Blue Prince (Dogubomb) is probably the best game I’ve ever played that ultimately is not for me. The game is wonderful in so many ways. It opens with an interesting story premise — a young man inherits a mansion, which will only become his if he can find the mysterious 46th room — and features beautiful illustrative-style art with muted undertones.
The gameplay is also quite fun, allowing the player to figure out how to play through the process of playing. As you enter the mansion, you are given a brief note and then open a door and are presented with a card draw of three rooms to build, and from that room (as long as it’s not a dead end), you build more and more rooms, constructing a path deeper into the home. You are able to continue building, exploring, and collecting supplies and zeroes until you run out of steps and are forced to take a rest, resetting the entire house to zero — creating a roguelike feel.
As you naturally explore and build the rooms, you learn about each rooms exact attributes (sometimes benefits or disadvantages). You also start solving a variety of puzzles — some of which are tied to a specific room, others involving finding clues, keys, and objects across the array of rooms in order to move forward.
And it is this specific combination of spread out puzzles and the roguelike restart at the start of each day that caused me to slowly loose interest in the game. When I started playing, I had a blast. I was captivated by the puzzles (which felt intuitive) and the story — and I fell in, the hours slipping by.
Over time, though, as the puzzles grew more complex, having to restart every day created a frustration point. I would figure out solutions to moving forward only to be blocked by the fact that I needed to obtain a very specific set of rooms and/or items in order to follow through on that solution. Every time I figured it out, made the connection, and solved something, it was immensely satisfying. However, those moments of satisfaction started to grow further apart, and I found myself spinning my wheels, performing run after run without being able to make any progress.
Eventually, I reached room 46 and rolled credits on the game, with the full knowledge that I’ve only solved a fraction of the puzzles and discovered a small portion of the overall story. Alanah Pearce describes reaching this point as completing the tutorial, which is fascinating. But at this point, I’m good with what I’ve done — and I’m ready to move on to another game.
Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, a free interactive audiovisual experience developed by Radiohead Namethemachine, and Arbitrarily Good Productions, is a digital museum space incorporating music and art from Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac albums. Exploring the exhibition spaces is a transcendent experience, combining deconstructed and reconfigured songs from the albums with halls and rooms that feel both grounded in reality and impossibly surreal, stretching the possibility of architecture, space, and void. Although the game was only about an hour or two long, I loved exploring the labyrinth of the corridors and lingering with the art. Wonderful.
A more detailed exploration of my experience with the game can by found in my essay, “This is Not a Game: The Kid A Mnesia Exhibition,” published in Counter Arts.
I finished up the last few hours of The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog), which were the most harrowing hours of gameplay I’ve ever experienced. So much of this game requires the player to put themselves into brutally uncomfortable situations — not only as a figure having to witness and survive violence, but also as someone seeking to enact violence on other people. At several points this game forces the player to press buttons — and thus actively participate — in moments of heinous violence. The end of this game is another one of those moments, and I hated it, and I was deeply moved by it. In the final climatic fight scene, everyone and everything is so exhausting, and I found myself powering my joystick, begging my character to just, finally, stop.
The Last of Us Part II is a brilliantly designed game, with fascinating narrative design that doesn’t allow the player to sit comfortable in a form of escape. It is definitely a game that requires a certain amount of mental preparation, because it is a grinding trudge through dark places. And at the same time, I loved it — and will probably play it again, because I’m fascinated by its structure, design, and incredible gameplay.
Finally, I played well over a dozen tiny games released in browser on Itch — some released during the Neo-Twiny Jame and others just because I was falling down an Itch rabbit hole.
The longest indie I played was “versuri” (“verses”) by kit riemer, a text adventure game about working on translations of obscure poetic texts in a dystopian future. The game uses a simple mechanic of clicking on words to reveal translations, demonstrating the layers of meaning from literal to more figurative and poetic translations. As the player continues to delve deeper into the work, a strange opening of perspective occurs, bringing with it new horrors.
“Strange Signals” was created by a small group of developers (including my fellow Narrative Department alumni Patrick Knisley and Dan Stout) for the Pursuing Pixels Game Jam. When a geological surveyor Orion Renaudin becomes stranded on a strange island, he seeks out strange radio signals to help determine a way home. For the short time span of its jam-length development, the game feels like a complete experience, presenting an interesting mechanic in the form of time travel, which allows for some fun nested puzzles.
I also played the following games, which are all just a few minutes long — packing wonderful experiences into tiny spaces:
- “Never Have I Ever” by Katie Canning – An interactive fiction about a drinking game that grows terribly dark
- “saltwater” by Kit H.J. – An interactive fiction about taking a walk along the beach and meeting something in the dark waters.
- “The Ocean View from the Keiyo Line” by Air Gong – A relaxing visual fiction about decisions made on a train journey.
- “Letters to Strangers” by Jean-Sébastien Monzani – A charming series of random letters.
- “No Wizard” by Jean-Sébastien Monzani – A beautifully illustrated Bitsy adventure about connection with others.
- “Summer Rain” by Jean-Sébastien Monzani – A lovely poetic journey through the rain.
- “Tiny Shovel” by Anna Anthropy – A micro-Bitsy adventure about digging up treasures on the beach.
- “A Special Box” by Zhanko – A young child seeks escape through playful distractions.
- “How to Haunt” by Rae White – A text adventure that uses shifting text to evoke a haunting.
- “The Last Node” by Maciek Stępniewski – A tale of a computer node looking to hibernate – or seek self destruction.
- “cat friends” by MeowUsername – Just a couple of cat friends on a journey for good eats.
- “黃鶴楼” by publicdomainfriend – A memoir in game format focused on translating Chinese poetry on a wall. The complexity of translation is well illustrated here.
If you’d also like to know about the books and movies that I enjoyed recently, you can check out my Culture Consumption for June.