Tag: video games

Year Walk — Games for People Who Prefer to Read

In the old days, man tried to catch a glimpse of the future in the strangest of ways.

they locked themselves in dark rooms

not partaking of food and drink

At the stroke of midnight

they ventured out into the night

through the dark woods

when strange creatures roamed

To see if they would be healthy

To see if they would be happy

To see if they would live

To see if they would be loved

After playing and thoroughly enjoying Device 6, I went into the back catalog for the game’s developer, Simogo. It’s a strange history, including a simple puzzle game (SPL-T), a rhythm game (Beat Sneak Bandit), a physics game (Kosmo Spin), and a strange side-scrolling driving game where you move the ground instead of the car (Bumpy Road). It’s clear that Simogo was innovating in a variety of ways, and not willing to stick to one genre.

However, Device 6 hit my brain just right because of the combination of interesting mobile-tailored interactions and interwoven story, and the old Simogo games fitting that mold seem to be Year Walk—released before—and The Sailor’s Dream—released after. I decided to try Year Walk first.

Cabin in the Woods

The game opens with the strange and cryptic description of Year Walking (an actual form of ancient Swedish divination: årsgång). However, you start by walking the woods during daylight, in deep winter.

Navigation is confusing at first. Scroll left and right with a finger. Swipe up or down where arrows appear at the edges of the screen to zoom into or out of the landscape. The world is a multi-layered paper cutout, and zooming takes you from one layer to another, while walking left and right show off the depth as the layers parallax.

Faint film grain adds a cinematic quality. The music is quiet, sometimes almost non-existent. As you move, boots crunch in the snow.

Eventually, by learning the controls and exploring, you find your way to a windmill. The miller’s daughter is there. You clearly love her, but does she love you? Either way, she’s betrothed to another. So you leave, returning to your cabin, vowing to year walk to see whether you will be with her in the future.

Moderate Dread, Mild Irritation

Year Walk is an atmospheric horror game with almost no dialogue. You walk the woods at night, coming across phantasmagorical visions and obscure creatures from Swedish myth. There is a little blood and a few jump scares.

For the bulk of the game, the story must be inferred from vague hints. This is a puzzle game, and the puzzles are challenging and obtuse. No real hints are given in the iOS version, although apparently the Steam version and Simogo’s game collection for console has a hint system. However,  there are a couple puzzles here that rely on mobile functionality which had to be reworked for other platforms.

I wouldn’t consider myself a puzzle master, but I do alright. For Year Walk, I had to use a guide to finish. The puzzles require some significant leaps of logic and aren’t nearly as clearly demarcated as in Device 6. One puzzle I missed completely because the interface made it unclear that the scene could be interacted with.

The Companion

The game points you subtly to the Year Walk “companion app,” and gives you a number. This is a completely separate, free app in the store, which describes some of the mythology that the game was based on. It’s written from the perspective of a researcher, and using the code grants you access to his secret personal journal.

This was where the game became more interesting to me—after it was ostensibly over. The journal, hidden inside this separate app, has the same ARG feel that Device 6 dipped its toes into.

Journal entries and blurry photographs document the life of a scholar researching the practice of year walking, trying to find old records or elderly people who may be familiar with the nearly forgotten folk ritual. His research leads him to a small town where the last recorded year walk may have occurred. It is somehow intertwined with a strange murder, for which the walker was convicted and executed.

The scholar’s own writing becomes more erratic and unhinged as he continues to unravel new threads. He finds a wooden box in the woods, locked by a mechanism with strange symbols. And here is likely where most players suddenly remember that this box appeared near the start of Year Walk, a puzzle that was never solved over the course of the game.

The scholar decides he can stop the murder that occurred decades previous. He can use the box to send a message through time. If only he can open it.

If you can decipher the code from his journal, you can restart the game, find the box, and open it to discover the message the scholar sent. This reveals a different, but no less bloody ending to the story.

A Sign of Things to Come

I found Year Walk to be slightly less polished and more frustrating than Device 6, but this final sequence went a long way toward improving my opinion of it. I can see the creative impulses and connective tissue between these two games. Year Walk…walked…so Device 6 could run.

I can’t say I would recommend Year Walk unequivocally. If you enjoy strange horror, challenging puzzles with no hand-holding, obscure Swedish folklore, or experimental games, it might be worth a few bucks and a look in.

How to Play

Year Walk is $6 on iOS and Android. It’s also available in a modified format on Steam for PC, and oddly enough, in yet another differently modified form for the Wii U. It is included along with many other games in the recently released Simogo Legacy Collection.

Device 6 — Games for People Who Prefer to Read

Device 6 is a 2013 iOS release from Simogo, ostensibly a puzzle game, although “game” is a bit of a misnomer here. It could be called a visual novel or piece of interactive fiction. It is mainly text, enhanced by sound, music, images and formatting.

Mobile Game (Derogatory)

If you own a smart phone in 2026, there’s a good chance you’ve been exposed to the horrors of modern mobile games. The most popular games are boldly billed as “free to play,” but are typically riddled with ads or paid loot boxes, with micro-transaction systems and dark patterns designed with scientific precision to promote addiction and spending.

Companies like Zynga, King and Tencent spent more than a decade systematically enshittifying these ecosystems, and Apple and Google have largely turned a blind eye to it while taking a 30% cut of the revenues enabled by these practices.

Device 6 hails from a simpler time. Five years after the release of the original iPhone, ubiquitous touchscreens were still exciting technology. Most of us remembered the pain of texting on a 10-digit keypad. Mobile games were slowly expanding beyond Snake and Breakout clones.

The Nintendo Wii had introduced motion controls to the public at large, and Microsoft’s Kinect brought computer vision. Now we all had multi-functional supercomputers in our pockets, and touch interfaces that could morph to any shape. In certain circles, there was a feeling that mobile was the new frontier for experimental game design.

Device 6 feels a little like an artifact from an alternate universe, one where mobile games didn’t drown in an ocean of slop; one where the user is made to feel something more than the desire to play one more indistinguishable level or tap their credit card.

If I sound bitter, it’s only because I think we were cheated out of a more interesting, vibrant future. Device 6 is a game that manages to feel fresh and innovative despite being 13 years old.

Text as Physical Space

Device 6 starts with a face scan. (Fake, of course. phones didn’t have face recognition back then.) A scan line buzzes across the screen once, twice, and then you’re in, given a generic-sounding user name.

The intro credits sequence that follows provides cinematic weight. It’s James Bond by way of Archer, stylized 2D animation of a delivery truck moving toward its destination backed by a light bebop soundtrack.

Then:

The black-and-white picture of a radio within the arrow is layered with film grain and parallaxed as you scroll, giving it a sense of depth, like a a storybook with cutout windows that peer into the another world. The sound of the radio accompanies the picture, but it becomes muffled as you scroll, because the text takes you out of the room, into a hallway.

The text gives you only a phone-sized page or two of description, bristling with side-thoughts in italics and more windows into the world before bringing you to a stairway where the text itself

steps

  down,

    taking you

      through

        the house, the shape and formatting of the text bringing you into a physical space.

Then it tips onto its side, inviting you to rotate your device to read the long, narrow lines that take you down a hallway, expanding to fill the screen again only when you reach another room.

Device 6 presents as a multimedia House of Leaves: a trapped, semi-amnesiac character moving through a mysterious, empty island mansion as the text and pictures move across and around the page.

Reaching Through the Window

Device 6 is split into six chapters, each with a handful of puzzles that need to be solved to progress. These puzzles use text, audio, and visual components scattered across the chapter. Some of those storybook windows are interactive: locks, computer terminals, keypads and other machinery that can be pushed, poked, or manipulated.

Early chapters have fewer, more self-contained interactions and puzzles. Later ones tend to build on each other, requiring a cascade of solving one puzzle to solve another to solve another. Backtracking is at first helpful, and eventually mandatory, to find the necessary clues. This is where the format shines, because the layout of the story makes scouring the text feel like searching a physical space.

I found paper and pencil to be helpful in the last two chapters, but veteran puzzlers with good memory could probably make do without.

A Layered Labyrinth

There is layer of meta-narrative in Device 6 that is easy to ignore at first. The story and the puzzles are designed to immerse you in the viewpoint of Anna, the protagonist. You quickly forget about the face scan at the beginning.

In between chapters, the game asks a few survey questions, then awards points to the player. Never mind the strangeness of some of those questions. Never mind that nice round 100 points you seem to get no matter what answers you choose.

Each chapter features a diagram somewhere alongside the text; schematics for a series of numbered devices that work in tandem and directly affect the human brain.

Even the seemingly random elements that flash across the screen during the credits sequence have meaning, much more apparent upon finishing the story and going back for a second viewing.

These extra layers aren’t required to follow Anna’s story or solve the puzzles, but they provide connective tissue and help to interpret the otherwise ambiguous ending. They add a pinch of ARG flavor by making the reader feel like a character in the story.

Where to Play

Device 6 is $3.99 and should take about 1-3 hours depending on how quickly you solve the puzzles.

It is available on iOS, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, and Windows. Do yourself a favor and play it on a device you can rotate and manipulate with your hands to get the full experience.

Week 21 & 22 — Year of Short Stories 2026

2026 is another year of short stories. In this weekly series, I track my short story writing, from idea and draft to submission.

This is for the weeks of May 25 – Jun 7.

Stats

  • Stories Finished: 2
  • Submissions Currently Out: 7
  • Submissions Total: 20
  • Rejections: 17
  • Acceptances: 0

Submissions and Responses

Two weeks, and one form rejection for Incident at Pleasant Hills. All my stories are still on submission in at least one place, so I’m not sending out more at the moment.

Goals and Results

Last post, two weeks ago, I had a singular goal. Finish revising F-TIB.

Well, it’s still not done, but some progress has been made. Firstly, the story has a new name! It’s now called T.I.M.

After critiques came back, I did a lot of rethinking, which resulted in a whole new outline and roughly twice as many scenes. I’ve now written a couple thousand words of fresh or mostly fresh material toward that outline, and I’m approximately halfway done. It’s looking like the updated story will be a little more than double the word count of the original, at least until it gets its follow-up trimming.

I think I may be able to get this new version of the story written by next week. However, I have had…

A Distraction!

I don’t talk too much about my non-writing hobbies here, but something has been absorbing a decent amount of my time and attention lately. I’m making a game.

It’s not a big exciting game, and I don’t expect it to end up on Steam or consoles or anything like that. It’s a traditional roguelike, which is a very niche genre, and I’m currently making it strictly for fun. And perhaps surprisingly, part of the reason I’m enjoying the process is AI.

When it comes to writing fiction, I have a very cut-and-dry opinion on AI, one that seems to be largely shared by other writers: it’s pointless to use it. Writing fiction is self-expression, and if AI is mucking about with all the words, it’s inherently taking away at least some of that self-expression. If I read something, I want it to be written entirely by a human being. The words and their entertainment value are only part of the equation—I also want to feel that I’m receiving a coded signal from the author, a signal that tells me something about them, as vague and ephemeral as that might be. I want to make art and consume art, not just content.

So it might seem odd that I’d use AI for software development. However, I’ve always felt that there is a messy blend of art and craft when it comes to programming. There is certainly an aspect of self-expression, but there is also the purely mechanical part. A program is a machine that can carry out a series of (often incredibly complex) tasks. As of the past six months or so, AI has become quite good at building many of the mechanical aspects. Since I’m working with some tools I’m not highly familiar with, it has been a helpful assistant in building the machinery, while I focus on the design and the…gaminess of it all.

And that’s what’s been distracting me. I’m still trying to figure out exactly how to split my time between game development and writing. We’ll see how it goes.

Next Week

That same dang goal, with a new title: finish T.I.M.

Firewatch — Games for People Who Prefer to Read

The job of a firewatch involves living in a single-room tower deep in the wilderness, monitoring the forest for fires. It’s a job that attracts those seeking solitude—the strange or socially awkward, and people trying to run away from their problems.

An Unorthodox Beginning

Firewatch begins with a blurred background and the audioscape of a bar. You play as Henry, a drunk college student, and you’re meeting your wife, Julia, for the first time.

A few paragraphs of text and a couple of life choices allow you to choose-your-own-adventure through several years of Henry and Julia’s relationship and marriage: their joys, arguments, and struggles. The choices start out easy, then problems arise, and the game presents more harrowing decisions where neither option is good.

Interspersed between these text vignettes are little snippets of 3D gameplay. As Henry, you load your truck in your apartment’s underground parking. You arrive at a trailhead in the forested wilderness. You hike, you camp. Eventually, you arrive at a huge, wooden firewatch tower.

On paper, I would never expect the opening of Firewatch to work. A rushed prologue in plain text? Front-loading a ton of emotional weight and exposition? When the game started, I was skeptical.

It’s a testament to the writing and design of the Campo Santo team that it does work. As a player, you become a participant by making tough choices with Henry in his back-story. You get a glimpse of life being good, then bad, and finally almost unbearable. It’s just enough time and detail to begin to sympathize with him and understand why he took the firewatch job.

Interleaving this backstory with the journey to the firewatch tower is oddly cinematic, a bit like voiceover, and creates the sense that all of this is weighing on him as he travels to the tower.

Exploration

Beyond this initial prologue, Firewatch sets aside the text and becomes a full 3D game. Your tower is your home base, but most of your time is spent in the forest. As Henry, you can walk and run, vault over obstacles and climb, but not jump. This is not a “walking simulator,” but the mechanics are simple and straightforward.

From the beginning, a surprisingly large area of wilderness is open to your exploration. More areas open up as you get further into the game and acquire new tools, the first of which is a backpack of ropes that allow you to rappel up and down shale slides and steep slopes.

You are given a compass and map, and the game doesn’t clutter the screen with big arrows, icons, and indicators. It’s easy to get turned around or take the wrong path, but this makes it feel more like real exploring and less like the game is holding your hand.

In reality, the game carefully contains the player, but it goes to great pains to make it feel like the world is wide open. For the most part, it succeeds.

Ten-Four, Boss

You are alone in the wilderness, and your only link to the rest of the world is your high-powered walkie-talkie radio. With it, you can talk to your boss, Delilah, in the next tower over, which is barely visible on the top of a mountain several miles away.

As your boss, she helps get you acclimated to the job and provides you with tasks to keep you busy. She’s been out here for years and knows her way around.

The radio becomes your primary means of interacting with the world. When you see something interesting in the world, an icon pops up and you have the opportunity to talk to Delilah about it. You soon strike up a snarky rapport, and she becomes your constant companion throughout the game. The two of you discuss your past, shoot the shit, and become close. Then everything starts to go wrong.

What’s Out There?

From your first day on the job, there is mystery lurking in the forest. Delilah tasks you with finding and telling off some camping teens who are launching fireworks in peak fire season. On your way back, you encounter a shadowy figure who blinds you with a flashlight and disappears into the night. Then you find that someone has broken into your tower.

At first, the strange happenings seem innocuous, but things get weirder and weirder. More and more clues point toward something nefarious (and perhaps science-fictiony) going on.

To make matters worse, a fire breaks out just a few miles away. Fire crews do their best to contain it, but it grows day by day, a looming danger that adds tension. If it spreads, you and Delilah will be forced to evacuate, and you’ll never know the truth about what’s really going on.

Storytelling

Firewatch is full of moral quandaries posed to flawed characters. Everyone here has made bad choices, and everyone can be blamed for something. The game doesn’t tell you how to feel, and doesn’t paint the world in black and white. It doesn’t provide a pat conclusion either.

Firewatch isn’t perfect—it was made by a small team, and they had to cut corners in some places to be able to finish it. But they did so very smartly. The graphics are not state of the art (even for a decade ago, when the game was released), but they have a painterly aesthetic that is often beautiful. There are few characters, but the voice-acting is impeccable, and makes the whole game work.

The story can be completed in 3-5 hours, but it’s full of twists and turns, and contains a few laughs and a fair bit of heartbreak. Games, even story-centric games, often struggle with endings. Firewatch sticks the landing. It’s not necessarily a happy ending, but the mysteries are all resolved.

Henry, having run away from his problems, is confronted with an example of how badly that can go. It’s up to you whether he takes that lesson to heart.

As a wonderful bonus, the game includes a documentary mode. It turns the game into a sort of interactive museum with stations scattered throughout the wilderness. Each station has voice notes from the developers, and sometimes concept art or other notes pinned to bulletin boards. I wish more games would do something like this, although I can understand forgoing it when it’s such a challenge just to ship a game.

Where to Get It

Firewatch is a game by Campo Santo, published by indie powerhouse Panic, Inc. It’s available on just about every modern console and PC platform.

If You Care About Video Game Stories, You Should be Watching /noclip

If writing is my creative first love, video games are my second. Words Deferred is a site about writing, so I mostly limit my talk about video games to the story-centric, like my series about Games for People Who Prefer to Read.

Of course, not all games care much about story, and the entire medium has long been lambasted by serious artists for its weak storytelling. There’s a weird tension built into games, between experience and participation, the twin engines that make a game at least partly something you do instead of something you receive. That doesn’t mean there are no great stories in games, but it does mean that you have to go searching if you want to find them.

Games are also fascinating from the perspective of their construction. They are half art, and half science; programmers and engineers working side by side with artists, modelers and sound designers. The closest analogues are stage theater or TV and movies, where there is a certain unexplainable amalgamation of the magical and the mundane in order to actually put a finished product in front of an audience. Art constructed by a team is very different from the work of the lone artist.

There are plenty of documentaries on movie making; on the actors, directors, and myriad other craftspeople who put stories on the big screen. But there are comparatively few who do the same thing for games. Among the best are the small team at /noclip.

They are remarkably prolific for a core group of just four people, not only putting out multiple high-quality documentaries per year, but hosting a weekly podcast, building a game history archive, doing some indie game development, and recently creating a sort-of, kind-of online game magazine thing. They are also clearly a group who loves games as a storytelling medium, and that passion comes through in the documentary series where they give voice to the developers of some of the most exciting story-centric games.

Now is the perfect time to check out their work, because they’re right in the middle of releasing a multi-part series about Disco Elysium, one of the most critically acclaimed and lauded “story games” in the past decade, and the story of the people who made it is just as interesting as the game itself.

Killing Time at Lightspeed — Games for People Who Prefer to Read

Killing Time at Lightspeed is a text-based, narrative game by Gritfish about browsing social media while voyaging between the stars.

You are a traveler who has left their life and your planet behind. Your lightspeed voyage will feel like less than an hour to you, but to your friends on Earth it will be twenty years. The only connection you have to those people is a news and social media feed: FriendPage.

This is a small indie game, clearly developed with limited resources. There are a few static illustrations in the introduction. After that, the entire game is contained within a simple, monochromatic yellow and black text console.

The game plays out in a series of turns, each one taking only a minute or two. During a turn, you can read your friends’ updates on FriendPage, and a handful of news headlines. You’re given the option to reply to one or two posts, and you can give them thumbs up or thumbs down. When you’ve read and responded as much as you like, you can click a button to “refresh” the page. When you do, a year passes back on earth and the news and social feeds update.

With that click of a button, you may see the results of an action a friend was considering. Relationship statuses are updated as the people you know get together and break up. They get married and have children. New technology appears, like cybernetic implants and humanoid androids. Your friends have time to adjust to societal and personal changes, but for you it all comes and goes in minutes instead of years.

There are many sci-fi ideas at play here. The arguments about cybernetic enhancement cover similar ground to the Deus Ex games. Discussions of android rights echo Detroit: Become Human. However, with this short runtime and limited budget, the game can’t delve as deeply into these particular issues. In a way, that’s the point.

In Killing Time at Lightspeed, everything that happens in your social media feed is ephemeral—even more than in our day-to-day lives. It excels in delivering a feeling of being cut off and left behind. You’re reading about what everyone else is doing and experiencing, but you are alone.

How much can you really communicate with your friends when months or years pass between messages? Momentous changes in your friends’ lives are summarized in one or two sentences. How many other important things are you missing altogether? You can ask them about what’s happening, but how can they explain all the things that have happened to them since last year and your last message?

The point is really driven home in the final years of the game, when a new social media site becomes popular and friends start to drift away from FriendPage. You don’t have the option of making a new account or checking the new feed. You only have what your spaceship gives you. Soon, your feed is almost entirely filled with spam, bots, and pointless Buzzfeed-esque listicles. You’re stuck on MySpace, in space. Your one tenuous tether to Earth is nearly severed. But you keep refreshing in the hopes that someone will come back and post something.

Then you arrive at your destination. The terminal shuts down. The game is over. Your friends are far away, living their lives without you. Presumably you’ll go off and live a new life without them.

Killing Time at Lightspeed is shorter than a movie, and can be comfortably completed in a sitting. It’s a narrative snack, not a full meal. I didn’t walk away from it with a lot of new thoughts, as I sometimes do with games like this. Instead, it left me with a feeling. A melancholy vignette.

Killing Time at Lightspeed is available for PC on Steam and Humble Bundle.

Blue Prince — Games for People Who Prefer to Read

Previously in this series I have mostly recommended games that might be described as light on gameplay and heavy on narrative. Most of them are of the genre pejoratively titled “walking simulators.”

My goal is to recommend games that don’t require twitch reflexes or a lot of experience with  game systems, interfaces, or particular genres. There is narrative greatness in the world of video games, it just takes some looking to find.

Blue Prince

Blue Prince is a “gamier” game than I would typically recommend in this series—not because it’s frantic or overly-complex, but because it’s less narrative-forward and more mechanical at a surface level.

The story is still there, but it’s a mystery, and you have to search for answers and clues, making inferences. Because this is a mystery, the challenge of the game comes from puzzles, and these work on two levels, which I’ll call “the grid” and “the meta-puzzles.”

The Grid

The grid is the surface puzzle. You’ve inherited a mansion, and every day the rooms reconfigure themselves. The house contains a 5×9 grid, and every time you open a door, you choose from 3 semi-random rooms to occupy that space in the grid. Your goal: to get to the far end of the mansion, find a hidden 46th room, and claim your inheritance.

The grid is a game of resource-management, with a finite number of steps per day, used up with each room. There are keys to unlock doors, coins to buy things, gems to pay for more exciting rooms, and the rooms themselves offering 1-4 exits and other perks. There are also special, unique items to be found, which increase your resources or provide beneficial effects.

The grid offers plenty to keep the player busy, at first. But after a few failed attempts to get through the house, the second part of the game begins to reveal itself: the meta-game.

The Meta Game

Some rooms work in combination with each other. Some rooms have clues for puzzles in other rooms. And there are many, many rooms to discover and unlock. Eventually the player will find ways to go beyond the house and find new revelations on the grounds and beneath the foundations. The game is much larger than it first appears.

Here, Blue Prince introduces “roguelike” elements—new tools and additional resources that persist across days. Meta-puzzles can unlock new areas, but they can also reveal new information. Books in the library, newspaper clippings in the archives, letters hidden in safes and locked diaries all reveal narrow slices of a larger narrative.

I won’t spoil the story, but it involves the aristocratic family to which the player character belongs. A history of the surrounding countries—politics, warfare, and xenophobia—is revealed over the course of the game. The family must navigate these dangerous waters, and it becomes apparent that they did not always manage to pass through unscathed.

The Price of Something New

I think Blue Prince stands as something unique: a roguelike puzzle game that manages to embed an interesting story within a mechanically dense framework. However, it is not entirely without downsides.

I found that the puzzles were well-tuned while I was working toward the “end” of the game—the stated goal of finding the 46th room of the mansion. Each new day I was able to find new clues, solve a puzzle or two, and often experience a room or item or new mechanic that kept things interesting.

Entering the “final” room isn’t the end though. Not really. It’s a revelation, but most players will still have a few dangling story threads and unfinished puzzles to keep them playing after that initial victory. It doesn’t take long to discover that there is plenty more that can only be uncovered after supposedly winning.

The puzzles get harder and more obtuse. The items are all found, and it starts to become more and more rare to discover a new room or a new clue.

The game provides more resources to the player as they solve meta-puzzles, making progress in the daily grid game easier. There are a couple of mechanisms that the player can use to tweak their likelihood of finding specific rooms or items. But eventually, the repetition starts to wear thin, especially when you want to try a puzzle solution or find a specific bit of information and just can’t get the randomness of the house to cooperate. You might only feel like you’ve made progress once every few days. I found myself wishing I could do more to stack the deck in my favor.

There were also at least a couple puzzles that I couldn’t get past without a guide. I don’t begrudge a puzzle game its challenging puzzles, but I am disappointed when the clues don’t point clearly to the actual solution.

The Limits of Narrative through Setting

Blue Prince tells its story through its setting. It relies on the rooms themselves, supplemented with the letters, clippings, emails and books found within. It allows a few concessions to gameyness (nobody is surprised by the magically rearranging house in an otherwise normal world). The story has to fit within the framework of the grid game.

These limits prevent Blue Prince from creating the kind of curated narrative arc that is present in What Remains of Edith Finch or The Beginner’s Guide. That’s okay. It’s a different kind of game and a different kind of story.

Ultimately, it shows that the borders of interactive storytelling continue to expand.

Games for People Who Prefer to Read — Dr. Langeskov

Okay, the full, absurd name of this game is Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and the Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist. If you’re a reader who has never, ever played a video game, this might be the ideal first game for you to try. It’s free, it only takes about 15 minutes to complete, and it requires no reflexes or puzzle-solving skills. It’s available on Steam for those who have it, and Itch.io for those who don’t.

I don’t generally throw my lot in with the “hardcore gamers” who heap derision on so-called walking simulators, but it might be more accurate to call this a narrative experience than a game. Still, it’s a fun narrative experience.

The game promises an adventure in thievery, but even in the description on the store pages, it’s clear that something is amiss. Halfway through the description of the game, the person writing it decides to join “the strike,” complaining about being forced to do multiple jobs, and signs off with “I’m out.”

The opening menu screen also suggests an over-the-top adventure, with a moody forest scene illuminated only by the taillights of a car. You click the button to start the game. A loading screen appears for “heist.map,” cycling through several tips about the history of the mansion that you will presumably set out to rob in just a moment.

Suddenly, the music cuts out. The screen glitches, and you’re back at the title screen again. There is a voice; distant and muffled. You realize you’re hearing “back-stage,” where people are getting the game ready for you, as though it were a live stage production. Then there’s silence. Nothing is happening. You wait.

At some point, you decide to do something. Maybe click the “start game” button again? Moving the mouse causes the camera to shift, and you realize this isn’t the start menu at all. It’s a huge poster of the start menu on a wall. You’re in a drab waiting room, staring at a painted replica of the menu background.

This immediate double fake-out sets the stage for a very silly game where most of the “behind the scenes” workers running the game have gone on strike. You’re recruited to help, pulling levers and pushing buttons back-stage so some other player can enjoy the experience you thought you were going to have. The voice over the loudspeaker assures you that if you just help out a little bit more, you’ll get to play the game next. Promise.

Dr. Langeskov was developed by a small, indie studio called Crows Crows Crows, which includes William Pugh, best known for his work on The Stanley Parable and the considerably expanded version, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe.

It’s very similar to the Stanley Parable; with limited modes of interaction; a narrator that leads you along; the light, absurdist tone; and the playful ways the game gives you to rebel against the narrative by refusing to do what you’re told. It’s smaller than The Stanley Parable, but it feels like the perfect size for what it’s doing, and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

The Read Report — November 2024

Where did November go? I got distracted for a minute, and the whole month was over.

Despite my best intentions, the month was light on both writing and reading. Still, I managed to sneak a few things in. I’m still working on the final volume of the main Witcher series, and still working through the last of the Dark Materials books with my kids. With some vacation time on the horizon, I have high hopes that those will be in the December report.

But, back to November…

Where possible, I’ve included Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon. If any of these books pique your interest, please use those links. I’ll get a small commission, and you’ll support real book stores instead of cocktails of longevity drugs for billionaires.

The Umbrella Academy — Vol. 1, 2, and 3

By Gerard Way, Illustrated by Gabriel Bá

My first experience of the Umbrella Academy was being in the room while my wife watched the Netflix show. While I have arguably “seen” most of that series, my attention was not necessarily focused.

The impression I got from the show was that it was a near miss for me: lots of individual elements that I loved, but it somehow didn’t quite gel together to make something that really excited me.

So, either in spite of, or because of that, I had fairly high hopes for the comics. After all, most comic adaptations either crash and burn (cough, cough…League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, cough) or have trouble capturing the magic of their source material. However, as a power-nerd, I tend to come to those adaptations already familiar with the comics. In this case, I was starting with the show and going backward. As much as I try to remain unbiased, there’s a common tendency to appreciate the format where you first discovered the story.

My first impressions, in volume one, is that this is a setting that’s a bit whacky, without leaning especially hard into comedy. I mean, it practically starts with a cybernetic Gustav Eiffel attempting to launch the Eiffel Tower as a rocket into space.

This is very much a superhero comics world. Superhero comics are the background radiation, even if it’s not obsessed with muscle-bound men and women in incredibly resilient spandex. It’s a world where insane happenings are just a normal part of life.

These books follow the titular Umbrella Academy, seven super-powered children adopted by a cold and uncaring father and trained to save the world. Much like Disney channel actors, this thoroughly messes them up. Unlike Disney channel actors, only one in seven becomes a drug addict.

Volume one felt like a rushed introduction. Not only does it need to establish this world, but the seven super-powered children, their adoptive father, their robot mother, the chimp butler, and a handful of other miscellaneous characters. It’s a lot for six issues.

There’s a story here about the one estranged sibling turning villain against the others, but it’s so lost in the tumult. I never felt like the story had time to understand why she was angry, or so quick to “go bad.” Each character is touched on, but there’s not enough time to dig into any of them in depth. Ironically, the TV series gave me extra context that helped me understand the books. I suspect I would have had a tougher time without that.

Volume two feels like the real, proper beginning. The characters have been introduced, and we’re at least familiar with the surface-level. While this second series focuses on one particular member of the squad, we get more interaction and more background on pretty much all of the characters. We also get two completely deranged villains. I have to appreciate this, since absolute crazy people with incomprehensible motives are difficult characters to make work, and they work pretty well in this particular setting. And there are time travel shenanigans, which always makes me happy.

I think the second volume is the strongest story arc of the three. There’s a clear instigation, as the time-travel police come after a member of the Umbrella Academy, there’s a clear resolution by the end, and the story is neatly structured to build up the characters along the way.

The third volume is the longest of the three, boasting seven issues instead of six. It’s also the most ambitious in expanding the world and characters of the Umbrella Academy universe. Unfortunately, I can’t help but feel that it’s an interstitial story, setting up a Volume Four that has yet to release five years later. (Supposedly it’s in development.)

I have pretty mixed feelings about the series overall. It’s definitely unique among the series I’ve read, and I like to think I’ve covered a decent breadth of indie comics. But it has that same “not quite hitting it” feeling that I got from the TV show. Still, if Volume Four ever comes out, I’ll definitely buy it, so that says something.

Interestingly, and somewhat surprisingly in the era of Marvel ascendent, the Netflix show excised almost all of the superhero background radiation, and still made it work pretty well. For a show where the leader of the time-travel police is a robot body with a goldfish bowl for a head, it’s surprisingly grounded. If nothing else, it’s a great case study in making a comics-based show appeal to a non-comics audience. As much as such a thing even exists these days.

EVE Online “Chronicles”

I’m not generally interested in tie-in fiction. I’ve been burned too many times before.

When I was young, I read some of the early Star Wars tie-ins. I remember the novelizations of the original trilogy being pretty good. And then there was the Heir to the Empire trilogy, which was so successful as to spawn the entire Star Wars Expanded Universe. Of course, it was written by Timothy Zahn, who turned out to be decent apart from Star Wars. (I really enjoyed his Conqueror’s trilogy as a teen. Having not read it since, I assume it must still hold up…)

The Myst games were among the first games I played that felt like they had a real story (as little as you could glean from them) and I devoured the trilogy of books that expanded that universe. For my money, the first two Myst games and those three books are still probably the best example of games and books that tell a great story together.

My first real disappointment with tie-in fiction came several years later. I had discovered the relatively young and expanding world of ARGs, and found an archive of a Halo ARG now commonly known as ilovebees. It was a strange and seemingly futuristic way to deliver a story, and came in the form of a sort of radio-play pieced together from 30-second clips by a group of people discovering it as it went along.

I decided to delve into the Halo books, and quickly discovered that they were pretty much unreadable, even for a teen with possibly questionable taste.

Since then, I have steered clear of tie-in fiction. I may have dabbled here and there with some D&D-adjacent stories, but I’ve mostly turned up my nose at those shelves in the bookstore packed with D&D, Star Wars, Star Trek and myriad examples of trying to make a novel out of a hundred lines of in-game dialogue.

And now we come to the present day, where I am an old man having just turned forty, and I have begun dabbling in EVE Online.

How could this have happened? Well, there honestly aren’t that many games with spaceships. I’ve bounced off this one twice before, and for some reason, this time it stuck. I just couldn’t escape the gravity of a game that seems to be populated mostly by middle-aged dads with a high propensity for programming.

EVE is one of those incredibly rare MMOs that isn’t World of Warcraft, and yet keeps puttering along, staying alive for over twenty years. Throughout all that time, they’ve been releasing fiction in this world.

Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t read any of their books yet. There are a few of them, but I’m not that far gone. Instead, I’ve been perusing the “Chronicles,” which encompass a bunch of dry descriptive reads about particular factions or technologies, and a slightly shocking number of short stories.

It’s now been a couple of years since I’ve participated in a long-running TTRPG group, and I find that this really scratches that itch. It’s the same satisfying combination of playing in a world, and then really digging into the setting. The only difference is that this one is online. (Well, okay, I guess my last D&D group met online too, thanks to the pandemic.)

What I’m Reading in December

Yes, I’m still reading the last Witcher book. Yes, I’m a little worried that the whole story is going to fall apart in the final volume. I’ll also be trying to wrap up the Dark Materials series, and I’ve still got a few more comics trade paperbacks waiting in the wings.

See you next month!

Games for People Who Prefer to Read — The Beginner’s Guide

The Beginner’s Guide starts with a white screen. The voiceover says,

Hi there, thank you very much for playing The Beginner’s Guide. My name is Davey Wreden, I wrote The Stanley Parable, and while that game tells a pretty absurd story, today I’m going to tell you about a series of events that happened between 2008 and 2011. We’re going to look at the games made by a friend of mine named Coda.

Now these games mean a lot to me. I met Coda in early 2009 at a time when I was really struggling with some personal stuff, and his work pointed me in a very powerful direction. I found it to be a good reference point for the kinds of creative works that I wanted to make.

Then, without ceremony, we’re dropped into a world: a facsimile of a desert town, a map for the game Counterstrike. It’s Coda’s first “game,” and Davey proceeds to tell us why he thinks it’s interesting. He explains that he thinks these games tell us something about their creator. Coda stopped making games, and Davey wants to figure out why. He even provides his Gmail address and asks for feedback from players.

The Beginner’s Guide is not a traditional game. Like The Stanley Parable, it’s very much in “walking simulator” territory. However, where The Stanley Parable was all about choice in game narrative, The Beginner’s Guide offers few choices, and no real way to exert control over the narrative. It’s more about experience than participation. It’s a little bit like a short mystery.

The Narrator

Davey will continue to provide voice-over explanations throughout the entire experience, with very few breaks. He is the tour guide as we travel through Coda’s games, most of them little more than small experiments. While the player usually has freedom to go wherever they want within a given game, Davey moves the player from one game to the next. Davey chooses to occasionally skip the player past content that he deems unimportant, like a complicated maze, in order to keep the narrative flow.

He constantly explains the real-life context of his relationship with Coda at the time each game was made, and inserts his own theories about what these games tell us about Coda and his emotional state over the years they knew each other. He is ever-present, and influences the player’s interpretation of Coda’s games in both subtle and overt ways.

The Context

This opening sequence and everything that follows it is designed to put the player in a particular mindset. It’s a framing device, and it sets our expectations of Davey and Coda. After all, this is a pretty strange premise for a game. We know Davey is a real person. He really wrote The Stanley Parable. But is this the real Davey?

Is Coda a real person? Did he really make these games? That seems less likely. And what exactly does the title of the game mean?

Davey is inherently an unreliable narrator, but he goes to unusual lengths to establish credibility and realism. He sets himself up as a sort of documentarian, chronicling and presenting these games.

As The Beginner’s Guide progresses, an astute player may notice that Davey’s interpretations of Coda’s games sometimes make sense, and sometimes…don’t. He overlooks the obvious. He dismisses nuanced questions as uninteresting.

He also has a peculiar way of talking about Coda, his games, and the fact that he stopped making them. Everything comes back to Davey, how it makes him feel, how it fulfills (or fails to fulfill) his needs.

The Turn

Davey’s narration is well done, and his commentary is enough to keep the game interesting for the relatively short play time of The Beginner’s Guide. However, what makes the game interesting is the ending, and I won’t spoil that.

It’s enough to say that there is a particular sequence where it becomes clear who Davey really is, and this recontextualization of him forces the player to reevaluate everything he has said up to that point. It immediately changes the obvious interpretations of Coda’s games.

Writing in video games is still young, and it’s rare for a video game to do something clever enough in its writing that it deserves the notice of writers in other media. The Beginner’s Guide is not a perfect game, but the setup, the turn, and the execution throughout is worth noticing.

The Game

The Beginner’s Guide is a small game. It takes around two hours to complete and it’s available for $10 on Steam. Go check it out.