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An Old West-themed comedic RPG with monochrome stick-figure art and surprisingly good music and sound effects. Pick your class (Cow Puncher, Beanslinger, or Snake Oiler), get a horse and a “pardner” (a combat teammate who is also tied to a major sidequest), and head out west to seek your fortune. Along the way, run into various random encounters and episodic sidequests featuring combat, puzzles, and a lot of humor. The game is warm and safe, with no game overs or permanent fail states and always warning you clearly before you do anything irrevocable, and whatever you do will probably be funny.
A sprawlingly-large open-world action RPG with a ton of things to do, all of which are loaded with backstory and world-building. The game’s aesthetic, fascinating world, deep lore, and mechanical variety combine to create a feeling I haven’t experienced since quitting World of Warcraft.
Set in a universe created and fleshed out by fantasy writer R.A. Salvatore, Amalur casts the player as the first person to become free of the threads of fate that bind the world and everyone in it. As such, you are uniquely positioned to thwart destiny and avert disasters - providing an excellent reason why you are the only one who can accomplish tasks ranging from small-scale side quests like saving individuals from preordained deaths all the way up to reversing the tide of the main story’s war.
In this 2017 Norwich Gaming Festival talk, Stuart Ashen tells the amazing story of Hareraiser, a 1984 computer game (of sorts). I wasn’t expecting much based on the hyperbolic video title, but the events surrounding this game are actually layered with intrigue and Ashen’s expert storytelling makes the thirty-six minutes fly by. In the end, I am persuaded - Hareraiser is quite possibly the worst game ever published and sold, but not for any of the reasons you likely expect.
A game featuring a modified three-dimensional variant of Picross. Instead of a grid made of squares to selectively fill in to reveal an image, the player is presented with a rectangular prism made of cubes to selectively chip away to reveal an object. The clues work differently as well - not every row or column has clues, and each clue is a single number indicating how many cubes should be left in that row or column. The number is presented alone if the cubes are contiguous, circled if they are in exactly two contiguous groups, or in a square if they are in three or more contiguous groups.
Zach Gage takes a look at how to make games so readable that someone looking over your shoulder on the subway as you play on your phone can tell what’s going on and get excited to download the game themselves. The key is the principle of The Three Reads, an approach which ensures that useful information is prominent at the right time and in the right order - first the core of the experience that draws people in, then the key details that convey the high-level rules, then the contextual information that conveys less-central rules.
Long ago, I wrote a post about the different roles of challenge and punishment in skill-based games and how they relate to flow and learning. My argument was that challenge should vary with player skill to maximize opportunities for flow while punishment should be flat-out minimized to prevent disruptions to learning. Doing things like kicking the player back to a distant checkpoint when they die inserts delays and distractions between attempts, making it much harder to learn. But there’s a significant difference between first learning a skill and mastering that skill, and this absolutely affects what kind of punishment is appropriate. I’ll explain, borrowing an example from commenters on that old post.
Imagine you are playing a new racing game. The tutorial teaches acceleration, braking, steering, and drifting, requiring you to perform each operation before advancing to the next. You hold the accelerate button, then the brake button, steer around some turns, and then try the drift but your timing is off and you fail to execute it. In this case, it would be counterproductive for the game to force you to start all the way over and pass the accelerate, brake, and steer tests again before giving you another chance to drift. The game is teaching the skill, not testing it. Failing to execute this skill should result in an immediate opportunity to try again. Additional punishment would just make it harder to learn, which is the exact opposite of the tutorial’s goal. A punishing tutorial is a bad tutorial.
But once you’re out of the tutorial and you start racing, the scenario is different. The game is done teaching new skills and starts testing them. You are no longer learning skills; you are practicing them. Your goals are larger in scope - not just “perform a drift” but “win this three-lap race.” And because the scope of punishment defines the scope of challenge, a challenge of this scope is not possible without real punishment. If losing the race results in just restarting, say, the final lap, the challenge becomes “win this lap” rather than “win this race.” In order to challenge you to perform well consistently enough to win an entire race, loss must cost you the entire race.
While I haven’t yet played Detroit: Become Human myself, I’m always excited when someone talks sense about David Cage. Here, Skill Up takes a fair look at Quantic Dream’s latest, acknowledging its flaws but illuminating how it’s the most successful realization yet of Cage’s vision for what games can be.
Tom Francis looks at player-driven risk/reward tradeoffs (which he calls “betting on yourself”) in roguelike 868-HACK, explaining their advantages over traditional difficulty modes and designer-driven difficulty spikes.
A simple puzzle game in which you place dots in hex cells so that each line of hexes adds to the specified total. For example, a row of two hexes may be marked with a total of four which may mean each hex needs two dots or one needs three dots while the other needs one dot. Ambiguous situations are resolved by finding the solution that satisfies all marked totals simultaneously - once all hexes are correctly filled, the puzzle is solved.
One of my golden rules of game design is “Never punish the player for exploring.” Bart Stewart takes a look at one way this happens with what he terms “irreversible events” in RPGs. He mostly doesn’t like them, and neither do I.
The Switch installment of a long-running series of tennis games starring Super Mario characters. While the core tennis gameplay is quite solid, as one would expect from a Nintendo title that’s been iterating for several console generations, what little there is on top is a mixed bag and probably not enough to satisfy those who play alone.
A game about surviving and escaping a collapsing city on an artificial island. Gameplay includes elements of 3D platformers, adventure games, survival games, and even dating sims.
Gameplay is split into a series of areas you must navigate and survive. Debris, damaged buildings, and uneven terrain present obstacles to get around, while earthquake aftershocks and newly-falling debris present threats to avoid. Usually you’re just trying to get through to the next area, but occasionally the story will lead you to other goals such as helping survivors or finding a missing dog. Reaching your objective is sometimes just a matter of sufficient exploration, but it can also involve basic platforming challenges or inventory-based puzzles such as getting a fire extinguisher to put out a fire blocking your path.
A game modeled after classic JRPGs, but using them as a jumping off point rather than something to slavishly recreate. The mechanics start with Chrono Trigger as a base and the story premise is reminiscent of Final Fantasy X, but I Am Setsuna goes in its own direction and has its own strong identity. The result is a game that - while flawed and small in scale - feels like it comes from an alternate world where Squaresoft never stopped making these kinds of games.
A deceptively simple wingsuit game. Glide through procedurally-generated mountainscapes and score points by passing near surfaces and through narrow gaps. Each run continues until you crash against a surface, but you can immediately restart. While it only takes a few minutes to get a sense for everything the game has to offer, it’s a game you can keep playing for a very long time.
A short (though duration will vary considerably with skill) masocore 2D platformer with Atari 2600-inspired pixel art. Progress through five areas and overcome deadly obstacles in your search for the Troof. Whatever that is.
Some obstacles are deadly due to their unpredictable nature and are clearly intended to take you by surprise, though if you have fast enough reflexes and proceed with caution you can survive many of these even the first time you encounter them. Other obstacles are more straightforward but require precision timing and positioning. Death generally doesn’t put you too far back unless you run out of the limited number of lives you have per area, in which case you must restart the area.
A game that has you walking around the physical world to find and catch Pokémon, improve and evolve them, and participate in asynchronous multiplayer battles to take control of Pokémon Gyms in real-world locations. A lot of the depth and draw comes from the real-world social interactions that emerge from multiple players in the same physical area. The dynamics of coordinating community members to defend gyms and the opportunity to meet people via a shared activity are far more interesting than the relatively shallow gameplay. As such, the game may have been at its most appealing in the months after its launch when it was pretty common to run into groups of players.
A third-person arena shooter starring busty schoolgirl ninjas armed with water guns. After four brawlers and a rhythm game, a shooter is a refreshing change of pace - but is clearly outside of the developer’s area of expertise and the experience is not up to the series’ usual level of polish.
A retrospective on the discourse around Myst as a case study on the weird and inaccurate ways we discuss and recall gaming culture. For me, the main takeaway is that gaming has always had more subcultures than the social narrative has accounted for and when we refer to gaming as a monolith we distort reality by ignoring the experience and perspective of many, many people.
Many games are tests of skill. Players succeed or fail at the game’s goals based on their physical dexterity and reaction time, general knowledge and reasoning ability, understanding and internalization of the game’s own mechanics - anything a game can test. But much of that skill is applied before the moment of success or failure.
Victory in a chess match may come from physically moving your piece into a position that checkmates your opponent, but that isn’t the hard part. And the hard part of beating Doom isn’t the button press that fires the last shot on the final boss - it’s everything you did to enable that shot. These goals, and indeed most interesting goals in games, actually have multiple stages of challenge that funnel into each other.
Here’s my conception of the phases of challenge. This is a fairly abstract framework, since it’s intended to be generalizable to every skill-based game. To help pin it down a bit, let’s take a closer look at each phase and then discuss how they interrelate. Once that’s done, I’ll go into some implications these ideas have for game design.
A rhythm platformer like its twopredecessors. Your character runs automatically, you avoid obstacles and collect gold by jumping, sliding, kicking or blocking at the right time, and your actions affect the music.
This third installment keeps the aesthetic from Runner2 and most of its additions (characters and skins to unlock, levels with branching paths, optional mid-level checkpoints, etc.) and adds several of its own including a double-jump and vehicle sections that control differently from standard running. Unfortunately, some of the new changes greatly damage the game’s core appeal. As a rhythm game with high challenge, strictness, and punishment, it’s important to minimize frustration and maximize flow, but Runner3 takes multiple steps backward in both of these aspects.
