The Flipside of Gaming
This is a review of Beyond Sunset played with a press key.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
Less a game than a puzzle, and not so much runnable software than a website, enclose.horse is a very nice thing to spend a few minutes of your day, each day, on.
Every puzzle is a map of a field, with an arrangement of lakes and a horse somewhere in it. You have a number of square blocks to try to completely surround the horse. The horse does not like to be surrounded (click on them to get their opinion), so the more space you can enclose the horse within the higher your score.
When the horse is surrounded, a field of wheat springs up to show you how much space you’ve left the horse. Each space of wheat is one point. Some puzzles have cherries on the map, and also enclosing those is worth five bonus points. There’s also Golden Apples, they’re worth ten points. There’s bees too, trapping the horse with those is five points off your score. And there are pairs of portals, which count as an additional avenue of escape for Horsie that you must also account for.
The puzzles vary in difficulty. It’s usually easy to score at least something, but your true aim is for an optimal, perfect score. When you submit your score (you only get one try!) you’re told what the perfect score is and shown a solution that earns it. You can also browse past puzzles and see how well you do at those, create your own with a simple editor, and play other users’ puzzles.
The site continues to be worked on. Up until a couple of days ago there was a Check button, that you could use to find out what a puzzle’s perfect score was, so you could keep trying until you achieved it. However that introduced a bit of reluctance to submit anything that wasn’t perfection (it certainly made me a lot less likely to submit a score), so in the past couple of days it was removed, and that was probably for the best.
Give it a shot, while it’s harder than you’d think, it’s also not usually very hard. I think you’ll like it.
enclose.horse (web, $0)
The indie game showcases highlight the many games we check out on game-wisdom. Please reach out (to Josh Bycer) if you would like to submit a game for a future one. All games shown are either press keys, demos, or games from my own collection.
00:00 Intro
00:14 Nimrods
1:47 Trash Goblin
3:09 Thunder Age
4:25 BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER 3: I OPENED A PORTAL TO HELL IN THE FAVELA TRYING TO REVIVE MIT AIA I NEED TO CLOSE IT
6:22 Beastieball
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
We try not to shy away from hardcore geekery-peekery here, and I think this one qualifies for that nonsensical nomenclature.
We’ve brought up Stephen’s Sausage Roll (SSR) here in the past, it’s a uniquely challenging turn-based puzzle game. You move a little fork-wielding guy around to cook sausages in an infuriatingly precise way: each two-unit long sausage has two sides to each of its units, and each must be cooked exactly once per side. The controls are simple, but the puzzle start out tough and get tougher. New wrinkles get added in an organic way, and the game feels like it changes as you advance through it, even if you doesn’t actually gain any new verbs; the levels are just cleverly designed so that Stephen’s advanced tricks just aren’t possible before the game’s ready to unveil them.
In this 7½ minute video, a Youtube channel with the suitable name Stephen’s State Space examines two early levels of SSR with their move spaces graphed out, and shows that, while there is room for some slight variation, both of them require the player to progress through a specific sequence to finish the puzzle. If you don’t know anything about SSR, the shown-off solutions will seem to be brain-melting in their specificity. Let me assure you that these puzzles are only the beginning.
When people talk about why they play these kinds of hard puzzlers, they often express it in terms of how they make them feel when they solve it, the harder the puzzle, the greater the feeling of accomplishment. When I hear that, I think, duh, but more than that, why do people have a “feeling of accomplishment” when they play these games?
When you put it in terms of a feeling, I think you’re getting dangerously close to those people who put it all in terms of dopamine, which I hate. Game players aren’t dopamine addicts! If you could get it out of a syringe, would you do that?
You get a jolt of dopamine, experienced as a feeling of accomplishment, because you accomplished something! I have long thought that the best reason for playing difficult puzzles isn’t the feeling you get when you solve them, but their improving aspect. Working through tricky puzzles actually makes you a little smarter for doing them. The fact that they’re fun to do is the spoonful of sugar, to borrow Ms. Poppin’s phrase, to get you through.
So go forth and cook those sausages! If you can get all the way through SSR, I reckon that’s enough to get your INT score up to at least 15. I don’t know if I can say if it’ll affect your WIS, and it certainly won’t help your CHA, but let’s work on one D&D attribute score at a time, eh wot?
This is a double review for Elephantasy 1 and Neyyah, played with a retail key and press key, respectively.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Christina Pollock of the blog Load-bearing Tomato has an insightful essay about how opinions shared on social media can come to shape, and often ruin, the work of unseasoned (and even well-seasoned) developers, letting the guiding design principles of their work get blown to the winds because of internet randos forming ill-considered opinions about them.
It’s related to something I’ve said for a long time: people don’t know what they’ll like. Statistically, your favorite game probably lies out there, miles away from your field of view, and you may well never hear of it before it (or you) expires. But beyond that, the way punchy memes and quickly-thought opinions on social media snowball can rapidly turn someone’s casual observance into obvious truth results in games slowly being ruined, over successive updates, into a bland design paste.
Take for instance Navi from Ocarina of Time, and how some decided that her occasional annoying cries of “Hey! Listen!” made her a nearly game-ruining feature. Her annoyingness was even referenced on The Powerpuff Girls (video, 40 seconds) at one point.
Sometimes the crowd has good points, yes. But also sometimes they turn molehills into mountains. Taken too far this line of thinking can turn into Always Trust The Dev, which can also be false. The answer, as it is with many things, is it’s complicated. Turn to Pollock’s article for a lot of examples of how it’s complicated.
The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games we check out on the channel. (JH: That would be Game Wisdom, please consider dropping by there!) Please reach out if you would like to submit a game for a future one. All games shown are either press keys, demos, or games from my own collection.
00:00 Intro
00:14 Mech Shuffle
2:06 Karate Survivor
3:51 Neva
5:36 Anomaly Collapse
7:48 Feed the Deep
9:56 Phantom Spark
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
I know it’s great because it includes a few games already mentioned on this blog, like Gar-Type! Find it (the list) here! And consider following Dominic on Bluesky or (via BridgyFed) Mastodon!
This is a preview of Void/Breaker played with a gamespass key. Footage shown is in early access and may not represent the current version.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
For this perceptive podcast, the YouTube channel Indie Enjoyer reached out to want to chat about covering indie games, and what it’s like to be a Youtuber today who enjoys talking about smaller and underrated games.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
The weekly indie game showcases highlight the many games we check out on the (Game Wisdom) channel. Please reach out if you would like to submit a game for a future one. All games shown are either press keys, demos, or games from my own collection.
00:00 Intro
00:14 Dobbel Dungeon
1:58 Entanglement
3:43 Parry Nightmare
5:07 Extreme Evolution Drive to Divinity
6:46 Ultros
9:09 Sniper Killer
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
We love it when we find weird and unique indie games to tell you all about! Our alien friends to the left herald these occasions.
A second webgame in a row, Urjo is a logic puzzle game about choosing which of each space in a grid should be red or blue, with the following conditions:
1. Every row and column must contain the same number of red and blue spaces.
2. Every numbered space must have the same number of spaces touching it (in the eight spaces around it) as its color.
3. No two adjacent rows or columns can have the same sequence of colors. In practice this is the most subtle rule. It doesn’t always come into play, but if it does it’ll probably be the breakthrough you’ll need to pull off a solve.
Every puzzle has a unique solution. It is similar in style to another web puzzle called 0h h1, but a major difference in presentation is that Urjo is watching as you try to solve it, and won’t let you make incorrect moves. Instead, it counts up all your mistakes and scores you on how well you did. You have an overall rating that goes up as you both complete puzzles with fewer errors and faster times than other solvers. This can be annoying (it’s easy to click the wrong size of a circle on accident), and it pushes you to try to solve them faster than you may feel comfortable, which may also cause inadvertent mistakes.
The software will try to give you puzzles just past your skill level, and I can verify that they get very difficult. If you make mistakes it’ll offer to give you some pointers. Myself I ignore those tips; but I can see how some people might find them useful.
Urjo (web, free)
