Category: Videogames

Apologies if you think I included a huge spoiler in my screenshot for this post, but I don’t think it spoils anything on its own (I never figured out what it means!) and it was thematically appropriate.

I still think that Blue Prince is a brilliant game. The only thing that’s changed since my last take is that I continued with a few more in-game days after the end credits rolled, and my thoughts changed from the excitement of “I’m just getting started!!!” to a much more sanguine “That was very good, but I’m done now.”

A significant part of that is because I only have a moderate tolerance for puzzle-solving. There’s a definite boundary where it stops being “a fun challenge” and turns into “a tedious slog,” and I comfortably hit that point. I know that there are many players who consider the end credits to be just the start of the “real” game, and the prospect of using clues scattered across dozens of sources, deciphering anagrams and diagrams across multiple stages, each puzzle unlocking a part of the next, is extremely satisfying. But I spoiled myself by reading the full solution to one of the game’s puzzles, and I could immediately tell it wasn’t for me.

That’s not at all a criticism. One of the many ingenious aspects of Blue Prince‘s puzzle design, and one that I never appreciated while I was playing, is that it gracefully provides multiple exit points for players. There’s a clear, straightforward goal presented at the game’s beginning, and once you’ve achieved that goal, you get the end credits. It’s reassurance that yes, you can keep uncovering more details if you like, but if not, then you’ve had a complete experience.

An equally significant part of why the end game stopped being interesting to me, is exactly the same reason the start of the game was so overwhelmingly compelling: it’s a roguelike.

At the start, the possibility space is infinitely huge, so structuring the game around a random number generator is an elegant way to focus. You can’t possibly do everything yet, so here’s a set of things that you can focus on for this go-round. There’s almost never a time limit on anything, so you can relax and divide-and-conquer your way towards solving as many puzzles as you like.

It’s kind of a shame that conversation around the game has polarized into opposite camps of “the RNG sucks and was a terrible design choice!” or “it’s not randomness, it’s strategy, and you just need to get good!” Neither take is entirely accurate.

In addition to focusing your attention on the subset of problems you can solve today, the fact that the game resets at the end of each in-game day means (paradoxically) that you’re never losing process or getting completely stuck. Red room penalties don’t carry over, you’re never permanently punished for a bad placement of a room, and any bad situation you get yourself into will last only until you decide to call it a day. Plus, learning how to mitigate the randomness is a key part of the strategy — there’s a reason that most players are eventually able to reach room 46, which wouldn’t be the case if it were actually completely random, or if you were like Sisyphus cursed to have all of your work completely undone at the end of each day.

But insisting that it’s just part of the strategy does nothing to change the fact that there undeniably are diminishing returns from the game’s model. There’s still plenty to do after the credits roll, but it’s significantly less than at the game’s start. The longer you play, the more likely it is that you know exactly what you want to accomplish, but the game simply prevents you from being able to do it until you have an unusually lucky run through the house.

Customarily, you’re supposed to wait until you’ve finished, or at least made significant progress with a game before you share your opinions about it. But even at my best, I’m still really bad at video games, and after a long stretch of not playing much of anything other than sims and turn-based strategy games, my already-unimpressive skills have atrophied.

Which all goes to say that I’m only barely into Blendo Games’s brilliant new Skin Deep. In fact, after struggling through a mission over several attempts and finally barely just making it through, the game showed me its opening credits sequence, making it clear that I’d been proud of myself for surviving through what was still the tutorial.

That’s bad, because I’m impatient and want to keep on discovering more of what the game has to show, since it seems to keep showing me new, weird things. And it’s also good, because I’d rather my experience with the game last as long as possible. I keep seeing people online giving their impressions after finishing the game (which has only been out a couple of days), and I kind of feel bad for them, because they’re done while I get to keep feeling like every story development is a monumental achievement on my part.

I haven’t even been to wonky space yet!

Anyway, Skin Deep is a game where you play as Nina Pasadena, an agent for an insurance company who’s tasked with infiltrating spaceships that have been captured by pirates, freeing the crew of cats who’ve been taken hostage, and then delivering everyone to safety. It’s a bit like Die Hard reimagined as a sci-fi slapstick comedy.

When you free one of the cat hostages, it leaps out of its cage as the word MEOW appears on screen in huge letters, with a drawn-out male voice saying “Meeeooow.” Because the overriding design ethos of the game is to be incessantly weird, funny, and delightful.

Skin Deep‘s narrative designer and writer, Laura Michet, wrote a great blog post about the team’s approach to comedy in the game, which I haven’t yet read in full because it contains spoilers. But it’s immensely gratifying to read an account of an entire team being so fully in sync when it comes to sense of humor and comedic sensibility, especially when you’ve seen how well it pays off.

Most of the games I’ve worked on have been comedic, but of the “battering the player senseless with jokes” variety, in the hopes that a good enough percentage of them will land. The highest achievement in that style of game, in my opinion, is when you manage to make the player an active participant in making the joke: when you can put all the pieces into place so that they get the setup, and then hand it over to them to deliver the punchline. Where you’re not just looking at the camera and saying, “Get it?!” but setting up a situation where the player has to get it before reaching the next step.

When it works, it’s sublime. And it feels like it’s the basis for the entirety of Skin Deep. It is relentlessly clever, but the core of your interaction with the game is taking a bunch of the components of physical comedy and then making them work together. Your only tools for fighting pirates are banana peels and bars of soap, empty cans of tuna or soda, copious boxes of pepper to make them sneeze, or a lighter paired with highly flammable deodorant or hand sanitizer. Your reward is popping the head off of a (still-living) pirate and tossing it in the trash, flushing it down a toilet, or throwing it out of an open airlock.

People who’ve played previous Blendo Games will recognize locations and characters from the entire catalog, most notably Gravity Bone, Thirty Flights of Loving, and Flotilla. More than that, they’ll recognize what Christopher Donlan points out in his review for Eurogamer: a clear and confident voice. Skin Deep doesn’t just have all the signifiers that it belongs in the “Blendoverse,” but feels like the culmination of years of experiments in style and design and presentation, testing the limits of how games can remain fully interactive while telling stories that feel cinematic.

The tutorial has several of the jump cuts that defined Thirty Flights of Loving, which I honestly think work better in theory than in practice, and also dozens of clever ways to deliver exposition and advance the narrative. A speaking character will have a spotlight cast on him while the rest of the room goes dark. Images describing what he’s talking about will be projected on the walls and swirl around the room. A slideshow projector will fly into your room to deliver a holographic message. Tutorials are administered via Google Cardboard-style VR glasses. You’ll witness a significant plot point by navigating a zero-gravity shipwreck, and then be able to fly through a Bond movie-style credits sequence.

It’s all kind of breathtaking, how far it goes to deliver an experience without ever wrenching control away from the player. All while maintaining a tone that’s confidently goofy and silly without being corny, predictable, and meme-like. Instead of telling you a funny and imaginative story, it wants you to be an active participant in telling it.

Even if you’re really bad at telling it, like I am. And even there, the slapstick keeps it on the fun side of frustrating. As I’m trying to stealthily take down a pirate, only to end up jumping on his shoulders, bashing his head into a washing machine, slipping on the suds and falling to the ground, getting shot as I’m trying to stand back up, only to have the shock from my auto-defibrillator be what ultimately knocks out my target, I’m spending the whole time thinking not I am an all-powerful master assassin, but Okay but I have to admit that this is a pretty good gag.

My obsession of the moment is Blue Prince, the outstanding first¹In that it’s the first release of their own original concept, as opposed to making work for other studios game from the studio Dogubomb, written, designed, and directed by Tonda Ros. It’s been getting a ton of attention and buzz from video game fans, in addition to several perfect reviews calling it one of the best games ever made, and I think the praise is entirely deserved.

The premise is that you’ve been named in your great uncle’s will to inherit his magnificent estate Mount Holly. As with most fictional wills, there’s one significant stipulation: you have to find the secret 46th room in the 45-room manor. Each night, all of the rooms leading from the entrance hall shift position, and the house never has the same layout twice. As an additional complication, you have to start each day’s attempt fresh, keeping nothing from your previous days apart from the things you’ve learned in your exploration.²With several exceptions that are all, like everything else in this game, thoughtfully designed.

My first couple of hours of playing, I wasn’t going for an optimal strategy so much as I was marveling at how many different types of game they’d managed to blend together. What if Myst and Riven were roguelikes? What if Betrayal at House on the Hill created a real 3D environment that you could move around, picking up pieces of environmental storytelling? What if a traditional inventory-based adventure game added the layer of making you responsible for placing the rooms containing puzzles and the rooms containing their solutions?

The initial experience is the best kind of overwhelming. Rooms are filled with enigmatic photographs and drawings that suggest every single detail might be a necessary clue for later on. I happily pulled out a notebook — which I never do in games, insisting “that’s what computers are for!” — and began furiously documenting everything. The photo library on my phone is now overflowing with screenshots of book pages and other documents found in the game. Some are probably useful for a puzzle later on, many are probably only there to establish the game’s lore and world-building.

In fact, that feeling of drowning in clues is the only criticism I have of the game so far.³Apart from some issues that I’ve heard affect colorblind players, most of which seem like they could be addressed in a future patch. The game is very good at communicating its clues for puzzles, but not as good at communicating when or where the clues can be applied. And because the available rooms are semi-randomized, and the layout is up to the player’s discretion, there’s a disorienting sense that you’re missing opportunities to solve puzzles, or you’re wasting time going around in circles.

For me, the most anxiety-inducing case of this was with the pairs of related drawings that appear in most rooms. It was obvious that they had some significance, and it was straightforward enough to figure out how to decipher them. The game has copious hints to help you decipher them, but I was left at a loss trying to figure out how and where to apply them. I spent multiple rooms through the house trying out the permutations to find a connection, convinced that I was losing progress each time I had to reset. My husband, who’s usually better at puzzles than I am, figured it out quickly, and he gave me exactly the nudge I needed without spoiling it for me outright. (In case you’re in the same boat I was: notice that the rooms can change based on their placement in the house itself, not just based on their placement in relation to each other).

And as it turns out, if I’d been patient, I would’ve eventually encountered the room that explains how to solve the puzzle. I was thankful that I’d gotten a hint that let me feel like I’d figured it out mostly by myself, instead of the outright explanation given by the game. But the larger lesson was clear: even though the game’s premise can make it feel like overwhelming chaos, there’s a very thoughtful and carefully-designed curve of progression through it.

I reached the end credits of the game last night, after 20 in-game days and, according to Steam, around 20 hours of real-time play. I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that there is still a ton left to explore, puzzles I still haven’t solved, areas of the estate I haven’t yet opened, blueprints I haven’t yet placed in the house, and parts of the story I haven’t yet uncovered. Considering how I’ve never been a completionist, even before I got old and more precious with my free time, it’s a testament to how well the game is made that I’m still eager to dive back in and see everything.⁴Although I was feeling very proud and smart and accomplished for reaching the end goal last night, and then on my first subsequent day, almost immediately built myself into a corner and had to end the run embarrassingly early.

But even if the game had ended on its end credits, it was extremely satisfying. Not just a cleverly-constructed game, but a surprisingly engaging story, with an ending that felt moving because I’d been allowed to make all the necessary connections myself. It really is a masterpiece.

Here are some high-level, non-spoiler ideas to keep in mind if you’re planning to play the game or are still early in it, things that I wish I’d known that would’ve calmed my tendency to meta-game it:

• Be patient and trust that the game will keep revealing new things.
• When placing rooms, try to build out as much of the lower “ranks” as possible in the south of the house to build up your resources, before working your way up to the goal at the north end.
• Whenever it’s possible without building yourself into a dead end, always favor placing a blueprint that you’ve never seen before.
• Don’t forget to go outside! (Useful for both in game and out of game).

I’ve got more thoughts about the game that might veer into mild spoiler territory, so I’d avoid reading the rest of this post if you haven’t yet reached the end credits of the game and want to discover everything completely fresh.

• 1
  In that it’s the first release of their own original concept, as opposed to making work for other studios
• 2
  With several exceptions that are all, like everything else in this game, thoughtfully designed.
• 3
  Apart from some issues that I’ve heard affect colorblind players, most of which seem like they could be addressed in a future patch.
• 4
  Although I was feeling very proud and smart and accomplished for reaching the end goal last night, and then on my first subsequent day, almost immediately built myself into a corner and had to end the run embarrassingly early.

I already gave my initial impressions of Civilization 7 after completing the first “age” in my first game. That was mostly in reaction to all the negative comments I’d been hearing about the new installment, and how much I disagreed with them. Even after decades of seeing game fans overreact to everything, with grown adults perpetually losing their shit over the most minor inconveniences, I still haven’t learned that the stuff video game people say online only ever has the barest connection to our shared reality.

My initial impression was that the game does have several issues, ones that can and hopefully will be fixed in patches and expansions. But at its core, it’s still got the feel of the best Civilization installments, letting you grow a huge empire and compelling you to keep taking one more turn until you’ve lost entire days to it.

And after losing a couple of days to it, I’ll stand by that take. It’s pretty good.

It’s still a little “mushy” in the mid game and end game, where I felt like I was pulling a lot of levers and flipping a lot of switches (figuratively), but didn’t have a clear idea of what my goals were or how to achieve them. The game straight-up fails to give you the information you need in a way that’s useful. It’s not just a lack of tooltips; even going to the Civilopedia to look up a concept usually gave me no idea of how to do it in game.

I’m guessing that’s an issue they were aware of, since each age starts by having you choose a single advisor to give you MMORPG quest chain-style goals that remain on screen at all times. Theoretically, this would focus all of your efforts while playing, but in my game at least, there wasn’t enough info. I was told to go for the “rail tycoon victory,” with an indication of how many points I’d achieved so far, but no indication of what actually generates the points.

That also has the side-effect of making the ends of ages anti-climactic. Even if you choose to focus on one goal, the others remain active (of course). By the end of my game, I had focused everything onto the space race. Ideally this would’ve meant a big transition for my civilization in which I had to set up supply chains and technology trees and the like, but really it just meant finding the one city that had the highest production value in my civ, starting a single project, and then hoping it finished before anyone else did. And while I was waiting, I assigned projects to my other cities, and “accidentally” achieved the economic victory on some random turn when a city finished a factory or something. I’m still not sure exactly what triggered the victory, since I just got a mostly-static victory screen and a game over.

I think this ties into my even bigger problem with the game, which is the choice to separate leaders from civilizations, and divide every game of Civilization 7 into three distinct ages. I have a sense of why I believe it was done: I think it was intended to impose some kind of semi-realistic narrative structure onto the game, instead of every game being hours and hours of repetitive game mechanics.

And it’s ironic that I think it backfired completely: by imposing a narrative structure onto the game instead of trying to encourage the narrative to fall out of the mechanics, it feels even less capable of emergent narratives than the previous installments were.

Civilization 7 has been getting some pretty dreadful buzz around the internet, and I was happy to hear it. I’ve got a life to lead, and I can’t be devoting it to a huge time-suck on the scale of the Civilization games, so I’d have been glad to skip it. Civ 6 never really clicked for me, so maybe the series and I could finally have an amicable break-up.

Besides, even if all the bugs and UI issues that I’d been hearing about were fixed, there are still basic design decisions that sounded horrible to me. In particular, the two most fundamental design changes: separating the game into three distinct ages, and separating the leaders from the civilizations. If there’s one thing that makes this series, it’s the novelty of having, e.g. George Washington lead the United States from ancient pre-history into the space age. A Civilization game without that feels like a Sims game without plumbobs or kitchen fires.

But the problem is that it’s really pretty. I actually loved the cartoonish character designs of Civ 6¹And as I’ve said before: Civ 6’s version of Phillip II of Spain can get it., so I didn’t need them to go more photo-realistic with the art direction, but I think they struck a really good balance with the new look. It’s stylized enough for the characters to have personality, but in environments that are overall realistic enough that they feel more like a world map than a play set.

I figured that to get around my FOMO, I’d just go back and play Civilization 5 again, since it’s probably my favorite in the series.²Or maybe 3, since it was the installment that really got me hooked. That — unsurprisingly — backfired, since it ate up most of a day and just put me in the mindset of wanting to play the latest and greatest.

• 1
  And as I’ve said before: Civ 6’s version of Phillip II of Spain can get it.
• 2
  Or maybe 3, since it was the installment that really got me hooked.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is gloves-down the most delightful experience I’ve had playing a game in years. Even by Mario standards, it’s over-stuffed with surprises and moments that had me laughing out loud just from an unnecessarily over-the-top secret discovery.

There was one addition, though, that seemed out-of-place with the franchise, and I wasn’t sure it would work. Throughout the levels, there are flowers that talk to you as your character passes by, in plain, unaffected English¹Or whatever language you’re playing in, I’m assuming.. They comment on what’s happening, give clues to things you might have missed, or just give you a bit of encouragement before you’re about to pull off a difficult stunt.

Todd Martens has a nice column in The Los Angeles Times about the game, where he says the flowers serve as a recurring source of encouragement and a reminder of the healing power of play. They serve as kind of a bridge between the game and the player, reminding us to appreciate the joyous details the game keeps throwing at us:

I’ve returned, for instance, throughout my playthrough to an early level featuring a bounty of Piranha Plants, those chomping, polka-dotted, Mario-biting flora that have long been a staple of the series. Only here, they walk, and at one point in the level can break into song. “They’re singing!” exclaims our flower pal, and indeed they are, with a high-pitched, childlike voice. […] It’s an easy, early level, but I revisit it because it never fails to make me smile, and it serves as a reminder that the so-called ordinary is often extraordinary if we’re willing to pay attention.

He’s absolutely right about the Piranha Plants On Parade level, which is a highlight of the entire 40-year series of Mario games, and which warrants a replay any time you’re feeling even a little bit down.

But the Mario games have always been about fun and surprisingly delightful moments. One of the things that sets Wonder apart is that it’s all about discovering those moments, even more than skill. There’s no timer in the standard levels, for one thing. As a result, there’s a sense that they’re more about exploration than just completion.

• 1
  Or whatever language you’re playing in, I’m assuming.

When I was a freshman in college, I was trying to make a point in English Literature class by comparing a character to Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. The teacher of the class casually responded that she didn’t get the comparison because she’d never read The Catcher in the Rye. I remember feeling an all-new-for-me combination of disappointment, condescension, and pity that to this day I hope didn’t show on my face.

To be clear: I wouldn’t have that reaction now. While the book influenced me a ton when I read it¹As a teenager, which is exactly when you’re supposed to read it for maximum effect, there’s no reason to suspect it would even appeal to a lot of readers, much less that it would have the same impact for most people that it did on me²If I remember correctly, sobbing at the beginning of Chemistry class for reasons I could not explain. But as a smug seventeen year old, I knew with an unshakeable conviction that the book was a modern classic that should be required reading for anyone who claimed to be at all literate.

I mention all that for two reasons: first, I feel like the “video game community” as a whole, as much as it can agree on anything, would agree that The Legend of Zelda series has a similar position of reverence and importance for video games as an art form.

Second, in all my years of playing video games, I’ve never been able to finish a Zelda game. And I suspect that kind of admission would trigger the same feeling of disappointment and pity in a lot of players.

But! In a new development, I’ve just finished my first entry in the series. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, which was originally for the GameBoy. It’s the one game in the series that I have bought three times: the original, the GameBoy Color version, and the Switch remake³For the record, I played and finished it on the Switch version after my GBC save game got corrupted.
I’ve been told several times over the years that it’s a perfect introduction not just to Zelda but to RPGs in general, since it’s compact compared to the mainline games but still feels like a moderately epic My First Adventure.

I’ve got to object to the idea that this is a Baby Game for Babies, though. The story is quite juvenile, but the puzzles are baffling, and the boss fights are infuriating. Combined with the other Zelda games I’ve played, it makes it clear what really is the defining aspect of this series: instead of being RPGs that have been streamlined and had more arcadey elements added, like I’d always believed, they’re actually arcade⁴However that’s defined at the time action games that borrow thematic elements from RPGs. I’m sure I’m not the first person to point out that Link’s Awakening is structured more like a Metroid game than like any other RPG I’ve ever seen.

There were several times that I had to consult a walkthrough, and I rarely felt as if the solution was something I would’ve figured out if I’d had more patience. More often than not, it was arbitrary — like the sleeping powder is the only thing that will work against this particular enemy, even though there’s nothing that telegraphs that — and I would need a kid’s patience and endless free time to experiment with solutions until I stumbled onto the right one.

More often than that, though, I had figured out what the solution for a dungeon room or a boss fight was, but I couldn’t execute on it. There are repeated puzzles where you have to drive a moving walkway to fill in a bottomless pit to “solve” the room. It’s extremely clever the first time you encounter it, but by the time you have to do it the third time, it’s asking you to fill up an entire room with extremely fiddly controls with no margin for error.

With the boss fights, it was the Mario-inspired standard, repeated over and over again: it wasn’t enough to figure out the solution, but you had to do the same thing several times. Unlike Mario, it rarely required only three hits, but demanded you keep doing it long past the point it became interesting or satisfying.

Now, my objections to this game are largely the result of being a 52-year-old man (who tends to play (and occasionally make) graphic adventure games) bouncing off of a 30-year-old GameBoy game. But looking back at the other Zelda games that I’ve started with high expectations but have never quite been engaged enough to finish, I can see what they all have in common, regardless of scope, and that’s that they’re not really my thing.

I respect the whole aesthetic a ton. The Legend of Zelda series has some of the best music of any video game. The game loop is so elegant and ingenious that it’s a marvel to anybody interested in game design. I can understand why people love these games. And now I can understand why I always start out eager to love them, but bounce off of them a few hours in.

(And to be clear, I’ve played a ton of these games, trying over and over again to find the one that I can appreciate as much as everyone else seems to. I’ve tried every mainline entry since Ocarina of Time, gone back to A Link to the Past, and tried most of the portable entries. Breath of the Wild‘s weapon durability mechanic annoyed me enough that I wasn’t interested in continuing, and I haven’t bothered with Tears of the Kingdom).

Maybe I’m being overly generous to myself, but this feels like a double victory. Not only did I finally finish a Zelda game — and I hardly ever finish any games these days — but I feel like I can finally ignore the conventional wisdom and acknowledge that even outstanding games might not be suited for everyone who loves video games.

• 1
  As a teenager, which is exactly when you’re supposed to read it for maximum effect
• 2
  If I remember correctly, sobbing at the beginning of Chemistry class for reasons I could not explain
• 3
  For the record, I played and finished it on the Switch version after my GBC save game got corrupted
• 4
  However that’s defined at the time