A COLLECTION ASIDE

It’s definitely possible that MEGHANN O’NEILL is getting soft in her middle age, but she found a lot of the following games to be unreasonably difficult, mostly in challenging, frustrating, surprise dying, “learn to play” kinds of ways. Luckily, those are all the things she finds fun, in medium sized doses. It’s also lucky that there was at least one purely fun game in the collection, because there probably actually are only so many words you can type into a recalcitrant parser. Please consider your own preferences for fun as you decide which of these games are for you.

PLEASE, TOUCH THE ARTWORK DEVELOPER Thomas Waterzooi PRICE $1-4.50 + DLC WEBSITE store.steampowered.com/app/1097100/Please_Touch_The_Artwork

Art galleries are the only place my husband and I argue. We nearly broke up at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, over our divergent interpretations of modernist sculpture. One thing I think we can all agree on, however, is that Piet Mondrian’s abstract geometric paintings were begging to be made into a puzzle game. Please, Touch the Artwork consists of three galleries, which are inspired by the artworks Composition with Large Red Plane, Yellow, Black, Grey and Blue (1921), Victory Boogie Woogie (1944), and New York City (1942).

Things get surprisingly difficult across more than 150 levels, the first of which require dragging lines and filling colours, by solving the order in which each puzzle piece is presented. Lines have a defined direction, from a point, and colours are filled adjacently to your cursor. It’s abstract, but makes sense, after some experimentation. Boogie Woogie requires squares to navigate to square shaped holes, via the rotating of other squares. New York is a bit like playing Snake in a maze, with poetry. I enjoyed this gallery, but my eyes got tired really quickly. So many lines.

Designer, Thomas Waterzooi, tells me that most of the game is procedurally generated. I didn’t pick it, although I did notice stems in the soundtrack that dropped in and out contextually. Another interesting thing about Please, Touch the Artwork is that the puzzles are so obscure, if you come back to it after a few weeks, you may have completely forgotten how to play. Like I did. Perhaps aim to beat a few levels each night, in place of your Sudoku or crossword habit. I’m very sure this intersection of art and puzzle is good for one’s mental acuity, if not marital harmony.

BETRAYED ALLIANCE BOOK 1 DEVELOPER Slattstudio PRICE Free AVAILABILITY WEBSITE rjslattery.com/betrayed-alliance

If it looks this much like a late 80s Sierra game, there must be a thousand ways to die, right? Yeah, I found a few but, given you can walk as close to the dartboard as you like and not lose an eye, it’s an only “somewhat menacing” experience. Is the parser annoying? Yes, like when I failed to read notices/ papers/sheets on a noticeboard/board/wall, but it’s definitely not more annoying than in The Colonel’s Bequest, into which I also typed a great many words this month. Is Betrayed Alliance as challenging as a late 80s Sierra game? Why yes, much more so, I’d say.

I did solve some puzzles myself, I swear, having definitely underestimated the game, initially. This was largely thanks to not exploring thoroughly or thinking creatively enough, however. Make sure to notice the “marbles” in the first room and their unique properties, for starters. Even the mini games are impossible (long story involving rings, ships and the hermit from Quest for Glory. Not to mention a chess problem I had to stare at for a very long time). And if you found the combat system in QFG difficult, you’re going to need to practice running evasively.

Betrayed Alliance casts you as fugitive, hero, library book returner, friend to squirrels and many other things. There’s gold to accrue and skills to build. It’s surprisingly ambitious.

Book 2, currently unreleased, promises more of the same. Mostly, I enjoyed the self-deprecating, silly (sometimes angry) humour. Although I also love playing real games from the late 80s, this mix of fresh content, nostalgic reference and selfawareness is compelling. It’s hard not to recommend this to Sierra fans, especially because it’s free. It’s hardcore, though. I apologise in advance.

CHINATOWN DETECTIVE AGENCY DEVELOPER General Interactive Co PRICE $35.95 WEBSITE store.steampowered.com/app/1172190/Chinatown_Detective_Agency

In 2022, it’s rare to play a game that is so hostile to players. Chinatown Detective Agency’s conceit is that it relies on your “real world knowledge” (and Google) to solve puzzles. I misunderstood this. It was stated once, via tutorial dialogue, and never repeated. I scoured the (in-game) library for information about a book, when I was supposed to be IRL googling a quote to discover its author. Amazingly, I then forgot Google completely (on the very next puzzle) when I was supposed to be buying a ticket nearby to an IRL location that I thought was fictional.

Further, I then missed a plane because I left the game to help my son chop potatoes (I didn’t notice the in-game clock). Then I became curious as to what would happen if I failed a hacking minigame continuously until I had no money (I was soft locked out of all progression, so far as I could tell). And there was this whole cipher situation which required meticulously poring over strings of numbers to (eventually) reveal a word. Finding letters was fun, 3 or 4 times, but 25 repetitions were required. All of these examples are from the (short) tutorial.

Gosh. I nearly stopped playing. Why did I continue? I guess I was intrigued by the “real world knowledge” requirement being inspired by the Carmen Sandiego series. Did I enjoy Carmen Sandiego? Not precisely. But I do have fond memories of the experience, mostly screeching with friends about the unfairness of it all, when we failed. In the late 80s, however, success relied on a physical almanac and clever thinking. Googling questions raised by puzzles and locations in Chinatown Detective Agency (bizarrely) yields game guides and spoilers faster than solutions.

I persisted, but mostly via use of a game guide. I can appreciate that googling cities based on a partial postmark, visual clues and “thinking laterally” could be fun, but I really just wanted to know what happened next for the story, and gaze at the rich world culture, reimagined as cyberpunk pixel art. I was intrigued by the conspiracies and twists, while investigating mysterious events for a host of colourful characters. Dialogue and well placed accents, like holograms, robots and drones, all contribute to the creation of an engaging and evocative world.

I came to really appreciate the protagonist, Amira Darma’s, wry sense of humour, too. On one mission, undercover in a little black dress and heeled boots, I accidentally arrived six hours early to a meeting in a fancy skyscraper, then couldn’t leave or use the wait function (another problem I encountered occasionally, related to the probably superfluous flow of time). And so, took a moment to notice her reactions to the lobby paintings, Compete, Adapt and Survive. Six game hours later, I had a conversation that was beautifully linked, thematically, to these three ideas.

Chinatown Detective Agency is very ambitious, even when experienced more linearly than was intended; as a “research game”. The art, sound and music are wonderful, and the dark, slow-paced story gripped me, for sure. As such, its initial idiosyncrasies seem all the more dissonant, because the effort spent polishing these aesthetic aspects seemingly didn’t extend to conscientious playtesting and tutorialisation. I enjoyed this, but leave feeling intensely curious about how one could more effectively create a spiritual successor to Carmen Sandiego.

DUNGEONS OF DREADROCK DEVELOPER Prof. Dr. Christoph Minnameier PRICE $5.95 WEBSITE dungeons-of-dreadrock.com

Games are fun. Maybe you’re into cool stories, tough bosses or playing with others. Your preference is good with me. Dungeons of Dreadrock, however, is deliberately “fun” by design, in chunks. One hundred chunks, to be precise. Generally, I find block pushing puzzles and rhythm games somewhat (not unpleasantly) frustrating, but I powered through this in two sessions, over four hours without ever wanting to take a break. It’s fast-paced, sequential and relatively straightforward to solve, all of the time. This makes for a very potent fun-formula.

Your brother has been taken into the mountain and he’s tasked with defeating the king. Given this happens annually and no-one returns, you set out to rescue him. Tiny increments of story are delivered via dreams, but explicit narrative is minimal. I don’t think the main characters even have names, beyond Brother and Sister. It’s fun to imagine the lore behind how this mountain became infested by a weird collection of monsters, but the answer is probably just that they are incidental, in support of whatever works best for play.

I immediately compared this with Lozange Lab’s Swim Out in my head, fairly inaccurately. Mostly, it’s treants, dead bodies and rocks that are placed strategically, sometimes on pressure pads, or down holes to land on some relevant feature of a lower level. Some creatures, however, move either slowly, like zombies, or fast, like skeleton warriors. Minotaurs will charge and drow will shoot arrows. Each has a number of hitpoints, going down in one to ten hits if you’re using the sword, or less from other kinds of damage, with spikes and fire killing most instantly.

Unlike Swim Out, creatures don’t wait for you to move, so it’s more like “real-time puzzling” than turn-based. Sort of. It’s actually more like a rhythm game, where you get used to the speed, movement, attacks and patterns of pieces, then solve the puzzle with these in mind. Do I have time to dodge the minotaur, evade the treant’s attack, push the minotaur and cross 4 squares before the minotaur charges again? Often the answer will be “maybe” or “only just” and I learned what was possible by feel and with experience.

The game never gets very difficult, largely because I always felt that I knew what I needed to know, for the current puzzle, based on what had come before. There were a few deadly (instructive) surprises and a few times I needed a nudge from the in-game, incremental hint guide, but every puzzle felt carefully crafted. I particularly loved noticing that you can walk through blood and create bloody footprints (which I’d thought was an aesthetic detail), then finding that bloody footprints are used as a puzzle solution. A keen eye is mandatory.

My younger son stepped in to play a later level of Dungeons of Dreadrock. He’s “good at games” but gave up pretty quick. The solution involved throwing the sword, leaving the sword behind, dodging two monsters while unarmed, flipping levers, dodging fireballs and, generally, impeccable timing. Daggy Old Mum aced it in two or three attempts, which horrified him. This is a fun game, for all the abovementioned reasons, but also because you learn at the same rate as the game is ramping up difficulty (It was pretty fun beating Lyndon, too).

SOKOBOS DEVELOPER Daisy Games PRICE $7.50 WEBSITE store.steampowered.com/app/1655890/Sokobos

Dungeons of Dreadrock warmed me up for Sokobos, which is a more “hardcore” block pushing experience, to say the least. In a feeble attempt to learn how to play this genre with greater success, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of research papers critiquing (the original) Sokoban’s design and iterations. Sokobos definitely teaches you its additional and original aspects, like how to push a block through coloured paint, but assumes you are coming at block pushing with professor level chops. How can something that looks so simple be SO HARD?!

I’m getting better at eyeballing the level before I start and making useful observations. For example, if I put a piece on a wall, it better be finishing on that wall, I can’t pull it back. Simple, right? But what if putting it on the wall is the only way to get it out of the way of other pieces that have to be sequenced into some inscrutably precise order? Thank goodness for the reverse button. And the ability to skip levels. It feels so counterintuitive to move a piece away from its goal, or to leave it half moved, but design relies on these ideas constantly.

Sokobos casts you as a cocky builder, tasked with assembling a temple for Zeus. My temple looks like Anubis’ breakfast. The gods are unimpressed. Completing levels was genuinely surprising, especially one time when I clocked 11 moves and the next score I saw was 63 (the online comparison feature is fun). The bravado of the dialogue does neatly match how I feel when I can beat a level but, mostly, I’m 513 moves in with one block blocked into an inappropriate wall. Ancient Greeks seriously didn’t know how to pull? Only push? Really? REALLY??!!

ONDE DEVELOPER Lance, 3-50 PRICE $19.95 WEBSITE store.steampowered.com/app/1676910/Onde

Bubble-based platformer? Kinetic puzzle toy? Interactive music experience? Onde is hard to define. There are lots of circles and arcs, let’s start there. When you’re traversing one, you’re alive. When you’re not, you respawn at a previous curve. Sometimes, you can create arcs, other times they’re made for you, and often they move. Black arcs kill you, teal arcs stop moving when you touch them, pink draw you in, and so on. Everything makes sound, on top of the soundtrack, and I’m surprised by how coherent the musical composition is, despite its complexity.

Is there a story? Yes? At least, there’s danger and a vast journey to undertake. I’d guessed that a lot of this game was set underwater, but I wasn’t sure until I left the water and an audio filter was applied as I resubmerged. There are lots of colourful aquatic plants to strum, in a lightly musical way. I might be a jellyfish, but one with detachable … gonads? At any rate, unidentified pieces of me are attracted to puzzle locations, usually allowing some combination of W, A, S and D to create arcs in a way I need to manipulate, time and navigate carefully.

I’d like to compare Onde to some other game, so you could get an idea of how it feels, but I’m honestly at a loss. It’s rare to find an experience that evolves so successfully (over several hours) by riffing on unique, underlying mechanical ideas. It’s definitely for fans of puzzle games. I experienced the classic, “this is impossible, ohhhhh,” feeling a great many times when experimenting with circles. And it’s for lovers of harmonics, modes and synths, for sure. It’s probably because I spent too many hours blowing bubbles as a child, but I loved Onde inordinately.