A good parkour game is a gauntlet of faith. You follow the flow of a city designed by some invisible hand: paving stones tilted at angles suggestive of a left turn, a warm light inviting you into a distant doorway, some plank of corrugated scrap extended toward an unseen edge. You are chasing a breadcrumb trail, except you don't always know what's crumb and what's dirt. Over and over, you leap without looking. Sometimes that means you die. But, when it's done right, you feel like you are predicting the future mere milliseconds ahead of time.
The best levels of Vholume make me feel like a clairvoyant with springs for legs. The worst feel like a brief test of my faith, nothing more. The protagonist of this wall-running platformer will often wheeze as if they're running out of breath. At the end of one run, I realised I had been holding my own lungs for the two full minutes it took me to hit the dark doorway that marks the finish line. This game is such a rush, it will deprive you of oxygen.
I started Sandustry on a whim at 8:15pm on a Friday evening. I was still playing at 2am. I went to bed, woke up at 9am, and immediately started playing again. It's rare that a game gets its claws into me like this. It's even rarer that I feel good about it.
Sandustry, now in Early Access, is a factory builder with a great hook: every pixel is physically simulated. Think Noita, but instead of a deadly roguelike, you're laying down conveyor belts and sorters to gradually process all the natural resources of an alien world. Factorio but with gravity. Satisfactory but I'm satisfied.
I used to think I had a complicated relationship with 'busywork games', the kind that give you a todo list of simple (and sometimes prima facie tedious) tasks, and invite you to decide whether the experience is a flow or fugue state. I love some of those games (Pokémon Pokopia, Turnip Boy) and flee almost instantly from the seeming pointlessness of others. I now think my relationship is very simple: some todo lists feel worthwhile and others do not, and it's a matter of design as to which is which. In other words, it is the games that are good or bad, not me.
This factory was hell but I was proud of it anyway.
Too often factory builders feel like they're putting artificial obstacles in my path and daring me to work hard enough to render the inconveniences moot. That power curve can feel good, but more often than not it feels too much like the bad kind of wasting time. I don't want to cup water for ten hours to earn a bucket.
Fields Of Mistria is a game with almost no friction. When you’re farming crops, your watering can is always full. When you’re catching fish, there’s no minigame but waiting for the bite. If you forage something but don’t have room in your backpack, it will sit where you left it. After not too long, you’ll unlock the lost and found system, meaning on the next Monday it will be whisked away into a big bucket conveniently near your farm for you to collect.
And, I think because of this, my experience with Mistria is strange. It’s soothing to zone out for an hour and run through several days of wandering around the village and farming, mining, fishing, gifting bits and bobs to NPCs and so on, all working towards new ticks on the game’s absolutely massive checklist. And my checklist is getting full. The museum is overflowing; the mines are reopened down to the depths; my heart levels with the villagers are almost complete. I can’t deny that that feeling of pleasure, while insubstantial, has led to me sinking nearly 70 hours into the game in the last month or so, and I can’t deny enjoying it.
Like everybody else, I am a March girlie.
But I can say it has also been grating. During the low-tension cycle of the daily tasks, there’s plenty of time for thinking about both the (inherent?) political tensions of the farming simulator and the issues I have with this one in particular (more on both of those later). And yet I keep falling for just one more day. And even when I do decide I want to do something more thoughtful, give me a few hours and I’ll think, damn, breaking a few hundred more rocks with a pickaxe sounds really good right now, actually.
At its best, Emuurom leads you to make new discoveries several times per minute. You are exploring a world, screen-by-screen, with nothing but a scanner you can point at the flora and fauna. Scan a cloud? It rains. The rain falls on a flower? It blooms. Scan a bird? It flies left to right. Scan a different bird? It shrieks. The shriek touches a flower? It splits into seeds. What do the seeds do? You'll discover that soon enough, with a little playful experimentation, and then discover another thing and another thing. Playing Emuurom is like being parachuted into the middle of Moominland without Tove Jansson's prose to guide you and so each new creature and interaction is yours to piece together.
That's Emuurom's surface layer, and it's a joy. It's where I live. Many people will try to convince you that this puzzle-platformer's greatness lies in the cleverness beneath that surface, however. Its developer has spent eight years constructing layer upon layer of secrets which reveal themselves only via perseverance and effort. Emuurom contains, for example, a unique language to translate. That's the kind of worldbuilding that makes a certain kind of person immediately excited, and it's a transparently impressive act of design. For me, a dummy, such depths are both admirable and off-putting, and so I am here to tell you that Emuurom is something much more than clever. It's fun.
There's a pronunciation guide for every weird lil' guy's name.
Jumping on things and scanning them are the only modes of interaction here. Emuurom has no combat and your character, sent to this planet like a data upload, has no health bar and cannot die. Instead, the creatures that populate this planet either passively let you shove them around, move along fixed paths, or shove you back when prompted. One area has dolphin-like creatures that leap out of the water when you scan them, for example, so you scan them when they're beneath you and they shove you to a platform that's higher than you can jump.
I'm giving away that discovery for free because Emuurom is full of them, and you will intuit much of what you must do to progress without much conscious thought. The trick is to just keep scanning everything, old or new, and to trust that the game will reveal itself to you, at least until you reach its endgame. These reveals are delivered in part via written descriptions of the creatures and plants you encounter, each of which have names, behaviours, and occasionally short snippets of dialogue. They build up a picture of a world that is playfully alien and silly, when the pixels and puzzles might otherwise have been austere.
Why bother filing the serial numbers off a beloved sci-fi property when you can simply use the file to scratch on your signature and call it a day? To be fair to ZeroSpace, not everything here is a knock-off of Mass Effect - quite a lot of it also pilfers from StarCraft. For instance, it has good ol' boy flamethrower marines that would definitely call Mass Effect a "space opry" if they ever said anything that wasn't a pun about setting people on fire.
Mostly I just wish I'd known sooner that you can do this. No one can stop you, apparently! ZeroSpace has basically Matriarch Benezia in it. The not-Krogan are here too, except they're also sort of the Cabal from Destiny. It's all up for grabs! I hope you're as excited for Nic Reuben's Denis Villeneuve's Frank Herbert's Dune Part 3 as I am. ZeroSpace is shameless, shonky, and wince-inducingly pricey for how early access it currently is.
And I sort of love it.
I sort of love it because, while transparently making a clumsy smash and grab for other, better works, ZeroSpace doesn't
It's the second heatwave of the year in the UK right now. My PC quivers like angry blancmanche at the suggestion it perform even the laziest task, and Snickers ice creams melt down my palm and form crunchy bangles around my wrist before I can ferry them home to my face. Sol Cesto, you say? The sun has ceased? Sign me up!
But seriously, folks: the sun dying will actually wreak a terrible toll on the once-verdant earth and force you to eke out a dangerous living in monster-infested catacombs far beneath the soil. I love the concept of a dungeon that's marginally better lit than the surface, but it sucks down here. I keep being forced to shove gargoyle teeth into my gums, and there are massive magic bees everywhere.
The red and blue monsters switch affinity each time you move. I call them 'butt imps'.
Each screen of the dungeon consists of four rows of four squares each, and each turn you choose one row to move to, landing on a random square. Some contain traps or monsters, others treasure or healing strawberries. You always kill monsters, eat fruit, or collect treasure you land on, but traps stay. Monsters are aligned to either strength or magic, and your chosen hero has a numeric score in each. Land on a two strength monster with a one strength hero, lose one HP. Land on a three strengther, and lose two HP, and so on.
"That's so much HP!", you wail, cravenly, producing a non-zero amount of spittle. "Why would I ever click on a row with a monster I can't handle on it? Am I stupid?!". It's fine. All adventurers are stupid, it's part of the job description. The reason you'd do that is because it might be the only sensible choice. Click the all-monster top row, and you're guaranteed to take damage. Go for the bottom, and you've got a 75% chance of getting some treasure, but you might land on your third toxic mushroom and die instantly. The very basic idea is to make the least worst choice each turn until you've knocked out enough squares to move on.
Except you might not actually want to play it safe - you might want to snaffle up treasure so you can buy handy, single use items from the merchant to counter the spiraling difficulty: healing potions, monster-killing arrows, a die that rolls a new room. Or, you might want to save your coins to pop in the bucket that takes them to the surface. Surface gold is safe gold, spendable between runs to diversify the dungeon's offerings, and also on a few new characters and upgrades. So: village coffers, or personal glory?
It's a much zestier approach to roguelike upgrades than plain buffs, since you're often just buying the chance to benefit - expanding a pool of possibilities with few guarantees that, say, the merchant will have the toothpaste you just spent a fortune to unlock. And I love how bloody dungeony this all is. Everything is either elusive, expensive, a bit shit in ways you can imagine a fickle god getting a mild chuckle out of, or is some variety of monkey's paw, bottle imp, or that time Beat Saber added 3D stages but only for Imagine Dragons.
With the benefit of hindsight, I should have read the dedication in Dungeon Crawler Carl as 'HERE THERE BE MONSTERS'. What it actually says is the following:
This version of Dungeon Crawler Carl is dedicated to the star of one of the greatest, most inspiring, most amazing survival stories of our time.
Fiona.
Fiona the hippo.
Yes, I am dedicating this book to a goddamned hippopotamus.
Sorry, Mom.
It really has everything. A zaniness hovering between being insecure and smug. Graceless repetition because the prose wasn't structured properly in the first instance. A self-conscious swearword to indicate that what's happening is funny. A gesture toward emotion as an afterthought. My god, if it isn't a perfect distillation of the whole book.
I picked up Dungeon Crawler Carl on a recommendation from multiple people I trust, and now will never trust again. It's the first entry in a LitRPG series that is both self-published online (visionary auteur Matt Dinniman has kept the digital rights, an incredibly baller move) and now trad-published in book stores.
Dungeon Crawler Carl has an air of originality because, while LitRPGs have been popular in countries like Japan, Korea and Russia for a while, this time it's about a cool white American dude. Our titular Carl is 6'3", jacked, and weirdly defensive about having been a member of the Coast Guard. Without warning every building on Earth and anyone inside them is destroyed - "splattered into dust" at "approximately 2.23 am", as we are told on literally page one, and if you think that's another sign of bad things to come, you're correct.
"The times when Dinniman writes something dense with subtext, it's because he's done so accidentally"
Objectively incorrect use of words and their meanings aside, the set up is fine, I guess. The middle of the planet is transformed into a multi-layered videogame-esque dungeon by the genocidal aliens now in charge. Carl, along with a prize showcat called Princess Donut belonging to Carl's ex-girlfriend, and several million other members of humanity, take their chances in the dungeon. Their exploits as Crawlers are televised across the galaxy in a daily reality TV show.
The LitRPG genre leaves in the tedious grinding and stat fiddling that you do in a videogame, but sort of excise from your memories of playing it. In Dungeon Crawler Carl, your brain has to suffer through multiple paragraphs like:
"She also received a dozen Heal scrolls from a Silver Survivor's Box. That one was rewarded to her because she'd ended a boss battle with less than 5% of her health. The scrolls were good to have because there was no countdown between reading each one, and even better yet, we could use the scrolls on each other."
I didn't have a specific quote in mind then, I just opened the book at random. There's even a supporting character who's the head of the Tutorial Guild and may as well be called Basil Exposition. Info dumps like this happen once a page or so, sometimes in the middle of the universally boring fights, and are all delivered in this repetitive, basic style with very few sentences of varying length. It's leaden.
More than that, it's dead. Nothing comes alive, adjectives are rare and a vanishing few of them are sensory. The dungeon is "dark" and "big". Goblins turn up a lot in this book, and the first Carl meets look "much like they did in movies and video games." Masterful stuff. I will give Dinniman an amount of credit for coming up with a reason why the dungeon is full of references to Earth pop-culture. And at least he shows more restraint than Ernest Cline.
To investigate the deaths at the Galley house, you'll first have to familiarise yourself with the machine. By inputting a time code, location, and the reference numbers for the people present, you'll be able to view that moment. Or, more accurately, hear it. Although you can occasionally pick out clues from the background art, and assign avatars to the hazy shadows once you've figured out which of the photographs in your inventory they correspond to, it's most important to pay attention to what they're saying.
The whole mystery unspools in these aural moments: people arguing and suddenly discovering dead bodies, the thunderstorm a constant accompaniment. It's a game that is predominantly a listening experience. Which is why it's surprising that The Incident at Galley House began life as Type Help, a text-based browser game.
Although the puzzling itself has been expanded, this transformation is predominantly a case study in the power of UI. I found Galley House's story to be solidly "pretty good," but combined with this upgraded presentation - the clunk of the strange machine, the generator flickering out every so often, the voice acting and audio design - I spent plenty of time genuinely creeped out. This isn't something I've experienced while simply reading, but it's also not something I've experienced in any of the other games that Galley House is inspired by, like Return of the Obra Dinn or The Roottrees are Dead.
