It hath arrived. My final stream for Thinky Games. It’s important to note I’m running on SATURDAY because I need the extra time to prepare twelve games in a single stream!
Circle the date on your calendars: Saturday 21 September. The stream kicks off at 9PM UK, 10PM CET, 4PM EST and Sunday 6AM Sydney. The Thinky Games Twitch channel can be found here: twitch.tv/thinkygames.
There will be tears, hugs and laughs, but without the tears and hugs. I’ll be going through another twelve games that are important to me, and giving approximately ten minutes to each title. There may be… a break or two.
This time I won’t be revealing any of the games in advance but you can always check the previous twelve to see what definitely isn’t on the menu…
I’ll add the videos for each part of the stream here as they get published.
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Excited to see what makes this final list! 🙂
Thanks cp! Hope it’s worth the wait 🙂
My prediction is that it’s just going to be 12 roguelites and you’ll introduce them all as roguelikes and matt will go into cardiac arrest
And I’ll yell as he goes down that this stream is a roguelikes because PERMADEATH motherfucker
It’s fine, he’ll be able to spend currency on permanent upgrades between runs. Just like in any roguelike worth its salt!
Matt will ❤️ these comments when he reads them
What even is a roguelite
Anyway I was thinking, when you say Witness-like, that could mean line-drawing puzzles which I call line-drawers, or it could mean stuff where you have to figure out the rules in a particular way which maybe we could call Understand-em-ups? I know CA already took line-em-up in the other thread but Understand-em-up names a game which is made entirely out of that part and also explicitly says what the game is about for the everyone who hasn’t played that game. And I was thinking, A Little To The Left is really a casual understand-em-up.
Hmm. Is Super Mario Brothers 1-1 an Understand em up? Is Captain Blood? Is not providing a manual a specific requirement? Same for tutorials? My inner contratian wants to say ‘but EVERY game is a -‘ (yes we get it, thank you IC for your valuable contribution) but I do sort of follow because working out how things worked was a core part of the Witness experience. I’m reluctant to credit Blow with the inventing the concept of learning however!
OK the straight answer here is that in the games I’m talking about, figuring out the rules is the challenge. Or the main challenge. Which is true for only half or so of The Witness, there are many puzzle sets which start by making the rule kind of inescapable, and then maybe running you through a couple corner cases, and then giving you puzzles where now that you understand the rules it’s hard to implement a particular solution.* Even in Understand there are ones where the solution is hard to work out even if you understand the rules perfectly, but there understanding the rules is like 90% of the game.
Which is why people compare Taiji to The Witness even though (I think) it has a different interface, it’s about clicking panels rather than drawing lines I believe. Oh the Taiji blurb has an excellent description of what I’m talking about: “It is always clear what the player must interact with in order to solve the puzzle, but it is never entirely clear what they must do.”
*And this is something I really don’t want to give Blow credit for inventing. Not to pick on the person I’m quoting but one IF author said The Witness “does a fantastic job of starting off simple and then throwing more and more complicated variations on the same basic idea at you. (Really, I can’t think of another game that does this so well. If you like puzzle games, you should go play The Witness. Seriously.)” and this comment kind of mystified me because it describes almost every puzzle game in the post-manual era. Games like Stephen’s Sausage Roll are distinctive because they don’t do this, and even they do this (like there’s a level near the start point that while tricky is also teaching you about two constantly recurring grill patterns, though one of the mean things is that it’s more or less random whether you first stumble into this level or Lachrymose Head). This has been another chapter of “So many people are so enthusiastic about this aspect of The Witness that they’re surely not all wrong, but I am really not seeing the thing that they’re talking about.”
ahhhhhhhhh they can’t keep getting away with this
“each journey is a series of choices, based on what you’ll be rewarded with when you’ve finished the accompanying twin-stick combat battles… you choose nodes based on the upgrades you prefer. You might pick something that’ll get you extra gold, used to buy better upgrades during runs, or one that will ensure you get to improve an aspect of your current school” is that a skill tree? a level select mechanism? I feel like the map is an important part of the Spirelike experience but that’s because it is considerably slimmed down from roguelikes where moving and fighting are on the same map, Slice & Dice is a Spirelike with no branching at all (admittedly this is a term I made up but that means I get to use it how I like)
John Walker how could you
Anyway in that last Leap Year puzzle just after I dipped in and out of the stream, can you jump on the second guy’s head and then walkfall across? Maybe you were trying that. I don’t see how you’d get back though. (Alas I cannot play that game.)
All 13 streamed games and two bonus videos have now been added!
Sorry I’ve not been replying to your messages, Matt. Been trying to get all these Thinky videos out and keep my sanity.
No worries, I never want you to feel pressured to respond you know! I just like talking.
However since that reply has renewed my Commenting License, I do have an observation on the topic of the post. I just replayed Patrick’s Parabox in part because I realized I didn’t have a save on this computer and I wanted to be able to listen to the soundtrack–have I mentioned that the music is so good–and the game’s generosity of spirit comes out not only in things like the cheerful atmosphere and permissive unlocks but in the whole idea of the puzzles. It is very common for puzzle games to hit you with a screen where you say “wow that’s impossible” and then after much super difficult struggle you figure out how to do it and say “wow that was amazing.” Patrick’s Parabox often pulls this off without the super difficult struggle. You look at something that doesn’t seem to make sense and then realize you already understood it.
Speaking of Snakebird*, it’s currently free on the EGS** store.
This is dangerous information.
* Well not really but
** More like EGGS store, eh, readers?
I think I shared this on BS and Masty recently although who knows if anyone will pick it up.
More like ‘peck it up’, eh, readers?
I did, based on interest from all your praise of SB over the years. 🙂