I’ve always considered Fez as being the “third game” in this wave alongside Braid and Portal, and also felt it uniquely distinguished itself by having its one mechanic not always be the centrepiece of puzzles, but recede in importance as more traditional “Myst-like” puzzles (ciphers etc.) came into play. So, you could say that Fez is the design “bridge” between Myst and these other games. But, the casting of the puzzles with cosmic importance (ushered in by a deific gold cube character) that you bring up is especially strong in it, too. The whole game is suffused with a cold dignity that wouldn’t suffer more down-to-earth puzzles to exist.
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Alyx was incredibly good though and we did already get heaven’s vault… I have never really understood why the valley of gods truthers are still so upset. it looked pretty early when they mothballed it?
like god knows I would not have felt the slightest regret at saying no to the salary if I got to make half life Alyx lol… except for having to move to Seattle
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cant say im that invested in this genre of thing though i did enjoy playing the witness just cause it was interesting having to figure out how all the diff bits related to each other. i tend to be a bit wary sometimes of like over zealous critiques of stuff that is characterised as too calculated / empty / cold / rigid etc cause i feel that often operates on this like assumed superiority of rhizomatic messy subconscious things, which idk abt that. cant say im huge into the adjacent bits (sound writing gfx style) that usually accompanies this type of game though, so not trying to defend too much hah.
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campo santo were making an archeology hiking sim, got bought, and then got absorbed into a half-life spinoff. as rare as a shipping half-life game is my choices for first-person adventure games are slim to none, and certainly none at that budget
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the witness was more palatable in 2016, i imagine it has aged pretty poorly in under 10 years. the novelty of hidden puzzles is basically expected in most big puzzle games now and is pretty played out. the witness’s 'miniature worlds adjacent to one another" aesthetic was totally outdone by outer wilds. the indie game auteur ecosystem from the late 00s to mid 2010s doesn’t carry as much weight these days (jon blows next game probably wont be as highly anticipated as the witness was). i dont think people tolerate “this video game has big important ideas” as much as they did then, though that may just be me.
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Speaking of Fez, I think it aged the best on these dimensions. Music from Disasterpeace (who went on to score Hyper Light Drifter) with chiptune melodies occasionally emerging from a deep well of ambient sound, a wisely sparse script, and handcrafted voxel dioramas that can feel both cute-and-tiny and awe-inspiringly huge depending on perspective.
(OTOH I’m still kinda mad that Fez’s number cipher uses a format with 16 possible options for a base-10 system)
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dont worry i give it a full three weeks before the swarming vanguard hordes of circa 2012 freeindiegam.es evangelists storm the gates of videogames culture to demand everyone go back to pretending to care about mmf2 games again. they’ve spent all this time in a big warehouse gathering weapons like the guys from Cobra. everyone itt can have all the opinions they want about polish in games being nice sometimes… for now.
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i believe in messy rhizomatic subconscious superiority. i’ll say it.
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the polish is one of the few things i still look fondly upon when i remember playing the witcher 3!
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yeah like if people like whatever kind of games go for it but i’m gonna say, there’s no “assumed” superiority here. every alt games person i know already grew up on highly polished consumer-oriented artproducts and whatever alternatives they’ve created from that aesthetic have been if anything undercut by a timid and perpetual overwillingness to say “don’t worry, i like the other kind too! i’m probably wrong! we can all be friends!”. indie games has been a full decade plus of people trying to find the Third Way between hobbyism and professionalism and whatever people think about the results, i surely can’t believe that at this point the former has been insufficiently interrogated for any opinions or aspirations it might dare to nurture.
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Rhizomatic vs Hierarchical, Art vs Science, Realism vs Abstraction, Dionysian vs Apollonian, Continental vs Analytic, New Games Journalism vs IGN, Humanities vs STEM, Id vs Superego, Collective Authorship vs Auteur Theory, Being vs Doing, Postmodernism vs Modernism, David Hellman vs Jon Blow, Natural vs Artificial, Seeing-like-an-individual vs Seeing-like-a-State…
Discourse… discourse never changes…
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i just want to clarify that i was only making a silly pun: the witcher 3 is massively improved if you switch the voice language to polish
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superegoic modernist IGN…
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It’s not a perfect fit for the Portal formula, but Andrew Plotkin’s Spider and Web pulls a comparable trick in 1998.
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I finished Honey in Quake today. It’s got a somewhat idiosyncratic charm with how it uses messages to represent an inner-monologue and tutorial, plus the ghost town bit at the end. I love how serious it is as a work of virtual architecture and level design, but it can be silly and ironic with itself despite that.
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i mean sure i get that about polish but i didnt have that in mind when i wrote that (admittedly during work break w like 2 mins left hah0)-- maybe im just too outside this whole lineage to rlly get this stuff properly idk the exact history. maybe growing up w like a lot of access to weird itch stuff played by youtubers skews me way off from some baseline assumptions. for what it’s worth though im very videogames agnostic lately and i dont even know what i would hold up as an example of a thing i actually could put myself behind fully so maybe im too negative.
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i’m sorry if my reply was mean, i think it’s hard to get a sense of where any consensus is around this stuff, to the extent any still exists. i think i’ve seen a few things lately which argued for a return to classical game design modes against a stultifying canon of ambient walking sims and it depressed me bc i think most of that stuff is dead and buried already, as anything beyond low-risk portfolio fodder for people waiting for the funding to make a ‘real’ game - and that the two beefing schools of the old mechanics v narrative debate are in fact both dead and just worn as skin by a pretty interchangeable collection of aspirational III guys each marketing themselves as the solution to the imaginary cultural hegemony of the other. it’s not great, in part bc it makes it hard to talk about this stuff without coming across as a secret agent for people nobody really wants to be associated with!!
“the game wars never ended…”
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dw haha. though yeah i definitely wouldnt want to advocate for a retvrn to classical game design, like i dont even think ‘videogames’ really makes sense as a term and confuses ppl into thinking theyre not just idk ‘software that’s not fully automatic’. game industry discourse stuff is this total circus like ppl arguing over katy vs gaga itunes sales
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Demon Lord Reincarnation (PC)
Finally felt comfortable enough with my party’s power level to start exploring floor 1, and got most of it mapped clumsily in Photoshop. ; )
I think some of the chests are random occurrences and some aren’t–like some encounters are scripted, while most are random. The chest at 3,4 wasn’t there when I left and came back without opening it, which makes me suspect it was random; I didn’t try that with the chest at 14,6–just opened it right off–so I’m really not sure if that one’s random or scripted. The two later ones, the ones in the northeast, I did leave and come back to, and they were still there, so I’m fairly sure those are scripted to be in those positions.
I suppose some of the random-seeming encounters could actually have been scripted!
Enemy types are probably floor-specific, I mean I haven’t encountered more enemy types while on floor 1, but those enemy types have leveled up a bit and gained new skills–plus larger groups and more waves of attackers per battle. I expect to encounter different enemies on floor 2, but we’ll see!
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as far as i can tell there’s really less consensus than ever on pretty much everything. this era to me is defined by people growing up within whatever ecosystems they either chose to or ended up being a part of, and have formed their whole picture of reality from that. and everyone’s version of reality seems very different, and everyone’s reference points seem very different. i don’t even know how you talk about anything half the time anymore because it feels like there’s no consensus reality. people just kind of subscribe to the version they want to hear and tune out other stuff. they just kind of think whatever version of the things they want to think regardless of whether it has anything to do with your reality. it’s pretty bad imho!
but yeah there’s no supremacy of itchio games, and like niche communities always have their small time bullies and people who are weird and overzealous but generally the law of the land is big companies and big products for a big audience as the cultural baseline norm and i would think that it’s kind of impossible to ignore that. but i dunno, i find more than ever that people… esp a lot of younger people, just basically tune out from the versions of the reality they’re not a part of and aren’t necessarily aware of the sentience of. we have the dominance of a lot of social media platforms for that.
so yeah that complete apathy/lack of awareness to anything else outside your own curated reality is probably the biggest hurdle to overcome to me when talking about stuff or doing anything in this space. if you’re not actively serving the needs of a specific audience and you don’t exist primarily in one space you’re like some kind of demonic dimension jumper to a lot of people. they just cannot even conceptualize that. unless you’re a youtube video essayist i guess, lmao.
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