — and you can — this is as good and as hard (hard! HARD!) as puzzle games come. The original Fish Fillets was a drag, whereas this isn’t at all: it’s smooth and responsive and has a generous undo and save system. Furthermore the puzzle mechanics in this one have been revised to be much more intuitive: yes of course the fish should be able to carry items downward as well as upward!

It gave me that childlike eager feeling I sometimes get, where not only am I enjoying myself but I become convinced against all reason that everyone I know would enjoy this too. It’s never true, of course — in fact often the things that inspire that kind of enthusiasm are the ones most idiosyncratic to me — but it’s a special expansive kind of enthusiasm, where even the non-ego parts of my psyche get folded in. This is a game not only for “I” but for “the Other”! Too bad Fish Fillets 2 isn’t available for Mac or else I’d give YOU a copy, gentle reader, whether you wanted it or not. (If you have a PC, please note that this is just $5 on Steam, and goes on sale for $0.99 regularly. Please note!)

The brilliance, as with DROD, is that the puzzle construction is always in interlocking conceptual layers: the big-picture plan (“I think the idea is to move the first piece across the screen and then use it to lift the second piece?”) is constrained by the move-by-move sliding-puzzle logistics (“Dammit, in what order do I have to make the moves so that I can squeeze both the fish past that jut in the wall? Is it even possible?”), and vice versa. The process of solving is always an intricate dance between attending to short- and long-term goals.

The puzzles are hard (HARD!) enough that all the X-Files fish nonsense feels perfectly welcome (though I’ll grant that the way the dialogue repeats after an undo is a bit exasperating). All the non-puzzle elements of the production feel like illustrations on paper plates at a 6-year-old’s birthday party, but that’s really fine with me. I generally had a good time at those parties. And yes, after tens of hours of brainwashing, I did actually start to chuckle at some of the supremely supremely nerdy joking. It’s all in good fun, people! Come on!

I’m writing it up even though I didn’t finish, yet, because — did I mention it’s hard? About 40 hours into this thing the difficulty started to be, as they say, prohibitive, and progress became very very slow indeed. But I’m not a quitter. Just a slower. I’ve slowed so significantly that I’m logging it. But I assure you: the work will continue.

Hey! I just now put it together that Fish Fillets is designed by Vlaada Chvátil, the same game designer as instant-classic tabletop game Codenames, as seen at your local Barnes & Noble! NOW do you believe me? This is the real thing! Woo-hoo, Fish Fillets 2!

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Meanwhile I do want to keep chipping away at the backlog. Still working through the Humble WB Games Bundle from 11/5/13.

• Scribblenauts Unlimited (2012): 5th Cell (Bellevue, WA) [played for 2 hours]

Curiosity about this game’s celebrated “type absolutely anything and it will appear onscreen!” mechanic was the main reason I bought this bundle in the first place. The system is simultaneously impressive and not that impressive. Everything’s rendered in the same simplistic, blocky, hinged-puppet style, and modifiers are implemented in the simplest and most obvious way. Wanna see “big fat angry teal koala”? Sure, it can do that. Just don’t expect it to be as funny to look at as it was to come up with. Despite all the adjectives it still just looks basically like “koala” which, come to think of it, looks basically like “bear.”

That said, there are certainly several minutes of genuine entertainment to be had in ordering it to generate a bunch of stupid surreal things and then watching them interact. “Stinky mean cantaloupe” vs. “hairy baby mapmaker”! Go! (In case you were curious: the cantaloupe attacked the baby mapmaker, who then defeated it almost immediately by throwing a map at it.)

As for the game, it’s more or less Richard Scarry’s Busytown, with plenty of glockenspiel cheer to go around. Contrary to the silly casting in the trailer above, this is designed for actual kids much more than for kids-at-heart (= weird uncles)… but I do have to wonder if even actual kids would find this rewarding for very long. Once you get past the pure sandbox amusement, the gameplay basically consists of a series of characters making requests like “I need something to help me put these dinosaur bones together!” and you type “glue” and then drag the glue to the woman who asked for it, and then the pile of bones puff-of-smoke into a complete skeleton, and the screen fills up with “hooray you did it” graphics. I guess maybe if I had typed “giant sticky boogers” it might also have worked, but it’s not like it awards creativity points. Glue will do fine.

Fun is where you find it, I guess. Sounds good. I made a hairy baby mapmaker and had the corresponding amount of fun. I heartily approve of the spirit of this game and have no need to actually play it.

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• Batman: Arkham City (2011 / “Game of the Year Edition” 2012): Rocksteady Studios (London, UK) [25+ hrs]

Batman’s post-Burton franchise affectations — of being “brooding” and “dramatic” and, quote, “dark,” end quote — are pretty hard for me to take, if only because I actually do like things that are brooding and dramatic and dark, and Batman, as far as I can tell, is actually just a ballet about a bunch of different Mardi Gras costumes getting into fights. All the weeping choruses singing double-talk Dies Iraes, the obsessive Pietà posing — get a grip, guys! Open your eyes and look at what’s really going on here: the little guys are bopping each other!

The storyline is just a catalogue of 15 different villains, strung together into a fetch-quest daisy chain, and the gameplay mostly consists of being trained to do tricks on cue, and then being fed the cues. (Whenever you see a concrete wall: use your explosive to explode it. Got that? Hey look, it’s a concrete wall! Hey look there’s another one!) The characters are all kinda gross and/or porny, and as I’ve already said I can’t really get into the vibe. So why did I thoroughly enjoy this game for 25 hours? Sheer production polish. This product is luxurious in every respect: it looks and sounds and responds like a million bucks. That’s what “triple A” games are supposed to offer: confident, seamless immersion in a sensory thrill. Taste, and indeed substance, is really beside the point. Games are the new Hollywood; this is a mountain of sparkly tinsel. I’m totally a sucker for tinsel. Isn’t everybody?

I think snobbery usually arises from people trying to fight off their own seduction by nonsense. I on the other hand enjoy allowing myself to be thoroughly seduced by all sorts of nonsense. If it can figure out how. This figured out how. Yes, I know, having no standards is risky — but listen: life is risky.

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The rest of the Humble WB Games Bundle is going to be skipped!

• Mortal Kombat Kollection is no longer supported by Steam and anyway it’s just old arcade games, which I can play other ways.

• Guardians of Middle-Earth is fundamentally a multiplayer game, in a genre I don’t care at all about, and Steam reviews pretty much all say it’s terrible. Three strikes.

The bundle also came with some kind of starter kit for Lord of the Rings Online but that’s not actually a game that I now own, it’s just a promotional enticement to enter an already free-to-play “massively multiplayer” game. Not happening.

So that finally brings me to the end of my purchases of… let’s see… November 2013!

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December 12, 2013: GOG, knowing that at the end of the year they’ll be losing their license to sell the original Fallout games, offers them for free to kick off their winter sale (and possibly to piss off the rights-holders?) I can’t resist clicking on buttons that say Free, so now I have them.

These are famous and beloved games, but they’re now essentially antiques and are furthermore not what I would usually consider to be my kind of game. So let’s see how much patience I have for them.

• Fallout (1997): Interplay Productions (Los Angeles, CA) [played for 2.5 hrs]

Results are in: Not enough patience. I can tell this is a nice, thoughtful RPG. But I have some kind of inborn RPG block, and this isn’t gonna be the game that breaks it.

I spent most of my time punching rats, then waiting for them to ploddingly “take their turn,” so that I could punch them again. A guy said he’d help me for money, but I had no money, and couldn’t find any way to get some. I died several times by stupidly wandering into situations I wasn’t prepared for. There were too many menus and stats, and everything required two more mouse-clicks than I instinctively wanted it to. I just couldn’t get in the zone. I never can with RPGs. That’s all there is.

Very very gradually earning new slivers of the statistical pie in the face of a random number generator is not fun to me. It never will be. Seems to me that RPGs are ALL ABOUT that.

This means I’m gonna skip

• Fallout 2 (1998): Black Isle Studios (Irvine, CA)
• Fallout Tactics (2001): Micro Forté (Canberra, Australia)

Okay.

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12/18/03 I purchase “Humble Bundle: PC and Android 8.” This ends up being 8 games (for $5). One of them (Little Inferno) I already own and have addressed somewhere above. The other 7 are next up on the backlog.

• Gemini Rue (2011): Joshua Nuernberger (Los Angeles, CA) / Wadjet Eye Games (Brooklyn, NY) [6 hrs]

All graphic adventure games are born fighting an uphill battle against terminal awkwardness. I can’t help but root for them… for the first half hour. The other five-and-a-half hours of Gemini Rue I spent making editorial corrections, mentally. The title gives a clue to the sort of writing on offer: Gemini is the name of a sci-fi location in the game, and then, yes, that’s just the plain old word “rue,” as in “rue the day.” As in “He doesn’t need to live a life of rue anymore,” which (spoiler!) is the final line of dialogue. Or as in the designer’s own words: ‘…since the game was pretty melancholy, I looked up a sad thesaurus and came up with the word, “Rue.” ‘

The protagonist’s name is “Azriel Odin.”

Sound and graphics are… okay, and some of the Philip K. Dick-ripoff story ideas had promise. The genre is a promising one for this form (and overall I found this more successful than Beneath a Steel Sky; the necessary actions may have been uninspired but at least they made sense). So, sure, the game has its points — I don’t need to look up a sad thesaurus to review it — but it is inescapably student work, living somewhere above “fan” but below “professional.” Of course, a lot of well-staffed graphic adventures also tend to find themselves stuck in that zone, which is why they all need so much rooting for. Root root root! If they don’t win it’s a shame. Hey Wadjet Eye, if you ever want someone to rewrite absolutely every single line of your dialogue, just let me know. Sample work: final line above should have been “Whoever he is… he’s free.” Get in touch if you want the other thousand.

Unless the voice acting is supremely good — which it never is — these constrained pixelly games feel far better without it. Much more enveloping, much more ominous. That hush is a threat and an enticement, just like the faces that are too lo-res to be seen. And yet I never have the guts to just outright mute the voices when they’re provided — it would feel uncouth, like refusing a birthday cake that someone has taken the time to bake for me. On which they’ve written “Happy birth! Day.” because they only got one take and don’t have any clue what the context is. Thanks guys, it’s! Delicious.

A break from the bundle backlog! After typing up the previous entry in this log I realized I maybe should play some games that I actually like, for a change. Done.

• The Talos Principle (2014): Croteam (Zagreb, Croatia) [28 hrs]

Purchased 12/28/17 in the Steam Winter Sale for $7.99 (down from $39.99!).

Excellent. Gently surreal uninhabited idylls filled with lock-and-key puzzles, a.k.a. Myst, but this is surely the cleverest narrative justification the genre has ever received. The particular aesthetics of these idylls were rewarding for me; I was pleasantly reminded of my recent visit to Pompeii, which I think is exactly what the designers had in mind. I was also affected by the level that seemed to be a take on Böcklin’s Toteninsel; the chance to go “inside” an evocative piece of art is one of the greatest gifts of computer games. All in all, a bunch of tasty make-believe places to spend some time.

Furthermore the actual puzzles are good too, basically revolving around the principle of locking/unlocking at a distance by line-of-sight. This is a simple and solid mechanic, and despite being intuitive and obvious, was genuinely new to me. Quibble is that there’s some redundancy, a sense of filler, over the course of this fairly long-for-a-puzzle-game game. Second quibble: of the two voice performances, one — the female voice you hear in the trailer — isn’t very good, and unfortunately it has a lot to say. Otherwise strongly recommended!

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• The Talos Principle: Road to Gehenna (2015): Croteam (Zagreb, Croatia) [12 hrs]

DLC (“DownLoadable Content“! We’ve been through this before!) for the preceding. I bought it on 12/30, after enjoying the main game for only two days, because it already seemed clear I was going to want it and I didn’t want to miss the sale price: $3.74.

This is the good kind of DLC, where the new stuff actually feels more polished than the original game, because the designers’ understanding of their own creation has grown more confident and mature. This set of puzzles is more varied, less redundant, and overall harder than those in the main game. In fact the set of optional extra challenge puzzles at the very very end are legitimately tough nuts. Which I was glad for. Even the writing was stimulating! There was a distinct sense of “let’s not just phone this in by grinding out more of the same, let’s come up with a new subject of interest and take it seriously.” Admirable all around.

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• DROD: King Dugan’s Dungeon (1996–2005): Caravel Games (Seattle, WA / Provo, UT / various) [35 hrs]

“D.R.O.D.” = “Deadly Rooms of Death.” An old friend. Played the original in 1998, then checked out the revamped edition in 2008 or so. I guess once every 10 years seems to be the rhythm because look what time it is. I recently learned that the version on Steam had some new “challenges” incorporated into it, involving doing old puzzles in newly constrained ways, and I’m a big enough fan that that’s an enticement. I had bought the first three games in this series from GOG on 6/14/14, bundled on sale for a total of $2.49 — good deal! — but those copies didn’t include the challenges, so on 1/1/18 I repurchased them on Steam, on sale for: $2.49 again. Sometimes it’s disturbing how cheap games are.

This is possibly my favorite game of all time? The ultimate computer game? The greatest puzzle game ever made? I’m not sure if any of those things is entirely true, but some kind of superlative certainly applies here. Not sure I can fully explain the grip it holds on me, but essentially: it’s like an infinite toybox. Each puzzle-room is a new surprise pulled out from its depths, and there are thousands upon thousands of rooms out there. This is a construction kit that can generate genuinely interesting and substantial puzzles, seemingly without limit. It’s a thing of beauty. And there’s something of the platonic ideal of videogaming, to me, in the way it’s simultaneously continuous action AND turn-based strategy — in its world, these are identical. Just as it’s simultaneously pure logic puzzle AND fantasy dungeon adventure — again, it makes these identical. It’s like the nexus of all gaming.

The game’s aesthetic quirks and shortcomings are to me endearing. Or maybe that’s even too condescending: they’re genuinely engaging in their own right. Suave and polished is not the only way worth being! DROD is profoundly unselfconscious in the greatest nerd tradition. It feels like something purer and more unembarrassed than “the industry” will ever know, and reminds me of the bygone computer culture of my youth, when the homeliest of homemade games sat shoulder-to-shoulder with intricate commercial products. Listening to voice-over done by programmers, and following along a storyline like something your friend would write in their notebook in 6th grade — at some level, though I do occasionally roll my eyes, these things make me feel that I’m somewhere healthy, somewhere worth being.

As for this first game in the series: yeah, it’s a little unbalanced, with weird difficulty spikes and several tedious stretches. And the “challenges” turned out to be a mixed bag at best. But overall it holds up and I was happy to be back.

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• DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold (2005): Caravel Games (Seattle, WA / Provo, UT / various) [52 hrs]

[There’s no dedicated trailer for just this one — the trailer above includes scenes from both of these first two games in the series.]

Played through way back in 2005, but was eager to take a second pass as part of this “let’s just play all of DROD in chronological order, dammit” kick.

Second game in the series brings new polish, new variety, and a significant increase in the amount of storytelling, which in this case means doofiness. When I first played this years ago I was a little turned off by that; compared to the relatively plotless first game, it felt like a regrettable downturn toward terminal dorkitude. But this time around, I really felt the opposite: that it was a welcome, cozy dumbness. It drew me in.

Again I was was eager to check out the “challenges,” a few of which turned out to be pretty cruel and tedious, maybe to the detriment of my overall enjoyment, which luckily is robust enough to take a few hits, no problem.

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• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 1. The Choice (2005): Neil Frederick [2 hrs]
• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 2. Perfection (2005): Larry Murk [17 hrs]
• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 3. Halph Has a Bad Day (2006): Eytan Zweig [6 hrs]
• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 4. Beethro and the Secret Society (2006): Jacob Grinfeld [11 hrs]
• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 5. Beethro’s Teacher (2006): Henri Kareinen [33 hrs]
• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 6. Master Locks (2007): Larry Murk [8 hrs]
• DROD: Smitemaster’s Selections: 7. Smitemastery 101 (2007): Jacob Grinfeld [4 hrs]

[No trailers for any of these things because they were made by and for superfans, who don’t need to be advertised to.]

Yes! That’s right! It’s more DROD! The plan is thus to go through all the official content in order of release. That means between the second and third games, all of these things.

I bought the complete “Smitemaster’s Selections” DLC bundle (12 in total) at the same time I bought the preceding games, 1/1/18, for $3.72. I splurged, what can I say.

So what are they. Well, another reason why DROD is the best computer game of all time — the most computer-game-y computer game of all time — is because the built-in level editor can be used by players to create, as suggested above, genuinely rewarding and original content. The things that make the games so great are exactly the things that a “modding” culture can take fullest advantage of. So the line between “official” content and “fan-made” content is, though clearly marked, deliberately faint. These “selections” are fan-made levelsets that were chosen for deluxe treatment by the developers — adding story and voice acting, more thorough testing, etc. etc. — and thus were elevated to being a more or less commercial product.

As you might expect from fan-made content, these are generally more compact, quirkier, and on average far, far harder than the main games. For those reasons they’re also sometimes the most stimulating. I wasn’t sure what to expect — I had never played any of these before — but for the most part I had a really good time. No. 5 of these is the hardest DROD content I’ve encountered anywhere, by a long shot, and also maybe the best. And generally I liked having personality brought to the fore. When you’re wrestling with a puzzle, you’re wrestling with a particular person. Here that became palpable.

Much much more DROD to come, rest assured.

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[No trailer available for such an old game. Here’s some gameplay from the tutorial area to give a sense.]

• Fish Fillets (1998): ALTAR Interactive (Brno, Czech Republic) [played for maybe 6 hours?]

I almost forgot, I played one other game on and off during this period, one that I’d tried a few times before but never gotten into. This was my most committed attempt yet and probably will be my last. It’s sort of a Sokoban/sliding puzzle with two player characters, gravity, and a lot of movement restrictions, some of which are extremely counter-intuitive. It’s a brutally unforgiving bastard of a puzzle game from the outset, and then even if you do manage to master the full ruleset, the puzzles ascend to really crazy levels of intricacy (here’s the solution to a late-game puzzle, just to give an idea). And wow, talk about folk art. The two fish do comedy routines in Czech while you’re playing (really!), and the puzzles involve moving deliberately goofy stuff around to deliberately goofy music. Like, say, a big toilet. Get it?

The reason I stopped wasn’t the actual puzzles, though there is certainly an element of infuriation there — it’s the extremely antiquated program itself, which is intensely clunky and slow to respond, and has no undo system, pretty much unforgivable when wrestling with problems of this depth, at least at my current levels of patience. Turns out there’s a much better implemented sequel from 2007, in which all my issues were addressed. Watch this spot.

These days, the original Fish Fillets is available free for every imaginable system, by the way. Have at it, I guess. Or don’t.