This week’s Thinky Stream is a little different. On Friday, 9 February, I’ll be talking through twelve games that are important to me. I’m streaming for two hours: that’s one game every ten minutes. One of them is Snakebird and perhaps you can make some guesses at some of the others – but I hope there will be the occasional surprise.

The stream kicks off at 9PM UK, 10PM CET, 4PM EST and Saturday 8AM Sydney. The Thinky Games Twitch channel can be found here: twitch.tv/thinkygames.

I’ll add the videos for each part of the stream here as they get published.

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11 thoughts on “Thinky Stream: Twelve Games I Love

  1. Ahhh I missed that this was happening! Looks great, I will have to make some time to watch it (this is a big statement from me, given how I feel about videos).

    I am going to guess that one of the games is Kairo.

  2. Yes, well done, Matt. The 2+ hour stream is being broken into a separate video for each game. I’m (hopefully) putting one out on the Thinky Games channel a day.

  3. I can still watch the whole thing on Twitch though! I think it will be more fun than having the individual games broken out in spoilery fashion.

  4. Lol I have spent so much time pressing Z in Snakebird. The “undo” key is the backspace!

  5. The good ol’ “Open up Lachrymose Head as the first level” Stephen’s Sausage Roll maneuver

    (I missed the stream but I can leave Twitchesque comments here)

  6. Yeah, Stephen starts you near three levels, two of which teach lessons that will become second nature by the time you play for long. And the third…

  7. OH I HAD A BIG INSIGHT ABOUT STEPHEN’S SAUSAGE ROLL THAT I NEED TO SHARE AND THIS IS THE PLACE TO DO IT

    In the stream someone said that The Great Tower is one of the game’s two missteps (which is wrong anyway, it’s Ferry Plateau and a bit of the delivery of The Backbone) but I realized why The Great Tower is necessary. The Great Tower is a huge blocker of course and it looks completely impossible and takes a lot of effort, which is a gradual process of figuring out several new rules and what you can do with them and making some gradual progress. As Pippa Warr said:
    I started tinkering with it and worked out how to cook a single sausage. From there I could cook four sausages. Then I worked out how to cook a sausage on the higher level of grill pads. Now I’m alternating between fiddling and contemplating.
    And as I said once, The Great Tower isn’t a great level once you know the mechanisms involved. [Pippa’s review is linked there, not linked here so I can stealth around the spam filter] The level is a huge mess, and the reason it’s a huge mess is to make you experiment and learn the mechanisms.

    OK, so this is the insight part: Why does The Great Tower give you this great mess that you have to experiment with to figure out how to do anything? Because later on you will encounter a smooth surface that seems to give you absolutely nothing to experiment with let alone make progress with. And you will have to experiment to see where the openings for experimentation are. And if you don’t do that kind of experimentation back at the Great Tower when you could see some of the effects it was having, you won’t be prepared to do the kind of experimentation you’ll need then.

    In short (rot13ed although we all know what I’m talking about), vs lbh pna’g ybir zr ng zl terng gbjre, lbh qba’g qrfreir zr ng zl qrnq raq.

  8. Okay, I have a couple of minutes.

    I don’t know if I can agree, Mr. Matt. “Why does The Great Tower give you this great mess that you have to experiment with to figure out how to do anything? Because later on you will encounter a smooth surface that seems to give you absolutely nothing to experiment with let alone make progress with.”

    I can’t help thinking that several puzzle games lay on this kind of trick, present you with something demanding, then walk away and leaving you to figure it out. But the Tower seems such a leap that I think it kills so many players at that moment. I don’t have the stats, of course, but I feel like it’s just too vertical a climb at this point.

    Even if that was smoothed a little, I think no player would throw in the towel on Dat Other Level U Mention. It’s too far in, too enticingly simple, you will keep going. But the Tower? It’s feels pretty early. I wouldn’t promote this to other puzzle designers as a course to follow.

    Perhaps it’s a player filter. Sure, let’s go for that. It’s a filter. But is it a necessary filter?

    At the end of the day, SSR is what it is. I wouldn’t change a hair on its head. I wouldn’t want a remake to shuffle around a few levels here and there. There are aspects I perceive as flaws in an otherwise perfect game. But I wouldn’t change it for the world.

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