I’ve finally gotten around to trying all the free QubicGames titles I picked up in December. Most of them I bounced off pretty quickly as not the kind of gameplay I’m interested in, but one surprised me: Mana Spark.

Mana Spark is a roguelike. I never get into roguelikes, but I figured I should give it a fair shot. I played it until my first death and then put it down.

The next day, I found myself thinking about it again. The combat had felt great and the music, sound, and art were excellent. I played another session, enjoyed the atmosphere and game feel, and thought it was a shame the game was a roguelike and I’d never be able to get into it. After a few more deaths I put the game back down.

About an hour later, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the game and I picked it right back up and went on to play it obsessively for days.

I’ve thought a lot about why this happened. It actually reminds me of my experience with SteamWorld Dig 2.

Metroidvanias are all about remembering what’s where and how to get back to it, so my terrible sense of direction renders most of them borderline unplayable. But SteamWorld Dig 2 has a fantastic map and generous fast travel. It fully solved my problem with Metroidvanias, allowing me to enjoy what’s good about the genre.

Before, when I’d seen someone talk about how satisfying it was to bring a new tool back to an old area to conquer a previously-encountered obstacle, or to figure out how to skillfully use your tools to sequence-break and get somewhere early, I’d roll my eyes at this bizarre celebration of backtracking and subversion of carefully-designed pacing. But now I finally understood it! That stuff was fun, now that my poor sense of direction was no longer getting in the way. What I disliked was frustration and wasted time finding my way around with sub-par navigational aides - not Metroidvanias themselves, which it turned out I actually liked a lot!

Mana Spark provided a similar entry point into the roguelike genre. What I dislike about roguelikes is their permadeath punishment and their random layouts, and how those factors combine to create exactly the wrong kind of repetitiveness for me. Starting over each run from the beginning means you replay the early content long after it’s ceased to be an interesting challenge, and if you die to a late-game challenge the randomized layouts/upgrade/enemies prevent you from practicing or retrying that challenge even once you get back through the early content again.

Given my reliance on novel challenges, it’s unsurprising that I’d be turned off by roguelikes. When I fail, what I want to do is try again on the specific challenge I failed, to learn how to handle it. The last thing I want to do is be forced to make my way through the early levels that are no longer novel or challenging.

But Mana Spark has combat unlike any other roguelike I’ve played. Its deliberate pace and varied enemies requiring different tactics made for a high skill ceiling and kept even the early areas' combat engaging for me for quite a while - long enough for me to get hooked. With that problem solved, I could finally enjoy the things I’d heard people say they liked about roguelikes - experimenting with different upgrades, finding effective builds, having great runs that take you farther than ever before. And so Mana Spark showed me that it really is that reliance on novelty and learning, not the core structure of roguelikes, that causes my dislike of the genre.

More and more, I find myself thinking that most of the analysis we write about games is really about justifying automatic emotional responses that we’re not even aware of and which vary widely between players.

For a while, I thought Mana Spark might be the first roguelike I’d actually finish. It’s looking unlikely, though, because the novelty problem gets worse the further into a roguelike you get. By now I’m consistently able to get past the second boss and into the third and final area where the game’s strongest enemies appear. It’s taking me a while to learn to fight them effectively, and every time they kill me I have to get through the first two areas and first two boss fights before I can try again. And by now I’ve seen all the upgrades, and there’s basically nothing new going on in those first areas - it feels like a run doesn’t even really start until I get past the second boss, and it takes a while to do that.

If I could spend some in-game resources to restart a floor when I die, without starting completely over - or to skip the gameplay up through the last boss I beat, getting the random upgrades I’d have gotten along the way - I’d probably still be hooked, and would expect to finish the game. As it is, too high a percentage of my time is now spent on non-novel gameplay and I’m losing interest.

It’s a shame that Mana Spark couldn’t permanently solve my problems the way SteamWorld Dig 2 did. But I still had a good time with it for a while and am glad that I can now understand the appeal of its genre.

So there’s this post by Andrew Haining called “Outer Wilds critical analysis” but what I find most interesting about it is a digression that has little to do with Outer Wilds.

Haining discusses what he terms a game’s “core loop” - the direct interactions with the game that take up most of your time - and the “metagame” - the long-term progression and goal framework laid on top of the core loop. I’m not a fan of using the term “metagame” in this way since it’s commonly used with a very different meaning, so I’m going to use the term “progression” instead.

What I found interesting is that he points out that games that want to be enjoyable but carry dark or difficult messages can generally choose between two major approaches. He gives Frostpunk and This War of Mine as examples of games that have engaging and enjoyable core loops but progressions that he terms “subversive” and describes as deliberately unsatisfying. You do fun stuff but you do it in service of an unsatisfying goal. I’d probably add Spec Ops: The Line to this list.

The other approach is that taken by, for example, Pathologic. It inverts the arrangement - the core loop is subversive and unsatisfying, but it’s in service of a more traditionally-satisfying progression. Haining notes that this is a much riskier approach, as the vast majority of players will be turned off by the core loop before they get any satisfying progress. And indeed, my sense is that many more people found Pathologic unpalatable than the other mentioned games.

I just thought that was interesting, and something to keep in mind when trying to make a game with dark themes or messages.

Sonic Forces is a tragic waste of a pretty great character creator.

Some puzzle games establish a set of consistent rules and then task the player with applying those rules to varied situations to accomplish goals. We might call these “logical puzzle games.” Prominent examples here would be Portal, Stephen’s Sausage Roll, and the pre-Eliza Zachtronics games.

In these logical games, satisfaction comes from mastering the tools the game gives the player. Thus, it’s vital that the rules be communicated clearly. If the game hid or obscured anything about how it works, it wouldn’t be playing fair and it would be actively preventing the player from achieving the game’s satisfying experiences.

Some other puzzle games instead task the player with figuring out the rules at least as much as applying them. Even if there is a set of consistent rules somewhere deep down, they express themselves in a way that seems to change frequently and defy generalizable logic. We might call these “lateral puzzle games.” Prominent examples here would be Antichamber, Superliminal (according to this review though I haven’t played it myself), and Gorogoa.

In these lateral games, satisfaction (I think) comes from pleasantly mind-expanding reveals. The game deliberately hides things about its world or rules so that the player may be surprised when the curtain is pulled back. In logical games, that would block off the game’s satisfying experiences - but in lateral games, it’s required for them. You can’t have a reveal without having misdirection first.

But like I said, I only think that’s where the satisfaction comes from, because for me lateral puzzle games are wholly unsatisfying. Daniel Weissenberger characterized Superliminal as existing “only to show off how clever its developers are” and I felt similarly about Antichamber and Gorogoa. It tempts me to dismiss the entire subgenre, especially in contrast to Portal being famously designed to make the player feel clever instead.

But! I know these games are well-liked by their audience - I tried both Antichamber and Gorogoa due to their enthusiastically positive reviews. So I suspect that what’s actually going on isn’t that lateral puzzle games are bad and all these people somehow failed to notice. Instead, this is likely another case where we enjoy different games due to different wirings. Much like with large games that make you work to find their quality content, I don’t get a thrill of discovery from lateral puzzles - to me they feel like exercises in reading the developer’s mind more than stretching my own. But if I did experience that thrill? If I found those surprises genuinely rewarding? I’d probably love these games and be grateful for the journey they took me on.

Like many folks, I was skeptical when the early reveals of Animal Crossing: New Horizons showed that it had a significant crafting element. But when I thought about it, I started to get genuinely excited because I think crafting could be the key to solving the single biggest problem I have with Animal Crossing: its randomness.

A significant long-term appeal of mainline Animal Crossing games is customization. As you get more and more customization options like furniture and decorations and clothing and so on, you can increasingly make your own mark and express your own creativity and personality in the game’s world. The problem is that those options are doled out on a largely random schedule. You can plan to decorate your house in a particular style, but you can’t really take steps toward the goal - you mostly just have to wait and hope the relevant furniture and such becomes available. In the meantime, you make do with what you get - and even if you have most of the furniture in a theme, you might be waiting a long time for the last piece or two and have to make do with mismatched sets in the meantime.

It’s not yet clear exactly how crafting will work in New Horizons but if it follows the precedent established by other games, it could solve this cleanly. Crafting can provide a progression that allows you to actually make plans and take steps toward your goals, and often themed sets of furniture and such are all on the same tier of that progression, craftable with the same materials.

For the first time, my Animal Crossing home decor might reflect a purposeful progression rather than a random mishmosh of whatever the Nooks have deigned to sell. I like that idea a lot.

Here’s something I don’t understand - why is it so hard to find chill life-simulator (and especially farming) games that don’t have time pressure? (I complained about this before and it runs counter to best practices for making “cozy” games.)

Like, whenever I’m looking for relaxing games, Stardew Valley is always recommended. And that makes no sense to me. With the game’s short days that penalize you for being out too late, plus your slow walking speed, plus the fact that the villagers you’re supposed to befriend keep moving around throughout the day, I found it tense, not relaxing. I couldn’t freely wander around looking for someone because I was constantly aware of the ticking clock and the need to start heading home with plenty of time left on it.

When I look at other similar games, my eyes instinctively go toward the top corners of any screenshots to look for in-game clocks and I almost always find one. And I don’t get it. These games tend to also have stamina meters limiting what you can do between sleeps. Crops can usually only be watered or otherwise tended once a day. NPCs can only get one gift per day or whatever. There’s already plenty of systems to limit what the player can accomplish in an in-game day, guaranteeing the calendar will advance and the player will see birthdays and holidays and seasons. Why not let that be it, and have time advancement be under the player’s control? Why also tie in real-time pressure to punish players who aren’t thinking fast enough or planning hard enough for what is ostensibly a comfy, relaxed gaming experience?

Is it really just because everyone’s imitating Harvest Moon?

What if we did this instead: you wake up with your full stamina bar. Doing farmwork or other hard labor depletes your stamina bar, but walking around, shopping, talking to people, etc., does not. It is morning until you use up half of your stamina, at which point it becomes afternoon and everyone moves from where they are scheduled to be in the morning during that day/season to where they are scheduled for the afternoon. Once you use up all of your stamina, it becomes evening and everyone moves again. One could easily imagine townspeople manning shops and other services during the mornings and afternoons, and then in the evenings heading to the bar or park or social spaces. So you can do your shopping alongside your farmwork and such, and then once you’re done working for the day you can head into town and relax by shmoozing with the locals. And then it becomes nighttime when you go home, and when you go to bed it rolls to the morning of the next day.

So there’s a thing that games do sometimes that I need a better name for. It’s when totally innocuous actions that aren’t telegraphed in any way as consequential result in significant unrelated content being locked out and you don’t find out until hours later.

As nostalgic as I am for JRPGs, I feel like they are worse about this than any other genre. For example - I was lukewarm on Final Fantasy XII from the beginning, but the moment the game died for me was when I found out a few hours in that by opening a totally unremarkable chest I had locked myself out from ever obtaining the game’s most powerful weapon.

It’s a particularly brutal combination of Guide Dang It and Permanently Missable Content. I know this bothers completionists like me more than others, but it just seems so disrespectful to me. I can only think of it as the game saying “fuck you” to the player. So until I get a better name, the degree to which a game does this is its FUCKYOU index, for Flagrantly Unintuitive Conditions Keep Your Objectives Unobtainable.

I’ve started playing River City Girls and I mostly like it, but there are some really strange decisions around boss fights that came close to ruining the game for me.

The fights themselves are basically fine (at least the first two, which are all I’ve seen so far). You go up against a powerful enemy with unique attack patterns. They have a lot of health and they hit very hard, so you need to figure out their pattern and the best way to apply your own tools to get in sustained damage while avoiding nearly all of their attacks. They also change their patterns and become more dangerous twice - once when you’ve depleted a third of their health, and then again when you’ve depleted a second third.

It’s really not feasible to predict their patterns and vulnerabilities in advance - at least, I wasn’t able to. They have their own telegraphs but they can usually whip out attacks very quickly and you just have to learn through experience what their attacks are and what their areas of effect are. In short - I’d expect even very skilled players to die a couple of times in the course of learning each new boss.

If I’m correct, then dying to a boss isn’t necessarily a failure. It’s just part of the learning process. If that’s the case, then it’s bizarre how heavily punished it is.

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As a completionist, my thoughts about achievements are complicated. But here’s a simple illustrative anecdote.

I’ve been meaning to play Stick it to The Man for a while now, since I found out the story was written by Ryan North. I have it on my PS4 from when it went free on PlayStation Plus, which means it has trophies, which means I look up the trophy roadmap whenever I’m getting ready to play it. And thus far I haven’t managed to get past that step and actually play it. And Stick it to The Man doesn’t even have a particularly bad trophy list. There’s really only one trophy that sounds at all frustrating or unpleasant.

Then I saw the game was only a couple of bucks on Switch during the holiday sale. Switch doesn’t have trophies. So I paid a couple of bucks to buy a game I already have so that I’d have a version without trophies that I could just play and enjoy. I paid extra to not have trophies.

One of my all-time favorite video game gadgets is the jetboard from Jak II. Apart from just being really cool, it made navigating the open world of Haven City much more interesting - it was faster than walking, capable of a variety of tricks and maneuvers, and got brief speed boosts from successful execution of certain tricks. This meant that even just going from one mission to another could be engaging as you practiced stringing tricks together along the way to maintain the top speed boost for as long as possible. This then paid off in the missions that required skilled use of the jetboard.

Effie is a recent 3D platformer by a small team that explicitly takes inspiration from genre classics including Jak & Daxter. It includes a “surfing” ability that’s superficially very reminiscent of the jetboard, as it involves taking your shield (which normally stays collapsed on your back), expanding it, and using it as a hoverboard.

But that’s where the similarities end. Surfing allows you to move faster, but it’s not really any more engaging than walking. You can’t do any tricks, and the only speed boosts are at fixed points in the environment spaced such that you’re not likely to be able to maintain max speed if you’re taking a direct route to your destination. You’re mostly still just holding forward, not practicing anything or getting rewarded for mastery of anything. Even the character’s body movements are bizarrely stiff while surfing, like there wasn’t time or budget to animate it properly (the rest of the game is much better animated).

It’s certainly possible the designers wanted to do more with surfing, but in the end it feels like it mostly exists to justify how wide open the game’s Red Plains of Oblena is - which in turn seems to be so wide open in order to justify the presence of surfing. The Plains' points of interest are quite spread out and take a while to get between, which is improved by surfing but still not interesting, and this is also the only place you can surf. You can’t do it in the main levels, and the only goal that actually requires it is a fairly easy and dull ring course that’s one of the Plains' points of interest.

It makes me really curious what the conversations were like during development. I can easily imagine grand plans for both surfing and the open area that there just wasn’t time or money to fulfill, and it would be difficult to remove either late in development (taking out the Plains would require restructuring the game, as it currently bridges all the linear levels, and taking out surfing would make the Plains incredibly obnoxious to traverse), resulting in the unfortunate half-baked state they ended up in. But who knows whether that’s what happened.