i admit i only watched a friend play through the game. but yeah - it is a Portal wannabe. but for being a Portal wannabe it honestly looked surprisingly good. it exceeded my expectations anyway… which i admit have been lowered a lot over the years. there is some kinda of crappy prestige indie game writing in it going on but certainly not as much as i anticipated. i would definitely put the creativity in the puzzles above Manifold Garden though, without a doubt.
i mean if you’re really a puzzle person and not just there to wander around cool/novel spaces i’d really recommend Stephen’s Sausage Roll… but most people don’t wanna go there because of how difficult it is.
SSR would be way more accessible if it had a few introductory puzzles. I think most people play it, take what they think is an unacceptably long time on the beginning puzzles, and then assume the game is not for them.
SSR has a flatter difficulty curve than most puzzle games. The beginning puzzles and the end puzzles are definitely different in terms of complexity, but I’d say they’re similarly difficult for how much you know about the game at that point. Like, I find late game Baba levels way less approachable than SSR levels, but Baba levels start way easier too.
The other fucked up thing about SSR is that it throws another roadblock at you about a 1/3rd of the way through in the form of “The Great Tower”, which is a level that requires some like high-level engineering Zachtronics-esque problem solving. It’s much bigger in scope than many of the other levels and requires you to break the problem down into parts, so it’s another place where people feel overwhelmed and quit even though the rest of the game isn’t like that.
I think it’s a very good game but I also think it’s hard to recommend because of those barriers!
Admittedly I played Manifold Garden a bit after ECHO, which is visually similar but honestly a lot more successful
(You should skip around the video)
I feel like hardcore puzzle games take pride in not giving any external motivation beyond the joy of puzzles which is understandable but a bit of a shame
I got farther in Infinifactory than I would have otherwise partially because I wanted to see more of these skyboxes, and enjoyed my prolonged time with it
I would have left at that giant tower of sausages in SSR no matter what though
so i will say that i’ve played through SSR twice and it is my favorite puzzle game, whereas i like (but don’t love) Baba is You. Baba is You is nice but it feels a little bit like it leans on a cutesy gimmickry, whereas there’s just a certain odd kind of… atmosphere and integrity to Stephen’s Sausage Roll that i enjoy. it puts so much faith in players to figure it out that it kind of moves beyond feeling like a “product” and into feeling like a more personal expression. i also felt no shame in looking up the solution to a handful of levels like The Great Tower so i could move forward. i’m there to get what i can get out of it, not brag about having solved everything myself. TGT is probably the biggest difficulty spike in the game though… barring some late puzzles.
i don’t mind puzzle games that are just puzzle games at all. i’m not bothered by them in the same way a lot of people are. when people react in the like… emotional intense way the way they do about puzzles i it just makes me feel alienated to be honest. i think you just have to get into the right mindset. i actually find AAA action games generally way more overstimulating and can’t handle them very well vs. puzzle games. i don’t think i’ve made it all the way through a single AAA action game that came out in the last 15 years. i generally feel like i enjoy the idea of most games more than i ever enjoy playing them… but that is not true for many puzzle games.
yeah, idk, all I can say is that it’s pretty case by case for me – I definitely don’t enjoy zachtronics stuff so take that as a baseline I guess, most of the enjoyment I get out of playing a game like that is thinking about how the developer could’ve come up with such a flexible engine to make so many satisfying puzzles, actually solving the dry puzzles does very little for me.
but at the same time baba is you is extremely brain teaser-y and I feel like it’s a fallacy to claim that it’s not enough of a pure puzzle game because it has too many gimmicks? the gimmicks are phenomenal, and lateral thinking can be a pleasant break from deep puzzle solving.
generally if I dislike an AAA action game it’s not because it’s overstimulating, it’s because it’s condescending. I think this is actually a pretty clear line in practice but because it’s more of a design problem than a philosophical one (after all, people are creating these games to be won) there’s just not that much you can extrapolate out of it that isn’t about the industrial processes themselves.
I’ve made a few dry puzzle games of my own, so unsurprisingly I get a lot out of both thinking about the design and solving the puzzles.
And yeah Stephen knew exactly what he was making. It is personal in that way – when I get feedback that my puzzles are too hard part of me has a reaction like “yeah, they’re for me and if it doesn’t work for you then that’s fine.” But there’s another part that’s like “if I just sand off this corner then a whole new group of people could enjoy my game and I might introduce someone to puzzle games who didn’t already know they liked them.”
I think both viewpoints are valid and I might fall on either side if you ask me how I feel about it on different days. “How can I make this game more accessible to other people?” is a question that feels like soul-crushing sometimes, because it often means sacrificing some part of the design you’re really attached to for a group you’re not even sure will ultimately like your game anyway.
I respect and even defend the way SSR is structured, but at the same time I do wish it was easier to recommend. I think it’s very clever and worth experiencing and scares people away for somewhat opaque reasons, but Stephen has been around long enough that he’s definitely considered all those angles and is doing what’s the most fulfilling for him.
Honestly do envy his confidence – it would be great if I didn’t hem and haw over every piece of feedback I get. I’m getting better at filtering, but it requires me to make ground rules about what I value, and getting the ground rules in place is hard enough.
as an addendum to this I was remembering how turning off the constant popups of score rewards for regular driving makes forza horizon a 50% better game and I should clarify that sometimes “overstimulating” and “condescending” are the same thing (but flimsy/fixable!)
i learned recently that ex-bizarre creations people ended up at playground games and it makes a lot of sense. i’d still vastly prefer a new PGR to horizon, though… just not into the presentation and structure of it, as fun as the driving is. it’s not as bad as like, the worst codemasters UX, but it’s not great
Oh I can’t actually stand Echo, I just loved the atmosphere and recursive environments in the first hour or so, and sort of admire the uncompromising rest of the game from a distance
Yeah, ECHO is miserable to play but a beautiful perfect object so I love it even more. When it’s hateful and frustrating towards the player it further separates itself from an object to be touched - it wants to be alone, cold and infinite.
I like ECHO largely because it’s a game I wouldn’t try to design, so when it fails I can be like “I told you so” and when it succeeds I get to examine why. Definitely too rigid and uncompromising to be a good game, but it sure is an interesting experiment.
The lights-going-out reset mechanic is probably the one I think about the most because it gave me a feeling I haven’t really gotten from any other game. Can’t think of another action game where a sort of strategic reset happens at regular time intervals. It makes for some very tense on-the-fly decisions.
Also maybe don’t start your game with 20 minutes of walking lol.
At the same time it creates a universal boring strategy for any level to patiently hide in a corner for two whole lights-out cycles so that the echoes forget how to tie their shoelaces and then waltz through
technically you can’t WAIT for the lights to change, they keep internal thresholds of ‘actions witnessed’ when the lights are on which determine when they switch off but its pretty easy to cycle through action sets that make the AIs completely ineffectual.
