Ghost Architecture: Sarah Winchester & the female players of The Sims

Here in the Bay Area, there’s a truly magical space called the Prelinger Library. On any day it’s open, anyone can go into its vast space in SOMA and peruse the stacks. There are, inevitably, a few folks seated around a central table, trading ideas and showing offbeat ephemera for some research project or another.

In other words, it’s everything I’ve ever wanted.

A couple of months ago, I was invited to give a presentation for PLACE TALKS, a series dedicated, very broadly, to exploring location-based topics.

Last night, I gave that talk. In it, I hit on a number of my favorite topics: “crazy” women, who gets to tell stories and why, and — you guessed it — video games. More specifically, I was drawn to the Winchester Mystery House in San Francisco, and how it looked a lot like architectural experimentation in The Sims.

‘Tis the season for ghosts, I guess.

Turt Weather

Summer is not the best time for your pal. I exist in a sartorial binary: it’s either I’m wearing something that could be mistaken for a dishrag, or I’m wearing a turtleneck. Those are the only two options. It makes any attempt to be professional during the summer an over-heated affair, as my coworkers look at me through a quizzically as my sweat collects in my turtleneck in 90 degree heat.

This is a long way of saying that I look forward, constantly, to fall weather, for that is when the turtlenecks are in their element and I can live my full turt best in peace.

It also so happens that fall is a great wave of games (see that transition!), and there are a number of titles coming out in September that already have me filing them into my personal budget for the coming month.

Get yr turts ready. Fall is coming.

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LATER ALLIGATOR

Later Alligator is a hand-drawn adventure, put out by the Smallbu Animation, the two-person team behind Baman Piderman, the surprisingly affecting series about two off-brand superheroes. One of them is dating a tuba. A pumpkin accidentally comes to life and falls in love with a squid. It’s in the line of Steven Universe or Adventure Time in terms of “both absurd and disarmingly sweet.” In short: it’s great.

On Baman Piderman alone, I’d be interested in the game. After watching the trailer, I’m thrilled to see that it has Smallbu’s trademark cozy squiggly style and tongue-in-cheek dialogue. It promises puzzles and alligators. I honestly don’t know what more you (read: I) could want.

Later Alligator comes on out on Steam and itch.io on September 5.

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SIMS 4: REALM OF MAGIC EXPANSION PACK

I thought I escaped The Sims in high school. After years of obsessively playing — with friends, by myself, in the middle of the night, when I was supposed to be doing other things — I thought I should put away childish things, as it were.

However, I recently used a local lecture series as an excuse to jump back in. Truthfully, I was inspired by Gita Jackson’s full-throttle support of The Sims on Kotaku , and her joy in play and discovery through The Sims mod community.

Turns out: I still love The Sims. I love that The Sims 4 recognized that players just want to mod the game, and created a specific folder in the game file so you can easily add the mod you’ve downloaded. I love that you can now play with gender diversity by allowing players to customize their Sims voices and bodies, regardless of the listed gender. (They still don’t have a listed nonbinary gender, but I hold out hope.) They still have one of the only robust online game communities that is predominantly women.

And it’s still got a gameplay loop that is addictive as heck.

The Sims has always made its money by releasing the base game for cheap, and then charging extra for expansion packs for things like pets, new areas, more items, or, like, vampires.

One of my favorite expansion packs of all time was the original Makin’ Magic pack for The Sims, and now The Sims 4 is bringing it back with Realm of Magic. Yes, I WILL go to a Hogwarts ripoff. And I WILL spend actual human money adding to a game I already own. Pew pew. Magic.

The Sims 4: Realm of Magic comes to the Origin Store (booooo) on September 10.

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UNTITLED GOOSE GAME

Where did Untitled Goose Game come from? I could just Google it, but I prefer to answer this rhetorical question with how I remember it:; that it sprouted out from the internet’s head, fully formed, after a goof of a post about a year ago. The title then was Untitled Goose Game, and the title now is Untitled Goose Game.

The gameplay is — you guessed it — goose-centric, with players tasked with solving problems and/or annoying locals via honking and other goosely actions. It looks like pure, dumb fun. Like if Grand Theft Auto had a goose for a protagonist.

Untitled Goose Game come out on Epic Games and Switch on September 20

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LEGEND OF ZELDA: LINK’S AWAKENING

I have something to confess: I am on my third playthrough of Breath of the Wild. Link’s Awakening will be nothing like BotW, as it’s a remake of the classic Zelda game originally put out for the Game Boy.

However, this looks cute as heck. I’m a huge fan of the tilt-shift perspective, and the redesign is bright and cheery in a way that will carry me well into the shorter days and longer nights.

And, let’s be honest, it will be a great interstitial for the inevitable fourth time I dive in/give in to Breath of the Wild. Because it’s the best game of all time.

Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening comes out on the switch on September 20

A Brain Teaser

Ah, VRChat.

It’s not that I thought that VRChat is without merit. It’s just that it’s the complete opposite of everything I look for in a video game. Whereas I prefer the slower, more ambling, and (above all else) solitary game, VRChat is the latest generation of manic online lawlessness.

If you’re unfamiliar, VRChat is part of the latest generation of massively multi-player online games that, unlike, say World of Warcraft or Halo, focus less on quests or initiatives, and instead create a virtual social space for individuals.

Its closest kin is Second Life, the once immensely popular (and now fairly abandoned) online community. Within Second Life, members created avatars for themselves, built houses, formed relationships, created interest groups, and made their own economy. It also encouraged a certain sort of goofy social lawlessness: forever etched in my memory is the time that an in-game interview was hacked by someone who made a parade of pink penises wiggle their way across the screen.

VRChat follows the lead of Second Life with user-defined avatars, which run the gamut in size and scope, from busty anime ladies, to tiny lil’ birds, to giant robots, to digital facsimiles of famous people. Compared to Second Life, VRChat’s avatars have much greater ranges of expression, due both to more complex design and the incorporation of virtual reality hardware (the “VR” of VRChat).

Even more so, though, VRChat seems to lean into the Wild West mentality that Second Life dabbled in. There certainly is some moderation in what is allowed behavior, it’s hard to say there is an iron-fisted oversight, given that VRChat’s most popular meme was Ugandan Knuckles, an in-game trolling method where multiple users would use an avatar skin of a bloated-looking Knuckles the Echidna to follow and harass others, all while spouting a fake “African” accent.

In other words, it was hard for me to see VRChat as anything other than Second Life dialed up to 11: a social site that served as another place for the id of the internet to expand.

And I’m sure it is still mostly that. (In fact, I’m positive.) Still, while diving down an internet rabbit hole, I came across a VRChat user named Syrmor. Though Syrmor gained some popularity for a video he made featuring a sweetly innocent kid playing VRChat whose motto was “Do Good. Die Great,” it turns out that Syrmor has been exploring a softer side of the game for a little while.

Specifically, Syrmor uses VRChat to meet and interview individuals who might normally be unable to speak to a larger community, due to access or ability. He has interviewed a man with ALS who chose a mushroom avatar due to his love of psychedelics, a kid who was grappling with being bullied and whose Kermit avatar reminded him of a more lighthearted time, and a man in Korea who was able to get a job lead through Syrmor’s followers.

In these cases, the interviews being conducted could always, say, be done via phone, but the combination of random encounters in VRChat and the weird illusion of physical closeness that VR provides lends a different tenor to these pieces.

My favorite Syrmor interview is one he did with a pastor who conducts baptisms in VRChat, specifically meant to cater to folks who are unable to attend physical church services.

There are some jokes about the avatars folks choose for VR church; in talking about the usual Sunday dress code, one user gestures to another user who happens to have a Winnie the Pooh avatar and asks, “Would someone, kind of, not wearing pants like this not be allowed?”

But there’s also something I find strangely moving about the whole encounter. Sure, it’s an anime girl getting baptized, but the digital church is built to be open and serene. The water is, somehow, beautifully rendered. The one-on-one attention and care is still there, and very real.

The pastor asks the avatar being baptized to crouch down, to give the effect of them being submerged in water. After some talk of being surrounded by God’s love, and accepting that love, the pastor asks the user to rise. When asked how he feels having been baptized digitally, he says, “I feel… like I just had an experience, even though I was just crouching.”

The thing about VR is that it truly does trick the brain. When using a VR device, the brain maps many of the experiences as it would in the “real world.” So, for individuals who may be unable to leave the house, the sensory experiences of VR might provide an incredible bridge to interaction and community.

It reminds me of a piece on Wii and XBox Bowling and its continued used by public libraries in virtual bowling leagues for older patrons, in that it too is centered on a digital version of a physical act that may no longer be accessible to everyone in the group, while also fostering socialization in an under-socialized community.

This is a long way of saying that it’s nice, even if just for a moment, to push past the frantic top-level energy of social sites like VRChat and see the folks using the platform to explore new ways of interaction.

Sure, there may be a digital SpongeBob hiding in the depths of the baptismal pool, but, then again, isn’t there always?

There, but for the grace of Gabe, go I: great games that are $5 or less on the Steam Summer Sale

Every summer, Gabe Newell puts on his mask of Benevolence and graces us again with the Steam Summer Sale. It’s a time to conveniently forget Steam’s probably-super-problematic and near-absolute grip on PC game distribution and that we’re (probably) never going to get Half Life 3 or Portal 3 or Team Fortress 3 or anything involving both Valve and the number 3… probably.

Instead, it’s time to gently bite one’s tongue and dive into Steam’s immense library, because there’s a lot out there for (for a while) very little money.

It would be perfectly reasonable to use the Steam summer sale to get a couple of bigger ticket items you’ve been eyeing. (ahem. AHEM.) However, it seems equally reasonable to spend that same amount of money on a retinue of smaller, cheaper games to keep you company as you plant yourself in front of fan with an ice pop and wait for the cool evening air to roll in.

With that, before the sale ends on July 9, here are:

Great games that are $5 or less on the Steam Summer Sale (in no particular order)

Hexcells Infinite - $1.49

Hexcells Infinite looks like it was invented by bees who love Sodoku. In each puzzle, you are charged with figuring the blue cells on the map. The game gives you come clues to finding them, like black cells tell you now many blue cells are touching it, or numbers outside the grid tell you how many blue cells are in that row or column. You left click cells you think are blue cells, and right click cells you think are black cells, revealing an underlying pattern. In order to progress, you need to make very few mistakes, and the number of times I involuntarily yelled out “NO” when I mis-clicked a cell were, uh, many. I love a frustrating a difficult puzzle, and this was certainly that.

You can also first get the slightly easier Hexcells or Hexcells Plus (both at $0.89). Or, you can do like me and start with Hexcells Infinite and feel like a genius when you backtrack to the other two.

You Must Build A Boat ($1.69)

For whatever reason, I never play Match-3 games, despite the alluring glittery appeal of Candy Crush. So it was interesting to stumble into You Must Build A Boat, which has gameplay entirely around matching at least three cells of the same type together. What drew me in was the addition of an adventure element: a little sprite doing a temple run at the top, which requires the player to match tiles that would help the lil’ runner complete their tasks. You can, for example, match 3 keys to unlock a chest, or match 3 shields to boost defense against enemies. If you don’t match fast enough, you are briefly defeated and returned to the titular boat. The more tasks you complete, the bigger your boat gets and the more power-ups become available. It’s an addictive little loop.

Because I’m not very good at it, each run takes me less than 30 seconds before I need to start over, but the game (charmingly) tells me I’ve won every time, even if I haven’t completed an assigned task. In this day and age, it’s nice to feel like a winner, no strings attached.

Her Story ($2.69)

Her Story takes one look at linear storytelling and says, “no, thank you.” Instead, the game puts the player in the position of a detective, trying to figure out the truth of a women’s story. You discover her story through video clips, but the videos exist in an in-game database and are only searchable through tags. So, at the start of the game, though all the videos are, theoretically, available to you from the jump, without the proper tags to search for them, they’re completely hidden from you. Starting with broad searches (“woman,” “crime,” etc.), you might watch a number of videos that are completely out of order chronologically, but which might hold words that will give you access to more specific tags. And on and on it goes. It’s an incredibly smart way to have a story unfold, and a fascinating way to look at narrative structure.

Papers, Please ($4.99)

I maintain that Papers, Please is the piece of media that made me think hardest about how hard it is to see humanity in people when you have your own pile of rubble to dig out from under. It’s an exploration on how stress keeps people compliant, and how that stress is conveniently manufactured by the powers that be. In it, you play a border patrol agent in a fictional Soviet bloc country, tasked with making sure only the allowed people are permitted to cross in. As regulations become more stringent, and as penalties for getting things wrong become higher, it becomes more and more difficult to keep your moral core. Do you let in the refugees who don’t have their proper paperwork and risk getting docked some day’s pay? It’s alarming how quickly one’s view becomes selfish by necessity. It’s a total slog. It’s nearly perfect.

If you have some extra money to spend, I also highly recommend developer Lucas Pope’s newest game, Return of the Obra Dinn ($17.99).

The Yawhg ($4.99)

I’ve long loved comic artist Emily Carroll, whose work about the horrors of the body and the home feel like something Shirley Jackson would approve of. The Yawhg was put out by Carroll and developer Damian Sommer, and both highlights Carroll’s adept tone at the mystical and spooky, and also introduces a really interesting game mechanic. The player is told that a great catastrophe is approaching, The Yawhg, in a few weeks time. Each turn is one of those weeks, and the player can choose what their character does. Those choices affect the characters’ stats, which come into effect once disaster strikes. (This was later used, with credit, by another fun game: Monster Prom [$5.99].) The game rewards exploration, and has a number of possible effects that might come into play, depending on choices made. Also, you can play with multiple people, and there’s nothing better than yelling at a friend for releasing a werewolf in the town, you know?

King of Dragon Pass ($3.59)

If The Yawhg has a few possible stories that might unfurl from player choices, King of Dragon Pass has about a hundred times that. It’s a mix of a city management sim, an RPG, a Twine game, and something else entirely weird. It makes sense that it totally flopped when it first came out in 1999 (!!) and that it now has become something of a cult classic. It’s very smart, and pretty inscrutable. (Its in-game manual is immense. I’ve read a number of guides and STILL feel like I’m usually just throwing my choices into a deep, dark well.) Mostly, due to an incredible number of randomized events, each play-through feels both unique and personal. It’s amazing to see a decision for some easy money made early in the game come back to haunt you 10 in-game years later.

I also have a deep appreciation for its level of Weird. I mean, it has a monster called the “Walktopus,” which — you guessed it — is an octopus… that WALKS.

Portal and Portal 2 (both $0.99)

I feel confident in saying that Portal is the best modern game ever made. (Only Tetris keeps me from removing “modern” from that title.) The first Portal is absolute perfection, in both puzzles and plot. If you’ve somehow managed to not play or hear about it since it came out over a decade ago, then you are truly blessed. What a gift, to get to experience it for the very first time with clear eyes!

Even if you know the story, you should get both games. At $2 for both, what are you waiting for?

Firewatch ($4.99)

Firewatch brilliantly captures some deep and dark feelings: the paranoia of being alone; the tug and pull of grief; the sense of adventure that comes with looking out over a vast landscape; the attachment you can feel to a voice in a time of need. The story follows Henry, who has volunteered as a fire watch — sitting alone in a tower, looking for wildfires in a national park — following the discovery that his wife has early-onset Alzheimer’s. His only companion is Delilah, a volunteer in a neighboring tower, who talks to Henry via walkie-talkie, but is otherwise unseen. The player explores the wilderness and stumbles across what may or may not be a mystery. Is it Henry losing his grip? Is there something in the woods? Firewatch weaved a story that stuck with me just as much as its beautifully rendered landscapes.

Oxenfree ($5.00)

Oxenfree came out in 2016, the same year as Netflix’s first season of Stranger Things. It couldn’t escape the comparison: teens in a paranormal adventure, dealing with both otherworldly threats and also their hormones. In this comparison, Oxenfree got a fair amount of flack or, maybe, it just got lost in the noise.

Going back to it now, it’s a strongly woven-together story. The player’s main mechanic is choosing how the main character, Alex, responds to those around her. Is she biting and cruel when stressed? Does she keep her feelings close to her chest? Is she self-sacrificing? Oxenfree is one of the few games I played with dialogue options that, in the end, felt like those dialogue options truly mattered. Sure, the story was ultimately going to the same-ish place, but having the characters be teens somehow made the impact of dialogue choices that much weightier. Also, it’s a good ghost story, and had a couple of moments that genuinely gave me the shivers.

And finally: games I haven’t played yet but am certainly excited to

SOMA

• SOMA ($4.49): Why am I including a game that is put out by the folks who made Amnesia: the Dark Descent, that game forever loved by streamers who like to play spooky games so they can scream at the camera? Turns out, SOMA has a “safe mode”, added to the game by the developers. In safe mode, the monsters in the game don’t attack or chase you. They’re still there, and the atmosphere is still dark, but players like me can avoid unwanted stress and still get to the (purportedly very good) storytelling heart of the game

• Invisible, Inc. ($4.99): A turn-based strategy game in which you command a spy organization trying to steal things. Heck yeah!

• Faster Than Light ($2.49): An earlier game by the same folks who made the incredible Into the Breach. In FTL, you command a ship travelling through the galaxy. Games are randomly generated, so it’s a new challenge each time.

• Bayonetta ($4.99): You’re a witch whose hair is magic and also you have gun shoes. It’s bonkers. It’s over the top. It’s really excited about Bayonetta’s butt. Sometimes a person just needs some hyper-saturated explosive chaos. It is 2019, after all.

Baba is You and the sweet agony of the adorable puzzler

For weeks (OK: months), I’ve had “write Gentle Gamers post” on my to-do list. I have the skeleton of an essay about The Sims and Sarah Winchester in my drafts folder, but haven’t strung all the parts together. I have a queue of new and classic games that I’ve been meaning to play for ages: Windwaker on my recently resurrected GameCube; SOMA’s “safe mode;” Outer Wilds; and a whole slew of itch.io games, including The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game which looks SWEET AS HECK.

But, on the evenings when I have time, I return to my go-to comfort games. The racked up astronomical hours throwing myself at the 3 boss cells difficulty of Dead Cells, mushroom-hunting in Breath of the Wild, and (god help me) re-playing Stardew Valley.

In other words, it’s been a season of apathy, with a pathological desire for the familiar due to exhaustion. However, at the recommendation of some friends, I took a chance on something different. I downloaded the adorable-looking, linguistics-based puzzle game, Baba is You, and discovered that there is one emotion can carry me out of the malaise and back into exploration: PURE. ANGER.

Baba is You is a aesthetically bubbly puzzle game that establishes a number of rules for each level, and then asks you to break those rules to get to a win state.

All of these rules are structured like the title. “BABA is YOU” is a rule that means that the player controls a little bunny creature named Baba. Each of these pieces is movable: the player can push BABA or is or YOU while attempting to build new rules. So, if BABA is YOU is the rule, but there’s also the word ROCK in the level, pushing ROCK into the place of BABA makes the new rule ROCK is YOU, and suddenly the player is a rock, moving around the screen.

There is always a [BLANK] is WIN rule on the screen, and the deceptively simple aim is to get to that win through the tweaking and moving of the available rules.

Baba is You by Hempuli

Now, I love puzzles. I play online room escape games to de-stress. I regularly invite my coworkers to help me beat the NYTimes’ daily Spelling Bee puzzle during downtimes at my day job. I even called up my boyfriend, crying in a furious rage because I couldn’t beat a puzzle in The Witness and refused to look up the answer, lest it break the implicit pact I had with the game to listen to its language.

Baba is You is, by all accounts, an excellent puzzle game, with the sort of ingenious design that makes puzzles look impossible at first glance, and then which feel absurdly clear the moment you “get it.”

But within the first 30 minutes of playing, I looked up puzzle solutions, then shamed myself for looking them up, then literally peeked at the guides through my fingers for “just a hint” of what to do next.

I keep picking up Baba is You, but never for more than 10 to 15 minutes at a time. It’s partially because I find the game challenging and partially because I’m confused about my reaction to the puzzles.

Baba is You by Hempuli

I think it has something to do with a certain reverence I have for rules. I am a rule follower, through and through. I wish it weren’t the case; I’ve often fantasized about being a person able to be flippant with authority, flipping the bird to the so-and-sos, free-wheeling my way through life.

But that’s absolutely not the case. I have an ongoing joke that I’m a Kid Detective, which mostly comes from the fact that I read everything (including most all contracts, regardless of their page count) from start to finish, and have a keen sense for exactly what the rules of each situation are. I like knowing the “don’t”s so that I can figure out the “can”s.

Baba is You asks the player to consider the literal flexibility of language and, therefore, the malleability of rules. Early on, for example, the game creates a pattern that FLAG is WIN. It says it so much, that it becomes hard to think of FLAG as anything other than WIN.

So, when it started to become clear to me that a level could only be beaten if I broke the FLAG is WIN rule to, say, make BABA is WIN, it took me a not-insignificant amount of time to reconfigure the neural pathways in my brain that had so tightly glommed on to the notion that FLAG must always be WIN.

This cognitive confusion elicited in me feelings of rage, not at the game, but at my own internal clinginess to “right” or “wrong.”

Baba is You by Hempuli

Even if I might not play through Baba is You to the end, there is something I treasure in this little, frustrating jewel of a game. More than any other in recent memory, it has challenged me to be critical with my routines, and how I can invite in some joy, exploration, and discovery into tearing apart (bit by bit) what I assume are rules in any situation.

The rules that Baba is You invites the player to question aren’t so much the “Keep off the grass” sorts of rules, but the rules we assume as rules because we’ve heard them so many times.

I think back on a time I worked at an outdoor adventure camp for special needs and at risk youth. It was a camp that was heavy on rules and expectations, and often for good reason. But because we got so used to providing a structure for the kids, it was easy to fall into a pattern of creating structure for structure’s sake.

There was a fellow counselor — a real gem of a human — who was careful with every rule he gave the kids. He made sure that, if a kid asked why they had to do something, that he could clearly give a “why” behind it. He otherwise threw out everything that didn’t have a clear “why.” (“Why not let them eat dessert first? SO long as they also eat dinner, that’s fine by me.”) Surprising absolutely no one, his kids flourished, often more-so than kids who were given twice as much “structure.”

I find this lesson a hard one, but it’s one I’m determined to learn. Even if I can only do it 10 or 15 minutes at a time, I’m thankful Baba is You exists to slowly, but surely, rewires the most stubborn parts of my brain.

Cribbage with Grandpas

I have an acquaintance who has a clown/performance art/drag act called Fantasy Grandma. To say that I find it charming is an understatement. But maybe “charming” isn’t quite the right word. Maybe, instead, “comfortingly subversive.”

Fantasy Grandma takes all the trappings of the platonic ideal of a grandma, and makes it simultaneously absurd (grandma acrobatics on a walker!), accessible (be the grandma you want to see in the world!), and loving (need a grandma who thinks the world of you all the time and always has candy in her pocket? Fantasy Grandma is there for you).

For whatever reason, this absurd/accessible/loving imagined family member hits me in just the right place. I get the same feeling from Joe Pera’s stand-up, which plays like an Andy Kaufman routine that’s had all the malice removed and replaced with an uncanny valley representation of That Dad From a New England Small Town.

It’s also the same feeling I get from playing the mobile game Cribbage with Grandpas which, hands down, has eaten up the largest portion of my gaming time in 2019.

Cribbage with Grandpas

As one of my few cribbage-playing peers said to me, “The only person I know who plays this is you and my grandparents.” Its rules feel arbitrarily assigned: adding up cards to 15 and 31 is super important; there are terms like “his nobs”’ and “muggins” used in earnest; there are three rounds per hand, the first of which is called “pegging;” there an unofficial (?) tendency towards rhyming one’s score. In other words, is a perfect game for grandpas of all ages and genders, and exactly the type of game I wanted digitized and accessible while on public transit.

With many things cute on the internet or in games, I had a certain expectation that Cribbage with Grandpas would, at some point, experience a Pony Island moment, where something previously sweetly nostalgic takes a dark turn. But there’s no bit here, no sudden wink-wink to the audience. It never takes a turn to the uncanny. Cribbage with Grandpas is literally just a mobile game, where one can play cribbage against a customizable grandpa of the player’s choosing (hence the plural Grandpas).

The only times the game is interrupted is when your chosen grandpa occasionally asks you a question: how your day is going, the answer to a riddle, if the weather is nice outside, etc. The questions asked are based on your grandpa’s (again, customizable) personality and often recycled, but I found myself embarrassingly and equally affected each time I got a question from my grandpa, taking a moment to pause and internally respond. Did I actually eat today? I’d put down my phone and make myself a snack.

I named my cribbage grandpa Dimitri, after my maternal grandparent, who passed away when I was in middle school. I loved my grandpa, my дідо, but I was little and didn’t speak his native Lemko. I don’t know if he liked to play card games. I don’t know a lot about him, honestly. But I remember the moments of his warmth, and his propensity to hand my brother and I dollar bills when we came to see him, and hearing him sing in Lemko in the other room.

It’s the rainy season where I live, and I find myself in quiet moments opening up Cribbage with Grandpas and playing a few rounds. It’s a pocket universe, where there’s an older figure looking out for you, without judgement or any of the beautiful yet messy complications that come with being connected by blood or time or shared history. It’s a pocket version of a desired warmth, seen through a foggy glass. It’s absurd, and accessible, and loving. Also it's cribbage, with grandpas.

Cribbage with Grandpas

Favorite Games of 2018

In all honesty, I love a good year-end list. It’s not that I’m interested in superlatives, but that I enjoy seeing how people cataloged their year. I’m doubtful that there’s such a thing as an objectively good piece of media (except Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild; that game is a masterpiece), but I do believe that examinations of subjective good-ness provide a lens for examining where we are, personally, as individuals and as a group.

Anyway, here are my favorite games of 2018. I liked them and maybe you will, too.

RETURN OF THE OBRA DINN

Return of the Obra Dinn

Developer Lucas Pope has a knack for highlighting hyper-mundane activities and elevating them into gameplay. In Papers, Please (truly one of my favorite games of all time), the player took on the role of a border control agent, having to process increasingly detailed bits of information in just-as-increasingly short amounts of time. While punished for any small mistake, players were pushed to consider the moral implications of their actions, as well as how tyrannic political rises truly are propped up by drudgery..

In Pope’s new game, Return of the Obra Dinn, the player takes the role of an insurance adjuster .They are tasked with going on board a recently recovered ship (the titular Obra Dinn) to figure out what happened to the sixty-some-odd members on board, all of whom have mysteriously disappeared. The adjuster has a log with each member’s name, group photos of the crew, and a mysterious pocket watch. The latter object transports the adjuster to a still image that shows the final moment of each (though not all) crew member’s life on the Obra Dinn. From there, the adjuster must move through these explorable freeze-framed memories to figure out everyone’s name, what their role on the ship was, how they died, and, possibly, by whose hands.

What follows is a puzzle box of a game, an elaborate visual logic puzzle. Just connecting names to people is difficult, since the brief snippets of dialogue before each scene rarely reveal a given name. Rather, it’s more likely to find the name of one person overtly, then have to extrapolate the rest through knowledge of ship relationships. For every three fates correctly guessed, the game seals those destinies. It’s just enough to keep one satisfied, while also preventing the player from brute-forcing their way through pure guesswork. Rather, I found myself examining minute details (including character’s shoes and specific bullet trajectories), trawling through the few crowded group scenes, and making a few lucky guesses.

Pope received some criticism for the visual style of the game, which is done in a two-color pixelated motif that hearkens to old computer monitors. I had no such issue with it. Besides being unique, I found that this style created just enough visual confusion in a few of the more active scenes to contribute to the pleasing difficulty of the puzzle solving.

Return of the Obra Dinn isn’t as politically overt as Papers, Please, but the relations on the ship definitely lent some uncomfortable moments, as known power structures on the boat become clearer (due to class, race, or happenstance). There was also a deep gut feeling of unease, as the player becomes more attached to the stories of the crew members, only to reduce them to an insurance number, either to be paid out to their living family, or requested as payment due to the crimes of the deceased.

Mostly, though, Return of the Obra Dinn is an exquisitely-crafted puzzle that gave me real moments of exuberance each time I found a tiny clue that allowed multiple small pieces to finally connect.

THE RED STRINGS CLUB

The Red Strings Club

This summer, I picked up a handful of games whose theme mostly centered around artificial intelligence and its relationship with humanity. I enjoy a number of these games (Subsurface Circular, LOCALHOST, and, natch, Portal), but really fell hard for Deconstructeam’s The Red Strings Club.

Here’s a snippet of what I wrote when I included it in my summer game recommendations:

Combining noir storytelling, a cyberpunk setting, point-and-click puzzle solving, bartender games, and ceramics (???), The Red Strings Club puts the player in the middle of a conspiracy thriller about the ethics of forcing humans to obey their better selves. I don't want to spoil it, but halfway through the game, I was sitting pretty tall on my high horse of theoretical morality, when a series of questions made me turn my back on everything I had established up to that point. The game pointed out my hypocrisy, before moving on and asking me to make a drink for the next customer at the bar.

I found it beautiful, affecting, and the slowest of slow burns

A stand-out game in its own right, I also want to take a moment to commend Deconstructeam’s itch.io channel. They regularly put out equally beautiful and touching short games, some of which are later pieced together into full-length pieces. Deconstructeam is something very close to my heart: a group of artists who have no qualms throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks. From this year, here are a couple games I played on their itch.io channel, all of which stay pretty firmly in Destructeam’s preferred cyberpunk lane:

• Eternal Home Floristry: The player takes the role of a one-armed hitman, hiding out and recovering with a florist who happens to have the final patch of earth capable of growing real flowers. Orders come in for bouquets, and the player can choose which flowers to pick and send along. The flowers they pick will affect the people who receive them, through the player never actually sees the result of their actions. Instead they hear through the grapevine (as it were) about the results of their choices, from patched friendships to solidified blood feuds. As the flowers become more scarce, the pain of pulling them from the ground only grows, but not necessarily for the reasons one might think.

• 11:45 A Vivid Life: A woman drives to a remote spot with an X-Ray machine and a medical kit. She’s convinced her body isn’t her own, and she’s not sure what happened to it or whose it is, but she is determined to find out through some self-surgery. Is she going through a mental breakdown? Is she part of some government project? Both are good questions but the game posits a bigger one: who do our bodies belong to, and how are we made strangers from ourselves?

CELESTE

Celeste

I don’t know how else to say this: Celeste is a perfect game. It might come in the familiar packaging of a hardcore platforming challenge, in the same vein as indie delight Super Meat Boy. But it’s not just a hard game that relishes being hard. Instead, it recognizes the emotions one feels when playing a difficult game and feeds that into the story of the protagonist: Madeline, a women with a steadfast desire to reach the top of Celeste Mountain, crippling anxiety be damned.

Just as a player might doubt their ability to finish Celeste, Madeline doubts her ability to climb the mountain of the same name. Celeste brilliantly marries the struggle of playing the game with the internal struggle of someone with an anxiety disorder, creating a deep bond of empathy between the player and Madeline.

Besides that, it’s a dream to play, with intuitive controls that feel hyper-responsive and light to the touch. Lena Raine’s soundtrack is so incredibly good that I’m listening to it while I write this. The visuals are gorgeous, with each new area of Celeste feeling unique and surprising. There’s also a not far-fetched argument that Celeste makes one better at gaming altogether.

Most of all, Celeste feels fair. It’s a hard game that knows its hard, and works with the player rather than against them. At seemingly the very moment I despaired at my high death count, a pop-up appeared in between levels, saying “Be proud of your death count! The more you die, the more you're learning. Keep going!"

Playing Celeste was the first time I tried to play a game that purposefully made me anxious. Playing it, I developed actual real-world skills to combat my anxiety. It’s a form of gamification that feels helpful rather than exploitative. Games are inherently media forms that traffic in emotional manipulation. Celeste is a rare game, in that it pulls back the curtain to show the player exactly how it is affecting the player’s emotions. In doing so, it gives the player insight into these feelings and, as such, feels like a radical statement in its kindness. Celeste feels like something entirely new, despite its familiar wrappings.

INTO THE BREACH

Into the Breach

Into the Breach is a turn-based strategy game that plays a lot like chess, but with kaiju. The player controls a team of giant mechs dropped into arrays of landscapes and tasked with destroying the monsters that crawl out of the soil before they destroy the world. Here, I don’t have a lot to say on themes or underlying messages or theory. It’s just fun, despite it’s pseudo-apocalyptic motifs.

It’s a game of economy: the player has a limited amount of “power,” which functions as a health meter. At the start of each turn, the kaiju move, and the game shows you exactly what they’re targeting. One might go for a building, while another might target one of the player’s mechs. Once the kaiju move, the player can decide how they want to try to ensure the least amount of destruction possible. There are different teams of mechs, each with different powers. One team might be good at pushing mechs around the board. Another might deal high damage, while also damaging themselves in the process. Another might be very good at lighting everything on fire.

Regardless, every time a building is destroyed by a kaiju, the power meter goes down. When the power runs out, the kaiju take over, and the player has to restart in a new timeline.

Each playthrough on a timeline lasts little more than an hour (at most), but it’s easy to want to try again, and again, and again. It’s a game both enjoyed in small bite-sized moments and in long, lazy afternoons. There are more achievements to unlock than hours in a week, and each one asks you to consider playing the game in a slightly different way. (“Can you light 12 tiles on fire in one turn?” “Can you finish a run without upgrading your mechs?”)

It’s a game of more losses than wins, and the looming threat of losing control of a difficult situation is always on the brink. As the game progresses and difficulty increases, it’s more likely than not that you won’t be able to do everything you want (or need) to do in a given turn. So, Into the Breach is a game of questions and considered decisions: would you rather sacrifice one of your mechs this turn (and lose a pilot who has gained experience and, therefore, perks like increased move range) or do you have enough power to allow a building to be destroyed?

It reminds me of playing chess with my dad, and the moment before I would take my finger off a piece a just moved and commit to my choice. He’d meet my eyes and ask, “Is that where you want to move?” Into the Breach relishes that moment when you decide to take your finger off the piece because, for good or bad, it was the choice you made.

GRIS

Gris

Gris would be a winner on its art style alone. It looks like a watercolored animated film in the style of The Secret of Kells. The screenshot above is from a section of gameplay and not, as I originally thought after watching the game’s trailer, from some sort of hyper-produced cut scene. When I first opened the game, I literally spent a few minutes having my character jump around, just so I could watch the flow of her jacket and skirt swoop around as she arced and landed.

Gris uses color as a storytelling method, with an opaque story of loss that leaves the player’s character in a world of black and white. As she navigates puzzles, she slowly adds color back to her world in layers. It’s a simple trick, but one well-executed, with new colors emerging in blotches and swoops and revealing new layers to the world.

In its unique art style and beautiful wrapping, Gris reminded me a lot of perennial favorite Monument Valley, a game which remains close to my heart for quiet moments of introspection and puzzles. However, I’m sometimes looking for a little more of a challenge, which Gris was happy to provide. None of the puzzles ever had me tearing out my hair, but a few were difficult enough to make me feel a little ping of self-pride when I figured them out. There are occasionally optional harder puzzles to solve, clued by glyphs that react once they’re reached. But solving this harder puzzles isn’t a requirement to finishing the game, so they act as a little cherry on top for folks looking for something extra.

With its short run-time and idiosyncratic style, Gris feels like a gift, like something that landed outside of your window and sang a you a song when you least expected to hear it.

DEAD CELLS

Dead Cells

Listen, I can talk a good game about playing thoughtful indies or whatever, but the game that I spent the most hours on in 2018 is, without a doubt, Dead Cells, a game I never thought I’d like in a million years, but here we are.

Dead Cells is a “soulslike metroidvania rougelike”, which is a super-douchey way of essentially saying that it’s hard (“soulslike”), involves 2D exploration and dungeon crawling through sprawling rooms and biomes (“metroidvania”), and places the player back at the start of a randomly-generated map each time they die (“rougelike”).

The player controls the Prisoner, a little lump of cells that makes its home in a beheaded body. At the start of each run, the player is presented with three randomized weapons: a shield, a ranged weapon, and a melee weapon. The choice in which weapons to pick up first sets the tone for the rest of the run, since the randomized weapon drops forced the player to adapt their play style to what is available: if an ice bow drops, the player can freeze enemies at a distance and control the speed of actions; if the player has the assassin’s blade, they’re encouraged to roll and get behind enemies, since the weapon does more damage when backstabbing.

Further, the choice in what to pick up and what to leave behind is a core mechanic in Dead Cells. The player can hold no more than two weapons and two technical assists at any given point in time, so in order to take on something new, something must always be left behind.

As the player moves through different levels, the difficulty increases. The player can travel through the world in a couple of different ways in order to reach the final boss. However, each path offers something new. One path might give the player access to a special upgrade. Another route might have bigger loot drops but much stronger enemies.

What connects any run, regardless of direction, is that the player will likely die a lot. Dead Cells offers a solace: when the Prisoner inevitably dies, they will keep access to whatever upgrades they’ve accumulated over their past run(s). So, each time the Prisoner sets out, they do so with increased powers and access to better weapons, giving each run just an edge of an advantage over the last. Further, even when the player defeats the final boss, it unlocks new ways to up the difficulty, leading to more challenging runs and even bigger payoffs.

The flow of the game is incredible, which makes sense given how long Dead Cells was in development. It feels weird to include it on this list, since I had logged nearly a hundred hours well before the start of 2018. Dead Cells has been out in early access since early 2017 and, during that time, I enjoyed watching its developer, Motion Twin, make both small tweaks and substantial overhauls every few months. With each new patch, they included notes on what changed and why. Often times, those changes were brought about by reactions the players had to the game. With such a long and public early access period, Motion Twin had an immense amount of data on how people were playing the game and where they were getting stuck. So, when the game was “released” this year, it came with all the lessons learned from its past. Like the Prisoner, it too got a little stronger every time it started again, and it’s all the better for it.

Side note: Motion Twin is an exciting company in part because it’s a cooperative. Each company member has equal stake and equal say in the company. In an era of video game companies working their employees to the bone, Motion Twin is a model for alternatives for company structures.

FLORENCE

Florence

Florence tells a familiar story in a way that feels both new and intimate. It’s the story of a relationship, from its enthusiastic beginning through its sad end. Like I said: there’s nothing new in this arc that isn’t also in some Lifetime movie.

Where Florence excels is in its use of medium. Specifically, I played it on my phone (something I rarely do), and was surprised by how well it utilized my phone as a framing device. Each moment in this relationship was executed in a mini-game style. When the characters cooked breakfast together, the player moves the pan to make everything sizzle. Or, as the characters try to work out their difficulties, the player tries to keep a photo of the two of them from drifting apart. Or, early in the relationship, the player puts together puzzle pieces in the shape of a dialogue bubble and, as the conversation continues, the puzzle pieces get bigger and easier to put together, replicating a growing comfort between the two.

Through all these small tapped interactions, there’s something additionally special about interacting with such a personal story on a device that we increasingly use for emotional closeness in our daily lives. Here’s what I wrote about Florence earlier this year in my summer games recommendations:

As a mobile game, playing it on a phone with headphones lends a certain special intimacy to the story that would be difficult to replicate on a traditional desktop.

Curled up on a late-night subway ride home, it was difficult not to feel deeply involved with the characters. Florence recognizes how much we use our phones for emotional attachment, and plays off that technological relationship in crafting a story about connection.

Like Celeste, Florence understands how the player is interacting with the game, using this knowledge to create something that feels supported and enriched by its medium, rather than just told through it.

DELTARUNE

DELTARUNE

In 2015, Toby Fox’s Undertale took gaming by storm, mainly due to one central conceit: though Undertale looked like a traditional JRPG where a character was faced with fighting a world of monsters, the player quickly learned that they didn’t have to kill any of the creatures they encountered. Instead, the player could talk to the monsters and convince them to stop attacking, thereby sparing their lives. By sparing monsters, the game became harder, since the player never accumulated any experience points. However, the “true ending” of the game could only be reached through this pacifist path. Further, this incentive flew in the fact of 99% of other video games, where killing creatures is a necessity to advance the game. (Imagine trying to beat Ocarina of Time without defeating Ganondorf.)

Undertale felt like a game of choice, in a landscape of games that feels determined to railroad players on a certain path. People loved it, including me.

So, when Toby Fox surprise-released DELTRARUNE this year (a convenient anagram of Undertale, natch), folks like me were quick to gobble it up. It had a lot of familiar elements: many of the same characters were there, albeit with slightly different backstories; the gameplay was similar, though with more complex mechanics; above all, there was still that same reminder that we didn’t have to kill any of the characters.

In my playthrough, I was delighted by how much felt the same. What a salve for 2018, to have a game so insistent on kindness! However, I noticed that more characters than usual were reminding me about my potential to be kind. It felt repetitive to the point of pathological. And it started to seem that I wouldn’t have been able to hurt characters if I tried. Where was my choice? What did it mean to be kind if there wasn’t any other option? As I wrote in my original short write-up:

When I finished the game, I immediately searched to see if there were multiple endings, a la Undertale. There aren’t. There’s just one, and it wasn’t what I expected. (Though, perhaps I should have known. Undertale, too, told me everything I needed to know in the first 10 minutes, if I bothered to listen.)

Undertale’s 2015 release date feels a world away here in 2018. We’re living in a world where it might be easy to question the imperative to be kind, even in the face of those who wish to do us harm. DELTARUNE feels aware of this shift in public thinking, and serves as a response to (or, perhaps, intends to question) the thesis of Undertale. Again, Toby Fox seems to have made a game that asks us to examine our ability to choose. It just takes a different angle this time.

MONSTER PROM

Monster Prom

You’re a monster, at a monster high school, trying to get another monster to go to prom with you. You have a certain number of turns to try to win their hearts before asking them to prom. Play against your friends. Watch them all get rejected by the beautiful gorgon. The writing is fun. The game is purposefully dumb as heck. If you play your cards right, you’ll accidentally plan an all-monster orgy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Toby Fox has some questions about choice

Video games, by nature, play with the question of how much choice we have. The player is limited by whatever parameters the developer has devised. Run too far in one direction of the map? An invisible wall might stop you. What comes after this quest? Why, it’s another quest that is linearly connected to the one you just did!

When Undertale debuted in 2015, part of what made it into the tour de force of the season was how developer Toby Fox recognized and played with that choice. Specifically, Undertale took a look at the usual video game imperative that the only way to win a game was to kill whatever enemies crossed your path. Instead, Undertale asked, “What if you didn’t have to kill anyone?”

This choice — pacifism or genocide — felt revolutionary. It both made Undertale potentially one of the most violent games of the year (in that the choice to be violent was just that, a choice of curiosity about the consequences of ruthlessness, instead of a necessity) and also potentially one of the kindest and gentlest.

All that’s to say that today, while sick in bed, I was thrilled to see that Toby Fox released the first chapter of a new game, totally for free called DELTARUNE.

From the opening screen, it becomes clear that Deltarune takes place in the same general universe as Undertale. The familiar characters are still there, though the timeline seems off. Most familiar, though, is the arc: a couple of children fall through a rift into an alternate world, one that used to live in harmony with the above-ground world until ties were severed and friendship turned to animosity. It too is clear from the get-go that you don’t have to kill anyone in order to progress.

It’s also sweet, and funny, and clever, with characters that are easy to love as they soften.

In that way, on the surface, the game seems a little like a clone of Undertale with some upgraded design twists. However, as I played, I had the creeping suspicion that I wasn’t completely in control. I had a feeling that, though I again continued to choose kindness, that something continued to be…. off.

Since its sudden surprise release, there has been debate on whether Deltarune is a sequel to Undertale, or if it’s a prequel, or if it takes place in some alternate reality for the main characters. While Toby Fox might have intended it to be any of those things (or none of them), my hypothesis is that Deltarune is meant to be a challenge to Undertale.

———

When I finished the game, I immediately searched to see if there were multiple endings, a la Undertale. There aren’t. There’s just one, and it wasn’t what I expected. (Though, perhaps I should have known. Undertale, too, told me everything I needed to know in the first 10 minutes, if I bothered to listen.)

Undertale’s 2015 release date feels a world away here in 2018. We’re living in a world where it might be easy to question the imperative to be kind, even in the face of those who wish to do us harm. Deltarune feels aware of this shift in public thinking, and serves as a response to (or, perhaps, intends to question) the thesis of Undertale. Again, Toby Fox seems to have made a game that asks us to examine our ability to choose. It just takes a different angle this time.

Anyway, the less you know about it, the better. Download Deltarune for free here. And if you haven’t played Undertale yet, you absolutely should.

Games for Lean Times

Maybe what you need right now isn’t a puzzle game for when the world is too much. Maybe what you need is to hoard a little, to conserve whatever resources you can scrounge together to make yourself feel safe and secure.

Maybe it’s lean times, with GoFundMes for gender affirmation surgery, or necessary medications left uncovered by insurance companies, or a sudden need to rebuild a home after a rental apartment burned down. Or maybe you’re starting a retirement plan that isn’t “Maybe the Force will just take me away when I turn 60.” For instance.

So, I’d like to continue this small series of recommendation on what you might need right now: here are some games for lean times.

All the below are either free, $1, or pay-what-you-can.* Most are sourced from itch.io, repository of the wonderful and weird and experimental in gaming. Some are betas. Some are the result of developers futzing with mechanics before making a bigger game. Most are short. All are totally and completely lovely in their own way and no less so for being very affordable.

*If you are in the fortunate position of not being in lean times, please consider the true meaning of “pay what you can” and toss extra money towards these creators.

11:45 A VIVID LIFE

Deconstructeam’s The Red Strings Club was one of my surprise favorite games of 2018. A touching exploration of free will and morals, it challenged my belief in my own moral compass, akin to Papers, Please.

So, I was thrilled to see that they regularly release small vignettes on itch.io. I was taken by Behind Every Great One, which told the story of a woman supporting her “genius artist” husband while she slowly falls apart under the weight of making herself constantly available and ever-smaller. However, I preferred 11:45 A Vivid Life (trigger warning: self-harm & descriptions of abuse). The player’s character has stolen an X-Ray machine and is determined to find out why she feels like her skeleton has been stolen and replaced with another. Who stole it? Whose it is? Where is hers? As something with occasional bouts of body dysmorphia, I connected with the specifically gendered feeling that my body isn’t mine.

ARC SYMPHONY

Arc Symphony is about a dedicated group of fans to a classic Japanese role-playing game of the same name. For weeks in 2017, game developers posted on social media about how much they loved Arc Symphony as kids. The thing was: no one outside of these folks remembered the game. Turns out, that’s because the game doesn’t exist.

Or, rather, the JRPG Arc Symphony doesn’t exist, but the game by Aether Interactive totally does. This latter Arc Symphony puts the player in the role of a fan of the JRPG who is trolling through the online comments board. Through private messages, quizzes, and chats, the player gets an idea of the world of the JRPG. It’s a deeply interesting take on how a story can get told. Because what is a game, anyway, besides a creation made between the player and the object? In viewing the (fictional) relationships between (fictional) people and a (fictional) game, the player gets a very real feel for Arc Symphony.

DAVID LYNCH TEACHES TYPING

I grew up on Mavis Beacon typing. Though I recently learned that Mavis Beach isn’t a real person (!!!), David Lynch certainly is (against all odds).

In David Lynch Teaches Typing, you’ll learn all about proper placement of your fingers on a keyboard, and also hear the existential wailing coming from within. In that way, it’s exactly like Mavis Beacon.

I also want to take this opportunity to share another piece made by Luke Palmer, who helped bring David Lynch Teaches Typing to life: his video essay on why the film Snowpiercer is the logical sequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Luke shared it with me a few weeks ago and I HAVEN’T STOPPED THINKING ABOUT IT SINCE.

THE ANNA ANTHROPY INTERMISSION

In putting together this list, I tried to decide on my favorite Anna Anthrophy game, and I just couldn’t. In addition to being a thoughtful critic of video games, Anna is making some of the most interesting games around. I love her ability to hone in on specific mechanics and put them under a microscope. (For example: her use of a countdown clock in Queers in Love at the End of the World, which I wrote about at greater length here.)

I’m still working my way through her games, but here are a couple to get you started:

• Someone on this Train: Anna has recently been publishing bite-sized alternate-reality games (“ARGs”) that ask the player to put themselves into a slightly different headspace while they go about their normal daily tasks. There are games for when you open packages, or when you’re dressing yourself, or when you’re cooking. But my romantic heart likes Someone on this Train, a love story for when you’re on public transit.

• And the Robot Horse You Rode In On: A steampunk cowboy text adventure, built on Twine and full of beautifully lush descriptions of its world. It’s also hella queer.

• Put On Your Makeup In The Dark: It’s exactly what it sounds like.

• Herding Cats is the puzzle game I like when I’m tired of all other puzzle games. Did I expect to be so delightfully frustrated by my inability to understand spaces while also trying to get all the cats? No. Was I anyway? Yes.

LIEVE OMA

When people talk about “walking simulators,” it’s sometimes meant as a pejorative, wherein it’s used to belittle games about exploring a space (often slowly) instead of dodging bullets.

Lieve Oma is a literal walking simulator, where you play a young child who has been brought to the forest by their grandmother in search of wild mushrooms. The grandmother moves slowly. The child doesn’t want to chat. Mushrooms and few and far in between. The pace moves from slow to slower and back to slow.

With a beautiful color palette and gentle woodsy music, I was completely charmed by Lieve Oma from the outset. Those factors alone would have been enough for me to recommend it to someone looking for a few moments of quiet. However, developer Florian Veltman has an exquisite ear for timing, and the pace at which the story unfolds both compliments the aesthetics and supports Florian’s goal to make an ode for people who know how to make space for children.

MONSTRUOUS

Monstruous, as described by its developer, “is a puzzle game in which you have to figure out in which order to use 8 actions to kill the monstruous creature.” That’s literally all it is. There’s only one correct order for the actions, and it’s up to you to figure it out.

Despite its simple premise, it comes in some very pretty wrapping. The animation is smooth, bright, and fun, with distinctly Adventure Time notes.

Moreover, like the logic puzzles of my youth, Monstrous required me to actually get out a pen and paper to figure out the order of operations in order to defeat this big ol’ worm. I respect any game where I have to physically plot out my plan of attack.

GAMES I’VE MENTIONED BEFORE BUT WILL AGAIN

Lost Constellation

There are a number of games for lean times that I’ve mentioned elsewhere on Gentle Gamers, but I love them dearly, and would feel remiss in not mentioning them again.

• Lost Constellation: Finji’s Night in the Woods is a wonderful game, but Lost Constellation (which they made while working on NitW) is stronger in my books. With a shorter running time and a more distinctly folklore vibe, it’s a beautifully crafted story of loss, hauntings, and old gods. Originally discussed here.

• Where the Goats Are: The player plays an old woman who, despite the requests of her relatives, has decided to stay in her small farmhouse and care for her goats, despite something terrible looming on the horizon. It’s a smart, sad story of dedication amid hardship and war. Originally discussed here.

• Hot Date: You’re a pug trying to date another pug. It’s weird and sweet and dumb as heck. Originally discussed here.

• Un Pueblo de Nada: Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero is a masterpiece, and I will never stop shouting about it. Un Pueblo de Nada is one of their “interstitial” pieces: exploratory games that are put out in between the acts of Kentucky Route Zero. Cardboard Computer takes the interstitials as a chance to experiment, and past episodes have been in the form of plays, or phone trees, or art exhibits. This one is in the form of a public access station. They also released an actual episode, showing the same events that happen within the game. It’s ace, all around. Originally discussed here.

---

Hoard to your heart’s content, my friends.

Puzzles for when the world is too much

Listen. I can't afford to keep buying skincare products.

I thought I was maybe it was just me, but given the recent rash of thinkpieces dedicated to Why Millennials Love Skincare, I am (for once) decidedly on trend. And it makes sense. Living in the US in 2018 is a constant reminder of how little control we individually have in the world. Sure, there is power in the mob, but pushing back against the gears of capitalism on one's own can feel outside of our individual abilities, especially on a day-to-day basis.

In grappling with waves of anxiety about our own ability to affect change, it would make sense to lean into small acts of pointed control. Routine and ritual are a security blanket against the entropy of the universe. 

Thankfully for my bank account, I have recently replaced buying acid exfoliants with another tool: puzzle games.

Ever since my hours spent in early childhood playing Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, puzzle games have helped me scratch a certain itch for a small sliver of order and control. Puzzles are problems posed with the knowledge that they are solvable (unlike the problems that come with hormonal adolescence or, say, that of political existential dread). In the moments just before solving, they are like those "perfect fit" videos, where everything suddenly falls into place if you just turn it the right way.

Below are a few suggestions for puzzle games to peruse if you find yourself needing to scratch a similar itch, and ranked according to what level of the-world-is-on-fire feelings they help address.

For when there are a couple of small fires but you're on your way to work anyway because this is just how the world is now: 

MONUMENT VALLEY 1 & 2

Monument Valley by Ustwo Games

Monument Valley is a short mobile game series, wherein you help a small be-hatted person navigate an M.C. Escher-esque world. 

The puzzles aren’t especially confusing or difficult. Though there might be a couple of moments where you try to figure out exactly what needs to go where, the game is more about ambiance than challenge.

And what an ambiance it is. The music is gently tonal, and the colors all seem to be in a perpetual golden hour of lighting. Some of the level design gave me the same feeling as staring too long at that glorious fractal broccoli in the supermarket, with some levels opening up like puzzleboxes on one’s screen.

It’s also a moment of respite from words, instead adeptly building feelings within the player through gameplay. An early puzzle in Monument Valley 2 has a parent and child moving in tandem; every time the player moves the parent, the child also moves. Getting them both to the end of the puzzle together is the puzzle, while also being a lovely nonverbal analogy for the level of bonding between the two characters.

I found it lovely to put on noise-cancelling headphone and open up the game on public transit. While crammed in between commuters, and despite playing on a small screen, it felt both vast and personal, and much needed.

For when you’re taking a moment to ignore the fires to instead stare into the abyss, and you are also wondering “what if the abyss was cuter, tho?”: 

DONUT COUNTY

Donut County by Ben Esposito

Donut County has been compared to Katamari Damacy, except that instead of using a ball to collect objects, Donut County gives the player control of a hole in the ground that grows as it eats up items.

Who knew that eating up the lives and existences of these characters could be so gosh-darn cute?

Developer Ben Esposito crafts a lovely little vignette in Donut County. The characters have witty one-off retorts (a la Night in the Woods), and the arc of the raccoon perpetrator of all this chaos is strangely effectively sweet. It’s a game full of “I don’t need this, but I like this” sorts of inclusions, like the glossary of all the items you’ve accumulated called the Trashopedia, which names each item and gives a raccoon-appropriate view of what it is (“Candle: really bad version of the sun. Tastes OK”).

Donut County’s downfall is two-fold: that half of the already easy puzzles have their clues given away from the game’s trailer, and that the game ends just as it feels like it’s getting started. Just as I felt like I was entering new, slightly more challenging territory, the game was over. None of the levels were so difficult that I wanted to revisit them by playing again, no matter how pop-y the level music or twee the graphics.

Nevertheless, it’s sweet dumb fun, and sometimes that’s all a person needs.

For when all the fires have come together into one giant fire monster and you’re wondering how time can ever move forward from this point:

GOROGOA

Gorogoa by Jason Roberts

Gorogoa sat in my game library for a long while before I played it. Sure, it looked beautiful, but I was having a hard time choosing it first over the other games I had yet to play. But you know when something seems to wait for just the moment when you need it?

In Gorogoa, a boy tries to solve puzzles so as to gain materials to defeat a giant dragon who has stomped into his city. This journey goes across time and space, and the boy as a character is almost always present, but never fully fleshed-out. For this game, it works. There’s an air of the mystical without trying to shoe-horn a “why” requirement onto any of the actions.

The entire game takes place in a four-square design. Each square might be blank or show an image. The player can interact with any image individually, zooming in or out to get different perspectives. By zooming into the right perspective, the player might reveal an item that can be pulled into another square to complete the puzzle, or can change the order of the squares to cause two to interact with each other.

It’s a little like an interactive version of Zoom, a book where each successive page reveals itself to be a zoomed-out image of the page that came before. Part of the joy for both Zoom and Gorogoa is a joy of new perspectives: the reveal of something seemingly familiar as both strange and new.

The game’s default setting clues the player in to where on each image can be clicked for interactivity. I kept this on, and still found some of the puzzles challenging. But if you’re a point-and-click veteran, or someone looking for a little added difficulty, you have the option to turn this off in the settings.

Regardless, Gorogoa’s eschewing of any traditional narrative gives the game a feel of questing. You might not know exactly why you’re doing the thing you’re doing, but you know that to do it is the goal. And, when things finally clicked (sometimes literally) into place to reveal something larger than you thought it was, it feels a little like magic.

For when there are too many fires for you, right now, thank you very much, and you would just like to dissociate for a little while:

THE WITNESS

The Witness by Jonathan Blow

The Witness was one of the first games I wrote about on Gentle Gamers, and, honestly, I don’t have too much more to add from my original thoughts. However, it most certainly needs to be added to this list. For a game that’s literally just a bunch of line puzzles, it occupies a place in my brain and heart.

The Witness was a game that, at one point in my playing it, I felt the distinct need to lie down, even though I was already playing in bed. I was so thoroughly upset by a puzzle that I had yet to beat that I got on the phone with my partner and literally cried.

None of this sounds particularly fun, now that I write it out, but the opposite side of that particular low was the stunning high that came with solving the puzzle, finally, after looking at it for hours.

The Witness makes everything in the game shining and beautiful, because you’re going to be looking at each vista for a while as you solve the puzzle. It’s a game about making you emotionally uncomfortable, even when surrounded by digitally-rendered beauty. It invites you to question why exactly are you so upset about a bunch of computer-game puzzles.

After playing The Witness, I found myself questioning how I approached frustration. There was nothing in the game that told me I needed to feel upset or low or frustrated. And, when I felt the incredible high of solving a puzzle, there was always another (usually even more) difficult puzzle right after.

The Witness instead invites the player to approach their frustrations as a given and to sit with them, rather than let them overwhelm or overtake. Since finishing the game, I’ve also thought about statements from developer Jonathan Blow in reference to a final, non-mandatory puzzle in the game that is heart-clutchingly difficult. This particular puzzle, unlike any of the others in the game, is timed, in addition to being randomly generated (to prevent looking up the answer online). Blow discussed how players complained that the challenge felt unfair with the rest of the game, and how having it as a “challenge” at all felt outside of the meditative ethos Blow had otherwise cultivated.

Blow countered with a question as to why people felt that it was a requirement to complete the puzzle at all. In an interview with Kotaku, Blow says “I don’t expect myself to master 100% of Gravity’s Rainbow. In fact the idea of ‘mastering’ a novel is kind of silly. It must not be a very good book if you can do that! So the fact that we have this kind of expectation of games is a sign that the work hasn’t really been that deep, all this time.”

In other words — and pretentious book choice aside — there is a skill in knowing that we don’t have the answers to everything, that (further) we can be (further still: are) complete without the answers to everything. Especially in this day and age, it’s a difficult lesson to learn. So, perhaps now is a great time to return to The Witness and re-learn to celebrate the joy in finding the puzzles we can solve, and challenging ourselves to see them through til the end.

Celeste & the potential of emotional manipulation

CELESTE

Credit: Matt Makes Games

With seemingly all of my friends on the opposite coast getting married this year, the Nintendo Switch has been a blessing. Every time I am crammed into some middle seat on whatever budget airline will have me, I can power up the Switch and push down whatever anxiety comes from over six hours of pinching my sciatic nerve. 

So, imagine my surprise when, about 30,000 feet over Earth and all of its terrestrial concerns, I found myself so stressed out by Celeste, an adorable 2D pixel puzzle platformer, that I reflexively shut off the system without saving and stared at the black screen until I calmed down.

If there was a list of things I do not like in video games, I can guarantee it would start with the following three mechanics:

• Time trails
• Situations where I'm being "chased"
• Any sort of requirement to be 100% exact with the controls

Having heightened visceral reactions to fictional material is the reason I even started writing Gentle Gamers. If the word didn't make me want to throw up in my mouth a little bit, I'd more regularly label myself an empath, in that I absorb emotions in a room without discrimination. I'm easily affected by any whiff of stress in those around me, so I try to avoid media that knowingly manufactures that stress within me (e.g., horror movies, "cringe" comedy, stealth-based missions in video games). 

At the point in Celeste when I turned it off without thinking, my player's character was having to run away from something, while navigating a complex puzzle that required utmost gamepad precision. My heart raced. My hands tensed to the point that I had to shake them out. I felt truly miserable. But after a few minutes staring at the black screen, I turned the game back on and resumed my attempt. Returning to it wasn't masochism, and it wasn't because I still had over three house left on my flight to the East Coast. It was because, from the start, Celeste was purposefully leaning into these stressful game mechanics to make a point about those feelings inside myself, and I was curious where it was leading me.

In that way, Celeste is not only an exquisitely constructed game, but one of the most empathetic I've ever played.

Short Games for Short Nights

June is around the corner and that summer feeling is coming with it: 'tis is the season to sleep with the windows open, put on your summertime clothes, and pine for those hot muggy summers of childhood with the Mr. Shane's ice cream on main street and sneaking in to Great Pond after dark or jumping off the cliffs into Lake Mamanasco in a misguided attempt at teenaged bravado.

Woof, that summer feeling, indeed.

Regardless of your personal summertime prep, it's objectively true that here in the Northern Hemisphere, the days are getting longer and the nights are getting shorter, and it probably behooves us to spend some time in the sun (albeit covered in sunscreen). So, here's a short list of short games that you can play during the increasingly-short nights.

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IF YOU'RE ABOUT FRIENDSHIP AND ALSO READING: BUTTERFLY SOUP

Butterfly Soup

Butterfly Soup was the darling of itch.io for more than a hot minute, and it's not hard to see why. it's an aggressively thoughtful and gentle game, exploring the inner lives of four young queer Asian-American women. Though the characters' identities are central to the story, in no way are they made "other." Their queerness isn't a source of agony, but is easily accepted by their friends. They attend an Asian-majority school, and reminisce about their confusion seeing so many white people on TV when there are so few in their hometown. (When one character says that the national Asian population is about 6% of the whole, one character replies, "That can't be right. Don't you mean 60%?")

The game is aggressively intimate. Butterfly Soup captures what I felt in high school, when my friends were my whole world and all of our idiosyncrasies became our personal inscrutable language. The fact that Butterfly Soup replicates the feeling of decades-long inside jokes and deep empathic understanding is a testament to developer Brianna Lei.

Butterfly Soup is a visual novel, meaning that the majority of playing the game is reading. There are a couple of opportunities to respond to other characters, but the choices you make are all pretty surface-level in that they don't affect the endgame. But who cares? You don't read a novel thinking that how you read it is going to affect what happens to the characters; you do it to sink into something new.

PLAY-THROUGH TIME: about an hour and a half, depending on your preferred reading speed

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IF YOU WANNA GET WEIRD WITH YOUR FRIENDS: MONSTER PROM

Monster Prom

Ah yes. Finally. An answer to that age-old question: what if high school, but monsters? Monster Prom is a single- and/or multi-player dating sim, wherein your character tries to woo one of six highly-sought-after monster classmates at (you guessed it) Monster High. 

Monster Prom takes a page from one of my go-to wintertime short games, The Yawhg (which features art and writing by one of my favorite visual novelists, Emily Carroll). Each turn, the player decides where in the high school their character should go, with their choice affecting one of 6 character statistics: they can get brainer in class, get bolder by playing hooky in the bathroom, up their charm on the dodgeball court, etc. Each turn also features a brief scene with one or more of your monster classmates, culminating in a skill-check question that will either improve your chances of getting a prom date, or move you further away.

The writing is light and funny, diving into both dating simulator and high-school-coming-of-age tropes. Playing in multi-player mode with friends is dumb fun: there's nothing like when you both decide to try and woo the super-haughty rich-girl gorgon only to find out that, despite turning on each other at every turn, she rejects BOTH of you on prom night and OHOHOs off into the night. Ouch, Vera.

To really drive the point home, the ending credits are accompanied by Mike Krol's Fifteen Minutes, a song that feels like it was made of pure, unfiltered teenage angst. 

PLAY-THROUGH TIME: 30 - 90 minutes per round, depending on if you're playing a short or long game

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IF YOU'RE SPENDING YOUR SUMMER ON PUBLIC TRANSIT: FLORENCE

Florence

Florence isn't breaking any new ground when it comes to storytelling. It's a pretty basic girl-meets-boy story, going from the very first moments of a relationship to the very last. But, despite this familiar territory, every moment playing Florence felt special and new.

As a mobile game, playing it on a phone with headphones lends a certain special intimacy to the story that would be difficult to replicate on a traditional desktop. This knack for knowing the ups and downs of its medium applies to the many mini-games that are interspersed through the story. For instance, I was particularly fond of how conversation on a first date was framed as a puzzle mechanic, which became simpler as the night progressed, replicating the joy when everything just clicks.  

Curled up on a late-night subway ride home, it was difficult not to feel deeply involved with the characters. Florence recognizes how much we use our phones for emotional attachment, and plays off that technological relationship in crafting a story about connection.

PLAY-THROUGH TIME: about an hour

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IF YOU WROTE "HAGS" IN THE YEARBOOK OF ALL YOUR HIGH SCHOOL CRUSHES: EMILY IS AWAY

Emily is Away

There are certain sounds that are forever burned into a deep part of my brain, and AOL instant messager chat sounds make up about 90% of my hippocampus' golden record. They are the sounds of high school longing, carefully crafted away messages, and indentities constantly in flux.

Playing Emily is Away is a flashback to all of these tender feelings. The game exists in AIM-style chats between the player's character and the titular Emily, their high school best friend. Each chat session takes place one year later, advancing from the last year of high school through the end of college. The player chooses how to respond to Emily's questions through a multiple-choice prompt. To make the words appear on the screen, the player has to type on their own computer keyboard (any random assortment of keys will do), which creates an interesting somatic effect: you know you're not choosing what words are appearing in-game, but the motion of typing makes you feel as if you are.  

It was quickly apparent that my tender memories of high school friendship weren't as deeply buried (or healed) as I thought they were. Now, like then, I found myself searching friends' away messages, looking to solve the puzzle of who we were to each other, and for how long we would be who we needed each other to be.

PLAY-THROUGH TIME: about an hour

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IF SCIENCE FICTION MAKES UP A LARGE PORTION OF YOUR SUMMER READING: THE RED STRINGS CLUB

The Red Strings Club

There really hasn't been a shortage of stellar games about artificial intelligence and it's relationship with humanity. (I'd bet that  video games being a medium that takes place mostly on computers has something to do with this.) 

You have Subsurface Circular's robotic detective, examining what it means to have a role in a system. You have the player character in LOCALHOST, trying to convince old AI systems to allow themselves to be shut down peacefully. Both are wonderful games, but only one game left me questioning all of my choices I'd made in the game prior, and also feeling deeply human (whatever that means) by its end: The Red Strings Club.

Combining noir storytelling, a cyberpunk setting, point-and-click puzzle solving, bartender games, and ceramics (???), The Red Strings Club puts the player in the middle of a conspiracy thriller about the ethics of forcing humans to obey their better selves. I don't want to spoil it, but halfway through the game, I was sitting pretty tall on my high horse of theoretical morality, when a series of questions made me turn my back on everything I had established up to that point. The game pointed out my hypocrisy, before moving on and asking me to make a drink for the next customer at the bar.

I found it beautiful, affecting, and the slowest of slow burns. It was a genuine surprise when I wiped away some tears at the end of the game, looked at the time, and realize that I had only played a few hours in total. It's a perfect game for a contimplative and quiet rainy summer night.

PLAY-THROUGH TIME: about three hours

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IF YOU THINK YOU'RE ALL ABOUT DATING THOSE HOT AVAILABLE DADS, BUT ACTUALLY ARE LOOKING FOR A HEARTWARMING STORY ABOUT FAMILY: DREAM DADDY

Dream Daddy

Did I expect to like a Game Grumps game? No. Am I still surprised that a game that marketed itself as the goofiest of goofs "hey don't you want to just date a dad?" tongue-firmly-in-cheek dating sims ended up being a rumination on friendship, family, and taking care of those around you? Yes, I am still very much surprised.

Dream Daddy (like Monster Prom) is plays a lot within the tropes of dating simulators: as the player, you know that your goal is to say exactly the right combination of things to get into your chosen paramour's pants. And Dream Daddy allows for a lot of that! You make a dad character for yourself, who then attempts to go on dates with one of the many eligible dad bachelors (dadchelors?) to try to convince them to date you.

But about half the game also involves your character building a relationship with your teenaged daughter who, along with you, is still mourning the passing of their other parent. The game quickly makes it clear that there's a hierarchy of relationships, and that for the player character, a new romantic partnership is below that of building new friendships. More than either of those, though, the player's character is determined to be a good parent.

Dream Daddy also tries its darndest to be inclusive. Though it's not perfect (Kotaku's Gita Jackson and Riley MacLeod talk through some of those points here), it does feature a diverse cast of cis and trans dads of varying body types and sexualities. No part of their identity is played for laughs besides, of course, the requisite dad jokes that pepper their dialogue.

I didn't expect to like this. Turns out: it's sometimes just nice to play a charming game with a kind heart.

PLAY-THROUGH TIME: about two to four hours, depending on how many dads you try to date

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Want to grab one of these games? It's rumored that the Steam 2018 Summer Sale (when many games are up to 50% off) will start around June 21. So, I'd recommend that you put them on your wishlist and wait to see what Gabe Newell and the Steam team has in store later this month.

Doll, Divine

Whomever says print is dead hasn't told that to the Bay Area. Every other day, it seems like there's a new zine, chapbook, or periodical. I'm certainly not complaining, especially when one of those new periodicals is New Life Quarterly, put out by E.M. Wolfman. Vol. 1 came out last year, and I was immediately in love with every article and subscribed to a years' worth of issues on the spot.

Now, I'm so over-the-moon to say that I have a piece included in Vol. 2, which just hit the shelves last week! You can read my essay, on online doll dress-up games, the fear of "play" in adults, and the importance of The Sims on pre-pubescent developing minds HERE.

I'm humbled to be among some truly stellar company, so you'd be missing out if that's the only thing you read. Get the whole kit and kaboodle here.

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

There are some games whose descriptions immediately warm the depths of my gentle-game-loving heart. Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is one of those games. Early trailers described it as an exploration of Americana, with the player picking up folk stories from across the United States, sharing those stories with passers-by, and watching the stories grow, warp, and change in their re-tellings. 

Did I mention that the player's avatar is also a bindle-carrying giant skeleton?

So, when the game came out earlier this month, I bought it immediately and dove in. All the things that excited me were there. The game's core stays true to its original premise and, in that way, it's an exciting meditation on the stories that are the scaffolding of what we think of as "America." However, it's also a game so unwieldy in execution that it feels like the result of branching bad decisions.

The player's character is a down-on-their-luck itinerant who happens to stumble across a game of poker while looking for a place to spend the night. They end up losing to a wolf-faced man (voiced by Sting, of all people), who charges the character with repaying their debt by traveling the land and collecting stories in a search to find a place where (you guessed it) the water tastes like wine.

The player is dropped off in Maine, with the horizon fading into a seeming infinity in the distance. They then wander across the United States, searing out houses where little "search" icons appear overhead. Interacting with these locations reveals little snapshots of life -- workers sharing sips of water in a field; charlatans trying to con the hopeless and needy; storms that rage across the plains; old houses with eerie inhabitants. 

The stories are treated like a trading deck. More accurately, they're treated like a tarot deck, with each story falling under a certain archetypal category. If the player hears a story about two people whose relationship is strained by one of the pair needing to travel far away to find a job, that story might be placed under "The Lovers." If they hear a story of a boy who dies while working in a field due to heat exhaustion, it might be put under "9 of swords," the card of anguish.

As the player crosses the country, they encounter a dozen or so fellow wanderers (who seem to be partially based on real people, including Jack Kerouac and Sister Rosetta Tharpe). As they camp around a fire at night, the player's camp-mate asks for stories: "Tell me something sad," "Tell me something hopeful." The player then has the opportunity to decide what stories to tell, of those they collected. If their camp-mate likes the story, they'll open up to the player, telling them about their lives, loves, and hardships. If the player gets them to open up enough, their avatar is replaced by a resplendent image, representing the character's innermost desires and anguishes.

For me, the real joy in the story comes after the player has encountered a few wanderers and told some stories and the map starts to include little icons where one can "hear a story." Interacting with these locations shows the player how their tales have changed. The Hessian rider in black they encountered in Pennsylvania becomes a ghost rider, who becomes the Headless Horseman.

I was particularly delighted by a story I picked up in the Northeast of a man, dressed entirely in leather, who lived in caves around New England. I recognized the story immediately as the fabled Leatherman. Growing up in Connecticut, I know his story well: he was a hermit who built a series of small cave homes around the area, and who would travel from den to den, trading and interacting with people who met him along the way (people who, by all accounts, enjoyed his company). He's the story of my home, my American myth.

It's a big ask to tackle the question, "What is America?" However, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine seems to understand that the answer that might work best is, "A place built on fables." This answer covers the wide swath of this country: all of its desires to cover up its past, its Shining City on a Hill desires, its deep-set belief in self-invention and (when that doesn't take the first time) self-reinvention.

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine also makes a smart choice in its broad placement in time. Though it mostly seems to be set during the Great Depression (with its railroad hopping and Dust Bowl-related deprivation), there are stories that span from pre-Colonialism to the 1960s and 70s. It drives home the fact that the folks tales that provide structure to this country are still being re-told and are still defining how we think, just like I feel the tug of "home" when I read about the Leatherman.

In short, at its best Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is a reminder that we both shape the stories we tell and are shaped by them. They are both created by our hardships and successes, and are also used to define those same experiences. For instance, despite how much I sneer at Aaron Sorkin, I often think of that quote from The West Wing where Jed Bartlet says, "It doesn't matter if most voters don't benefit, they all believe that someday they will. That's the problem with the American Dream, it makes everyone concerned for the day they're gonna be rich."

The American Dream is a fable, just like the Leatherman. It's the story we created to tell ourselves, and it is also the story that defines us. It's both the solution we came up with, and the problem the solution was intended to fix. The gordian knot we're trying to undo is also what makes this country what it is.

I'm excited to see a game tackle such a big question, and equally excited to feel those moments of success. Unfortunately, despite the amount of time the player spends wandering the world, I rarely felt moments of revelation within the game. Instead, I was bogged down by very un-lofty issues in how the game was constructed.

I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt, which is why I've waited to talk about it. But even weeks later, and after many patches, the game still runs in stops and starts on my computer, which has never had trouble processing hi-res games. If my computer is having trouble, I can only imagine what someone might experience if they have a non-gaming PC (my guess: not much in the way of actually being able to play the game).

The controls are also cramped and unintuitive. You can whistle in tune with the background music to move faster, but I this meant juggling the W/A/S/D direction keys to walk, holding down the control button (to prompt the whistling), and pressing the arrow keys (to whistle in time with the music), which felt very un-meditative. The camera swooped in and out randomly, and I couldn't seem to control it. 

I also ran into difficulty when telling the stories to the wanderers. "Tell me something scary," they'd ask, and I'd select a story I was SURE was scary. Instead, they'd respond that the story didn't fit what they were looking for. There are over 200 stories, and I was finding it hard to remember which ones were, counterintuitively, in different "genre" categories than what I assumed they'd be. Was the story about the prank-pulling ghosts in Cincinnati scary or funny? I lost track. And then it felt like I was spending more time trying to keep track of these small details, instead of focusing on the bigger questions the game seemed to want to ask. And then I stopped playing altogether.

This game feels like its a beta release. Moreso than that, it feels like the developers weren't confident in the strength of their idea. And that's where I'm disappointed, because it's such a strong concept: a dissection of how we think of "America." 

I feel like its an especially important thing to discuss in today's political climate, as politicians bluster on about who is a "true American" and who is an outsider. With a little honing, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine could be a sharp knife, flaying the body politic and exposing our country not as one homogenous form, but as a complex web of capillaries that carry the stories that sustain us. (For better or for worse.)

Un Pueblo de Nada

In elementary school, my friend and I had a brief stint of popularity when we advertised ourselves as being able to see and communicate with ghosts. One or another of us had received a Ouija board, and we spent long afternoons squealing accusations of "YOU'RE MOVING THE BOARD" and/or "NO, YOU'RE MOVING THE BOARD!" We had a regular "spirit" correspondent (Alice? George?), who would field our questions about our present lives and possible futures.

I don't remember how it got to this point, but someone at school overheard us talking about our after-curricular activities, and we eventually asserted that we could talk to ghosts. Classmates would huddle around us during recess, asking us to relay quotidian questions to our ghost friend.

In my heart, I knew what we were doing was fake, and I'm sure our classmates did too, to some extent. But we were at a point in our young lives where we were surrounded by so much information. Being in school meant that we spent every day confronting new realities about the physical and intangible world. We were learning that the oceans were full of more creatures than we thought, that numbers could be manipulated into complex equations, that the land we lived on had a long history that was older than our parents, their parents, or their parents' parents. In short, we were learning that there was more to the world than we could imagine. So, two girls asserting that they could talk to ghosts was just another drop in the giant bucket of possibilities.

Kentucky Route Zero is a game about ghost stories. Or, rather, it's a game about being haunted. It's also a game that I evangelize to literally everyone, even though it's not even fully completed. Rather, its developer, Cardboard Computer, has released four of its five promised "acts." It's often over a year between one act and the other, and Cardboard Computer soften the blow of having to wait by releasing short interstitial games in between each act. Once, they wrote a play. Another time, they created an elaborate and labyrinthian phone tree. This time, they've maintained a website that is representative of the in-game public access television network, WEVP.

For the past year, wevp.tv has hosted a number of shorts, all of which either were or had the feel of home-made analog tapes, like the kind you'd see on a late-night local television show. Some had connections to pirate television stations, or to famous acts of pranksters jamming local television channels (like the Max Headroom incident of 1987).

However, this past month, Cardboard Computer put out word that there was something special at wevp.tv. Anyone who went over found footage of a woman in a public access-style set-up, talking about characters and locations within the Kentucky Route Zero world. It features guests, showcases of tapes, an avant-garde weather forecast, and (my personal favorite) a call-in viewer with a long drone about watching raccoons. It also, true to Cardboard Computer standards, has a phone line where one can call in to leave messages. The broadcast ends with an interruption. Within the narrative of the game, there's a looming presence of a character named Weaver, a cousin to one of the playable characters. Weaver is most known by the citizens of the game world because she would show up on WEVP transmissions in disconcerting ways. At the end of the video, the "broadcast" cuts to static and a low drone. Suddenly, there's Weaver.

Cardboard Computer also released a companion game called Un Pueblo de Nada, which shows a behind-the-scenes view of the taping, with the player controlling Emily, WEVP's producer. It's Cardboard Computer's most refined offering to date. (The fact that they release the acts so infrequently means that each is more technologically complex than the last.) It's beautiful aesthetically, with an expert eye to creating a stage picture. Thunder booms outside. When Emily is lost in thought, large white illustrations spiral around whatever she's looking at. The puddles on the floor turn from small points of refraction to giant pools of light.

In the game, Emily observes two characters fiddling with a radio, talking about the static in between stations, and the phantom voices you can find there. Later, she watches helplessly as Weaver overtakes the airwaves again, a ghost in their machine. Then, the station is destroyed by the storm that has raged outside during the entire broadcast, taking the people inside with it.

Like I said: Kentucky Route Zero is a game about ghost stories. And it's the first game I've played that recognizes the mystery in the medium it inhabits, and reveals our hauntings as something of our own creation.

I remember a book that I had on my bedroom shelf around the time of my brief stint as a schoolyard medium: The Way Things Work. In it, a cartoon mammoth explained the inner workings of objects in our modern life. It connected simple mechanics to items like televisions and washing machines in an effort to de-mystify the inner workings of these items. (The book has apparently since been updated for the digital era.) As a child, even with this book, the items it described still felt a little magical. Sure, The Way Things Work showed me what the insides of a television looked like, but it didn't describe everything. And so what it didn't describe must be a miracle.

It's no wonder that the American Spiritualist movement of the 19th century (which happened to coincide with the tail-end of the industrial revolution) utilized newer technology of the time to fill their stories with ghosts. Spirit photography and spirit trumpets (large horns, like that of a phonograph, said to magnify the voices of ghosts) were both utilized by mediums to convince others that ghosts were present. This trend continued as technology advanced: people look for ghosts in radio and television static; Ringu/The Ring played with the idea of haunted VHS tapes; and Twitter user Adam Ellis has been exploring what a ghost story via Twitter looks like with his Dear David thread. 

Kentucky Route Zero examines our reverence and anxiety around items that increasingly fill our homes and lives. We're surrounded by little boxes that, no matter how many times we ask "Remind me how this works?" we still never completely seem to understand. We think of radio, television, and internet signals passing through the air (or through us) and it seems natural to wonder about what these signals pick up on their way from point A to point B. It's like being in elementary school again: overloaded with information and knowing that we're surrounded by so much that we don't understand.

Look at the machines that we've built to accompany us. Look at us filling the gaps in our knowledge with possibilities, myths, and spirits.