Gaming Notes

In my last roundup of recent gaming I noted that this would be an irregular series. Entirely unexpectedly, however, a rule has suggested itself: I will post about gaming on LGM every time that Color Gray Games release an expansion for their fantastic, idiosyncratic puzzle game The Case of the Golden Idol. Well, probably not, since The Lemurian Vampire is being advertised as “the last Golden Idol DLC”. But it was a delightful surprise, as I was putting this post together last week, to discover that I can once again recommend new content in this game’s world. Like the previous DLC, The Spider of Lanka, it ramps up the difficulty of its puzzles while holding on to the weirdness and pulpiness of its setting and story. If you haven’t yet played The Case of the Golden Idol, it remains one of my top gaming experiences of the year. If you’ve already played the original game and The Spider of Lanka, I know you’ll be just as excited as I am for another chapter in its story.

Otherwise, my gaming in the last four months has been scattershot. I played almost nothing in the months immediately following my last post, and then a whole bunch of games throughout August. In the sweltering days of summer, it felt as if I was looking for some control over the entertainment I consumed, rather than taking in a book or a television show. Not all of these games delivered what I was hoping for—one, in fact, was quite the disappointment—but the best of them kept me occupied at a time when my brain wasn’t up for anything more substantial. Here are my thoughts.

Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator (2021)

Last year I wrote about Strange Horticulture (2022), a game in which you play an occult horticulturist in a cod-medieval fantasy world, who has to collect new plants and serve customers who come to her for everything from a headache to help removing a cursed magical amulet. I enjoyed the game, but also observed that its fixed plotline gave it limited replayability value. Potion Craft, from Russian studio Niceplay Games, addresses that complaint, in a way that sometimes makes you regret making it. Instead of a horticulturist, you go further up the chain to play an alchemist, who learns how to combine plants, fungi, and crystals to produce different effects. Though the types of potions you can brew are fixed, the clients and their demands are procedurally generated, according to your skill level and reputation.

The most interesting thing about Potion Craft if how it realizes the alchemical process. You generate different potion effects—everything from healing to necromancy and invisibility—by drawing paths along a map. Different ingredients produce different path segments, which can be further manipulated by grinding them with a mortar and pestle, or adding liquid to the potion to dilute its effect. This ends up being an effective metaphor for the experimental process. A lot of your time in the game is spent drawing ever-more convoluted paths in an effort to discover new effects. Later in the game, as you become more proficient, you might refine a recipe by creating a more efficient path, or try to come up with a new one as the availability of ingredients changes.

Realism, however, can be a double-edged sword in gaming. As much as it captures the thrill of scientific discovery, Potion Craft also captures the drudgery of it—the tedium of having to traverse the same part of the map over and over as you try to get further out to find new effects; the realization that you’ve wasted precious ingredients to produce a substandard potion (however you feel about save-scumming, I don’t think a game should be actively encouraging you to do it); the exasperation at the twelfth customer demanding some utterly mundane potion that you then have to waste precious minutes producing (the game does allow you to save some recipes and produce them automatically, but there are limited save slots, and you’re still at the mercy of ingredient availability; I often found myself turning a customer away upon realizing that I’d have to manually craft the potion they wanted). In lieu of a plot, the game offers a protracted list of increasingly complicated achievements on your path to becoming a master alchemist, and there’s a growing tension between attending to customers (and wasting time and ingredients on them) and spending all your time exploring the secrets of the art (which requires ingredients, which require money, which you can only get from customers). Again, that’s a pretty elegant way of literalizing the “reality” of your character’s situation, but the result can be as frustrating as it is engrossing. It’s easy to be drawn into Potion Craft, and the allure of fulfilling one more task or customer request. But it’s equally easy to get exasperated and put it down in a huff.

Venba (2023)

One of the most heralded indie games of the year, Venba, from Canadian-based Visai Studios, bills itself as a cooking game. In reality, it’s more of a narrative game with some cooking flourishes. You follow immigrant couple Venba and Paavalan, and eventually their Canadian-born son Kavin, through the years as they try to settle into their new country. The cooking minigames—in which Venba, and later Kavin, try to decipher instructions for making their favorite Tamil dishes from a hand-written notebook compiled by Venba’s mother—are enjoyable, but ultimately a rather minor part of the game. More often, cooking is used as a lens through which to observe the family’s struggles—Venba’s homesickness and longing for her mother, Kavin’s fear of sticking out at school by bringing unfamiliar dishes to lunch, his later realization that he’s lost touch with his language and culture. As that list suggests, there’s not much in Venba that is unexpected, but the story is affectingly told. A sequence in which Paavalan is attacked on his way home from work is anxiously and yet sensitively depicted through the waiting Venba and Kavin’s eyes, and a conversation between Kavin, now a TV writer brought in to lend “authenticity” to a South Asian character, and his oblivious boss, packs a lot of ideas into a short exchange. Coupled with beautiful animation and an engaging, distinctive soundtrack, they make the game an impressive, if brief, experience.

Storyteller (2023)

In the constant struggle between plot- and puzzle-focused games, Storyteller, which expands Argentinian designer Daniel Benmergui’s 2008 browser game, charts an interesting middle ground. The game dumps you into its puzzles without any explanation or excuse for why you’re solving them, but on the other hand, the puzzles themselves are narrative-based. In each one, you’re given a selection of characters and situations (wedding, death, poison, etc.), and a desired narrative outcome, and have to combine the former to create the latter. It’s fun to watch the various situations unfold—you can pair the various characters with each other, gender notwithstanding, or take sadistic pleasure in torturing them with kidnapping and death—and interesting to observe how ordering the various situations—wedding before death or vice versa—can affect their outcomes. (In this respect, the game reminded me of Amanita Design’s delightful Pilgrims (2019), which uses a seemingly limited array of story elements to create nearly endless situations.) The required plotlines get more complicated as the puzzles progress, involving poisonings, disguises, magical curses, and resurrections. Occasionally, they dovetail with familiar classics, making for a gameplay experience that is amusing as well as satisfying. It’s not the most exciting game I’ve played this year, but it does a good job executing a novel concept.

Oxenfree II: Lost Signals (2023)

In 2016, Night School Studio released Oxenfree, a game that epitomizes a lot of the most popular indie gaming tropes of the teens. It was a creepy story involving ghosts and time loops, coupled with a touching character exploration, whose relatively light gameplay—the story was basically on rails and the “puzzles” mostly involved clicking on the most obvious thing on screen—was compensated for by a compelling plot, a genuinely intriguing mystery, and a conversation system that allowed you to explore, and affect, the web of relationships between its teen protagonists. Combined with beautiful graphics that stressed the game’s natural setting—which the designers were only too happy to distort and make unheimlich as their story approached its climax—and an increasingly disquieting soundtrack, the result felt a bit like being in the driver’s seat of an “elevated”, indie horror movie.

In the intervening seven years, Night School released Afterparty (2019), which preserved a lot of Oxenfree‘s core mechanics and storytelling approaches—the conversation system, the emphasis on large, elaborate backdrops against which the characters look almost like stick figures, the focus on complex relationships between lifelong friends on the cusp of adulthood—without really capturing the first game’s combination of creepiness and depth of feeling. So it probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise that when the studio (now a Netflix subsidiary) returned to their biggest hit, what they delivered was not unlike a lot of horror movie sequels—more of the same, with less bite.

Once again, the setting is a national park in the Pacific Northwest. Once again, our heroes are young people on a nighttime ramble, who fiddle with a radio and unleash unquiet spirits with the power to break time. Once again, the game takes its players to underground cave systems, empty ranger stations, and abandoned buildings. Which might be fine, but Oxenfree II doesn’t find the next level to either its story or its gameplay. If you’ve played the original game, you’ll be well ahead of the main characters—thirtysomethings Riley and Jacob, who have been hired to place transmitters to investigate weird transmissions from a nearby island, the setting of the original game—in working out what’s going on and figuring out how to escape their various predicaments. Meanwhile, instead of the tangled relationships between the original game’s leads, Riley and Jacob’s issues are relatively straightforward—he’s worried about getting stuck in a dead-end life; she’s returned home after a failed attempt to escape the same—and the fact that they almost instantly start spilling their secrets to each other makes a lot less sense, given that they are virtual strangers. Most importantly, the game simply isn’t as creepy as the original. There are scenes and moments in the original Oxenfree that have lingered in my mind for years, and nothing in the sequel even comes close.

There are some points of interest. About two thirds of the way through there’s a plot development that reveals new information about the original game’s characters that is both disturbing and entirely in keeping with how that game ended, though it eventually fizzles into nothing. An intriguing—albeit far too sparingly used—new mechanic allows Riley and Jacob to travel through time in order to traverse obstacles that exist in the present but not in the past. And the fact that the protagonists in Oxenfree II are older allows the game to give Riley an emotional challenge that is entirely new to this series, which ends up producing some of the game’s most affecting moments. But none of them are quite enough to make up for the fact that this is a game with nothing to say about its setting or situation that wasn’t already said, and better, by its prequel. If you haven’t played Oxenfree, I highly recommend seeking it out, but the sequel adds nothing to it.

Birth (2022)

In Birth, by Madison Karrh, you play a bird-headed skeleton creature who has decided to alleviate their loneliness by creating a companion. You wander the city collecting the bones and organs you’ll need to put your new friend together. There’s not much more explanation of it than that, as this is largely a vibes-based game. Its animation, for example, hits the very popular sweet spot between horrific—most of the city’s denizens appear to be suffering from some light decay—and cute. Technically, this is a puzzle game, and there are some traditional puzzles along the way—jigsaws, dominoes, tile-matching, code-finding. But a lot of the time, the puzzles have a lightly surrealist flavor. You have to track down stars to add to a painting whose subject will then give you a hammer with which to smash a display case containing a heart. You zoom in on a salad to discover tiny people playing a game of cards among its leaves. The puzzles aren’t particularly challenging, but the conceptual leaps they require you to make, such as pulling an item out of a computer screen in order to use it in the real world, paradoxically end up giving the game a sense of heft. You feel as if you’re investing in the weirdness of this world, learning its nonsensical rules as you go. The result is very much the epitome of casual gaming—a couple of hours of weird, gentle gameplay with cute animation and nice music—but it’s so much itself that you can’t help coming away feeling completely satisfied.

So, what are you playing these days? What are you looking forward to? In the extremely wide category of games I never play, the biggest recent release is Baldur’s Gate 3, which has been getting very good reviews. Have you played it? Consider this an open thread for all things gaming related.