Unwinnability and Wishbringer

Someone asked recently about a version of Zork modified to avoid all the classical Infocom annoyances. Expiring light sources, random combat, crucial items stolen by the thief... Zork comes from an era where all these were simply part of the fun. You saved a lot, optimized your run, and tried again if you failed. But the gaming world -- I include myself -- has largely decided over time that this isn't fun.

As far as I know, there is no such modified Zork. But it's an intriguing idea! In fact someone is working on a modified Planetfall in just this vein. A new MODERN command switches to a mode with no hunger timer and, ideally, no unwinnable situations.

When we talk about those early games, it's easy to fall into the trap of calling those unwinnable situations mistakes or design flaws. Once you do that, you're stuck searching for explanations of why the designers made those mistakes. Answers come in two flavors. Either (a) the state of the art was too primitive to understand that unwinnable situations were bad; or (b) the designers were padding out their games to a given level of difficulty or play time.

Speaking as one who played the games back in the day: this is just wrong.

This Giant Bomb article puts it well:

The early generations of text adventure games tended to have a lot of chances that could lead players to unwinnable states, as a way to make a game deeper and more challenging; this kind of game design was not yet considered unfair to players. It was usually considered a product of the game’s difficulty rather than poor design and encouraged (or, as its critics would say, forced) replayability.

-- Unwinnable State (Concept), Giant Bomb

The need for many failed run-throughs before one figures out the perfect approach was certainly an element of the challenge. But it was never padding. It was as much a part of the design as the treasures and the magic words.

There's a deeper confusion, though. The same article goes on to say:

Mike Dornbrook, Infocom's Head of Marketing, conducted a customer survey in late 1984 which showed a clear correlation between the Infocom games players considered their favourites and the games they had actually finished. This piece of marketing intelligence led to the more foolproof design of Wishbringer and later games.

-- ibid

Wishbringer was Infocom's second junior-level game. It is friendlier than earlier games, more forgiving, and more generous in its design. Most of the major puzzles have at least two solutions. But it's a misconception to say that Wishbringer avoids unwinnable situations, or that Infocom changed its design stance after 1984.

It's true that Wishbringer was immediately followed by A Mind Forever Voyaging, which was focused on narrative exploration rather than puzzles. But this was just halfway through Infocom's high season. Their later slate (Spellbreaker, Leather Goddesses, Trinity, Lurking Horror, ...) embraced the model of failable game design and refined it into some of their best-regarded work. With Journey, Infocom redesigned IF from the ground up (discarding the parser!) -- but doubled down on failable puzzles, structuring the game around a limited resource system which took much trial and error to solve.

To untangle this, we're going to have to dig into the ways in which games can become unwinnable. How does it happen and why?

A couple of Myst fandom notes

We're still waiting for the PC release of the new rebuilt Myst. But that doesn't mean that nothing's going on.

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This week Cyan announced official support for the long-standing Myst fan wiki at guildofarchivists.org:

We are delighted to announce that as part of the Lore Project, Cyan Worlds, Inc. will be utilizing the Guild of Archivists website as the Official wiki for the Myst franchise!

The Lore Team knows how important the preservation of the franchise’s mythos and our community’s history is, and wants to ensure it can live on a continuing platform which is not filled with ads or subject to shutting down.

To that end, while Alahmnat will still remain the Guild’s Grand Master, today Cyan is formally committing to providing server space and our support to ensure the Archive and other Guild of Archivists resources will remain online, independent, and ad-free forever!

-- Cyan announcement, Feb 9 2021

The Guild of Archivists (according to its own about page!) has been running for twenty years. If you look back into my old Uru pages you'll find many links to D'niPedia, the wiki's original home at dpwr.net. It's one of those fan resources which has become invaluable to the original creator, and Cyan's offer of support reflects this.

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I also caught scent of an online documentary series called Preserving Worlds. I'm not familiar with Means TV, the studio that created it -- they seem to cover political topics primarily -- but they seem to have taken a stab at videogame history. The show was created by Derek Murphy and Mitchell Zemil; it consists of six thirty-minute episodes covering ZZT, Second Life, Myst Online, and other multiplayer games of yore.

(Bonus points for the Chicago font styling!)

I just watched the Myst Online episode. It consists of an in-depth interview with Zib (Max Batchelder), a long-time fan -- I've seen him around the forums and conventions forever. He gives a good thumbnail overview of Uru's checkered history and its many fan incarnations, followed by a tour of several fan-created Ages.

The background footage of the show is clips from Uru Ages. Some are familiar areas from Cyan's original game, others are fan Ages; but the documentary presents them on an equal footing. There's no hierarchy of "canon versus fandom" -- they stand entirely on their own merits until Zib begins to introduce particulars. (And then there's a credits list at the end.) I thought that was a nice touch.

The interview was recorded last summer, before Cyan's surprise release of three fan Ages on the official Myst Online server. Each of those three appears in the show; so do several others that I'd only seen as static snapshots in a gallery. I appreciated the walking tour.

Four (or five) recent Lovecraftians

"Lovecraftian game" is an improbable label to begin with. We don't say "Conan-Doylian game" or "Gibsonian" or "George-Lucasian". Games have adapted stories by Poe and Verne and so on, but not enough to talk about them as a category. Tolkien adaptations are an industry in themselves, but you'd say "Middle Earth games" -- maybe -- certainly not "Tolkienian".

Lovecraft, as always, is weirdly liminal: a collection of tropes that can be, and arguably should be, detached from the stories themselves.

So. A game genre (subgenre) is a set of conventions about what you do. Except Lovecraftian-ness isn't defined by what you do; it's defined by what happens to you. You are shaken out of your mundane reality and forced to confront the cosmically terrifying. (Or cosmically astonishing, but we'll get there.) What you do in your mundane reality is an open question. The opening and closing of the story, before and after revelation, can go anywhere! It's not like a "Sherlock Holmes" game where you know exactly what's on the menu.

Of course, a game that leads up to cosmic discoveries may well start out with mundane discoveries. That's an obvious model; it's why the Call of Cthulhu RPG is canonically about investigators. I don't have hard stats, but I'd bet that the most common Lovecraftian crossover is the hard-headed private eye who's seen it all and is about to see a whole lot more.

Now look: I'm going to ignore the kind of game where phallic oozing horrors swarm at you and you mow them down with a shotgun. That's Lovecraftian only in the sense of H. R. Giger and the Aliens franchise -- the influence is unarguable, but anything you can blow up ain't cosmic. (Nor run over with a boat; really, don't get me started.)

(Yes, I'm handwaving a lot of ground here. The FPS Gigeresques led directly to survival horror by simply deleting the shotgun. Many undeniably Lovecraftian titles there. But "shooting" and "dodging" are the easy answers in game design, right? And even with those answers, players demand at least a little plot.)

A lot of Lovecraftian games start out with the general question: what's going on here? As these games indeed do. But that doesn't mean that you do the same stuff in them. Let's compare.

• Moons of Madness
• Transient
• Old Gods Rising
• Call of the Sea
• Paradise Killer

Twitter makes it harder to read tweets

Yesterday I touched off a teacup-storm when I tweeted:

Twitter cut off the ability to read a tweet by fetching its URL with a normal HTTP GET. You need Javascript or an authenticated API call.

I know most people don't care. It's normal web browsing, with all the data-hoovering we've come to expect.

Just want to say that it matters.

--@zarfeblong, Dec 17th

Quite a few people started discussing this, and it wound up on this HackerNews thread.

What's going on here?

The problem here might not be clear. After all, if you click my tweet link in a regular web browser, you'll see the tweet and its replies, right?

"Twitter cut off the ability to read a tweet by fetching its URL with a normal HTTP GET. You need Javascript or an authenticated API call."

That's because a regular web browser supports Javascript, cookies, and everything else that's been thrown into the Web over the years. When you browse like this, Twitter can cookie-track you (notice that I'm using Safari's Private Browsing feature). They can nag you to log in. They can show you ads. All the usual stuff.

If you try turning off Javascript, you see this:

"JavaScript is not available."

(This is iCab, a third-party browser with some nice features. Twitter supports iCab just fine if JS is turned on.)

But let's reduce the situation to bare essentials: a raw HTTP GET request using curl.

curl -v https://twitter.com/zarfeblong/status/1339742840142872577

HTTP/2 400

This browser is no longer supported.

Please switch to a supported browser to continue using twitter.com. You can see a list of supported browsers in our Help Center.

I've elided most of the headers, but that's an HTTP "400: Bad Request" error response.

In the past, all of these requests would work; you could read a tweet this way. Twitter added warnings a while back ("Do you want the mobile site?") but you could get through if you wanted.

However, a few weeks ago, Twitter added a warning saying that on Dec 15th, they would remove support for legacy browsers. That's what changed this week. I didn't catch the exact time, but on Dec 15th, they started returning this error page which includes no information about the tweet.

What problems does this cause?

I admit up front that my browsing setup is weird. My default browser has JS turned off; it has a strict cookie expiration limit. This is hardcore privacy mode and most people don't do it. Lots of web pages work badly for me. But most of the web works at least a little bit -- when I go to a web page, I can usually see what's there.

(Of course, if I want to buy something or edit a Google doc, I need to switch modes. I use four different browsers and about six or seven different profiles with different levels of privacy protection. I told you it was weird.)

The point is, I am willing to trade off convenience for privacy. But as of Dec 15th, when I go to a Twitter URL, I see nothing. The tradeoff just got a little worse.

This isn't about me, though. From followup discussion:

• My friend Jmac is working on a tool which displays chat from several sources, including Twitter, in a single window. Twitter broke it.
• Keybase is an open platform which supports personal end-to-end encryption. It uses Twitter as one (of several) means of identity verification. Twitter broke that.
• Someone in the HN thread mentioned a script they use to check for broken links on their web site. Twitter broke that (for links to tweets).
• I've heard that previews of tweets on other chat/discussion platforms has also broken. (Not sure which ones, though.)

To be more ideological about it (yes I will), Twitter is asserting that people reading tweets is not their priority. Twitter is not about people communicating. They'll block communication if it pushes up their corporate numbers.

This was my summary from last night (slightly edited for clarity):

The point of the web is that a public URL refers to information. You can GET it. There may be all sorts of elaboration and metadata and extra services, but that HTTP GET always works.

Tools rely on this. Blogs pull previews via HTTP. RSS readers collect and collate posts. People peek pages using fast or low-bandwidth tools. It's not part of any company's value proposition or stock price; it just works. Until somebody breaks it.

The error message that appears now when I do this on Twitter (and the warning that popped up a few weeks ago) says that Twitter is dropping support for legacy browsers. But you support legacy browsers with an HTTP reply that contains the tweet text. That's all.

The only reason not to do this is that someone at Twitter said, "Why are we letting people just read tweets? That doesn't benefit us. They need The Full Twitter Experience." Which boils down to selling ads.

Yes, I could be using the API in various ways without directly hooking into the ad firehose. But then at least [Twitter] controls the experience -- [they] give out the API keys, [they] can decide to cut people off or otherwise control what's going on.

If I can just read a public tweet the same way every other web document works, then I can make the experience work how I want; I can have the conversation on my own terms and in my own framework.

To Twitter, this is anathema. So Twitter cut it off.

That's all. That's where we are. I don't expect different because Twitter is an ad company. I expect other changes in the future which will make Twitter even less hospitable to me. Maybe next week [or] maybe in ten years -- I'll find out when it happens.

--@zarfeblong, Dec 17th (or on nitter!)

Alternatives and workarounds

Of course there are many.

Twitter's public API

Twitter supports a web API. You can use it from any language you like (Perl, Python, whatever). In fact you can use it with curl or wget if you enjoy web plumbing.

As is usual for big web APIs, you have to register as an app developer and request an access key. This is free, but it puts the process under Twitter's control. In theory they can revoke your access if they think you're a baddie.

Also, the API has rate limits. This isn't a shock; every web service has some kind of rate limit, even if it's just Cloudflare or your ISP cutting you off. But Twitter has made it clear that they limit use of the API to make sure that third-party clients never get too popular. They don't exactly want to squash third-party clients, but they see them as a threat to be contained.

(See this 2012 blog post -- particularly the bit about "if you need a large amount of user tokens". I wrote more about this in 2018, when Twitter deprecated some functionality from their API.)

Nitter.net

Several people referred me to Nitter.net, an alternative Twitter front-end which doesn't require Javascript. Pretty much aimed at people like me! You can substitute Nitter in any public tweet URL and get a URL that works in all the ways we've been talking about. For example, https://nitter.net/zarfeblong/status/1339742840142872577:

curl -v https://nitter.net/zarfeblong/status/1339742840142872577

This downloads an HTML document which contains my original text, and all the replies. You can also visit https://nitter.net/zarfeblong to see my Twitter profile, except there's no ads, no promoted crap, and it loads fine (and fast!) without Javascript.

I'm sure that Nitter uses Twitter's API, mind you. It is, de facto, a third-party Twitter client. Which means that -- again, in theory -- Twitter could just cut it off. I don't know whether they're likely to. At any rate, at present, Nitter is a useful interface.

Faking your User-Agent

Turns out that if you're Google, you can GET tweets all you like! And pretending to be Google is pretty easy.

curl -v -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://google.com/bot.html)" https://twitter.com/zarfeblong/status/1339742840142872577

This sends Google's User-Agent string (instead of the standard curl string). Twitter happily sends back the same web page I was getting before Dec 15th.

Now, this web page asks me to turn on Javascript. But the text of my tweet is in there (along with people's replies in the thread). You can extract the text by looking for og:description, which is the standard web preview metadata.

Is this a viable workaround? It certainly works. But it's a hack. Twitter's policy is that I should not be allowed to get this page. Only Google can, because Google is king. I'm a peon. Their enforcement of this policy is crude and easy to cheat -- but that's a bug. Maybe they'll fix the bug. Maybe it's not important enough to fix. Again, I don't know.

It's also worth noting that the page you get this way is 586 kb. The Nitter.net equivalent is 28 kb. Twitter has piled a lot of junk into their UI.

So now what?

Honestly I haven't decided. I think I'm going to set up my default browser to redirect twitter.com URLs to nitter.net. That will take care of most of my day-to-day needs.

(I do use Twitter clients, by the way. Tweetbot on Mac, Echofon on iOS. But I try to use them in a mindful way. I don't want them to pop up just because I clicked somewhere.)

Mostly, this is an opportunity to look clearly at Twitter and remember that it does not love us. It's a commercial social network; we are its fuel and in its fire we shall burn. I use Twitter, but -- as with the web in general -- I want to remain aware of the tradeoffs.

For what it's worth, Mastodon never got traction for me. Sorry. My private social circles are now on Slack and Discord. Slack just got bought. Maybe it'll be okay. Discord's heel-turn is still in the unclear future. I don't know. We have to stay flexible.

So, you know... the usual story. Enjoy your holidays. Stay home and videochat. Play some games.

Reading Myst for detail

The VR remake of Myst is due out for Oculus Quest on the 10th. I will not be playing it this week because I'm not into VR or Facebook. The updated Myst will be released for other VR platforms and flatscreen PCs in 2021 -- I believe they said "early 2021" -- and I am happily anticipating that. The screenshots look amazing.

(Cyan has walked a painful line insisting that this is not a "Quest exclusive" release. It's just a game that releases on Quest this week, and other platforms at an unannounced future date. My personal theory is that Facebook walked into Cyan's office with a bucket of money and said "Make Myst VR a Quest exclusive!", and Cyan said "Oh, no, we really can't do that," and then there was a lot of pacing and gesticulating, and they wound up with this handwavy compromise where the PC version ships a couple of months later and nobody calls it a Quest exclusive. This is only a theory.)

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to go back and look at how little we know about the Myst story!

The original game does an incredible job of painting a complex story of betrayal with just a few brushstrokes of narration. But it's surprisingly hard to pin down exactly what happened. We know that Atrus trapped his sons in the red and blue books, and the boys trapped Atrus in D'ni... hang on, how did that work? Who was trapped first?

Here, try this puzzle. You've played Myst. Using only your knowledge of the original game, put these events in chronological order:

• (A) Atrus creates the red and blue trap books.
• (B) Atrus goes to D'ni and is trapped.
• (C) Atrus moves four linking books from the library to the protected places on Myst.
• (D) Atrus records a message to Catherine in the Forechamber imager.
• (E) Atrus tears pages from the red and blue books and scatters them.
• (F) Sirrus and Achenar burn the library on Myst.
• (G) Sirrus and Achenar do something ("used Catherine") to trick Atrus into going to D'ni.
• (H) Sirrus and Achenar enter the red and blue books and are trapped.
• (I) Sirrus and Achenar tear one page from Atrus's Myst linking book.

(I've put these in alphabetical order to avoid giving hints!)

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Spoilers farther down the post. While you think about it, I'll mention some other recent Cyan news...

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A month ago Cyan released a photo-sharing iPhone app called Crowbox. No, it's not a game; it really is a photo-sharing app. It uses peer-to-peer networking. You browse through your photos on your phone, select one, and everybody else standing near you can see it pop up on their phone. That's the whole gimmick. It's free, no ads, with a paid DLC option for extra features (more shareable albums).

Cyan teased this idea last year at Mysterium. Now they're pushing it as ideal for pandemic times -- you can show people your photo album while standing six feet away from them. (Outdoors, preferably, but you know this.)

They also posted an in-character Atrus journal touting the idea, in case you like your marketing ARG-style.

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If you're into merch, Cyan has put new mugs, shirt, posters, and other stuff on their company store page. Some of this has art from the upcoming Myst; some spotlights fan artist Lauren Herda. I snagged a couple of mousepads, which are now sold out, ha ha.

The loss of Arecibo Observatory

We learned this morning that the Arecibo radio telescope has collapsed entirely. (Announcement; news story.) The hanging instrument platform broke loose and smashed into the dish below. No one was injured.

There are some preliminary photos of the wreckage on Twitter. I'm sure there will be more later. I won't link them. Here is a photo I took in March of 2019, when the observatory was fully operational:

Arecibo Observatory, March 2019

This is an ignominious end, but we knew it was coming. The first cable failed in August; more failed in November. On November 19th, engineers declared that the damage could not safely be repaired and the telescope would have to be decommissioned. We hoped for a controlled disassembly, but cables continued to unravel progressively, and this morning it all went.

So this hurts, but I did my grieving two weeks ago. Here is the twitter thread I wrote on the 19th:

Of all the terrible news this year, I am unexpectely wrecked by the decommissioning of the Arecibo radio telescope.

I saw the report of the first cable failure in August, but not the second, worse cable failure in November. It's bad and engineering assessments say it can't be safely repaired.

(Don't "what if" this. We believe that engineers know their shit.)

When I was in elementary school, I read Danny Dunn and the Voice from Space (Williams and Abrashkin). The book was written in 1967, a few years after Arecibo was completed. It was about a kid decoding messages from aliens. I loved everything about that.

The book's radio telescope was fictional ("Grendel Observatory" in England, thank you easily accessible ebooks) but it must have been inspired by the excitement around the brand-new world's-largest radio telescope in Puerto Rico.

I was so excited about SPAAACE that I started drawing a tiny radio telescope on things as my personal logo.

I did not wind up becoming an astronaut. But, for a while, I was "radiotelescope" on livejournal. I still have radiotelescope.dreamwidth.org, although I don't post there.

Hadean Lands source code book (a limited kickstarter reward) with radiotelescope logo

I still sometimes stick that radio telescope logo onto something, just for old time's sake. And SPAAAAACE.

Me visiting Arecibo

Here's me visiting that, early 2019. Like I said, one of the wonders of modern human civilization. We suck in a lot of ways but we build literal, monumental cathedrals to Science. Working Science.

The news stories say the observatory will still exist in some form, and maybe a new instrument can be built. I hope so. Every other headline this week [of Nov 19th] is about the absolute rage and contempt that's arisen against knowledge, science, and cooperative effort.

Sorry. This was supposed to be a positive thread. I want to be hopeful, but the future is hard these days and I'm scared for a lot more than astronomy.

Stop the fascists.

Apologies (again) for getting dark at the end. It's two weeks later now. The US fascist movement has lost its immediate hope of seizing power. (Don't ask me about 2022.) COVID vaccines are in production. We might still build a new telescope at Arecibo. It seems like a distant hope; we're still reaching towards the possibility of funding the Post Office. But we don't have to give up yet.

Civilization is a group effort. Stand in support of all of us.

Puzzle games of the year: my favorites

Yesterday I tossed up fifteen short takes on puzzle games I've played this year. Today, longer comments on the two puzzle games that most impressed me in 2020:

• Filament
• A Monster's Expedition

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Filament

• Beard Envy Games -- Steam page

A top-down puzzle game where you wrap cables around posts. I really liked this one. The basic mechanic spins off into dozens of variations: forbidden posts, ordered posts, colored posts, gate-opening posts, pairs of posts... it goes on.

By itself that would be a perfectly fine game. But it's also embedded in an explorable environment full of secrets. I love secrets! It's a big abandoned spaceship where the computer terminals are controlled by, guess what, wire-wrapping puzzles. Terminal-activation codes are hidden all over the place. It sounds silly, but the technology makes sense in a weirdly retro-future way.

(Bonus points for the abandoned spaceship which is full of daylight and bright colors and yet, somehow, still creepily haunted.)

I could quibble about the environmental storytelling. It's mostly conveyed through punchcards containing the crew's email and log entries. That's fine, but (a) you wind up reading each email at least twice -- once on the sender's card and once on the receipient's. More for group messages. And (b) you get a card every time a new set of puzzles opens up. By the time you reach the hard sets, you've seen all of the rooms and most of the emails; there's relatively little left to unlock. (And (c) the emails feel a bit tacked on to begin with.)

In other words, the back half of the game does a crap job of rewarding you with narrative. Your reward for solving puzzles is just harder puzzles. Yes, it's a puzzle game, but it has story elements and they could have paced them better.

As I said, quibbling. The actual endgame is an (enormous, mind-expanding...) new room filled with puzzles that combine variations from earlier in the game. (Much like Sensorium!) Plus a few new ideas. You want puzzles? This game has enough puzzles for you.

I will admit that I looked at walkthroughs for some of the tough ones. It was... possibly too many puzzles in some of the sets. And the epilogue scene doesn't exactly make sense that I can tell. Nonetheless, I highly recommend it.

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A Monster's Expedition

• Draknek & Friends -- game site

Okay, look. Last year I went apeshit about Baba Is You. Puzzle game of the year, of the decade, I told everybody who would listen that Baba would be known as a landmark of puzzle design for generations.

(Of course you don't need me to tell you that. Baba has a slew of awards and accolades to its name.)

So listen: A Monster's Expedition (Through Puzzling Exhibitions) is going to be a landmark of puzzle design for generations. In a completely different way! AME isn't a continual explosion of semiotic fireworks. It isn't an unending landslide of new puzzle-pieces that rewrite the rules of the universe.

AME, let's be clear, is about chopping down trees and pushing logs. There are also rocks. It's a block-pushing game. Except that the blocks are cylinders, so they roll if you push them sideways. You can push a log into the water to reach the next island. That's the whole game.

What AME does is take these simple elements and unfold them into a rising symphony of new possibilities. And it does this so smoothly, with such unerring craft, that every time you say "Wait. You can do that?"

To be clear, each new possibility always existed. It just never came up before because the level design didn't lead to any position where it happened. So you didn't notice. But then it's time for you to notice, and it's right there in front of you. Over and over, you gain mastery over the elements -- the logs and rocks -- and are then presented with a new way to combine them that you didn't even realize you could have tried. And then you reach the next set of levels, and it happens some more.

In Baba, in practically every puzzle game, these new possibilities are new game elements which are introduced at specific points. Here's a teleporter. Here's a bomb. Here's the word "LEVEL". Now solve some teleporter levels or bomb levels or LEVEL levels.

AME doesn't do that. It introduces... I think two new elements. Here, I'll spoil it (without spoiling the game at all): AME starts with trees and rocks. Later it introduces taller trees (two-space logs) and shorter rocks. That's it. But these are woven into probably a dozen unique mechanics, introduced sequentially in different groups of islands. Maybe more. I didn't count.

And I'm not even getting into the way islands are connected, such that you travel from one to the next on paths that are entirely emergent and yet take you exactly where the designer wants you to go. Or the way you don't get stuck, even though the island-reset button is not inherently safe. (You can imagine situations where resetting one of a pair of islands leaves you stranded on a beach. It just never happens because the designer was careful.)

(Okay, I got stranded once. I think three islands were involved. It took effort. The game keeps multiple autosaves so I was able to recover easily.)

Also, to be clear, the puzzles are sneaky and clever and challenging and never quite impossible. Difficult, yes. I'm sure plenty of people will try the game, solve a lot of islands, bog down, and never reach the formal "you won" point. That's fine. It's still worth playing.

(This is why Baba had a "midpoint" goal -- a satisfying ending for people who are not completist puzzle fiends. AME doesn't have anything like that, and maybe it should.)

(I have not said anything about the narrative, because there basically isn't one. There's a series of funny one-line takes on modern life. It's pleasant but not a big feature of the game. I always appreciate a narrative frame -- I did in Filament -- but hey, not all games. What AME does have is a consistent tone: inviting, peaceable, unhurried, generous.)

So: AME is not splashy. It's a deft, quiet, intensely thoughtful exploration of a simple idea. Its craft is so understated that it's easy to overlook it entirely. (Compare my comments on the narrative flexibility of Heaven's Vault.)

Do not overlook it. Think about systems so dense that you don't have to introduce bombs and teleporters to change them up. Think about ways to put players in the line of discovering a new thing, and ways to have that line not open up until the time is right. Think about arrangements where the player's only option is to try something wacky; think about delightful, revelatory reactions to that wacky act.

Also, play A Monster's Expedition.