A completist plays old games
Here’s something new and really cool that became my obsession for a few days last week and which I’ve been mulling over ever since. At heart, 0PLAYER is a game about sliding tiles around on a grid to form connections between things, according to mechanics you discover over the course of the game, solving mini-puzzles […]
As usual, I picked up a bunch of cheap stuff in the still-ongoing seasonal Steam sale. Mostly things that are pretty cheap normally, but which I nonetheless just threw on my wishlist until their cheapness hit “sure, why not” level. And of these things, the one I’ve found the most interesting is (the) Gnorp Apologue. […]
I recently saw Environmental Station Alpha (2015) mentioned alongside the likes of Tunic and Animal Well for its secret puzzle layer. At first blush, it comes off as just a standard retro-styled metroidvania set in a deserted space station, like many others, and allegedly it can be played to a conclusion without contradicting that assumption. […]
The first mission (of fifteen) in Cryo’s Ubik is taken from the novel, more or less. That is, it’s about going to a kibbutz in Topeka and recruiting a powerful psychic named Pat Conley to work for Runciter Associates (the protagonist’s employer) before the Hollis Corporation, Runciter’s rival, gets to her. But the bit where […]
I recently chanced upon a post that reminded me that Cryo Interactive, the outfit best known for making loads of CD-ROM adventure games in the 1990s, once also made a game based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Ubik, and that I have a copy that I’ve barely played. On my first pass, I never even […]
Here’s a recent game that I happened across in a list of recent games written in Godot. I bought it on a whim because it was cheap, and reasonably short, and it put me in mind of the sorts of weird little indie experiments I used to post about a lot here. At first, it […]
Blue Prince has a lot of repeated iconography. The holly leaf with three berries, the crescent moon with a circular hole in it. The shapes that are symbols of the various nations. But the most mysterious of its symbols is the spiral. There are four handwritten notes you can find (only three of which I’ve […]
Heavy plot spoilers for Blue Prince ahead. But be aware that I still haven’t finished the later post-game parts and everything I say about the story should be taken with a grain of salt. It must be said: The whole idea of a will with strange conditions attached to it, especially conditions in the form […]
The very first time I heard about Blue Prince, it was from a social media post by Andrew Plotkin, in which he stated that he didn’t feel the need to write a blog post about it because everyone else was doing that. It’s basically this year’s Animal Well — and not just in the sense […]
So, yeah, I’ve dropped into a months-long silence once again. There is a reason for this: I have been making a game. An indie puzzle game, but one that I intend to fill out to the point where I can in good conscience ask people to give me money for it. I’ll have more to […]