Crashbook #31

14 thoughts on “Crashbook #31”

1. *sees John Blow being criticised on Electron Dance*

   everybody take a drink!

2. Wait, is that because I now do it regularly or it remains a relatively infrequent thing?

   (asking for a friend)

3. Despelote just won the AMAZE most amazing game.

4. Actually, I think it’s Matt and I who’ve done most of the critic-ing.

   How to measure relative frequency in the ED continuum could be somebody’s thesis.

5. Alert! Alert! John Walker has started a game review “Imagine a modest No Man’s Sky set in Proteus.” I’m not playing this for the usual reasons but it looks ace (I mean that literally, the graphics are very ooh though idk about the fact that there’s shooting).

   Blow critiquing, I suppose I do let my thoughts leak out some though frankly not to the extent I actually feel them. On this topic I did stall out in Recursed, the first playthrough after creating a paradox, which is one of those “WOW my head hurts” moments some puzzle games create. [Corrypt, Promesst, looking at you, though it’s a very different nature.] The second playthrough I didn’t get nearly as far in but partly that’s a matter of time constraint I think. But also that navigating through the puzzles can be kind of laborious, timing your jumps and throws and everything. OK this time I just started it up again and failed at “Uh, what key do you press to select a menu option?”

   BUT this pales beyond the laboriousness I find in The Witness. I’m not sure if I’ve explicitly said this and I feel a little bad because this game is so important to Joel but: I hate The Witness. A couple of times I have typed and deleted screeds about it so let me just summarize my final experience with it: I had finally made it over to the Tetris puzzle tutorial on the swamp boardwalk. (A big complaint I have is level-selectish: in theory there are a lot of puzzles open to you, but in practice if you want to work on something different it’ll take you like fifteen minutes to get there.) At some point I found a branch and took the road less traveled by, which sent me to the boat. The boat was slow. I could speed it up, but I was like “Why is this happening in real time?” and I had the dread realization: It was because, while circling the island, you could find some of those background puzzles. I even found what looked like one and tried to trace it, but it didn’t work for reasons that were not clear to me. This took a while because the boat is not that fast even when you speed it up and if you want to get the right angle it is slow slow slow. Eventually I made it back to the puzzles I had left off and wanted to resume. But I had trouble finding exactly where I had left off. After some fruitless wandering around–I will admit that part of my problem is that I’m easily disoriented*–I hit on the brilliant idea of climbing to a higher level of the boardwalks, from where I could see which puzzles were lit up and which not, and I knew how to get back down and start on them again. And I realized: I did not want to do that. Those puzzles weren’t interesting to me! I don’t find any of the individual logic puzzles memorable. At this point I uninstalled. And all the time I felt like I had Blow’s voice in my head saying “I Am Having You Put In A Lot Of Effort Because My Game Is Important.”

   Gah I need to make a few more threads about roguelikelikes on Bluesky, people seemed to like those.

   *This may also have been part of my problem with A Highland Song–sorry James I haven’t got back to that one.

6. uh so do we just call that one drink or

7. does draining the bottle in one slug count as a single drink

8. hahaha

9. I would have to say that I’m still not sure whether I like The Witness so much as I like the fact that I was able to beat it. The same incidentally is true of the escape room board game Exit: The Gate Between Worlds ,which I played tonight with some friends.

   The game is a Witness-y mixture of logical puzzles and environmental riddles, creating that constant vague pressure that you might get hard stuck somewhere along the way, which is relieved (momentarily) when you turn over the card you think is right and are rewarded with a ‘success!’ and a new puzzle. We were pleased (relieved) to get through the whole thing without needing to use any of the the hint cards.

   And yeah. I guess it was fun? But the key discriminant to that fun was success: otherwise, our reward would have been frustration.

   I think our host wrote approximately 50,000 words on this dynamic over a series of very good entries on puzzle games. I don’t have the wisdom to end this post with any real insight. So I guess for me the jury is still out on Blow.

10. I mean, no one is actually laying into Jonathan Blow. You’re laying into his game and that’s not quite the same thing. I’ve been willing to defend JB with his eccentric opinions and what I read as unintended hostility (a la no one understands this like I do, wait does that sound unintended) but he has gone full throttle POS and he’s no longer on my Christmas card list.

    Oh dear, looks like I’ve added MIRO to the next Crashbook post (the new pile is already at six games).

    And, Matt, all of your complaints are reasonable complaints but they basically come down to whether all that stuff works for you and they largely did for me. Blue Prince has similar red flags that makes a lot of people think “fuck, this game is wasting my time” yet that I didn’t feel that me until I got about 60 hours in. Seriously, I’ve apparently got 84 fucking hours in that game. (To be fair, I left the game running a few times because you can not save in the middle of a run. That could explain about 10-20 hours but I doubt any more than that.)

    The reason Blue Prince started to wane is that I stopped making progress despite knowing there were Things To Solve, which is an evidential data point for CA’s suggestion that fun comes from success and not the slow pressure of failure.

11. Understood, Joel. I’m not on the social meej, so the games tend to be all I have to engage with. (Some personal stuff does break through into other channels, but it’s not the same as hooking yourself into a creator’s direct feed.)

    I guess it must be an odd feeling when you’ve praised someone’s work publicly, and then they, in turn and equally publicly, make a prize pillock (or worse) of themselves? Not that I want to poke at a sore point, but are you comfortable, uncomfortable in this ambivalence?

    I mean it’s not exactly like you’ve posted selfies with Mussolini, and I do believe in separating art from artist, but I think this might be a potentially interesting perspective for a critic to share.

    But again, it’s easy for me to be detached as a pseudononymous spectator. Not trying to be awkward.

12. To be fair, I don’t see or hear much of JB these days as he wasn’t part of the Twitter exodus, being a pro-Trumper and Ex-Twitter suits him just fine. I went out recently to see if he had calmed down, considering The Witness is all about taking those moments, but it did not seem to be the case.

    I still think The Witness is great. And I’m still happy to wave around The Unbearable Now. Naturally, in 2016, I was more sympathetic to Blow. At the time, I suspect he was a different person to who he is now. I guess the problem would be if he crosses some line like JKR when the goodness of the work is no longer resistant to its creator’s screeds or dehumanizing damage. (Saying this, I’ve only really enjoyed the first Harry Potter and found diminishing returns with each book that makes that world less and less “believable”. Man there’s a very boring essay contained in those quotes.)

    However, there is a video that does give me the shakes. It’s a short film I’m proud of and do not want to remove from YouTube. I love its snappiness, its vibe and the quality of its production. That video is Penetrate the Night which promotes two developers who are now largely persona non grata. This is the video that gets under my skin, makes me paranoid. One day, I think, someone is going to ask why I haven’t taken it down. And so I find it difficult to acknowledge its existence and even posting this comment about it, drawing it into a small spotlight, makes me anxious.

13. I have more to say on the subject, but happier things! Instead of just complaining about the r-word I have started dumping a lot of bluesky threads about various elements of the games people sometimes call roguelikes or roguelites or something else! The first one is here and the most recent is here and they link back and forth at the end. Also even ripping off these screenshots and writing alt-texts is really time consuming! I don’t know how you manage to make an entire video, Joel.

    Speaking of which, don’t be anxious about that video in my opinion. Nobody is cancelling anybody for talking about the most popular and ubiquitous video game of all time, whose creator happened to turn out to be a white nationalist basically, and for the other one if I know which one you mean, what the dev did does not reflect on you and I don’t think anyone is likely to try to pin it on you, and if they do I and others will have your back. (I did wind up not playing that game partly because an IF community person who might have been expected to be enthusiastic about it was asked about it and was basically like “I will not support that dev,” but that is not your situation and was a personal choice of mine anyway. It’s not like I don’t have lots of games to eat up my time.)

    Speaking of which, Crashbook! People seem to like Clair Obscur! My reaction is “30 people seems like a lot?” Holy crap I wish I could play Lushfoil, it looks like traveling without getting on an airplane. Alan is releasing a demo and I haven’t even bought the full Electrifying Incident yet, I feel bad! Also I should buy the droqen game! I just was replaying Starseed Pilgrim a bit and the level where the cyan seeds do something weird is very difficult!

14. So I bought and played Electrifying Incident (I did not get the secret ending, not sure if it is some patented Draknek “do outlandish things all over the map” stuff–come to think of it, that’s not how Cosmic Express worked), and then I looked at the Steam discussions, and guess what! Cancellation-related drama! I’m not sure of the underlying details and I have decided to unknow the whole thing. So yeah, I see why you might be anxious, but IMO you probably have nothing to worry about, if someone is yelling you about something you didn’t do yourself you can block and move on.

    On the general are we critiquing Blow or the game question here, I think there are three Blows–Blow the person, Blow the designer, and Blow the expresser of opinions about games. Blow the person is a dead loss, Blow the expresser was the one who caught flack in the post, and my usual thing is to complain about Blow’s game. And in general I think it’s OK and even laudable to separate your opinion of an artwork from that of the other two, a friend of mine wrote a book about it, and it’s kind of a flaw of mine that I don’t as much as I like. Not that I didn’t want to enjoy The Witness, but my reaction to it may be overstated by my annoyance about his opinions (about games first go-round, then about everything). Also some backlash because everybody recommends this to me as the puzzle game I must play, and the letdown was extreme! There’s more to say about frustration but this paragraph is already too long because I had been trying to one of the games in the Crashbook! Spooky Express demo!

    OK so it seems like Spooky Express realized that they could have the level play out as you lay the track, which is neat and something that hadn’t occurred to me, and also when the little girl was introduced I was like “oh she’s kind of a mechanical variant of the slimy alien” but then they did something different with her which was neat! I haven’t played the “subscribe to our newsletter” levels yet.