In Signalis, you play as Elster, a Replika android searching for her Gestalt coworker Ariane to fulfill a promise made during their working relationship. Elster arrives at a largely derelict mining facility on the planet Rotfront, where she quickly discovers that a horrific illness is corrupting and consuming the surviving Replika workers. Intermittent visions of half-remembered horrors haunt the Replika whose consciousness remains – however, Elster remains stalwart, sworn to her purpose.
And yet the dominant influence on this game is pretty undeniable – this is, at its heart, a classic Resident Evil game, with tank controls swapped for pretty strong third person avatar play. The combat, puzzles, and exploration in this game are simply top notch. The puzzles never become too obscure to solve but require a little clever lateral thinking. There’s always the tension of wanting one more inventory slot as you realize you need to carry Owl and Hummingbird keys AND some health toward an objective. The guns get just the right amount of ammo to cycle through them as you play, and your weaker guns never “stop doing enough damage,” making it exciting to plan your loadout as you head into unknown territory. I found it hugely fun throughout, a great modernization of a classic genre, which I honestly had not expected from a horror game with this quality of art and narrative.
Elster looks on at a comatose commander.
What elevates Signalis, though, is the discovery of its plot, its horrors, its unspoken sadness. To borrow a comparison made in the pretty excellent piece by Elijah Gonzales in Paste, “I can’t help but compare it against something like the influential psychological horror film Jacob’s Ladder, which is excellent until its dunderheaded final minute provides an overly straightforward answer that undermines the complicated web of ideas that came before. By contrast, Signalis manages the difficult task of using multiple conclusions to amplify its main ideas while leaving ample room for interpretation, its unanswered questions and evocative answers buzzing in my mind long after the credits rolled.”
Because I like some game critics who love horror games, I end up seeing a lot of horror game Let’s Plays. It’s a genre that occasionally seems stale and like everything has been done. Signalis points toward a way forward into the new. This is a very considerate game that pokes at systemic cruelty, personal joy, and how terror can distort our vision of reality. Using cinematic techniques and misdirection, Signalis is capable of making the player second-guess what they’re seeing, and not in the silly Eternal Darkness “memory card corrupted” way. What elevates Signalis is the respect with which it treats its audience and the intelligence of its narrative.
Hearthstone: Heroes of WarCraft Blizzard Entertainment 2014 PC, Mobile
Of all the games I’m writing about this month, Hearthstone is the one I’m most embarrassed to have given so much of my time and energy. A quick-play, simplified rerun of Magic: The Gathering, Hearthstone is ugly, unbalanced, and largely based on lore I don’t care about at all. I loved WarCraft III when it came out, but I never made the jump to World of WarCraft, so the vast majority of card references are totally lost on me here.
The basic premise is very familiar to Magic players. You and your opponent have 30 card custom built decks of creatures, spells, and weapons. Each turn, you get energy in the form of mana to play cards that can attack your opponent’s creatures or their life total directly. Every turn, you get more mana, so you slowly ramp up from early jabs into colossal game-defining uppercuts until you or your opponent is defeated. The game is in building your deck to be as consistent at winning as possible and defend itself from your opponents’ strategies.
The thing it took me so many years to stop admiring about Hearthstone is its dedication to using the tactility of a collectible card game, which I’ve loved since the Pokemon TCG I grew up playing and collecting, and combining that with its digital format to do things that were completely impossible (or, at least, immensely inconvenient) in a tabletop card game. One of the simplest, “Discover,” gives you an opportunity to add one of three randomly generated cards to your hand. In real life, this would require both players having a semi-unlimited number of every printed card to function – digitally, you can just give someone the opportunity to use this card they might not own for a single game.
like cmon man this is so garish garrosh
There are mechanics that reward having only odd or even cost cards in your deck, mechanics that shuffle five random super-rare cards into your deck, mechanics that require players to only have one of each selected card in your deck (rather than the typical max of two) to get access to a special effect. These mechanics could maybe be achieved by registering with a judge before a given game or by owning a massive library of cards to play with, but they’d be onerous to track at best.
Hearthstone is at its best when it takes advantage of its digital format. Its single player adventures take advantage of asynchronous gameplay to create memorable puzzle-card gameplay. But, over five or so years, the number of mechanics forced a power creep and level of investment that made the game completely inaccessible to newcomers. I think many of its best mechanics have been lifted into other digital card games like Slay the Spire, Inscryption, and Balatro. The game’s last gasp for me was its Battlegrounds mode, a direct riff on the DOTA AutoChess mod that never quite offered anything on top of that formula other than “more money.” I haven’t played in years, and probably never will again, but I’ll always appreciate the excitement Hearthstone showed toward combining tabletop and digital card games and pushing that genre into a new era.
OUTER WILDS Mobius Digital 2019 Xbox, Playstation, PC, Switch
Time loop games tend to operate in one of two models. There’s the time loop that serves as a justification for clockwork gameplay mechanisms, encouraging the player to master the sequence events and execute on the “perfect run.” In some cases, this functions about the same as a quick retry button, but the narrative justification allows for a little more exploration of alternate consequences. There’s also time loops that serve as branching path narratives – if you create one chance meeting on day one and pursue that story, what’s the butterfly effect to day three when everyone else is still on script?
Outer Wilds is not quite either, though there are certainly consequential events and precise timings rewarding attention to detail. You play as a space explorer who, on the day they’re to take their little ship into the solar system, gets locked into a time loop which ends each day with supernova and armageddon. You have 22 minutes to advance from your home of Timber Hearth into the alien landscapes and prehistoric ruins of planets settled by the ancient (?) Nomai civilization. Your primary goal is to investigate the mysteries of the supernova, the Nomai’s demise, and the current status of the other Hearthian explorers. The game tracks this in a convenient journal on your ship and pins questions to your idea map, but it never offers obvious waypoints or quest markers.
The time loop primarily controls the solar system’s simulation. Weather on the oceanic planet Giant’s Deep operates on a storm cycle you can learn and, eventually, use to explore the planet’s truth. A portion of the planet Brittle Hollow breaks off at the same time each cycle and falls into a black hole that has opened at its core – to see that part of the planet, you’ll either need to arrive quickly or figure out how to navigate to it within the black hole itself. The Interloper is an icy comet that travels on the same portion of its orbit with each time cycle – that orbit affects the temperature on the comet’s surface, altering the ice pattern and your ability to navigate the surface.
Floating through the canyons on the Hourglass Twins, a pair of connected mini-planetoidswhich trade a desert’s worth of sand over the time loop.
You, too, exist as a part of this physics simulation. Gravity varies wildly based on your location, and your fragile little body is easy to send into the abyss and back through the loop if you’re not careful. The spaceship controls a little like the classic arcade game Lunar Lander – your body inverts the standard video game jump so that hitting the button bends your knees and releasing causes you to jump however high your body goes based on the gravitational forces near you. Learning this mobility is, for a lot of players, the brick wall that prevents interest in seeing this mystery through to its conclusion. For me, it took some practice but in the end felt natural – I was able to pick up these controls again quickly upon playing the DLC expansion Echoes of the Eye, a new mystery that builds nicely into the game’s story.
And it is that story which I think makes the game so special. The time loop, physics simulation of the game is delightful, but it is the natural science and archaeology that are so rewarding. Ultimately, Outer Wilds is a story about the end of the world – some Nomai predicted an eventual demise, others built into eternal denial. The eventual answers to the mysteries of the Outer Wilds both confront the player with futility and peace. The game’s true ending, without delving into spoilers, is a celebration of life and its ending. It’s a moving, emotional sequence that both offers outrageous spectacle and aesthetic quiet.
Special notice must be given to the game’s fantastic soundtrack. Composed by Andrew Prahlow, the score is a combination of campfire acoustica and synth majesty. It combines the Hearthian’s forest fire architecture with the unknowable mystery out in the stars. The “Main Title” and “Travelers” are songs I listen to frequently. The synth line that begins to play near the end of a loop is catchy and unmistakable without being trite or dreadful. I hope to hear more scores from him someday soon.
I love rhythm games, and I think it’s fascinating the way they create challenging gameplay. For most listeners, music is not inherently interesting because it’s hard to perform. Yngwie Malmsteen is not a more popular guitarist than Jack White – Art Tatum isn’t inherently more beloved than Dave Brubeck. Games based on pop music run into this problem pretty fast, with the highest difficulties basically always being occupied by blast beat metal or hardcore techno. The ceiling is a combination of speed and variable notes that make for a pretty niche listening experience. At some point, it represents difficulty for difficulty’s sake. Guitar rhythm games require being able to powerslide and fingerpick through borderline illegible solos – dance rhythm games have so many notes flying at the screen their order has to be memorized in slow motion.
Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven franchise is pretty notoriously difficult despite stripping out a lot of that complexity. In Rhythm Heaven Fever, the franchise’s best game before the pivot to “greatest hits” collections from the first three games, there are only two commands. You either press the A button, or you press the A and B button at the same time. The speed also never gets especially high, either, largely set around 130 BPM. Where Rhythm Heaven Fever derives its difficulty is precision – the game requires on-beat hits without the sloppiness of some more forgiving rhythm games, and its pass/fail criteria can create brick walls if you’re really struggling to get the rhythm down.
The music itself is just delightful, veering wildly in genre from city pop to bossa nova to hard rock. Because the difficulty is only tied to the rhythm itself, the game’s later stages are able to vary far more in terms of genre, with the game’s later levels including hip-hop, 80s power pop, video game chiptunes, hard rock – it’s much more feasible to play with an interesting rhythmic challenge in a typical genre than to introduce difficult notation.
The game pairs every minigame with a unique, fantastical cartoon that the music is soundtracking. The mascot monkeys that appear here and there throughout the game might be playing golf or operating a watch – Karate Joe needs to land his punches on beat to keep in shape – a cat and dog are keeping a badminton volley going while piloting biplanes. The visuals are absurd, full of jokes and color, and are themselves such an aesthetic treat for playing well. Sometimes they can be so engaging that it’s actually better to just close your eyes and feel the music, but learning the visual cues can also help mark your place in the song itself.
At a time when the odd side of Nintendo’s magic has somewhat waned in favor of iterative sequels and huge, complex games like Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, a game as simple as Rhythm Heaven Fever seems especially far away. Nintendo has chosen to grow alongside its players, creating experiences that are deeply appealing to people who either already intimately know how deep video games can be or who have a child’s time to learn. Even getting into a game of Mario Kart 8 requires building a vehicle, one that has stats, and engaging with that system without attention can result in creating a kart that’s no fun to play. I admire Rhythm Heaven Fever because it takes only two or three sentences to explain the controls you’ll use throughout, and each individual rhythm game contains tutorials to ensure the player knows how to interact before beginning. And yet, without any fear, Rhythm Heaven Fever also throws those players directly into the deep end, demanding that internal metronome be more precise than a lot of the rock legends of the 60s and 70s. It’s a wonderful dynamic that creates a sense of humor in play, matched by the cartooning you see on screen. It’s Nintendo embracing absurdity, and I hope it’s not the last we see of those funky monkeys.
Norco is a rare achievement, balancing the legacy of adventure games and multiple movements of American literature. There are pops of Pynchon in product names and comical nobodies, broken by a culture that has no gods, visions of Vonnegut and P.K. Dick in science fiction absurdity, and yet still the lineage of material reality borrowed from Faulkner and Wright. These pair as neighbors to Kojima’s Snatcher and the backrooms of Wadjeteye’s modern adventures games like Unavowed and The Shivah.
The city of Norco is doomed. The cyberdystopian capitalists at Shield have failed to protect the people who work their oil refineries from floods, drugs, and gangs that have started to resemble cults. Your first player character, Kay, knows this before the game begins, and it’s why she left town. However, she’s returned after the passing of her mother, Catherine, and quickly wanders into a mystery. Kay’s brother has gone missing, and Catherine was investigating something Shield representatives took from the house without asking. When you play as Catherine, you quickly see that the client she’s working for, an online app contractor known as “Superduck,” is far, far more than she ever meant to meet.
We live in an age of “the narrative banger,” and Norco is pretty well read as these things go. Largely, it’s written in genuinely funny, conversational dialogue with people like your local scuzzy private detective or Pawpaw the Ditch Man, who believes Catherine and Kay to be direct descendants of Christ’s bloodline. In Catherine’s storyline, she meets the Garretts, a gang of pseudofascists who crack a lot of jokes about social media, porn, drugs, and the like who are being made to share a name by their leader John. This stuff is balanced against the introspective narration of a game like Disco Elysium, with extended (though infrequent) passages of beautiful prose. One great moment early on involves Kay remembering the three floods that have washed through the family’s home in Norco over the years, ending with a projection into the future of a fourth flood that will be the end of the homestead for good.
All this is joined with a strong pixel-art design, full of expressive faces, painterly horizons, and funny, simple animation. It’s really thoughtfully handled and sets the tone for a place that feels lived in, only for the horrors of technology to make mystic overbearance. Norco is a pretty darn good adventure game, with fun environments to explore, fun puzzles, great pacing. It makes this favorites list on the strength of its composition. Its understanding that black comedic satire and thoughtful poetic spirituality can be married, its purposeful use of moody chiptune grooves and pixel art that feels genuinely grimy, its considered politics and political incorrectness.
Higurashi: When They Cry Ryukishi 07 + 07th Expansion 2008-2022 (it’s a long story) PC
The memories I have of playing Higurashi: When They Cry involve the nighttime dog walks after a session just as much as the experience sitting in front of my computer. The idea of the “mystery game” has existed almost as long as games themselves. Ken and Roberta Williams created the murder mystery adventure game Mystery House in 1980, the start of their storied careers. But many of those mysteries have fatal flaws. Sometimes, they are too easy to deduce, with plot beats that land as thudding “WE KNOW ALREADY” moments. Other times, they’re impossible to deduce, either because the reality is far too implausible or because the game actively lies to create tension (maybe never more infamously disappointing than David Cage’s Heavy Rain.)
Higurashi: When They Cry is a mystery that trades on familiarity. A “sound novel,” or a visual novel with an emphasis on atmosphere in its storytelling, perhaps its most famous signature sound is the cry of the titular “higurashi,” summer cicadas. It’s a sound I grew up hearing in my midwestern suburb, not as lushly textured as the sound of Hinamizawa’s forests and fauna. I grew up with similar anime, too – a protagonist-attituded teenage boy, Keiichi Maebara, moves to a new town and meets a high-energy cast of teenage girls. After getting friendly with them and beginning to develop relationships, he participates in the town’s summer Watanagashi festival, a local tradition with carnival games and sweet rituals. After this festival, however, bodies turn up – an unfortunate recent event is the annual deaths on the night of the festival. Keiichi has been friendly with these victims, too – and, unfortunately, it may have associated him with the grudge that took their lives. Now, Keiichi must do his best to navigate a network of suspicion, often suspecting even the friends who took him in of the violence he fears may come his way next.
I say “often” because Higurashi’s storytelling structure is fairly unconventional. The game is divided into eight “chapters,” each separate executables, and a newly released (June 2022) epilogue. Each of these chapters is not sequential with one another. Rather, they offer alternate scenarios – the first four scenarios, the “Question” Arcs, portray alternate versions of the Watanagashi Festival and the violence that ensues. Different characters may appear, different decisions get made, and, ultimately, different unfortunate misunderstandings set friend against friend. The latter four scenarios are the “Answer” Arcs, and they offer different perspectives on the events of the Question Arcs – and, as a result, often far more information about the ultimate cause of this violent ritual.
The Steam release of Higurashi. Rena confronts Keiichi about underlying tensions in Ch. 1 – Onikakushi, free on Steam.
Each chapter plays out with a fairly regular structure – the first half plays out as a slice of life anime, really dedicated to fleshing out the characters and building affection for their friendships. I can’t stress enough that if you don’t have much tolerance for 2000s anime comedy, this is probably gonna be a tough sit for you. It’s worth noting that sexuality is never explicit in Higurashi (valuable in a series about literal teenagers!) but it does lean into tropes about Keiichi sexualizing his classmates, “RANDOM!!!” humor, and meta gags. In high school, this was the stuff I ate up with an appetite – shows like Lucky Star, Azumanga Daioh, and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya were my favorites. That last one owes a massive debt to Higurashi – I doubt it would have been received the same way without a loyal Higurashi fanbase, if it were written the same way at all without its predecessor.
After the laughter, dread sets in – the Watanagashi Festival has arrived. After the first chapter, you’ve come to learn what this will mean. And you know that shortly after this last gasp of friendship, the despair comes soon to follow. The thriller sequences of Higurashi are among the more terrifying horror novels I’ve read in a long time. The violence isn’t necessarily excessive, thankfully. The quality of the writing allows for genuine dread to instill, and the sound novel aspect allows it to really punctuate horrific moments.
Every Arc is, in my opinion, quite satisfying. The first is very much an introduction to the world, and it plays out in ways that might feel somewhat predictable to fans of the genre. But its primary suspect for Keiichi, a disturbed version of the girl next door, Rena Ryuuga, has a handful of moments that are chilling. And, even better, there’s elements you can’t explain right away. For one thing, it wouldn’t seem like she’s acting alone, but no explanation of her behavior can account for how she’d have accomplices. For another, one cause of death – seemingly self-inflicted lacerations, which merit more detail but I don’t want to spoil – can’t clearly align with anything you’ve seen. You’re left piecing together what you can.
The original Higurashi – When They Cry art. A local cop browbeats Keiichi for his competitive nature and lack of skill.
Those nightly reflections on my Higurashi readings are so memorable precisely because I really was able to piece together a good amount of information I hadn’t previously been told without ever giving the whole mystery away. I’d walk around, asking myself what I’d learned that night, trying to piece together the ultimate mystery. I’d think about these characters throughout my day, remembering my favorite moments, both happy and sad, scary and funny. I really grew to love them, and so solving the layered, quite complex mystery was my full hobby for almost a month as I binged the game.
I’ve often said that the runtime approach to games is totally skewed. Sure, I played the PS3 game Journey for three hours. But when I thought about it for a decade afterward, listened to the soundtrack repeatedly, and acknowledge it altered the way I thought about the transcendental – did I only get “three hours of value” out of the game? Higurashi, even just in terms of screentime, is a long game – I made liberal use of the game’s fast-forward button to get all the text on screen at once, and Steam says it still took me 50 hours to complete. If you use the popular 07th Mod to add voice acting and actually listen to all of it, you’d probably hit 120 hours of game time easily.
It took me three weeks to read, and it honestly wasn’t long enough. Higurashi is easily one of my favorite games ever, and has made me rethink my relationship to games. The novel originally released over five years, the first chapter releasing in 2002 and the eighth in 2006, and then released in the US between 2008 and 2010. It’s expanded into anime, live action films, anime sequels, spinoff games, and, of course, the maybe even more popular spiritual successor, Umineko: When They Cry. I’m giving myself time to live with Higurashi as the end of the story for now – but it’s partly that I know there’s more to discover, more time to live in the world of its writer, Ryukishi07. Compared to certain other recent mystery games (*cough*Immortality*cough) I can only just barely wait to fall back into this world.
A screenshot from the popular 07th mod. Rena confronts Keiichi again in Ch. 1 – Onikakushi.
Additional notes – the Type07th Expansion mod, and the “original” art. The Steam version of Higurashi, released between 2015 and 2016, allows you to switch between the art you’ll see on the new Steam page and the original art, the conversation you can see between Keiichi and a local cop. I am not going to argue for anyone to play with the original art unless they really want to – it definitely has a lot of personality, but, uh, it’s obviously a lot harder to take seriously. I did not install the popular Type07th Expansion mod, which adds voice acting and the art from the PS2 release- you’ll see it in the image above this paragraph. Most diehards swear by the Type07th Expansion mod. I didn’t install it. I personally preferred to play without voice acting, which allowed more ambiguity in a lot of the line readings, and the Steam remaster art is totally acceptable IMO. But I figured I’d make you aware of it, because many other diehard fans would cuss me out for not making you aware that you could play this game with what, from what I’ve seen on YouTube, is excellent voice acting!
I can’t remember how exactly I wound up playing Rollercoaster Tycoon, the independently developed first entry aimed at Scholastic Book Sales and cereal boxes – if it came into the house through the intended method, or if my dad (who was a PC gamer unlike me) had read about it and decided to take a crack at it himself. I loved Disneyland at that age but hadn’t been old or tall enough to really ride rollercoasters or most rides scarier than Dumbo. When I finally did get a season pass to Six Flags about four years later, I was terrified of each impending step up the rollercoaster intensity ladder. My motivation to keep going came from a love of the damn rides (I’m thankful I still enjoy them now!) and memories of playing so much RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 & 2 as a kid.
I came back to the management sim as an adult after picking up RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 in a Steam sale during the pandemic. I often struggle with sim games and creativity canvas games – RollerCoaster Tycoon combines the two. Each park template comes with a scenario goal, such as attracting a target number of guests before a certain date, or to achieve a certain park value in fixed assets built into the park. As a kid, I found many of the more difficult goals arcane, unbelievably high, too distant to achieve. Now, the goals are almost ancillary to just designing a park I’d enjoy spending time at for a day.
While the game’s many “flat rides” (here meaning rides without tracks, such as a ferris wheel, merry-go-round, or swinging ship) offer some prefab parts you can slot together to get started, designing a fun, profitable park involves building some damn roller coasters. When I’m designing a ride, I spend time mentally imagining how it would feel to ride. I have enough sense memory of certain top speeds and G-forces to be able to consider (even if probably not 100% accurately) how the turns, rattles, airtime, and inclines are for the passengers. The game’s evaluation of whether or not a ride is fun is pretty smart, but I’m only really satisfied when I make something that I think I’d enjoy.
I follow a couple of different YouTube channels that produce really high quality RollerCoaster Tycoon content to this day. The first, Deurklink, is focused on using in-game scenery, rides, and shops to create beautiful, detailed parks, the way people build scale model backdrops for their model railroad kits. The second, Marcel Vos, is an expert of the game’s programming and design, testing the absolute limits of what the game can simulate – rides that last simulated eons, theme parks with no rides that can attract thousands of guests, parks that occupy two in-game squares. This degree of expertise partly comes out of the fan-made OpenRCT2 app, which basically operates as an enhanced version of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 you can only run with a proper installation of the game. RCT2 has an extremely dedicated fanbase I’d been unaware of for twenty years, and I’m blown away by all the work they’ve done and continue to do.
I remember listening to the Idle Thumbs podcast, a show run by game developers, discussing the intentional “game design” of theme parks. They talked about visiting Disneyland with a lot of attention toward “the intended experience.” This is, to some extent, true of all architecture, but unlike more purely functional landscapes or buildings, the theme park is meant to provoke the broadest, most directly accessible form of “fun.” Unlike Disneyland, RCT2 is at its most fun when you honor the natural landscape to guide the design experience rather than flattening everything to match your design, so simulating the economics only better facilitates the play.
I imagine most people learning the game focus first on just learning the mechanics of making a profitable park which can complete the game’s goals. But you don’t have to become a wizard at exploiting the game mechanics to reach the point where it’s more rewarding to turn the game into a canvas. I haven’t been able to get into more abstract creative games like Minecraft or SimCity – it helps me a lot to have the sound of a roller coaster chain lift, the screams of joy from guests getting soaked on a log flume, imagining adolescent summers where I learned to conquer the Raging Bull’s 208 foot drop.
Two duelists meet in the battleground. Sometimes it’s a castle – sometimes a waterfall – sometimes Valhalla. They jab, deflect, jump, dodge, and spar until death does them part. This is the “normal” part of Nidhogg. Then they run.
Nidhogg is fencing football. The player who’s most recently won in a duel takes possession of the screen and sprints toward the opponent’s goal. Whoever makes it there first is swallowed by the titular world-devouring serpent for an audience of cheering fans. The other player will be reborn every few seconds to make a valiant defense and stop them, and if they win, they take possession and start running.
This ends up making for some of the most frantic twitch gameplay I’ve ever seen. It’s easy to pick up and play for two people who have never played before, but it’s also full of details that make it difficult to master. The duelist can hold the sword at three different elevations – holding your rapier at the same height as your opponent’s thrust can block attacks, but raising or lowering your blade over the opponent’s sword can knock it from their hands. Holding the sword up above your head leaves you defenseless, but it also allows you to throw the sword at your opponent. After deflection or a throw, you can run faster, but your only defense is a smartly timed kick.
All of this is rendered in crazy pixel graphics. Your technicolor duelist bleeds their color all over the battlefield, leaving a paintball arena of battle spoils as you run back and forth over the course of a match. The animation is so precise and well-animated that each action feels snappy and responsive while also feeling expressive and surprisingly violent. The music by indie musician and producer Daedelus is synchronized to player action, so every game has its own unique soundtrack. It’s a simple game that’s easy to read – playing with friends makes for a great pass and play game.
Video games are so cool, man. I play the sequel, Nidhogg II, at I/O Arcade Bar every time I go – in the sequel, your dudes are nastier, the game offers a bunch of different weapons, and there are even more crazy stages to fight on. I still prefer the simplicity of the original game at home, but the madcap experience of playing with friends hasn’t gotten old a decade later.
A great, impending doom is coming – when the season ends, The Yawhg will come, bringing untold death and destruction. The players each choose a character and, by choosing where to spend their time when, they tell a story of the last season before the great change comes. Each turn involves reading a short story prompt, making a choice, and then seeing the consequences. After everyone’s taken enough turns, the game ends, and you see how your characters lived.
This story is told with a sense of humor. There are vampires, drinking contests, streetwise burglars and vigilantes, potions gone wrong. While there is occasionally peril, your character is not going to die before The Yawhg arrives. The game luxuriates in strange, non sequitur experiences, like meeting an old man who asks you to stand against the sun and provide him some shade for a nap. Moments like these keep the game light and award all kinds of play. Tell your story – and tell it again differently next time.
The Yawhg released into a climate experiencing an independent multiplayer boom scattered across tabletop RPGs, board games, and video games, and it combines elements of all three. The branching narratives of The Yawhg invoke the Twine interactive fiction boom and matches games like Johann Sebastian Joust or Spaceteam. Its beautifully drawn art by Emily Carroll and its short playtime (a four person game of The Yawhg takes about 30-45 minutes) remind me of games like Tokaido and Agricola.
But the game The Yawhg reminds me most of is the tabletop RPG The Quiet Year, a map-drawing game where players take turns in a fantastic settlement drawing random events from a deck and, ultimately, facing down impending doom, the arrival of The Frost Giants at the end of the year. The two games are similar in their concept of offering more life in the settlement than just preparation for the End of Days. The taking of turns, drawing of cards as random events, and building of a collaborative story are kismet – the two games released at roughly the same time and appealed to many of the same people.
But what differentiates The Yawhg and The Quiet Year, apart from The Yawhg automating the process and taking about a quarter of the play time, is that The Yawhg centers on its characters whereas The Quiet Year is built around the community. The Quiet Year actually makes specific rules around not picking particular characters for each player – while you’re allowed to return to pet themes and storylines, The Quiet Year positions the players as responsible for both introducing the characters and creating the friction in their lives. The Yawhg uses its perspective within the characters’ shoes to automate that narrative friction and let the players imagine personalities without feeling responsible for eventually tearing them down.
The two games make beautiful companions for one another. Between them, I see a powerful understanding of the possibilities in the medium. Understanding the two next to one another creates dialogue about intention in design and tone management. I understand this reason for loving these games sounds so niche and dorky. I really appreciate having two variations on this idea, one aimed at the highest level of RPG players ready to create a story world together and take seriously its politics, economy, and characters, and one aimed at all levels of roleplay designed to laugh, look at some beautiful art, and relish in someone else’s great work.
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: TEARS OF THE KINGDOM Nintendo 2023 Nintendo Switch
Tears of the Kingdom’s greatest strengths are in its use of mystery to drive plot, in lost time to create pathos, and its incredible mechanical depth to enhance the gameplay of Breath of the Wild. I found the eventual storyline regarding Princess Zelda to be quite moving, and the dungeons at the centerpiece of this game’s five major temples are clever and concisely designed. Songs like “Lookout Landing,”“Water Temple,” and the new “Main Theme” prove Manaka Kataoka (who got her start writing the iconic “7 P.M.” theme from Animal Crossing: New Leaf will be one of the greatest composers in gaming history. Rather than share the same sort of post I typically do regarding Tears of the Kingdom, an enormous and gorgeous game which could merit an entire playthrough diary and a book’s worth of criticism, I’ve decided to share the diary I wrote during my first days with the game.
5/14/2023
I’ve decided to start keeping a diary of my sessions playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. There are a number of root causes, but the primary is pretty simple – I want to track my own understanding of the game’s world and lore, exploring the narrative empty space the game offers. It wouldn’t be the first time that I started expanding on a narrative throughline and had it collapse by game’s end. Skyward Sword’s Groose, in a heroic sacrifice, seals Demise within himself and becomes the Demon King Ganondorf, destined to battle his friend Link generationally and lose every time, maybe intentionally. Or…not. But that empty space I filled in still feels thematically relevant and possible, informing how I think about the game’s text. Maybe that misdirection was always in place.
Tears is full of empty space, literally and figuratively, for the player to try to piece together a mystery. A being what look like Zelda keeps being spotted throughout Hyrule, only she doesn’t really behave like Zelda and seems capable of some kind of teleportation or projection. My theory, right now, is that this is The First Zelda, Queen of Hyrule, the Sage of Time (so named by the Sage of Wind) who has projected forward to aid (or threaten) Hyrule’s people. Documented so far, I’ve spotted her:
-Silently blessing Link’s arm with Recall, in the body of a Golden Tear. -Receiving the Master Sword from Link, presumably back in the past. -Standing on Hyrule Castle’s ruins before floating away in golden light. -The Blood Moon rises, with new, more confident, slightly fear-inspiring dialogue. -*REPORTED*: Zelda came to Kakariko Village after the Upheaval dropped the Ring Ruins. After inspection, she told Purah and her team to stay away from one particular floating ruin. (I can’t airdrop onto it – maybe an angle where pictures can help?) -Spotted in Rito Village, though no mention of her doing anything but floating away. -Spotted on Stormbringer Ark, just walked forward and disappeared (no floating.) -Seen in Memory of the Sage of Wind, where she’s called “The Sage of Time” and in which she predicted Link’s quest.
Zelda in front of the Blood Moon.
Any of these appearances could hypothetically be “Our Zelda” (would like to come up with a name for her. The Archeologist?) or The Sage of Time, or even any Zelda in between those two. So far, none of the Zeldas I’ve seen since separating in the Tomb Depths acts like our Zelda. She’s more direct, mostly, with the rest being on the marginalia. Our Zelda is prone to tangents, repetition – she’s a little nerd and we like that for her. She’s also much more timid. I believe these are appearances by The Sage of Time, and Our Zelda is still somewhere else.
The Stormbringer Ark legend is a curious one. Why did the Rito return to Hyrule? Did they first reach the Stormbringer during The Demon King’s first invasion? The memory of the Sage of Wind indicates so. No other reference to an upheaval is mentioned during the Sky Temple. Did the Rito people simply not participate in the Imprisoning War? Was the Stormbringer (armed with cannons) used as the lead battleship in an aerial fleet? Many questions still to answer. Winter has thawed with Colgera defeated. I’m a little melancholy to have fully reset the region so quickly, but I don’t actually love snow areas in these games, so I’m more likely to dig deeper.
Other threads to pull on in the next sessions:
-Kakariko Village’s Ring Ruins. Still don’t know what these are. One story about the six sages found so far. Might have to make a priority here. -Hateno Village’s Mayoral Election. The fashion lady is obnoxious. I’m helping Reese. I do really like the hat she designed, though. -Lurelin Village’s pirate invaders. They’ve taken over my favorite town in the whole game. I’ll have them longshanks. I wonder if you’ll have to go around and find all the citizens who’ve left, or if word will travel for you. -How long has it been since BOTW? Seemingly, at least a few years. Zelda built a school in Hateno and took over Link’s house. Tulin has come of age, from childhood to becoming a warrior. Paya is now a young adult. -Impa’s pilgrimage. She left with someone and put Paya in charge to search for something. I wonder if we’ll find her out there. -The Chasms and Sky Archipelagos. If there is some broader narrative to explore above or below, I haven’t found it yet. No quests are really sending me up or down to explore yet. I know the Yiga Clan is in the depths somewhere, though. I need to hunt for some sky quests. Maybe then I’ll be able to upgrade my power supply. -The Lucky Clover Gazette. Stable questline. Maybe the first thing I’ll do is warp around to different stables and progress those questlines ASAP. Give myself some more direction. -Lookout Village. Haven’t really dug deeper into the castle or what’s going on in the village. Supposedly, after the first Temple is completed, stuff opens up in Lookout. I’ll have to stop back. -Bubblefrog Caves. No idea who to trade the snowflakes to. Satori gave me a clue to look for caves. I wonder if that’s still online, or if it’s been long enough that I’d need to return to the mountain to extend the blessing. -Din’s dragon. I’ve seen Farrosh and Lanayru. No sign of the red dragon yet. I haven’t been north of the castle except for the Rito questline.
I’ve visited three of the major towns and activated their warps. That leaves five more, right? -Tarrey Town -Gerudo Town -Death Mountain Town -Zora’s Domain -Lurelin Village
Lurelin is next. After that, I’ll have to start poking around. I did see that Hestu is apparently northeast of Lookout Village, so I’ll head that way in the hopes of expanding my inventory.
Hestu in Tears of the Kingdom.
5/15
Okay, I made very little lateral progress (just getting east of Lookout slightly) but I made a ton of progress on many of these questions. It’s crazy how much of this game is just laying about in open fields to surprise.
-Bubblefrog Caves. I’m headed for Woodland Stable to meet the “old couple” there who collect Bubblefrog medals.
-Lookout – Things didn’t open up *that* much after the temple. Hestu’s arrived, thankfully. The hidden passage under the castle has a Demon Statue and a little loot down there, but until I can break black blocks, I’m not getting any deeper. (Diamond weapons? Eldin power of summoning?) I’ve unlocked the next phase of Josha’s Chasm questing, to find an underground temple and get a power there (Auto-Build?)
-Impa’s pilgrimage. Sure enough, she was right on the path from Lookout to Rito, investigating the Geoglyphs. This was probably the most impactful bit of lore I got all session – the Geoglyphs each carry one of the Dragon’s Tears, which unlock a memory of Our Zelda’s experience on the other side of her time jump. She definitely is operating in the past! And it seems I was wrong about The First Zelda. If the Sage of Time is not Our Zelda, then she’s also not the First Queen of Hyrule. The First Queen of Hyrule, Rauru’s wife, is a Hylian named Sonia. Each Geoglyph has a memory (found in a small water pool on the design). The next phase of Impa’s quest, where I can presumably find the locations of all the designs and add them to my map, is in a cave in the Hebra trench.
-Lurelin Village’s pirate invaders. Zonai Monster Control have been sent to contest the pirates. I’m headed that way next *for sure* after the Woodland Stable (lol).
-Ancient Hylian text crashed down into the Lookout, sending Wortsworth the Lore Expert to Kakariko Village. Maybe this will allow the questline to progress?
-A construct merchant crashed just north of Lookout, offering a trade of 100 crystallized ore (or whatever currency) for 1 energy cell. Thankful I’ve got that all sorted now!
-Found some brightcap hunters and shield surfers all headed toward the Hebra region. And a cave with a “white bird’s treasure” north in Hebra. If I need to make some cash and find new weapons, I should probably explore northern Hebra.
-Hit 8 hearts, so I’m headed for my first stamina ring. Will switch back to hearts till at least 16 i think after that?
-The Lucky Clover Gazette questline seems to have pointed me toward a vision of Zelda riding some great beast. The images look unfamiliar – maybe this game’s interpretation of Dodongo, but otherwise not recognizable to me. (Dodongo are one of the Zelda 1 enemies still not interpreted in this game, so they’d make sense! There are too many not included to list, though, and they certainly won’t add all of them.)
Main quest stuff: I’m surprised, but returning to Lookout has definitely pointed me toward Eldin next. They’re battling a Gloom crisis on Death Mountain, turning Gorons hostile, but the land is temperate and the need for fire-resistant armor is temporarily eliminated. I’m sure once I clear the Gloom it’ll be back in full swing, though…maybe will buy the armor before I complete that questline.
Lurelin calls, though.
Impa’s blimp overlooking the Geoglyph.
5/16
Lurelin draws even nearer! I’m overlooking the swamp now, with an awful Thunder Gleeok visible overlooking the path into Lurelin. I found a pirate ship on the coast as well, so I know I’m getting close. (Unfortunately, given every enemy appears to be a black or blue foe, I may be here waaaaay too early.) Some headway on other questlines as well.
-The “odd couple” collecting bubbulfrog medals is Kilton and his brother. I never really interacted with Kilton in BOTW, and it feels like he’s got a different vibe.
-We are close enough in time to the Upheaval that a sidequest where borrowing farming tools from a stable is close enough to be a misunderstanding. Maybe a few months.
-Found my first Gloom monsters east of the castle. That was…terrifying oh my god!!!! They can take a lot of damage!
-The Yiga Clan have set up shop on the Great Plateau. I got a Yiga mask after setting free a designer. They also outlined on a map three other locales – they’ve kept their primary base in the desert, but also set up north of the castle in Hebra and even further east of Death Mountain in Akkala.
-The Great Plateau also had by far the most powerful shield I’ve found so far.
-I’ve found the musicians and the first Great Fairy! The others are marked on the map, and they’ll require musicians of their own. You can meet the musicians outside of the band’s tour, you just have to figure out where they went. The drummer is somewhere north of Kakariko, the flutist is at the Horse God’s old stomping ground stable.
-Speaking of the Horse God, a nap revealed that it can be found at a stable in Akkala. People looking for the Horse God think they can find the White Stallion.
-The journalism questline so far has been fairly relaxed, but hasn’t helped me find much of anything about Zelda. The Great Fairy seems to think the blonde figure who looks like Zelda isn’t her.
I also found another couple memories. The first was mostly just showing Rauru’s sage power – big fire of lasers, but also saw Ganondorf’s Gerudo forces (and his summoning of the molduga.) The second was more important – it depicts Sonia’s grave (the mural in the intro also depicts Ganon taking the Secret Stone from Sonia, presumably killing her) and Zelda confronting Rauru about their demise. He mentions “his hubris” leading them to that point. His hubris…maybe Ganon came looking to make a pact? Or maybe just peaceful conquering.
Almost to my goal. Almost rescued my friend from pirates.
The south Thunder Gleeok.
5/17/2023
LURELIN IS SAVED!
That’s really the only major event in this session that I saved. Bolson is there and is going to help rebuild the time – 15 logs and 20 hylian rice. That was one long fucking fight.
I also did fight my way through the black bricks in the Hyrule Castle-bunker passage. It was a fun run! It leads basically into the bottom of the castle, what’s left after you shoop half the castle into the sky. I did one more major event. I leapt under the chasm under Hyrule Castle…and, yeah, unsurprisingly, that leads into the endgame. It’s a long series of tunnels, full of black horriblins, shock like likes, shock keese, ice varietals of both of those, and a white lynel. All of the above are covered in gloom. And then you eventually make it back to the tomb from the beginning. The mural – it reveals that using the monster sword, they can summon a great dragon to battle Ganon back. Past that, you jump down into the heart of the gloom, where a cutscene plays and you fight a full horde of Ganon’s army alongside any sages you’ve gotten secret stones. Since the spoilers abound (I already know too much about the dragon being summoned, for example) I figured I’d find this out sooner rather than later anyway, and thankfully now I know how difficult it is to accidentally stumble into the endgame. (How many people accidentally found themselves battling Calamity Ganon in BOTW? This is way more obvious and requires way more intentional travel. Though…maybe there’s a shortcut I haven’t found.)
All My Friends 