Zarf Updates

I have been playing weird games that are little. I mean, short. One evening, two evenings tops. Maximum weirdness density.

(Twist ending: one of the games listed here is not short. Read on to find out which one! Spoiler: it's the last one. I said twist ending, I mean, obviously.)

• Strange Jigsaws
• Öoo
• Sword of the Sea
• Mini Mini Golf Golf
• The Drifter

Strange Jigsaws

Jigsaw puzzles from the 20 Small Mazes guy. If you didn't play that, here's the deal: the screen fills up with a mess of jigsaw puzzle pieces, and then you realize that they all have weird little tricks to them.

It gets meta. You know that line about "uses every part of the pig"? This game uses every part of the jigsaw, including the fourth wall of the box and the outside-the-box.

With that wild collage of ideas, it's not surprising that the game is a bit uneven. I thought the best gimmicks turned up in the first half. And the finale metapuzzle should have been better telegraphed. (You get the keys before you discover the big gate, as it were. That always feels like an anticlimax. You want the narrative tension of finding the lock first!)

Those are minor complaints, though. Strange Jigsaws was a great way to kill an evening. I snickered and said "Oh jeez" a lot.

Öoo

A short puzzle-platformer. You are a bug that poops bombs. You can't jump, but you can lay a bomb underneath yourself and then blow it up.

Note: this is not a precision platformer, but some moves require setting off bombs in tight intervals or while falling. There's a lot of "squish" to make the timing easier, but it's still timing. So, not a pure puzzle game.

That aside: Öoo is impeccably designed. The entire game is built around you and your two bombs. No power-ups, no new abilities. (You start with one bomb, so getting the second bomb is like a power-up, but really it's the end of the tutorial.) Every room requires a different trick, and I'm pretty sure every possible trick with two bombs is used in exactly one room.

"No new abilities" doesn't mean no new mechanics. A few room elements are introduced as you move through the game. But the real tricks are the things you learn to do with those elements -- and with your bombs. You have to discover these tricks on your own; but the game does a fantastic job of leading you into them. If a room makes you say "Wait, why is that there?" then I guarantee you that the answer is important.

The final sequence is a bit shaky. The intent is clearly to force you to use every trick you've learned, in places where you've already been, but in ways you couldn't before. That works -- but it's not as stitch-perfect as the earlier parts of the game. No matter! Öoo is absolutely worth a go; I'd put it up with Monster's Expedition for tight design work.

Sword of the Sea

I looked back at my Abzû review (2016!), where I wrote:

Sometimes I just want to sit down with a couple of hours of narrative experience that has arc, theme, variation of interaction model, a bit of challenge, and (not tangentially) is really, really pretty.

Same comment exactly again!

In between Sword and Abzû, this studio did The Pathless, which was a more traditional openish-world-exploration game of a more traditional size: 15-ish hours. Explore large areas, do a lot of bonus quests in each one, wrap up with a boss fight, on to the next area.

I enjoyed that, but that's not where Sword of the Sea landed. This is a three-hour tour of small areas (or large but zippily-traversed areas). There's a few well-defined goals in each. You can coin-hunt -- there's bonus stuff all over each map, some of which is quite tricky to reach. But that's all very optional. The game's momentum (embodied as streams of sparkly fish and dolphins) always pulls you on to the next area.

Which is really, really pretty. The is-it-sea-or-desert motif reminded me a bit of Jusant, although the style is completely different. Same magical space whales, though. Well, the designer has always had a cetacean fetish.

The point is swooping around in a world of sparkly sand-or-sea. Or snow, etc. Top-notch swooping. Well done.

Mini Mini Golf Golf

Man alive, I do not know what to say about this one. It's 2057 -- I think? you've got a 2050s-era teletype-tablet along with three janky 1990s CRTs. Climate change almost destroyed Europe, but humanity has survived through large-scale geo-engineering... hang on, I'm tapping my headset and getting a message that maybe it didn't. The message is from the future. It's encoded in a mini-golf game from the past. Got it?

The mini-golf game is glitchy, and in fact you have to proceed by playing glitchily. Hints are embedded in an adorably low-budget Euro talk show about videogames and life. (You can play in easy mode, which obviates the golf challenges and makes the hints unnecessary. But watch the talk show anyhow; it's the best part.)

This absolutely ought to be my jam. It's got everything: glitchy live video, videogame interfaces warped to other ends, messages allusively encoded in other messages, metaphors about videogames and life. I love that stuff. I found this game almost impossible to play. Something about the slow-roll text -- literally slow roll; letters appear as you putt the ball. The putting interface is slow to begin with. You have to wait just a teeth-cracking moment too long for the ball to come to rest.

Then, at the end, the mini-golf game got stuck. I'm pretty sure this was on purpose -- one last glitch-puzzle. I couldn't figure it out, though, and quit out of the (real) game. Oh well.

This is the most creative narrative game I've seen in a year. (And that's after I played Occlude and Phoenix Springs!) I wish I could have gotten into it more.

The Drifter

Okay, this one isn't a tiny little game. It's a full-sized adventure game.

Have some Australian pixel-art point-and-click pulp. Grindhouse? Thriller? I'm not sure what label I'm looking for, but The Drifter sure is one. You're a loser ("I'm not homeless, I've just got a nomadic lifestyle") hobo-ing across the country to attend one last family affair. The family you ran out on. Then someone shoots up your train car and kidnaps a reporter, and also there's monsters? Or hallucinations? You're not really in good shape here.

This roughly alternates between high-tension cliffhangers (window-ledge hangers, precarious-mine-tunnel hangers...) and more traditional detective-game scenes (ask everybody about every topic you've got, collect more topics). Puzzles are a distant third place -- lightweight, not too many, meant to move the narrative along rather than hold it back.

The funny thing is, this is the "polite" "merciful" style of adventure game. You can't get stuck or lock yourself out of winning. Familiar ground -- but it's a weird fit for a plot built of escalating life-or-death crises. A lot of scenes are narratively high-tension but mechanically "try as many times as you want until you figure out what to do." The actors do their best to sell it, as do the music and sound effects and everything else, but it wears thin at times.

In fact you can die... maybe. The first chapter introduces your apparent ability to rewind death by a few minutes. Unless that's a hallucination? This is a story element so I won't say more. But, gameplay-wise, it's just another way to say you can experiment forever.

"Loser" and "I can't tell what's real" aren't great hooks for a story. I was initially worried that this would go off the rails. But once the game gets into your real history (your wife, your child, characters who talk to you instead of just threatening to open fire...) then the plot firms up. The game is on solid footing thereafter. Or, you know, on a solid rollercoaster of life-or-death crises.

The Drifter has adopted the recent point-and-click concept that you don't have to click on absolutely everything. Hovering your mouse over a scenery object displays its description, tooltip-style, with an x cursor. No clicky! This is great; it saves time and avoids hearing "I can't do anything with that" a million times over. (Return to Monkey Island did something similar.)

(The game is fully voiced, but "fully" means dialogue and the narrator's internal monologue. Scenery descriptions are text-only. I approve of this too; you can get in a lot more descriptive detail without blowing up your voice budget.)

A wild ride and goofy in parts, but it's good fun and good writing in the end.