Spacechem keyboard shortcuts3/8/2023 5) What Remains of Edith Finchīy Giant Sparrow Total Time Played: 138 minutes Like a chain chomp is so perfectly clear what it is and how it works that you understand exactly how it works and how to overcome the challenge it presents, yet it was originally introduced in a desert level in Mario 3, but now it’s everywhere? They just don’t care about anything other than perfect clarity and joy. Mario and Bowser have simple, understandable motivations but no personalities and they are surrounded by creatures and characters with very clear gameplay affordances that make no effort to fit into the world, they’re just there. The thing that characterizes Mario is his gallery of enemies and compatriots. It’s like the game software is made of mirror neurons or something.Įverything that makes this game successful comes from combining the subversion of classic Mario tropes with deft homage to a timeless character that is defined by his lack of definition. It takes your nostalgia and fires it into your brain at a million rounds per second. It’s the simplest thing, suddenly turning your enemies of 30 years into your weapons and tools. The core conceit, that Mario can use his sentient hat (!?) to take over the bodies of specific enemies allows the game to deliver a familiar but wholly new experience - you get to be a Bullet Bill, or a Hammer Bro, or even that weird football player from Super Mario World. It does this by tactically using references to its own bizarre, mismatched canon in short, perfectly paced bursts while at the same time introducing new concepts and gameplay dynamics at a furious pace. This game somehow manages to be an unoriginal pastiche of itself and a totally original joy factory simultaneously. I made this, and it solved a lot of my problems:īy Nintendo Total Time Played: 1638 minutes Because there’s always room for improvement and there’s always satisfaction in making a machine to solve a problem. Because there’s always that one fucking friend with a doctorate in computer science and a masters in philosophy who’s SO SMART and you can never beat his solutions. Is this a dystopian future that Zachtronics is trying to warn us about? That in the future we’re all going to be part of some kind of species-scale mechanical turk that’s madly trying to solve problems in the most efficient way possible for a force beyond our ken? Or are they taking full advantage of the medium by giving us the tools to solve problems that can’t exist in the real world, to teach us how to think, to teach us that the only way to succeed is to try, to fail, to succeed, to try again, to learn, to optimize, and to never give up until you’re at the top of the leaderboard. It’s very challenging puzzle solving that requires creativity and lateral thinking - but at the end of the day the games are training you to solve a very specific set of problems. Shenzen I/O is explicit in this regard you play as an outsourcer for a Chinese corporation building circuits. Zachtronics has consistently produced a very specific game there’s an ethos and a philosophy underlying all of their work, but the question is, is it a warning or is it a belief? There’s no getting around it - Opus Magnum is work, like TIS-100, Spacechem, and Infinifactory before it. This is one of those games.īy Zachtronics Total Time Played: 1596 minutes Very few games objectively prove that the manner in which we engage with this medium differs from all other previous mediums - by examining every relationship involved in the mechanism of interaction. Very few games can make you step back and ask you what it means to play a game, to actually be unconsciously conscious of the mental prosthetic you are using as an information delivery loop. Very few games can re-organize your relationship to the idea of a “game”. 2) OneShotīy Little Cat Feet Total Time Played: 282 Minutes It is beautiful and perfect, and I loved it. It also aligned with a deep need that I had for quiet and solitude, contemplation and escape right at a time when I craved it most. ![]() ![]() ![]() I want to find some way to express my unique point of view on this game, but everything I can think to say about it has already been said, better, by someone smarter than me.īreath of the Wild perfectly aligns with my interests and philosophies about game design. It’s objectively true to me that this is the best game of the year. You can find detailed information here 1) The Legend of Zelda - Breath of the Wildīy Nintendo Total Time Played: 3088 minutes This year I played 194 games for a total of 59317 minutes. Your definitive guide to the year that was
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