This has been on my mind lately because I’m thinking of making a “marketable” indie game and a lot of “conventional wisdom” is to make a Survivors Like. And in studying the field the conclusion I came to was that these games are basically clicker games but with movement. It is fun to have a swirling death ball but now that I’ve gotten that out of my system there really isn’t much left to the games and I can’t get myself to start up another session. It has been interesting to play a few games that are all Plate of Mayo (gameplay) and no Pineapple Pizza (story). Interesting in that, actually, I do need some kind of story setting to get me to want to continue the game. I think that’s a good thing.
Megabonk’s developer probably had a background in mobile game design, because the quest screen where you go and check off quests for currency is ripped directly out of one. I would not be surprised if their game progression curves are also informed by their time on mobile games.
I have been enjoying Old School Rally, despite it being very barebones of a racing game, it’s fun to just bounce the cars around in the dirt. As much as I was annoyed by Titanium Court, I wanna go back now because I need to play something that’s mentally engaging.
Arcade games are an interesting foil. You could definitely catch Pac-Man fever or what have you, but I agree that they’re less habit-forming than the more recent genre.
I think games that encourage compulsive behavior can still create valuable experiences. I just have to be very careful with how I engage with them. I really enjoy many moments in Slay the Spire and Dicey Dungeons. The math problems are fun. However, they also put me in this space where I knew I should stop playing and found it hard to do so.
I want to lower my exposure to those kinds of experiences and embrace more where my creativity or imagination is activated. I want experiences that make me feel more of what it means to be human.
I’m excited for Big Walk. I’m looking forward to playing more of Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and Despelote. One day, I will go back to Baby Steps.
Have a whole steam category set up for that. It’s funny because it is a mix of like shitty addictive game design and games that just scratch certain parts of my brain enough that I know I wouldn’t stop if I started back up.
Side story: for a very long time as a kid I had misheard those lyrics as “Thirty thieves and the Thunder Chief”, at least from that little spoken-wordy breakdown part where he just keeps repeating it
One thing that’s interesting here is that this is a hugely-crowded field and the games which are good in it tend to be good for reasons aside from the core loop. So competitors which do nothing BUT the core loop and overload with currencies and compulsion-mechanics (like, say, Soulstone Survivors) feel empty.
What makes a game like Vampire Survivors good is that it’s full of all sorts of weird little secrets. It’s parallel to something like Call of Duty Zombies; you have the pressure loop (survive long enough against a horde of increasingly-tough enemies), which you juggle while you explore and solve puzzles or search for secrets.
Reaching the end of a run in VS is trivial once you know how to play it, and not particularly satisfying either. What IS satisfying is discovering a new weapon evolution on accident, or finding some weird esoteric trigger which leads to a bizarre secret level. The game’s full of this!
This is also why stuff like the Caiys games (Boneraiser Minions, Voids Vigil) or Halls of Torment feel good. They aren’t about just playing the same rote path over and over, they’re about fully exploring the possibility space of the game and being pleasantly surprised. Chasing different combinations and secrets and being rewarded for it.
I actually quite dislike Megabonk, whereas I am a fan of Vampire Survivors and Risk of Rain, the two games it is directly riffing on. Perhaps it’s the overly cloying writing for end screens. Perhaps it’s the hollow loop which focuses too much on survival and not enough on secrets. Perhaps it’s because I can recognize it for what it is: a shameless bastard of two successful games that incorporates their design decisions without care or consideration.
This is only true because steak is expensive and takes work to cook well. Gimme one of those infinite meat Brazilian steakhouses and I will show you a man get carried away eating steak
my feeling on this is that the illusion of hidden depths activates the Lore impulse for a lot of people and makes it seem like worlds are deeper or stranger than they are. it makes it easier to project into and develop elaborate theories about - it’s the classic horror film technique of not really showing the monster.
it does also feel like its own sort of iteration of the indie puzzle platformer trope where you introduce one concept and then iterate on that with each subsequent puzzle at a painfully slow pace. and, especially if you’ve played multiple kinds of those games before, it’s really boring and predictable because you know exactly what they’re going to do until they hit whatever weird or different thing the game may or may not end up doing with that. but it’s still easy for someone to pretend it’s building to something much more grand and to fool audiences if they haven’t played a lot of those types of games. and it’s a way to pad out the run time of a commercial game to make it seem like it’s more extensive or Worth Your Money.
i do think there is a conservativeness on the part of audiences that comes with being afraid/anxious of being dumped in a weird world from the start. but also it’s not like some very popular games don’t manage that successfully - like something like Myst pulls that off just fine. so i do think you’re right that a lot of the time it’s mostly about designers trying to mask their own not particularly interesting or deep ideas by making it seem like there are hidden depths there. and it’s kind of the same problem regardless of whether it’s a puzzle or a horror game. and people tend to just go default to genre autopilot because it’s an easy formula that other games have followed successfully, especially in the commercial realm where there’s a lot of anxiety about people even buying and playing your game at all.
the appeal of so many free indie games of the late 00’s/2010’s was just dumping you into weird worlds and not wasting your time all that much. maybe that will come back into vogue again as an approach, especially as game marketplaces get more saturated.
unrelated, but for me the most actually addictive game has been the Trackmania games. it’s punishing to redo races a trillion times and it fucked up my wrist when i played it too much during 2020/2021. but it does just feel good to successfully move really fast through slick and crazy looking tracks. and i don’t really feel like i wasted my time playing it. maybe i just like moving through spaces too much to ever really get on board the Balatro/etc train.
This inspired me to finally finish the website I’ve been sitting on for months, and, that’s right, we’re absolutely sorting games into those two categories from now on
i guess most modern games feel like an evil person had final say (this doesn’t need to be literally true, evoking evil is actually the status quo in video games)
i don’t mind getting addicted to a good thing. i mind getting addicted to an intentional trap designed with explicitly bad intent