oh that’s interesting cos yeah i was also wondering about the inclusion of more gamey mechanics like that. a year is a long time to iterate so uhh… 
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There is a demo still up on the game’s steam page in case you are curious to see what it is like yourself, I have no idea if it is the same build as before or whether it has been updated in the interim.
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yeah i also found the demo interesting but the combat very frustrating esp when i got to the boss of the demo. no idea what’s changed since then but i fear it’s not much. i know there’s another designer working on the combat who has made some other games like this one Soul Searching from several years back.
don’t exactly know what to make of a lot of developers known for doing more artsy games with little to no action trying to do more conventionally “gamey” games in their style in recent times - from Judero to Angeline Era from Analgesic to Jeremy Couilliard’s FPS game he just announced to Cosmo D’s Betrayal At Club Low from a couple of years ago that featured… game mechanics. i don’t think any of these are horrible compromises for their respective creators at all but i def feel like the art game/walking sim sort of stuff has been really devalued if it ever had much value to begin with. and it feels like there’s a substantial pressure to make “a real game” or disappear into irrelevancy.
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I’m sorta confused because all of Analgesics games have been quite heavy on game mechanics.
Admittedly Anodyne 2 does the cool trick of exploring what conventional mechanics can mean narratively if they don’t work like you think they will, but it’s still in a zelda-influenced action RPG framework. Sephonie mixes in the vignettes about the characters personal histories with it’s weird parkour. Anodyne 1 is mostly Links Awakening dungeons by volume.
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eagerly anticipating the health insurance-funded golden age of gaming
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healthcare spending is one of the money hoses software companies haven’t cracked yet and they so badly want to
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flappy bird in character saying “hey kids! someone has acquired the legal rights to exploit my likeness!”
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at least schrier won’t accuse the new version of stealing from mario, since anything backed by vc money automatically acquires the dignity of Labour
tbh my feeling is that at this point anyone still making hobbyist-scale projects, games funded by kickstarter or patreon or something rather than publisher capital, knows that they’re already pretty much guaranteed commercial oblivion no matter what they choose to make - so the formal distinctions between artgame and commercial game become less relevant. like, you can do whatever and it won’t be selling out because there’s nothing you have to sell, nobody’s poaching altgame types and giving them that Gris money. and anyone making no-budget artgames probably finds themselves having more in common now with people doing gamey games on the same economic level than they do with like, ex-palantir people making important experimental artgame Le Zoo.
so to me it sort of has a different flavour to it than that backslidy 2010s period where everyone played dark souls and decided their game needed a stamina bar, and it’d be nice to feel like something new might come out of it as a result… that being said i still believe certain lines should be uncrossed. nothing with deckbuilding in it.
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ah yes time for me to lament the highest profile independent vietnamese game project and where it left its creator again
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I still never played the first one and now there’s a second one.
(Henry rollins voice) Sandwich Man
Eccentric OSAKA Gourmet…
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Annapurna more like I’ma spurn ya.
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i have been waiting years to make that pun
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Anno punna
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That’s incredible, the execs must’ve been really awful for the entire team to quit in solidarity like that.
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i’ve made my feelings about not liking what Annapurna and the whole middlebrow prestige-'em-up publisher-core thing has done to indie games very clear, but i have to imagine that Megan Ellison and whoever else is at the top is probably the worst to deal with. won’t speculate too much but i know the film publishing division had been in financial trouble for years. perhaps Ellison had some boneheaded idea to do with AI or the Metaverse or whatever other crazy thing rich people are on that the interactive division didn’t want to go along with.
it just has to be really really bad for an entire staff to resign and abandon all the projects they had picked up. i can’t imagine qualified people wanting to work there in light of that - who knows what kind of crazy mandates they were getting from the top. i’m sure all of those highly connected rich kid indie devs who love to blow their loads over NDAs are all gossiping in various group chats right now about all of this lol. a lot of the stuff Annapurna was publishing is high profile enough to get attention regardless, but i don’t really know how exactly a company do basic operations for stuff that you’re contractually tied to as a developer when the entire company’s staff has resigned. what if they do hire staff and they’re terribly incompetent or completely change their expectations for developers? maybe that’s lawsuit material. even in the best case it’s not exactly great to have your money tied up in a company that everyone just ghosted.
but yeah lately been feeling like the indie publisher ecosystem is collapsing a bit since its ascension in the mid to late 2010’s and this obviously just adds to that. i’ve heard that Devolver is run very competently but i don’t know really who else there is.
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I feel like there’s an opportunity for valve to step in as an indie publisher and invite a juicy anti trust suit to really crater things
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I never finished the first one but it was a good time. Probably wait to get it on sale, but yeah.