Nobody knows what "Indie" means and I'm going to go insane
Lately, I've been seeing a lot of people display a poor understanding of what the 'indie' label means for a creative project. This is tied to Glitch Productions being sucked into the terrible whirlpool that is online fandom discourse, but is in no way limited to animation; I've seen a similar pattern in conversations on music artists, video games, board games, TTRPGs, even Youtube content creators. To explain what I'm talking about, I'm going to use music for my analogy:
Imagine yourself attending an indie musician's gig. Imagine the whole process, from hearing about the show, through attending, to wrapping up and going back home. Now, I'm willing to bet the vast majority of you did not imagine struggling to get tickets to a sold-out stadium with 20-30k seats; more likely, you thought of standing outside somebody's garage, or in a field, or at a bar, or near an impromptu amp setup at a music festival. I bet many of you did not even imagine the band playing on a stage.
If someone tells you they prefer indie music, or indie games, or indie anything, people take that with an assumed 'as opposed to the mainstream.' Indeed, when a band signs a record deal and starts playing big shows, in the minds of the fans they have ceased to be indie. That assumption, that indie as a descriptor means 'small,' 'niche,' and even 'unpopular' (or, if you'd prefer, 'hasn't hit the big time') is the key here. That's not wrong per se; in fact, for most indie artists it's probably quite appropriate - but in an age with the internet allowing success to just hit creative works like lightning, it cannot be treated as definitionally necessary for the indie label to apply.
Indie is, of course, short for 'independent' and thus an indie project is one made by a small group of people, or without support from the big players in the space, or both. The economy and the internet being what they are makes this definition a little fuzzy in the modern day, but we'll get to that. For a long time, success was something you got by partnering with a big org. If you wanted your band to be your job and book gigs across the country, you needed to sign a deal with UMG and have your CDs sell. If you wanted to be a toymaker, you had better hope your ideas are appealing enough for an exec at Mattel or Hasbro to pick them up and put ads on Nickelodeon. That wasn't true 100% of the time, there have always been sudden breakout successes in every industry, but for a few decades the correlation was strong enough that the general public has seemingly adopted the idea that once you achieve success, you are no longer indie. That is the feeling that has persisted into some of the most baffling takes I have seen.
For a few examples, some of which you may have seen if you spend your time withering your soul via your phone like I do: "Undertale is not an indie game because it sold millions and sells merch through Fangamer"; "GLITCH isn't really indie animation because TADC is being shown in theaters"; "Team Cherry is not an indie developer because Silksong broke Steam on release day"; "A TTRPG that makes 100k+ on backerkit isn't a real indie," and I could go on. I did see one take that said that "ttrpgs that are pbta ('Powered by the Apocalypse' - using the rules of Apocalypse World as a base) are fake indies" which is a take so profoundly baseless and stupid it doesn't really apply to this essay, but I had to see it and now you have to as well.
Takes like these usually come from misguided consumers, the type of contrarian poster who has a deep insecurity about their own tastes; the kind of person who needs to feel like their opinions have transcended the interests of the rabble, that they are among the chosen few who support 'real' art. The person who sees something they are a fan of getting popular as the threat of the hoi polloi kicking down the door of their clubhouse and eating all their snacks.
As much as I'd like to imagine that's the only type of person making these 'real indie' arguments, unfortunately that isn't the case. A lot of creatives, people often working by themselves to create art they believe in, make those arguments out of a feeling of resentment. The funny thing is, I don't really blame them. Imagine working your ass off for the better part of a decade trying to create something. You spend your life putting it together, brick by brick, improving a little bit every day but seeing barely any returns, if any. You could be struggling to make ends meet and meanwhile, someone closes out a kickstarter making something similar with half a million dollars in their pocket. How do you not feel resentful? How do you not see that as an unfair advantage, as a disqualification to call themselves indie? You've been heads down on actually working this whole time and they're out here selling logo t-shirts through a third party website, they're just playing to the crowd, here to make a quick buck, you're the REAL creator here.
Ultimately, while I'm empathetic to these feelings, they're just wrong. Markiplier may have ~38M subscribers, but Iron Lung is still an indie film. Undertale/Deltarune, TADC, and Silksong are all made by small groups of people and built with their own creative interests at heart. They're being built...independently. We just happen to live in a time where the internet amps up discoverability and word-of-mouth so high it almost breaks the scale. I have added dozens of games to my wishlist through social media posts or devlogs posted to reddit or bsky. YouTube's fucked up awful algorithm has at least managed to feed me reviews of indie ttrpgs I hadn't heard of before, sometimes things you can only buy as a pdf off of itch. And, of course, the great turbulent sea that is 'whatever people are posting about this week' can sweep up any project and give it the entire world's attention - for better or worse.
In conclusion, while the term 'indie' has definitely been made more fuzzy in recent times, it has never really been about success. There are a lot of problems surrounding the creation of art, and a lot of hardship that comes with being an indie artist, but "a project can become successful unpredictably" is not one of them. The label should be treated not as a measure of how hard the creator's life was while making it, but as an indicator of who got to say what was being made, and who contributed the most to that effort.
Something I think about often is just how good the linking books from Myst are as plot devices. I own the unofficial-but-kinda-official Myst TTRPG Unwritten and I just keep thinking about how much juice this one setting element could pump into the campaign.
For those unaware, linking books are essentially a magic book that teleports you to a new location when you touch the picture on the front page. While aesthetically it's like jumping into a story book, in execution and tone it's more like a long-range teleporter in a sci-fi show; when you use one, you aren't entering a fantasy world, you're dimension-hopping*.
The specifics of how the books work, however, are where things get really interesting:
They can take you basically anywhere. There's no real limit on where the destination is, with some important caveats:
The book has to be written at its intended destination and
The destination, once set, cannot be changed. However, the area in and around the destination point can change, and the book won't really care.
You also cannot link to a place in the same Age (Myst's term for dimension/planet/plane of existence) meaning in order to use the book, you have to bring it somewhere else first.
Linking is a one-way trip. The only way to get back to where you were is to find/bring another linking book.
The book you use can't come with you.** You leave it behind when you link.
Only living things can link. Anything they're carrying goes with them, but you can't just send inanimate objects through.
Lastly, and this is key, it's a book. They're small enough to carry or conceal, but also fragile. In-canon they're more resilient to aging but are still very vulnerable to fire, water, or someone who just wants to break one with their bare hands.
This also means they can be created with relative ease; you need the right materials and technique, but once you have that all you need is the time to write.
All of this means that all sorts of story events can happen surrounding the linking book. Just finding one is a mystery in and of itself: Where does it lead? Will the destination be safe? Will I be able to get back? When an Age doesn't have a return book, anyone linking there would be properly stuck, and the society who created these books knew that and used that to create prisons. That also means that an Age could be turned into an ad-hoc prison by just taking the return book, jumping off a cliff, and letting the book fall into the ocean. People imprisoned in this way can then be freed if someone new links in with a return book, and that person might not know it was a prison in the first place!
Or how about someone getting temporary access to a location, slinking off somewhere and secretly writing a linking book to return to do some nefarious business later? Or someone taking an important book hostage? Or someone discovering a book you left behind and now they're messing with your stuff? How about tricking/forcing someone to touch a linking panel?
All of this is really rich, fun drama that would play out in all its myriad forms over the course of a TTRPG campaign, and that's before considering that the Ages the books are linking to can be practically anything. I haven't run Unwritten and I don't know how well the Fate system would work at my table, but everything I've written about here is why I so desperately want to run a campaign for my friends someday.
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*Yes I know that there's debate on whether Ages are created by the writer or if they existed beforehand, this post is not talking about descriptive books (although those are also very juicy as plot devices). **Relto and any other Yeesha superpowers notwithstanding. If you don't know what either of these footnotes mean then don't worry about it.
Over the weekend, I played through the Anthology Of The Killer and I had an absolutely fantastic time. I had sporadically heard about it over the course of a few years, and from how I had seen people discussing it I got the sense of it being something like "your favorite indie darling's favorite indie darling." Having now played it, I think now it's one of mine as well; it manages to be charming, frightening, surreal, hyperreal, cuttingly simple, and disarmingly complex all at the same time.
The game is definitely not for everybody, but the best games never are. While I want to share some of my thoughts and experience with the game, I am going to avoid discussing any of the events of the plot just because I think you should play it yourself! The game is $7 on Steam or itch.io and takes about three hours to see the end of. If you're into the raw, avant-garde forms of art that only teams with single-digit sizes can create, you're in for a good time. Moreover, if you're interested in exploring that type of art or expanding your horizons a little, I think it's a great starting point. It's cheaper than a cup of coffee and shorter than the latest Avatar movie - give it a shot! Hell, if you're really strapped for cash, you can track down each of the nine Of The Killer games' original releases on GameJolt for free.
With that out of the way, my thoughts below the cut:
First things first, I enjoyed every chapter, but my top three are probably Drool, Flesh, and Heart in no particular order. This is only after my initial playthrough, there's a good chance I would name a different three if I played it a second time; Face, Blood, and Ears also came to mind but each chapter is great in its own way.
---
Reader, to pull back the curtain for a moment: originally I was planning to put a huge multi-paragraph essay here where I would wax intellectual about the setting, motifs, creative choices that the developer thecatamites made, and so on. I had been picking away at it for a few days when I remembered I forgot to go back and check out the bonus tunnels, and now having done so I realized that those big paragraphs simply weren't built for purpose. If you want a toothy, well written, thought provoking look into the world Of The Killer, that already exists: It's called Anthology Of The Killer and you can get it on Steam or Itch. The guy writes circles around me, what can I say!
So instead, here's just a few concise things that I want to highlight:
I love how simple the game is, and I mean that from a design perspective. There's a lot of adding by subtraction here: there's no main menu, no way to control the camera, there aren't even game-overs! A horror game where you aren't penalized for getting caught by the monster sounds like a bad idea, but it really works here. It's great for pacing and perfectly fits the tone.
On a similar note, the framing of the Anthology collection as an in-universe art museum combined with the fact the game only launches in 4:3 aspect ratios really gave a voyeuristic first impression. Again, a great tone setter! It starts a conversation with one of the themes of the work (art as commodity) while also smartly trimming the scope of development a little. A+
This goes without saying if you've played the game, but it's really fucking funny. Very witty but also very stupid, without looking like it's trying too hard. Balanced out with some serious dread in those scarier moments.
I really just adore the conceit of a world where every little banal frustration and microaggression is elevated to the most extreme level: a guy running at you with a kitchen knife about it. The fact that thecatamites did that while managing to keep everything feeling sincere and not hammy feels a little magical.
Tommy Tone's soundtrack is a perfect fit and a great listen in its own right. The quiet main melody to Storm has been in my head all week. Pick it up on bandcamp, it's free!
That's all I have - I really enjoyed myself. It's one of my new favorites, and I think fully deserves the "cult classic" honorific.
I didn't mention the then-upcoming console ports in this post since I thought they were a ways out, but apparently not! You can now get the Anthology on Switch and PS5! Even fewer excuses not to spend your weekend getting chased by a few maniacs.
Over the weekend, I played through the Anthology Of The Killer and I had an absolutely fantastic time. I had sporadically heard about it over the course of a few years, and from how I had seen people discussing it I got the sense of it being something like "your favorite indie darling's favorite indie darling." Having now played it, I think now it's one of mine as well; it manages to be charming, frightening, surreal, hyperreal, cuttingly simple, and disarmingly complex all at the same time.
The game is definitely not for everybody, but the best games never are. While I want to share some of my thoughts and experience with the game, I am going to avoid discussing any of the events of the plot just because I think you should play it yourself! The game is $7 on Steam or itch.io and takes about three hours to see the end of. If you're into the raw, avant-garde forms of art that only teams with single-digit sizes can create, you're in for a good time. Moreover, if you're interested in exploring that type of art or expanding your horizons a little, I think it's a great starting point. It's cheaper than a cup of coffee and shorter than the latest Avatar movie - give it a shot! Hell, if you're really strapped for cash, you can track down each of the nine Of The Killer games' original releases on GameJolt for free.
With that out of the way, my thoughts below the cut:
First things first, I enjoyed every chapter, but my top three are probably Drool, Flesh, and Heart in no particular order. This is only after my initial playthrough, there's a good chance I would name a different three if I played it a second time; Face, Blood, and Ears also came to mind but each chapter is great in its own way.
---
Reader, to pull back the curtain for a moment: originally I was planning to put a huge multi-paragraph essay here where I would wax intellectual about the setting, motifs, creative choices that the developer thecatamites made, and so on. I had been picking away at it for a few days when I remembered I forgot to go back and check out the bonus tunnels, and now having done so I realized that those big paragraphs simply weren't built for purpose. If you want a toothy, well written, thought provoking look into the world Of The Killer, that already exists: It's called Anthology Of The Killer and you can get it on Steam or Itch. The guy writes circles around me, what can I say!
So instead, here's just a few concise things that I want to highlight:
I love how simple the game is, and I mean that from a design perspective. There's a lot of adding by subtraction here: there's no main menu, no way to control the camera, there aren't even game-overs! A horror game where you aren't penalized for getting caught by the monster sounds like a bad idea, but it really works here. It's great for pacing and perfectly fits the tone.
On a similar note, the framing of the Anthology collection as an in-universe art museum combined with the fact the game only launches in 4:3 aspect ratios really gave a voyeuristic first impression. Again, a great tone setter! It starts a conversation with one of the themes of the work (art as commodity) while also smartly trimming the scope of development a little. A+
This goes without saying if you've played the game, but it's really fucking funny. Very witty but also very stupid, without looking like it's trying too hard. Balanced out with some serious dread in those scarier moments.
I really just adore the conceit of a world where every little banal frustration and microaggression is elevated to the most extreme level: a guy running at you with a kitchen knife about it. The fact that thecatamites did that while managing to keep everything feeling sincere and not hammy feels a little magical.
Tommy Tone's soundtrack is a perfect fit and a great listen in its own right. The quiet main melody to Storm has been in my head all week. Pick it up on bandcamp, it's free!
That's all I have - I really enjoyed myself. It's one of my new favorites, and I think fully deserves the "cult classic" honorific.
The latest update for No Man's Sky is blowing my mind. If you had told me last week that you wanted walkable spaceship interiors, I would have responded saying it was never going to happen. Whole swaths of the game would need to be reworked under the hood. I simply never thought Hello Games would spend the time untangling 9+ years of development to make it work. But they did! Those crazy sons of bitches did it! You can even walk on it while it's flying. No loading screens between celestial bodies. You can even spacewalk now! Starfield eat your damn heart out.
I enjoy seeing this post make the rounds whenever Sean Murray posts a new emoji. It’s nice to see this game get so much buzz still, nearly ten years after release!
Also, they just added pet battles to the game, so Pokemon Champions eat your heart out, I guess
Baby Steps has come in at the buzzer to be my sleeper hit of 2025. I bought it at launch but only just started playing it this week and it has kinda blown me away. I can understand people writing it off as another Bennet Foddy 'Streamer Bait' game but it really is so much more than that.
For starters, in my opinion, the game isn't really trying to make fun of Nate, the protagonist. Make no mistake - the game is quite cruel to Nate and goes out of its way to be so, from having characters mock him to his face all the way to putting an errant banana peel halfway up a particularly treacherous climb. The game even gives you opportunities to outwardly harm Nate, allowing you to vent your frustrations by having him step on a bear trap or fall down a well. That said, I don't see the game actually wanting you to hate Nate, even when he stubbornly refuses help; even as you watch him dig his own conversational grave, again; even as his legs just give out for no discernible reason and you watch his dirty-onesie-clad dumptruck ass hit every single rocky outcropping on the way down the hill, impotent to stop himself from sliding off each and every one of them.
The game doesn't want you to hate Nate. They want you to pity him, in the way you see a lost kitten on the street in a rainstorm. They want you to will him to achieve a better life, one step at a time. Spoilers below the cut.
I was surprised at how much of the game's writing was dedicated to toxic masculinity. In hindsight, I probably should have realized it would be a core theme, but it was through this critique that I found my understanding of Nate and the strange world he was brought into. I should note that I have not 100% completed the game, not even close (more on that later), so there may be some cutscene that clarifies or chafes against my reading.
The first cutscene that really stuck out to me was an interaction with a character named Wilson, a nearly naked man stuck face-first in a mudslide. Nate meets him by thinking he is a rock and stepping squarely on his spine. Wilson isn't upset by this, in fact some of the first words out of his mouth are complimentary: "You're doing great at this." He then asks Nate for advice on how to continue the climb, something that clearly throws Nate for a loop. Nate's version of advice is to stammer out "You're, uh, kind of a b...beta male." Obviously a cruel thing to say and it goes exactly as you'd expect - the terminally online rhetoric lands as gracefully as a wet napkin. What's equally obvious, though, is that this doesn't come naturally to Nate at all. This is not a true core belief for Nate; rather, this is something he has picked up from somewhere and has rooted itself in his own insecurities. He is following the script - something he thinks, or was led to believe, a 'real man' would say.
Baby Steps' allusions to Pinocchio also really compelled me. I made the connection as soon as Ethan, the donkey-headed man with no pants on, showed up suddenly to tell Nate to use his one wish (something he didn't even know he had) to wish up everybody some cigarettes. The game re-contextualizes pleasure island through these wild party-animal caricatures of the dude-bro. Every time you see them, they grow in number - one, then two, then around six, and all of a sudden there are dozens of them. The parties get louder, more debauched, leaving more debris in their wake. The group also gets meaner the larger it gets, not content with taking advantage of Nate, but making sure he knows his place is at the bottom of the totem pole. He is the weak link, the lowest of lesser men, and that means they can boss him around, abuse him as they like, without fear of retaliation.
To get personal for a bit, this mirrors experiences I have had with male socialization growing up. As a cis man, having been one all my life, there was a constant pressure of the patriarchal pecking order, and I have found it manifests itself in its purest form in groups of young men. The social force that glues many of these groups together, like the groups I found myself in, is coercion. Disagreeing with the group is countered by threats - either ostracization or, in some cases, physical violence. If you can't back up your words with some collateral, either the backing of the rest of the group or your ability to bruise someone, you have no say. The group doesn't have to listen to you or even respect you, but what other option do you have? They are your only friends, and they barely tolerate you. Good luck finding anybody else.
Thankfully, this is a solvable problem that teenage me does end up working out - after building some self esteem, putting myself out there, and making new friends in college. This is something Nate figures out, too, in a small way. One of the donkey-men, Moose, has already dissociated himself from the group. Regretful of his time spent with them, he looks to live a relaxed life up in a cabin near the top of the mountain. The default end of the game is Nate choosing not to finish his climb up to the summit, instead choosing to live with Moose in his cozy cabin. I choose to interpret this as a falling-in-love story, though I don't think it has to be romance, necessarily. It could be read as Nate finding a friend who cares and operates on a similar wavelength. That said, I am choosing to interpret it as the subtle start of a gay romance, just because it once again mirrors my own coming to terms with my sexuality and casting off the shackles of the masculine mindset.
This, I think, is where the themes and ideas of Baby Steps really come together. Walking is more difficult than in other games, but it's not that difficult most of the time. Each campsite and checkpoint is connected with a relatively straightforward path, one that often stays relatively flat and unchallenging. There are extremely difficult sections that lead to collectibles, items, secret cutscenes that are all - this is important - completely optional. No matter what the characters, achievements, or the very game itself says - you do not have to do them.
In much the same way that Undertale's genocide ending questions the idea of completionism, Baby Steps questions whether you need to do all the optional content you come across. The game itself will goad you, tease you with stacked cans and glowing fruit put at the end of some hellish set of stepping stones. Some challenges will be actively called out, usually with Nate stubbornly insisting that he is going to do them while other characters tell him it's not worth it. The key thing is, I think, the game doesn't really care who you agree with. You can throw Nate up some nightmare climb for hours on end or you can try twice, give up and take the easy road and you will end up in the same place either way. You, as a player, might feel a bit of shame in not doing things the hard way, but that is in-nate (get it?). It can be ignored. In truth, there is no shame in making things easier for yourself. If you prefer taking the difficult way, charting your own path - that's fine too! Do whatever you like - but making it harder for yourself doesn't make you more of a real boy.
I Hope You Get To Live Your Entire Life As A Human Being
I thought this was going to be a review of my time with Santa Ragione's Horses, the controversial art game recently banned from Steam and the Epic Store. To some extent, this will be that but after playing the game I think the game itself is maybe not too interesting when compared to the situation surrounding it.
which is to say that a game about pressures of authoritarianism is fine but watching forces outside of the right align with captial and champion the decision to ban it from storefronts is perhaps even more telling than anything in the game. nominally lefitist gamers or vaguely progressive academics have found ways to decide that this game is simply something that should be dismissed. in doing so they align with the forces of mass capital and censorship, painting a picture of How This So Of Thing Is Allowed To Happen.
Horses is a violent game. it is a game about participating in torture and slavery. it is a game that deploys sexual violence with mixed clarity. but I think it deserves to exist and so watching as certain voices have emerged to contend that worthiness has been frustrating. so I played it and we're gonna talk about it.
but we're also gonna talk about how we talk about games...
In Horses, players control Anselmo. He is a young man working on a farm for two weeks who discovers early on that the horses on the farm are actually person who have been captured and forced to wear horse masks. They are, according to the farmer, mostly people caught having sex in the woods of his property and throughout the game Anselmo (and therefore the player) will not only tend to regular farm tasks but also the discipline of these horses.
This involves a variety of situations. In some cases, the farmer flogs the horses and asks you to clean their wounds. After one horses is found fornicating with another, in what's perhaps the game's mode defining scene of violence, Anselmo must hold the offending horse's legs open while the farmer castrates him. Afterwards, the player must quickly stitch the wound. Later, this horse refuses to work in the field and while you can try offering carrots to help them move, you are eventually forced to strike them with a club.
this is not every day. some days you wake up, set wood on a stump and chop some logs for the fire. maybe you prepare some food for the dog. functionally, which is to say in the act of play, Horses is a sort of first-person adventure game mixed with a farm sim. click item, click on thing to use itself with. sometimes this is normal, in other moments this mundane user experience is used to enact violence on the horses.
Beyond these acts that the player participates in, there's a variety of sexual violences that are implied. A sick female horse is tended to by a doctor who eventually takes her into a shed where he seems to rape her to death. this is not a kind game but the violence is at lest deployed with some kind of purpose. as players gain familiarity with the routine on the farm, learning the layout and how to do tasks, they similarly acclimate to the presence of extreme violence.
some critics, like megan farokhmanesh at Wired, have questioned if this violence (particularly the gendered sexual violence) is worth having. others have adopted a different approach; this is a game that invites comparison to a work like Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom and so the comparison goes "Well, there was worse in that movie" or perhaps even "there's worse stuff in many films" and so this violence, while not glossed over, is placed into a wider art context. many mediums have works more gratuitous that Horses! and the presentation of the violence, while gross, is not as explicit.
where you fall on the spectrum here is a personal decision. farokhmanesh is correct to say that much of Horses violence is deployed casually and perhaps without care. on the other hand, that casual nature is arguably the point. this is a story about slavery and sex and denigration. it is about the ways in which powerful people turn their enemies into something other than human beings.
does it all work? I'm unsure. the violence is neither explicit enough to truly shock and the content so broadly metaphorical that Horses message about authoritarian powers and how they cow us into accepting their grosses decisions is perhaps so wide reaching that it lacks a certain bite. regardless, this is a game which has been banned from many store fronts that contain games which often render up scenes of violence that are more detailed, more graphically raw than anything that exists in Horses. is it good? bad? that might not matter considering what else you can find on Steam with a cursory glance.
and yet, the conversation about the game is revealing. many people who are not of the right wing have found ways to decide that yes this game is somehow EXCEPTIONAL to all the other violent stories our medium has and contrived many ways to justify aligning with storefronts in their decision making. and this, I think is maybe more interesting that Horses itself as the game is a rather flat work.
One scene at the center of the discussion is one that Santa Ragione themselves calls attention to in explaining why they think Steam initially turned down the game. A few days into the story, after we've had time to be around the horses and understand the situation, a businessman and his daughter arrive at the farm.
the horses are stood before the pair, auction-like, and the daugther chooses one to ride. the player guides the horse (holding it by the reins) around a corral as the daughter rides upon its back. in the original version of the game, the daughter was supposedly a child. this has been changed in the final release where she is an adult.
but (i think correctly) Santa Ragione identified this scene as one that drew the ire of Valve. even now, as a scene that doesn't exist it seems to be used by some folks to justify Horses removal from the store. through a game of telephone, the story has spread that this is a game of pornography and perhaps even one with an underage character in a scene. this is not the truth but it has led some folks, even some who previously rallied to defend "problematic" games during their struggles with payment processors like Visa, which led to a decision at the time to delist NSFW content. in that case, itchio was out of line but here? well, maybe Valve's in the right! Or so the thinking goes.
and yet, I think this scene is perhaps the most important in the entire game insofar as what is happening in the text. The daughter terlls Anselmo that she KNOWS these horses are people. this is not merely some avant-garde absurdist twist; it is textual that the horses are human beings. they are slaves. she knows this. her father knows it. the priest that visits the farm knows. but it's okay.
you see, these people are degenerates! and maybe even if they don't don't deserve this treatment, they have dangerous ideas. we're never told why those ideas are but it doesn't matter. they are different, they are "others" and because of that... because of the implied deviancy... it is okay for them to be mistreated. likewise, those games are art... because Horses has become to some folks an example of some kind of degenerate art... we shouldn't worry about the storefront bans.
"I hope you get to live your entire live as a human being!" the daughter says. It is chilling, a threat without even meaning it to be one. For the moment, Anselmo is a "human being" in the eyes of the farmer but there is a suggestion that this could change. For whatever reason, he could become something else. Not a human being. And therefore subject to the same violence as all the other horses.
for many of us, this is threat we live with. to be trans in america is to constantly skirt the line between "human being" and something else, for instance. many people in my life still see my humanity but there's always the threat that could stop. that the propaganda will take hold and I will not get to live my life as a human being. so it goes to people of color, people with mental health issues. and more.
you are not always assured of your status as a human being. and in a less drastic example of this arbitrariness... you are not always assured that the thing you create, the art you make will be seen as art.
for many people, Horses is not art. and the discussions about its worthiness have, in some ways, the same tone as the discussions about the worthiness of someone's status as "human being." and it is in this that I think Horses has proved interesting. more so than anything that happens inside the game.
A curious blip in this conversation was the re-emergence of a voice whose weight in game's related discussions had certainly waned over the last decade: Ian Bogost. Known best for making Cow Clicker and embodying the kind of presence one might expect from someone wrapped in the warm cloak of academia, Bogost popped his head up first to debate market factors surrounding Horses ban before falling back to one of his tried and true lines of inquiry. that the game was, unlike games he made and he liked, not a serious work.
"Q-Up and Candy Crush, say, are more serious works of game than Horses (which seems fine and even innocuous!) or whatever embarrassing anime RPG trash is on Steam or Nintendo EShop," he said, referencing the clever competitive coin-flipping game
Many of us rolled our eyes but I am going to talk about it briefly because in relation to Horses I do think Bogost's bait is worth taking for what it reveals about the situation surrounding the game. First, I'm gonna do a very briefly history lesson. In the 2010s, there was a growing emergence of alt games and particularly queer games that heralded the growth of alternate critics.
I was one of them so I feel qualified to talk about this but we're talking writers like Lana Polanksy, Stephen Beirne, and in more mainstreams spaces this is where someone like Austin Walker emerges as well. It was a varied coalition of writers who had a holistic and emotionally-driven approach to their criticism. games as experiences synthesized by players living in a context similarly made by people living in their own circumstances.
In response to this, Bogost and some other tenured sorts start to write op-ed pieces extolling the power of games systems. Games, to people like Bogost and New York University Game Center's Frank Lantz, are only valuable for the systems they contain and the results of those systems. They embark in their writings to dismiss "childish make-believe, imaginary dragons, badly written dialogue." They stress games as *processes* and the only valuable narratives that emerge come from the collision of these processes. you don't need characters, you need mechanisms.
note that in the context of the 2010s what Bogost was doing and to some extent Lantz was doing was slipping briefly out of comfortable tenured spaces to essentially deride games made by marginalized creators and criticism made by women, blacks, and queers. we pushed back because why the hell wouldn't we?
This leads to what some people call "The Debate That Never Took Place" wherein many of those young alt-writers formulate writing in opposition to what's being written ultimately by comfortable white men with good jobs. Not all this writing exists but it is where terms like "ludocentrism" and "ludofundamentalism" are coined. Ways of describing a mode of thinking, born primarily from academia, which the opposition bloc finds too narrow to describe what games are doing and, importantly, why audiences enjoy them.
All this fades away as a gaming is eaten by things like Roblox completely rebuilds the landscape but Bogost seems to have held onto that position and I think it's interesting to consider and talk about re: Horses because something we failed to grapple with at the time of The Debate That Never Happened" was how ludocentrism is a chiefly neoliberal idea. one which easily aligns with censorship.
It's not a big leap to go from "games are only systems" to "markets will fix all of society's problems." We all understood this maybe but didn't quite attack for the foolishness it is. Because this urge, this impulse ironically aligns Bogost (a neoliberal professor) with forces of censorship and to some extent fascism. funny how that works.
Time and time again over the years when formalists talk about their derision towards games stories, this comes hand in hand with what is frankly a kind of racism. this is particularly true with Bogost, who often slips into orientalist jabs.
Bogost cannot help, for instance, tossing a jab at JRPGs often and I think it's important to identify that for what it is. Bogost doesn't simply believe that only certain kinds of games are games; he also believes that only certain kinds of developers can make those games.
there are people and there are fuckin' horses, y 'know?
developers are people like him or Lantz. They are men, they are white, and they are American. This makes them better designers, smart people, and therefore The Only Real Designers. Atlantic writers and such.
(the difference here BTW is that Lantz at least makes good games.)
understanding his opposition to Horses becomes an easier task viewed in this light. He's not still simply opposed to story in games; he fundamentally believes on some innate level that the artists at Santa Ragione are not worth the default kind of respect that he gives to certain peers and implicitly deserved to have their game banned.
They made the wrong kind of game! is it even a game? This emotional garbage? Couldn't this have been a spreadsheet?
Perhaps it could have but I think that playing Horses also reveals the ways in which that could have hobbled the story. You could totally make a suitable fascistic exercise in Excel but this does remove you from certain pressures that make Horses effective. proximity to the violence being done, proximity to potential danger that the farmer might enact on Anselmo. sound, music, movement. the theater of it all, that mix of sickening shock and comedy. breath in your ears.
the undeniable complicity of holding someone down as they are tortured. holding the button, waiting for your accomplice to bring the sheers close. close enough to cut it's coming soon just hold the button don't let him squirm at least make it clean. that's not easily turned into an abstract system. to hold a button in order to hold a prisoner down creates a more active and unambiguous participation in Horses' violence which serves the text.
and so in discounting these things —for instance, our multi-day bonding time with Linda the Horse (a character in a story!) shifting as we are forced to assist in violence against her—Bogost's neoliberalism sees him easily align with storefronts over artists. he aligns himself with capital over labor. and he deploys formalist language to the same end as he always has: to police creatives who are not "like him." he doesn't resent the market forces that led to Horses lack of support because he mostly agrees with it.
This is a key factor to discuss with Horses because there's a lot of people out there who are not devilishly right wing that are nevertheless finding ways to contort themselves into positions that defend this game's banning from storefronts.
the people who railed against itchio's payment processors missteps a while back seem fine with Valve axing Horses because it at one point contained something they maybe thought was icky which doesn't even exist in the text anymore. a former games writer defends to the death the decision simply because stores have the right (they're not doing anything illegal maaaan!) to remove whatever they want from shelves. a university professor aligns because this is happening not to people like him but people he doesn't respect. these are not villainous or "bad" people but they all reached the same bad conclusion
and suddenly, this game about fascism and complicity is interesting not for the violence or sexual content but because it provided a case study for how a range of people—nominally online young progressives, academics, others—will find ways to say "oh, well it's okay this time." when it comes to censorship.
Thinking about this helps underscore why I think Horses biggest stumbles come when trying to explain why the farmer is doing what he is doing to these people. We are told that this is an inherited violence; he is doing to his horses what his own father made him do to a family dog. He is pressured by forces of religion and sexual repression. some nights, he puts on a mask of his own and hovers around, particularly observing the sexual violence his dog Fido commits. her leers, chastity belt snug and secure.
I think Horses isn't terribly interesting when it comes to trying to track down where this cycle began and how much a victim the farmer could be in his own right. and I think the stumbling is interesting to consider when viewed side by side with the variety of ways in which certain people have decided to acquiesce to Vale and Epic. they don't need much reason! sometimes the reason for their support is as simple as "well, they're allowed!"
There doesn't need to be much of a reason for anyone to blindly align with power or else participate in violence. Many people who think themselves fundamentally decent will find all kinds of way to justify their behaviors. In Horses, this can be as simple as finding an excuse to lie when a priest asks if you believe in god. The priest clearly holds sway and is an ally of the farmer; if you say you don't believe will that change how they think of you? Will it make them turn on you?
Horses is full of these little justifications. I'm just lying to keep safe. I'm just playing along until the moment where I can do something else. I don't believe in this stuff but I don't wanna end up like one of *those* people. And in the discussion around the game, we see small versions of these arguments and justifications.
They technically have the authority to ban this game. Well, geez I heard from a friend online that there's some secret pedo shit in their. Oh, that's not true. Okay but there's still a reference to a blowjob and that's icky so I'm glad we banned it. Hmm, actually this game is not as worthy of consideration as the mobile powerhouses that steal money from children and grandparents alike. Why? Well, you see it simply is. I know because I'm a professor of this stuff!
The truth, the content doesn't matter. There's just a powerful market force and the many ways we decide to justify the decisions it makes. Be it casual moral judgements, legal technicality whataboutism, or anything else. People don't really need much reason at all. They'll invent any of several! and if they're doing this about a mid-quality art game, you have to ask... what else will they do it for?
and it's through *this* arrangement of circumstances that Horses becomes something else, something more interesting and more potent. life around the game imitates the absurdity within. oh, we put those people in masks because they were fuckin' freaks anyway. oh, it's fine to ban this game because it made me uncomfortable somehow. so it goes for art and beyond. and it's not just the fascists who will do it but the liberals and even some leftists too.
and more than anything, as I watch them align themselves in the way they have...
I hope these people get to live their entire lives as human beings.
People who use AI to write code think they're the Sorcerers to normal programming's Wizards, but in reality they're the Warlocks. Chuck that damn amulet in the river Timothy, I don't give a shit what it said to you
I wrapped up a three-session Halloween adventure for my table of players last night and it has me thinking about GM philosophy and Player psychology.
I want to start by saying that this is a success story: sure, I had some gripes with the adventure as-written which I will get into, but ultimately everyone had a blast and my group was excited to come in each week. I mention that because I don't want anyone to think this is typical rpg horror story fare, where I'm spending the whole post whinging about stuff that happened at my table. My players are wonderful and I don't have a single bad thing to say about them.
The module, though, had some flaws that interestingly reflect the more mundane /r/rpghorrorstories posts you see from time to time. Not the horrible SA stuff, but more typical breakdowns of the social membrane of the hobby: specifically GMs not really caring about their players.
I see posts like these pretty frequently, especially on the /r/DnD subreddit. A player makes a post talking about how the GM is ignoring their wishes for their character, or took something away from the character without letting them save, or outright killed the character in retribution of some diversion from their ideal story path (and that's all ignoring the actually heinous shit).
This goes both ways, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of stories of players being rude and acting out; that said, I'm focusing on GMs since the module we played felt like it was written by a GM on a power trip. This was a horror "meat grinder" yes, but this felt like it wasn't really meant to be beaten.
As written it was, primarily, a completely linear sequence of rooms with only one thing in them, and that one thing would almost always be directly harmful, sometimes outright disfiguring anyone who interacted with it. There are no side paths, no capabilities to retreat, no loot, and some of the enemies have ACs as high as 18, +5 to hit, and take multiple turns. The module was advertised as an OSR (Old School Revival) adventure for low levels, and I can only speculate that the author meant "OSR" in the sense that being forced to roll a DC 16 Dex check or instantly die is pretty "old school."
Now I ran it because its horror concepts were actually interesting, and a meat grinder adventure is the perfect thing for the season, but this had to change for my table. So I made some changes:
I peppered some extra loot in the otherwise empty rooms, to incentivize players taking risks
I brought down ACs but bumped up health slightly to compensate, provided more options to deal with the encounter instead of just getting their health to 0
I made some pregen backup characters so that players can keep playing after combat ends
Et cetera. Basically, I gave the players a fighting chance, even at level one. Not only that, I rooted for them. When a player makes a desperate play to try to gain the slightest advantage in a fight, like setting the room on fire, I let them do it and I give it a chance to work. And work it did - they won! They beat the big bad after losing eight characters across the whole adventure.
To me this isn't "pulling punches," they were never going to even see the last boss if I had played the adventure as-is. One of the most common pieces of advice for TTRPGs I see is to "be a fan of the other players" - this is what that means. I played fair by putting my thumb on the scale, since the author of the module had already put his thumb on the other side.
And truly, all it takes is to listen to what your players want. You don't have to give them exactly what they want, but these games are more fun when they can feel like they can make choices. If I ruled that the oil lamp wouldn't count as an attack, or laughed at them every time a character tried to do anything and had all their skin melted off or whatever, I would have been doing the whole table a disservice.
But because I showed them I cared, rewarded them for taking big swings, painted their failures with sorrow and their successes with triumph, they cared in return. And that's really all it takes.
I know I'm a little late to the party on this one, but what in the fuck are Nintendo thinking with the Virtual Boy 2: We Learned Nothing Edition.
Nintendo are the king of making backwards decisions for seemingly no reason, but this one really takes the cake for me. I work in software development, so I understand how difficult it may be to convert the originals to play flat instead of using Stereoscopic 3D. At the very least, I get the vibe that Nintendo seemingly wants to touch their old games as little as possible to get them on their Switch Online storefront.
The idea of spending $99 on a peripheral (or $25 for a piece of cardboard in the shape of a peripheral) just so I can play games I need to pay a subscription to access is already a tough sell, but they made it so much tougher. Even if you pay for the service and buy the peripheral (paying premium for the wobbly plastic on a tripod you still have to lean into)... you won't even be able to play all the games. Of the 22 games that ever officially launched on the damn thing, they're only porting 14 of them and not even all of those will be available at launch, opting instead to dripfeed them over an indeterminate amount of time.
If you're some kind of Nintendo super-fanatic, I can understand why you might buy this. Plus, I am always glad that games like these are available in some legal capacity. All that said, given the above I can't help but feel like this is going to be the Morbius of video game consoles - fated to fail twice.
Let's talk about difficulty in games. This is a hot take on a hot topic, so I'm expecting a fair bit of disagreement and I'm fine with that.
I am a strong advocate for games using difficulty as a part of storytelling. If the game is about surviving in a hostile environment, the environment should feel hostile and that I need to survive in it. If a game is about the will and tenacity to keep fighting, then choosing to keep fighting should ideally require some willpower. If a game is about triumph in the face of great adversity, having a slider in the menu that makes the adversity less great makes the game less impactful.
For context (and what prompted me writing this) I have hit credits on Hollow Knight: Silksong. I am far from done with the game, and eagerly waiting for my workday to end so I can keep going. For this post, I will refrain from getting into specifics, but I will talk vaguely about things in the game whose existence constitutes a spoiler, so if you want to go in blind, come back to this one later. I will also be comparing to the original Hollow Knight so spoiler warning for that one too, since I know a lot of people have picked up the first game after seeing the Silksong hype train crash through every digital storefront.
I've seen this cycle happen a few times: a new game comes out in a franchise, people are not used to whatever has changed in it, there's some struggling, some angry posts about why it's 'bad game design,' then the people complaining either get used to the game or leave and after a month's time the game is praised, then eventually the next game comes out and the whole thing starts again. I saw it with Dark Souls II, Bloodborne, DS III, Sekiro, Elden Ring, and now Silksong.
I'm not trying to gaslight you into thinking these games aren't hard - they are! What I am saying is that people jump the gun while they're still in the learning phase, and for many of these games the learning phase is the entire game! Each new area and encounter is a new challenge: new enemies with new moves, but also new gear with new moves for the player. But, and this is key, the learning happens through the lens of death. You are expected to spend a couple lives getting used to the enemy patterns, making adjustments to your strategy or loadout if necessary. The game is still designed for you to win, just not on the first try.
With the broad philosophy out of the way, I wanted to dive into some specific criticisms of Silksong I've seen floating around here in the first few days after launch:
"Too many things deal two masks of damage": This one I definitely get, and I actually somewhat agree that it devalues health upgrades early on, but I like that you can't take any enemy for granted. Even with multiple upgrades, entering an early-game area with late game power can still kill you if you're not careful. Put a pin (or needle haha) in this one, we'll circle back to it in a sec.
"The diagonal pogo is bad": Wrong, it's honestly great. A little practice and you can get very consistent with it for platforming. There are a few areas where I don't think I could have made it through without it. People complain about this one because if you knew how to pogo chain in the original Hollow Knight, you could trivialize the entire first half of the game. Hell, you could easily skip portions of it. The diagonal is harder to chain on the same enemy, meaning you need to actually care about positioning.
In the original Hollow Knight, doing the big end-game boss rush where you fight every boss in the game back to back to back, out of the forty or so bosses you needed to fight, maybe half a dozen of them actually required 'locking in' once you had some practice down.
"Everything is too expensive"/"pay to win benches": People literally forgot that the original Hollow Knight also had benches you needed to pay geo to access. A bunch of them, in fact. They forgot because by your tenth hour of HK, you literally never needed to think about money. If you were fighting enemies with gathering swarm equipped, you would just have thousands by the end of an area. Farming was trivial since every enemy dropped a fistful of geo.
In Silksong, though, they were more deliberate with it. The game has themes of economic disparity and exploitation, so there are a lot of things 'fleecing' you for rosaries. Add that to the fact that rosaries are only carried (and thus dropped) by 'civilized' bugs and you end up thinking about money for the whole game. The theme of economic disparity is made real, through your lived experience. In practice, if you're exploring every nook and cranny, you will likely have enough for every bench & map you find, but only just. If you're smart about converting large amounts of loose beads to strings, you don't even need to worry about losing them when you stumble into a boss fight. Better to lose 20 beads in the conversion than the full 80 to a big fly or whatever.
"Team Cherry are being cruel with their environment design": This one is more specifically pointed at certain booby traps in the game (iykyk) but I've seen it relegated to platforming challenges and bench placements as well. The thing is, Team Cherry are trying to portray a dangerous, hostile world. Pharloom is a place where safety and comfort are not guaranteed, so what better way to convey that then to have them literally not be guaranteed. Hidden traps, surprise ambushes, bosses that pretend to be defeated only to have another phase - these are things that teach you to be skeptical and on guard, even when you 'normally' would be safe. It paints a world that is not just passively but actively out to get you, and it does so without feeling arbitrary.
On the idea of this being cruel: speaking personally as a GM, when I throw something awful at my friends it's not because I secretly like being mean. When I have an NPC act against the party or add a tripwire to a hallway that sends axes swinging at them, it's because I want to see them deal with a big problem, not because I want them all to die and quit playing. Team Cherry's 'meanest' surprises are like that - they want you to beat them even when they aren't playing 'fair.' It's also not torture or anything, most of this happens in areas that you technically don't have to go through, which means you can leave and come back later when you're stronger. Of course, this might be the place you went to in an attempt to get stronger, so sometimes it is a test of tenacity.
"Boss runbacks are outdated, tedious wastes of time": I'm definitely in the minority on this one, but I actually like boss runbacks. I agree that it feels a lot nicer to have a checkpoint right in front of the boss (ala Stakes of Marika) but I don't think runbacks have no place in games. It paints the idea that the bosses are the 'important' part of the game and the rooms between them aren't. Runbacks are only tedious filler when they aren't challenging, but when they are challenging, they become part of the boss fight. As we established earlier, you can't really take any enemy in the game for granted, so many of these runbacks do end up quite difficult. You want to get back to the fight so bad, to learn it faster and get your stuff back. Your own impatience rockets you into taking obscene risks to try to bypass the rooms full of dudes to get back to the boss quicker. Hornet has a slick enough moveset that sometimes those risks can pay huge dividends, but just as often you'll fly facefirst into the mouths of a hundred worms or something.
I'm not saying they're perfect, or that every boss should ideally have you run through a whole gauntlet just for the privilege of dying to them; but there are areas and fights and moments in this game that are memorable because they're as hard to get to as they are to get through, if not harder. There is one boss in particular I will remember for the rest of my life and if they had a bench outside their arena they would be an afterthought to me.
I want to cap off this opinionated rant by just saying: you can do it. I am not putting up walls around Silksong saying 'you must git this gud to enter.' Getting through it can be a struggle, but it's a fun struggle. Team Cherry aren't pulling their punches, and sometimes they're even fighting a little dirty, it's true; but they have given you everything you need to beat them anyway, and it's going to feel so much better when you do.
Now that I have 100% Silksong, I can stay that I fully stand by what I've written above all the way through the end of the game and all optional content. It's a masterpiece; it's tied with Blue Prince for my personal GOTY.
I will definitely be doing a Steel Soul run soon, but for the time being I'm putting my feet up and listening to the soundtrack.
Let's talk about difficulty in games. This is a hot take on a hot topic, so I'm expecting a fair bit of disagreement and I'm fine with that.
I am a strong advocate for games using difficulty as a part of storytelling. If the game is about surviving in a hostile environment, the environment should feel hostile and that I need to survive in it. If a game is about the will and tenacity to keep fighting, then choosing to keep fighting should ideally require some willpower. If a game is about triumph in the face of great adversity, having a slider in the menu that makes the adversity less great makes the game less impactful.
For context (and what prompted me writing this) I have hit credits on Hollow Knight: Silksong. I am far from done with the game, and eagerly waiting for my workday to end so I can keep going. For this post, I will refrain from getting into specifics, but I will talk vaguely about things in the game whose existence constitutes a spoiler, so if you want to go in blind, come back to this one later. I will also be comparing to the original Hollow Knight so spoiler warning for that one too, since I know a lot of people have picked up the first game after seeing the Silksong hype train crash through every digital storefront.
I've seen this cycle happen a few times: a new game comes out in a franchise, people are not used to whatever has changed in it, there's some struggling, some angry posts about why it's 'bad game design,' then the people complaining either get used to the game or leave and after a month's time the game is praised, then eventually the next game comes out and the whole thing starts again. I saw it with Dark Souls II, Bloodborne, DS III, Sekiro, Elden Ring, and now Silksong.
I'm not trying to gaslight you into thinking these games aren't hard - they are! What I am saying is that people jump the gun while they're still in the learning phase, and for many of these games the learning phase is the entire game! Each new area and encounter is a new challenge: new enemies with new moves, but also new gear with new moves for the player. But, and this is key, the learning happens through the lens of death. You are expected to spend a couple lives getting used to the enemy patterns, making adjustments to your strategy or loadout if necessary. The game is still designed for you to win, just not on the first try.
With the broad philosophy out of the way, I wanted to dive into some specific criticisms of Silksong I've seen floating around here in the first few days after launch:
"Too many things deal two masks of damage": This one I definitely get, and I actually somewhat agree that it devalues health upgrades early on, but I like that you can't take any enemy for granted. Even with multiple upgrades, entering an early-game area with late game power can still kill you if you're not careful. Put a pin (or needle haha) in this one, we'll circle back to it in a sec.
"The diagonal pogo is bad": Wrong, it's honestly great. A little practice and you can get very consistent with it for platforming. There are a few areas where I don't think I could have made it through without it. People complain about this one because if you knew how to pogo chain in the original Hollow Knight, you could trivialize the entire first half of the game. Hell, you could easily skip portions of it. The diagonal is harder to chain on the same enemy, meaning you need to actually care about positioning.
In the original Hollow Knight, doing the big end-game boss rush where you fight every boss in the game back to back to back, out of the forty or so bosses you needed to fight, maybe half a dozen of them actually required 'locking in' once you had some practice down.
"Everything is too expensive"/"pay to win benches": People literally forgot that the original Hollow Knight also had benches you needed to pay geo to access. A bunch of them, in fact. They forgot because by your tenth hour of HK, you literally never needed to think about money. If you were fighting enemies with gathering swarm equipped, you would just have thousands by the end of an area. Farming was trivial since every enemy dropped a fistful of geo.
In Silksong, though, they were more deliberate with it. The game has themes of economic disparity and exploitation, so there are a lot of things 'fleecing' you for rosaries. Add that to the fact that rosaries are only carried (and thus dropped) by 'civilized' bugs and you end up thinking about money for the whole game. The theme of economic disparity is made real, through your lived experience. In practice, if you're exploring every nook and cranny, you will likely have enough for every bench & map you find, but only just. If you're smart about converting large amounts of loose beads to strings, you don't even need to worry about losing them when you stumble into a boss fight. Better to lose 20 beads in the conversion than the full 80 to a big fly or whatever.
"Team Cherry are being cruel with their environment design": This one is more specifically pointed at certain booby traps in the game (iykyk) but I've seen it relegated to platforming challenges and bench placements as well. The thing is, Team Cherry are trying to portray a dangerous, hostile world. Pharloom is a place where safety and comfort are not guaranteed, so what better way to convey that then to have them literally not be guaranteed. Hidden traps, surprise ambushes, bosses that pretend to be defeated only to have another phase - these are things that teach you to be skeptical and on guard, even when you 'normally' would be safe. It paints a world that is not just passively but actively out to get you, and it does so without feeling arbitrary.
On the idea of this being cruel: speaking personally as a GM, when I throw something awful at my friends it's not because I secretly like being mean. When I have an NPC act against the party or add a tripwire to a hallway that sends axes swinging at them, it's because I want to see them deal with a big problem, not because I want them all to die and quit playing. Team Cherry's 'meanest' surprises are like that - they want you to beat them even when they aren't playing 'fair.' It's also not torture or anything, most of this happens in areas that you technically don't have to go through, which means you can leave and come back later when you're stronger. Of course, this might be the place you went to in an attempt to get stronger, so sometimes it is a test of tenacity.
"Boss runbacks are outdated, tedious wastes of time": I'm definitely in the minority on this one, but I actually like boss runbacks. I agree that it feels a lot nicer to have a checkpoint right in front of the boss (ala Stakes of Marika) but I don't think runbacks have no place in games. It paints the idea that the bosses are the 'important' part of the game and the rooms between them aren't. Runbacks are only tedious filler when they aren't challenging, but when they are challenging, they become part of the boss fight. As we established earlier, you can't really take any enemy in the game for granted, so many of these runbacks do end up quite difficult. You want to get back to the fight so bad, to learn it faster and get your stuff back. Your own impatience rockets you into taking obscene risks to try to bypass the rooms full of dudes to get back to the boss quicker. Hornet has a slick enough moveset that sometimes those risks can pay huge dividends, but just as often you'll fly facefirst into the mouths of a hundred worms or something.
I'm not saying they're perfect, or that every boss should ideally have you run through a whole gauntlet just for the privilege of dying to them; but there are areas and fights and moments in this game that are memorable because they're as hard to get to as they are to get through, if not harder. There is one boss in particular I will remember for the rest of my life and if they had a bench outside their arena they would be an afterthought to me.
I want to cap off this opinionated rant by just saying: you can do it. I am not putting up walls around Silksong saying 'you must git this gud to enter.' Getting through it can be a struggle, but it's a fun struggle. Team Cherry aren't pulling their punches, and sometimes they're even fighting a little dirty, it's true; but they have given you everything you need to beat them anyway, and it's going to feel so much better when you do.
The latest update for No Man's Sky is blowing my mind. If you had told me last week that you wanted walkable spaceship interiors, I would have responded saying it was never going to happen. Whole swaths of the game would need to be reworked under the hood. I simply never thought Hello Games would spend the time untangling 9+ years of development to make it work. But they did! Those crazy sons of bitches did it! You can even walk on it while it's flying. No loading screens between celestial bodies. You can even spacewalk now! Starfield eat your damn heart out.
I can't get over the Silksong announcement today. Team Cherry goes completely radio silent for nearly six full years, thousands of days, with fans subsisting off nothing but the mere evidence that the game is still being worked on. Database updates, years old interviews, remarks from people around the project but nothing at all from the team themselves. Seeing a single new screenshot somewhere qualified as a big news day.
Then, today, they show off a new trailer with a release date in two weeks alongside an interview with Jason Schreier.
The interview is what I want to focus on, because it's incredible. Jason asks them "what happened, why did the game take so long?" Team Cherry's answer? "We had basically no problems during development, we just really had too much fun making the game."
This is astounding for a few reasons. See, back in 2023 Xbox said that Silksong would release before the end of June 2024, and then June came and went and it still hadn't released. No word from Team Cherry. Given how long the game took to make, there was a lot of speculation that the game had hit some sort of snag, or they needed to delay to rework something big after some internal testing fell through. Games don't take six years without hitting some serious hurdles.
But no! The team is just really small, and they like adding things to the game too much to stop. They had too many good ideas, all the time, and they decided to include all of them. They didn't do any messaging because there was nothing to report - they were just working on the game. They weren't even impacted by Covid!
All the while, people online were losing their fucking gourds not getting any updates, inventing a full genre of shitposting, but the devs aren't terminally online like we all are and just didn't see that much of it. They were just making the game. People went to their offices to see what was up and they work out of "a grubby room full of cardboard boxes," because they don't care about decorating the place, just making the damn game.
And this is all just...wonderful? Reading all of this feels like standing in a ray of sunshine on a cool day. The video gaming industry has been a fucking meat grinder for decades, and the last few years in particular have been particularly bleak, and it just feels good to see devs just fully enjoying what they do - for the biggest problem with development being that they like their job too much and have too much money to rush it.
After being on tumblr for eleven years, I decided to finally utilize the 'blogging' feature of this blogging platform. Of course, I couldn't suddenly change up my posting behavior for my entrenched audience of old acquaintances and robots trying to steal my credit card information, so I made this sideblog.
Basically this is a sort of 'hole' that I can dump thoughts and ideas too niche or long-winded to crowbar into normal conversation; and now you're in the hole too. Make yourself at home.
Rants and Rambles - On the Cheap @bakers-discount-worldbuilding - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
