Here’s the video games I’ve been playing:
Highlights
Control - amazing, although I wasn’t in the mood for creepy-action-suspense vibes, the mechanics and art were fun! I got to the end in like 3-4 pretty long sessions, but I skipped side missions that would give me skill points to buff my health and powers. The game doesn’t have difficulty modes so I ended up getting tired of dying during the some of the final waves of combat, and just ended up Let’s Playing the rest. The plot was good— not revolutionary, but good.
Untitled Goose Game - been meaning to play this particularly after reading Ian Bogost’s piece. I don’t know what he’s on about, Ian are you ok? The game was short, goofy, and carried a weird quirky-but-destructive tone. If he thought the game was too long I get that but are we really talking about a single-evening game with 4 levels and goose honks as extraction of labor? The link to the gate glitching was cool though.
TAS (Tool-Assisted Speedruns) - Speaking of glitching, I watched a speedrun of Pokemon Blue in just over 10 minutes. There’s plenty of different variants of speedrunning rules, this was one where glitching is allowed, but no save corruption with the goal to just get to the hall of fame & credits. To that end this crew put together a speedrun that takes advantage of a lot of statistical analysis to make improve their odds of getting NPCs to be exactly where they want, and names pokemon things that’ll glitch the game out, along with a host of other small optimizations speedrunners will use (e.g. picking Pokemon Blue instead of Red, so that your rival’s default name suggestion is “RED” which takes less time to print to the screen than “BLUE” lmao). The result is a video that makes no sense and I love it.
Other games
Data Wing - Kind of a time trial game. Silly plot (mostly non existant tbh) with mechanics that range from difficult to frustrating and a cool aesthetic.
Donut County - Saw this in the PS store in other things Goose Game players have bought, the characters are fun and kids might like it but you’re basically just a hole, and you swallow things, but it’s in levels and your hole resets in sizes every time. Not really a gameplay marvel.
Outer Wilds - Been hearing hype about this game here and there, haven’t really gotten pulled into it yet.
Mystery Chronicle: One Way Heroics - RPG but it’s also a keep-moving-right side-scroller. Didn’t sink much time into this one.
Sanctum 2 - was jonesing for some Tower D, and it’s just as unsatisfying as the original Sanctum.
Next Up
Pry - a cinematic narrative for iOS, found via Kill Screen’s Samantha Gorman interview. The other two here are also from the Kill Screen email newsletter.
Manifold Garden - a platformer for PC Mac and iOS withi abstract geometric art.
Links:
[1] https://theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/10/dont-play-the-goose-game/600472/
[2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=curk3_Eqj54
[3] https://killscreen.com/samantha-gorma
