Indie Games

Bastion – Critical Miss #35

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“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

A Safe Place Amongst the Ruins

When I first got my PS4 in 2014, I had already been devouring gaming content on the internet and was aware of some of the big indie games. Super Meat Boy, Nuclear Throne, Fez–hell, I had already played Cave Story on my 3DS by then–all these games I was super excited to play once I got my shiny new console. Only thing is, I never finished any of them. Call it decision paralysis, but I bought so many games when I first got the console that I spent maybe an hour in each of these games before moving on to something else. Another game I bought right around the same time was Bastion, the indie darling of 2011, and first game made by now legendary developer, Supergiant Games. I liked Bastion enough from what I played of it, but nothing about it really grabbed me and pulled me in. Looking back, I’m not sure why, because Bastion is truly a special game. And, well, every proper blog is supposed to start at the beginning…

A narrator introduces the main character as he wakes up in a bed on a chuck of floor floating in the sky. The character is only ever referred to as the Kid–in a very Blood Meridian way–and the narrator speaks of the Calamity that has broken up and wiped out most of the city you live in, Caelondia. They speak of the Bastion, the place your people have agreed to meet at in times of trouble, and you head out for it. As you do, fragments of ground will suddenly fly up to create a path in front of your feet. The visuals of Bastion are immediately striking. The game uses hand-drawn art–a staple of Supergiant’s games–and it is all extremely detailed, vividly colorful, and absolutely gorgeous. The art helps make everything in the game interesting to look at, but mixed with the isometric camera, I found it hard to tell where the edges of the world was and often fell off due to it. That is a common problem with any isometric game, but the insane lushness of the art only made determining what was a safe piece of land to stand on harder. Luckily, falling off the edge of the world is only penalized with a second of wasted time as you fall back on the level and a small bit of damage being taken. Like the art, the music in the game is also great. An interesting mix of twangy folk, fuzzy and distorted rock, and trippy hip hop beats–my favorite track in the game being “Brusher Patrol.”

The short journey to the Bastion will take the player through a tutorial level where you can get a feel for the combat and the isometric view of the game, all while the narrator comments on the player’s actions and provides small details about the world around you. Once you reach the Bastion, the Kid meets the narrator himself, an old man named Rucks, and is informed that to rebuild and repower the Bastion, the Kid will have to adventure out into the world to collect cores. The game is broken up into rather short levels, all with unique visuals and gimmicks to them. Of course, there are enemies to fight through in order to get to the Core you’ve come to find. Be them wild creatures, members of the Gasfellow race, or soldiers from the enemy Ura people, the Kid must get through them all in order to get what he came for in hopes of saving his community. 

The combat in the game is serviceable–nothing amazing, but it doesn’t do anything wrong either–but the game shines with the variety of weapons and the customizability offered to the player. Weapons are divided into melee and long range weapons, all varied with how they handle, and all with different strengths and weaknesses. You can also learn special techniques that can help in battle. Some of these require certain weapons to perform, while others are agnostic, like the ability to summon a Squirt to fight alongside you or throw grenades. Weapons can be upgraded once a Forge is built in the Bastion and they can be swapped around to choose a loadout at an Arsenal in the Bastion or in a level. 

Building structures in the Bastion is what the Cores are used for in the game. There are six buildings to create and they all aid the player in levels. Passive perks can be equipped at the Distillery, items can be bought at the Lost and Found, the Memorial gives the player objectives to complete in the game for rewards, and the Shrine allows the player to pray to different gods. Doing this will give the player more exp and money in levels, but also adds a difficulty modifier to the game. Enemies may hit harder or move fast, they might leave little bombs behind that explode a second after they die, or the Kid’s movement speed might be reduced if hit. This difficulty system is really interesting due to its tactileness, how it allows the player to change up the game feel as they see fit and benefit from it. The Shrine mechanic tied with the customizability of weapons and loadouts add a ton of replayability to the game.

But, as much as I am a mechanics driven player, gameplay isn’t everything. Supergiant Games has been constantly praised for making games with not only satisfying gameplay, but engaging and emotional storytelling, and it clearly started here with Bastion. 

Along his travels, the Kid will meet a couple survivors and bring them back to the safety of the Bastion. They are from the Ura people, the same ones the Caelondians were warring with before the Calamity. The young man, Zulf, was an ambassador to Caelondia trying to bring peace between the two nations. The woman is Zia, an Ura woman who was born and raised in Caelondia. The player can learn more about them and the history of the world surrounding them by asking them about items they find while exploring levels or by fighting in Who Knows Where, a gauntlet level where the play fights through hordes of enemies as the Rucks tells the backstory of characters and the world of the game. The differences in nationality or the fact that they were at war with each other, does nothing to prevent Zulf and Zia making fast friends with the Kid and Rucks. All is well in the Bastion for a bit. That is, until the Kid finds a journal from Zia’s father out in the world and Zulf reads the true cause behind the Calamity.

Without wanting to spoil the twists and turns of the plot in the second half of Bastion, all I will say is that the Calamity has similarities to the Manhattan Project. It is a story of trying to rebuild after destruction, attempting to make sense of a world blow to bits, and accepting responsibility for things out of your control. Because the characters in the game had nothing to do with the Calamity, except maybe Rucks, but they are left shouldering the burden of what to do in response to it. Some seek revenge, some seek only the truth, and the ultimate decision of reversing the Calamity in hopes it will not happen again or accepting the world as it now is and trying to move past the atrocity is left up to the Kid, and therefore the player. 

Bastion is a strange game to talk about because there’s not one thing I can point to and say is done better than any other game I’ve played. But I still came out of it extremely positive and I would recommend it to anyone interested in video games. It’s not one thing the game does well, but everything, from gameplay, to world building (both story- and mechanic-wise), to narrative structure, to the tactileness the game offers the player, to the gorgeous art and incredible soundtrack. It’s done with equal attention and given equal importance, it’s all melded into one, and the game feels stronger for it. Bastion is a game that wants to engage the player both on a fun level and on an emotional level, and it succeeds at both. At the end of the day, that is the best thing I can ever hope to say about a game.

The Binding of Isaac & Forever Games

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The Binding of Isaac is my favorite game and I’ve been playing way too much of it lately. Since the final expansion, Repentance, released on consoles last week, the game has its hooks firmly in me again after months of not really touching it. There are a few games I experience this waxing and waning of interest with: Stardew Valley, the Monster Hunter and Pokémon series, Darkest Dungeon—all games I will have a feverish urge to play all of suddenly, games I will obsessively play for a few weeks, and not have to desire to touch again for months until the cycle repeats. I call these types of games “Forever Games” and Isaac is my ride-or-die forever game.

No game is meant to last forever, though, so how can a game be considered a forever game? I define this type of game not as a game that will take up 100% of your free time and be the only thing you play for the rest of your life, but more so a game you can pick up, play, out down, and return to at any time and still enjoy as much as always. I often think about what would happen if I ever had to get rid of my game collection, to pare it down to just a few titles and have only them to play going forward. Although I have lots of games—probably too many games—on my shelf and digitally to play, I feel like I could easily just choose three to five games in my collection to last me forever. And I honestly think that anyone who plays video games could do the same. They may be massive strategy games, MOBAs or MMOs, multiplayer shooters, or giant open world games. These games, the ones that someone could look at and say “I could be happy just playing this for the rest of my life if I had to,” these are forever games to me.

There is another term that is similar to mine of the forever game: the desert island game. You might be asking what the difference between a forever game and desert island game is and the answer is delicate. I don’t much like the term desert island game. It strikes me as more of a thought experiment or game you discuss with your friends. Choosing a game that you would want to be stranded on an island with as opposed to a game you could see yourself enjoying playing at any time is a subtle but important difference. I might choose a game like Skyrim, a game I would want to force myself to make the time to play, for a desert island game; I might choose a big game that would take forever to 100% like Super Mario Odyssey or Breath of the Wild; or I might choose some sort of fighting or strategy game so I have the time to dig deep and learn it inside out. Choosing a game with the expectation of forced isolation is less personal than choosing a game you have already played and know for certain you would be happy playing for the rest of your life. And that brings me back to The Binding of Isaac.

I can’t recall how I first learned of Isaac. It might have been from an old Super Beard Bros video or just a random top 10 YouTube video. I do remember the hours and hours I’ve poured into the game since first playing it in 2015. I put 200-300 hours in on my 3DS, 200+ hours so far on my Switch, and countless hours (I would estimate at least another 200) on my PS4. Isaac has been with me for half a decade and has shaped the gamer I am today; it helped me through some of my worst bouts of depression; and helped me discover my favorite YouTuber: Northernlion—which is obvious if you are familiar with the man’s content. But this is all to say that I love Isaac; obviously, it is my forever game. Now let’s answer why that is.

Isaac is a roguelike, meaning each time you boot it up the rooms, items, bosses, everything is randomly generated. Death ends a run and you start completely fresh when dropping back into the basement for a new one. This is all standard roguelike stuff, but what sets Isaac apart in my mind are the synergies. With hundreds of items, all combining and interacting with each other in strange, powerful, or run-ruining ways, each run feels more different in Isaac than any other roguelike I’ve played. More entertaining too. Besides discovering new combinations or building different archetypes of runs, the visual spectacle of wacky synergies is always a blast to watch. Isaac is an endlessly replayable game. Not just due to the randomly generated runs and seemingly infinite ways the items interact with each other, but because it is just absolutely massive.

There is just a shit ton of content in the Binding of Isaac. 34 different characters to play as, different routes to take and end bosses to fight, 45 special challenge runs to beat, and over 600 secrets to unlock that give you new items, trinkets, and consumables to play with in the game. If you only unlocked one new thing in The Binding of Isaac a day, it would take at least a few years to get everything. I’ve been playing the game off and on for over five years and I still have never gotten a 100% completed save file—although, this is mainly due to moving what console I primarily play it on. There are hundreds of hours to juice out of Isaac just to get a 100% save file and after that, you can just keep playing it since every run is different and fun. And the best part about this is that it feels like a complete game. There are no pay-to-win mechanics, no option to just purchase a deluxe edition with everything unlocked, no road map or any of the live service bullshit that seems to fill half of the AAA games releasing now. While those types of games feel soulless, cynical, and greedy, Isaac still feels nurtured, personal, and true to its designer, Edmund McMillen.

Even a game as story light as Isaac needs context for the world it brings the player into. It needs themes for the players to reflect on. The Binding of Isaac deals in themes of Catholic guilt, dysfunctional families, religion zealotism, and child abuse. McMillen uses the game to explore these themes as they affect his upbringing, his current life, and the world at large; and they very thematically resonate to me. Through playing Isaac, I found myself looking back on my own Catholic upbringing and family life as a kid, not only the bad, but also the good. It helped me accept how those things molded me into the person I am today. It helped me see religion as a whole in a less black-and-white way than I used to; helped me see the community some people find in their religion and the good it can do.

This connection with the themes, this interest in Catholic myths and demons the game fostered in me, is a huge reason why I continue coming back to Isaac again and again and again. Add to that, the replayable nature of the game and mountain of things to unlock, characters to play as, and synergies to learn, and the game never gets stale. It is the game I boot up when I just need to kill an hour or two. It is the game I turn on when I have no interest or am too depressed to play any of the other games on my shelf. It is the game I can also rely on to destress or calm me down when I’m feeling too anxious. With the release of Repentance on consoles, I am determined now to finally buckle down and 100% the game. It might take forever to do, but that’s fine since The Binding of Isaac is, now and always will be, my forever game. 

What Remains of Edith Finch & Magical Realism

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“…in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past.”
—Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Outside of video games, my other biggest hobby is reading. Comics have taken up most of my reading time in the past months, but I will always love fiction. The stories told, the characters come to life, the craft of writing a compelling novel has always enthralled me. One of my favorite genres of fiction is Magical Realism, which blends mundane life with fantastical events. It is a genre that leads itself extremely easily to fascinating, beautiful, and heartbreaking stories and seems like it would be such a great fit for video games. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how well video games could embrace Magical Realism ever since I played What Remains of Edith Finch.

An indie walking sim, What Remains of Edith Finch stood out from the crowded genre by offering a variety of small, brief gameplay sections. The game focuses on Edith Finch, the last living member of the Finch family, who are proclaimed to be the most unlucky family in the world. She has returned to her ancestral home to discover the secrets of her family that have eluded her for so long. I was immediately struck by the outrageous architecture of the Finch home and the narrative text floating in the air for the player to read. But I did not realize the game took inspiration from Magical Realism stories until the first gameplay section where you play as Molly, Edith’s Grandmother, as she turns into various animals and hunts for food. When I finished the game, I immediately looked up if there was anything from the developer saying they were inspired by Magical Realism stories—in particular A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez—and, according to a 2017 Eurogamer article, my assumptions were correct on both accounts. I will get to the similarities between What Remains of Edith Finch and A Hundred Years of Solitude in a bit, but first I should explain what the term “Magical Realism” means in the terms of writing.

As a genre, Magical Realism is a bit fuzzy to define. I’ve read multiple books and essays trying to pin down exactly what Magical Realism is and is not, but scholars cannot seem to decide on one solid definition. The easiest way to describe it is that it’s a genre where the impossible can happen in the mundane, real world. What sets it apart from the fantasy and science genres are a few caveats. The “magic”—anything impossible, unnatural, or extraordinary—is most often not explained, it is generally accepted by the characters in the story as real and not often questioned, and it is not clandestine. Books like science fiction, which tries to explain or base its fantastic elements on real world science, and the Harry Potter series, which keeps its witches and wizards separate and hidden from the normal world, would not be considered Magical Realism. While Magical Realism stories existed before Márquez, it was his novel A Hundred Years of Solitude that thrust the genre into public attention.

As I said before, What Remains of Edith Finch and A Hundred Years of Solitude have a lot in common. Both are a generational story revolving around the hardships of a single family—both families are even headed by a elderly matriarch who seems to have outlived her natural lifespan—but while the Buendía family of A Hundred Years of Solitude is doomed to repeat the past over and over again, the curse that haunts the Finch family is a much more nebulous thing. The most the game says about the curse afflicting the Finch family is that it makes them considered the most unlucky family in the world, but it seems to relate to the fact that every member of the family dyes in unexpected and tragic ways. The player is expected to take this curse as a real force affecting the family, not imaginary or simply superstition. Every story and related gameplay section the player discovers throughout the game relates to the last moments that character spent alive. There is a sense of a desire to escape in every family member—escape their problems, their family, and the house they all call home.

The Finch house is a great setting and another similarity between the game and A Hundred Years of Solitude. Spacious and filled with secret passages, it is a joy to explore. There is a lopsided tower jutting to the sky out of the home where the family haphazardly built additional rooms for the growing family. While the Buendías never built a rickety tower, the ancestral home in the novel is under constant construction and expansion as the family grows. The fact that the Finch house looks the exact same as when Edith and mother left years ago is another bit of unreality in the game. It’s not just that the home looks the same or that everything is in the places they were left—literally nothing seems to have changed. There is no dust in the home and nothing appears to have aged at all. It is a detail that is never really mentioned in the game, but one that caught my attention at once. All the bedrooms in the Finch house have been sealed up by Edith’s mother. While this is a more outrageous than magical detail in the story, it helps heighten the strange, unworldly nature of the home while remaining true to the narrative’s more grounded nature. Edith says her mother sealed off the rooms to try to forget about the past, about the tragedy and death that has haunted the family for generations. By gaining access to these rooms and discovering the secrets of her own family, Edith will finally understand the true scope of the Finch curse.

There are moments where What Remains of Edith Finch breaks with the standard walking sim formula and lets the player experience little bite-sized bits of gameplay. These moments are when Edith is reading—whether it be a dairy, comic book, letter, etc.—about her family. All of these sections show the last moments of the relative’s life, but also reveal the entire family’s history to Edith in a very similar way that Melquíades’ scrolls reveal the history of the Buendía family to Aureliano. These are also the moments where the marvelous come to the surface of the story. These moments range from a little girl being sent to bed without supper turning into different animals to hunt for food, an artist painting a door on a canvas and stepping through it, to an infant using some sort of telekinesis to move a frog around the bathtub. These stories are effective, both as gameplay sections and as a work of Magical Realist fiction, because they ask the player to take them as not just stories, but real and true.

Magical Realism as a genre places a lot of emphasis and importance on stories, be it myths, folktales, superstitions, or confused memories. It is a genre that inherently understands and explores the gray haze between facts and truth. So in What Remains of Edith Finch, when I was reading a pulp horror comic book detailing the disappearance of Barbara, I took that as the truest recounting of her fate. When I played through Lewis’s section that shows his need to escape the mundanity of his work through his imagination growing more vivid, I believed a part of him ended up in lands of Wonder. Milton will forever remain lost because the door he painted to escape was as real as the paints he made to create.

But there is a wrinkle to all of this, a common wrinkle that hangs off stories of this nature. It is a debate that many insist on having over and over again and write fan theories of and it’s one that I frankly don’t have much patience for. What if it’s all in the characters’ head? Molly is shown to eat mistletoe berries, which are poisonous, before she transforms and goes on the hunt. Could that not be a hallucination of a fevered mind? The scene with the infant is shown through their eyes and could be an overactive imagination. There is no evidence that Milton and Barbara didn’t just run away from the family and the home. There is as much evidence that there is nothing actually magically happening in the game, but I choose to believe that everything shown to the player is real for a few reasons. First being that there is nothing to explain the family cure, which is always presented as a real force at work against the family and one that the player sees the direct result of time and time again. Second, as mentioned before, the developer has cited works of Magical Realism as huge inspirations. And third, if there is nothing magical happening in the game, then it just becomes less interesting, more bleak and dour to me. If none of the stories can be trusted as real, then nothing in the game can be trusted as real. Explaining everything as psychotic episodes from the character robs the whole game, pardon the pun, of all the magic it has.

After completing What Remains of Edith Finch, I went online to see if there were other games that would be considered Magical Realist, but I couldn’t find many. Life is Strange seemed to be the most well known game in the genre, but I’ve never played it so I wouldn’t be able to say. At the recent Playstation Showcase, Sony showed off a game called Tchia that looks like it establishes itself in the genre so I’m interested in that when it comes out. But other than that, I couldn’t really find any solid contenders. But why is that? Why are video games not taking inspiration from Magical Realism when it could be used to tell such unique and interesting stories? I really don’t have a good answer, honestly. Maybe it’s because the conventions and tropes of standard fantasy and sci fi are more easily understood and digested by the masses. With video games being such a time-intensive and expensive medium to work in, many AAA developers seem deathly allergic to anything that doesn’t have much wide appeal. Magical Realism is still a relatively new genre in the world of literature, and not a very well-known one at that still. It would make sense then that game developers have read more fantasy and sci fi compared to Magical Realism and just want to tell stories in those genres. I really can’t say, but I love to see more video game stories blend the world of the mundane with the outrageous, the surprising, and the magical. 

5 Favorite Roguelikes

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The term roguelike is an interesting one. It was originally created to describe games similar to the 1980 game Rogue, a dungeon crawler with randomly generated levels, turn-based combat, and permadeath with nothing carrying over from run to run. Now the term has expanded to include any game with randomly generated levels or encounters and permadeath. Some folks have extreme ire against the term being used in such a sweeping manner, debating online that the term should be roguelite instead. While I do have my own definitions for what both roguelike and roguelite means, they are just my personal definitions. My opinion on the debate as a whole is that it doesn’t really matter. Genre names are more limiting than anything else and language is a continually growing, evolving thing so terms often become bigger than originally intended.

But this is all to say that I love roguelike games. I love when a game in the genre succeeds at still feeling fresh after dozens, or even hundreds, of hours played. I’m fascinated by how the games all have their own sort of gameplay language they use to speak to the player. I adore getting lost in games that are so heavily mechanics driven, playing run after run, and learning a little more about the game each time. I wanted to take some time to discuss a few of my favorite games in the genre. Keep in mind, I haven’t played every roguelike. Some major games I’ve only played little to none of would be FTL, Risk of Rain, and Nuclear Throne. And honorable mentions going out to Darkest Dungeon, Slay the Spire, and Into the Breach—all of which are incredible games, but feel to me to be games with roguelike elements more so than roguelike games. But with all that out of the way, let’s get into my top five favorite roguelikes.

#5) Hades

Hades released last year to instant critical and fan applause. It topped many best of the year lists and has been a commercial smash hit for developer Supergiant Games. And I found myself on the outskirts of this celebration, however. I picked up Hades the day it released on Switch and loved the gorgeous art direction, the intense and lightning quick combat, and expressiveness allotted to the player when building a run from boons offered by the Olympian Gods. However, I found myself less interested in the story and characters as most people seemed to be, preferring to just hop back into the next run. I was disappointed in the lack of gameplay benefits the relationship system brought. Neither of these are bad things really, just things I didn’t particularly care for in the game. Hades is incredible, no doubt, but it came out pretty much the same time as another roguelike in 2020—one you will be seeing later on this list—which devoured all my free time of a few months. 

#4) Streets of Rogue

Streets of Rogue is a fantastic little game with incredible depth. As a top down, 2D immersive sim, each floor tasks you with completing certain missions like neutralizing a target, stealing from a safe, or escorting an NPC to the exit of the level. How you complete these missions, though, are completely up to you. You can hack enemy turrets to fire upon their owners, use vent systems to poison a building full of hostiles, sneak around all guards, or just go in guns blazing and killing everyone in your way. What makes the game great is the options given to the player and how the game world reacts to them. Some classes immediately hate each other and will fight on sight like the members of the opposing gangs, thieves and police, gorillas and scientists. It leads to some of the most chaotic situations a roguelike can offer and some of the highest satisfaction too when everything goes just according as planned.

#3) Enter the Gungeon

Enter the Gungeon probably has the best moment-to-moment gameplay out of any game on this list. It’s face-paced, brutal, and an absolute blast to play. Shooting down enemies, dodging bullets, sliding across tables, and rolling through pots and boxes all feels incredible due to the insane amount of polish in the game. Enemies are all expressive and easy to spot, things explode into clouds of pixels that then cover the floor, and every gun has a unique reload animation. And everything in the game is a gun. The enemies are bullets, the bosses’ names are gun puns, the guns you can pick up are reference guns in movies and games, there’s even guns that shoot smaller guns which in turn shoot bullets. The difficulty is set higher than most roguelikes I would say, but it feels so good to play that you will find yourself loading up another run again and again and a gun and again.

#2) Spelunkey 2

Remember when I said that another roguelike came out around the same time as Hades? Well this is it. After not being able to really get into the first Spelunkey, I was shocked how much I loved Spelunkey 2. It feels like a remixed and perfected version of the first game with tweaks, changes, and new additions to keep things fresh for old players and exciting for new players like myself. I’ve never played another roguelike where the player’s skill matters as much as in Spelunkey 2 due to the fact that the item pool is very limited and the game is obscenely difficult, with death often coming instantly and hilariously and with you cursing Derek Yu. It can feel discouraging to get far into a run only for it to end in a second due to a poor jump or misplace bomb, but if you stick with it there are some of the most satisfying challenges to be overcome in the game. I named Spelunky 2 my game of the year for 2020, so if you are interested in a deeper look at what makes it so great, you can find that here.

#1) The Binding of Isaac

This is it, folks. The big one. The reason I bought a New 3DS and a PS4. The game that started me on the road to loving video games. My favorite game of all time. 

The original flash Isaac was one of the first modern roguelikes and helped popularize the genre. The game has been expanded many times—I personally picked it up during Rebirth and after—which has lead to sine wave of quality, but the game is so vast, with some many secrets to discover, hundreds of things to unlock, nearly unlimited synergies between items to learn, all leading to no two runs feeling the same. The game has its own language that it speaks to the player with and it expects them to learn in order to tilt luck in your favor. What started as developer Edmund McMillen wanting to make a smaller game poking fun at Catholicism blossomed into something bigger, something more personal, and one of the most popular indie games ever made. This game means so much to me, and there is so much I want to discuss about it at any given time, that I find it hard to write about because my thoughts get wiped up and spun around like a hurricane. It is my “forever game,” a game I can pick up anytime and anywhere and still enjoy it. Come Hell or high water, from the beginning of Creation until the moment of Rapture, I will always love The Binding of Isaac.

Spelunky 2: Game of the Year – 2020

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I didn’t play a lot of games released this year. Partly due to a limited budget of money and time, but mostly it was disinterest in most that came out. No AAA game really caught my attention. I found Final Fantasy 7 Remake demo repetitive and tedious so I never picked up the full release and I refuse to support companies like Naughty Dog and Ubisoft, so that crossed out all their new games. Even the indie games I played this year didn’t excite me too much. Carrion was a fun little bite size romp and Hades was so close to being what I want for a roguelight with social mechanics, but sadly fell short. I felt I didn’t play enough games to make another top five list this year, but I wanted to talk about what is undoubtedly my favorite game of 2020: Spelunky 2.

My history with the series is weird. When I first got my PS4, one of the first games I picked up was the original Spelunky because it’s reputation was so strong. However, I found the difficulty completely impenetrable; I could hardly make it out of the caves. The difficulty in Spelunky 2 isn’t any easier (it may even be harder), but the game just feels better to play. There is less stiffness in the controls and you can toggle run to always be on so you don’t have to constantly hold down the trigger. There is one strange control aspect that returns in Spelunky 2 and that is carrying items.

In both games, carrying items is pretty clunky. To bring anything anywhere it has to be carried and only one thing can be carried at a time. This includes weapons, keys, and the pets, who will give you a health point if delivered to the level exit. This can lead to having to manage multiple items at one on levels that require multiple things to carry around, like the floor in the dwellings where you have to bring the key to the chest to unlock the Udjat eye. If you have a weapon on this floor and also want to carry the pet and the key at the same time, get ready for a juggling act of dropping and picking up items.

This clunkiness with carrying items is very obviously by design though. Since delivering pets to the exit is one of the only ways to get health, only being able to carry an item at a time forces the player to assess what is most important to grab and carry, leading to a sort of flow chart to be run down in the moment. This is because different throwable items have different attributes. Rocks only hit for one point of damage and never break while arrows hit for 2 points of damage, but break and become useless after hitting an tougher enemy like a caveman. So you are constantly going over a checklist in your head. Am I carrying an item that can be thrown as a weapon? If no, grab one. If yes, is there a better weapon or item I should be carrying. It’s these little moments of consideration, these moments of assessment that make Spelunky 2 such an engaging game to play aside from the platforming elements. 

Like most every other roguelike, Spelunky 2 is a game of learning from mistakes and internalizing what needs to be done in the future. Every different biome has different enemies and challenges to consider. Enemies attack patterns and health need to be learned. Interactions between level elements have to be assessed when scouting out a safe path forward. And, the most frustrated of all, traps that can kill you with one hit need to be spotted and avoided.

There is at least one thing in every biome that will kill you instantly no matter how much health you have at the time. Spikes, bear traps, lava, moving blocks; all of these can end your run in a second. While it is definitely frustrating to build up a great run only to have it snuffed out in the blink of an eye, the instant death traps are necessary for the balance of the game. The game would become trivial with the right combination of items and having traps to constantly look out for keeps the game engaging. You have to always be looking ahead for upcoming traps to avoid, enemies to dodge, and treasure to grab that your mind will be racing a mile a minute while playing. Once you have the base gameplay down, then you can start hunting for secrets.

There are so many hidden things to find in Spelunky 2 from secret areas and paths to take throughout the game, items to collect, and new explorers to rescue. And, if you wish to discover the secret 7th world after the “final” boss, there is something that needs to be done on nearly every level and secrets that must be revealed and, quite literally, death to be defied. It’s while going after this secret world that the limited item carrying comes into play as the game’s way of balancing itself. At a few points, items will have to be carried between levels, meaning that if you get a powerful weapon, for example the shotgun, on an early level, you will have to eventually give it up. It’s a great tool for the game to balance itself. If you are just going for a main path ending, you don’t have to worry about giving anything up, but if you want to see the secret worlds and bosses, you have to sacrifice things.

Spelunky 2 is a game of checks and balances, of risk versus reward. Everything good you can get in the game comes with some drawbacks. The shotgun has knockback that can send you flying back off ledges or into spikes. Paste can help you stick bombs to enemies, but will also attach them to walls and ceilings if not aimed properly. The jetpack offers the best mobility in the game, but can easily explode, causing massive damage. With most other roguelikes, it can be very easy to become completely overpowered and become nearly impossible to be killed once you know what you are doing. Spelunky 2 is not like this at all. With the constant threat of instant death by traps and very good items having massive drawbacks, you have a game where full attention is required throughout an entire run. Good play is necessary and mistakes are harshly punished.

This is why I love the game so much. It manages to stay engaging through every different run, perfectly balanced so it is impossible to easily win a run, and it is simply fun. Puzzling out how to get a trapped pet or ghost pot to the end of level without killing or breaking them is fun. Discovering all the secrets and items is fun. The art style itself is just cute, charming, and fun. Many people considered the first Spelunky a perfect game; so much so that there were those wondering how they could improve it for a sequel when it was announced. I cannot speak for the first game due to lack of experience, as stated before, but Spelunky 2 is about as perfectly designed as a game can get in my opinion.

Paratopic Review

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August has been a hell of month for me. Between personal issues, vet appointments for my cat, and the power adapter of my Xbox 360 getting fried, I didn’t have time to complete the game I had intended to review for Critical Miss this month. But I wanted to get a short post up anyway, so I decided to review a short game I recently experienced.

Paratopic is a first-person horror experience. I remember hearing about the game when it came out, but I didn’t know much about it besides it was short and the graphics were apparently creepy. This won’t be an in depth review due to the short length of the game and lack of hard mechanics in general, but I want to discuss some things that really got to me.

You play as three characters in Paratopic: a hiker trying to catch a photo of a rare bird, a smuggler transporting illegal VHS tapes across the border, and an assassin as they perform a hired hit. A lot of the fun in the game comes from trying to unravel each character’s storyline. Since there are no character features on display and the story jumps from moment to moment, it’s up to the player to pick apart the plot. This goes a long way to immerse the player. Since the game lacks a lot of moment-to-moment gameplay, the best way to engage the player is to give them something to think about as they play. The mystery of the plot and who you are playing as is a constant in the back of your head while playing through the game. As you are forced to search around for context clues, you have to study the world. You get so drawn in that you even start to notice when things are slightly off.

The visuals do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to the horror, but there are hardly any overtly scary moments in the game. Paratopic excels at getting under your skin and unsettling the player. The game is bathed in the dying light of a perpetual sunset and the art style is reminiscent of early 3D games from the PS1 or Quake era. Everything is orange or brown or deep black darkness. But it’s the subtleties that shine through in the visuals. Characters’ faces will slide around the model of their heads, landscapes are jagged and harsh, and the textures constantly change on the trees as you walk through them, making them seem to pulsate and bubble like one of Lovecraft’s soggoths.

I think my favorite way the game unnerves the player is with the scene cuts. Each time the game moves to the next character or next part of the sorry, there is not a smooth transition or expected jump during a usual story beat. It just cuts in the middle of an action and you are in a new location. You might be walking along a cliff, watching it twist out in front of you, and think you have a long way to walk, but no—cut and you are driving in a car. The transitions are never expected and extremely jarring. They just make you feel uncomfortable through the entire playthrough because you never know when the next cut is coming up. They almost act as jump scares without actually resorting to jump scares in the game and it’s extremely clever.

I’m not going to spoil any of the story or any of the surprises or scares here. Paratopic is so short, about an hour long max, so just play through it if you are interested. The game is an incredibly effective horror experience by how it works to unnerve the player. I don’t get actually scared from a lot of media anymore, but Paratopic did manage to get under my skin a bit. I would compare it to an Ari Aster film like Hereditary. The unrelenting tension and atmosphere has you on edge even while nothing horrifying is happening directly on screen. 

Darkest Dungeon & Stress

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I’m no stranger to mechanically deep games. Games like Dark Souls, Monster Hunter, or The Binding of Isaac have mechanics that run deeper than they seem at first and all take time to master. But if those games are as deep as oceans, then Darkest Dungeon is the Mariana Trench. There is so much to manage in Darkest Dungeon from party positions to their attacks and trinkets, provisions for quests and the effects of curios, character quirks and equipment. It often feels overwhelming and stressful and stress, funnily enough, is another thing you have to manage in the game.

The stress mechanic in Darkest Dungeon ties into the games Lovecraftian themes and portrays the deteriorating mental state of warriors as they encounter unknown horrors. All characters have a stress gauge that goes from 0 to 200 and stress is inflicted by a multiple of sources: enemy attacks, curios, low torch light, and even walking backwards through a dungeon. When a character’s stress reaches 100, their resolve is tested. This either gives them a flaw, like paranoid or hopeless, which will make them act on their own during battle to the detriment of the party, or make them virtuous, which gives them a positive characteristic, like heroic, that they can use to destress or buff their party members. If stress continues to build for a character whose resolve has been tested and it reaches 200, they have a heart attack. A heart attack instantly reduces a character HP to 0 and puts them on Death’s Door or kills them outright if they already have no HP. Stress builds and builds on a character until they finally snap, like they were a rubber band being pulled too far.

A character’s stress meter basically works as a second health bar, but while wounds and HP are healed instantly after a mission is complete, the psychological scars and stress carry over. HP is the immediate concern in a battle because that will most affect if the character makes it out of a dungeon alive, but stress is, to quote the game, a slow and insidious killer. There are things that can be done during a mission to reduce stress on your team. Some characters have skills that will heal a small amount of stress, there are camping abilities for longer missions that relieve stress, and it’s always a smart idea to focus on enemies that deal in stress damage at the beginning of an encounter. 

The easiest way to relieve stress is in the hamlet, the main hub of the game. There, characters can take part in activities like drinking, praying, or gambling to forget their problems for a while and reduce their stress. It is in the town that stress becomes a resource management mechanic. All the activities that help characters require money and will take that character out of the action for a while, unable to go on missions. This works as a drain on your resources. You could buy equipment upgrades for your team or you could spend that gold relieving your main healer’s stress to get them out in the dungeons again. 

Having characters be excluded from missions to relieve stress guides the player to constantly rotate their parties for dungeons. Not only does rotating them help keep stress at a minimum, it will lead to a barracks of soldiers of consistent levels. It can be a real issue in the later game if you have a gap in levels between your main team of characters and your backups. The dungeons don’t get easier as the game progresses. The dungeon missions only get harder with each passing in-game week and sometimes sending out a lower level team is dangerous, but it’s your only option. If you have been diligent about rotating characters, the gulf in levels will be more narrow, meaning a losing a handful of high value characters will be slightly less catastrophic. 

The truly interesting aspect of the stress mechanic in Darkest Dungeon isn’t how it affects the characters on the screen, but the player. You will become attached to certain characters through emergent gameplay moments, like a character struggling through their stress to become virtuous and single-handedly save the rest of the party. Small moments like that make your party feel like they are really fighting for their lives and makes you appreciate the ones who rise to the occasion. But what happens to characters who never do that? Who seem to miss every important attack or whose building stress always becomes a flaw? Well, you might start thinking less of them. And when that happens, Darkest Dungeon adds just the slightest friction of morality in to keep things interesting.

Moral choices are nothing new to video games, but while most AAA games rely on a dichotomy of good and bad choices, indie games fare better. Darkest Dungeon presents the player with a nuanced, grey-area take on morality and, much like Papers, Please, it is solely based on the player’s beliefs and emotions. You can dismiss any character at any time for no penalty. This means you are basically a boss in a right-to-work state, but your employees’ only way of leaving is through death. So what you do with these people is completely your choice. You can take care of everybody, make sure that they are mentally stable at the cost of constant stress upkeep, or you can discard them, just toss them aside when they are at their breaking point mentally and of no use to you. There’s no drawback to this in-game; it solely relies on you to make the choice. When I first played the game years ago, I had no problem throwing away characters that were too much of a hassle or too expensive to keep, but in my most recent playthrough I found that much harder to do. I started dismissing less and less of my team until I was keeping everyone until they died. And even that isn’t necessarily a “good” thing to do. But I couldn’t let them go just because of high stress and bad traits. Those are caused either by my own poor decisions in fight or in the dungeons, or due to the nature of a chaotic, uncaring universe (e.i. the random number generator) which only heightens the Lovecraftian themes.

Darkest Dungeon is a game of staggering depth and the stress mechanic, how it affects the gameplay and the player, is just one aspect of it. There is so much to the game that I could easily make many more posts about it and probably will revisit it again in the future. What I just thought of at first as a neat idea to have two different types of health made me reevaluate the entire game. Stress in Darkest Dungeon is like a glass bottom boat tour: you can see what’s on the surface easily, but so much more lays in the blackness of the unknowable ocean’s depths.

Return of the Obra Dinn & Lateral Information

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It fascinates how video games convey information to their players. I remember picking up Ocarina of Time 3D for my brand new 3DS in 2014 and having the toughest time with the dungeons. After not really playing video games for 10+ years, my knowledge of how games design puzzles was dusty at best. Like any form of media, video games have certain things they expect the player to know coming in, a sort of jargon almost. Red barrels will explode, if townsfolk keep mentioning a cave to the west then that’s where you should go, solutions to puzzles are most likely located very nearby. Besides mechanics that can be used throughout the game, a lot of information found by a player in a level tends to stay there. But recently, I replayed Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn after finishing his other game, Papers, Please, and how that game tells the player important information through a concept I refer to as lateral information is truly incredible.

Lateral information is similar to lateral communication in an office. The term refers to how workers on the hierarchical level across departments will discuss and work to resolve issues that affect the company as a whole. Lateral information are details or information in a game placed throughout a playthrough to be used in different sections or at different times. It is information gained by the player through thoughtful level design or story. I don’t consider power ups or items to be part of this definition because those are more tied to mechanics than information.

The core gameplay loop of Obra Dinn is based around gathering lateral information. In the game, you play as an insurance agent investigating what happened to the titular ship, which has drifted to harbor with its entire crew and passengers either dead or missing. In your possession is a stop watch that transports you to the exact moment a death has occurred. With this ability to view deaths, you are tasked with two goals: figure out who each person is and how they died. A death memory feels like entering a diorama and it can be overwhelming at times when you first experience the chaos of sounds, still figures, and rooms. There is a lot to take in but it is important to study everything you can in a scene: who is present, items characters may be holding, what jobs they seem to be performing, etc. All this information is important and it is up to the player to notice the details.

Most memories require information discovered during other memories to solve. The game becomes more and more open design-wise as the player discovers new memories, and it is left to them to gather the information and make the deductions needed to solve the fates of the crew. This gives the player plenty of time to investigate memories at their leisure, plenty of time to find the important clues, and plenty of time to think of how everything is tying together. This is lateral information. Using clues in memories to solve other questions in the game, all while treating all information as equally important, is the lateral information that Lucas Pope uses to great effect in Obra Dinn.

As a board concept, lateral information can be used in many different ways. As mentioned before, one use is to incentivize players to investigate everything in a memory. Since there is no way for a player to tell what they’re looking at will prove to be a useful piece of information, they have to comb through every little detail and commit what they can to memory. This does wonders to draw the player into the game world. By focusing on everything, players will naturally learn the structure of the ship and the peoples’ relationships aboard it. Add in the unique, monochromatic art style and you have a game world that is deeply immersive that keeps players grounded in it through constant focus.

Lateral information also helps structure progression through Obra Dinn. As you visit memories and discover the fates of the crew members, you will write down their identities and deaths in a book. Each disappeared person has a portrait for themselves and those portraits will be clear if you have found enough information to determine their identities or cloudy if you have not. This helps guide the player through the game before they have found all the memories because it tells them that either they haven’t found enough information, therefore needing future memories to solve, or they have found enough so they could puzzle out that person’s identity right there. Identities do have levels of difficulty to solve so it is often better to save difficult ones for later, but the picture system tells players that all the necessary information they need for that particular character can be found in previously discovered memories.

The greatest strength from lateral information that Obra Dinn gains is how it leads players to organically revisit and explore past memories once they have all been found. Since the bodies can be found in a nonlinear order, it’s nearly impossible to solve all the fates before the storm comes over the ship, indicating that all the memories have been discovered. This means that the player will have to go through memories they think have important information and reexamine them. In most other games, the solutions to a puzzle would be in the general area of the puzzle or there would be a near linear path to the solution. Obra Dinn is not like this. Since the whole design of the game is based around collecting lateral information from everywhere throughout the game, it’s natural that players would need to re-explore past areas and the game encourages this simply by how it is designed. Since the players have already been exploring the ship at their own pace and learning how to look for and collect important details, they are completely ready when the reigns are let off entirely. Even other puzzle games tend to increase the challenge by changing the mechanics whether it be through adding more rules as the game progresses, adding more variables to levels, or making the movement to complete the puzzles more complicated. Obra Dinn is different to these too because the gameplay and mechanics are the same throughout the entirety of a playthrough. Difficulty is only determined by the details players are expected to find. 

I hope games start to utilize more lateral information in their design. Not just puzzle games, but all types of games. This style of giving the player information helps the world of a game feel more organic and less constructed, it helps players become immersed in the world, and it helps them feel clever after solving a puzzle by recalling information found previously in the game without any indication to do so. Lucas Pope utilized lateral information so well in Return of the Obra Dinn, that I, someone who is usually pretty bad at puzzle games, managed to complete it. Not only that, but it has become one of my favorite games from a design aspect because it just fascinates me how the game feeds the player information.

Papers, Please – Critical Miss #11

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Working for the Clampdown

Solo developed video games have always interested me. They are a good place to see what can be accomplished with unhampered vision and passion. Lately I’ve been working my way through Return of the Obra Dinn by Lucas Pope. The game is fascinating and it made me interested to check out Pope’s earlier game Papers, Please. Met with critical acclaim when it was released in 2013, it has since kept up a reputation of a unique and heartfelt game. 

In Papers, Please, you play as a border inspector for the totalitarian government of the fictional country of Arstotzka. The country takes obvious inspiration from the former Soviet Union and its heavy regulation and restriction of immigration. The gameplay focuses on checking the papers of all people trying to enter the country through your border checkpoint, accepting the immigrants with proper papers and denying all those with missing and forged papers. Your character gets paid for every person processed and pay is docked for every mistake you make. The money is important because you have a family at home that depends on you. Rent is immediately taken out every night and you must also pay for food, heat, and medicine if a family member is sick. That is, if you have enough money. 

 Everything in Paper, Please revolves around time and space management. Your desk space is extremely limited and you will soon have too many papers to check to have them all on you desk at once without overlapping. The time in a day you have to work is also limited and is even cut short sometimes by terrorist attacks. If you don’t process enough people in a work day, you’ll go home short on cash. The game throws a load of little things that take up a tiny amount of time which adds up throughout the day. This aspect of the Papers, Please is so smart and subtle it is a great candidate for a future post.

The most interesting thing in the game is the people trying to get into Arstotzka. Many are desperate to enter the country, begging and bribing you to let them in if their papers are forged. Some get mad at you for denying them entry and some are even bitter about returning to the country. There are dozens of sad stories that will pass through the checkpoint during a playthrough. Memorable ones for me were the couple were the wife is missing papers, the woman who wants you to deny a man because he plans to sell her into sex work, and the father who request you to steal a man’s passport so he can track him down for killing his young daughter. 

Even through the game’s minimal dialogue, the character’s fear and sorrow are heart wrenching and it is effective at making the player want to help them. This is not easy to do though. You have two free mistakes in accepting improper people a day, so you have a little wiggle room if you play perfectly, but if you are too careless then you pay and the end of the day screen will remind you that it is your family that suffers. The player is constantly torn between wanting to help the people coming through the checkpoint and keeping their family healthy. 

The game offers multiple playstyles without ever changing the core mechanics at all. During my first playthrough,I found the easiest way to win was to keep my head down and work under the government’s boot heel. The only problem with that is I felt horrible turning away anyone in need of help. During my second playthrough, I tried to help as many people as possible since I improved at the game, but quickly ran into issues making enough money to keep my family warm and full. Many games offer different skill sets for differing playstyles or classes, but Papers, Please stays the same game mechanically. You’ll still be checking papers and all, but it feels completely different trying to slyly subvert the government or just look out for you and your own.

There is a strange sense of meta-immersion in the game. It often feels like office work while looking over the number of papers needed to be checked and that feeling is only heighten while you are sitting at your desk playing on a computer. A complaint I’ve often heard against Papers, Please is that is can end up feeling too much like a job. This is a valid complaint because checking the papers can be tedious and fear of making a mistake is stressful like work can be. I’ve also heard people say that they would not consider Papers, Please a game due to it feeling too much like work and I don’t agree with that. The game still has very video games rules and logic. Booth upgrades can help you point out discrepancies and stamp passports faster, there are no repercussions of skipping a day of meals if you eat the next day, and the fact that you can quickly restart a day if you fail a task and lose are all examples of things that could only happen in a video game. Real life work doesn’t offer a redo button nor do books or movies offer the freedom of choice in Papers, Please.

It’s a game that only works as a video game and I was enthralled from beginning to end. The concept was interesting and the characters’ desperation fit perfectly with the setting and themes. Papers, Please is fascinating as a game because it uses a new and unconventional gameplay style to tell a believable story of human pain. Mechanically it is fresh and challenge, keeper players just on the edge of failure, but offering enough support throughout the game to keep them engaged.

Of course, there are some issues with the game. The art style I really like. It is rough and bleak, fitting perfectly with the former Soviet Union setting, but it does tend to make it difficult to spot certain discrepancies. Height was always an issue for me to catch due to the measuring bars behind the characters not being clear enough. The font on the documents is extremely pixelated, making it hard to read sometimes, and fingerprints are very messy, requiring me to just check for differences whenever they came up. Most discrepancies are noticeable while just looking over documents and comparing them, but it’s the moments when they are not clear at a glance that lead to frustration. 

Other issues I have with the game are very minor. Failure can come in an instant at times if you forget to do a certain task in a day. Example of this would be losing because I denied a diplomat from entering Arstotzka because their papers were incorrect. But while failure can come quick, you can also restart just as quick on the day you failed. The pointer can also feel imprecise at times. It’s more annoying than frustrating when you mean to click on a date on a passport but end up highlighting the entire passport, but because of the imprecision, I never ended up using the final booth upgrade to double click to search for discrepancies. 

But all these issues are forgotten when I think of the line of sad stories that passed through my checkpoint and how it made me feel genuinely terrible not to help those struggling people out. Papers, Please is so truly engaging and unique that I implore anyone who hasn’t played to please check it out. It is a highly emotional experience and a strong, sad story that doesn’t skimp on gameplay. It is an argument for video games to be considered art. It is a video game that only works because of the unique qualities that make games different from movies or books, and that is honestly the highest praise I can give any game.

Untitled Goose Game & UI

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When I first heard  of Untitled Goose Game a few years ago I wanted to play it immediately. I didn’t know anything about the game besides the player takes control of an annoying goose and runs amok in a rural country village. It all sounded so fun and silly and unique that, in the following years, it became my most anticipated game, my most “hype” game. Well the game came out a couple weeks ago and, after playing through it immediately upon release, I can say it is exactly what I wanted.

The main loop of the game is very easy to explain. In fact, it’s so easy that I’ve already explained it. As the titular goose, the player goes around a village and irritates every human being they come across. I wouldn’t say they wreak havoc on the village, more so they wreak nuisances. They make a boy trip in a puddle, take away a man’s stool right as he’s about to sit down, and, in my personal favorite section, force one neighbor to throw the others belongings back over the fence when the goose drags them over. 

It’s all very cute and quaint, but there’s a level of polish to the game that shows how well designed the game is. First: the art style is perfect. Everything is simple and low textured, with deep colors and thin outline that makes it look right out of a children’s book. Second: the sound design is great. I was thrilled every time I picked up a new item and learned it affected my honk, like a glass bottle muffling it or making a harmonica sound when holding one in my beak.Third: the characters are expressive. The humans in Untitled Goose Game, while being simple by lacking fingers and even faces, show a range of emotions from fear to anger to confusion. This is done by all of them using overthetop gestures, but that just feeds into the slapstick tone the game. This also is an example of my favorite thing about the game, it’s integrated UI.

Most user interfaces in video games tend to appear above the game, in a layer between player and game. They appear as button prompts to open doors and climbable ledges, enemies’ health or level appearing above their heads, or informational text floating above a weapon you might choose to pick up. They exist only for the player, not the character in the game, and can add slight fractures to the immersion the game is trying to build. Some games, however, choose to have the UI existing in the world of the game. Notable examples of these are the map and compass in Metro 2033 that the player has to pull out to  check objective locations and in Dead Space where the player’s health is shown through a glowing bar on the back of their suit. These are what I think of as integrated UI because they integrated, explained, and exist in the world of the game.

The UI in Untitled Goose Game is integrated into the world more thematically than physically, but it works extremely well. I mentioned before that the art style of the game resembles a children’s book. Well the UI uses that style to feel a part of the world. Honks appear as lines from the goose’s mouth like in a cartoon, indicated to the player that is a noise that will alert other characters to them and other items with similar indicators act the same way. Items the goose can pick up also has the white lines appear around them when they can be grabbed. It’s a clever way to show what’s intractable in the world while being thematically and stylistically coherent with the game’s world.

Untitled Goose Game is one part stealth game, one part puzzle game, with all the fun of annoying your neighbors in Animal Crossing. The stealth and puzzle genres of games have some overlapping rules used by them. They both work with predictable character AI and set patterns for those characters so the player can anticipate their movements and so the results of actions can be consistent. 

A lot of stealth sections in games will have enemies walking back and forth along one path so the safe areas are clear or they will have a way to show the enemies’ range of sight so the player can work around them. Untitled Goose Game’s world feels so much more alive than that. The villagers in the game have patterns they will go through in a section, but they do might do four or five different things, making their paths and movement ever changing, but still predictable. There is a video game shorthand for when the player has been spotted in enemy territory and that’s the sudden exclamation mark appearing over an enemy’s head.

Untitled Goose Game is not above using the same cliche, but that’s only if the player is caught doing something the people don’t care for, like stealing an item or being where they are not supposed to be. Other times, if a village spots the goose but the player is not doing something that warrants being chased after, the people will simply stand there, staring at the goose, perhaps stroking their chin a bit. This is a really well done system. While the ! or ? appearing above a character’s head when they notice something out of place feels slightly out of place in the world of the game, the pencil style font melds well with the art style and the two different ways characters react to the player clearly shows them when they are in trouble or not.

Last bit of UI in Untitled Goose Game I want to mention is how the game tells the player the characters’ intentions. As a puzzle game, the player needs to know what each villager is intending to do so they may use it to solve the check lists of objectives. The game shows this by having a thought bubble appear over a character’s head with an image of the item they intend to grab. This is one of the biggest things that endeared me to the game. It’s true that the thought bubbles exist only to the player and not the goose in game, but it feels completely in place in the world. Utilizing the strong art style of the game, the characters’ thought bubbles heighten the children’s book aesthetic. They are not integrated into the world physically, but artistically, like the honk and grab lines.

I love Untitled Goose Game. I found it endlessly charming and silly when I first booted it up, and it bloomed into a very clever and well designed game. The first time I noticed its genius was in the simple and integrated UI. But I’m now a little sad that it’s out because I need to find a new game to be my most anticipated game to be released. At the moment, honestly, it’s got to be Team Cherry’s Silksong.