It’s Have You Played’s one year anniversary! Along with two posts from guests, I’ve covered 49 games, from console blockbusters and real world experiences to indie web and VR games. Maintaining a weekly pace while running a company has been tough, with barely a day between hitting “publish” and starting the next game.

But I’m not complaining! I had a few reasons for starting this newsletter, and the first one was giving myself an excuse to play more games. The reason why it was hard is the same reason why it was necessary: making games can be a tiring, time-consuming process and it was hard to motivate myself to play after work, especially games outside of my comfort zone. After making mostly smartphone fitness games for over a decade, I felt I didn’t have a good grasp of the full breadth of video games.

I also wanted to write about games in a different way than I’ve seen elsewhere. I joke to friends, in an admittedly mean-spirited way, that games writing all too often begins with three paragraphs about how the author loved going fishing with their grandfather as a kid, after which you finally get a sketch of Animal Crossing. I don’t have anything against that kind of writing when done well, but if all writing is like that, it becomes difficult to know what a game is actually like to play – moreso if you aren’t familiar with the genre. It’s not unusual for me to read 500 words about a new game and still be mystified about what it is you do in it.

Hence Have You Player’s matter of fact introductions and detailed descriptions of game mechanics and controls and progression. It’s not because I’m fussy (though I am), but because I think these things are interesting and important. I’m fascinated why a little game like The Exit 8 becomes so popular; it’s not just because it’s about “the backrooms” or liminal spaces, it’s because of countless deliberate choices.

My focus on the nuts and bolts of game design has, I fear, led some to think that’s all I write about. If you’re still reading my newsletter, you’ll know this isn’t true – I just like to serve the vegetables before dessert. My tale of Viewfinder’s narrative crimes has done the rounds amongst many game designers I admire, but it only makes sense if I’ve explained how the game works. That I bury my hot takes might explain why I haven’t reached as many readers as I’d hoped.

Weirdly, I imagined my main audience would be the general public – people who were curious about games but didn’t know much about them. Instead, the majority of my 800+ subscribers are from the games and tech industry. At first, I was a little disappointed, but it’s ended up being a blessing.

See, I have a mild inferiority complex when it comes to game design. I worry my experience making ARGs and fitness games isn’t super applicable towards more conventional video games. Writing about 50 games in a year was my attempt to disprove that. My lower subscriber numbers, then, are more than made up by the respect of my peers. In fact, at least a quarter of my posts have been read by the game’s creators, who’ll sometimes kindly send a note or an email, even when they disagree with me.

Now, onto the good stuff!

Most Viewed Posts

1. Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser (12,300 views)

2. The Exit 8 (7700 views)

3. Cityscapes: Sim Builder (3000 views)

4. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood (1800 views)

5. Mars After Midnight (1500 views)

Most Liked Posts

1. Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser (27 likes)

2. The Exit 8 (12 likes)

3. The Invincible (11 likes)

4. Phantom Peak (11 likes)

5. Honkai: Star Rail (10 likes)

These stats are a little misleading because newer posts haven’t had the chance to accumulate as many views and likes. As such, it’s impressive that Mars After Midnight hit 1500 views after just one week.

Notably missing are the most popular games I’ve covered: Spider-Man 2, Starfield, and Cyberpunk 2077. While I think I have interesting things to say about those games, I can’t blame people for overlooking yet another post on games that have been discussed to death.

Instead, it’s “under-discussed games” that have really drawn the crowds. That isn’t the same as “niche” or “indie” – Honkai: Star Rail is immensely popular, but there isn’t much writing about it for more general audiences. The same goes for my 12,000 word epic on the Star Wars hotel, which got a lot of visitors despite reports to the contrary, but is still one of the only longform articles that goes deep into the details of its immersive experience.

The Exit 8 stands out for a different reason. GameDiscoverCo Plus estimates it having sold half a million copies, no small feat, but still quite a bit less than other games I’ve covered. It’s certainly under-covered, lacking proper reviews on the big game sites, but here’s the real reason why my post is so popular:

That’s right – Google blessed my post as its official source on the game. Anyone searching for “The Exit 8” will see my description first. Pretty cool! Other posts aren’t blessed, but still rank highly on Google, like for Cityscapes: Sim Builder, Mars After Midnight, and Puzzmo. Evergreen content, baby!

View by month

Overall view of my newsletter have climbed steadily over time. The peak in August is for the Star Wars post, which got a lot of attention and links, and February is when The Exit 8 started doing the numbers. I’m sure this month will be lower.

Notably, half of my views now come from posts older than a month.

Subscriber growth

I don’t do any growth hacks, nor any Substack recommendation swaps, and I prefer not to harp on about the newsletter on my socials. As a result, my subscriber growth has been gradual, with peaks when a few posts were shared widely on other newsletters and social media thanks to Antony Johnston, Simon Carless, Cory Doctorow, Kathryn Yu, and others. I’m sure I could have a lot more subscribers if I tried harder but… I don’t want to. I enjoy writing and that’s where I choose to spend my energy.

My posts average a 55% open rate and since the start of the year they’ve been attracting around a thousand views each. That’s not the same as individual readers, mind you – if one person opens an email ten times, that gets counted as ten views.

Some of the posts I’m most proud of haven’t been very popular, like Viewfinder (which pairs nicely with The Invincible), Roadwarden, and Sunset. I feel like I’ve said something different and new in those posts, which is what I really care about.

What’s next?

For the time being, I’ll continue to write more or less as I have done so far, but less frequently. I’ll also mix in posts about other things I’m interested in across entertainment and technology – feel free to skip those!

Despite all my talk of numbers and views, Have You Played is a hobby. I don’t rely on it for money so I don’t need to change it. But just as a thought exercise, what if I went all-in on growing it?

If I stuck with the current format but ramped up to a hundred games a year, I’d expect to have thousands of subscribers in a few years time. Pretty good, but I’m not sure how I’d monetise without making even more stuff and putting it behind a paywall.

A possible route would be to zero in on my games industry audience by creating a kind of paid database of in-depth analysis going even further than my current posts, including video captures; a way for designers to quickly learn about other games without spending hours playing them. Game Developer and GDC already do this, but it’s usually designers writing about their own games (so they don’t have to pay them!). Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not the same as serious criticism from independent writers. Would people pay for this? No idea.

Going in the opposite direction, rather than writing 50 posts about 50 games, I could do what most sensible websites do and write 50 posts about the five most popular games. This would save me untold hours: playing 50 games a year isn’t like watching 50 films a year, it’s like learning 50 new hobbies a year. In other words, inadvisable.

Even if I wanted to do that, there are plenty of sites with hot takes about the biggest games and no-one needs another. In fact, the demand for written games journalism seems to be waning. As Nathan Grayson put it on The Aftermath, “after a certain age level, a lot of people just don't read about games anymore,” preferring video from TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch.

So, pivot to video? I’m not tempted. Video editing is difficult and time consuming, plus YouTube’s ever-changing algorithms demand a punishing schedule from creators. I could try a podcast, but I’d need to find a co-host and/or regular guests, which is a lot of work, and there are already a ton of good games podcasts.

The fact is that I like writing and I think I’m pretty good at it. So, why a newsletter and not something else? I used to write a column for EDGE magazine, for example.

Well, like social media, newsletters as a format are so successful at delivering addictive feedback to hyperlexic writers that they’re pulling them away from all other formats. Write two thousands words for a newsletter and the moment you press publish, the views and the likes and the comments roll in. Write two thousand words for a book and nothing happens at all. Once you’ve written 100,000 words, for twelve months still nothing happens except your words gets increasingly outdated. When it’s finally published, people will say you’re a genius, though they’re probably being polite because no-one reads non-fiction books any more.

I’m exaggerating, of course, and books tend to have a better shelf life than newsletters. Even better, readers come with the expectation, however misguided, that book authors have developed deeper and more complex arguments than those in newsletters. That’s why people take you more seriously and give you nice consulting gigs once you’re a Published Author.

I would love for there to be something that’s the best of both worlds, though: a way to write something big and substantial but regularly get confidence-boosting feedback; a way to reach lots of people without it feeling ephemeral or left to fortune. But with the demise of magazines and newspapers, the space for this kind of writing is shrinking.

What’s the solution? In the same conversation on The Aftermath, Jason Schreier suggested:

I think you have to kind of meet people where they're at. The newspaper of record these days, The New York Times, is doing all sorts of multimedia stuff. They have podcasts and newsletters. It's trying to reach people wherever they are. I think that is ultimately the solution. That's not to say every website should be trying to do everything. It's kind of recognizing the audience you're trying to pursue and doing it that way.

Like others, I’ve been thinking hard about this problem. In my head, I imagine something called a Fast Publishing Platform, and I intend to experiment with it for the immersive entertainment book I’m writing. It’ll still be a book-like object but it’ll be more multimedia, more accessible, and have more of a sense of community and immediacy than traditional books.

It’s probably a terrible idea! But as always, I can’t wait to try something new.

Mars After Midnight is a puzzle game where you run a community support centre. Your job is to admit the right Martians (e.g. non-farters should be kept out of the “Farty Party”), tidy the refreshments table, and put up posters for upcoming sessions.

It’s tempting to call Mars After Midnight a game for kids, especially when the designer, Lucas Pope, says:

It's my usual repetitive isnt-this-just-work bs, only more carefree. I made it for my kids, who claim to "love it", as is their obligation.

But there are kids games and there are kids games. Is Tetris a kids game? Is My Neighbor Totoro a kids movie? Adults love them no less than kids. There’s a level of artistry and care to them that can be appreciated by all ages. I wouldn’t put Mars After Midnight quite in their ranks – it overstays its welcome just a smidge – but it’s funny and witty, approachable and absurd, silly and caring. That’s no easy balance.

We begin with a view of the Martian landscape speeding by: first, the Earth Colony, then some distance away, the Off-colony Settlement. A clock ticks the seconds to midnight, and a shop’s sign flickers from “Airtight Shipping and Receiving” to “Off-colony Community Support Center”.

Tonight’s session is for Cyclops Anger Management. A note taped up on the inside of the door’s shutter indicates that no-one with two eyes or anyone smiling should be admitted.

Someone knocks. To lift the shutter, you turn the Playdate console’s physical crank. An angry cyclops? Hold the A button to let them inside. Anyone other than an angry cyclops? Crank down the shutter. Sometime you’ll need to peer from side to side to check if an alien really does have only one eye, or if it’s just a chancer looking for a free snack.

That’s because Martians pass by your refreshments table on their way to the meeting room. If they decide to have a bite, they often make a mess which needs tidying up lest subsequent Martians get grossed out and don’t leave a two credit tip.

Tidying is basically a Tower of Hanoi puzzle where you rearrange stacks of dishes and utensils to how they were laid out before, as indicated by a poster. The only complication is that you also need to sweep the table of crumbs using the satisfyingly crank-operated “Soup-A Sweep-A”, which requires lifting everything up on your two tentacles. It’s surprising how well this works with the Playdate’s limited controls; you can lift from any object in a stack, move and drop stacks independently, and it never feels confusing.

There’s zero time pressure, though the constant door knocking from eager Martians can be hard to ignore, and the worst thing that can happen if you don’t tidy up is that a Martian won’t leave a tip, which ultimately makes no difference whatsoever, gameplay-wise.

Back at the door, you admit more Martians. It’s never not funny to crank up the shutter, see someone who is plainly not suitable (e.g. they have six eyes) and slam it down, usually to forlorn mews. They’ll be fine!

When the session is at its six-person capacity, you clear the refreshment table by feeding everything into a big vacuum tube, then watch as your robot partner plays the Cyclops Anger Management session tape and the Martians dance around it. I have no idea what is meant to be happening here, but it looks fun!

Interestingly, you don’t know whether you’ve admitted the “right” Martians until the session concludes and give two credits to indicate whether they found it helpful. This is just one of the ways the game tries to make you feel OK about discriminating between Martians, the idea being that sessions have a limited capacity and it’s better if you let in those whom your help is designed for. It worked for me but I can imagine others feeling a bit uncomfortable.

What if someone doesn’t find the session helpful because they weren’t (in this case) an angry cyclops? Nothing bad – you’ll just need to run the session again at some point for the angry cyclopses you missed. And you might still have gotten a tip from the non-cyclops for your refreshments.

After they leave, the Martians spread out across a map of the settlement and you see a message: “114 Martians still need help”, represented by flashing dots. This is the beginning of the planning phase, where you decide on three things for the next day:

1. Choose a session topic, like Shy Smiler Mixer, Cracked Skull Crew, Wind-Proof Warriors, Gnat Knife Handling, and so on (more on these later). Each topic highlights where its six attendees live in, which doesn’t really matter but kind of looks cool. Some sessions require an accessory – Gnat Knife Handling needs a five credit Zoom Lens, as does one about clogged pores. Other sessions are locked until you buy the required session tape (ditto).

2. Place posters where the attendees live. They can go in distinct regions across the settlement, each of which costs a different amount to poster. At the start of the game I assumed there was some strategy in picking sessions where attendees were clustered in regions where postering was cheaper, but you soon have more money than you need so it’s really just a bit of busywork.

3. Pick a refreshment. These also cost money (e.g. Wugwiches and Dune Bug Pie are both 3 credits) and are more popular in some areas of the settlement than others, but apparently your choice of refreshment has no effect on who visits.

Once everything’s decided, you pay for your selections and head to your empty apartment with your robot friend. You dream of famous places on Earth like Big Ben, Stonehenge, and the Colosseum, and your robot dreams of repair parts, snakes, and nuts and bolts. It is unbearably sweet:

Planning and running a session takes a little under ten minutes, which you’ll do around 25 to 30 times. The speedy rounds and the game’s forgiving nature, with its complete lack of fail state, permits a surprising level of ambiguity. One of my early sessions was the Non-blinker Roundtable; a picture showed a Martian with two eyes, so I wasn’t sure if I could let in three-eyed non-blinkers. It turned out this was fine, but I didn’t feel too anxious about being punished, and in the end, I only misidentified three Martians out of more than 200.

In my book critiquing gamification, I note that many of our most beloved games are completely devoid of achievements, levels, badges, and challenges. The same is true of Mars After Midnight, which has none of them. There’s no grinding, either – as soon as you’ve mastered one session’s gimmick, like using X-Ray glasses to let in vampires, you’re onto the next.

The one time when things begin to drag – when you’ve let in four or five Martians and it’s getting too easy to tell who’s got clogged pores – is when the sketchy-looking Sherb turns up. He’ll sell you one item a day, including:

• Tapes that unlock new sessions

• Expensive recipes (15 credits for Chorbfish? You’re havin’ a larf, mate!)

• An almost entirely superfluous but amusing Blab-o-dex translator

• A transit pass for a ticket to the Earth Colony, which costs an eye-watering 100,000 credits and is obviously the game’s goal.

You’ll end up buying everything, even the outrageously expensive Chorbfish recipe, just to see what happens; of course, everyone thinks it’s delicious and it’s more fun to arrange than other refreshments.

An Incomplete List of Sessions

• Clogged Pore Clinic: Use a zoom lens to see which Martians have clogged pores. This was tricky at the start – what does a Martian clogged pore look like?

• Math Olympics: Hold up a calculator showing sums for Martians to answer correctly. Usually they give comically bad answers; to “92 + 98” one alien answered “3” (adding “for sure”). Another, when asked “0 x 6” lamely said “no idea”.

  

• Flinching Fellowship: Toot a horn; if the Martian doesn’t flinch, slam that shutter down!

• Boxing Brush Up: Fire a boxing glove to see if Martians can successfully dodge; if they get hit, no entry. I tried to punch Sherb’s delivery robot once – of course, it dodged.

• Gnat Knife Handling: Only let in gnats bearing knives! Naturally, you need the zoom lens:

  

• Farty Party: Just listen for the extremely loud farts!

• Shy Smiler Mixer: These Martians will only smile when the shutter is half-closed and you can’t see their eyes. This requires more delicate crank operation than usual, along with peering up and down the window – tricky.

• E.S.P. 1 2 3: Test whether Martians can successfully read symbols from hidden cards. You need the translator for this!

In a recent post on Sunset, I suggested that polish is overrated. Lucas Pope evidently disagrees because this is one of the tightest, most polished games I’ve played in a long time. But as in his other games, his polish is more like the sheen of a handcrafted chair rather than that of a mass-produced SUV. Mars After Midnight has idiosyncrasies and ambiguity to spare, to the point where sometimes it’s unclear what you’re meant to be doing, but it’s all clearly on purpose.

The polish covers every surface of the chair, even the underside. Every alien, robot, and human is hand-drawn in weird, organic forms reminiscent of Daniel Mróz’s sci-fi illustrations for Stanislaw Lem. Voices are heavily distorted English that you eventually recognise by the end of the game. When there isn’t a Martian to admit, you can see hovercars whizzing buy, aliens slithering around, and people shouting things to each other from windows like “lovely weather!” and “terrible weather!” There’s the sly, nervous look your character has when a Martian finishes eating and hopes for a tip.

And then there’s your adorable robot, a friend as well as a business partner. Every session begins with you slamming the session tape into its top, which feels very satisfying until you mistime it and it cringes the next time you try. Martians deposit credits in slots on the robot’s side; the robot runs sessions and helps you plan them.

After a while, it dreams of a teddy bear, night after night. Sherb turns up, offering to sell you one for 15 credits – steep, but of course you pay it. The next night, the teddy bear is sitting on top of the robot’s chest as it dreams of being in a boat with its bear:

When there’s only a few Martians left to help in the settlement, Sherb gifts you a transit pass to the Earth Colony. Why not after you’ve cleared it? To establish that your goal is not, in fact, to get to Earth as soon as possible, but to help as many people as you can.

The Earth Colony is essentially a bonus level. There’s only 24 people to help with weirder refreshments and sessions (e.g. detecting Martians secretly posing as humans). Sherb gifts you an even more expensive ticket off Mars, but this time he can’t join you on the rocket. As you approach Earth, the game ends with a message: 8.2 billion Earthlings need help.

It is often said that designers make “sad dad” games after they have children, a joke that has more than a little truth. God of War, The Last of Us, The Walking Dead – they all linger on the fragility of life, a tragically missing mother, the sacrifices a man must make for his child, and so on.

So what does Lucas Pope do after he has kids? He makes a game where you honk a horn at aliens and clean up after their mess. Let’s call it a happy dad game.

This post marks the one year anniversary of Have You Played! It’s a good moment to slow my pace so I have time to write other things, as well as move to my old blog.

More details next week, in my final roundup post from Substack!

Strands is a daily wordsearch-like puzzle game. Words are hidden within a 6x8 letter grid; letters can be connected horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. All the words are based on a theme, with one word (the “spangram”) summarising the theme, its letters touching two opposite sides of the grid.

You drag or tap letters to construct a word; correct “theme words” get highlighted in blue and spangrams in yellow. Like a wordsearch or a crossword, there’s a single solution to this puzzle. If you construct a word that isn’t part of the solution, it fills up your hint bar. Do this three times and you earn a hint indicating the region of undiscovered theme words.

The small grid size leads to a hill-shaped difficulty curve. At the start of a game, it’s usually easy to discern one or two words related to the theme, then it’s harder to find more obscure words whose letters aren’t as clustered. Once you’ve found more half of the words, however, it’s straightforward to find the rest by process of elimination by looking at “alleys” of letters and working backwards. Here’s a completed Strands puzzle with the theme “Don’t do it"!” and the spangram “Cardinal Sins”:

There’s no score and no timer, just a count of how many hints you’ve used, though this might change if and when Strands leave beta.

Figuring out the day’s theme can be the hardest problem. “Don’t do it!” was pretty clearly related to prohibited or bad things, and “Sounds good to me” was about musical instruments, but another day’s theme, “Do the do”, tricky enough I had to resort to a hint:

I was fixated on “do” meaning “party”, especially with the Oscars coming up, so I tried “STARS” and suchlike, to no success. It turns out this is more of a Britishism than the North American slang for “do”:

Once it gave me BRAID it became easier to search for and spot similar hair-related words:

Even so, other words like MOHAWK, BEEHIVE, DREADS, and TOPKNOT didn’t come as quickly to mind, making this the toughest puzzle I’d played to date. The whole thing is yet another reminder that word puzzles are much more culturally specific than people imagine. It’s not just about knowing the names of US vs. UK sports teams, it’s about how quickly your mind can connect different concepts.

Strands, like crosswords and suduko, is more of a puzzle format than a specific game. Each day’s puzzle is unique – some are good, some less good, depending on the creator and the theme. In fact, the entire point of Strands is that decrypting the theme unlocks everything. Along with the small grid, it’s what makes the puzzle manageable given that words aren’t in straight lines, as in traditional wordsearches. Any frustration, like I had with “Do the do”, can only last for a few minutes until you either figure it out or use a hint, and those moments are made up for delightfully-crafted puzzles like the cardinal sins one.

Taking another step back, it’s best to understand Strands as a prospective member of The New York Times’ complement of nine daily games, which now includes multiple crosswords, shape and pattern-based puzzles (Tiles and Vertex), number puzzles (Sudoku), and word puzzles (Spelling Bee, Connections, Letter Boxed, and Wordle). Some of these are more time consuming and difficult than others, like the main crossword, whereas others like Wordle might take less than a minute. Strands isn’t that quick, but it’s very simple and it extends the NYT’s jealously-defended territory to yet another puzzle niche.

That territory is already massive. The Mini crossword was played over a billion times last year; Connections is played by over ten million users a week; the NYT Games app was downloaded over ten million times in 2023. Many of those users won’t be paying subscribers, but there are probably millions of NYT subscribers who play at least one of their games a day and to whom the games are a significant reason for their continued subscription.

Games are habit forming, and that includes puzzles. I started playing Puzzmo – a collection of puzzles and minigames like NYT Games – in November, partly to cover it for this newsletter. Four months later and I’ve racked up over 100 hours across a thousand puzzles, with streaks extending to 143 days. And I wasn’t even a puzzle guy before!

One could come up with all sorts of evolutionary psychology just-so stories for how these puzzle scratch an itch for NYT subscribers who remain otherwise unfulfilled in their sedentary, desk-bound, suburban lives (“hunter gatherers liked pattern detection and categorising plants”, “on the African savannah our ancestors liked strategising how animals would move, like in chess, etc.”). Regardless: they’re popular.

They’re a pleasant distraction, formulaic enough to require precisely 40-60% of your intellectual capacity, with gentle difficulty spikes to keep things interesting, yet not so distracting they’ll end up consuming hours of your life. In other words, they’re perfect for NYT readers.

Love Is All Around is a Chinese romance game using first-person live action video (aka FMV). You’re Gu Yi, a young man who comes to the big city to pay off his debts and meets six women who, for reasons that are never convincingly explained, fall head over heels for you.

Every minute or so, multiple choice questions let you determine how the story unfolds. Your answers also change your “affection” level with women; if your total score is too low at the end of a chapter, you’ll need to replay part of it to proceed. Mechanically speaking, that’s pretty much it.

Love Is All Around is too sweet to be a Pickup Artist (PUA) game and it’s too simple to be a proper dating simulator. Nor is it a high concept interactive movie like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. So what is it? The lowest concept imaginable: a wholesome romance drama… for guys… that’s funny!?

It’s so normal, in fact, that it wraps around, horseshoe theory-like, into being quietly groundbreaking. That, along with the actors’ impeccable acting and comic timing, may be why it’s sold 1.6 million copies according to GameDiscoverCo Plus estimates, which probaby makes it one of the most popular FMV games in history. Almost all of those sales are in China, but the English subtitles are perfectly serviceable.

Now, I don’t want to oversell its wholesomeness: it’s literally Male Gaze: The Video Game. Every woman you encounter is young, romantically available, and conventionally attractive. It’d score minus points on the Bechdel test. All that said, it’s much better than your average raunchy romcom like the American Pies; characters are broadly drawn but always have a bit of depth (the party girl is not just a party girl, etc.), there’s zero nudity, zero sex, and, incredibly, basically no titillation whatsoever. Not that that’s anything wrong with those things if done well, but usually they aren’t.

This is especially surprising given how the game starts. You wake up in a fancy apartment with no phone and no memory of how you got there. Your first task is to investigate its rooms, point-and-click adventure style, by clicking on objects, discovering the date from a calendar or noticing paint cans in the bin.

Once you’ve found all the “key information” in a room (i.e. clicked on all 3-5 things), the next video in the story plays. Uh oh, a young woman appears from a bedroom, Zheng Ziyan! You flashback to the gallery where you’re an assistant; she came in for a reception and you helped fix her skirt. It was too busy for her to get a cab home, so she invited you out to a cocktail bar: her treat, since you’re dead broke. A hilariously gauzy, dialogue-free drinking montage plays out in which we’re given to believe she connects with you.

Back in the present, Ziyan asks if you slept together. You can respond in three ways, but the answer is “no”. She messes with you by saying her husband will be back soon, then confesses she doesn’t know whose apartment this is, either. Cue another woman, Li Yunsi arriving – uh oh!! She asks if you know how you met; say it’s when you gave her a painting and she’ll observe, “Men are full of shit.”

Flashback: you’re staring at a painting instead of mopping. Your boss chides you but Yunsi admires your taste, so you’re told to give her a tour. She asks your opinion of an artwork. The two choices are “it’s something my uncle would paint” or “the colour and composition have a distinct style”. If you choose the latter, you rattle off an improbably informed disquisition on it that had me laughing out loud. Yunsi gives you her card, and you can choose to wave, hug, or shake hands; pick the latter, which suits her more reserved personality, and you get an extra affection point. It emerges that you drunk-dialled her to pick you and Ziyan up, which she’s none too pleased about.

In the space of a few minutes, the game has neatly set up the fact that you are hapless but smart, well-meaning but unlucky, the woman aren’t instantly in love with you, and that while the story is set in the real world, it’s also very silly. I complain a lot about how too many games are poorly edited – not this one. It’s very fast paced and you’re always onto the next adventure.

During the remainder of the first chapter, you find your lost phone at the cocktail bar from an irate waitress, Xiao Lu; reply to text messages; look for a new flat with your buddy Liu (“I’m working to consolidate real estate resources. OK, I’m an estate agent.”); and meet an army of prospective roommates. This takes around 20-30 minutes.

Each chapter concludes by summarising the affection levels of the women you’ve met. If your total score is too low, you won’t be able to start the next chapter; instead, you’ll have to visit the story map to replay scenes.

The map shows all your choices, including the ones you haven’t made yet. You can restart from any thumbnail to make new choices, though you’ll have to play all the way to the end of the chapter for your affection scores to update. Thankfully, you can fast forward or skip through any video you’ve previously watched. Unless you want to unlock some of the more obscure endings, there isn’t any need to exhaustively complete the story, and even then, you’re better off saving yourself the time and using the walkthrough.

Things that happen in the rest of the story:

• Liu finds you a great flat – but Xiao Lu is already living there! You become friends and go to her graduation ceremony when her family can’t make it. Later, you whip up a home-made meteor shower lightshow when she isn’t able to see one at the park.

• You’re ambushed by a childhood friend, Shen Huixin, who forces you to become her personal assistant. Huixin buys the gallery you work in, which you both run into the ground, though not before all your women friends join forces to decorate it.

• You pretend to be Lin YueQuin’s boyfriend to annoy her ex-husband, whom you end up fighting (and losing to) in a boxing match. You then defend YueQuin’s son against accusations of bullying.

• You’re run over by Zhong Zhen, a high-powered consultant, who lets you stay in her company’s storage room. When she complains about overworking, you take her on a trolley ride through the office.

Two things should be apparent. Firstly, this game burns through plot like it’s tissue paper. You barely spend five minutes with one woman before another appears out of thin air.

Secondly, Love Is All Around isn’t a dating simulator, it’s a manic pixie dream boy simulator – and you’re the boy. It’s genuinely sweet how much effort “you” put into making other people happy, it’s just a shame that all of them are women. But while the game is unquestionably sexist, there is blessedly little unpleasantness: everyone ends up becoming friends, or at least respecting each others’ qualities.

It’s a nice counterpoint to the thrum of economic insecurity and inequality that pervades the story. Gu Yi is forever interviewing for jobs, being hounded by his creditors, and having deep conversations about whether there’s room for anything in life other than making money. I wouldn’t mistake this game for a documentary, but it’s an interesting way to learn about how young men in China see themselves today.

While Love Is All Around’s designers are perfectly aware of the conventions and limitations of their chosen form, with meta jokes scattered liberally throughout (“Why can’t you speak in full sentences?”), you won’t find any gameplay innovations here. Is that a problem? No. The least interesting criticism you can make of a TV show is that it’s yet another 30-60 minute landscape video. Here, the creativity lies in the storytelling.

If nothing else, it’s unusual to see a game about a penniless Chinese manic pixie dream boy being pursued by six women – especially a game that’s this popular, funny, and sweet.

Sixth Tone and Shine have more background on the game’s development process and how it was received in China. Apparently a sequel is being made – for women!

Pacific Drive is a first person driving game where you explore the mysterious Olympic Exclusion Zone. Off-road driving and hostile “anomalies” constantly damage your car, so you spend a lot of time looting supplies to make replacement parts and upgrades that advance the story.

The Pacific Northwest setting, with its 1950-90s period details, is lushly illustrated through procedurally-generated 3D environments and minimalist posters. Throw in the otherworldly anomalies – floating piles of junk, crash test dummies that move when you aren’t looking, portals in the sky, meteor showers, etc. – and the result is an atmosphere that’s both gorgeous and unsettling.

It’s not an easy game to play. There’s far less driving and much more looting and crafting than you’d imagine from a game called “Pacific Drive”. Even its biggest fans surely tolerate rather than love putting their car into “Park” every time they stop, the lack of saves during hour-long “runs” punishes time-constrained PC gamers – and that’s just the start. It was enough to make me abandon the game.

You begin by driving a beat up car toward the Olympic Exclusion Zone, a staging ground for experimental technology established in 1947. Eight years later, the zone was walled off, and over time the borders grew and access points sealed. When you arrive in 1998, huge walls surround the entire area. Naturally, you get sucked into a portal and wake up deep in the zone.

Your car’s controls are highly tactile and “immersive”. You can’t just jump in and hit the gas – you need to look at the ignition key and tap a button. Then you have to look at the gear stick and hold down a button down to shift it into drive. Only then can you get going. The same multi-stage, multi-button fussiness applies to replacing tires, swapping out doors, and laboriously flinging “repair putty” onto disintegrating panels.

Once your car’s repaired, two voices on the radio, Tobias and Francis, guide you toward a garage. It’s a pleasant drive through woods with weird anomalies to look at and avoid. Along the way, you jump out (putting the car into park so it doesn’t roll off) and siphon fuel from an abandoned car (get fuel can from trunk, walk to other car, look at gas cap, hold down a button to siphon for a few seconds, ditto on your own car).

Tobias and Francis explain that your car is a Remnant, a rare piece of technology that still works in the zone, which otherwise renders matter unstable. This is a nice narrative justification for Pacific Rim’s roguelite nature, wherein the areas you drive to change every time you visit. But if you were expecting to be able to drive continuously across the entire game world, Grand Theft Auto-style, think again: the Olympic Exclusive Zone is divided into square regions surrounded by impassable borders, each invariably containing a major road junction.

Travelling between areas therefore requires… teleportation?! Sure, why not! The owner of your garage is a scientist named Oppy. She has apparently invented every major technology in use in the zone, including the ARC device you install in your passenger seat, a combination GPS tracker, power plant, and teleportation enabler.

Sometimes teleporting between areas is as easy as driving through a gate in the road. Other times you have to obtain a “Stable Anchor” to charge your ARC device, a fraught process attracting hostile anomalies, then link it to a “Gateway”. This triggers a battle royale-style storm circle to start contracting around the gateway, its location marked by an awesome pillar of light.

These thrilling races to gateways are not representative of your time in Pacific Drive. I rarely drove for more than thirty seconds before stopping to loot an abadoned shack or government trailer for field repairs or craft bigger upgrades in the garage. In fact, I could barely make it ten seconds without coming across some anomaly barring my way. At first, these electric blue sparks and floating junk monsters were scary, but I saw them so often they became mere inconveniences – not quite the vibe the designers were aiming for.

These constant interruptions plague the game. Early on, I was excited to get out on the open road after a long repair process, until I was prompted to scan some blueprints, refill my fuel tank, and charge the car battery. Immersive, yes – but at what cost? I began thinking Pacific Drive was more like a crafting menu with a game bolted on the side more than anything else; “so… like most survival games” as one wag put it to me.

As in most survival games, your tools don’t last forever. Every time I took apart a wreck with my scrapper chainsaw or broke a lock with my pry bar, I worried about finding enough supplies to craft replacements. Some people like breakable tools, god bless them, but not me. I understand the appeal of wanting to live inside a game – there’s a level of familiarity and mastery over a game’s systems that can be intensely satisfying, or at least, distracting. I’m just not sure how broad that appeal is.

I personally don’t find it interesting to scrounge through toolboxes and shelves for duct tape and bits of glass, or to inch my way around the hundredth anomaly blocking the road so I can reach an identikit trailer that may or may not have the chemicals I need to progress the story. The elements of Pacific Drive that “time waster” players enjoy are the same ones that prevent me from appreciating its world and story.

One could argue my complaints are like saying Tetris doesn’t have realistic graphics, that I simply don’t understand what this game is trying to accomplish, but I’d flip that around. Pacific Drive is very deliberately designed as a finicky, “immersive” game aimed at people who like that kind of thing. Since they also want to attract more casual players, the designers offer lots of gameplay and accessibility modifiers to make things easier; for example, you can turn off the entire “car quirks” system that opens your car trunk when you reverse. But because finickyness is so inherent to the game, there isn’t a modifier for extending tool durability or the million other chores that get in the way of appreciating its non-finicky aspects.

Pacific Drive’s setting is almost enough to pull me through. It’s reminiscent of Firewatch’s beautifully-lit vistas, surely a key inspiration for the Olympic Peninsula’s 50s-style park theming. When you crest a hill and see a dark megastructure rising out of a plain, it’s hard not to be intrigued. But the game’s other spooky inspirations – Control, SCP, The Lost Room, STALKER, Tales from the Loop, etc – are all too familiar. Weird things floating in the air, redacted government records, improbably dramatic transcriptions, tales of scientists’ hubris – they’re just… boring now.

Plenty of games have rote plots that are saved by excellent characterisation, but not this one. You hear plenty from Tobias and Francis and Oppy but in the few hours I played, it was pure plot – “I bet you’re dying to hear about Remnants!”, “Driver, watch out for the [anomaly] bunnies, they’re a doozy!”, and so on. I can’t help but think these jargon-filled data dumps might have been better conveyed through environmental storytelling or spread out between more chat. Either way, their explanations are altogether too casual for the genuinely horrific place they live in, as if living in the zone is no inconvenience at all and witnessing the first human in history to teleport (you) is barely worthy of comment.

Oppy is insulting and regretful, Tobias and Francis are enthusiastic, and that’s about all I could tell you about them. Left out are any other elements of their personality, not to mention exactly why they’re helping you and what the stakes are. Oppy’s motivation for entrusting you with her wondrous ARC device is literally getting you “out of [her] hair.” I’m sure if I kept playing I’d learn more about what everyone wants and how they’ve managed to survive in the zone for so long, but motivations should make sense in the moment, too.

Ignoring the story could’ve been an option if it weren’t for the checklist in the corner of the screen tracking the next story-related tasks, muting any impulse to explore the world. I’m perfectly happy with linear stories, but it’s an odd choice to tell one in a procedurally-generated game with so much busywork.

The checklist underpins Pacific Drive’s tutorial that guides you through repairing your car with nested tasks. This worked swimmingly until I put on Oppy’s “Mechanic’s Eye”, a pair of goggles that layers icons and information over the world. Everything I looked at seemed to have four different actions I could perform on it, indicated by tiny icons with contextual controls where tapping a trigger does something different than holding it, which is how I threw away my pry bar while trying to scrap a car.

When I couldn’t find it, I wondered if I’d have to restart the game until I realised I should use the nearby “scrapper” chainsaw instead, a task that was mysteriously omitted from the checklist. Pacific Drive is hardly the most complicated game I’ve played – Against the Storm has much more going on – but it’s yet another odd choice to begin with an exhaustively complete checklist and then give up any attempt of explaining things half an hour later, whether that’s the tools or the utterly confusing stability scanner/mapping system.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I was so excited for a game but ended up so completely unable to play it. There’s an early area where I had to get onto a bridge, which involved a lot of off-roading in the dark. I couldn’t see anything because one of my headlights was bust and I didn’t have the blueprint to fix it, so I kept bumping into things that damaged my car, meaning I had to get out every minute to repair it – a task made harder because I didn’t have a torch. Immersion!

This is the point at which fans will say I should’ve turned on car invulnerability and “brighter nights”, which I did, but only after a great deal of frustration. Pacific Drive is one of these new kinds of games that disdains easy/medium/hard difficulty settings, instead giving players dozens of individual modifiers to tune the game to their liking. The problem is that as a new player I have no idea what I should pick – which is precisely why games offer global difficulty settings in the first place.

Again, the absence of torches and difficulty settings are not technical issues, nor is the fact that your GPS is only visible if you look to the side. These are not technical issues. They’re choices to make the game harder and more “immersive” – but not so immersive that refuelling takes two minutes rather than ten seconds, or that you have to do oil changes.

Other problems may be harder to fix. There’s no way to save your progress when you’re away from your garage on “runs”, apparently due to the game’s procedurally-generated maps. This means you could be on an hour-long run and die right at the end with very little to show. Yes, you can turn off “item loss on failure” to remove much of the sting, but if it’s a story mission, you’ll probably have to redo the whole thing. And while I played on a PS5, where suspending the game is easy, this is much trickier for PC players. Other roguelikes I’ve enjoyed, like Hades, Elden Ring, Against the Storm, and Brotato, are nowhere near this punishing.

Then there’s the motion sickness. Pacific Drive’s restricted field of view wasn’t a problem for me when I was driving on smooth roads in daylight, but when I was off-roading at night with a busted tire and glancing at my GPS every 15 seconds, I felt very queasy. I accept this is an individual issue and others won’t be bothered, but it’s a shame nonetheless; certainly I didn’t think the driving would be as tough as it was.

Finally, I ran into a tricky soft lock when collecting an Anchor to power my ARC device. Since you can only carry one thing at a time in your hands, I had to drop an important mission item, which for some reason I couldn’t put in my backpack. But as soon as I picked up the Anchor, the ground started heaving around me, so I lost track of the mission item. I spent a few minutes rooting around in the woods for it, to no avail. In the end I repeated the entire run. I expect this, and other soft locks, will be fixed, but it’s a reminder to avoid playing games on their release day.

On a later run, I lost an Anchor during a storm and couldn’t figure out what the story wanted me to do next. I returned to the garage to discover my next major upgrade needed lots more scrap metal, for which I’d need to saw apart a bunch of abandoned cars. This wasn’t my idea of fun, so I stopped playing.

Pacific Drive is caught between two very different kinds of games:

1. Classic roguelikes with emergent gameplay deep enough to withstand hundreds of runs over procedurally-generated levels.

2. Narrative adventures with levels hand-crafted to fit a linear story.

Neither of them truly work here. The story is diluted by the endless procedurally-generated looting, and there’s little emergent gameplay because the anomalies are so isolated and the story dictates a linear progression in abilities.

The lesson? In game design, it’s best to pick a lane.

Space Invaders: World Defense is an augmented reality (AR) game where you shoot waves of aliens by pointing your phone at them in the real world. After each wave, you switch to an “Invader Dimension” where your ship flies on rails through a 3D wireframe landscape that’s meant to look like your neighbourhood but doesn’t.

…And that’s about it, which is fair enough because Space Invaders: World Defense, being totally free with no ads, is more of a tech demo or proof of concept than a complete game. The problem is that the concept it’s trying to prove – AR gaming – remains stubbornly unfun and annoying.

When you start the app, it locates you via GPS and notes your temperature and weather conditions, which supposedly influence gameplay but not in any manner I could detect. Since it’s a true AR game rather than simply location-based, it also requires a view of your nearby buildings. That’s why I had to go out on my street to play, waving my arms in the air like I just did care (that it was 2016 and Pokémon Go had just come out).

The game begins with a pixellated spaceship – your spaceship – flying over an AR feed from your phone’s camera. Cleverly, it gets you to turn in a circle to follow the spaceship, which I assume is how the Google ARCore technology more precisely locates your position and sets up a 3D mesh of your surroundings.

Once completed, an alien invader appears, its position indicated by an arrow above your ship if it isn’t in view. You auto-fire by dragging a finger across the screen, allowing for one-handed play, though my arm quickly tired to the point where I had to support it, Mulder and Scully-style:

Aliens appear one at a time around you, requiring you to turn to shoot them, though no walking is necessary. For me, the aliens were rarely occluded by real world buildings, and when they were it didn’t work properly – a couple of times an alien was half-embedded in a wall. The depth at which the aliens were projected into the world also seemed out of whack, with some going backwards “into” buildings; however, it was hard to tell whether this was really happening since the aliens also varied considerably in size (but not shape), sometimes appearing very close by through portals.

Some aliens have shields, meaning they take half a second longer to kill than others. Some have red spheres on their shoulders, of uncertain purpose. Some fire yellow cube bullets at you. And sometimes you collect power-ups, most of which seem to make no difference at all. There is basically no skill required other than being able to point your phone at bright colours.

After shooting aliens for a minute, you complete the wave and enter the Invaders’ Dimension for a non-AR treat. A black portal appears in the sky, quickly expanding to fill the entire screen with a 3D wireframe of your surroundings. This works perfectly on a skyscraper in their demo video. My street, however, was rendered as a barely recognisable blocky valley using data I expect came from Google Maps’ various aerial, satellite, and Street View sources.

My spaceship, previously stationary at the bottom of the screen, took off and flew on rails over the equally blocky neighbourhood toward groups of aliens. I found this slightly more interesting because there was now more than one alien at a time to shoot at; I also appreciated not having to hold my phone up. Sadly, after a minute I was returned to the real world, and the cycle repeated until I got hit by one yellow cube too many.

(It’s possible to play solely in the Invaders’ Dimension if you tell the app you’re indoors, but you might as well play literally any other game in those circumstances.)

Space Invaders: World Defense is not a good game. It is a good demonstration of AR gaming, however, in that it reminds us that no-one, with the dubious exception of Niantic’s various creature-collecting games, has created a convincing reason for people to put up with the physical discomfort and social awkwardness of pointing their phones at things in the real world that they aren’t photographing or filming. Even if every single technical issue in this game were fixed , even if the aliens were perfectly occluded by trees and cars and buildings, even if my phone were rendered entirely weightless, it still wouldn’t be fun.

It’s telling that the only AR game I’ve really enjoyed playing was released in 2010. In UFO on Tape, you try to keep a UFO in your camcorder’s viewfinder as it darts around; the longer it’s off the screen, the faster your battery drops. It wasn’t real AR because it didn’t display the real world on your phone at all, but it felt like AR because it combined your phone’s gyroscope with the aesthetics of amateur video to put you in another time and place entirely. Like every other game that makes you hold your phone up, it was only tolerable in small doses, but I loved it nonetheless.

A sequel, UFO on Tape: First Contact, was released in 2019, replacing the original’s charm and simplicity with fussy gameplay and garish art. It is worse in every way.

Housekeeping

Over the past few weeks I’ve been exploring various different places to take this newsletter, with the hope of merging it with my blog, since I think Substack’s archives – or indeed, any newsletter service archives – aren’t ideal as a way to host them.

Ghost was briefly enticing, but it’s quite expensive and would mean all my blog comments would be wiped out. If I didn’t want to merge with my blog, I could revive my dormant Buttondown newsletter or try Beehiiv or similar services.

One option I’d dismissed long ago was using Wordpress. My blog is hosted on the paid wordpress.com service, which includes newsletters. When I tried it a few years ago, I didn’t like the look of the emails it created and was annoyed at how it dealt with multi-page blog posts. However, this week someone at WP helpfully pointed out these things had been improved, or at least made clearer.

I’m still not 100% set on merging my blog and newsletter: they have completely different names and purposes. Then again, over 95% of my long-form online writing is about games right now, and so maybe it’s time to recognise that.

Anyway: if you think it would be confusing to get newsletters from “mssv” (or maybe “mssv + Have You Played”), or to sometimes get emails about things other than games, please let me know!

Sunset is a first-person game where you clean a penthouse apartment in the fictional 1972 socialist republic of Anchuria. You arrive at 5pm and leave an hour later, each time learning a little bit more about its owner, Gabriel Ortega, a mysterious art curator.

It’s a simple game: there are no puzzles and no ways to fail. You’re kept entirely within Ortega’s enormous bachelor pad, but the buzz of helicopters and explosions on the horizon never lets you forget there’s the growing revolution against Anchuria’s military leadership – a revolution you shape by passing military secrets from the apartment to the rebels.

Ortega’s apartment, perpetually bathed in the golden hour, is gilded yet more by the impeccable art and furniture that fills its rooms and walls. It’d be perfect escapism if not for anger and longing expressed by your character, Angela Burnes, an African-American woman whose recently graduated from college. When other games try to tackle hard subjects, they often do so at a remove. Not so in Sunset, where Angela writes in her diary about growing up in a racist America, the ideals of pacifism and the necessity of violent resistance, and how it feels to fall in love with someone she’s never met.

It’s bracingly political – too political for most gamers, who shunned it upon its release in 2015 – yet the chores that occupy most of your time remind you that even in war, life must continue.

I’m friends with the designers of Sunset.

May 21, 1972, Pentecost. You begin in an elevator. In front is your reflection, a task list left by Ortega, and a set of buttons that cleverly stand in for the game’s options. You open the doors to Ortega’s apartment, which is completely empty save some boxes, which you have to move and unpack, giving you a reason to poke around.

Angela talks for a minute after exiting the elevator, musing about her work and recent events; she’ll do the same for your 43 subsequent visits to the apartment. Otherwise, her thoughts are conveyed via text captions when you look at specific objects or out at the city. This mostly works well except for when she’s talking over the captions or when important plot points are delivered at incongruous moments.

A few objects have actions associated with them. Sometimes there’s just one choice of action, like when you unbox books; sometimes there’s two, like washing dishes brusquely or thoughtfully, or answering a note left by Ortega in a professional or personal way.

There are a lot of oddities to how Sunset presents actions:

• Actions are spelled out and described with emotion; it’s not just “clean dishes”, it’s “Load dishes into dishwasher, wash each glass carefully by hand,” a level of specificity that reflects that care that can go into them.

• Viewing each choice requires you to look slightly to the left or right, which feels unnecessarily awkward given that they’re mapped to separate buttons.

• Once you press a button, the screen fades out and you’re teleported to a new location to see the finished work (e.g. laundry folded and moved to the bedroom, paintings hung on the wall etc.); you don’t see or perform the chores directly.

Some actions consume time: mopping takes 18 minutes, washing dishes takes 30 minutes, polishing silver takes 25 min, etc. Others are performed instantly. The idea is to make you think about what you want to spend time on, because it’s not only binary choices that give you agency in Sunset – you can also ignore tasks and chores completely. Doing nothing is a choice.

Some days, there are more chores than there’s time to complete them and it can be hard to find exactly where the letters are that Ortega wants mailing or which plants he wants watering. Other days, there are only one or two things to do, taking just ten in-game minutes. On those days, I luxuriated in wandering through the apartment, taking in the skyline, noticing what new artwork had been added, and leaving early.

As the hour turns, the light fades, making it harder to snoop around and find notes. At 6pm, the day ends: you can keep walking through the apartment but you can’t interact with anything, and it’s time to take the elevator down again. The one exception is that if you sit down in Ortega’s easy chair at 5:59pm, Angela will write her diary in full, which appears word by word with no audio. Ortega sometimes moves the chair between visits to picturesque spots, leading to a fun hunt.

(I didn’t realise I should sit in the easy chair until I read the instructions a few visits in. No-one reads instructions!)

After a few visits, you settle into a routine of completing chores, updating the wall calendar, and settling down in the easy chair; Ortega’s penthouse may be huge, but you can still walk across its two storeys and patio in 30 seconds. The challenge in Sunset, if there is one, is in noticing things. Not just Ortega’s notes, which might be tacked on the kitchen counter or inside a wardrobe, but spotting a new painting or when the art book on the coffee table has been turned to a new page.

Ortega notices how you change the apartment, too. When you unpack the boxes at the beginning of the game, you can display paintings in a perfect grid or in a more fun arrangement; you can pick what wallpaper to hang, how to repair a broken window (Angela wondered whether Ortega likes the boards I chose, if they give the apartment a “romantic favela feel”), what colour to paint the bar area. These choices persist through the game, small ways to make the apartment feel like your own.

With each visit taking around ten minutes to play in real time, you experience entire months in under an hour. It’s unusual for time to rush by so steadily in these kinds of games; you might get the occasional time jump or opening Up-style montage, not a constant ticking through the calendar. Sunset’s immersion isn’t literal like in “immersive sim” games where you might clean plates wipe by wipe or have stats for your money and health – but it is immersion, an immersion accelerated by montage, with the goal introducing you to a very particular character in a very particular world, as quickly as possible.

Sunset’s story takes place over three acts. The first act begins with your arrival as a cleaner and ends with two discoveries: Ortega knows military secrets and Angela’s brother, David, is a rebel leader. In the second act, Angela begins copying information that Ortega leaves out in the open, seemingly deliberately. He goes on a trip to see his ex wife, encouraging Angela to decorate and learn the piano while he’s away; it ends with David’s capture.

The final act sees the rebels fighting the government openly in the capital. Ortega begins stockpiling art, turning his apartment into a maze of boxes. As helicopters buzz outside and fires dot the horizon, Ortega and Angela work to get the President to step down, their relationship deepening into a love affair, even as they remain apart.

There are a lot of things that seem strange or wrong in Sunset, some of which I assume are accidental or due to time and resource constraints (more on those later), many of which can be explained by the particularities of its design. Here’s what I mean by that: we’re used to seeing broad tropes in games, which is a consequence of how they’re designed to fit into existing genres and targeted toward existing audience segments. Such games are less likely to have speed bumps that get in your way of spending time in them, but they’re also less likely to offer anything very different from what you’ve already played ten or a hundred times.

For example, it stretches credulity that Angela wouldn’t meet Ortega in person over the course of 44 visits, even by accident. But then, missed connections are the entire point of the game, and everything else is arranged to justify that: professional distance, a business trip prolonged by the civil war, Ortega going into hiding, and so on. Too many coincidences, perhaps – more than Chungking Express, a movie that inspired this game – but it just about works, and it certainly works better than seeing him wandering around the apartment.

Then there are the binary choices on how you act towards Ortega. How many people really choose the brusque/professional option versus the personal/romantic ones? Not many, I bet. You have a choice, but it doesn’t feel like one – as Philippa Warr and Emily Short have noted, the personal choices are literally more attractive, described in greater detail and emotion. The intimacy that results from these options feels sudden and disproportionate given how vocally frustrated Angela is with Ortega’s privilege. But again, maybe that’s the point – choices are never equal, especially for someone as lonely as Angela is.

Angela’s diary reveals a similarly fierce, intellectual passion that swings back and forth between naivety and cynicism. Is this the sign of an inconsistent character, or is it exactly how a young woman, recently graduated from university and living in a foreign country undergoing a revolution, would feel?

I can’t excuse everything in Sunset. Angela’s thought-captions are often too broad (“sexy flowers”?), very much out of character with her thoughtful, mournful diary entries. I’m assuming this is a casualty of having to bang out too many one-liners in too little time. And sometimes Angela mentions things in voiceover, like how Ortega has been arguing for her brother’s release, that we never discover from our time in the apartment, as if there were a sidechannel of communication invisible to us.

Sunset’s achievement system is equally jarring, popping up as you “progress” in Angela’s piano practice or her relationship with Orgeta (e.g. “Angela is probably in love with Ortega. Or he with her.”) I can’t imagine anyone other than the most mechanical of gamers wants or needs this to be spelled out in such an atmospheric, narrative-driven game, yet here we are.

I’m fascinated by Sunset’s treatment of the act of cleaning. From a gameplay perspective, cleaning isn’t important at all. Yes, there’s a list of chores to cross off, but Angela notes that Ortega never seems to care whether you clean the dishes or tidy his papers. Sunset tells us that mindlessly completing “mission objectives” merely seduces us with the illusion of progress.

So why clean at all? It’s a choice. In the real world, I take pleasure in cleaning. I used to vacuum and mop the floors of our office, and I still clean our home even though we have a cleaner. If you want it to be, cleaning can be a gesture of consideration and love.

Sunset has many technical issues, ranging from actions and captions being hard to trigger, to the clock not updating properly when you’re meant to arrive late. There’s a uniform lack of polish, too. I accidentally skipped to the next day twice in a row; outdoor sound effects are repetitive and poorly mixed; transitions between locations are too jumpy; some voiceovers are out of sync with the story revealed elsewhere. And given its mechanical simplicity, the game is harder to learn and play than it needs to be.

None of this is a reason to avoid Sunset. I’m reminded of something Jon Ingold said recently:

I blame polish. I kinda hate polish; it’s a thing that makes everything more expensive and prices people out and it’s not really worth anything much - we all forgive the computer all the time anyway; every game camera is clumsy, every texture blurs; every animation clips. You CAN polish a turd but you don’t NEED to cut a diamond.”

Indeed, despite these issues, Sunset received excellent reviews from many critics upon its release in 2015. Unfortunately, it was such a commercial failure the studio soon announced it would no longer make games.

Many of the discussions amongst “gamers” at the time were frightening to behold in their anti-intellectualism and hostility toward the “entitlement” of artists who want to earn a living. The mere presence of books by Kurt Vonnegut in Ortega’s apartment enraged them; only pretentious designers would do such a thing. These gamers demanded to be pandered to; they weren’t looking for polish, they wanted a completely different game.

It’s more complicated than ignorant gamers shunning arty games, though. Sunset’s Kickstarter referenced Gone Home (2013) and Dear Esther (2012), both of which likely sold hundreds of thousands if not millions of copies. A year after Sunset, another arty walking simulator, Firewatch, would sell millions. So what explains Sunset’s poor sales?

Putting aside anti-intellectualism and outright racism, the lack of polish may have discouraged those who were receptive to its themes – but there’s a difference between being receptive and being hungry. It’s not like gamers weren’t aware of racism and autocracies and revolutions in 2015, but I’m not sure they wanted them in their entertainment. But if Sunset were released today, with bug fixes and a decent application of polish, I’d like to think it’d be received rapturously.

That might be optimistic, but more people than ever are aware of how significantly Tale of Tales, the game’s creators, have influenced the industry. The Graveyard inspired one of the best moments in the otherwise violent and frenetic Uncharted 2; The Path inspired The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and The Stanley Parable. Right now, Auriea Harvey, one half of Tale of Tales, is the subject of a major exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York.

Even if that weren’t the case, Sunset demands attention. It’s about a young black woman fleeing the racism of America; the necessity and cost of violent resistance; and how two people who've never met can fall in love. So many games shy away from politics, preferring to approach those ideas more obliquely. Here, you can’t overthrow US imperialism, but you can choose to burn an American flag. It matters to no-one except yourself.

When asked if they believed a game could players understand what it’s like to live through the horrors of a war or the scary exhilaration of a revolution, the designers rejected utopian visions:

No. I mean it would be nice I guess. But it would be even nicer if such horrors didn't exist at all.

The focus of Sunset is on what happens in regular people's daily lives. Today, we are all living our lives while in the background a war is going on. Maybe not right outside our window, as in the game, but often fought in our name nonetheless, far away from home. Everywhere in the world people are being abused and exploited and oppressed to grease the wheels of capitalism. If the violence is not physical, though it very often is, then it's psychological, social and cultural. Sunset is about all of our lives, the lives we all lead: in our peaceful apartments while the world is burning outside.

And one of the things we try to explore is how a relatively normal life still happens, even in extreme circumstances. We still feel joy, we still sing songs, we still do our work, we still fall in love. And those things are important. So important that, well, maybe they are worth fighting for.

So it was in 2015, so it is now. Sunset is worth fighting for. One day, I hope to play a remastered version – but you don’t need to cut a diamond.

Bonus

I first met Tale of Tales back when I was making ARGs. Fittingly, Sunset has its own ARG including the Anchurian Air website and Ortega’s diary on Tumblr. There’s also an extensive blog of visual story references.

Monday was my final day as CEO of Six to Start, the company I co-founded in 2007; here’s my attempt at summarising those seventeen years.

Finally, I do still intend to move away from Substack – soon!

Episode XOXO is a lightly interactive story game where you choose how the main character looks, dresses, and behaves. As far as I can tell, all eighteen stories centre on romance, each containing fifteen 5-10 minute episodes, and each following well-worn genre conventions (e.g. you’re actually a princess, friends to lovers, etc.)

The game looks like a bright, fun 2D cartoon. While the writing, settings, and even gameplay vary wildly between stories, some things remain the same. Firstly, everyone looks like they’re in their 20s because they’re constructed from a shared pool of character models and animation. Secondly, choices usually have three options spanning the classic asshole/normal/cool spectrum. And finally, those choices make little to no lasting difference to the plot or how other characters treat you.

Episode XOXO’s ease and approachability explains why smartphone games like it became so incredibly popular, enduring – and profitable. As an Apple Arcade title it lacks the ads and in-app purchases that “gate” access to desirable outfits and good choices in its free-to-play parent, Episode – Choose Your Story, but it wasn’t hard for me to see how fans could justify spending money in a game they might play for hours upon hours every week.

I played large chunks of two stories: Level Up, where you enter a video game tournament with a more-than-friend, and Suddenly Royal, which is exactly what it sounds like. Plus there’s a bonus story, which you’ll find at the end…

If you’ve ever wondered what you actually do in these games, what the choices are like, whether the stories are any good, and why they’re so popular, find out in this exhaustively detailed episode of Have You Played!

Level Up

I am compelled to share the description for this story:

You’re a known gamer! Throw in a competition, an annoying partner, and underlying feelings, and you’ve got quite a mess. Will you be able to Level Up or will it be too much?

These are not words and sentences that any native English speaker would utter. I am convinced this story is either machine translated or AI generated – maybe both. The uncanny writing continues through the entire story but fails to detract from its pure, unadulterated, can’t-take-your-eyes-off-it interpersonal drama, as cliched and predictable as it is. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

You begin by customising your character’s look and name. By default, you’re a conventionally attractive young woman, but you can choose from endless hair styles, face settings, makeup styles, and skin tones. There are only four body types, however, three of them barely distinguishable and one plus-size; and very limited ways to make your face look older; I kept the default look and name (Elle).

Next, you choose whether you want to date men or women, and customise their look. This feels vaguely creepy.

Episode 1

Elle and her friend Maisy are selected to compete in the Level Up video game tournament in New York. Yay!

In Episode XOXO, dialogue and internal thoughts are conveyed one line at a time, but you can tap through as fast as you like. There’s no spoken dialogue, but there is constant background music and a few sound effects. It’s nowhere as good as a proper cartoon, with props frequently floating in the air and people moonwalking – but it’s not not a cartoon either, since lines are accompanied by character animations (e.g. dancing, shrugging, eyerolls) and scenes often involve zooms and pans.

Elle and Maisy share the news with their fans on a livestream; despite the crude visuals, it’s perfect for smartphones and done imaginatively. The writing, however, is painfully basic with a weird lack of contractions and generically geeky terms. Someone asks how she’s feeling. I choose “I hope we’ve trained enough”, the other option being “We’ve stacked things in our favour”. I’m reminded my choices will affect the story, which I refuse to believe is true.

Someone called Hayden crashes the livestream to say she’ll beat Elle; of course, Hayden is Elle’s dream partner. Maisy notes “Y’all could be the enemies to love trope personified if you wanted,” which is a sly thing to say and also a yet another sentence that no-one would ever say out loud.

Elle explains she used to be friends with Hayden; that’s why she got into video games. It’s a tricky revelation as I’m struggling to identify and role play as their person who I don’t know anything about. Hayden somehow appears at the door and I choose to challenge her to a game of Kicking Combat (yes) rather than keep arguing.

This begins a minigame, and of course I have to choose my avatar’s costume. Next, I’m instructed to strike when I have an opportunity and evade when I can’t strike. The minigame repurposes Episode XOXO’s choice-based game engine by prompting me with something like “She’s [the enemy] is tensing her muscles” or “She’s looking at something behind my back” and you can either strike or duck down. Choose the right option and you knock down Hayden’s health one notch. There is no challenge whatsoever, but it succeeds in providing the absolute minimum simulacrum of being a beat ‘em up.

After the game, Elle calls it “Deadly Combat”, gesturing at the lack of continuity editor on this story. She has a chat with Maisy and her boyfriend Lyle, then I decide  what wardrobe to take to New York (sweet, trendy, or cool, each with three outfits). Lyle calls with bad news: Maisy broke her wrist rollerblading. Oh no! Oddly, Maisy is smiling as they commiserate; it’s not as if there’s a lack of sad faces in Episode XOXO’s library so I’m chalking this one up to hurried art design.

Elle tries to find another partner, with no luck. She decides to tell the tournament “panel” she’s pulling out, the panel being a guy called Blake sitting in what looks like a school office. Hayden is already there, saying she wants to compete on her own without a partner. Blake says that’s not possible, Elle jumps in and says she’s her partner. I tell Hayden she needs me (the other option being “Admit you need her”) and Hayden gives in. TO BE CONTINUED!

Episode 2

Elle arrives in NY, shocked at the price of the hotel room, especially since she can’t split it with Maisy any more. Of course, Hayden arrives and says she’s sharing the room: “We’ll still have our own spaces, even though they’re connecting rooms.” Excuse me, Hayden, that’s not how Junior Suites work. I don’t have any choice to agree to this or not.

Naturally, Hayden blasts music, it’s rubber and glue etc etc. Elle and Hayden have a FaceTime with their mutual best friend, CJ, which is actually quite funny. I choose to sass Hayden back the next morning; I am quite sure this changes nothing in the story. My attention wanders; I go onto Discord and post a joke about John Gruber on three separate social networks, brush my teeth, then return. I choose hair, makeup, and a dress.

Cass (“one of the top players of Space Aspect”) is talking to Hayden at a tournament meet and greet and wants to see her later; she looks just like Maisy, I guess a result of the limited body types for characters. I decide not to interrupt them. Amazingly, because I chose my dream partner as being female, literally everyone in the competition is a woman; presumably half would’ve been male otherwise.

The whole thing is an interesting take on the mutability (or not) of gender roles, since I’m convinced the game’s dialogue, other than pronouns, is exactly the same as regards Hayden whether she’s male or female; Hayden’s clothes are also mostly coded as traditionally male, as we find out later on. This is not at all a game-breaking issue but it is curious to see it in practice so transparently.

We learn that tournament viewers can vote on their favourite gamer duo, who get to go out for a night on the town. Cass hopes she and Hayden will be voted favorite duo (uh, how?). Elle ponders how to get votes when she’s less famous than everyone else. Hayden tries to boost Elle’s confidence, suggesting she do behind the scenes livestreams and vlogs. “People would like that kind of content”. Elle reminds herself Hayden is one of the best players she knows and climbed up fast, something I am pretty sure I read verbatim in the previous episode.

Lacey proposes a friendly game of Space Aspect, which I do not get to play or see. Instead, I go back to the hotel to recover and find Hayden in her PJs. Elle stares at Hayden’s tattoos, embarrassed (they’re on her arms!! how is that embarrassing?!), and gets flustered. Elle does a livestream, answers questions about playing with Hayden, then says “let’s play some Space Aspect!” Once again, I do not get to play.

Elle has a Facetime with Maisy. I choose to say my time with Hayden has been better than I thought (alternative is “full of regrets, only regrets” which is pretty funny). Maisy reminds Elle of how she had a crush on Hayden once.

Elle and Hayden play a round of Space Aspect together (“level 5 is the hardest”); the crude art does not show Elle holding any kind of controller or input device. Hayden leans over Elle to show how to play. Romantic!

Episode 3

Our first big tournament event manifests as a minigame where you shoot aliens. You can skip it if you like, but you “won’t earn any gamer point”. The goal: shoot aliens when they’re distracted, dodge if they’re shooting, and when multiple aliens appear, keep shooting. Supposedly the choices were timed, not that I noticed. Once again, Elle’s avatar in the game was Elle but in a different costume, a bit like what 80s young adult fiction imagined future video games would be like when you were sucked into a computer. It was all very chunky: the aliens were cobbled out of existing character models but, e.g., missing noses; Elle’s gun was floating in the air in front of her; aliens vanish when shot, etc.

Of course, we win (well, I win). Cass makes a mean comment Elle flashes back to when she last had a soda at a bar with Hayden, who’s come to make a peace offering after being nasty to her in high school. They agree to make up due to their mutual best friend, CJ. I notice how Episode XOXO, basic in so many ways (someone is “holding” a lollipop that floats in front of their hands), has a seemingly limitless gestures  and reactions to illustrate every possible mood –  shyly hunched shoulders, eye rolls, nervous hand clasp, an arm protectively holding elbow. It works.

In the present day, Elle and Hayden go outside to admire the New York skyline. It’s cold, so Hayden gives her letterman jacket around Elle. Later, viewers on Elle’s livestream spot that she’s wearing Hayden’s jacket, and the next morning Elle wakes to her socials blowing up: Elle and Hayden have been voted as best duo! Cliffhanger!!

Episode 4

Elle and Hayden celebrate by jumping on her bed, at which point Elle belatedly realises Hayden is beautiful. I choose an outfit, hair, and makeup for her photo op, plus which poses to strike (e.g. flirty vs. cute).

Our duo go to a funfair with a photographer: dodgems, ferris wheel, games. None of it is interactive. Over a burger, Hayden says, “admit it, you like being with me” and various other bits of playful sarcasm that don’t work because it’s so flat. Hayden remembers Elle’s fave burger order. They have a heart to heart, Hayden praises Elle’s abilities. That’s it – boring!

Episode 5

Elle does an Insta video where she trains on a Quest of Legends “speed run” – but first, I have to pick a dress!

In a minigame, I’m told to “get the crystal”. I choose whether to go left or right in a forest – pick left. I meet a fairy, whom I can attack or ask what’s up. I do the latter – fairy stabs me and I die, ending the minigame. “Well, at least I know what not to do!” remarks Elle to her viewers.

Later, Elle notices her video has 12k likes and lots of nice comments (I really like the integration of social media in this story). But when she goes back to practice more, her bedazzled Epitrix Pro X controller is missing. Flashback: it was given to her by Hayden years ago, who signed up to a waiting list for it. Young Hayden offers to train Elle at gaming in a backhanded, antagonistic way. What a tiresome dynamic – are they really going to stretch this out for ten more episodes? Probably!

Elle tells Hayden she lost her controller; Hayden is quietly upset. “Little did I know this was the catalyst for what was to come” as we see a shadowy person take the controller somewhere. To be continued!!

There are ten more episodes in Level Up, but I suspect things won’t change beyond the formula already established, so I move on to…

Suddenly Royal

This is, of course, one of a million takes on The Princess Diaries:

You find out you're the heir to the throne of a small European kingdom...but you're not sure you have what it takes to be a queen.

The writing is much better than Level Up but the presentation is less inspired, with no minigames other than a short fine art “quiz”. Once again, I can customise my look, name, and dream partner, but my character has to be a woman. Of course, Sarah (the default name) has the same thin, white look as Elle, in her early 20s.

Episode 1

Flashforward: You’re already a queen! You have to “decide” whether you want to be a queen, give up the crown, or you don’t know. Cute!

Four months, earlier in Philadelphia: Sarah is an overworked, underappreciated intern at a law firm. When visiting her parents (I’m pleased to see a bit of diversity with her mom being black), Patrizio, lawyer to the throne of Valais (“the wonderful European kingdom”) appears at the door. As the late king’s only daughter, Sarah must become king; of course, she was adopted. Sarah has none of it.

Shortly afterwards, Felipe, royal advisor to Valais, turns up to convince Sarah to come back – by any means necessary. Given that I already designed Felipe’s look as my dream partner a few minutes earlier, it’s kind of funny the game dispenses with suspense of knowing he’ll be a love interest, but I guess the designers have decided that wish fulfilment outweighs suspense.

Episode 2

I notice that like all good soap operas and reality TV, every episode begins by reprising the stinger from the previous ep: “Do I need to repeat myself? I’m Felipe Wagner, royal advisor to Valais, and I’m here to…” etc.

Sarah shows Felipe into her office at work – uh, how does she have an office, isn’t she an intern? She works until midnight with Felipe still patiently waiting. Peter, her boss, busts in demanding his notes. I can choose to say “you gave me a lot to do/I’m working as fast as I can/back off”; regardless, Felipe leaps to my defence. I say I can defend myself; Felipe apologises, says he will do as I command. I do not like these vibes!

He departs, leaving a note with a place to meet. I decide to meet him, and choose a new outfit (at midnight?). Sarah goes to his hotel, where he’s reading a book about Philadelphia. He confesses Valais isn’t doing well; since King Victor died, it’s no longer prospering. “A kingdom without a ruler, it’s left at the mercy of those without good intentions.” I have no choice – I have to go!!

Number of choices in this episode: 11

Episode 3

Felipe says Sarah’s employers have already agreed to let her go. Um, rude?! Felipe explains some facts about Valais to Sarah and her family with “childlike glee”, as if he were a simpleton.

On arrival at the palace in Valais, the maids dress her up, naturally. Sarah meets the royal private secretary, Mathilda, and quickly becomes overwhelmed. Felipe interjects, saying he needs to meet urgently, “I can feel his strong hands on me,” as he steers her outside. Inappropriate!

Felipe says he noticed Sarah struggling to breathe during the meeting; he’s that perceptive “when it comes to you”. I note this is sweet/observant/creepy. Felipe barely notices the remark. They walk around gardens, which his mother used to tend. Felipe and Sarah’s hands touch.

They head back inside to see Mathilda talking to a woman named Emilia. Emilia claims Sarah isn’t the queen!!

Episode 4

Emilia Von Brunner was married to the late king’s brother and possesses the same ageless look that almost all characters have in this game. At lunch, Emilia is annoyed that Sarah, a young woman without “training”, who’s never been to Valais, can be Queen. Welcome to hereditary rule, lady! “So the king was infatuated with some commoner, that doesn’t mean she can be queen.” Clearly not a Meghan stan.

Emilia, who looks like she’s 20, says her daughter Giulia, who also looks like she’s 20, would make for a better queen. Later, Giulia comes and apologises for her mother’s rudeness. Giulia: “Now tell me about America, is it as fascinating as in the movies?”

Most of the choices in this story, and probably the rest of Episode XOXO’s stories, are utterly inconsequential – Felipe pops in and asks to meet, I’m sure nothing I say will stop him. But of course, that isn’t what choices are about. Most of what we say in real life doesn’t have lasting consequences, it’s more an expression of your beliefs and attitude and emotions, so the fact that I can choose for Sarah to do one thing or another is more a way of me pretending that I’m imprinting my own attitudes on her; even on the most superficial level, role playing still works.

Sarah and Felipe go to her father’s secret library. Felipe says he knew her mother, who had to leave because the king’s parents wouldn’t let him marry a commoner. They talk about what it’s like to be in love. The next morning, I get woken up – there’s an important gallery event I have to attend! Not that exciting! TBC!!

Episode 5

Mathilda assures me I just have to turn up, look pretty, and talk about art – oh, and choose a dress. Felipe will come along to advise about the art, because apparently he knows everything.

At the gallery, Emilia announces Sarah knows so much about Valaisan art that she’ll give everyone a tour. This drama is so contrived I have to resist flinging my iPad away; surely everyone knows this new queen, who appeared all of two days ago, hasn’t actually been to Valais?! The problem with this story is that when you’re asked to consider how anything about the fictional world works, it completely falls apart.

This “tour” begins the simplest of minigames: I have to comment on four pieces of art, making one of three comments on each – smart, dismissive, stupid. I make the smart choices, everyone likes me. I am guessing that in the paid version of this story, only the dismissive and stupid comments are available for free and you have to pay real money or watch an ad to unlock the smart one.

Afterwards, I confront Emilia, who feigns ignorance. When Sarah goes back to her bedroom, Giulia is looking through her stuff! TBC!!

With ten more episodes left, I’m impatient to see what else Episode XOXO has to offer, so I briefly tried a third and final story:

Summer Crush

Your parents sent you to summer camp to teach you how to get over your social awkwardness, but you might just learn how to get in trouble and fall in love instead…

As usual, I could choose to date guys or girls; unusually, I could choose whether to be a man or woman. The story begins with my character, Aiden, whose sole defining trait is “social awkwardness”, being driven to summer camp. On arrival, the camp staff take all my electronic devices, which I’m outraged at in a genuinely funny way. In response to learning there’s a landline for emergencies, Aiden retorts, “Do you think I remember any of the numbers in my phone?!”

After choosing an outfit, Aiden surveys the camp attendees and morosely notes, “Everyone here is having fun… I’m not like them. I’m just too… socially awkward, I guess.” See what I mean?

Aiden spots a loner on the pier, a girl named Blake. She has a tattoo on her leg, like all the love interests apparently. Two camp regulars chastise me for not dancing. I’m rude/direct back at them. The camp staff tell Aiden off, remarking they were warned by my parents he was awkward. One of the regulars says, “Sorry, I didn’t know you were a loser.” Staff member: “Don’t apologise, you only tried making friends.” This is where the humour falls flat – the story is trying to be considerate about social anxiety but then has everyone else being cartoonishly cruel. It needs to be sillier or less silly.

I get sent to the Reflecting Cabin for a time out. Blake arrives shortly afterwards, for swearing. “Little did I know this is how I’d have a great summer…” etc. To be continued!

From a technical perspective, Episode XOXO is flawless, no doubt a product of many years of improvements. Not only is the app excellent at resuming from being in the background (most games are bad at this) but it constantly saves your progress; I force-quit the app and when I restarted it, it picked up from exactly where I left off. This sounds like basic stuff but it’s harder than you think, and essential if you’re competing with both books (perfect state memory) and games (very entertaining). And like books, you can play multiple stories at the same time.

Structurally, episodes are the perfect length for quick engagement at 5-10 minutes long, short enough to complete over a couple of subway stops. All the stories I saw had 15 episodes, which struck me as overlong; 8-10 eps would seem enough, but perhaps this was due to decisions inherited from Episode – Choose Your Story.

In some ways, it feels pointless to discuss Episode XOXO in favour of its phenomenally popular parent, an app that once made and may still make millions of dollars per month. In that app, some decisions and looks cost real money or require you to watch adverts. I believe the same was true for unlocking additional episodes. Emily Short wrote about this dynamic way back in 2017, far better than I can:

Choices [a very similar app to Episodes] uses its monetization to get out of having to balance the gameplay (or, perhaps, as a form of balance). Often there’s one option that’s clearly the best tactically or the most interesting for your character, and it costs money.

…Different stories use this feature in different ways. In The Freshman, your diamond unlocks tend to be for things that make your character behave in (mildly) sexually adventurous ways: wearing a bikini! Going upstairs with Chris! In Rules of Engagement, at least for the first few chapters, they’re more about getting your character to speak her mind to the ex who cheated on her and other unpleasant characters.

As Emily notes, it’s hard not to be amused or faintly appalled by how the narrative design of these games are warped by the demands of monetisation, the echoes of which are perfectly audible in Episode XOXO. And while it is probably apparent from my summaries, the stories largely reinforce traditional stereotypes about female beauty and worth, which themselves are exacerbated by the monetisation of exclusive looks.

Yet I can’t help but admire how its stories are so effectively engineered to keep players coming back; how, on occasion, its humour overcomes dubious AI interference and a lack of human editing; or how its designers can transcend its desperately limited art library to create imaginative visuals. That doesn’t mean I like Episode XOXO; it’s more that I admire the format and the craft that’s gone into it – which isn’t a small thing.

Mother of Frankenstein: Volume One is a tabletop puzzle game where you read letters, decode star charts, and solve riddles to reveal a secret hidden by Mary Shelley. While it shares the tactility of other “escape room in a box” games like EXIT: The Game, Unlock!, not to mention Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, its subject and length – 15 hours, if you count all three volumes – makes it feel weightier than the rest.

A sheet titled “Start Here” tells us to:

Think of [Mother of Frankenstein] less as a puzzle game and more as a novella with puzzles: instead of trying to get to the end as quickly as possible, we recommend you take your time to engage with the story.

While Volume One has more writing than similar games I’ve played (excepting Sherlock Holmes), I wouldn’t call it a “novella with puzzles” but more “a puzzle game with story” because even with fifteen letters, there’s not all that much of it. Those letters deftly conceal clues within their prose, making for an unusually hurried reading experience as I hunted for solutions despite the instruction to take our time. I suspect other players are more patient, but the fact the game mentions pacing at all suggests the designers are aware of the hazard.

I was patient in one way: the game advises that if you’re stuck for more than 15 minutes, you should consult their free online hint system or paid hint cards – and we never resorted to them until the very end…

I was given a free review copy of Mother of Frankenstein Vol 1-3.

Mother of Frankenstein’s conceit is that you’ve won an auction for “The Shelley Volumes”, three volumes filled with unknown documents and various artefacts. These were left to Mary Shelley’s son, Florence, upon her death, who himself ordered them destroyed upon his own death, but were instead preserved. This setup is conveyed by a fine imitation of an auction brochure from “Notheby’s”, which also includes a brief biography for Mary Godwin, as she was known before her marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley

Then we have Mary’s letter to Florence. She writes that within the three volumes is “a secret many great men have devoted their lives to unearthing, and always in vain”, one that now belongs to him as a family legacy. This vague intrigue is all you get to propel you, which, owing to its studied vagueness, fell flat for me; not that I threw away the game at that moment, but what drove me instead was my curiosity of reading the letters and the satisfaction of solving puzzles.

Those puzzles exist because Mary has literally designed them as a way to prepare Florence for his secret legacy. As narrative justifications go, it’s a pretty good one! This first volume covers her courtship with Percy Bysshe Shelley, she explains, consisting of three assignments on astronomy, poetry, and music. Completing each assignment gives instructions on how to assemble a larger ring-shape puzzle; those rings, combined with riddles spread across fifteen letters between Mary and Percy, spells out a phrase marking the end of Volume One. Mary’s instructions are unavoidably detailed and a little daunting, but I suppose if you’ve gotten this far you’re not going to leave.

Astronomy

Each assignment comes in a sealed envelope, and Astronomy consisted of five letters, two maps of the stars, and a big map of the solar system.

The letters detail Mary and Percy’s burgeoning relationship. Percy visits her father and unexpectedly meets Mary, recently returned from Scotland. It’s an intellectual connection as much as a romantic one, discussing astronomy, nature, physics, and – uh oh – the “unjust” and “unnatural” institution of marriage, which is just as well since Percy already has a wife.

We first tried putting the letters in order based on references to events and how they addressed each other (“Mr. Shelley” then “Percy” then “Dearest Percy” etc.) until we realised a) we didn’t have all the letters yet and b) their order was irrelevant for now. In fact, the back of every single letter had both a fragment of a riddle and a tiresome if necessary warning to “not try to solve these riddles until all three rings have been constructed”.

Our actual goal was to mark the position of each planet and four asteroids on the map of the solar system by means of triangulation from the two maps of the stars: one from Earth and the other from a comet. In practice, this meant drawing lots of intersecting lines across the map, a nice spatial reasoning puzzle that also involved deduction, since the orbits of the asteroids were unlabelled.

With this done, we wrote down the “answers” (the order of the twelve planets and stars, plus which astrological sign they were in) on the back of the envelope, then checked whether we were right by peeking inside the envelope where the correct answers were printed. This clever bit of design saved us from opening it up again when we came to assembling the ring for the final puzzle.

This took about 50 minutes, so we had time to move on to…

Poetry

Our mission: write out the “order” of twelve poems spread across five letters and seven accompanying sheets. I’ll spare you spoilers and simply note that this involved the most wordplay I’ve seen in a narrative puzzle game. Some of the answers were simultaneously groan-worthy and delightful in the best possible way, and the overall puzzle was constructed such that you were aided on the final tricky questions by means of elimination.

Good stuff! This took 40 minutes, making for 1.5 hours in total for our first session.

Music

The “Start Here” sheet advised us to tackle this assignment in its own session, but in the end we only spent an hour. I’m sure this was because we were both experienced at reading sheet music, which lay at the heart of this puzzle.

Once again, we had to put twelve things in order – this time, songs. Three “Exercises” guided us through this process, the first two involving the completion of magic squares based on the number of beats in a sequence of notes and rests from the songs, and the third requiring a close reading of the five letters in the envelope.

The magic squares were designed with just the right level of complexity where certain answers seem impossible to reach until you realise you can, e.g., figure out some based on elimination, or that diagonals in magic squares behave the same as rows and columns. The same went for matching the songs with symbols, which called for yet more wordplay.

We were less enamoured of the third Exercise where we had to rank Mary’s preferences of four philosophical concepts; essentially it was a logic puzzle but written in prose, making it more than a bit ambiguous to the point where when we discovered we’d mis-ranked one concept, we simply threw up our hands and moved on. Such are the risks of narrative puzzles!

Letters

With the assignments completed, we assembled three concentric rings out of twelve pieces each, their order corresponding to the answers we’d written on the back of each envelope, and placed the reverse side of map of the solar system in the centre. Next, we put all fifteen letters in chronological order and flipped them over to show a set of three riddles. This was a bit awkward with only two people reading through the letters, so I shudder to think how much fun it’d be with any more…

Each riddle came in two parts. The first revealed how the middle and outer rings of should be rotated to align different symbols; the second revealed which two symbols on the circular sheet should be connected in a line to intersect with letters that combined to form the final phrase. The rings were a bit tricky to rotate without falling apart or everything getting out of alignment, but at least they were impressively large and chunky.

As for the riddles, they were straightforward except for when they weren’t; it’s a rare riddle that doesn’t have multiple acceptable answers, even if one is better than the others. One riddle spoke of a “hungry creature” which prompted much debate about which of a whale, bear, bee, fly, soldier, or increasingly metaphysical entities might hunger for things. In the end, we solved all the riddles but the last, and we only realised we were wrong because the letters it generated were gibberish; on learning the correct answer, we were both very much grumpily “oh I suppose that one works better.”

This points to a hazard in so many physical puzzle games, which is if you reach the end of a multi-step puzzle and get the wrong answer, it’s often unclear exactly where you went astray, and it’s frustrating to backtrack and physically “fix” the error. This is less of a problem in video games which can tell you when you’ve made a mistake in real time or reveal which sub-puzzle you got wrong. Mother of Frankenstein has a hint system, of course, but I couldn’t help but think of it as a failure to resort to it.

EXIT: The Game addresses this with its puzzle cards and physical decoder wheel, an innovation that lets players quickly check whether their answer is correct without risk of spoilers, and even better, guides players toward the correct solution; I believe Unlock! does a same thing. These ingenious “answer validation” systems limit puzzle design due to how they require answers to be represented as numbers or symbols, in the process making the whole game more visually cluttered, but their popularity indicates that for most players, the saving in frustration outweighs the costs. I don’t think Mother of Frankenstein needs a better answer validation system; for the most part, its puzzles are very well-designed. It’s just that that people tend to remember the frustrating sections more than the other bits.

After 90 minutes in this session and four hours in total, we were all done with Volume One. Puzzle-wise, I enjoyed the experience and especially the wordplay, something rarely seen in these kinds of games.

I was a little impatient with the story’s pacing, however. I get that not everyone is as interested in plot as I am, but given that the entire reason Mary made such an elaborate puzzle was to hide an awesome secret, I would’ve appreciated having more revealed after four hours of effort. Perhaps Volumes Two and Three will change my mind – we will see.

This lack of urgency touches on a wider problem with Mother of Frankenstein. As a whole – the letters, the box art, the name, the marketing – the game does a very poor job of explaining why players should care other than unearthing a “secret”. Don’t get me wrong, it’s refreshing to play a tabletop puzzle game that isn’t about murders, kidnappings, or theft. I can’t praise the designers enough for telling a very different kind of story, one with consistently solid writing where Mary’s curiosity and intelligence shines through. It’s clearly a labour of love given that Mary Shelley is not anyone’s idea of a hot name.

Presumably this why the game isn’t called “Mary Shelley’s Secret Legacy” but employs the more bankable “Frankenstein” instead. Yet I can’t help but think the name “Mother of Frankenstein” is the worst of both worlds, appealing neither to Shelley-heads nor Frankenstein-fans. This baffling decision is compounded by the strange box art and lack of tagline. For the purposes of this newsletter, I could care less whether a game sells a thousand copies or a million, but a book’s cover and a movie’s poster are crucial in setting the right tone and building anticipation.

This is a shame because, with its focus on storytelling, Mother of Frankenstein: Volume 1 is trying something very different to most puzzle games – and it mostly succeeds.

DoDonPachi Resurrection HD+ is a shoot ‘em up where you fight enemies that fire so many projectiles it feels like you’re in bullet hell. But it isn’t just a masochistic test of reflexes and memory: the swirls of enemies and blossoms of bullets that burst across the screen create patterns so mesmerising they verge on the sublime.

The controls are easy to understand. Your ship shoots automatically, so all you have to do is steer, and switch between your main gun, which fires a wide spread of bullets, and your laser, a more powerful, narrow beam that can “parry” enemy laser beam. You can also fire bombs to destroy everything on the screen, along with your Hyper Cannon that does more or less the same thing but, if used correctly, gets you lots of points.

Since DDP Resurrection was originally an arcade game, you can reach the end in under 30 minutes, but mastering all the game modes and spaceships and the smartphone-specific “SM scoring system” that rewards you for piloting into bullet storms takes much longer. Most won’t have the patience for this given the existence of Vampire Survivors-likes that are both more approachable and offer deeper gameplay, but there’s an intensity to DDP Resurrection’s arcade roots that remains unique.

DDP Resurrection has too many variations and game modes to recount; I played on an iPad, mostly in Smartphone Mode on Normal difficulty. I suspect the game is much easier with touchscreen controls - dragging a finger to move your ship is a lower level of abstraction than pushing a controller stick.

You begin by picking one of three spaceships that vary in speed and range of fire, then you progress through five stages in order, going from Earth to space. There’s no story of note; the sole cutscene comes at the very end, where you learn you’d been sent into the past to prevent a war, except maybe your superior actually wanted the war to happen. Or something.

Stage 1 is set in 2008 Tokyo, and its enemies are tanks and boats – feeble stuff compared to what’s coming, and only a few bullets to avoid. You get your first taste of hell a couple of minutes later when the mid-stage boss appears, firing fans of bullets at you; and then the end of stage boss gets really wild with spinning lasers and clouds of bullets.

Here is why this isn’t infuriating to play:

1. Bullets only harm you if they hit the very centre of your ship (technically speaking, your hitbox is far smaller than the outline of your ship).

2. Bullets move slowly

3. They’re really easy to see

4. While some enemies aim bullets at you, they don’t home in on you

5. Most enemies and bosses can be killed pretty quickly

Don’t get me wrong: I still died a lot, just not every ten seconds, as you might think from these screenshots. In fact it’s not that hard to learn the patterns of enemy bullets and avoid them.

When a bullet does hit you, your ship automatically fires one of your limited supply of bombs. Not only does this destroy the incoming bullet but almost everything else on the screen, plus you remain invincible for a few seconds. When you’re out of bombs, the next hit will destroy your ship and subtract a life. You start with three lives, each coming with three bombs; you can collect one more bomb or life toward the end of each stage.

What happens when you run out of lives? You can get three more by opting to “Continue”, as if you’d shovelled in more coins. This can be done as many times as you like, perfect for those who just want to get to the end, though it resets your score – a fate worse than death for serious players.

The surface level strategy is simple: use your main gun against weaker enemies that are spread out, only switching to your laser when you’re up against tougher opponents that need more concentrated fire. The laser is also essential to parry enemy lasers. These come in all kinds of arrangements, including laser grids, horizontal laser gates that need to be pushed back in both directions, like mini-puzzles; and best of all, concentric, rotating circles of indestructible enemy ships firing outward and inward with lasers and bullets that grow and shrink, a scene so remarkable I threw away more than a few lives just marvelling at it.

Destroyed enemy ships and buildings leave behind star-like “items” that give you more points. Enemy items tend to float toward you, unlike the more valuable ones from buildings that have to be collected at some risk. The screen is often showered with so many items, bullets, lasers, ships, and buildings that it’s almost impossible to tell them apart, especially as the background begins moving sideways, diagonally, and even backwards. Charmingly, the game deliberately slows down and stutters in these moments, extending and heightening the drama, and because you can always move slightly beyond the confines of the screen’s viewport, it never feels too claustrophobic.

The bosses at the end of each stage are a touch underwhelming compared to the exuberant bedlam preceding them. These huge ships change form as you chip away their health, deploying increasingly fine interference patterns of bullets and lasers. Memorably, one boss threw exploding basketballs at me. Less impressively, they all morphed into robotic women before exploding.

DDP Resurrection HD+’s “SM scoring system” extends the game by encouraging risky piloting. When you destroy lots of enemies in a row, your Slaughter (S) gauge will fill, increasing your weapons’ power and letting you pick up more items. The downside is that your score multiplier is reduced, making this entire strategy undesirable for high score chasers. For them, the goal is to boost Menace (M) by “scraping” bullets – that is, deliberately flying close to them – since a high Menace gauge raises your multiplier and charges your Hyper Cannon.

Accordingly, the best strategy is to pilot toward bullets and avoid destroying enemies for as long as it takes to max out your Menace, then fire your Hyper Cannon, which destroys everything on the screen and “cancels” enemy bullets, yielding lots of points. Even better, firing your Hyper Cannon charges your Slaughter gauge without reducing your score multiplier. The very best moment to fire it, therefore, is when the screen is full of bullets – in other words, the riskiest parts of the game.

I did not try this strategy. The game is so hard I’m just proud of myself for surviving ten seconds during intense sections, let alone trying to get any kind of high score.

Shoot ‘em ups like DDP Resurrection are a rare breed now, seemingly an evolutionary dead end. Arcade games, by dint of how they make money, are designed to be short, intense, and repetitive. They don’t have memory; high scores are the sole recognition of players’ progress and skill. In our era of roguelike games that leaven repetition with random variables and incrementally reveal new mechanics and story and areas to explore with each play, DDP Resurrection’s scores feel a little too spare, if not miserly. This is not just a question of taste: incremental progression really does help players learn and master mechanics one by one, which most evidently prefer.

It’s said that evolutionary dead ends “result from traits that are selectively advantageous in the short term but ultimately result in lowered diversification rates of lineages.” For the DonPachi series, those traits might include the game’s punishing difficulty, the overwhelming visuals, the incomprehensibility of the scoring mechanics. All of these traits must have originated from player demand – one can imagine shoot ‘em up aficionados in the 90s tiring of games they felt were too easy or simple, rewarding developers who kept turning the bullet hell knob higher and higher until it reached a point where it became impossible for the games to attract newcomers. Lowered diversification + an inability to adapt to changing environments and competitors = extinction.

And yet DDP Resurrection HD+ exists. The arcade game it was based on was released in 2008, and the first iOS “HD” version came in 2012; the “HD+” version I played arrived in 2021, a year after Hades brought roguelike principles to the masses. DDP Resurrection HD+ isn’t remotely a roguelike but its many gameplay modes, scoring systems, weapons, and ships reflect an understanding that people now want multiple ways to play the same game. Even the game’s time loop conceit, present in the original version, gestures at the narrative justifications used for roguelikes’ repetition. And many of the game’s traits – ultra-powerful “bullet heaven”-style weapons, risk/reward scoring, autofire – have spread far and wide to Vampire Survivors and its progeny.

It’d be a mistake to draw too many parallels, though. Practically all modes and ships are unlocked at the start, generosity that’s the flipside of incremental progression. And DDP Resurrection’s ingenious gameplay and imaginative level design are tightly packed into barely enough time to play a single run of a Survivors-like game. It’s one set piece after another, every second a thrill and a delight when you come across factories building enemy tanks or the shifting columns and grids of lasers, or when the background begins circling around rings of enemies.

I can’t recommend it wholeheartedly. Some experiences are better left as memories. But if it’s a dead end, it’s the finest of ends.

Against the Storm is a real time strategy game where you build settlements in a fantasy world wracked by apocalyptic storms. Your settlements are a means to an end, stops along your caravan’s journey to reaching Ancient Seals that, once repaired, will end the storms.

Unlike city builders like The Settlers and Age of Empires, Against the Storm lacks combat, focusing instead on literal environmental factors. Periodic storms make your villagers miserable; the forest’s “hostility” increases if you chop down too many trees; sometimes you’ll be in benign woodlands, other times you’ll hack your way through forests full of threats, forcing you to adapt your strategy each playthrough.

With every completed settlement you unlock persistent upgrades, buildings, and perks. When combined with the game’s larger goal of constructing chains of settlement into the increasingly perilous land around Ancient Seals, this combination of repetition and variation and incrementally-revealed game mechanics makes the game a roguelite – unusual for city builders. Even after a dozen hours of play, there are still major mechanics I haven’t yet encountered.   

Every settlement begins in the same way: a few villagers in a glade with a warehouse and a large hearth. By constructing camps and workshops, your villagers can chop wood, gather food, mine stone, and process them into more complex goods and consumables by carrying them between buildings and warehouses. These satisfy your villagers’ needs and fulfil orders sent by your queen, both of which earn you reputation points.

As your reputation increases, you unlock new buildings; when your reputation is high enough, you win. This usually takes one to two hours, after which you return to the world map to place a new settlement a bit further along the way to an Ancient Seal. Of course, it’s not quite that easy. Settlements fail if the queen’s “impatience” rises too high. Impatience automatically ticks up over time and jumps when villagers leave because they’re unhappy or are killed.

New orders from the queen arrive every few minutes, like “Build two Woodcutters’ Camps and produce 10 Wood” for which you’ll be rewarded with three new villagers, reinforced axes, and one reputation point. Another might be “Keep your human villagers’ Resolve above 25 for 30 seconds”, which means making sure they’re well-fed, housed, and have some entertainment and culture available. Usually you can pick between a couple of options for each order depending on what you have on hand.

Villagers are specialised according to their species: beavers are faster at woodcutting and engineering but are harder to make happy, whereas lizards are better at tending animals. It’s pretty straightforward to make sure the right villagers are assigned to the right tasks.

You can direct your villagers to cut specific trees in order to reach clearings in the forest called Glades. Glades are shrouded in fog until you open a route but typically include supply caches plus a threat and/or opportunity that needs to be resolved quickly before it harms your settlement or disappears. One “glade event” threatened to kill three villagers every five minutes unless I delivered wood and fabric; another was a lucky stag that needed to be caught quickly. All the events include a choice in how you resolve them: you can break open a supply cache or send it back to the queen for extra reputation points.

Occasionally you get to pick new “cornerstones” (i.e. perks) for your settlement, like an Exploration Contract that gives you extra resources every time you open a new glade. In keeping with its roguelite nature, practically everything that happens in Against the Storm involves choices: when you unlock new buildings, you usually get to choose between two or three.

The best word to describe Against the Storm is “logistics” – half of my time was spent figuring out why my villagers weren’t making meat jerky fast enough.

Most goods that aren’t raw materials like wood and vegetables are made with “recipes”. For jerky, you combine insects or meat with a fuel like wood, oil, or coal. Insects and meat are easily obtained by villagers stationed in a Trapper’s Camp, which is pretty cheap to build; and wood comes from villagers working at a Woodcutters’ Camp.

So far, so good. But jerky can only be made in specialised buildings like a Kiln, Butcher, or Smokehouse. Constructing a Smokehouse requires 5 planks and 2 fabric, neither of which are raw materials; you can make both, at great expense, in a Crude Workstation, but you’re better off using specialised buildings like a Lumber Mill (built with 2 bricks and 2 fabric) or a Leatherworker (ditto). Where do bricks come from? Also a Crude Workstation, but also a Kiln. And so on.

The supply chain is rendered transparently by villagers literally carrying supplies back and forth between forests and farms and camps and warehouses and workshops. When they’re not doing that, they’re working (with a little timer showing how far they’re along in making, e.g. planks); waiting for raw materials; walking to the hearth to get warm; or resting. Everything is based on units and timers; even entertainers’ output is measured in entertainment units per minute. It’s all highly deterministic

This better sound interesting to you, because everything in Against the Storm is about making processed goods. Villagers are much happier eating processed foods (“complex food”) like biscuits, jerky, and porridge, and glade events and orders invariably require delivery of luxury or trade goods that have lots of inputs. But there are always shortcuts; you can trade for resources you’re missing, and most inputs to a recipe can be swapped if you’re lacking in one or the other.

If I were a programmer, I’d say that my jerky production problem was a bug in my production line.

The game tries to make debugging easy. The UI highlights which of your supplies are increasing and decreasing, with special icons for ones that are plummeting. When you place a building, dotted lines connect it to other buildings that it’ll draw resources from, indicating you should place it in the midpoint. And when my second settlement came with the “muddy ground” condition that slowed my villagers down even more than usual when they weren’t on paths, not only did I start paying more attention to laying paths everywhere (the basic ones are free) but I began rotating my buildings so their entrances directly faced paths.

It’s an oddly generous game. Whenever a new order or event pops up, there’s no penalty to pausing the game to figure out how you’ll restructure your economy to produce 15 packs of building materials, nor is there anything stopping you from moving smaller campsites as often as you like when you encounter better resources on the map. Even bigger buildings can be dismantled and all your building materials refunded, though that takes a bit longer.

Then again, I suspect most players would abandon the game all too quickly without this leeway, given how frequently new constraints and objectives materialise. Every few minutes, the season changes from “drizzle” (spring/fall) to “clearance” (summer) to “storm” (winter), with major effects on everything. Farmers plough in storm, plant in drizzle, and harvest in clearance, but harvesting requires more effort, meaning you can scale back workers during the storm and drizzle. The storm makes villagers depressed to the point where they start leaving and the queen’s impatience begins rising.

One solution is to sacrifice resources in the hearth to boost morale. This is so ruinously expensive I was anxiously watching my wood stockpile to see if I could make it through the storm, which explains why I was relieved to discover I could upgrade my hearth by placing housing and decorations around it. Yet more systems!

Against the Storm cleverly addresses the criticism of city builders being thinly-disguised celebrations of capitalism and imperialism with those same systems. Not only are settlements subject to unavoidable storms but the ferocity of those storms is based on the forest’s “Hostility”. Many factors influence Hostility, but the most interesting ones flow from the expansion of your settlement.

The more glades you open, the more woodcutters you have, the more trees you fell, the worse things get, so while it’s possible to clearcut the forest and create sprawling town, the resulting Hostility would be enormous. The game’s systems and objectives instead guide you toward more strategic ends: felling the fewest trees possible to reach glades; avoiding overproduction; reducing workers at camps and deactivating them entirely if necessary; and surging villagers for urgent events. Normal city builders reward you for reaching population and revenue milestones, but you’ll only ever have a handful of villagers in Against the Storm, scurrying back and forth your gradually-migrating buildings.

The end result is a game that places the merciless logic of production in an environmentally conscious world. No small feat!

The world map lets you choose new settlement locations, which have to be near existing ones. Your goal is to reach and repair far-off Seals before a Blightstorm wipes everything out; Blightstorms happen every few decades, so if you take too many seasons to complete each settlement, you won’t reach it in time. Once a Seal is repaired, the interval between Blightstorms extends, giving you more time to reach ever more distant Seals.

Every location has a semi-random set of modifiers, usually related to its location. My first settlement had Settler’s Luck (each settler has a 35% chance of not eating food during a break) and Gift of the Woodlands (trees produce more wood when felled). Other modifiers included Lightweight Wood (woodcutters carry 10 more goods in drizzle season), Looming Darkness (villagers are unhappier) and Humid Climate (they’re more annoyed).

The roguelite of it all extends to the Deeds and Upgrades systems. Deeds are achievements earned by, say, winning a settlement in under five years, or winning without completing any orders. These unlock new buildings and experience points, which in turn level you up, unlocking yet more buildings, traders, and cornerstones. Upgrades are bought with resources earned on completing settlements, incrementally reducing the difficulty (e.g. villagers walk 2% faster, the hearth uses 2% less fuel, etc.). All these unlocks persist even beyond Blightstorms.

Oh, and you have a home where you can talk to your Aunt about the backstory and rules, because why not?

My first few settlements took around 1-2 hours to win. I’m sure speedrunners can get through far quicker, but new orders and their reputation points only become available at fixed times. You can get points through glade events, but it takes a while to chop down the trees to reach them; so does ramping up your production lines to produce the goods required to make your villagers happy and earn reputation that way.

I got stuck trying to repair a Seal, though. The Seal was hidden in a forest with mutated, hard-to-chop trees, beset by dreadful storms, like a plague of mosquitoes that temporarily halved production. Unlike previous settlements where reputation points were the route to victory, this could only be won by locating which glade the seal was in (other glades had monuments pointing in its direction), then repairing it over four stages.

Most glades triggered a threat upon entry; one had a Fishmen Cave that needed pacifying lest it kill my villagers every dozen minutes. Of course, this process also produced more threats – Fishmen Totems – that increased Hostility. I had to divert a whole bunch of villagers and resources away from normal production to sort things out.

The narrative structure of these “Seal Repair” missions (Seal Team Sicks?) gets shakier when it comes to the Ancient Seal itself. I had to apply four separate Seal Fragments, each of which required delivering a bunch of resources (e.g. 125 wood) or, say, repairing a building. I can see why you need to fulfil your queen’s orders with packs of crops, but what does that have to do with applying a Seal?

Since this was my first time playing, I felt especially disheartened at the onslaught of requirements. I was asked to establish five trade routes, which wasn’t even possible since I didn’t have the relevant Upgrade, or find four ancient tablets, and I kept coming up short in glade after glade. I won’t lie: I just gave up after a couple of hours.

Aside from Seal missions, Against the Storm is very chill. There are no enemies laying waste to your buildings, and on easy difficulties you’ll have plenty of time to address even the most dangerous threats. It’s basically a little worker placement village simulator with just the right amount of structure and time pressure to give it momentum. Any less and it’d be a toy; and more and it’d be stressful.

On a micro level, it’s addictive to see so many numbers go up every second, inching towards fulfilling an order or repairing a building. On a macro level, it’s just as addictive to trek towards new seals and unlock upgrades. It’s so addictive that, like Civilization, I simply have to delete this game. That means I won’t ever reach major gameplay mechanics like blightrot that infects your settlements, or “rainpunk” technology that can power advanced machinery, or trade routes. Sadly I know myself too well to risk spending more time in the game.

Yet I can’t fault it for that. Against the Storm is more honest and affordable than the countless mobile strategy games that bleed players’ wallets dry. Even though I don’t plan to play more, I keep thinking about how I might do better next time. Perhaps I’d focus on villagers’ happiness and complex foods, or I’d tackle more settlements before trying to repair the Seal, or I’d try building multiple Trading Posts, or…

Against the Storm lets you speed up time. But not by enough.

The game has an official wiki: more developers and publishers should do this! Also, I occasionally struggled because some interface elements were hard to make out on Steam Deck. This is mostly my fault: like most strategy games, it’d be twice as easy playing on a big monitor with a mouse, the way it was clearly designed for and how most players will experience it.

VR Agent is a rail shooter arcade game where you automatically proceed along a fixed route, shooting enemies and dodging as they shoot back.

While the game has a screen, it’s only for onlookers – the player looks through a VR headset that’s fused to a toy gun. After you pay, the whole apparatus automatically descends on wires from its secure storage in the top of the unit, making it unusually “attendant free”, unlike other arcade VR games that require someone to help you put the headset on.

I’ll be honest: the game isn’t much to write home about. I’ll describe it shortly, but what drew me to this game was its hardware. I have never seen a VR experience like this and it makes me wonder whether we shouldn’t try bolting VR headsets onto other things.

Despite its unique design, holding the gun and bringing my eyes to the headset felt comfortable and natural. There was no way to adjust the eyepieces’ separation to account for interpupillary distance as most consumer VR headsets, but a little shuffling of the gun made the view decent enough; as good as any public VR headset I’ve used, at least.

I didn’t feel encumbered by the headset, probably because it wasn’t weighing down on my head; instead, my arms were carrying everything. Nor did I feel much motion sickness as the game slowly moved me along a set path, with only one exception at the start of the second level when I improbably floated down from a platform to the ground. In other words, despite VR Agent offering an entirely new control and display mechanism, it worked perfectly well.

The gun had two triggers: one to fire and the other to reload. This is different from most light gun arcade games which have a single trigger, where you fire away from the screen to reload. Of course, this can’t work in VR Agent since there is no screen. Because your view is fixed “above” the gun, you can’t sight down the barrel either; most players don’t do this in arcade games, but it still made it hard for me to know where I was shooting. Instead, the game displayed a reticle where my gun was pointing, which was just about OK.

The game itself is very normal rail shooter stuff: I was taken through offices and corridors, pausing at locations to clear out enemies who’d pop out behind desks and around corners. All enemies had a health bar that’s chipped away when you shoot them, with damage numbers flying out of them; as usual, headshots kill most enemies instantly. Some enemies carry shields, requiring you to hit a series of weak points before they can be taken down.

You can avoid incoming fire by moving physically behind walls (presumably it’s just the headset position that’s being tracked), though in practice the game didn’t effectively telegraph the direction enemies were shooting me from, so it was more of a Time Crisis-style "duck to avoid all fire” rather than the directional dodging in Police 911 (aka Police 24/7), which used a series of infrared sensors to detect your body position. Perhaps this is because they don’t want players to break the headset or hurt themselves; regardless, it made the game a lot less fun.

Something I didn’t realise until I watched a couple of kids play was the extent to which the game makes you spin around. One kid was turning a full 180 degrees from their left to right to hit enemies on all sides. Weirdly, I never felt like I was moving that much when I was playing, even though I absolutely was. I can only assume this misconception is due to the tight corridors, and that turning isn’t the same as walking.

Ultimately, VR Agent is more of a well-executed tech demo than an actual game; given that it’s one of Sega’s first VR arcade games, that seems understandable. VR in public has always struck me as impractical since it costs so much to have attendants on hand at all times, but this game demonstrates how VR experiences can be cheap, easy, and quick.

They’re still working on “good”, though. What VR Agent boasts in immersion and convenience, it lacks in depth and challenge. I much prefer Police 911 or Silent Scope, an arcade game where the light gun has a little “sniper display”. Most of the time you’re looking through it to pick off distant enemies, but since its field of view is so narrow, sometimes you need to look up at the main arcade screen to find your next target or to spray incoming helicopters with bullets. The constant tension of deciding which screen to use makes it a game with meaningful choices and skill – unlike VR Agent.

I played VR Agent, along with last week’s Squid Game Immersive Gamebox, at Gravity Max Liverpool, a big venue that opened this summer featuring “competitive socialising” and “immersive entertainment” in the form of the latest arcade games, multiplayer VR areas, augmented reality darts and bowling, and a multi-level karting track. As traditional shops and malls are placed by online retail, they’re increasingly being replaced by indoor entertainment complexes that offer a kind of fun that can’t be delivered via traditional video games.

No-one should expect a resurgence of arcades to their pre-console era, but I do think these complexes are replacing other kinds of socialisation and recreation. Instead of kicking around a football in parks that no longer exist or playing darts in a pub that feels unwelcoming, people choose – or are limited to – these more polished, more expensive, more predictable experiences. That they’re climate-controlled merely adds to the vaguely dystopian feel.

Ultra Moto VR was one of a few other VR games at Gravity Max, this one costing £3.50 per play ($4.50). When you put the headset on, it asks what level of motion you’re comfortable with. I opted for maximum immersion, which I assume means I got the VR headset’s full field of view during racing rather than a limited “comfort blinders” view. It also meant I endured an unnecessarily nauseous pre-race sequence where you zoom through the air towards your waiting motorbike.

The game is pretty standard stuff and I was a bit disappointed the motorbike seat didn’t move itself; instead, I moved it to steer. Despite that, the immersion was impressive and I could see myself trying an improved version with better graphics and gameplay .

Like VR Agent, Ultra Moto VR is attendant free. The headset is attached by a thick wire to the motorbike, and when not in use, sits in a receptacle in the front. None of the players I watched had any difficulty in wearing it, which goes to show how pervasive VR has become. The fact that none of the VR games at Gravity Max were broken also demonstrates that current-generation headsets can withstand a lot of  punishment – plus they aren’t unusual enough to be targets for vandalism any more. Even then, the game’s headsets – 3Glasses Blubur S2 – only cost $549 to replace.

VR isn’t suitable for a lot of arcade games and it’s still not very social, which is kind of the point of an arcade; in VR you can’t turn to high five a friend or see if they’re having fun. But manufacturers and operators and players seem happy enough, so I’m very interested to see what the next wave will look like.

In a venue dedicated to “competitive socialising” the Squid Game Immersive Gamebox might be a little too on the nose. Based on the hit South Korean TV drama where 456 contestants compete to the death across six children’s games, this experience sees players work together in the same six games to earn points.

It may be predictable Netflix would transform a satire of capitalism and reality TV into a real reality TV show and immersive experience, but that doesn’t make it any less horrible. These rancid vibes are mostly, but not completely, sanitised by Immersive Gamebox’s version, whose unusual motion-tracking technology cannot save the fact that:

1. Games designed for specific physical contexts (e.g. big playgrounds) require a lot of work to be fun elsewhere

2. There’s a reason children’s games are for children, not adults

3. The least interesting thing about Squid Game is the games

But what are such concerns against the profit to be made adapting their biggest show of all time to every platform imaginable?

An “Immersive Gamebox” is a room where three walls display images from ceiling-mounted short throw projectors. Each player wears a hat whose position is tracked very reliably across the room, though crouching or jumping makes no difference to the game because it can’t sense depth. Our attendant told us to imagine our hats as controllers in a video game, which was a good analogy. The walls can detect touches, but only crudely – you need to place your entire palm against the wall and even then it doesn’t always work. There’s certainly no Kinect-style depth or silhouette tracking, let alone skeletal mapping.

This meant the floor had to be completely clear so no-one tripped over bags, and any bags and drinks had to be at the back rather than resting against walls where they might trip off the “touch sensors” (in reality, cameras looking at the walls).

1. Red Light, Green Light

After a brief intro video, the game begins with Red Light, Green Light. One player at a time moves from the back of the room to the front via a series of circles, freezing when the giant girl’s head turns to face them. The player is shown by a coloured dot on the front wall: if they walk forward, it moves up the wall; if they walk right, it moves right. This makes the front wall a top-down projection of players’ location within the room’s floor, an interface re-used in most of the six games.

Because it’s your hat that’s tracked, it’s possible to freeze your entire body but still get caught if your head wobbles only a little bit. This happened several times in a row, which was an awful start; the designers should’ve turned down the sensitivity for the first few rounds to ease players in.

Another problem: The girl’s head turned far too often. This is because the room is much smaller than the playground-sized area this game is usually played in, meaning you need players to freeze more frequently otherwise it’s too easy. Understandable – but not fun, given that it was so predictable. I suspect the designers also tuned the game so players would get eliminated as quickly as possible so the next person could have a go.

A bit of variety was introduced by deadly spiky walls to navigate around, then with rounds where two players moved at the same time. Each player was kept to their own half of the room, which was probably for the best. The winning strategy was always the same: making a dash directly to the next circle if it was close enough, or just leaping halfway and then freezing.

Each round had a timer of around 30 seconds to prevent the player from being too cautious, and the entire game had an overall timer of about 7 minutes. Scoring felt more or less meaningless but was based on the number of times a player reached the front of the room safely and the number of times someone was caught out (“eliminated”). Eliminations were counted by the 456 fictional contestants being whittled down, so if you got caught ten times, you’d end the round with 446 left – except in this game they weren’t machine-gunned to bits like in the show.

2. Dalgona

In Dalgona, players trim the outline of a shape from a piece of sugar candy by walking a set path. Deviate from the path too much or take too long and you’re eliminated. As rounds progress, shapes become more complex (e.g. triangle > circle > umbrella).

It’s easy to understand, at least – onlookers were cheering and groaning as we played – but I found it more uncomfortable than fun. Maintaining the accuracy required wasn’t easy, necessitating a fast shuffle around the room. I was glad to see the back of this one.

3. Tug of War

Tug of War is a rhythm game where players move onto circles in time with a musical beat. Successful moves means your team pulls an opposing “enemy” team toward them, and if you do this enough times in a round they fall off the end of their platform.

This was fun thanks to all the things that make games like Dance Dance Revolution fun – the pleasure of moving your body in time with music. It was also more social because there were always multiple people playing at once. It didn’t get perceptibly harder over time, but the game was short enough to remain fun.

For some reason, the designers chose to depict the enemy team plummeting into space when you win a round. This isn’t anywhere near as graphic as the show, where you see them fall to their deaths dozens of metres below, but it’s the most the game reminds you that hundreds of people die in the original story. Fun!

4. Marbles

One player at a time rolls marbles into a field in order to push “enemy” marbles out of it. Players choose a marble (small, medium, big) by touching it on the wall, then walk around the room to aim it. Each marble has a point value; if the total score of your team’s marbles in the field exceeds that of the enemy’s, you win the round. Later rounds add more enemy marbles.

This may have been the most boring game because it was so easy. The only challenge came from trying to maintain the correct aim while touching the wall to “fire” a marble, yet another limitation of the motion-tracking technology.

5. Glass Bridge

Glass Bridge is a memory game where players work together to memorise symbols displayed on the right and left walls.

For example, if the left wall displays a lion, wolf, and eagle, and the right wall displays a lion, wolf, and tiger, the question “Which side had the bird?” is correctly answered by players moving to the left side of the room. If a majority of players make the correct choice, the team moves forward along the bridge. If they choose wrongly, something bad happens, but I’m not sure what because my team was just too good.

It’s fine! There’s a mild thrill in shouting out what symbols are on each side, but it never got difficult even as the number of symbols increased. It’s notable this is very different to the show, where the glass bridge involved zero skill at all. Instead, contestants jumped forward onto the left or right glass slats of the bridge and died or survived at random.

6. Squid Game

One player at a time avoids walls and dodges enemies on their way to a “home” area. The difficulty ramps up as enemy number, speed, and detection distance increases. By later rounds, players have to strategically lead enemies away in order to reach home.

The enemies’ rudimentary AI makes this the most video game-y of all six, which is mostly a good thing since it rewards skill and is exciting to watch. However, since the walls and enemies are, as ever, projected on the wall, it involves a bit more abstraction of movement than some players might enjoy.

Scoring

Your team’s score is totted up based on their performance in the six games plus the total number of remaining contestants, where it goes onto a local and world leaderboard (there are also scores for individual players). The room takes a short celebratory video of your team; while it’s being “processed”, a trailer for another game plays – in our case, Ghostbusters.

All in all, the experience took about 45 minutes – a bit shorter than the hour promised, but then again, we were only two players.

From a business and technical perspective, the Squid Game Immersive Gamebox is quite interesting. It uses surprisingly dated motion-tracking technology when an Xbox Kinect-style solution would have allowed for a broader range of interaction – players could have synchronised pulling a virtual rope with their hands in Tug of War, and Red Light, Green Light could have featured a side-on instead of top-down perspective, better for hiding behind obstacles.

Yet most people seemed to be enjoying themselves! I can’t deny that Immersive Gamebox experiences are novel, unlike bowling and karaoke, and more accessible than most boardgames and card games, which require more setup and explanation. If you’re a family desperate for anything to do that isn’t watching TV on a weekend, it’s an intriguing if pricy choice (£26/$33 per person, remember!). The best comparison in terms of price and duration are escape rooms. Since Immersive Gamebox rooms are so small and have fewer things to break, however, they can fit inside venues with more footfall like arcades and cinemas, and only require one supervisor for a set of rooms. They also have slicker IP-based marketing (Squid Game! Ghostbusters!) and promise a less stressful experience than many people’s associations with escape rooms.

As far as their Squid Game experience goes, however, that accessibility conceals a lack of depth and character. The things that make escape rooms more varied and occasionally frustrating are what gives them imaginative puzzles and joyous moments of discovery. Still, if you want entertainment that passes the time but is entirely forgettable, you could do much worse.

In the final episode of Squid Game, the mastermind reveals he chose the six games because he enjoyed them as a child. This explanation is incomplete at best, as we’re also told the “Squid Game” was invented to entertain psychopath billionaires, as a kind of snuff reality TV. Children’s games work because it’s easy to tell who’s winning or losing, unlike chess or Go.

It’s humiliating to be forced to play any game, but doubly so when they’re games made for children, which in their execution in the show end up being as much about luck as skill. Some contestants in Dalgona only have to cut a circle out of their candy, while others contend with a near-impossible umbrella. That’s not fair, but the billionaires enjoy watching them fail: here, the cruelty really is the point.

The drama in Squid Game isn’t about the games themselves. They’re too simple and boring! There’s only so much mileage you can get out of marbles or a tug of war. In video game terms, they’re minigames like lock picking or wiring circuits, ways to fill time rather than the main attraction. The drama is about how the contestants save and betray each other, the ways they cheat and bargain for advantage, and their tragic reasons for joining in the first place.

A game that embraced the true horror of Squid Game would force players into the same dilemmas. Now that would be memorable.

The Invincible is a sci-fi adventure game where you search for your missing crew on a mysterious planet. You’ll walk and drive across deserts and cliffs, unearthing clues from abandoned bases and robot probes, all while talking to your boss on the radio.

It’s based on Stanislaw Lem’s 1964 novel of the same name, about humanity’s reckless quest to dominate the universe and the nature of intelligence, and adopts a period-appropriate “atompunk” aesthetic: vivid colours, chrome surfaces, ray guns, and flying saucers, everything westerners thought the future was going to be in the 50s and 60s. It’s stunning compared to the drab militaristic style that dominates today’s sci-fi.

On paper, The Invincible is everything I want games to be. In practice, it just doesn’t work.

You play as Yasna, a doctor/biologist on the research vessel Dragonfly. Its crew land on a planet hospitable to life but strangely devoid of it; when they go missing, Yasna is dispatched to find them by Novik, the injured leader of the Dragonfly, who remains in orbit.

The game begins when you wake up from concussion on the planet. The view is intensely immersive: your first-person perspective is constantly obscured by the rim of your grimy helmet and everything you interact is highly tactile, like your delightfully imprecise “tracker”. Robot probes have control panels that can be opened to reveal stacks of photographic slides, which you page through to learn more of the story; you navigate with a paper map that you literally have to look down at.

Things you can interact with are denoted by white circles; look at a circle, press your right trigger, and you’ll “do” the thing related to it, like picking up an object or opening a door. It’s like a point-and-click adventure but worse, because aiming your entire view is more laborious than moving a mouse pointer. The same method is also used to “report” things you can see to Novik on the radio. During these conversations, sometimes you get three choices about what to say, though usually they aren’t consequential.

Despite a few alternate endings, the game is highly linear, especially on a moment-to-moment basis. Most walking simulators are linear, of course, but they usually have sections where you can choose which of two or three areas to explore next; not so with The Invincible. Early on, I was told to repair an antenna so Novik could get a robot working. I expected some challenge or illusion of freedom, but it really was just pressing one white circle after another. I wondered, not for the last time: if you won’t let me do anything interesting, why not make this a cutscene?

All design is a series of choices, game design doubly so. How fast should the player move? Do we give the rover a big or small windshield? How long should conversations last? How many buttons will we make players press to open a probe’s panel?

There are no right answers – it just comes down to the kind of experience you’re prioritising. There are reasons to have players move extremely quickly, like in action games, and extremely slowly, like when you’re an old woman visiting a graveyard.

At every turn, The Invincible optimises for visual splendour and superficial immersion. I’ve never taken as many screenshots as I did during this game. So many spaces and interactions are handcrafted to produce the most incredible scenes that meld raw natural beauty with space age power. A flashback sees you in the Dragonfly conferring with the crew; a woman slumps on a curved banquette, a cigarette dangling from her fingers, as a man stares through a porthole at the mysterious planet. Later, you stumble into a forcefield that’s sheared through the surrounding cliff, creating circles and arcs around the protective dome.

Just as impressively, the artists take full advantage of The Invincible’s period without becoming mired in steampunk tropes. There are no conventional computers, only punchcards, printouts, and slide projectors. Sleek rockets evoke Chesley Bonestell’s classic paintings, blown up to gargantuan 3D scale; robots deploy antimatter weapons both simpler and more terrifying than the arsenals in modern media. This is a game that spits in the face of generative AI art.

But these choices come with a cost The Invincible is unwilling to pay. The same terrain that’s breathtaking in screenshots is infuriating to traverse. Much of it is impassable, and worse, you can’t tell which bits you can clamber onto until you’re standing right next to them. Moving between two points becomes an exercise in guesswork and frustration, not least because you can only run for a few seconds before becoming breathless. No doubt the designers would say this is realistic – spacesuits are heavy! – but this reasoning falls flat given the myriad other unrealistic things in the game.

When you do find the right place to climb a ledge, the game wrests control from you to play custom animations. These happen so frequently I, once again, wished the game would just drive itself. And for that matter, the driving is both pointless and annoying because it’s so hard to see through your rover’s tiny windows as it bumps along. Immersive? Sure. Playable? Barely.

Yet there are shocking gaps in the immersion. The game superimposes ugly non-diegetic labels on the landscape when it can’t figure out any other way of displaying choices or points of interest, like “OPEN AREA” and “HIDEOUT”. Other games would simply have Yasna speak up automatically when you look in the right direction, or show an icon, or use diegetic symbols like flags; their omission here is hard to explain given how much effort is expended elsewhere.

These labels caused me more grief toward the end of the game when I had to reach the centre of a crater. Because it was filled with laser turrets helpfully labelled “INSTANT DEATH”, I circled the crater rim to find a clever way in – a tunnel, perhaps, like I’d used in other circumstances. Nothing presented itself, so I gave up and walked straight into the crater. The only thing to die was my hope the designers cared at all about players’ experience.

Note that I do not say “players’ enjoyment”. The Invincible, being a fairly bleak story, is not meant to be fun in the conventional sense. The problem is that it gets in its own way too much, as if Schindler’s List made you swap DVDs every five minutes.

Unforced errors abound. While exploring a massive metal structure, you use a handheld “detector” to distinguish stable parts of bridges (bright sections) from the brittle (dark sections). Since the detector’s image didn’t match up with my perspective properly, I fell through the bridge over and over again. This was so aggravating it would’ve been better to remove the “puzzle” entirely.

Editing might have saved the story too, which starts very badly. Not only do we need a moratorium on characters waking up with amnesia, as Yasna does, but we need to ban games where the character is only talking to themselves for the first hour. It’s extremely difficult to write solo dialogue that goes on for minutes at a time without it sounding unnatural or boring, let alone perform it. In my own audio-driven games, I’m always impressed when we find writers and actors who can pull off these feats.

Due to her utter isolation, Yasna is given far too much to explain than the character can handle. As a result, the writers turn her into:

1. A walking exposition dump, jumping to conclusions faster than what we – Yasna! – have seen and learned but also

2. The human heart of the story but also

3. The summariser-in-chief of the game’s lessons.

Throw in the stock lines the game delivers to fill long silences (I heard “this mission drags on so much” and “my legs are so heavy” a dozen times each) and you end up with a character whose words are erratic to the point of insanity. This is not a knock on the actor or even necessarily the voice director but the entire way the story was constructed.

Things improve the moment you repair your radio and start bickering with Novik about crew safety and the mission’s priorities, which would be annoying but for Novik’s mordant edge. Yet this can’t hide all of The Invincible’s storytelling sins, like conversations that go on for way too long, meaning you’re often standing around doing nothing while listening to arguments play out.

The Invincible never quite recovers from these shortcomings, though the story and themes become richer and more particular over time. I revelled when Yasna needled Novik about the superior resources and technology of the Alliance (clearly a stand-in for “the west”) in comparison to their own Commonwealth’s scrappy Dragonfly (coded as eastern/communist). The game also does justice to some very big ideas about the terrifying potential of inhuman machine intelligence on a scale equal to Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem. That isn’t surprising given Stanislaw Lem’s mastery of the genre, but what is surprising are the designers’ additions to the plot, a lot of which work very well (and some of which doesn’t).

And I have to credit The Invincible for handling its intricate, time-jumping plot, involving flashbacks, twists, and multiple cases of amnesia, with aplomb. It’s a grown-up story told in a grown-up way, with refreshingly intellectual dialogue rather than the joke-a-minute self-deprecation we get these days. The story culminates in a series of battles against an unstoppable cloud of machine insects waged by an Alliance officer who, in a darkly humorous portrait of superpowered futility, insists that the next superweapon will surely do the job.

And yet it is deeply unpleasant to play. There’s too much friction and too many meaningless bits of interaction for it to be a traditional walking simulator, but too much dialogue and too little freedom to feel like you have any agency or can even identify with the main character, who is meant to be you but keeps remembering and thinking things you don’t. In the end – and I mean the literal end of the game – you spend five minutes listening to an argument play out with a man whose back is turned to you. The view’s amazing, though!

I can’t help but think The Invincible’s designers are a little too uninterested in video games. If they were more aware of conventions and expectations around traversal and interaction, the game wouldn’t be half as frustrating. Then again, it’s also possible to be too interested in games at the expense of everything else, in which case you end up with games that are pleasant to play but have nothing to say. This is not a problem faced by The Invincible, a game based on a 1960s Polish novel about evolution and machine intelligence and humanity’s insatiable quest for knowledge and control. It has a lot to say.

When every story has the same tired tropes of evil billionaires building murderous AIs, you need to travel further for a different perspective. The Invincible may not work mechanically, but we need more designers humble enough to adapt stranger ideas.

Other games can only wish their failures were this daring.

Stanislaw Lem Recommendations

Stanislaw Lem is one of my favourite authors and perhaps the best science fiction writer of all time alongside Ursula K. Le Guin.

Given the themes of The Invincible, you’d be forgiven for thinking Lem’s stories are tough reads. Well, here’s a hot take for you: Stanislaw Lem is funnier than Douglas Adams. You heard me! The short stories in The Cyberiad and The Star Diaries had me laughing constantly, and their ideas are so imaginative you’ll be flipping to the front and exclaiming, “Wait, he wrote this story about ChatGPT in 1965?!” (Trurl’s Electronic Bard, just for you).

If you like those two, I’d suggest moving on to Fiasco and Solaris. I haven’t seen either of the movies of Solaris, but I liked the 2013 film The Congress quite a bit, which is based on Lem’s The Futurological Congress and is suitably bonkers.

Moving from Substack in 2024

For the past few months I’ve been hoping, rather naively, that Substack would decide to ban Nazi publications. This is plainly not going to happen, so I will be moving to a new platform next year, maybe Wordpress or Buttondown. I’ll let you all know in good time when this happens, and you won’t notice much of a difference!

The Exit 8 is a spot the difference horror game set in a Japanese subway corridor. Sometimes the corridor looks like a normal subway corridor, and sometimes it contains “anomalies” like a missing door or different floor tiles or a monster that leaps out at you. To exit the subway, you need to spot if there are any anomalies, eight times in a row.

Now, liminal spaces and backrooms may be hot with the kids, but setting a game in them doesn’t automatically make it good or scary. What’s special about The Exit 8 is how it achieves maximum tension through unbelievably streamlined design.

This is in effect from the very first second. When you start the game, there are no company logos, no “Powered by Unreal” badge, no menu to change controls or view credits; you start the game and you’re immediately standing in a subway corridor. It’s deeply disconcerting, like when you take a step and the ground isn’t where you were expecting. It’s such a small thing to do and not really advisable for most games, but it sets the tone perfectly.

The corridor has white tiles lit by harsh fluorescent strips in the ceiling. A man walks past you, carrying a briefcase. There are posters on one side, advertising a dog salon and a photo exhibition; opposite them are locked doors. A hum emanates through the space, with a quiet clicking sound that comes so infrequently it’s always a mild shock when you hear it. It’s rendered with near-photorealistic fidelity, which intensifies both the monotony and the terror.

Not only does The Exit 8 have the coldest of opens, but it has zero story and makes zero effort to explain itself. Here’s what happened in my first few minutes: I walked down the corridor, following it left, right, then left again, and arrived at exactly the same corridor with the same man rounding the corner. Turning around just took me to the same corridor, as if space were warping around me. This time I followed the man, keeping him in my sight; he stopped at an exit sign to look at his phone; when I walked round a corner and back again, he vanished.

It’s very weird, but also weirdly boring. There are no smears of blood or post-it notes declaring the end is nigh. I ran around the corridors a few times until I noticed a new sign had appeared:

1. Don’t overlook any anomalies

2. If you find anomalies, turn back immediately

3. If you don’t find anomalies, do not turn back

4. To go out from Exit 8

In practice, this means you enter the main corridor and see if anything looks different. If there’s nothing different, you go to the end and keep walking. If there is something different, like there are two men standing in the corridor instead of one, or there’s a stain on the ceiling, you turn back the way you came. If you’re correct that there was nothing, or there was something, the number on the yellow exit sign increases from Exit 0 to Exit 1. But if you’re wrong and you missed a difference, it resets to Exit 0. That’s it!

I’ve deliberately underplayed the scariness of some of the “anomalies” because The Exit 8 is, for the most part, not filled with jump scares. Most of the differences in the corridor are subtle and easily missed, like this stain on the ceiling:

or a doorknob appearing in the centre of a door:

But once in a while, something deeply unnerving happens. Early on, I rounded the corner to see the man walking towards me far faster than any human should; I got the hell out of there. Later, I noticed the eyes on a poster were moving. Another time, I was studying the posters when I had the vague sense something was wrong; I looked up and saw the fluorescent lights were all askew:

And then there are the rare jump scares. These happen just often enough to keep you on edge every time you turn the corner. Once, I was most of the way down the corridor when I heard a noise, like a loud fan. I turned to look at the vent in the wall, which seemed normal, then looked back to see a wave of red water surging down the corridor. I walked, then ran backwards as fast as I could.

Then there’s the time I died. I spotted the anomaly immediately as I turned into the corridor: there was the outline of a man on the far wall. I could’ve left right then, like a sensible person, but instead I decided to get closer to see what it was. When I was just a few metres away, the man, who was covered in wall tiles, sprung out and throttled me; the screen went black and I woke up right at the start. So when I later encountered an anomaly where the lights flickered off and I only had a small torch to see with, I could only imagine what terrors might be in store for me.

Recounting these anomalies is like telling scary stories around a fire: “this one time…” What’s impressive about The Exit 8 is how efficiently it delivers those stories. Other games, burdened with dialogue and story and world-building, space out those stories across minutes and hours, but in this subway, every time you turn the corner you’re setting yourself up for a scare. It might not happen – sometimes you can go around a few times without seeing anything weird – but that only heightens anticipation and forces you to pay more attention.

It only took me 30 minutes to decide correctly eight times in a row and reach Exit 8. When this happens, the corridor is swapped out with stairs and you’re greeted with sounds of the city and nature; the screen goes white and we roll credits. Then you’re back in the corridor again, except there’s a new sign:

Thank you for using the underground passageway. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause you, There are 26 of anomalies that have not been found. We appreciate your understand and cooperation.

The number ticks down as you keeping playing and spotting more differences. It’s nicely subtle scorekeeping that reassures you there’s more to see over the next couple of hours. Even better, anomalies aren’t repeated, so there’s little wasted time.

The designers’ restraint is impressive – another game might have been all jump scares, but it’s the wonky ceiling lights that will stick with me for their economy of terror. It’s trivial for designers to speed up a walking animation or change the image on a poster or move around lights in a scene, but if executed well, the effect it has on players is profound – who would do such a thing?!

Lately, critics have become jaded to graphical fidelity, correctly seeing it as a replacement for good gameplay, but The Exit 8’s photorealism is essential to its success, as the architecture and surfaces and lighting are so close to reality that any departure from its perfect cleanliness and straight lines seems even scarier. As a side note, I was astonished how good this looked on my Steam Deck OLED, though it did chew through the battery at a ferocious pace.

Then there’s the whole liminality and “backrooms” of it all. Much has been written about how they represent the repetitiveness and loneliness of city life, their familiarity and unsettling nature making them perfect vessels for modern-day fables and SCP Wiki stories. The Exit 8 nails this vibe with consummate ease, its bland official signage far more subtle than Scarfolk’s one-note horror, its experience more compact even than the other space-warping corridor-based horror game that surely inspired it, P.T.

All of that deserves praise, but it overlooks how, amid an age of active shooter drills and situational awareness training for sightline and exits, The Exit 8 has reinvented “spot the difference” for 3D horror games. This is more than a cheap thrill – it’s a jewel of game design.

Jeff Wayne’s The War of The Worlds: The Immersive Experience (TWOTW) is a real world experience based on the 1978 Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, a rock opera album musical which itself is based on H. G. Wells’ 1898 story The War of the Worlds.

Even if, like me, you haven’t read Wells’ story, you know the gist: Martians invade Victorian England, overpower its defenders with huge three-legged machines equipped with heat rays (“tripods”), eventually succumbing to earthly microbes. The rock opera follows similar lines, but is even weirder.

Over the past half-century, the opera – never mind Wells’ story – has seen many adaptations, including live shows, an audiobook, and three video games, demonstrating its endurance and malleability as a piece of pop culture IP – and therefore its suitability as immersive entertainment.

TWOTW wasn’t on my increasingly long list of games to write about; it’s much less game-like than Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser or Phantom Peak, other real world experiences I’ve covered, but I unexpectedly had a morning free in London and it was the most enticing result from my deeply-considered research process, to whit, googling “immersive experience london”. I guess we can call it a real world walking simulator – but wouldn’t that just be “walking”?!

Except where specified, I’ve used photos and images from the company’s photo gallery, trailer, and social media because you can’t use phones during the experience. Despite being promotional photos, they are all pretty true to life. I also couldn’t take notes, so if I get some events out of order, that’s why.

TWOTW is located in the City of London, the most wealthy, soulless, and benighted part of the UK, one that has not traditionally been the place to find weird art/tech/culture like this, instead finding its true purpose as the money laundering capital of the world. With Brexit and the shift towards remote work, however, the City has been grasping for ways to attract visitors on evenings and weekends for its “leisure economy”, much as a spider does with its web, if its web were novelty mid-market restaurants and experiential entertainment (e.g. crazy golf, Duck and Waffle, etc.).

I was told to arrive unnecessarily early, a whole 45 minutes before my session’s start time. There are formalities to be completed beforehand, like signing a safety waiver and stowing your stuff in the free lockers, but the other 40 minutes is for buying drinks at the bar. Immersive experiences with lots of actors and support staff typically have non-existent profit margins, so they make it up on ancillaries like food, drink, and souvenir photos.

As bars go, it wasn’t bad – steampunk to the max, with screens masquerading as “moving pictures” on the walls, an odd brass sculpture with miniature train, and massive Martian tripod eyes that blew coloured steam at the start of sessions. I wasn’t hungry enough to sample the themed menu with its Tripod Turkey Burger or The Monocle pizza, but others were already getting in the beers in even though it wasn’t yet 11am – who says the UK has a drinking problem?

My group of ten guests lined up when red smoke billowed from the tripod. We were a family of five, two couples, and me. Through a door, we entered a narrow alleyway and walked into Victorian London. A man with a top hat and steampunk goggles told us the Martian invasion was several years ago; humanity had made leaps and bounds since then, and we were about to see a retelling of those events aided by Martian technology like (VR) goggles so as to prepare for the future. It felt fussy as a framing device – why not just drop us in the action? – but I’ve seen worse.

This first actor encounter set the tone for the rest, with a minute of chat and easy questions (“you don’t have any Martian communicators or watches on you, do you?”) preceding the delivery of essential plot (“let’s escape into the tunnels!”). But first, we sat down in a theatre to watch a Pepper’s ghost projection of journalist George Herbert and his wife Carrie Herbert explaining, once more, the events of The War of The Worlds. The projection looked pretty good but the accompanying slideshow behind them was too dim to see well, perhaps as a result of all the glass.

George and Carrie walked off and what I can only describe as a trailer played all around us, including on the theatre walls: mostly tripods blowing things up, concluding with a title card for, yes, Jeff Wayne’s The War of The Worlds: The Immersive Experience. How many times were they going to introduce the story? Weren’t we already in the immersive experience!? I began to doubt whether I’d chosen wisely. The only saving grace was that the music was absolutely banging, probably because it was directly from the album.

We went through a smoky, mirrored corridor to an observatory. A mumbling astronomer guided us towards “telescopes” to view green clouds on Mars. Looking through the eyepiece at a gyro-enabled tablet screen, you could pan the view a bit, but sadly there was no zooming in. It was only after a couple of minutes of purposefully-dull narration when our telescopes showed us an explosion at the nearby Horsell Common, with a massive metal egg at its heart, that I realised we were now in the “past”.

The astronomer led us to the Common – in reality, a wooden platform separated from a grassy area and part of the metal egg painted on the wall. He wandered around muttering to himself about measurements, eventually getting himself killed by the tripod’s heat ray. This was accompanied by flames from two lines of gas burners embedded in the grass which, I’ll be honest, did not look great. I don’t know how you can convincingly portray a heat ray in real life but this ain’t it.

We were rushed by a soldier down some stairs to the street outside George Herbert’s house. As she banged on the door, she grilled us about what we’d seen, chiding us for our unrealistic reactions: “Why are you all smiling when you just saw someone vaporised?” and so on. I mean: yes. But also: no! I just think it’s unfair to cherry pick guests’ out-of-character moments; it’s not like we were wearing proper Victorian clothes or speaking in appropriate accents. This happened with other actors, too, and while I understand the desire to get guests into character, I don’t think chiding is the way to go.

Stymied by the door, we jimmied open the window and climbed into Herbert’s dining room. Fun! The maid arrived, the soldier ran off, and we sat down at the dining room for tea. She rubbished all the talk of Martian invaders (“who’s Martin, eh?”) until we began hearing gunshots and explosions.

The lights flickered, then we were plunged into total darkness. Eerie sounds of a tripod’s metal tentacles circled around the room, then a strobing light came through the fireplace and the maid was pulled through, screaming. Hell yeah! Who knew that leaning on audio and leaving visuals to the imagination worked so well? (Me, that’s who).

We rushed out with the soldier, who’d magically reappeared, and weaved through the kitchen. In a corridor, we saw a Pepper’s ghost projection of George saying something unmemorable, then we ended up crouched in a trench. Once again, we couldn’t see the tripod, but the sound effects sold it well, with our soldier telling us to run as she lay down covering fire.

On the other side we reached an alleyway, its walls covered with letters searching for missing people. Spotlights drew our attention to one after another until a door opened to a small pantry. An injured man was lying on the floor; our soldier appeared, saying we could trust him.

He made a decent joke about one of our guests who was wearing a Nirvana T-shirt (“that’s an odd name for a girl!”) before telling us to escape on a boat. We were to pretend to the boat pilot we were members of XYZ family, and he gave us some money in case they needed further convincing. Our exit was a hole in the wall hidden behind some shelves:

After walking over a wooden bridge, we made it to the dock, where two boats were waiting with VR headsets perched on the seats. The pilot tricked us, saying to a couple of real life siblings, “if you’re X then you must be her brother Y”, but of course, Y didn’t exist. Classic! Thankfully the money bought us passage, and we were onto the boats, beginning the first of three VR sessions in the experience.

It was a little weird to pause the fiction while we put on our “Martian technology goggles”, and I suppose this was the reason for the framing device of a recreation inside a recreation, but in 2023 I think most people understand what they’re getting into when they buy a ticket for a VR-enhanced immersive experience, all of which is to say, it’s not any more weird than having flashbacks in movies, it’s just something you get used to.

I was initially disappointed by what I saw: a sunny river with autumn trees on either side, rendered at fairly low resolution with a noticeable screen-door effect; TWOTW uses HTC Vive VR headsets, which are popular among retail and entertainment companies, if not state-of-the-art. On the plus side, the experience was in true real-time 3D with six degrees of freedom tracking rather than an immersive panorama, meaning I could’ve seen other guests if I turned around.

I’ve played a lot of VR games on the Meta Quest 2 and done a few real-world VR experiences, so I wasn’t as blown away by the boat ride’s PS2-era graphics as the other guests were, but as we entered fog and appeared in a London with Martian tripods blasting Parliament to bits, I felt pretty immersed. The rock opera came into full flow here, and while you might imagine it’d feel out of place, it actually worked perfectly to amp up the energy and convey the story. Using a boat ride as the first VR experience was also a smart move, as it kept people sitting down, less prone to motion sickness.

But by the time we transitioned to the sea, watching HMS Thunder Child taking down a Martian tripod and getting exploded for its trouble, I was a little too immersed – the boat was being rocked sort of in time with the massive waves engulfing our boat, testing my nausea to the absolute limit. We were also sprayed with water, which was fun but also puzzling: how did they manage to avoid hitting the headsets? A guest who’d taken off theirs, presumably due to nausea, later informed me the staff were doing it by hand. Of course!

Once we’d made our escape, we were led to a pub that was being used as a holding area for survivors – in other words, the interval bar.

I picked up the Martian-themed cocktail I’d preordered with my ticket – look, it was after 12pm by this point – and sat down. An adult said to their kids, “In the future, if you want to go to Tokyo you’ll just put VR on and then you’ll be there.” Their daughter noted that that sounded awful. “Yes, but that’s what will happen!” Such are the effects of VR on an unsuspecting person.

Not long after we arrived, another group entered the bar. TWOTW welcomes new groups up to every ten minutes, a conveyor belt delivery system that partly explains why actors keep coming and going between its “24 interactive scenes”. I wonder what it’s like to repeat your spiel six times an hour, but I figure there are far more repetitive jobs in immersive theatre and theme parks.

After 20 minutes, we were sent back in. As with many shows, the second half was much shorter, around 40 minutes compared to the first half’s hour-long duration.

Our boats had washed up on the shore near a spooky candlelit churchyard. A woman greeted us, relieved to meet more survivors, and ushered us inside to meet the priest. We were all much more subdued and in character after the interval – that’s what a well-dressed bar gets you.

We filed into individual confession booths and put on VR headsets. In VR, the priest appeared behind a grille and began lecturing me on how the Martian invaders were a punishment from god for our sinful ways. It was exceedingly creepy and well-acted despite – or perhaps, because of – being lo-fi.

The priest left his side of the booth and drew open the curtains on mine. He continued his ranting, with the woman we met earlier unable to stop him from setting the church on fire. As the building started coming down, a Martian tripod stabbed a tentacle through the window and killed both of them before lifting my entire booth into its body.

The screen went dark for a second, then I “woke up” inside the tripod’s vast spherical body. The same window from which I watched the church burning down was now a portal through which I could see hundreds of pods like mine, tentacles roving back and forth between them. Real world shrieks and laughter came from nearby booths; I quickly discovered why, when a syringe-like proboscis poked through my window and searched around for me. I backed away but it kept coming and physically poked me a few times until giving up and retracting.

Let there be no doubt: this entire sequence was truly deranged shit, the likes of which I have never experienced in VR. The tentacle stuff was undoubtedly accomplished by someone prodding me with a Vive tracker on a stick, explaining how its position was rendered perfectly in real time. They must’ve had two or three people poking us in turn while the others waited in their booths. Is it scalable? Not really! But was it fun? Yes! Will it get old if every VR experience does it? Absolutely.

After the thrills, there was an explosion and resistance fighters led us out of our booths and down a metal slide; only later did I discover this was meant to be “the claw of a Martian Handling Machine”. We were evacuated to an underground hideout where the soldier we met earlier explained her plans to create a glorious new civilisation hidden from the invaders. This was illustrated by a pleasingly bonkers video projected onto a dome, accompanied by excellent rock opera music.

The narrator of the video, George Herbert, expressed doubt in the plan, so the soldier bid us farewell and went to a radio room where we listened to a military transmission declaring they were going to surrender. There were enough knick-knacks inside I thought we were going to do a mini-escape room puzzle, but instead someone came in and explained their plan to fly away in a hot air balloon.

We entered a large room with balloon baskets, each with a pair of VR headsets. Before donning them, we were instructed to locate the handle at the top of the basket. Since there was only one handle, I let the other guest in my basket drive, which in practice meant lighting the burner to make the VR balloon go up. In a nice touch, their body was rendered as George Herbert. Otherwise, this last VR experience was the least impressive – as we flew over devastated towns, the graphics limitations manifested as unconvincingly boxy houses and flat landscapes.

We drifted toward an immobile tripod and the narrator (Herbert again) explained the Martians were killed by microbes; the basket touched down and George was reunited with his fiancé Carrie. Yay! Then we took off again, zoomed into space, flew to Mars, landed in a crater, then toppled through a hole into a vast cavern full of tripods. Roll credits, a photo opportunity, and then we were out!

TWOTW is a very fun, very silly two hour thrill ride. Beyond the slow start, it’s excellently paced and frequently overwhelming, leaving you little time to think upon the horrors of war and the extermination of humanity. The designers could dwelt on this longer, spending more time in the underground city or with injured people, but they opted for pure entertainment. And honestly I have no problem with that – it’s just a thriller. If we get a dozen of these in a row, then I’ll be worried.

I’m still agog at the choice to adapt Jeff Wayne’s rock opera album. It would’ve been a lot cheaper in terms of royalties and licensing fees to do a more conventional adaptation of Wells’ story, which is in the public domain. Then again, Wayne’s music and narration made sequences like the VR boat and balloon rides, along with the underground city tour, into the strongest in the entire experience.

When I mentioned I was going to this immersive experience, I was taken back by people’s genuine affection for Wayne’s musical, often inherited from parents who’d listened to it in the 70s and 80s. I’d vaguely heard of it before but assumed it was far too cheesy for my liking, but everyone’s positive reactions meant that I wasn’t bracing myself for the worst.

I saw a surprising number of guests in their 40s and 50s and older in the bar, so perhaps the smart move for immersive experience designers is to target the generations that can afford to drop £50 on an afternoon by adapting other stories from their youth. Or maybe the secret is making a fun, original experience with great music and a gripping story? Given that 180,000 people have apparently seen TWOTW so far, it seems to be working.

Bonus: Immersive Food Corner

With the Martian invaders defeated, I headed to lunch at Marugame Udon, an  “authentic” Japanese udon restaurant. Marugame Udon opened its first kitchen in Japan in 2000, where it’s known as Marugame Seimen. Today it has  over 1000 branches worldwide, mostly in Japan, but with the first UK restaurant opening in 2021.

Like so many new fast casual restaurants, the idea is to provide a more interactive, immersive experience, in this case by pretending to be a Japanese cafeteria.You stand in line at a counter where a chef takes your order, dunks fresh udon noodles into broth for two seconds, deposits it in a bowl, and layers your chosen protein on top. Then you slide your tray down the counter to the “tempura station”, a set of wire shelves where you pick your own sides. After paying, there’s another station where you can pick your own garnishes and chillies and spices to go on top.

Restaurants have always tried to simulate the places that inspired them, but beyond the kitchen there were two things that distinguished Marugame Udon, and neither of those were the food, which was perfectly average. Firstly, you can sit in any number of “rooms” in the restaurant, all of which are named. Secondly, my room had a huge ultrawide wall screen showing a snowy Mount Fuji.

I wonder if the secret of creating a profitable restaurant chain in our everything-is-immersive era is simulating “exotic” places where a virtue is made of a) getting customers to do things themselves and b) packing them in more tightly. If done well and supplemented by well-designed, immersive, distracting hard product, people won’t mind the communal tables in Wagamama or busing their own trays in Marugame Udon. Expect more immersive restaurants in the future!

In Jusant, you climb a massive stone tower one handhold at a time. With a trigger button assigned to each hand grip and a stamina gauge steadily ticking down, movement is tense and deliberate. Traditional ropes and pitons are joined by novel mechanics, some of which work well (rock creatures that you hold on to as they move) and some which don’t (fireflies that float you through the air).

It’s beautiful. With the exception of some oppressive caves, every vista is sculpted for maximum awe, thanks in part to the game’s sci-fi/fantasy setting. The designers’ imagination only goes so far though, with the story and iconography following the same arid environmental and technological collapse fable we’ve seen in so many other recent games.

But et’s start with the climbing. In most action adventure games like Uncharted or Assassin’s Creed, you press a “climb” button and point in the direction you want to go. This prioritises speed, with the game automatically moving your character’s hands and feet, but lacks depth and challenge.

In Jusant, your hands can only move to specific handholds on a cliff face or ceiling like a protruding rock or a ladder rung. You must always have one hand gripping a handhold, performed by holding down the left or right trigger, otherwise you’ll fall. This means that when you’re climbing, you’re constantly alternating between holding one or both triggers (no legs required in Jusant). Let go of one trigger and that hand can stretch towards another nearby handhold by pointing your left stick; hold the trigger again and it’ll grip onto it. Swap arms on a hold and you can get a better reach.

You have to pay close attention to your character’s body. It’s hard to tell whether you can make it to a handhold or your jump will end in disaster – there are no icons or colours indicating the chance of success, you just have to try it and see what happens.

This makes climbing into an intensely physical process. During long climbs, your trigger fingers will get a little sore, echoing the sighs and gasps from your character as their stamina slowly drains (or quickly, after jumps). You can recharge stamina by pausing to shake your arms out, but the gauge’s maximum capacity also shrinks during climbs and is only fully refreshed on the ground or at certain rest points. By the end of difficult climbs, your stamina is so limited you can only move short distances between pauses and it’s a mental and physical relief to stop tensing. But for the most part there is little time pressure or even action other than perhaps timing a jump-and-hold well.

Every climb takes place on a specific route and begins by attaching your rope to a socket conveniently located nearby. This struck me as rather contrived until I realised the former inhabitants of the tower built all the routes you follow; in other words, it’s worldbuilding, not laziness. During climbs, you can place up to three pitons. These act as ingenious physics-based save points because if you fall, you’ll only drop as far as your last piton. Since you don’t have any health to lose and there are no surprises where handholds break or ladders shatter, it’s a very fair and forgiving game overall.

Pitons are also used as solutions to climbing problems. When you find yourself in a spot where you can’t climb or jump to the next part of the route, you hammer in a piton, rappel down, and swing sideways to a handhold. This kind of thing is the platonic ideal of physics-based puzzling, even if Jusant’s control of swinging in free space doesn’t always work.

Your rope only extends so far, presumably to make players be a little careful in how they place pitons. Cleverly, it changes from blue to red as it runs out, though that never happened except on one infuriating occasion which I will recount in due course. On completing a climb, you rapidly wind your rope back into your bag and regain any pitons you placed.

While the game is essentially linear – there are no story-based decisions to make – there are occasional side rooms and ledges to visit that prevent you from feeling railroaded. Most climbing routes feature shortcuts or alternate routes, some of which are faster but riskier.

Pleasingly, there’s barely any recognition of which path you take - no timers, flags, scores, and certainly no achievements. Even more remarkably, Jusant has no progression mechanics whatsoever. Your rope doesn’t get any longer as the game proceeds, you don’t get any more pitons, and your stamina doesn’t improve. What changes is the nature and difficulty of the climbs, and your own skill.

(Jusant doesn’t have difficulty settings, but there are accessibility options for unlimited stamina, jump assistance, alternate rappel mode, and more.)

So: not only does climbing in Jusant fundamentally make sense, but it’s fun. It’s a feat worthy of praise when so many games continue to rely on shooting or hitting as their main way to interact with the world.

That said, there are rough edges. The game stumbled early on when it failed to tell me how to do a double jump until I’d failed twenty times. A more serious problem came during a tricky climb where I placed all three pitons such that I ran out of rope a mere metre away from my destination. The game “helpfully” told me I should figure out a way of freeing up more rope by detaching a piton. I didn’t relish backtracking, especially with my stamina gauge as low as it could get, so I restarted at the last checkpoint (there’s no save system), assuming this would be where I began my climb.

Reader: it was not. I had to repeat multiple climbs, murderous thoughts drifting through my mind about how I was being punished for doing the things (placing pitons) I’d been taught to do earlier. Not long afterwards, I was on another long climb, completely piton-free what with the trauma still fresh, when the game suggested I place a secondary piton in case I fall. I learned it from you, Jusant!!!

Like a lot of games with novel but simple mechanics that might otherwise be perceived as being “too easy” or “too boring” by people who have nothing else to do than play games all the time, Jusant adds increasingly weird and contrived challenges every chapter. Early on, you encounter huge vines studded with handholds that lengthen when activated by your mysterious animal companion. Another plant creates handholds over a wide area that wilt and die after a few seconds in the sun, introducing time pressure to climb across them and place a piton. In keeping with the game’s generally forgiving nature, plants can be activated unlimited times.

One variation I enjoyed were moving rock handholds borne on the backs of little cliff-dwellers, groups of which would trundle across otherwise-impassable routes in intersecting and diverging streams. If you hold onto one rock creature for too long, it eventually slows down and stops (tang ping exists everywhere) so you need to keep swapping between them. Fun and cute!

Higher up the tower, wind becomes a way to make your jumps go further. Since it keeps changing direction, you have to time your jumps right. If you’re caught out in the wind, your stamina drops fast, encouraging you to hide behind shelters like moving waterwheels. Again, it works because everyone knows what wind is.

Less good: firefly “sparks” in caverns that surround and loft you between highly specific locations on cliffs. Send this one back to the drawing board, lads.

The caverns highlight another of Jusant’s weaknesses, in that its complex geometry and layered environments can make it hard to know where you’re meant to go next. The game’s lack of traditional user interface elements also meant I wasted a lot of time trying to climb around impassable barriers. It turns out that if you eschew maps and objective markers and glowing breadcrumb trails in favour of immersion, your environmental design needs to be absolutely bulletproof. Your companion creature can tell you the direction of interesting things, but since these are usually behind lots of walls, it’s next to useless.

All that said, I’m not sure I’d have preferred a map showing a list of places for me to visit. It was refreshing to wander along, occasionally pausing to read letters and place a stone on altars, no doubt missing a few, but safe in the knowledge the game would ensure I saw the really important stuff.

I was very excited for the thirty minutes during which I thought Jusant had zero dialogue or writing. The game starts with a wordless cutscene where your character trudges through a dried-up seabed littered with rusting ships, eventually reaching an impossibly broad and tall pillar of rock. Nestled inside their bag is a small blue creature whom you have undoubtedly already guessed will be the key to restoring environmental balance to this desiccated world.

The tower is deserted, with only a few harmless animals around. Signs of the inhabitants are everywhere, though; not just ladders and shacks but entire villages and ziplines and cavern complexes. As you ascend, the technology and buildings and crafts become more complex and sophisticated – there are even burger joints in later chapters – communities built and abandoned as the sea levels rose and fell.

You’re given fleeting glimpses of their past lives by listening to conch shells. Pick one up in a workshop on a cliff face and you’ll hear the chiselling of wall carvings, the laughter of children jumping from a diving board into water. There’s no animation, just sound more evocative than any cutscene could be – and much cheaper, to boot.

That’s why it was so disappointing when I came across my first letter:

No actual human writes like this. This is exposition 101, as clunky as it gets, and worse, completely unnecessary. You don’t need a letter to realise the tower’s inhabitants loved their home or to figure out they left because of a drought. If you must have words in a game like this, keep them to a minimum, like the shop sign that said something like “closed until the sun starts moving.” That’s neat!

Of course, you are here to sort everything out. At the end of each chapter, you place a blue conch shell into a sculpture. When you blow in it – and your companion hums along – ancient technology activates, with plants magically sprouting forth from the bare stone, glowing blue symbols telling the story of what happened.

I sighed when I saw this, and not in a good way. I am tired of the Atlantean trope, where an ancient civilisation possessed incredible technology that was their downfall but could be our saviour. Deployed in countless games, typically with vaguely Arabic or Mesoamerican art, it’s meant as a cautionary tale of hubris and greed, but to me it comes across as simultaneously reactionary and blasé; hey, we might destroy the world, but at least someone in the future might fix it – using our amazing technology!

It is OK to care about environmental collapse, and it is understandable that artists will put that into their art, but doing this well is not easy and can end up compromising both the art and the message. The story works far better when it moves closer towards Journey’s magical realism and you reach the pinnacle to find a huge blue sphere floating above. Yes, it’s made of water, and your blue companion helps make it rain. It’s nice!

Jusant’s narrative missteps weren’t enough to dent my enjoyment, though. Even if its story is literally overwritten, it’s still a beautiful, meditative marvel.

Subpar Pool is a puzzle game where you hit balls into pockets on irregularly-shaped tables. You could call it a cross between pool and minigolf, though that doesn’t do justice to its oddities.

Each game takes place on a “run” of five procedurally-generated tables, each with one or more pockets along the edges or in the middle.

You begin by placing your white ball anywhere on the table, then dragging on the screen to aim. A line shows the direction of your shot, with more lines showing post-collision trajectory with other balls. Unlike other golf games, you don’t shoot your white ball as soon as you finish aiming; instead, you double-tap the screen. This makes it possible to aim regardless of the table configuration because dragging anywhere on the screen rotates your aim rather than pointing it at (or away from) where you’re touching.

This admittedly fussy description of Subpar Pool’s controls highlights how it doesn’t have the same kind of intuitive one-to-one manipulation as other touchscreen games like Angry Birds, where you pull back on a slingshot and release it to fire. This isn’t a bad thing: separating aiming from firing enables a broader arrangements of targets. In Angry Birds, everything you’re aiming at is to one side, whereas in Subpar Pool you aim at targets at every range and direction. It also enables much more precise control. This makes it a true puzzle game, for better and for worse.

(There is a very cool bit of design where, if you move the white ball after aiming, the aiming will remain “locked on” to the original target. This lets you experiment with placement so you can make the white ball go in a useful direction to set up the next shot.)

You can shoot while balls are still in motion. Everything slows to a crawl as you drag to aim, making things a little harder than if time paused. I didn’t do this very much, partly because I found it a bit annoying to precisely aim shots. If I wanted to glance off another ball, I’d have to wobble my finger back and forth just to get the perfect oblique angle. I get why Subpar Pool wants to keep things simple rather than having a secondary fine-grained aiming system, but this is where I started getting confused about how skill-based this game is meant to be.

In some ways, Subpar Pool doesn’t care about skill. Nothing bad happens if your white ball ends up in a pocket; it just removes the “flawless” status from that table, which usually doesn’t mean anything. In fact, it can be useful to pocket yourself as you get to freely place the white ball again. Similarly, while each table has a different par number, representing how many shots you have to clear it, here’s what would happen if a table had a par of 3 and you:

• Cleared the table with 1 or 2 shots: “Subpar” score (nothing special happens)

• Cleared with 3 shots: “Par” score (ditto)

• Cleared with 4 shots: “Bogey” score (ditto)

• Didn’t clear with 4 shots: Lose one of your two lives; any remaining balls are turned black and moved to the next table to clutter things up and remind you of your failure. If you pocket them, you’ll lose “flawless” status; if you clear a table and there are still black balls remaining, they’ll just vanish.

Subpar Pool looks and feels chill, too. The balls bob and sway to the music and chirp things like “last shot!”. The white ball elongates when you shoot it; colourful floral patterns sit behind bleached-bright rasterised table graphics. It’s very charming and distinctive. But this “we’re just having fun” vibe is at odds with the game’s unforgiving progression mechanics, which absolutely demand skill, or more precisely, skill and luck. You begin with a single table style (“world”) to play, with normal balls and normal behaviour. Unlocking the game’s three more interesting worlds and many gameplay variations and different ball types requires completing challenges.

Challenges can be trivially easy, like completing a single run of a world, or pocketing eight balls across multiple runs. Others can be infuriatingly hard, like repeatedly pocketing a ball using another ball, or pocketing multiple balls in a single shot. At the start, I failed a pair of challenges five times in a row, meaning I had to repeat the same setup for 25 tables.

This was so disheartening I was considering abandoning the game entirely. One stick challenge involved sinking three “long shots” in a single run, but it was never clear how long a long shot had to be, and worse, the procedurally-generated tables meant it was completely random whether I’d be presented with a setup that would even make long shots possible. I was relieved, if still annoyed, when the game became easier as I completed more challenges.

Complete a few challenges unlocks new worlds or “cards” to modify runs. When you start a run, you select a world along with modifier cards like:

• Hunter: Adds balls that home in on your white ball

• Chonker: Larger, slower balls

• Crystal: Balls that can be cracked and destroyed

• Locker: Immovable balls that can only be dragged around by their connection to other normal balls

• Fast Run: You only have a few seconds to aim per table

• Fixed Start: The white ball can’t be freely placed at the start of tables

• More Space: Tables are bigger

• No Bounce Line: Aiming lines show less information

and so on. The further you get in the game, the more cards you can apply to a run at the same time. Challenges are attached to worlds and cards, encouraging you to select several cards on a single run so you can knock a few off at once.

This is, however, not a good idea, because generally speaking, the game gets harder the more cards you apply. A game with Fixed Start, Fast Run, No Bounce Line, and More Space will be punishingly hard to complete, especially if you’re trying to do something like pocket multiple balls in a single shot. Accordingly, being good at Subpar Pool means figuring how what combination of cards and worlds will make it the easiest to complete a particular challenge.

For example, the Gateways world adds portals and much bigger holes to tables. This makes it a prime candidate for any challenge requiring pocketing lots of balls at once. I completed that one plus “Cut off connections to Lockers 8 times” in my first try since Lockers make it easy to drag groups of balls around together.

Subpar Pool is at its best when modifiers interact in interesting ways. It didn’t take long to discover that the best way to pocket Hunter balls was to pocket myself (the white ball) and have the Hunters follow me in. Even though the designer undoubtedly planned for this, it’s deeply fun and satisfying to feel like you’ve discovered a shortcut.

A couple of hours in, as more challenges and tables were unlocked, I started knocking out one or two challenges every run. While they were easier, not all were fun. On the Links world, the hole moved every time I pocked a ball, with a shadow showing where it was moving next. This sounds fun but was quite annoying given I never figured out how to exploit the mechanic. The same goes for the conveyor belts on the Belts world, which made it hard to get the timing of shots right.

You’d think I’d hate the Fast Run modifier, then, but I loved it. Rather than giving you a fixed amount of time per table, you get a fixed amount of time to move and aim, meaning that as long as you aren’t touching the screen, you can take as much time as you like. It’s a pleasing mixture of thinking and rushing, and the time pressure reduces the impulse (and need) to perfect shots. I’m surprised Subpar Pool doesn’t use timers more, but again, I think the designer wanted to make a puzzle game, which is a shame since it would’ve made for a killer action/puzzle game.

It took me four hours to unlock every world and modifier card (there’s also an option to unlock everything at any time). I didn’t feel any urge to continue playing, though: the aforementioned fiddliness and randomness made for unpleasantly wild difficulty swings. This sounds like I’m putting the game on blast, but I’m really not – we just need to step away from the notion that games need endless gameplay. Subpar Pool was perfectly entertaining for the $4.99 I paid for it on iOS. Not even ten years ago, we’d think it was a miracle of a mobile game.

I’ve always thought the problem with turning pool into a video game is that by making it more accessible with guides and “bounce lines”, you make it too boring and predictable. Subpar Pool’s many worlds and modifiers and procedurally-generated tables introduce impressive variety but subpar consistency.

Puzzmo is a collection of six puzzles and minigames that refresh daily. Most are word-based, but a variation on chess and a shape-fitting puzzle broaden its reach, and social features allow paying players to compare their scores and performance.

The most obvious comparison to Puzzmo is The New York Times’ wildly popular Games section, which also includes lots of word-based puzzles and things like Sudoku; notably, they bought Wordle in 2022. NYT Games is included in some of the newspaper’s subscriptions but has also been bought standalone at $5/month or $40/year by over one million people.

But the better comparison is printed newspaper puzzle pages. These are still published and still have their devotees, albeit dwindling. Their charm – and Puzzmo’s, because it mimics them so closely – lies in how contained they feel. Here is your set of six puzzles a day, no more and no less, all displayed in full on a single (web)page. It’s a comforting mix of the familiar and the novel.

Well – it’s actually seven puzzles, because there’s always a bonus duplicate puzzle, so sometimes you’ll get two SpellTowers or two Fliparts instead of one. You never get two crosswords, probably because they cost more to make and take longer to play; and if you get two chess games, one of them will be much harder than the other. It takes me about 40 minutes to complete them all, though some will go much faster or skip puzzles they don’t like.

SpellTower

By connecting adjacent letters (including diagonally) to form words, you gain points and remove them from the board. The longer the word and rarer the letters, the more points you get. If you include a starred letter in a word, you double its score. Include a red letter, and its entire row will be removed. Form a words of five or more letters and the layer of letters surrounding it will also be removed.

Phew! SpellTower is one of the most game-like things in Puzzmo and originally launched in as a standalone app in 2011, now available as SpellTower+ on Apple Arcade. I played it a lot back in the day, but I find it a touch exasperating in this incarnation: the tower of letters is so large I’m often paralysed with indecision about how to start. It’s not that I can’t find long words in the tower, it’s that I know there’s a level of strategy where you engineer the tower to create really long words that I don’t have the patience for.

The reason I know this is because Puzzmo always tells me that other players, faced with the same tower, find way longer words than I do:

That this is bothersome is a problem for me – maybe I should get therapy – but it’s also a design problem that I’ll touch on later. The original SpellTower avoided this with a mode that added time pressure so you couldn’t spend too long crafting the perfect strategy; then again, it’s nice that this version doesn’t have time pressure, unlike some other Puzzmo games which can make me anxious.

All of which is to say, I think there’s plenty of room for improvement here, but I’m optimistic it’ll come: recently, the game updated so that finishing with two or fewer rows remaining gives you an extra 1000 points, and finishing with zero letters remaining gives you 2000 points. These massive bonuses give a tangible goal that all players can aim for, providing a bit more structure to the experience.

Typeshift

By moving columns of letters up or down, you form words in a horizontal line, turning the letters from grey to black, scoring points. Once you’ve turned all the letters black, the game is complete. There’s a neat hint system that shows moves the columns one at a time to clue you in to how to find any missing letters. That’s it!

Typeshift is an unpredictable game. It can take a surprisingly short or long amount of time to use all the letters, and I often have to reverse-engineer my way into a solution if I’m stuck with a grey letter in a weird place. I believe each game is designed so that all the letters can be used with a short set of “core words” that aren’t too uncommon, but I routinely complete Typeshift using weirder words or just hammering through combinations as fast as I can, which doesn’t feel very satisfying.

I do this because Typeshift’s scoring is mostly based on speed. It’s possible to finish some games in under 30 seconds, so there’s not much reward in taking your time. In fact, since you can see the Typeshift letters on Puzzmo’s home page even before you start the game, you can pre-find some – or all – of the words because a single timed second passes. Reader: I do this, but I promise it’s only for a couple words to start with, and only because I’ve convinced myself it’s the only way to compete against those dastardly players who probably pre-find them all.

Wordbind

You’re presented with a long word and need to find words inside it by using letters from left to right. You can also use the same letter twice in a row, so in this case, “SOONER” would be allowed:

Completing the first phase of the puzzle requires finding a list of words of specific lengths; here, it’s four 5 letter words, two 6 letter words, and one 7 letter word. This gives you a modest target to aim for, and again, a hint system reveals one letter at a time of missing words.

The second phase of the puzzle involves finding enough additional words to complete the progress bar at the top. You don’t need to do this, but it gets you more points. But that’s not all, because there can be yet more words to find even when the progress bar is full! This is a nice bit of design that gives players an honourable off-ramp when they feel like they’re done.

Like Typeshift, Wordbind is prone to cheating because you can see the whole word before you start.

Really Bad Chess

This is normal chess except your starting pieces are semi-randomised, so you’ll have four queens, three pawns, five knights, and so on; pieces still move like normal and the end goal is the same, though.

Because you’re given better pieces than your computer opponent, making trades aggressively (e.g. a bishop for a bishop) is a winning, if protracted, strategy. It’s also usually possible to checkmate within just a few moves because the computer isn’t that smart.

Really Bad Chess has quickly become one of my favourite Puzzmo games. I am not at all a fan of chess – the patience required to process the combinatorial explosion of possibilities or memorise starting patterns is beyond me – but because Really Bad Chess is easier and sillier and every game is very different, I find it much more fun.

Even more incredibly, it’s training me to become better at chess. Now that I’ve played thirty games in a row, I don’t rush headlong into simple trades; I check the most obvious repercussions, search for forks so I can pin down two pieces at once, and keep a lookout for what openings the computer might exploit. I don’t even mind it when the bonus puzzle is Really Hard Chess, where I think the pieces are more equal and the computer is a bit smarter. Frankly, my only problem with Really Bad Chess is that the computer sometimes makes foolish, unpredictable moves that wreck my plans.

Scoring appears to be based mostly on the number of moves you make before winning; you can always undo your last move or restart entirely, though this doesn’t reset your move count. I’m never tempted to speed through games, and to be honest I don’t even compare myself to other players because I know I’m not that good at chess, except for that one time I got the highest daily score, of course.

Really Bad Chess launched as a standalone app in 2016. Designer Zach Gage (also the lead of Puzzmo) said, “This could be perceived as an affront to chess,” but as people noted at the time, it really is a great learning tool.

Crossword

You know how crosswords work, I’m not going to explain them. These are “midi” sized, around 11x11 squares on average, and come in a range of difficulties. The clues are in the more literal, accessible US-style as opposed to the smug British cryptic crossword variety where you’re expected to learn the rules by osmosis.

I am traditionally not a crossword-enjoyer but something about Puzzmo has changed that in me. Perhaps it’s just that these crosswords are easier and the hints are well-constructed: the first hint for each clue show an additional, more obvious clue; then it’ll just reveal one letter at a time, all adding on extra time to your clock and reduce your score.

But that’s not it – I have access to NYT Games’ US-style crosswords and I’ve never been tempted to play them. Maybe it’s the size? Someone pointed out to me that the full-size NYT crosswords are much of a commitment than Puzzmo’s.

Or maybe it’s just completionism and the leaderboards; maybe I started playing them only to increase my total daily Puzzmo score and, improbably, ended up liking the. Maybe I’ve been played?! In any case, now I’m the person who’s memorised annoying and repeated clues like “SZA’s album” (CTRL) and “Penny Prez” (ABE).

Puzzmo’s crosswords are provided by AVCX, who seem to have a good business in supplying all sorts of companies. The US culture references and spelling still trip me up on occasion, which oddly means that the “easiest” crosswords are often the hardest.

Flipart

Fit a bunch of irregularly shaped pieces composed of square tiles into a box by rotating them from their fixed points. The challenge is that their starting positions are often heavily overlapped, and it’s not always obvious what shape a tile is in until you rotate it.

Flipart is very fast: standard-size games can be solved in well under 30 seconds, and even the bonus “Big Flipart” puzzles only take a couple of minutes. It’s satisfying to tidy up the tiles and figure out tactics like starting from the corners and edges. The only problem is that because the game is so fast, it feels almost too tense and disappointing when you make a mistake; even a few extra seconds on your clock or piece rotations is enough to see your score plummet down the leaderboards.

Puzzmo is designed to become a daily habit in a world where people don’t buy newspapers any more. It has an uncommonly good website that looks and works great on screens of all sizes, and since your state within a puzzle is saved in real time, you can easily start a game of Typeshift on your laptop, pause it for a Zoom call, then resume later on your phone (I find Typeshift better on touchscreens anyway because you can dual wield letter columns).

Its web-based nature matters to its business model, too. If Puzzmo were an app, it would give up 15-30% of its gross sales to Apple and Google, which is more than most business’ entire profit margin. I’m glad to see Puzzmo demonstrating the value of web-first experiences and I hope more creators follow it.

Buying a $40/year subscription gives access to two players, hides ads, and unlocks the archive of past puzzles, along with some exclusive games and puzzles. Subscribers also are included in leaderboards, get statistics about their play, and can create groups. This social side of Puzzmo is an important source of its growth, but also threatens to overwhelm what makes it fun.

Like the NYT’s Wordle and Spelling Bee, or popular trivia quizzes and crosswords more generally, much of the fun in daily puzzles lie in how they generate conversations from a common context, like weather in the UK; players rejoice or commiserate over an especially obscure word or a really fast solve. The standalone apps for SpellTower and Really Bad Chess are much cheaper and have far more puzzles, but they lack this social glue.

Gamification in Puzzmo

A lot of discussion in one of the groups I formed, Garbage Puzz, has been in puzzling out Puzzmo’s scoring systems. It seems that players are rewarded for getting things correct early, so that if two players solve the same crossword in 10 minutes but one of them got 95% of the clues right in the first minute while the other got them in the final minute, the former will get a much higher score. This makes sense and helps avoid tied scores, all of which end up being in four digits, which is a lot of digits.

What’s interesting about this is not so much the intricacies of scoring but the fact we spent so much time talking about it in the first place. Despite the disavowal of gamification in Puzzmo’s manifesto, gamification infuses every single aspect of the website:

Play is not kid stuff, or time-wasters, or gamification. Mindlessly matching gems while you watch tv is not play. Doing light math advertised to keep your brain elastic is not play. Work cannot be magically reformulated to become play. Play is its own thing. Play is engaging and all-encompassing. Play makes you feel light and free, even when it itself is deep and complex. Play is the companion of joy. …Play is a deep breath in and a slow release out.

Competitive stats from your friends and strangers are scattered liberally throughout the homepage, along with multiple leaderboards. Every time you finish a game, you see multiple graphs comparing your performance to everyone else’s, spelling out your percentile. Streak counts and weekly and monthly leaderboards encourage you to come back every day. Some of these can be hidden, but they’re all shown by default.

Puzzmo’s fixation on scores and leaderboards betrays a lack of consideration on how they can affect people negatively. I am a long time critic of gamification (I wrote a whole book about it!) as it’s most frequently used to manipulate people into spending more time on your product or service than they would have otherwise. I don’t think it has a place in games that are meant to be fun and joyful, as Puzzmo is. Personally, I get bummed out when I finish a puzzle and see I’m in the bottom 20%; and other people in my group are annoyed about being punished in leaderboards because they don’t like doing crosswords or apparent cheating from other players and groups.

There are other ways to commentate on players’ performance – the most obvious is prioritise personal trends, so you can see how you’re improving. But even that isn’t perfect, since it’s impossible for anyone to get better forever. It’s not like Puzzmo doesn’t know how to do this, either, as it will celebrate when you’ve found a longish word or completed a chess game with fewer pieces lost than usual, which isn’t exactly the same as fixating on “line go up”.

Of course, these things are harder to design and programme and calculate than scores – they literally cost more money in server time, too – but that’s the price of creating joy rather than anxiety, which is what I feel when competing in Typeshift and Wordbind against the spectre of genius/cheating strangers.

Puzzmo only launched a few weeks ago. It’s already changed in that time and I’m sure it’ll change much more in the coming months and years, adding more games and features.

I like it an awful lot, which is why I hold it to such a high standard. Its rampant, distracting gamification is a curious stumble from an otherwise fair and thoughtful website.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is an action-adventure game where you play as Peter Parker and Miles Morales as two Spider-Men protecting New York against villains large and small, amidst personal and relationship drama. Combat and traversal form the core gameplay, but it’s the slower and more heartfelt moments that elevate the game beyond a technical marvel.

Disclaimer: While I’m the producer and lead designer of Marvel Move, I’m writing this in a strictly personal capacity. Of course I can’t pretend I’m unbiased but “Spider-Man 2 is a good game” isn’t an unusual opinion amongst games writers!

Most missions and sidequests take place in specific locations throughout New York City. You reach them by swinging between skyscrapers with your web shooters, which instantly fire webs to appropriate locations above and ahead of you. We’ve all seen this in the movies but it remains astonishing how easy and natural it feels in this game; in practice you’re holding down one or two buttons and nudging an analog stick, yet the adrenaline rush of always being slightly out of control, like on a playground swing that’s been pushed a little too hard, never diminishes.

It’s easily the most joyful form of traversal I have experienced in any game, which I attribute to its combination of real(ish) physics in a 3D world with meaningfully varied elevation. It’s so good I’m baffled why it hasn’t been ripped off more; grappling hooks and grapnel launchers are common in action adventures, but using them as a primary traversal mode is unusual.

Spider-Man 2 introduces Web Wings, wind tunnels, and updrafts so you can glide when there aren’t any tall buildings around (e.g. across Central Park). They’re fine, I guess? At the beginning of the game you can’t glide very far, which is frustrating, and even when upgraded the wings are more utilitarian than fun. Unsurprisingly, Spider-Man is best when he’s swinging, though it is nice to see New York from high up.

Once you’ve reached an area of interest, you will do one of three things, in descending order of frequency:

1. Punch villains

2. Look for a thing

3. Walk and talk to friends

The first two – especially combat – make heavy use of Spider-Man’s web powers. These can variously be used to hit things at a distance, bring distant things towards you, throw things, and move things towards other things. In other words, they allow you to perform actions at a distance, which is most of the appeal of guns but even better, because they are ostensibly non-lethal and are more versatile.

Like traversal, this feels amazing. The kinetic pleasure in snatching a Spider-Bot towards you from twenty meters away or zipping through a gap in a wall is unmatched. You see something in the world, you want to do something with it fast, and Spider-Man’s skill set means you don’t need to wait a second. Web powers reduce the gap between thinking and doing, intention and action. Again, why don’t more games do this?

The combat is less compelling. There are lots of things you can do, like dodge, punch, shoot webs at enemies, yank them towards you, and so on, but their identikit powers and behaviour and the arena-like combat environments quickly become repetitive. At its worst, combat is a slog through waves of enemies and bosses with multiple health bars you gradually whittle down by dodging attacks and punching them more. Confined to a rooftop or an indoor hall, Spider-Man becomes indistinguishable from other melee games, and as fights lengthen, the game’s constant dialogue becomes a liability rather than a strength.

This repetitiveness is leavened somewhat by special powers that recharge over time. These include four “ability” slots associated with Peter’s robot arms and Miles’ electric powers, corresponding to a charge, big punch, lifting enemies into the air, and so on – vanilla stuff. Then there are four “gadget” slots shared between the two characters, for things like a web grabber that pulls groups of enemies and junk together, and a sonic blast. These can all be upgraded and can change when Peter gets alien-enhanced powers, and so on. Oh, and there’s a special “symbiotic surge” and “mega Venom blast” that enhances Peter’s damage and blows stuff up near Miles, respectively.

All these powers, plus the finishing moves, gives you the sensation of being super powered even as you engage in low level battles with random hoodlums, but aside from their visual spectacle, I appreciated them mostly as a way to get combat over with quickly rather than being especially enjoyable to use (except for the web grabber, whose physicality never disappointed).

My problem with Spider-Man 2’s combat is that it sits in an uncomfortable zone between being highly scripted and being more free-form. The former is exemplified by the game’s numerous cutscenes and chase scenes where you press buttons in exhilarating quick time events (QTEs) to catch falling civilians or punch bosses; the latter doesn’t really exist in the game but might be equivalent to Soulslikes or Breath of the Wild or first-person shooters whose combat encourages you to do more or less anything.

Both can be done well, but sitting in the middle feels unsatisfying, which really gets to the tension at the heart of Spider-Man 2 – is this trying to be a movie or a game?

This was a very persistent and annoying question during the 2000s and 2010s whose roots I will not get into but is valid here because Spider-Man 2 is both:

1. The most movie-like game ever made due to its incredible graphics, cinematic cutscenes, and linear storytelling and

2. A highly accomplished game qua game thanks to its astonishingly good traversal and vast “open” world

Now, you could say the same thing about Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption 2, but the difference is that Spider-Man is one of the most famous fictional characters in modern history, and with great name recognition comes great responsibility. You cannot make a Spider-Man game where players have the choice to go around murdering people with guns; you cannot tell a story without some combination of Mary Jane, Harry Osborn, Doc Ock, Green Goblin; you cannot take away Peter’s web swinging powers.

Spider-Man is a known person, like Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. Games with such characters operate within strict parameters. There’s always freedom to try new things but you have to hit the main beats of their story; even Across the Spider-Verse with its critique of “canon events” can only change its Spider-Man’s character and backstory and abilities so much. It would be a fascinating exercise for students to design a Spider-Man game that breaks the mould, but it would be an extraordinary financial risk for a publisher.

Spider-Man 2 needs combat that at least feels freeform, because that’s what players expect from a big-budget game today. The combat also needs to be cinematic, because Spider-Man is a movie star, and integrated into cutscenes that seamlessly take you from one encounter to the next; that’s why it’s confined to arenas and rooftops.

There’s a moment early on when you’re battling lots of mini-Sandmans (Sandmen?) in various arenas. It’s not terribly interesting from a combat perspective – they’re all the same. Later on, you can perform an action to break apart pipes to “melt” nearby sand and reveal whatever’s buried beneath. It’s a cool look, even if it makes no sense. Because Spider-Man 2 isn’t a true open world, you can’t perform this on pipes everywhere – it only works in certain places. This happens over and over again to the point where cutscenes with QTEs blend into highly linear gameplay situations with dazzling one-off actions, like when you fire a Iron Man-style beam weapon to cleave Sandman in two.

Sometimes these moments feel a bit much, more like tech demos than anything else, like when Sandman punches you across twenty blocks and you zip back within seconds, all thanks to the PlayStation 5’s fast SSD. It’s all scripted, just like a bravura sequence where you swing through portals across New York, but who’s expecting choice in a Spider-Man game?

The actual structure of the game is pretty conventional. While you swing around town, icons for random encounters will pop up in your view, like Arms Deals or Arson. When you arrive, you invariably beat everyone up and take civilians to nearby ambulances. Sometimes the other Spider-Man will be there and you’ll do fun combo takedowns.

Stopping crimes and taking photos or finding hidden Spider-Bots or completing sidequests earns you “district progress”. There are 14 districts with their own reward tiers, giving you the ability to “fast travel” within them, along with Tech Parts and Hero Tokens that improve your gadgets, health, speed, abilities and so on. You also get experience points (XP) doing most things; when you have enough XP, you’ll level up and get a Skill Point to learn new abilities and moves. Levelling is fairly constant and I never felt the urge to grind sidequests for XP; maybe that’s because I turned the difficulty down, but hey, that’s a good thing!

As the story progresses and you meet new enemies, more encounters appear on the map – Kraven’s Hunter outposts, cultists, alien symbiote nests, and so on. This makes things blissfully calm at the beginning of the game and rather silly by the end when they’re all crammed in together.

Occasionally the game does very contrived things like “if you find all the crystals that are affecting Sandman, you could help him become whole again” or “we need to restore network access to New York” and you just know it’s going to unveil twenty identical sidequests (optional, thankfully) to get all of Sandman’s memories or such. But on the whole, it’s astonishing how much unique stuff there is, how constantly novel sidequests appear. As Miles, I helped a student stage an elaborate prom invitation to his boyfriend, which was unbearably sweet; another time, I tracked down a “monster” in Brooklyn that turned out to be an injured robot dog drone; naturally, I had to beat up the baddies who hurt it.

Spider-Man is defined by his wholesomeness and pluck; without it, his story would be one of unremitting violence. This game forgets this lesson too often, though.

After battling Sandman, we’re introduced to Harry Osborn, Peter’s best friend, whose illness has been healed by an exoskeleton that later turns out to be an alien symbiote. Harry invites Peter to join him at a new institute aiming to save the world. You wander around the institute marvelling at how Science could prevent famine and save the bees and whatnot, which inevitably gets undone as various baddies intrude, but you’re left with the impression that otherwise they would have saved the world. This kind of tech solutionism is hardly new, but it’s a shame to see it presented so uncritically here, and you can’t just say “oh it’s a comic book” because comic books have criticised it!

In any case: it’s wholesome. There’s no combat at all, just walking around looking at things (a walking simulator bit). These moments happens quite a bit early on, like when you tidy up Peter’s house and look at overdue bills and old photos, or cycling through town with Harry, sneaking into your old school and shooting hoops to music from The Shins (yes, for real). Probably the most impressive bit comes halfway through the game in Coney Island, where you play a truly astounding number of fairground games, all while chatting to Mary Jane and Harry.

Between these and the countless puzzles and one-off interactions threaded into sidequests and the main story, Spider-Man 2 must have the highest density of minigames I’ve ever seen in a long time. There’s a rhythm game in a VR attraction, a game where you launch drones in the sky, a puzzle game to analyse molecules, even a bee protection minigame! None of them are very fun and they’re all skippable, which raises the question: why do they even exist?

The answer is that Spider-Man 2 is not an action-adventure game: it’s a Spider-Man simulation game. You get to be Spider-Man, and that means worrying about the mortgage and riding rollercoasters and looking through microscopes. It’s a superhero life simulator, enabled by a 20 hour duration, a near-limitless production budget, and not one but two Spider-Men, each with their own personal drama.

Unfortunately, around the midpoint of the game, things get less wholesome and the story accordingly becomes unremittingly grim and violent. A super-strong villain, Kraven the Hunter, arrives in New York, frees lots of imprisoned baddies merely so he can hunt them down. Like an annoying version of Batman, Kraven is always one step ahead of our heroes, meaning you battle him over and over again because he’s constantly allowed to escape.

Kraven is ultimately killed by Venom, a new villain created when the alien symbiote fully takes over Harry. In fact, you get to play as Venom and kill Kraven during a disturbing sequence where you mow down dozens of security guards. Venom then becomes the main antagonist and, yet again, you fight him in battles where he has multiple health bars, prolonging the endless monologuing: “you’re still holding back”, “you’re too weak”, etc.

What works across a few lines in a short movie fight scene simply does not work when spread across dozens of lines in a minutes-long boss battle. The dialogue when you fight an evil version of Mary Jane is especially ill-advised. It’s not as if the creators don’t know how to write her – she sounds fine in other scenes – it’s just that if you want Peter to have an argument with Mary Jane, it doesn’t need to involve them punching each other.

Case in point: the multiple dream sequences where Peter and Miles literally battle their inner demons. I am officially requesting the game designers of the world swear off this trope! We’ve spent the entire game punching people, is it not possible to confront your fears in some other way? Demolishing dozens of enemies at a time is not what I associate with Spider-Man – let’s leave that to Batman and Wolverine, please.

Combat aside, Spider-Man 2 is a marvel. It’s unblighted by gamification, polished to a mirror-finish, wholesome to a fault, with the best traversal ever invented. There is no finer cinematic game. They could make a new one every five years – hell, every single years – and players would gladly keep buying them as long as there’s more story and more villains.

Maybe that’s fine! Maybe we’ve reached the point of technological maturity in video games where the yearly gains in graphics and performance shrink to the point where players’ demand for innovation and novelty will have to be sated in other ways. Who knows, maybe Spider-Man 3’s innovation will be breaking its gameplay canon?