Discussion: All The Colours, Every One

26 thoughts on “Discussion: All The Colours, Every One”

1. Not entirely sure when this Electron Dance newsletter will actually reach the people. It’s been stuck in Mailchimp’s servers for nearly 20 minutes with no sign of progress…

2. there we go, that’s better

3. omg, another shout out in the Electron Dance newsletter!! I’ll never get used to this…

4. I was thinking about Kitchen Sink as the core back when you first linked Kat’s piece. There are some games it seems to work for–Frog Fractions and Candy Box and Dark Room, and maybe about six to eight hours of Evoland 2. On the other hand this is a tight rope to walk, as witness Frog Fractions 2 which I ragequit not that far in.

   The thing about Candy Box/Dark Room is that the genre needs to change mechanics pretty quickly or you get fucking Cookie Clicker, which we already discussed. And the changing mechanics put a limit to the game, because the developer can’t get infinite “play” out of finite development, which is good. Then the thing about Frog Fractions is that it kicks you along fast through a bunch of different things that aren’t very frustrating. Which was the problem with the sequel because I spent most of my time in the overworld which was difficult and also a slog. With Evoland 2 it was funny to see how they changed genres and came up with excuses for changing genres, but eventually I realized that the game was going to be very long and when I got to a tough boss battle it went into the graveyard.

   Kat complained about how in Dave the Diver she wanted to be swimming around and had to do all these other things and that’s the problem with some of these. If you make the player do a bunch of things they all have to be good or at least over painlessly. (The part you go through slowest is the part you spend the most time in.) I’ve complained about the doing-things-in-the-engine problem here, the initial thrill of “it’s Breakout in Bit.Trip Beat” gives way to “I wanted to play Bit.Trip Beat, not Breakout.”* Or “Ooh, you can do a line-drawing puzzle in DROD/English Country Tune” turning into “Line-drawing games have better line-drawing interfaces than these do.”

   Then again I really enjoyed Cato: Buttered Cat, which is mostly a puzzle platformer where the platforming isn’t twitchy, but has some end-of-world sequences that are effectively forced runners, and those are great. Mostly because they are so very generously checkpointed that it is impossible to get stuck. Well mostly mostly because they are the part of the game with the most adorable cat animations. But then the other end-of-world sequences are boss battles which are pretty not fun, because combat bosses are not what the game is good at. (However you can skip these after a minute.) And also there are minigames, which are very much of the “You can do Flappy Bird in the Cato engine” sort, but these aren’t bad because they are extremely optional and clearly just the devs having a goof. So I only have to do Flappy Bird in the Cato engine if I want to. Which I don’t.

   *Not to mention the FUCKING FINAL PONG BOSS which not only takes away the rhythm play but introduces a new loss condition, which is what got me every time. I never reached the ending!

5. Also I would be very remiss if I didn’t thank you for your upcoming words on two games with Mac ports! I have these words on Utopia Must Fall: Oh, so we’re doing Missile Command as a r*******e now? Interested to hear what you are saying though my reaction was not exactly “wow I really wanted to do a Missile Command.” I have been doing a bit more twitchy games though, partly because one of the books I use for philosophy of games next turn was talking about Super Hexagon and I was like “Oh I should try that.” It turns out it is not a rhythm game! At least not at the level I’ve been playing at (my high score is 23 seconds on Hard mode, which is easy mode).

6. I’m torn. On the one hand, I am incredibly happy because I would likely have missed the 868-BACK campaign if not for this newsletter, and I was a huge fan of the original. On the other hand, the main body of this edition was the most misguided and ignorant the newsletter has ever been: Normally I am a huge fan of the work but this one was just… all the wrong takes for all the wrong reasons.

   What a baffling series of thoughts to string together: How do you miss the small weird wonder and joy intrinsic to the star-sprite in Talos 2, and how it ties back into both the game’s increased emphasis on movement and the nature of the entire narrative? How do you ignore the ways that diverse mechanics and interactions often ARE exactly what the developer wants to put into their game, to put out into the world, to show to other people? How do you lump in the joyous goofy little celebration that is Balatro’s minimalist cosmetic deck skinning alongside whatever the hell Fortnite is?

   I guess the final conclusion is that while I am glad I got this edition in my mailbox, I genuinely hate what I had to read to get to the only worthwhile part.

7. Kat

   Just remember I’ll need another 200 AUD to keep the link recommendations going. That’s a Cyber Monday discount, too.

   Matt

   Yes!! Kitchen Sink was THE thing that jumped out at me when I watched Kat’s video. I had been meaning to write a more fleshed out response about it, but it ended up being chucked into this messy newsletter here (I’m not altogether happy I’ve wasted my opportunity to write something more considered about it.)

   If you think back to when “games were games” (LOL) most titles had a single mechanic and that’s where they stayed. Over the years, they began evolving mechanics within a game and some games began to experiment with a completely different mechanics under the same roof (e.g. Necromancer from Synapse in 1982 has three distinct stages; Beach-Head in 1983 has five, I think).

   I might be wrong about design genetics here, but titles like GTA III and Minecraft blew the doors off in terms of what a game could be. That’s you can construct a symphony of different activities rather than a single, coherent concept. But somewhere along the way, we find games increasingly bolting on shit, sometimes for F2P-type reasons, sometimes for reasons that feel very much like ‘more is better’. I’m not going to argue any individual cases here. I was hesitant about throwing Animal Crossing into the mix (so I didn’t) because it’s a well-loved game but it’s also following a ton of these ‘lots to do, keep the players involved’ crossed with Fortnite’s constant self-reinvention.

   But you’re right, it is still – in the end – about all these activities being complementary rather than simply design padding. GTA III: San Andreas had this appalling ‘go to the gym’ busywork. Survival games have you do a lot of activities but they’re usually in the service of a single idea – how to stay alive and get further into the game? Subnautica has a ton of different things going on but they all feel connected.

   On your other points…

   The theming of Cato: Buttered Cat didn’t appeal but you’ve now talked it up, so well done Matt.

   Utopia Must Fall– Matt, they are very, very careful not to call the game a roguelike/roguelite in the Steam write-up. It is mentioned, but not as a direct description. I’ve thrown nearly three hours at Utopia Must Fall so far: I’m hooked.

   Hexagon– I’ve always stayed away because I expected to be terrible at it. But I had the skills for Death Crown, so who knows? I’m still not doing it though, Matt. Nope.

   Ariamaki

   Every time I usher some words into the public light, I experience a pang of terror, wondering if I’ve committed to posterity a take so horrible that I’ll wonder what the hell I was doing. That panic is worse for a newsletter as the material tends to be more on the unfiltered side. After I pressed the button this time, I was sure the negativity about “you’re not going to earn any money anyway” was not filed down enough, too flippant in tone for something that’s a genuine problem for anyone trying to make a livelihood with games. Ah. But it was done.

   But this is not what has got me into trouble today! And that’s okay. Opinions and counter-opinions are all good. Partly the issue here is that because of the deliberate emulation of the newsletter as Kitchen Sink design, the newsletter doesn’t really fight any of its fights, doesn’t put teeth into any argument. There are questions for a dozen articles and it doesn’t cohere: it just kicks over some chairs on the way through – well, that was some words on the internet, huh?

   I’ll put a bit more meat on some of the points you’ve picked out.

   Sprite: Whenever I finish writing about Talos II, which will be sometime after I finish the DLC, I’ve got a bit speaking up for the narrative dimension of the sprite, which I feel is the optional goal which reinforces the story better than the others (I’ll probably then go on to grumble about the role of the Gold puzzles.) However, the mechanic of running after a tiny dot in a game about being pensive and reflective just goes against the grain. There are a few occasions where the sprite becomes a puzzle which I’d wished had happened more often – but most of the time it’s like, jesus, where the hell did it go now?

   Balatro collab: It just makes me really sad every time indie games do this collab thing. I know *why* it is done and I cannot begrudge anyone doing it. I’m not really connecting a ton of dots between Fortnite and Balatro. (I was so hooked on Balatro for a couple of weeks that it gave me something along the lines of RSI which probably would have made a more amusing anecdote.)

   Regardless! Appreciate you reading and putting down how you felt about it.

8. I feel the need to push back against the idea that kitchen sink design didn’t emerge until GTA3. In both the console space and on PC, it didn’t take long for designers to start straining against the constraints of the first 8-bit home computers, both in terms of vertical and horizontal scope (ie. doing a single mechanic but bigger and better vs adding additional mechanics).

   One of the earliest iterations of this were games with shooting and platforming sections, or shooting and driving sections, or platforming and driving sections, or platforming and driving and shooting sections. Or strategy sections and action sections, strategy and tactics sections, tactics and action sections… basically, kitchen-sinking using the most popular forms of the day. Early examples might include Vice Project Doom, Blaster Master and Paris-Dakar Rally in the east, and Pirates!, Elite and Populous in the west.

   It seems to me that we can broadly subdivide this idea into three categories: adding variety (minigames which exist chiefly to provide brief respite from the central mechanic), integrating genres (trying to balance multiple mechanics evenly, contra the ‘Sid Meier rule’), and emergent behaviour (simulating the consequences of multiple mechanics running alongside one another such that new, unintended, perhaps surprising gameplay is organically synthesised (is that an oxymoron?)). The ploughing of each of these furroughs can be traced through the ’80s and into the ’90s, before an explosion of ‘omnigames’ (which I accept took most prominent form in GTA and Minecraft, as well as Oblivion and ‘the Ubigame’) brought multi-mechanical design well and truly into the mainstream.

   And.. jeez. What is it I’m trying to say, here? It really feels like you’ve torn the lid off something! It’s like you’ve gestured at the *entire design space of the interactive medium* and invited us to DRAW FIRM CONCLUSIONs.

   Which I guess is what I *actually* want to push against. This is going to be a wet nothing of an opinion, but, I personally believe it’s good when a concept is well-executed on, and… bad when it isn’t? By which I mean that I’ve played too many games that did one thing brilliantly, or multiple things convincingly well, to see any value in being perscriptive. And what works for one person might not for another. We can even find ourselves at odds with ourselves.

   If you want an example – try this review of some game with a name so unmemorable that I forgot it even though I was looking at it three seconds ago. I don’t recommend the article on either the strength of the review or the game – rather, just see how far you can get into the description of the game’s mechanics before your brain revolts. Then scroll down and see how much more there was yet to come. This game (whatever it is called) is perhaps the apotheosis of “systems bloat” – the idea that the developers just kept on coming up with more and more dishes in the kitchen sink, and didn’t reject a single one. And then gave it away for free.

   Even the reviewer, considering himself from a point of dispassionate detachment, has to concede that there is no sane world in which he can recommend this game. It is simply too much. It is Dave the Diver on overload, expando ad absurdum. And yet there are people in the world who love this game – and the review, seemingly in spite of himself, is one of them.

   Edge Magazine famously wished, in their review of Doom, that they might be able to talk to the monsters. This quote has reverberated down the years since its utterance. At first it was widely mocked – Doom was a game that did one thing, a thing at once an extension and a transformation of the cardinal gaming mechanic – shooting stuff – better than any game before it had ever done it. Doom was a monomaniacal game, and for the reviewer to call for a completely different mode of interaction (and one so at odds with its gameplay and theme) was laughable.

   And yet on the other hand, since then, the quote has become prophetic of a more transcendant vision of gaming – one more profilerate in genre and activity, between games and within games – that has since been (arguably) realised. Many games exist now where talking to the monsters is postively encouraged. Careers have been made and unmade (cf Peter Molyneux) on the promise of being able to do just about anything that came into the designer’s head.

   And.. again, what is it I’m trying to say, here? Nothing I’ve said is new, or surprising. It’s scant consolation to Kat, struggling with one particular aspect of DtD, or Matt, struggling with the handbrake-turn at the end of BtB, for me to be blethering about how great it is that some games get it right, sometimes, and that it’s cool when designs are ambitious.

   But.. it is, right? Cool, I mean.

9. Frog Fractions 2 turns out to be on-topic with more parts of the newsletter because its launch involved an ARG with clues hidden in a bunch of other indie games and we don’t mind that kind of collab, do we? There’s quite a tradition of that sort of thing like Super Meat Boy involving all kinds of characters from other indie games and also being the boss of the meatmen in Desktop Dungeons, which truth be told bugged me a little because it seemed kind of cliquish and in-jokey, but at least it’s the developers having fun. Which may be true of other collab/cross-references. And then about Frog Fractions 2 (or 3) itself…

   “Instead, Frog Fractions 2 still leaps from genre to genre but centers more firmly around a ASCII text world evocative of 1980’s Rogue.”

   oh hell no

10. I kind of do mind that sort of thing, in my grumpy way. Firstly because of the cliquishness you mention, but also because of the unshakeable feeling that it’s marketing by the back door. Friendly, mom and pop, lend-a-helping-hand marketing, sure. But you’re still making me look at an advert.

11. Great article. Makes me reflect on how most ‘meta’ content in puzzle games feels out of place and can cheapen the experience of the actual puzzles. Always asking: “is this puzzle even possible to solve at this point?….or is it even a puzzle at all?….or is this a part of the main puzzle or something that was put in for the super clever ‘secret’ puzzles? Or maybe, just maybe…..I need to go on some internet forum and find the rest of these coordinates to dig up the map with the next clue…”

    It usually just cheapens the experience of the main progression and shows a lack of confidence in the core mechanics/puzzles.

    But what do I know, the meta content seems to sell.

12. You know what has procedural generation and permadeath? Super Hexagon!

    Joel: Ok, um, I do think Cato is a good puzzle game but I certainly did not mean to give the impression that the theming is not a large part of the appeal. Partly it showed up at a very vulnerable time when we were between cats and one of the appeals is that you can unlock different cat colors so we were able to play as our old cat and our new cat. And the adorable kitty idle animations! This also connects back to Kat’s video because she said the reviews of Stray were “Who’s a cute cat, who’s a cute little kitty meow meow, four and a half stars” and I was like why are you personally attacking me?

    Anyway part of the reason that the minigames work, besides their being so optional, is that you don’t have to worry too much about breaking the mood of your game when your game is already about a cat and a piece of buttered toast using their powers to spin in mid-air. (A good thing, because the dialogue is… not very well localized, maybe?)

    Michael: I know right? This is something I’ve been wondering about with Fez, which is does it hold up? At the time everyone was all like “Oh my GOD the secrets” to the extent that all the information you could find was about secrets and none of it was about the puzzles in the normal gameplay. I played until the point where you get back to Gomez’s home and everyone’s moving around, which seems like a midway point, and also a point where you are definitely supposed to work on hidden puzzles maybe, and it’s also possible that I didn’t really look closely enough at what was going on to uncover the Real Hidden Secrets and Truly Savor The Game, but I am a toxic enough gamer to think that if I played that long and did that much without getting more of an inkling of the Real Hidden Secrets, then it’s not me, it’s the game. Especially insofar as the Real Hidden Secrets may involve writing down and deciphering the glyphs scattered throughout the world. Kat was disappointed when Stray autodecoded the glyphs for you, but writing down and decoding scattered glyphs sucks! OTOH Starseed Pilgrim is an example of This Done Right because the game is engaging before you discover the Weird Stuff and exploring the game you’re given naturally leads you toward that except for one thing which I think the statute of limitations has passed on and I can say now, the keyhole you need to press down arrow on looks like an up arrow!

    Then with puzzle games more broadly there’s the Puzzle In The Overworld which one certain game did amazingly right, because it was an amazing aha moment that could be solved by careful observation and experimentation and just throwing stuff at the wall and also introduced a new mechanic that still kept the levels from overflowing their bounds. And which other games do not do amazingly right. I have mentioned here before that I am stuck at 30ish percent in Can of Wormholes because of an overworld puzzle, or maybe two overworld puzzles, and perhaps that Can of Wormholes has an amazing hint system that doesn’t exist in the overworld. This is particularly egregious because it has locked me out from two-thirds of the game, but even in Monster’s Expedition many of the multi-island puzzles in Monster’s Expedition are stressful for “is this a puzzle?” reasons though they’re clearly signposted as super optional. I think they are what has kept Joel from writing about the game.

    In the hugely sprawling multiauthor text adventure I participated in, my main contribution wasn’t my room(s) so much as in betatesting, I whined about how when I got to a room I never knew whether I was supposed to solve it then or get something from somewhere else until Jenni Polodna included a hint system that solved that exact issue. Also I started a collaborative “Bohemian Rhapsody” takeoff in the project slack and used my last name for my unique namespacing identifier so my source code is full of lines like “Touching is weiner contact. Rubbing is weiner contact. Squeezing is weiner contact.” [This is also on topic for the thread, because one of the other things I did was beta test the room written by Erica Newman, who helped write the Frog Fractions 2 ARG! I think a few other people including Jenni also worked on FF2.]

13. This conversation is so incredibly apt – I just shared my thoughts on Tunic over on Patreon, and one of the points of disagreement was the post-endgame content which requires you to (*spoilers I guess, but I feel like this is very much out there*) TRANSLATE THE ENTIRE 50-PLUS PAGE MANUAL PHONEME BY PHONEME. Personally I can’t think of a task that sounds more like tedious homework…but plenty of people loved it. One of them shared their opinion that this content was so core to the game that they weren’t sure if the game was worth it without engaging with it, which I chose to read as a bit of a damning indictment of the first 10 hours of the game (which I’d describe as competently derivative with a few really cool and inspired moments here and there). I do agree with the commenters here that at least, the game needs to be fully worth it notwithstanding the Super-Secret-Centre-Of-The-Mystery-Layer-Cake.

    This is always going to be a contentious topic isn’t it, because of that polarisation. Some people find so much joy dedicating countless hours to getting to the centre of that cake, the deeper and more obtuse the better. Then there’s people like me, who find meta puzzles awesome… up to a certain (very specific to my personal reserve of time and patience) point when I start finding the whole thing obnoxious and masturbatory. A point past which the dev is demanding so much of my time that a good old-fashioned mystery becomes the kind of obsession only gamers with way too much time on their hands are willing to perform. And it starts feeling a little icky.

14. I have a rant which I should almost certainly save for later but something just popped into my mind as an example of Doing The Game-In-The-Engine Right or at least a reverse of doing it wrong. In And Yet It Moves there were a bunch of sequences toward the end with appearing and disappearing platforms where you had to rotate gravity in the right sequence to get through them, and my grumpy reaction was “This is just Simon.” Then at the very end there were a couple sequences that were literally just Simon and that was charming! One nice thing is that the interface was as suitable to Simon as a regular Simon interface.

    Oh also a conundrum (for Joel perhaps) on collabs which may have a connection to the rant: What about the Bonfire Peaks area with all the items from other puzzle games? Which is even moodbreaking with the general tragic environmental storytold? Do we forgive it because it’s all indie puzzle people sticking together, or just because we like Bonfire Peaks so much? Bonfire Peaks was also an offender with the overworld shenanigans IMO (even the DLC which dispenses with overworld puzzles sometimes gets into a hole where you have to keep restacking overworld boxes to access everything you want to–the best time to access all the puzzles is after you’ve solved them all). There is the one guest appearance we all approve of.

    Yeah I was like “I’m just going to leave a quick comment” so obviously I had to fire up Bonfire Peaks, get that screenshot, put that screenshot in a linkable place etc. etc. Now I don’t even have time or space to record my first impressions of Stray!

15. Apologies I’ve gone quiet just because I’ve been knocked out by actual flu this week and only now able starting to powerup my biological systems again.

16. OMG, I am so looking forward to your next pieces, Joel and Kat.*
    Utopia Must Fall was on my radar day one because the music is made by one of my favourite artists. That said, I still haven’t gotten around to Endlight. It shall continue to rot in the backlog…
    I have so many thoughts about Tunic and… seriously, what Tunic’s core? It’s a game that, honestly, is both very personal and not really? It feels like it started off completely personal with little consideration for wide appeal and marketability. But that’s not exactly how it ended up. Does the polish, dress-up and the overall coating of action and RPG** to satisfy the player’s cravings… invalidate its personality? Absolutely not. Does it dilute it to a state where personality is less concentrated? Possibly.
    * I do realise I don’t have to “look forward to” it because it’s already there on Patreon, don’t @ me
    ** Tunic was always a soulslike and this part is definitely personal and meaningful to its creator – I’m referring to the work that went into making it more “juicy”

17. Alright, I’m gradually returning to normalcy, although I’m still frikkin’ exhausted. It has been a rollercoaster of ill-health since last Tuesday when swallowing something the wrong way during a Teams call and coughing myself into a sore throat turned out to be the first sign of influenza. WHO KNEW

    If there’s one thing the comments have taught me, is that I should never again deliberately defocus the newsletter because there are about 100 interesting conversations here and I’m likely to reply to each one with passive platitudes like “whoa, too true, dudez”.

    CA argues that GTA3 was just the latest revision of kitchen sinking. I can see something in this, but I guess I’m thinking more about monogames, the idea of the one game you play for a realllly long time. There were many games that could suck you in for long periods of time and they were all RPGs (ho ho, but actually I spent serious jail time in Ultima IV). But Minecraft really seem to capture that idea of PLAYING FOREVER. And GTA III crystallized the open-world game which then was builded upon by the many developers with mooore minigames and mooooore collectibles and moooore and mooooooooore. When I tend to look backwards and a lot of that stuff feels more proto-monogame. When I see the bit on Troubleshooter, that feels less monogame and more a ridiculously overwrought set of systems to me – but maybe, ehhhh, I didn’t read enough. *shrug*

    Matt has thoughts about Frog Fractions 2 because its a collab in the guise of an ARG. Later, he also mentions about Bonfire Peaks, which throws in a few references to other puzzle games. Collabs-as-clique? I think the thing that really gets my goat about collabs – aside from they create a virtual MCU of indie games – is that it is putting the money on the outside. The financial value of a collab is cross-advertising. When I see Bonfire Peaks showing off Jack Lance and others, it is homage, more These Are The Games That Made The Peaks What They Are. And that’s why the FF2 ARG doesn’t bother me as much. Plus I haven’t played any of the FF2verse, so of course it doesn’t bother me.

    Michael then tugs at metapuzzles, an additional layer of puzzle icing on top of *hopefully* an already delicious core. Are metapuzzles are extra content for the sake of it? I think it depends on the game. Some of the draknek meta stuff is very clever but usually far too hard for my liking; the fun/frustration ratio can initially look good but then runs aground with HOW THE FUCK DO YOU GET TO THAT SNOWMAN SEND HALP. Cosmic Express is of a different variety: they’re just alternate solutions as opposed to ‘meta puzzling’, so that doesn’t grate the same way. And just as I wonder if perhaps we’re beating up metapuzzles a bit too much, Kat mic drops in a Tunic example – I haven’t played Tunic, but I’m slightly aghast at that one. I get the feeling she wants to mention Animal Well. You do, don’t you, Kat?

    Starseed Pilgrim gets a pass because “the metagame” doesn’t feel extra to me, it feels core: the two sides of its coin are strongly associated. (Although I still had issues with some of its brutality.)

    And That Scar is looking forward to any writing on Utopia Must Fall and all I can offer at this point is that I got a new high score yesterday. But I’m also struck with the implication in That Scar’s comment that perhaps heady mystery can obscure that a game is just not very interesting in places. I don’t know. Utopia Must Fall does not have meta mysteries, I can confirm this.

18. I enjoyed Animal Well! Probably more than Tunic – AW had a cool aesthetic at least. The core game of Tunic just felt too familiar to me. Also AW can absolutely be enjoyed a ton without the metapuzzle BS.

19. OK this is not even the rant that I had prepared about metapuzzles but: Can of Wormholes can go to hell and take some of its fans with it. I mentioned being stuck on a metagame puzzle, oh, nine months ago? I played through again up to the point where I was stuck, got stuck at the same place. There was a small stuck place and a big stuck place–there was one puzzle in the first four “worms” I couldn’t access, and I also couldn’t get to the fifth “worm.”

    I jumped on the Thinky Puzzle game to ask for hints, and was immediately answered–by a complete wanker who kept asking me rhetorical questions like “other than the puzzles themselves, how else have you been taught info?” even after I said “sorry I really need an actual hint on this.” After a couple hours (literally, though mostly because I took time off for dinner) I extracted an explicit statement that you can’t get directly from worm 4 to worm 5, and I decided that I could probably get more information from a video. So I started looking around in Joe Plays Puzzle Games’s playthrough (but carefully because I don’t want real puzzle spoilers!) and while I haven’t found the part where he gets to world 5 yet, I found the explanation for how to get into that one puzzle (which the Discord guy was prompting me for with questions like “where have you seen part of the structure blocking you from getting before?”). There was a sign about it in a room at the beginning of the level which, because of the maneuvers I had had to do to connect worm 3 to worm 4, was completely concealed from view. I felt abused.

    And anyway the overworld puzzles give me a horrible pain. There’s one clever one at the beginning, but the mechanics are explained only through pretentious wordless signs, the maneuvers are fiddly, the undo/reset is messed up (instead of reset undoing everything you did since entering this screen, it undoes the entire metagame), and it’s just the kind of thing that should be gating easter eggs or optional puzzles instead of the entire game. It’s like he was aiming for that one moment in Stephen’s Sausage Roll and he landed on “to get from one world to the next you have to solve a twenty-five piece slider puzzle.” Why not just let me do the puzzles?

    So, in keeping with my obsessions, I think we have a winner for worst level select ever. Well, second worst.

20. “looking forward to the Trump and Musk skins in the next season.”

    Eeesh, yeah. The Ship got there a long time ago and the more recent ‘Remasted’ edition expanded the roster to feature Blair, Thatcher, Trump, Hillary Clinton, Saddam, Bin Laden, Kim Jong Il and Castro. The original Murder Party is one of my all-time favourite multiplayer games so it’s pretty gross seeing all these figures in it! Especially when clear and fixed identification runs so counter to the design.

    Oh and don’t get me started on game collabs and cross-overs. My brother and I recently flushed Hunt: Showdown after they shoved Ghostface from Scream and a music artist called Post Malone into it. My interest in Sea of Thieves sunk thanks to the grand entrance of Pirates of the Caribbean and Jack Sparrow. Later my beloved Monkey Island would make an appearance too. I remember rolling my eyes at Payday adding John Wick (after the first film, before it was a big thing). I dunno, it just smacks of insecurity in your game and dilutes what made it unique and interesting in the first place. I read an interview with Jonathan Chey, the design director of Wild Bastards, and he said “Our humor is always “in-universe” though – we don’t like to make […] meta-jokes about memes or contemporary culture.” and while not quite the same thing, it was refreshing to hear someone resisting the siren call of ‘I understood that reference’. Tangentially, I don’t think my eyes have fully rolled back into place after Alien: Romulus.

    “I was hesitant about throwing Animal Crossing into the mix”

    Yeah, Hailey and I lament the subtle change of direction for the Animal Crossing games. We loved Wild World and New Leaf back in the day because you hopped in, saw what was happening in your village, did a few things then clocked out. You were often told (by your own villages no less!) to take a break and it was clear you were only supposed to dip into it. How lovely! But with free-to-play Pocket Camp on mobile it went from this breezy, low-activity and often amusing experience to something a lot more hyper and fixated on amassing stuff to gift to folk. Your villages were needy, transactional pricks. I tapped out early. New Horizons later released on Switch with a tedious crafting system (and terraforming), daily activities and rewards to work through and I was like… wtf is this? Where’s my chill village simulator and a bunch of quirky and adorable little freaks to surprise me and tell me off for being on it too long? An enduring feeling of playing Animal Crossing was that sometimes there was just… nothing to do, and certainly no expectations, but coupled with the music and shifting moods (from sunset to night time, rain to sun, autumn to winter), and your villagers going about their business, it was just a nice place to visit for a while. I feel like I’ve said all this before somewhere. Possibly here.

    Ooo, I did read that Mike Cook article and it was fascinating.

    Glad to see the little heart next to Super Cable Boy and Utopia Must Fall. I want to like Roto Force more than I do! Not sure whether it’s the controls, or how busy it gets, or both! That title screen music is so good though, but too damn short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tCXvjyXvfs

    I also saw you wishlist Proximate a while back and that trailer won me over instantly.

    @CA: I know of Troubleshooter and had no idea it ran that deep! Good lord.

    So my experience with metapuzzling is quite limited (no La Mulana, Fez or Tunic yet) but I really enjoyed Animal Well for the most part. The deeper I got down the well/rabbit hole, however, the more tedious, obtuse and, quite frankly, obnoxious it got. The ‘first layer’ of the game is great and has an early if slightly unfulfilling ending/off-ramp. I worked through the ‘second layer’, tying up most loose ends and getting a very pretty ending. That should have been my off-ramp… but I kept going. I’m really chuffed with how much I was able to work out with minimal help but the fruitless wandering and wondering burnt me out and regrettably tarnished the overall experience. Eventually I threw the towel in and watched a walkthrough to see what was expected of me and… good grief Billy Basso. There’s just no way. To give you a small example of how awful some of the later stuff can be: one screen requires you to brush your mouse pointer over some vines or shake the windowed game to reveal something in the background (which is a pretty neat effect, I’ve got to say). But, besides there being nothing to suggest there was anything behind those vines, I’d played the entire game on controller, and in fullscreen so no mouse pointer was visible anyway! Even when somebody told me there was something in that room I would never have discovered it without windowing the game. Animal Well is gorgeous and cool in so many ways but the late game is for a very particular type of obsessive player!

    I’m currently playing Isles of Sea and Sky and it’s delightful!

21. Hello I hadn’t meant to leave these chunky comments lie undisturbed for so long, but it was Christmas and I retreated from most of my Electron Dance operations.

    Matt: I have Can of Wormholes on my list to get back to. But your speakings on the subject of the great meta do give me pause.! Perhaps there’s an Electron Dance article in here after all – another piece of the puzzle pie I haven’t looked at.

    Gregg: ‘Your villagers were needy, transactional pricks.’ Perhaps a statement for the ages. Love this. Probably my second favourite critic mic drop of 2024 after ‘I’m a bird person, bitches.’

    I’m not very good at Roto Force, not good at all. I’m sure someone is, but it isn’t me. Super Cable Boy is a real… commitment. I’ll go back at some point but some of the levels are seizure-inducing as you don’t realise you’ve been working at 150% brain capacity for two hours straight largely on one level :S But it makes me feel GOOD despite the frustrations. God damn.

    What you’ve just said about ‘nothing to suggest there was anything behind those vines’ reminds me somewhat of the Yellow Paint piece I just wrote. Secrets need to be FOUND and there must be no HINTS. But after a while you’re just shooting randomly hoping you find something. That’s not exploration – that’s just as bad as loot box gambling, hoping you’ll unearth something through sheer luck.

22. It turns out that there was another layer to the meta stuff I was stuck on in Can of Wormholes, especially how to get to world 5. Which makes me feel a little foolish but also even madder. But I don’t want to get into it now, partly because you’re thinking of getting back to it… so maybe I can say something about what makes the meta puzzle in Stephen’s Sausage Roll so good. Most of which was not present for me in CoW. Going to try to not issue any real spoilers, but anyone who hasn’t played SSR and wants to go into one of the greatest moments in puzzle games completely fresh–which is a good idea–stop reading.

    OK, so I’ve talked about how I think The Great Tower sort of prepares you for the Big Moment (not the level name) because it forces you to do a lot of experimenting. And one thing about The Great Tower is IIRC you are likely to run across it fairly early in the island, look at it, say “No way in hell,” and then do other stuff. Until you have to do it eventually. And it’s pretty likely to brickwall you for a while, but you at least know it’s coming.

    Something like that happens for Big Moment. You encounter it, think “That’s obviously literally impossible” which it is, go do other stuff, come back, it’s still literally impossible, and when it’s the only thing you can do… something has changed in an obvious way, which doesn’t seem to make it less possible, but lets you know what you might need to work on. And then you fiddle around on this seemingly smooth featureless surface until you find a way in.

    And what’s more–this teaches you how to do something you’re going to keep using. The game didn’t have to teach it to you like this. There are other ways (OK this is a COMPLETE AND TOTAL SPOILER which is going in rot13, don’t read it unless you already know what I’m talking about): Yniryyr pbhyq unir znqr vg fb gung gur zrgn fnhfntr nccrnef haqre gur fgehpgher vafgrnq bs arrqvat gb or zbirq gurer orsber lbh fgneg gur yriry. But this was a great way to do it.

    A contrast I will talk about that one puzzle piece in The Cloud Bridge in Braid, which uses a trick that you never see again (or maybe it’s in the deep Easter egg stuff), and that seems cheap. And part of it is that Blow didn’t really have that many ideas for puzzles that used the mechanics in that world, since they basically amount to “platform in the normal way except you can rewind time to make difficult jumps.”

    Oh, and the Thing happens pretty deep into SSR. By the time you reach it you’ve done two-thirds of the puzzles I think? And of course when you need to solve it, it is very obvious that you have nothing else to do. This is related to a thing I wrote a bit of about why Celeste is better than Dustforce, because it enforces what is required of you. (I was sort of thinking of making a video about this and then I realized I do not want to make a video.)

    Other comments… the Animal Well thing is tough. Carl Muckenhoupt says the first two layers are gettable solo but the third has stuff that has to be a community project, like something that requires fifty players to share information. So it’s an ARG I guess. And what happens with an ARG when you aren’t part of the first community to solve it? But I guess it’s supposed to be a complete game without this? But games like this compel people to do Everything. IDK, this game seems like my sort of thing but no Mac port, alas.

    Have to say the name Super Cable Boy grinds my gears in a way that’s kind of like a collab. Can it not have a Super Meat Boy name? I don’t even like Super Meat Boy that much! Mostly because I don’t like walljumps and it’s made entirely out of walljumps, but also there’s all this stuff about “every intro screen is an allusion to a classic platformer! [holds up APPLAUSE sign]” and I haven’t played those games so that does nothing for me, so alluding to that doesn’t help either. But aside from that crankiness the game seems like my kind of thing! There’s a note on the Steam page saying it’s not compatible with Mac Catalina or above and I don’t know what’s up with that, it can’t possibly be 32 bit in this day and age.

23. Matt, I think I’m so numb to Super Whatever Thing that I hadn’t noticed the Super Meat Boy connection!

    Regarding Animal Well, that’s exactly it. Layers one and two are doable solo (though not without a lot of wandering which is when it started to fray for me) and beyond that is hell, which is at least other people. The fifty players puzzle is real and I knew somebody through a forum who was part of that first wave of Animal Well puzzle and secret busting and they were obsessed. I suspect if you’re not part of the community doing the busting then it’s off to walkthroughs and guides or a forum to ask for hints so… uh, yay? I did a little bit of collaboration on one relatively minor late game puzzle and the busting didn’t make me feel good, to be honest.

    @Joel: yeah, I’ve been mulling on this ever since I finished with Animal Well. Back in the day, my brother and I used to go around levels on Doom ‘humping the walls’ to find secrets. Similarly, when we were desperately stuck in adventure games we used to try ‘everything on everything’. It was just crapshooting. The Doomguy’s humping grunt is forever burnt into our minds though.

    I always think back to VVVVVV’s trinkets and the effect they had on me. Okay, there’s a trinket, how do I get to it? As a pure platformer it was often ‘simple’ enough to work out but doing it (the hard way) was the problem. As a puzzle game: solve the puzzle, silly. As a Metroidvania (blech), like Animal Well and Isles of Sea and Sky: do I have the right tools? I come back later, with all the tools. In the case of Isles of Sea and Sky: solve the puzzle, silly. With Animal Well… well, one tool alone opens up the possibility space so wide it becomes a bottomless chasm. There was one collectible I’d seen ages ago but had no idea how to get to it. Turns out (spoilers, rot13) gur tenff tebjvat va n arneol cynagre jnf n one pbqr naq arrqrq gb or fpnaarq gb tvir lbh n frevrf bs ahzoref juvpu pbeerfcbaqrq gb abgrf ba lbhe syhgr. Ugh! It’s clever, like the vines thing, but just crosses a line for me. I suppose I don’t like fourth wall-breaking ARG shenanigans; I prefer everything to be neatly contained and doable within the game itself.

    Speaking of, and on a less curmudgeonly note, I fully completed Isles of Sea of Sky the other day so I’m really chuffed with myself. Absolutely loved it from start to finish.

24. I was playing through the beginning of Can of Wormholes again to see how fair the metastuff is and how much is me overlooking something, and it struck me that a critical thing about weird mechanics that aren’t explicitly explained, which is most weird mechanics, is how much you are forced to play around with them. Like the way the worms move is weird, somehow like the way that snakebirds move is weird, and the way pipes roll is weird, and the way the sausage fork moves is weird. But you have to struggle around with it so much that you get used to it and you get used to the possibilities of nudging the worm in various ways. Allen Hazelden calls this “slime mechanics” I think, where your puzzle game involves slime and the way slime acts doesn’t make sense in any real-world sense so you just have to teach it to the player, and this is pretty much inevitable without exposing the source code. Even if you said “When you attempt to move the snakebird/worm into its own tail blah blah blah happens,” players wouldn’t get it without having to experiment. Which is part of the reason I think The Great Tower works, because it forces you to do a ton of stuff that gets you started understanding the way sausages work in the third dimension. And why Yugo Puzzle is so great, because gradually it becomes apparent that what look like a bunch of special rules are all manifestations of a single mechanic (that your move is slightly more complex than it seems at first).

    The flip side is a mechanic you need to know without constant experimentation. I had a bit of trouble with one of the main-puzzle parts of CoW here, where the mechanics of how and when you can flip pieces are not totally clear to me in a way that got me stuck in one puzzle, because you don’t flip pieces as much as you move the worm (or as much in Pipe Push Paradise, say). I don’t mean edge cases where there’s a particular thing you can do in one puzzle, you figure out you can do it, and that’s the puzzle. I mean things where you have to do something where it is both non-obvious that you can do it and that you need to do it, and it’s been long enough since you learned to do it that you’re likely to have forgotten you can.

    One of the nastiest cases I’ve met is a late-game Baba Is You bottleneck puzzle, where you have to do something convoluted to set up an effect that you’ve seen once before, maybe about five worlds ago. The sort of thing where when I gave up and looked at hints, I couldn’t understand how the solution worked until I tabbed through it step by step. Which was a lot harder because (as you observed with the story in Full Bore) a game like Baba Is You is going to be done in bits over a long time, and you’re going to forget things. And the metastuff I was stuck on in Can of Wormholes wound up being kind of like that at two removes. Verdict: Still cranky.

    I should say that CoW is a good puzzle game, it’s just that it takes to the extreme a lamentable trend of puzzle games over-egging their overworld, combined with a lamentable trend of needless enigmaticness. You might remember I had some static with Bonfire Peaks with the overworld puzzles, in particular one part where I got stuck on a basic maneuver with a two-by-one block (note that I am not standing one step further back), but even without that there was too much restacking blocks and the hidden parts tended to be too coy. CoW ramps that up and puts it in front of parts that are not optional, whatever that means.

    (Why am I more forgiving of Baba Is You here? Partly that the bottleneck was very late and mostly it just gave you its puzzles, and it had come after some meta stuff that was fair and cool. And partly because there was a solution I could look up and read, instead of having to beg in vain for help from a supercilious jerk on Discord and then spend about half an hour jumping around in video walkthroughs until I found the part I needed.)

25. But this does, to bring it back on topic, connect to my first impressions of Stray, which is: glyphs! One thing here is that it’s been a month since I’ve played, so I guess I didn’t find it so compelling, and I had stopped at the point where I met the robot that decodes things, but even before then I saw the glyphs and was like “Oh those are pretty much English! That one says ‘Ramen’!” Which was fine and I didn’t need it as a puzzle. But it seems like a kind of kid-friendlyish game that is meant to lead you through a series of experiences without being super challenging (I am told there is a chase sequence later which may break that but that seems more like ill-advised mechanics clash of the “don’t put action sequences in your point and click” variety), which can be fine because kitty, but also seems like not what The Indie Game That Is Getting Praised should be like.

    Anyway it opens with a sequence where you are exploring an environment with a bunch of other cats, and that was what made me think it could have been kitty Bernband, which would’ve been pretty cool. The autojumping isn’t a problem, I don’t need to be missing jumps as a cat, but it did have a jump prompt show up over every jumpable surface, which was a little annoying. Except that after that section it turned into something much more linear where it would’ve gotten pretty annoying to not realize that things were jumpable. So I’m going to link back to this from the yellow paint discussion. Or is this a Vault the Grave issue? Anyway.

26. Feather = Berdband. How did we not see this?