Interesting Games
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Journey is a very interesting game, pioneering you could even say. Still, I don’t think I liked it. Read more
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I have been quite enjoying Steelrising lately. It’s an action game set in Louis 14th France filled with destruction, dead bodies and robots. Read more
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Reigns is an interesting small title that misses just a bit to be great for me. Read more
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20 Minutes Till Dawn is such an amazing example of a small game. Design and execution is so incredibly small and boring, but it’s incredibly fun. Killing enemies gives you EXP to level up and on level up you get a bonus to some of your base stats or special power. That’s. It. It’s so… Read more
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There is a practice I have noticed some AAA studios do –> Series of main releases with smaller releases of the same franchise in-between. As you can imagine developing games takes quite a bit of time and investment. A lot is betting on a single release, just imagine a game in development for three years… Read more
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I recently wrote about how irreversible decisions can be a powerful tool in game design. One of the examples was XCOM and how it deals with permanent death of in-game characters. Today I would like to look at it from a bit more narrative driven point of view. We will encounter bit of a trouble… Read more
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I think that irreversible decisions can be one of the most powerful tools you can use in your game design. But as we all know, with great power comes great responsibility. When there are decisions player has to make, that will have significant impact on the rest of the game –> it makes it very… Read more
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Into the Breach is amazing. It’s right there on top as an example of fantastic system design. Chilling with Darkest Dungeon, Noita and mainly chess. That is a high praise indeed. Game designer comparing game to chess is like painter comparing painting to Mona Lisa or Last Supper. It means a lot. You can read… Read more
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Chess is amazing. It’s the purest and simplest example of beautiful systemic design. You see, what I appreciate about games is how deep and interesting systems they can create from simplest possible mechanics. Chess is a king and queen of this concept. Anyone can learn chess in few minutes, no matter the age. By learn… Read more
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Loop hero is an interesting game in itself, but that’s not what we will talk about today. What’s interesting about Loop Hero is how it takes a genre trope, puts it on its head and then dances with it Cancan. It’s a very interesting way how to think about creating original game mechanics. For a… Read more
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Let’s talk about PlanetBase, it’s probably my favorite bad game. The premise is quite simple; Real-time base management game about small group of settlers building a colony on a new planet. PlanetBase is seemingly quite complex, you have bunch of statistics to keep track of, the usual suspects: Power (electricity), oxygen, food, water, biomass, metal… Read more
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I think Portal may be the best example of pacing in any game I have ever played. I will assume that everyone played or have at least heard about Portal, so I will describe the game only very briefly. It’s actually quite simple: You have a gun that can create Red and Blue portals on… Read more
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There is something very interesting about Buckshot Roulette. Let me first introduce you to the game: It’s a short horror game, which is actually not scary at all, sorta “Russian Roulette-like” exercise in probability. Helpful, aren’t I? Let’s have a look at our typical game loop: Player sits in front of the dealer with a… Read more
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I have played Dagon recently. You can think about it as a visual novel adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft’s short story. It’s a bit more interesting than that actually. Most visual novels tend to focus on the story and spam you with hordes of text, while the “visual” part of the game is changing only… Read more
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