098: The Ghost Of C-Monster

Mid-January, I played a little of The Return Of Obra Dinn, having been inspired by the always-good

Laura Hudson’s piece on why it was her game of the year. As per usual with my schedule, it was only an hour, but it made me acutely aware that this is was something I didn’t have a clue about. It was New.

In the ancient history, I was a moderately infamous games critic. I did it professionally for fifteen year, hanging up my cleaver in 2010. Then, just shy of five years later, I stopped playing videogames to any serious degree. Why? There’s a big reason any amateur psychotherapist can guess in terms of What Changed In 2013-2014, but a lot was just priorities. The games I like tend to be jealous lovers. I don’t have 5-40 hours to play those sort of things, as it means another stretch of isolation, and my wife would divorce me. Instead, I’ve gravitated to gaming which is explicitly social (RPGs, boardgames) and gaming-adjacent activities I can do socially (Painting).

There’s a lot of digital gamers (and devs, for that matter) in my circle, of course, so it’s not as if I don’t know stuff. I co-owned a games site until a couple of years ago. I follow the churn of the big games, even have a nose. And part of me quite enjoys being Spider Jerusalem, up a mountain, farming vegetables and having old friends turn up and tell me about how messy the cutting edge is. Not having a clue is fun. Letting go is fun.

Letting go is also odd, which is what Obra Dinn got me thinking about. While I could see the elements that constructed the game – retro-Mac art style, an epic extrapolation of grid-based logic puzzles, gothic fiction in mood, Matrix freeze time, the Looking Glass Aesthetic Logs-As-Storytelling Device, Gone Home’s Extrapolation of Environment As Storytelling Device and so on – any description only reduced and confused it. It was best explained as itself. “Obra Dinn is like Obra Dinn.” The developers’ previous game, Papers, Please had the similar quality, that thrilling singularity.

It was also clearly the sort of thing if I were still writing I’d be hammering out several thousand words about, because as well as the genres which were my beat, I was always a neophile. That’s something that always interests me in games. New does not mean good, but new does have a quality of its own. New changes the boundaries of what is possible, and having the language to describe something doesn’t reduce that.

Anyway – that’s the kind of stuff I was chewing over, and it made me think “I wonder what the five New things in the last few years are?” As in, if I was forced to write games journalism again, what would the holes in my conception of the form would be most obvious? Some of them I have a guess at, especially in genres of games which have become popular in the last 5 years (the Battle Royale derived stuff, etc) but smaller stuff especially would be unknown to me. I thought about asking twitter, as it would be a fun exercise for my old friends. I didn’t, as I realised it could go viral, and a lot of the responses I’d get would be of excellent games which didn’t fit what I was talking about. I’ve watched C play Breath of the Wild at length, but for all its obvious excellence, I understand it in the way I simply didn’t understand Obra Dinn.

Weeks later, procrastinating, I posted it.

As the interactions above shows, it went a bit viral, not least due to being posted on twitter moments, which brought in a lot of mostly lovely gamers in with their own takes. I’ll admit – the earlier responses were more useful than the latter ones, in terms of finding stuff which fit the criteria. You can also see me trying to push the answers to what I was trying to search for in the tweet – I suspect I should have been even harder and just said “No sequels” so the point would be even clearer, but that’d just lead to a lot of different arguments, so maybe not. When something takes off, it’s out of your control, and if people want to list their favourite five games of the last five years, that’s a fun thing to do, right on a Tuesday afternoon, right?

(You’ll also note getting ahead of the “there’s nothing new” cynicism.)

The thread’s here, which is full of a mass of great recommendations. If I get a chance, I’ll try and compile a “this is what I’d play from this list to genuinely try and get back to the critical standing” list but I need to get this sent out so I can go and play a boardgame with my friends.

(Betrayer! Traitor! - The Ghost Of C-Monster)