Some games have optional backtracking - letting you return to earlier areas or content for various reasons. Others have structural backtracking - in Metroidvanias, the player often encounters impassable obstacles to which they’ll need to return later once they have the ability to get past them. (How obnoxious this is varies considerably with how good the map is and how generous the fast travel is, but that’s another post.)

But there are also games where backtracking isn’t an inherent part of the game’s structure or an opportunity to recontextualize earlier content. Instead, it’s an apparently-arbitrary requirement that the player repeat mostly-identical content, seemingly as filler or an attempt to increase replayability. This is what I call mandatory backtracking, and it’s one of my game design pet peeves.

I recently played LEGO City Undercover, which has tons of mandatory backtracking in a way that I get the impression is typical for Traveller’s Tales' LEGO games. You gain new abilities as you progress through the story missions, and every mission has collectibles you can’t possibly get your first time through because they require an ability you don’t have yet. Most of the missions have collectibles that require an ability you get at the very end of the final story mission. So to fully complete the story missions, you have to play them all at least twice.

To me, this is annoying - whenever I see one of these collectibles in a mission, it feels like I am being taunted. And it smacks of insecure design - my instinct is that if the mission is fun enough to play twice, I’ll play it twice; if it’s not, I resent being forced to do so if I want the collectible.

LEGO City Undercover also has an open-world hub area to explore, which is chock full of goodies to find - many of which require various abilities, including the one you get at the very end of the story. At first I had a great time casually exploring the city, finding collectibles and beating challenges, and heading into a story mission for a more directed experience only when I felt like it. But I kept running into collectibles I couldn’t get yet, which made me feel like I was being discouraged from exploring before advancing the story. I felt like I had to play story missions before I was in the mood for them, and that damaged the experience.

Worse, I’d sometimes find a trail to a collectible that would take me platforming across rooftops, using a couple of abilities along the way, and suddenly dead-end in an ability I didn’t have yet. You get abilities in a set order, so I don’t know why they didn’t just make sure that trails always started with the latest needed ability to complete them. Since they didn’t do that, I often had to just back out without getting the collectible, and when I later got the ability I needed it was extremely difficult to find where I’d needed it - because the trail actually started somewhere else with basic platforming or some other earlier ability and wasn’t marked in any way as incomplete. This made me feel like I was being outright punished for exploring, which made it much less relaxing and enjoyable to do.

In some ways, I feel like LEGO City Undercover doesn’t really start until it’s over. You aren’t fully free to find and complete everything until you have all the abilities, which you won’t until you finish the entire story. At which point you’ll have to replay the entire story and re-explore the entire world if you want to find everything. I can see where that would work out for kids, but I had a hard time getting in the right headspace to enjoy that. I eventually just powered through the remaining story missions, but then found that hunting down the collectibles no longer seemed appealing. It’s an extreme case of texture outlasting structure. If getting the collectibles is fun without the story, why force me to go through the story before I can get all the collectibles? And if it’s not, then why make sure that you can’t get all the collectibles until you’re done with the story?

But all together, this is a great example of a design choice that’s enjoyable for some players and unpleasant for others rather than being inherently good or bad. There have been a lot of LEGO games over the years, and my understanding is that they basically all do these kinds of things. I think they would have stopped by now if it weren’t a positive for their target audience. These games are largely designed for children, who enjoy repetition. It’s a much safer assumption that a child is going to want to replay the content anyway, and this means they can get new rewards for doing so.

Similar to my claim that what’s hard about a game should also be what’s interesting about it, this is a foundational design belief of mine that’s important enough I want to write about it but seems so obvious that it’s hard to know what I could even say about it.

Games should never punish exploration.

A player getting drawn into a the universe of a game, engaging deeply enough to want to explore off the beaten path and not just follow the narrative breadcrumbs and signposts? That’s a huge compliment that means the game is working. It should never be repaid with a slap on the wrist.

Games should not assume that a player exploring an area means they don’t know they can leave or have forgotten their goal and have an NPC repeatedly and patronizingly bark at them to move on.

Games should not have one-way doors or points of no return that are not clearly telegraphed. (And they definitely should not have unmarked plot triggers at the end of dungeons that teleport the player all the way back out of the dungeon.)

Games should not surprise the player with sudden deadly difficulty spikes in otherwise safe areas.

Games should not provide interesting-looking and apparently-reachable places that are actually out-of-bounds instant death traps.

Games should never punish exploration.

Sometimes it’s stressful to start a new game.

Entering a new world, understanding a new set of rules, seeing the systems beneath, learning what’s vitally important and what’s noise to be ignored, all create real cognitive load that can be quite demanding.

It’s pretty silly how many evenings I’ve wanted to unwind with a game but not been in the middle of anything with sufficient chill and found myself unwilling to start a new game, even one known for being relaxed and cozy, because I didn’t have the energy. At those times I want comfort food, not a new adventure.

This is one of those things that’s really helpful about genre conventions and so-called kitsch. It’s one of the major benefits of a series holding on to its core identity. The more you know what you’re getting into, the less energy it takes to get into it.

That’s why I was a little nervous about how different Animal Crossing: New Horizons is from its predecessors, but I was reassured by its connections to the past. I’m pretty sure that no matter how stressed or tired I am today, starting New Horizons isn’t going to scare me off. It’s going to feel like coming home.

So like, I love Nintendo and everything, but this is also the company that decides there is One True Way to play their games to justify forcing you to unlock all characters in an otherwise tournament-ready game one by one, or selling you an expensive controller and then not letting you use it while destroying accessibility by unnecessarily requiring motion controls, or preventing you from backing up your own saves, selling you a save backup service, and then not letting you use it, or requiring an online connection to experience certain content even if playing alone on a portable console.

I’ve heard a lot of talk about entitled gamers, but none about entitled developers. I don’t know what else to call it when a developer feels like they can decide for you how you get to enjoy the games and services you’ve purchased from them and hobbles those games and services in ways that cause real problems for communities, accessibility, and preservation all to stop players from having fun in an unapproved way.

See also: Atlus pretending Fair Use doesn’t exist and dictating terms for using gameplay footage and screenshots (perplexing after their previous backpedaling on the subject), many developers tracking player activity even outside of their game, and on and on.

I have mixed feelings about Murder by Numbers being described as Picross meets Phoenix Wright. The Picross part is accurate enough, but while there are definitely some Ace Attorney vibes here the gameplay bears only a passing resemblance.

Like, yes, there are murders, and you look around for clues and talk to people with simple dialog trees and you can show them your clues to get a reaction and sometimes this is necessary to get more information that moves things forward. But that’s common in mystery games. To me, the essence of Phoenix Wright games are the trials and especially the cross-examinations. Hearing witness testimony, finding the lie or error, and presenting the piece of evidence that proves the contradiction - it requires some actual deduction and understanding of the case’s facts, and to me it makes for the most satisfying moments of those games.

I’m enjoying Murder by Numbers, but I’ve now completed two of the game’s four cases and there’s been nothing like that.

I get that Phoenix Wright is the best-known murder mystery game series with an anime or visual novel style. The comparison would be inevitable even if the soundtrack weren’t by Masakazu Sugimori (who also did the music for the first two Phoenix Wright games). But on some level it frustrates me because it seems based on a superficial read on the series which leaves out its best strengths.

Given my music purchasing habits, it’s frustrated me more than a few times that many indie games only make their soundtracks available for purchase as DLC on Steam. This was fine for games that I happened to buy on Steam, but I have had to resort to double-dipping on a game I already had on a different platform. It was worth it, but still silly.

So I’m really glad Steam finally made soundtracks available as standalone purchases a couple of months ago. And today, I finally made use of this ability for a game I’m playing on Switch. Feels good.

Ring Fit Adventure is apparently sold out everywhere, which is bad timing for folks looking for electronically-assisted indoor fitness options during the COVID-19 pandemic. But it’s worth noting that while Ring Fit Adventure requires dedicated peripherals and is thus not available digitally, there are other Switch fitness games that just use the joy-cons and can thus be bought digitally. And in my house we actually prefer one of those - Fitness Boxing - to Ring Fit Adventure.

If you aren’t familiar, Ring Fit provides a workout, but does so as part of an overarching RPG-like game. The story is very simple and has a cartoonish feel, including a companion character named Ring who is the in-game representation of the ring-con controller and is excited, friendly, and talkative - to me, the overall effect feels weirdly kid-targeted for an exercise game.

In at least the first few regions of the game, you progress through an area and have some fights along the way. Going through the area looks like a forward-facing 3D platformer (a la Crash Bandicoot) and you step in place to move your character. Along the way are opportunities to point the ring-con in a direction and squeeze it to release an air burst to break something and get coins or open a door or things like that, or point it down and squeeze to hover across gaps. The battles are turn-based and your attacks are variously categorized exercises like squats and yoga chair-pose lifts and such.

I was left feeling like the target audience for Ring Fit is someone who doesn’t want to or can’t be particularly deliberate about their exercise and is looking for a distracting framework to motivate them through it. The idea seems to be that you just play regularly and get through some levels until you’re tired or whatever, and you’ll definitely burn calories but it’s not a consistent or targeted workout. There’s always plenty of stepping, but the other actions aren’t necessarily balanced, especially if you’re optimizing for combat effectiveness instead of a better exercise, which seems likely for the sort of person who wants to play this game. The idea seems to be that the RPG is appealing and distracting and you’ll get exercise in the course of playing the RPG.

I did not find the RPG appealing, given how kid-targeted it seemed. And for me, it’s more useful to get into a consistent rhythm with my exercise so that I can just get in the zone.

Fitness Boxing is much more suited to this. It’s essentially a rhythm game that gives you instructions on the beat via scrolling icons, similar to Dance Dance Revolution. And while you can pick specific exercises if you like, you can also just have it tell you what to do. For example, I told it my fitness goals were “Strength and Cardio” and that I wanted 15-minute workouts, and then I could just start the “Daily Workout” from the menu and it would give me a 15-minute-ish workout that gets slightly harder each day based on my history and performance. I know how long it’ll take, I won’t be unpredictably changing what I’m doing along the way, I won’t have to stop and think about what attacks to use, and I can just get into the rhythm.

(There’s also Just Dance, but those workouts are not progressive in the same way.)

So, you know. There are other options besides Ring Fit Adventure - ones that can’t sell out. And for many players those other options are better anyway.