Zarf Updates

Well, this is certainly a terrible time to play games, isn't it. It's not that I couldn't use the distraction. I need the distraction! The problem is being able to concentrate on the game at all. I want to appreciate these things as the author intended, but wow. Rough.

Here's what I've tried recently.

• Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure
• LOK Digital
• Pine: A Story of Loss
• Chroma Zero
• Discolored 2
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

---

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure

• by Furniture & Mattress -- game site

(I'll start this one because I'm in the middle of it. To order with chronological heck!)

A grid-sliding puzzle game with a pretty goofy story and lush art. Almost too lush, honestly -- there's a lot of layers whizzing around the screen and I found myself tuning out a lot of the environment. Can't blame them for trying though.

This is a good solid time-waster. In theory the world is One Big Interconnected Puzzle, but in fact the map is tidily segmented. Individual challenges are fairly small and tractable -- except where interconnection is specifically called for. Great for "I'll just do one more puzzle before bed", even in distracting times.

Also has the inescapably quotable line (from a teenage NPC): "Have you ever loved someone so much that you wanted to barf up your own skeleton?"

LOK Digital

• by Letibus Design -- game site

A tight little grid puzzler where you trace out magic words. Each word does something. Some letters have special properties too. The goal for each level is to exactly use up all the letters on the grid, once each, none left over.

This is clearly a Baba relative, albeit much simpler. There's only six or seven words to learn in the game; I rolled credits in just a couple of days. But it's not simple. The rules are fussy, precise, and productive; by which I mean that even a simple grid lets you try a whole bunch of different approaches. (Order matters a lot.) You know you're in Baba-land when the game introduces entire chapters by saying "Learn a new keyword" or "Figure out the rule you didn't see before."

(There's a hint system. The hints don't always help.)

And then of course there's bonus levels and secrets to find. If you're wondering how they can fit secrets into a letter-grid puzzle, go play it.

LOK does great on the distraction-ometer because you can play it in tiny snips. Pick it up! Solve a level! Get stuck on the next level! I recommend the mobile edition for this, obviously, but I bet Steam Deck works too.

Speaking of editions, LOK was originally released as a printed puzzle book. I seriously do not understand how people solve this thing on paper. (Even with a dry-erase overlay, included.) You have to experiment a lot -- at least I do -- and the consequences of each move aren't always obvious. Which means that on paper, I would constantly make mistakes! The digital version keeps me in line, and then I can solve the puzzles. Mostly.

Pine: A Story of Loss

• by Made Up Games -- game site

Another one of those small wordless narrative games about An Emotion. A lumberjack figures out how to grieve, aided by solitude, a daily routine, and the superhuman ability to maintain bulk on a diet of three cucumbers per day.

I'm afraid I hit this at the wrong moment. A quiet reflective game about losing yourself in routine? My daily routine is chasing my tail until I'm too exhausted to think, and then maybe I can pass out rather than fretting all night. Reflection is the mind-killer.

As a result, I played Pine with only half my attention. Slow repetitive animations just give me time for a few more moves of a phone solitaire game before it's time to chop the next tree. Or cucumber. This isn't the play experience anybody intended, but it's what I can do right now.

Pine is nicely drawn, anyhow. I'm not sure the wood-carving feels like wood-carving, but the experience of "It's lunchtime, I guess I should look at some food" hits hard.

(Interest note: I backed Pine on Kickstarter, a million years ago.)

Chroma Zero

• by ekorz -- game site

A puzzle metroidbrainia-ish game, sort of a combination of Outer Wilds with an "explorable puzzle box" (think Mu Cartographer). The more you do, the more you learn about what you can do next time. It's not a time loop story but there's a "reset to start" mechanic.

This is clearly a deep and deeply-designed experience, but again, bad timing. I played for a couple of hours and discovered several things, but the highly abstracted world and story didn't hook me. Eventually I realized I wasn't going to play any more and uninstalled. Oh well.

(Maybe I just needed more oontzy synth music in my colorful abstraction. Remember Fract OSC? Aw yeah.)

Discolored 2

• by Jason Godbey -- game site

I played the original Discolored during one of my brief jaunts into Apple Arcade territory. That was a quick narrative puzzler whose gimmick was colors disappearing and reappearing in the world. (Red objects only exist when red is switched on, etc.) I remember nothing of its narrative frame, I'm afraid, but I liked the puzzles.

Now we have the sequel, which is considerably scaled up in size and ambition. Discolored 2 is a full-length game with more story, more characters, and a bunch of new ideas.

I did get into this one, but I'm not sure it was entirely successful. The puzzles: all good. The surreal frame-breaking and narrative strange-looping: yes, that is my jam but this felt like the ideas were just stuffed in as the author thought of them. I guess that goes for the whole game, really. "Okay, you've solved a puzzle, let's rearrange your inventory or the world in an unexpected way to set you up for the next puzzle." Perfectly playable and I'm glad I did; it just didn't hang together as much as I wanted.

(Footnote: I just noticed that this is the same designer as The Search, which I played several years ago. Liked that one too.)

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

• by MachineGames and Bethesda -- by game site

Man, I dodged a lot of discourse by not playing this until January. I recall ledge-painting discourse, NPCs-solve-the-puzzle discourse, stealth discourse, triple-A budget discourse... and that's not even getting into the political topicality.

Anyway, ignore all of that. This is a game where you get to run around being Indiana Jones, which is more fun than anything else that's happened to me this month. And everybody making the game is also having barrels of fun. Troy Baker embodies movie-era Indy/Ford; his obvious love for this character and this actor just sparkles through. The writers do classic movie banter, the directors do classic movie cinematography. (Aftermath had a good post on this.) It's all just deeply relaxing and cheerful.

And yes, I played in "Story Mode", meaning the blackshirts were all stupid and nearsighted and had glass jaws to boot. I was not there for a challenge. I was there to sneak around and take in the scenery and mutter Latin and climb some buildings and raid some flippin' tomb.

Yes, and solve puzzles. This isn't a puzzle-heavy game, but it's got a nice variety of little puzzle scenes. I will cheerfully admit that I went to the walkthroughs a couple of times. Like I said, not there for the challenge.

Did I mention the scenery? The game does a great job with its locations, and they're very different kinds of locations, too. Vatican City is all narrow streets and high-walled plazas and palazzos. Gizeh is wide shimmering desert with the Pyramids looming in the distance. And the shorter chapters (I won't spoil locations) are as distinct and vivid and detailed as the three "showcase" open-world maps.

I almost felt bad soaking up so much art budget for a not-very-challenging play-through-once story adventure! Sorry, this is triple-A discourse after all...

Is this game going to make back its extravagant development costs? Is it going to be this spring's big layoff story? Can I really feel good about supporting the big-studio system, when we've spent two years cursing big studios for their terrible treatment of labor?

Yes, complicated. MachineGames isn't Bethesda; I have no insight into the publisher/licensor/developer dynamics there. And, fundamentally, I paid the AAA price to play the AAA game. I hope it does well. I'll buy the DLC episode when it drops.

But I can't help feeling like Great Circle might be the last standout of its breed. Publishers are clearly scared to fund anything that doesn't promise an infinite money fountain -- live-service, subscription, loot boxes, something. Where do they fit a big-budget game that's just a couple of weeks of plain fun?