Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 5

[You're not even ten percent of the way through this blogging project, and there you are, narratively trapped inside of a point-and-click haunted house, being chased around by some sort of fungus man with a meat cleaver...]

Night Manor (1P, Adventure, Puzzle) "Trapped in a nightmare where you must use your wits to survive and escape!"

[Thankfully, prior to that fictional car accident and waking up in a terrifying, pixelated escape room, you fell into a bit of a WarpTank hole, so we've got access to the following un-edited notes to tide us over.]

OMG WarpTank (1P, Adventure, Puzzle) "Use your tank to regain control of the station and sever all ties to capsule world!"

-much ado about how this is the first game to get a little "favorite" heart applied to it (I hope there isn't a Steam achievement for hitting "like" on 10 games or something like that)

"Master Blaster driving meets Solar Jetman platforming inside the guts of an R-Type factory"
The occasional use of monstrous organic creature corpses as regular non-threatening level geometry rules; sneak in a prediction about how this is a brilliant way to set up an unexpected boss fight...

What's the achievement situation looking like?

  • To give a "garden" gift...
    • Defeat Renegade
  • For "\./..." (are these terminal passwords?)
    • Defeat Big Tank
  • Strongly implies that there will be boss fights, potentially need to push for at least one of those before gushing about how chill and relaxing this one's been

rarely are the real time games so thinky/chill, and rarely are the thinky games so kinetically engaging
among the UFO 50 gamut, blah blah at this point, it takes a special blend of 

  • Do a lil breakdown of how many games fall into each of the filters that count as "gameplay types?"
    • Thinky Play = 25 games
    • Reflex Play = 30 games
    • Interestingly, WarpTank is one of the overlaps, falling into BOTH categories!
  • Would it be emotionally rough to do a breakdown of what % of the library remains untouched against what % of the blogging project remains?
FIGURE OUT WHAT THE TEAL/PINK SWITCHES ARE CHANGING

If this was a stand-alone indie game on Itch.io, it would have a TON of narrative content about how the WarpTank technology works and why your plucky science pilot girl, (with nerdy waifu vibes) has to pilot this prototype against the industrialized results of human/corporate greed; fighting fire with fire, as it were. I'd be sitting through little cutscenes at least every set of three levels. A helpful NPC would have locked out my controls and tutorialized me on the damaging potential of the WarpTank's lateral exhaust jets. Instead, clever level design rigs the odds of accidentally toasting enemy turrets by warping next to them, and the resulting epiphany feels so much more satisfying!

For all I know, there's totally a lore bible backing this, explaining why the station exists and why you need to sever all ties with capsule world, but showing the player anything resembling that level of story attachment is a choice. I find myself returning to that axiom of less feeling like more at every turn.
What does it say about me as a designer that I prefer to be narratively left in the dark about most things, rather than appreciating earnest, high effort attempts to give me the tools to build a wiki?
As a player, I do find myself wishing for the production of 50 tastefully distressed, high resolution scans of the physical instruction manuals that would have come with each of these titles were they actually shipped in the eighties, and to be authentic, those pages would almost certainly contain a lot more lore than we've got, so these aren't simply quibbles of the modern game industry just because the scope of storytelling inside the games themselves has exploded.

"Capsule World" speculation zone:
-----

-capsule-shaped level entrances, capsules as progress
-development theme originally inspired by capsule toys? (what if there's a master blaster tank capsule toy just sitting on someone's desk?!)
-pills & coffee feature prominently; themes of addiction? ("sever all ties")
-eva-like giant corpses lying around, meaning the station capsules are likely teleporting you down to capsule world to break the link in each level

[Fates willing, you'll have found your way out of the Night Manor in time to flesh out and edit the next entry...]

[<= Day 4] - [Fifty Days of UFO 50] - [Day 6 =>]

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Void Stranger and Player Expectations

Image
     After hearing murmurings from Super Eyepatch Wolf and others, I decided to jump into system_erasure 's latest game  Void Stranger completely blind... This is normally where spoiler warnings would be appropriate, but I'm not sure how much I could possibly spoil given I haven't really started the game yet. That's right; I'm stopping to write this in response to playing the game for all of 5 minutes! + + + Void Stranger appears to be a game about defying player expectations. Before even getting past the title screen, I am confronted with a dynamic representation of the simple controls; Up , Left , Down , Right , A , and Start , in black, white, and gray against a field of rising particles. The interface responds to inputs and makes it clear that my controller is indeed working, but pressing Start simply causes it to light up; it does not allow me to actually start the game... How strange. A bit of thrashing around on the buttons yields a minor discovery; did the
Read more

FFVIII Junctioning Isn't That Complicated, But...

Image
    A  common refrain you tend to hear from Final Fantasy VIII 's detractors, (a group I certainly belong to, despite my devil's advocacy) is that its reviled Junction System is "too complicated." That's a bit reductive, and putting stock in stories of forlorn players pushing deep into the game without ever engaging with the system is difficult, given how exhaustively they teach and over-explain it. You can tell your 18 y/o teacher is into you if she slow blinks Heck, given her age and status as a pump-fake love interest, I suspect the only narrative reason Quistis Trepe was written as an instructor and not just an upper-classmate boils down to naturalizing her unhinged level of tutorialization on the topic! Individual spell casts get sucked out of enemies and act like consumables, and Guardian Forces buff you by equipping stacks of spells to your stats; that's about it! Core player understanding of FFVIII 's Junction System wasn't really one of its
Read more

Ahab Souls

Image
I am haunted; kept up at night by visions of an enormous whale-like creature that certainly will exist, but whether or not being devoured by it will satisfy me won’t be revealed for another two months…      The first time I played the Lies of P Demo, I was duly impressed by the audio-visual design and charmed by its over-the-top premise, but the experience didn’t manage to fully entangle me in its strings; not yet. You see, combat is well over 50% of what makes or breaks a souls-like title, (with the rest being monopolized by level and world design) and when it came to dismantling frenzied puppets, I bounced off; the meta-narrative driving this whole release seems to be “Elden Ring is lovely, but the world wants a sequel to Bloodborne very badly,” and so this vertical slice of a Pinnocchio-based spiritual successor convinced me to play it like one.      Everything about the Victorian steampunk setting told me to find a rhythm of attacking and dodging that would make a hunter of hunte
Read more