I'm trying to do too many things at once, and it feels really good.
Here's a quick list of stuff in my head:
So, I guess that's to say: I'm filling myself and hoping that a sense of self emerges. Speaking of which, I played two games that were not on the above list of stuff to do, recently. I played Blue Prince and I played Indika. I wanna share my thoughts with you.
Blue Prince, which is being talked about considerably right now, was kind of pathetic. On a technical level it was doing some really cool and interesting things, the loop ceased to be fun about 5 hours in. If you're unfamiliar, the game is like this: it has a roguelike resource management gameplay loop, in which you draft smallscale room puzzles from a large pool, three at a time. Some groups of room puzzles have "synergy" in either a puzzle axis (two rooms or more rooms are needed to complete one puzzle) or a resource management axis. As you place rooms on a grid, you deplete rooms from your draft pool. Rooms have various configurations of exits: exits can lead to empty spaces, which allow you to draft additional rooms, the exits of two adjacent rooms can be aligned to link them, and the exits can become dead-ends if blocked by an adjacent room's wall.
The primary tensions lies in both resource management and in gambling. You expend "steps" to traverse rooms, you expend "keys" to unlock exits which allows you to draft new rooms, you expend "gems" in order to pay additional costs on higher-value rooms when drafted, you expend "dice" in order to reroll drafts for better room selection, and you expend exits as you attempt to build out the map and are forced into corners. Running out of steps automatically ends a run. Running out of available exits soft-locks a run. Running out of keys increases the chance that a run will end, as possible exits get more and more likely to be locked as you advance through the game.
It's an incredibly fun puzzle game for about five hours during the first stages of investigation; however, there comes a point where it loses its charm. Puzzle games that I enjoy lock me out of gameplay by exceeding my ability to wrap my head around them. I enjoyed The Witness, I enjoyed Obduction, I enjoyed the platform, physics bullshit of Portal. Blue Prince isn't like that though. At the five hour mark, I had built up a beginner understanding of the mytery of the game and assembled a list of tasks I wanted to try and complete. And thus began a slog through hours of 10-30 minute runs where I was essentially rolling dice in the hopes that two rooms would appear side by side.
At no point was I really tearing my hair out over how to complete a puzzle, or throwing my hands up in defeat, like "okay, I get it, you're smarter than me!". There were objectives that were completely clear to me, and my mastery of the resource-management aspects of the game was sharp enough to keep runs going well into the 30 minute range, searching and praying for the right rooms to show up, doing everything I could to increase my chances. The amount of bad-luck I experienced has pushed me out of playing it further after about the 12 hour mark.
Still 30 bucks for 5 really solid hours of entertainment was alright. I just wish I hadn't tried to puzzle-game bash my head against it for all that additional time.
Indika, on the other hand, I would call excellent.
It's a beautiful, third-person adventure platformer about a russian orthodox nun in a fantastic world-war I era Russia. Indika is probably about 5 hours or so of pretty generic gameplay, but the gameplay feels like a vehicle for style and narrative that are the core of the experience. The game asks direct questions about faith and God, and what is free will anyway? It marries acts of religious observance to a points-based system that implies a gamification of the Christian soul, and at the end of the game it clearly and openly states a position on the final worth of these observances.
Part of me also feels like: am I actually a smart & thinking person? I think most of the time I act on instinct, not according to any great plan but just based on my predictive experience. Do I just have good luck? Have my experiences just trained me into a statistically successful pattern of behavior? Day-to-day, I don't think very clearly. I get lost in my kitchen, in the middle of tasks not knowing what to do, my floors pile up with dirty laundry and coats I throw off as soon as I get home. At work, if one of my bosses asked me a question, I would know intuitively which lie to tell to navigate that singular conversation, but I feel like an animal driven by instinct.
I guess those kinds of questions are a big reason I liked Indika. I can't really feel confident that even if the answers come out of my mouth, that I'm the one answering them.