+1 for Frog Fractions. I finished in about an hour. Cannot tell you much without spoilers, but I can say it’s not one of those surprise horror games. It looks like a kid-friendly game and at least content-wise stays kid-friendly.
Already gaming on Linux, but I have not tried third party tools and this article’s explanation of how to is pretty useful for if I ever do. As well as the explanation on why you need compatibility tools in the first place. I have just always taken “the exact software for one OS might not immediately run on the other” as a given. (In other words, I might as well be a newbie given how much I know: not everything the article had.) Thanks for sharing!
I got lost a few times in that game as a kid. I do not htink it is too bad these days. I think it was a matter of being put in a significantly larger world from what we were used to.
I’ve played it so many times at this point, I think I could navigate it without enemies or needing to click on consoles it with my eyes closed.
Recently bought and played Minecraft. What I enjoy is playing singleplayer while also doing roleplay in my head and making up story and conversation between me and villagers.
I would say many games with procedural generated worlds, like Minecraft, No Man’s Sky, etc. Where the main task is deciding where do I go next, where do I settle down, maybe there is some better place over the next hill, next planet, etc.
There are other games, where it is also sometimes not quite clear what to do next. Like games have a lot of progression and rebuilding of stuff that was done before because of it. Like Satisfactory, Factorio, etc.
And on a more literal sense, where you actually redo the game over and over to progress, like The Stanley Parable or Outer Wilds.
Some games have a very labyrinthine level design, where it also isn’t really clear what to do next, like Dark Souls, Subnautica, etc.
Or environment puzzles, where you have to figure out how to progress, like the Myst series, Riven, etc.
Open ended games, like Minecraft and NMS , can be really hard for people who only play ‘on rails’ type games to wrap their minds around. ‘Whats the point?’, the same one as in living your life.
Also, personal opinion, Stanley Parable is NOT a game. It is a walking simulator with a bunch of bad philosophy thrown in.
Wherever Stanley Parable is a game or not, isn’t really important. Someone could make the argument that open ended games, without a clear winning or completion state aren’t games, but instead simulations.
Someone could argue that the winning or completion state of Stanley Parable is seeing all endings.
Other people say that to be a game, you need some kind of adversary or challenge to overcome, but that would depend on the definition of challenge. Is figuring out what to do in order to see a ending you haven’t seen before a challenge? If not, that would exclude many other genres.
So I just do not want to down the road of making useless distinctions, and be liberal in my understanding of words, and just ask if something is not clear.
I just call Stanley Parable a game, because the creators call it a game, you can buy it and games similar to it for game consoles and on Steam under the game category. Wherever you can or cannot find enjoyment in experiencing it, does not depend on wherever it is a game or not.
Came looking for someone to say Minecraft. If I’m not good about intentionally placing landmarks and the like I can get myself lost very easily. And sometimes even when I do place landmarks and write down the coordinates of my starting place! I have to tryhard on keeping directions, placing markers everywhere, on crafting maps with a little icon that shows where I am, to prevent getting lost when exploring. Admittedly I am not the greatest with directions in real life.
As an old game player. If I stop and think about it, I really hate that I get frustrated /bored if I’m playing a game that doesn’t tell you what to do / where to go at every moment.
To me I’ve feel like I’ve lost my sense of adventure.
Maybe it’s also a time factor too, I don’t have the same amount of time to play when I was a kid.
Having said that, game design certainly has improved over the years and lessons learned in what not to do when it comes to level design!
Yeah I wonder how much of it is we’ve gotten used to having quest markers all over the place to tell us where to go and just need to have the option of turning them off and rewiring ourselves… Or I just don’t have the patience anymore? Haha
My ass repeatedly reset games I had beaten or got close to beating, especially if I was stuck. I was especially guilty of this with Pokemon games, where I would just reset if I couldn’t get past a certain point (didn’t find the strength TM in BW so couldn’t fight Team Plasma), I beat PMD Gates to Infinity like 4 times lol. I grinded so hard on Platinum Victory Road in an attempt to beat the elite 4, that I found my first ever shiny from ruining the local Rydon population.
I’m far too tired to do that shit now, I felt depressed going from Octopath I to Octopath II because I have to grind again and I’m broke 😅
Turok 1? Cause IIRC there’s only a couple areas where I feel you can get stuck unless you really think about things. For the most part you just explore all parts of the map until you find the right place to go.
The one that first comes to mind is the level where you’ve got to find a bunch of switches to raises “stairs” over a pit of lava. Again, IIRC. The other one is a place where you’ve got to know that falling off the cliff won’t kill you. But IIRC you can see the tree tops in that area which you wouldn’t see in an area where falling will kill you.
Yeah, the maze with button platforms is catacombs, that was definitely the one that had me stuck the longest time. Partly because of the maze-like structure and partly because it relies on a few climbable walls that are a lot less obvious than the usual and a very missable teleport tile.
There’s also plenty of places especially in treetop village where I was like “how the fuck am I supposed to go there?”. Turns out none of them is really necessary (and some might just not be normally accessible, even though they have items?) but that’s still confusing.
And even though I didn’t get lost too bad in it, Final confrontation surprised me. From the name I went into it expecting maybe a short level and the boss fight. That thing took forever to go through. I even had multiple moments where I was like, “lots of ammo, music is becoming ominous, here we are, boss fight”… And… No. Just another room full of enemies.
If you want to produce the sensation of being trapped you have to use the feeling of power and loss. It stems from the sense of ‘If I could just…’ If I could just get out there, I could defeat that henchman for him. If I could just get out there, I could solve that riddle for him. If I could just escape this box, all would be fixed.
Now, the trick is, because this is a video game, players have a reduced sense of agency. The player’s sense of capacity is ‘what happens when you hit the button.’ Mario, before more modern adaptations, had a capacity to move left and right, jump, run, and ‘use ability.’ The player never had the ability to do anything else, so it never feels like a limitation. No one ever said, ‘playing Mario makes me feel trapped because I could beat Bowser if I could just access the cannon that’s right over there.’
So, to produce the feeling of confinement, one must create the sense of power, and then take it away. Give the player enough power that they could even defeat the dragon, but then take it from them so they feel limited. If you can find a way to make it feel like it’s not even forced, as in they feel like they could have won the game in Act 1, Scene 1, but their lack of skills as a player were what made them lose, all the better.
Would that be your classic ‘meant to lose’ fight, usually against the big bad, which is technically winnable but the vast majority of players will lose and progress the story as planned? The example that comes to mind is Ghost of Tsushima, but it crops up in plenty of games.
It can be that. Never played Ghosts so I don’t know about that one in particular. Some games do other things with it, but that sort of thing is absolutely usable to create that ‘trapped’ feeling.
I’m a fan of taking turns “driving” for slower paced logic or puzzle games. Titles that come to mind:
Myst
Curse of the Golden Idol
Summertime Madness
Chants of Sennar
Superliminal
Viewfinder
Baba is You
I can highly recommend all of these as they almost universally benefit from more minds working on them together. I would say Baba is the only one that gets REALLY challenging, but there are good mind and logic bending puzzles throughout them all!
EDIT: I’ll also add that Myst, Golden Idol, and Chants of Sennar (Summertime Madness maybe a little) all benefit from solid note taking and map making This provides a great job for the “copilot” while the other person is managing the actual input device.
My girlfriend and I do the same but with more simplistic story heavy games. We just finished Slay The Princess and it was an amazing experience like this.
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