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I don’t know about you, but I’m not in the mood to write about brilliant game design based on a mere four levels I played on a Saturday morning stream.
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1. I do not know why ppl cannot post comments on the mobile web page until someone has posted a comment. I’ve known about this for ages but no closer to solution.
2. I’m aware that “regular” streaming for me is not what regular streaming is for most people. Please accept this limited reality distortion.
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year, Joel (& Electron Dance readers)!
Why has the family board game play time declined? Did Pandemic Legacy exhaust you all? (I stopped reading the series after that previously-discussed spoiler warning, ha. I might still play the game one day!)
Sorry to hear you’re feeling worn out, too. I can relate. I hope you will, in the coming months, find the time to recharge.
Oh and, say, buddy. As one of the few people I know who is on Bluesky – do let me know if you ever have a spare invite code. I’ve been keeping an eye open for one for over 18 months at this point…
Agh Shaun, you’ve reminded me of one thing I was meant to put in the newsletter – ask if anyone wanted to BS codes. I have just a handful of invites (and I’ve sent one over to you already).
The family boardgame decline is something that has been ongoing and I was meant to get into that in an article I started writing in Jan 2023 :/ It’s the alternative reading of the title ‘The Year We Fell”.
Unfortunately, it’s more than just needing to recharge. There are multiple Things happening that I do not know the endpoint of. Like a marathon you just have to keep running but no one has labelled the finish line. Much more difficult to grapple with, though, is that there might not even be a finish line. Still, at least one of the multiple things that has dominated since September – the building work – should be finishing in January; it’s stumbled due to a problem with one of the materials we needed.
Thank you for digging into subscriptions! I’m subscribed to about three things (including electrondance) and yours is the only one that I always read all the way through. I like to read your thoughts on puzzles, mysteries, and human interaction. I think you always have something insightful to say and you say it in an interesting way.
Happy New Year all!
“I’m not in the mood to write about brilliant game design based on a mere four levels I played on a Saturday morning stream.”
I put one game on my Games of 2022 list last year that I hadn’t finished. As a rule I avoid doing that but I was feeling courageous! Unfortunately subsequent play sessions got worse until my friends and I stopped playing it entirely. This is why that rule exists. (The game was Grounded by the way. I jokingly called it Honey I Shrunk The Workbench in my write-up and that doesn’t seem like a joke now.)
“I said “so beautiful” after cracking the puzzle Thrust Vector that wasn’t streaming theatre, that was real.”
I love this! I do wonder how much streaming transforms people’s experiences of games compared to, uh, ‘solo intimacy’.
RIP entombed board game 🙁 Speaking of The Sea Will Claim Everything: I have installed The Cylinder Will Roll Everything—sorry, I mean: The Eternal Cylinder. Looking forward to giving that a… spin. Sorry.
I loved Pixel a Day’s latest video: I think it’s one of her best! I have not watched the hbomberguy video yet.
How are you getting on with Signalis? That piqued my interest around the time Saturnalia came out. I’m also wanting to start Void Stranger myself after recently completing Cocoon and Viewfinder. Cocoon had some really clever and satisfying bits but I wished it had been more content to let you get stuck. I think it was perhaps too well oiled! Viewfinder was really impressive technically but I found the narrative and characters insufferable. Some of the puzzles were tricky and smart but a good chunk of them felt samey and derivative. A shame. What the hell is Crossroad OS…!?
God, I really need to get off Twitter, or ‘X’. How is Bluesky? I’m not sure I want more social media but, at the same time, I see so much interesting stuff on it…
Nathaniel
Thanks! I just hope I can get more WRITTEN WORDS done as some point. I keep etching away at my o’erlong Immortality essay…
Gregg
Hello sir. On streaming, there’s a big difference between playing to an empty channel and a crowd, as well. The Talos streams had barely anyone watching and the only person who chatted was vfig (and one other, but that’s another story). That felt like I was playing more for myself. The Thinky Games stream tends to be a lot more active and you really feel the performance aspect, that you’re presenting a show. God knows what happens if you’ve got a hundred people watching a stream live (Thinky isn’t there yet!!).
The Eternal Cylinder: Marvellously strange game, but I found it tricky and it remains unfinished. Got a big bogged down with some boss-type stuff.
Signalis: I finished & loved Signalis (spoken as someone who had no familiarity with Silent Hill at all, which is why I didn’t click with Lone Survivor). I think I blasted through it over one week and it damaged my sleep pattern :/ I want to play it again on a stream so I can try to figure out WHAT THE EFF HAPPENED. It’s not a short game, though.
Void Stranger: I kept playing but I found it hard to keep going because it seems like… it’s just more-or-less simplistic puzzles over and over and over with VN interruptions. However, I think there are some crazy twists coming but it’s really tested my patience. (Andrew Plotkin found it very hard to keep going with.)
Cocoon: Oh I need to get back to that, I did keep playing – I’m past 50% now. It’s good but, and I think I put this on social media, I don’t think it lives up to the hype? That said, it is getting more involving and tricky, but – like you say – it seems largely going through the right motions than actual puzzle solving a lot of the time.
Viewfinder: Ah, sad to hear the story is a bit of a drag! I’ve bought Viewfinder but haven’t played it at all. I’m more likely to hit up Slay the Princess TBH.
Crossroad OS: I think this is around 2 hours in length. I kept on playing after the stream (hence it’s on the newsletter playlist) but not finished yet. It’s not too taxing, medium difficulty, and I love the vibe a lot.
BlueSky: Here’s the skinny on BlueSky. Content is a bit thin when it comes to videogames. A lot of political peeps have migrated but games are just pretty quiet there. And sadly it’s a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy – people see it’s quiet and revert to Twitter. Devs/artists are finding it a struggle to generate meaningful marketing there. I generally don’t post that much ANYWAY since I retreated from being so social media focused but I’m always there. BlueSky is like an embryonic version of Twitter, but will it grow? Zarawesome posts there a lot and Chris Franklin is around. Matt W is there.
In contrast, Mastodon is extremely active but it’s tonally different to Twitter; it’s something else (Amicable Animal & Nick Bell & Daniel Cook & Andrew ‘Zarf’ Plotkin & vfig have been there for ages). I get more game recommendations there than from BlueSky at present.
If you can background hbomb Joel, you can definitely background ole Kat! XD But that was a compliment and a half (and then many more halves), thank you!
Nobody puts Kat in the corner
I am now somewhat concerned a Dirty Dancing reference is too old for contemporary usage
I feel the Pickle link was put in specifically to cater to me and it succeeded! “We have many pictures of the cat. Indeed, we have the actual cat to look at whenever we like,” so true. Our cat is not supposed to leave the house but we have a Pickle-like in the neighborhood who strolled in when we were moving a large piece of furniture onto the porch. It was happily munching on the food we had courteously deposited in our cat’s bowl when it was seized and escorted out.
The Thinky Games stream thing sounds very difficult to deal with. Yet another thing turning Fun into Work in a way that gives you perverse metrics! That is, you run up your score by starting a bunch of different games even though that’s not what you enjoy most. I’ve popped in on the streams occasionally but I just can’t put this kind of thing on in the background so I’m out of step with the modern world in this way.
A recent Experience has left me with lots of space on a new hard drive and many blank save files so I looked at my Epic Games account and discovered I had Saturnalia on it, so I tried for a bit and, like with so many Santa Ragione joints, I find myself kind of befuddled before I get to the part I’m supposed to be befuddled by. There’s a guy asleep on a couch and I have a goal to take care of him and I’m not sure how? I turned on the fireplace. It doesn’t help that I get disoriented navigating 3-d spaces, which is supposed to happen here I think but maybe not this much? Which, speaking of Epic Games that I now have space for on my drive, explains a lot of my ennui with The Witness. In theory there may be many different puzzles I could try but in practice trying a different puzzle means fifteen minutes wandering around the island.
Then Snakebird Complete turned up free on Epic Games and on my first playthrough of Primer I was like “this is too easy,” but I tried it again and they honestly do introduce a lot of concepts in a gentle way. Like the backward push comes in with two snakebirds nose to nose so you can’t do anything else, and there’s one with a snakebird in hook form sunk in the ground where you lever it out with the other one and that’s it. Which is old hat to Snakebird experts but that’s the point! I was going to say that they don’t introduce the convoluted Tetris drops but there’s a little bit of getting yourself in the right shape over the spikes, and if they did the convoluted drops it wouldn’t be Primer I guess. Also in the main game they changed level 23, possibly specifically to prevent some of the dumb stuff I tried! They didn’t change the double portal drop level though.
Honestly, Matt, I put that Pickle story in there for some more light relief! I am not being particularly deep on this occasion 🙂
One of the particular points I wanted to make about the streaming was that although I had “prepared” and “practiced” it had missed out a few vital things: I didn’t realise I wouldn’t focus on playing one game over time and I that would have the consequence of key chasing. Although drawing up a list isn’t a real problem as Thinky Games itself is pretty good at giving me a list each month (although I always feel proud if I’ve found something extra).
The work has done its job, though. I was feeling out of step, as you say, with games in general. It was always a lot of effort to catch with the latest Elden Souls Discourse and I was tired of it. Being part of the Thinky Games project has given me some focus, although it’s been at the expense of the broader Electron Dance picture. However, in the long run, it will be to its benefit as it has helped inject some much needed enthusiasm. I know this sounds a bit of a contradiction considering the tone of the newsletter – but it is true.
Saturnalia: Actually that particular puzzle wasn’t too difficult for me, but I held on for FUCKING LIFE to stay alive and my town never randomized – so I knew where everything was. Except that has diminishing returns. I probably need to play again, maybe from scratch. I never went back after some terrifying unavoidable encounters. Free space after a recent “Experience”, eh, Matt?
Primer: Yes, I breezed through the game so quickly. As I bear the scars of the original Snakebird, Primer was a piece of cake. But that was its intention, of course. It wasn’t for us, but for the non-Snakebirdees. Although I would say if you lurve hard puzzles and tough love – skip Primer and advance straight to Snakebird and do not collect $200.
@Joel: Yeah I was hoping to play Slay the Princess over Christmas but the developer made the fatal mistake of saying that they’d got a big update planned in 2024. This happened with Terra Nil and Phantom Brigade, which I still haven’t played because those updates are still coming! I only really get one good swing at most of these games so I’d rather play something else in the meantime…
@matt w: Saturnalia had me befuddled for a good while as well! Yeah, there’s the disorientation (getting disoriented is totally supposed to happen, and yes: that much!), but there’s also the somewhat mystifying nature of the game because it’s not just a straight forward survival horror with a single character. I loved that early period of not knowing what the shape of the game was—where its edges were. Even near the end I was still learning things and a few mysteries remained (Santa Ragione and the Discord community weren’t much help there). It’s a shame it was overshadowed by Signalis at release, even with it going for free on Epic. Mind you, I think the Epic store is a bit of a poisoned chalice for some games. It’s currently got a mere 19 user reviews on Steam despite a November release 🙁
The recent Experience involves some negligence on my part and a whole lot of malign neglect on the part of my university IT people and I can’t talk about it without getting very angry so I won’t say any more. There’s also a hard drive I need to find somewhere in my house.
It’s good that the streams are structuring your play in a way that makes things enjoyable! That’s often a thing in many parts of life. I similarly have more or less got Nothing Done over my winter break but have decided not to worry about it, part of it was I’ve had an annoying cough that made it hard to do anything but crosswords and roguelikes for a lot of it. At least during the term I should have more time for Stuff than I sometimes do.
Gregg, I don’t think I successfully conveyed how much I’m befuddled. As far as I can tell it’s still a walking simulator with one player! Well not really, but I haven’t got to the Horror at all. (I also have only played one session.) I don’t really know anything about survival horror so I’m not sure if I’m going to have expectations disrupted in the same way.
Another thing I’ve been doing with Old Games is using Wineskin to play Windows versions of games that disappeared down the 32-bit sinkhole. My success with this has been mixed. I did get NightSky up again, which I was pleased about, but it is kind of in slow motion. Proteus has also been in slow motion, kind of enough that it’s hard to play given how laggy the camera movement is. I also started Oikospiel for the first time and let me tell you, I am pretty sure that playing through the opening of Oikospiel in a slow-running emulator is even more disorienting than it’s meant to be? I also have been unable to convince the Epic Games Store to give me a file of Talos Principle that I could try this with.
Anyway I’m thinking of looking at some more old games from those yottabundles. And that Thinky Games article reminded me I should really check out Can of Wormholes!
Oh god Oikospiel, one of those games I JUST GOTTA PLAY but let’s wait twenty years. I was supposed to be writing in a coffee shop but I just burned over five minutes finding out where David Kanaga is now. ty Matt
Impression of Can of Wormholes through eleven levels: It’s good. So far it more resembles Snakebird than other comparables, which I guess I should have anticipated (eat things to grow bigger and twist your long objects into the right shape). It had a particularly nice bit of “introduce the new mechanic by having the player naturally run across it in a way that won’t solve the level, so they have to think about how to use it in a way that will solve the level.” The level select is kind of weird though.