People, you simply must buy Michael Brough’s new game 686-BACK immediately. This game deserves to make money, and you deserve to play it. I’ve been a big fan of this guy’s beautifully surreal clockwork-precision mini-roguelikes for a long time, and this feels like his masterwork.
There’s a sort of campaign system in this where you hack multiple servers, each being its own tense little dungeon crawl. It’s a really cool way to build on the original 868-HACK. I also really like the gameplay additions like devs and scrips that let you make more customized, synergistic builds than the original game allowed.
There are also very fun and silly modifiers applied to certain servers that really mess with the player, like 3D Graphics that put you into first-person view (which makes the game much harder moment to moment), or pop-up windows that make you take a penalty whenever you get a powerup:
The whole thing has this great scuzzy 90’s cyberpunk vibe to it too. A lot of beautiful designs, great music, bizarre soundwork with a lot of detail to it. I always mute roguelikes and listen to my own music… except for this one.
my friend flew out to portugal to stay with michael to work on that game, then he got sick and got to stay an extra week!! im gonna go tell him to sign up for sb right now
Hell yeah. This game feels like when your favorite experimental musician suddenly puts out a polished, hi-fi art-pop album, and after the initial shock you find that it’s just as good if not better than their low-fi work. This game is still as original, strange, and challenging as much of his previous work, but this level of polish and scope seems novel for him, and he wears it well.
Har har har, but true, Saint Elizabeth does fit that dynamic now that you mention it and it’s good. Come to think of it, it’d probably work pretty well as an alternate soundtrack to 868-BACK.
A videogame thing I think about a lot is how Brough made one of my favorite puzzle things in Corrypt and followed it up by spending the next almost 15 years creating a subgenre that just does nothing for me.
868-BACK is the best game of all time, according to the community voted “most helpful” steam review, and i’m extremely proud to have played my small part in bringing it to fruition.
i’ve also recently achieved the world record score of 9599 points. if you want to be totally spoiled for so much stuff, you can watch the vod of me talking about the run and playing the final day. seriously though, don’t click that link if you haven’t either already played the game to the point where you’re sure you don’t mind spoilers, or you have no intention of playing the game unless convinced by my thrilling gameplay (this video, of 1/15th of the run, is over 2.5hrs long).
i’m happy to be asked questions about the development process or the mechanics or whatever! nice to meet you all!
however, i have to honest in the face of this thread’s title: the only game i’ve played today is Spelunky HD. my goal is to get a chain eggplant run this year, after achieving bookskip eggplant last year.
Hi Jake.
First question: do you think you’d have hit 10K if /godel and /product had swapped places on the map.
Second question: have you played Puyo Puyo, because I’ve been comparing the game and 868-HACK to that game in chats with friends, not just in the sense of requiring a basic puzzle-like finesse in order to accomplish anything, but also in the sense that both games’ combos equally “hide in plain sight” and meaningfully transform what the game is about when used… as in “people think the game is like this” (footage of noobs flinging 2-chains at each other until someone dies) “but actually the game is really like this” (footage of a 10-chain getting one-shot by an opposing 12-chain)
I think I would have hit 10K if i had realized _bind was on my stack. what is wrong with me >_>
Gödel and Product swapping… I mean I don’t think so. Let’s see. Total product points pre-Gödel was 267 in 3 servers, avg of 89. My Gödel points were 327 in 6 servers, avg of 54.5. There are all kinds of reasons why this comparison doesn’t make sense, but it’s a big enough gap that it kinda seems like Product is just better? I also did do a fair amount of scrip acquisition after getting Product I think, which is another point in Product’s favor. And I managed to turn Product on almost all of the time, only missed 2. But I could easily be missing something!
I have never played Puyo Puyo, and only barely played anything in the genre (I don’t remember which one it was). But I have watched a bunch of your competition videos and it seems very exciting and good. I am laughably bad at doing block puzzles under time pressure (a fact I have learned from my dozens of hilariously failed bookskip attempts) so it’s probably not for me, but I can see what you mean!
I messed up the post and meant to say /extrapolate instead of /godel >_< But nevermind. The other thing about Puyo that reminds me of 868 is that unlike Tetris, and arguably even unlike Panel de Pon, you have to do on-the-spot threat analysis when the opponent presents an attack, especially when it’s uncertain where and how much will land on your field. Being able to say, I can accept 1 line, 2 lines, I don’t have to spend material in reply to this, based on the state of your field, the opponent’s, and both next pieces, is quite similar to abstractly measuring how much alert you can reasonably accept in 868.
ah! in that case i have really no idea, i’ve never really used extrapolate at all. A little hard to imagine it giving 89 legacy per server? in fact the more i think about these questions you are asking me, the more i think product might be really really strong.
and yes! that kind of estimation is such a good part of the game. it’s kinda wild how specific a feel you can get for it, given the variance. it’s especially satisfying to be like “i can take 13, but 15 will cost too much” and be right :D
once the new build is out i think i’m going to try to go for a 0-legacy run next. i kept meaning to do that in development and never did.
EDIT: hey is there a way to prevent automatic emojification here? I’ve dodged it via ZWNJ, but it would be nice if there was a setting. Couldn’t find one though.
I haven’t been active there for several years either. My username is still the same as it was, but I think my avatar was quite different. (I made the Bio Force Ape TAS, if you ever watched that one.)
/extrapolate is “+X data every time you siphon a datacube”. I find it quite hard to imagine it wouldn’t go bananas with password and /key and the option of going for .boost + _fork
Like, to get 89 legacy from a X3 (i.e. +29 data), you only really need to siphon 10 datacubes after getting it to +3 (two boosts), and obviously less if you siphon cubes when it’s at +1 and +2.
(Yes, this is ignoring natural 7s, 8s and 9s hitting the cap, so feel free to make it 11-13 cubes instead).
