#animalwell — Public Fediverse posts

https://www.wacoca.com/games/1373359/ 『ANIMAL WELL』のセールがSteam、ニンテンドーeショップで開催中 ##GAMING #２Dアクション #AnimalWell #Bigmode #BillyBasso #Game #GameNews #games #GamingNews #steam #ゲーミング #ゲーム #ゲーム攻略 #ゲーム最新情報 #セール #ニュース #ニンテンドーeショップ #メトロイドヴァニア #蚊取 #謎解き

https://www.wacoca.com/games/1373359/ 『ANIMAL WELL』のセールがSteam、ニンテンドーeショップで開催中 ##GAMING #２Dアクション #AnimalWell #Bigmode #BillyBasso #Game #GameNews #games #GamingNews #steam #ゲーミング #ゲーム #ゲーム攻略 #ゲーム最新情報 #セール #ニュース #ニンテンドーeショップ #メトロイドヴァニア #蚊取 #謎解き

#AnimalWell 在玩了大約30小時後，拿齊了全部12樣道具。

很想要集齊全部64顆蛋，可是我目前還剩4顆，總覺得無法拿齊了……QQ

#AnimalWell 在第14小時初次通關了，我知道它只是「第一個」結局，好不容易拿到新道具（目前共7個，還是沒滿呀？）的我，忍不住要再去探索之前的地圖。

我最怕被跨地圖追著跑了……T_T

結果我的 #AnimalWell 已經玩12小時了。道具仍然還沒拿全，地圖已經開到可以抵達4個火焰的程度，但是我不知道要怎麼「拿走」火焰啊？難道不需要拿走嗎？

不太有戰鬥這一點真是太棒了，但平台跳躍經常要不厭其煩地重來就有點討厭……可怕的是一再嘗試之下，我現在對那些平台跳躍也有點習慣了= =

理論上我的進度應該已經達到一定程度呀？但卻覺得整個遊戲還有很龐大的量等著我去解謎與探索，永無止盡似的。

卡住的多半是睡前很睏的幾個小時，睡一覺醒來就如有神助。但仍然有幾個謎題還想不出答案，尤其是在眾鴉底下用slink要去按按鈕的那裡，即使我加上了yoyo也做不到……

很棒的是我找到了Reddit的Animal Well板！那裡的人都很小心地給予發問者提示而不劇透，我從那裡悟到了快速傳送的方法！

RE: https://g0v.social/@miau715/116231867934714505

因為米奧的評論，我在這次的 #Steam 春季特賣買了 #AnimalWell 。遊戲開頭和整體場景都會讓我想到 #RainWorld ——儘管我沒有玩過；但那種晦澀難明的調調實在讓我無法不這麼聯想。以開頭的1小時來說，它並不「困難」，至少沒有死亡懲罰（難道我已經被Hollow Knight系列訓練得太M了嗎？），就像米奧說的一樣，有些地方考驗操作的技術。

我感覺這款遊戲是那種長玩型的，想到時就開來解一下謎這樣？

RE: https://g0v.social/@miau715/116231867934714505

因為米奧的評論，我在這次的 #Steam 春季特賣買了 #AnimalWell 。遊戲開頭和整體場景都會讓我想到 #RainWorld ——儘管我沒有玩過；但那種晦澀難明的調調實在讓我無法不這麼聯想。以開頭的1小時來說，它並不「困難」，至少沒有死亡懲罰（難道我已經被Hollow Knight系列訓練得太M了嗎？），就像米奧說的一樣，有些地方考驗操作的技術。

我感覺這款遊戲是那種長玩型的，想到時就開來解一下謎這樣？

RE: https://g0v.social/@miau715/116231867934714505

因為米奧的評論，我在這次的 #Steam 春季特賣買了 #AnimalWell 。遊戲開頭和整體場景都會讓我想到 #RainWorld ——儘管我沒有玩過；但那種晦澀難明的調調實在讓我無法不這麼聯想。以開頭的1小時來說，它並不「困難」，至少沒有死亡懲罰（難道我已經被Hollow Knight系列訓練得太M了嗎？），就像米奧說的一樣，有些地方考驗操作的技術。

我感覺這款遊戲是那種長玩型的，想到時就開來解一下謎這樣？

RE: https://g0v.social/@miau715/116231867934714505

因為米奧的評論，我在這次的 #Steam 春季特賣買了 #AnimalWell 。遊戲開頭和整體場景都會讓我想到 #RainWorld ——儘管我沒有玩過；但那種晦澀難明的調調實在讓我無法不這麼聯想。以開頭的1小時來說，它並不「困難」，至少沒有死亡懲罰（難道我已經被Hollow Knight系列訓練得太M了嗎？），就像米奧說的一樣，有些地方考驗操作的技術。

我感覺這款遊戲是那種長玩型的，想到時就開來解一下謎這樣？

RE: https://g0v.social/@miau715/116231867934714505

因為米奧的評論，我在這次的 #Steam 春季特賣買了 #AnimalWell 。遊戲開頭和整體場景都會讓我想到 #RainWorld ——儘管我沒有玩過；但那種晦澀難明的調調實在讓我無法不這麼聯想。以開頭的1小時來說，它並不「困難」，至少沒有死亡懲罰（難道我已經被Hollow Knight系列訓練得太M了嗎？），就像米奧說的一樣，有些地方考驗操作的技術。

我感覺這款遊戲是那種長玩型的，想到時就開來解一下謎這樣？

👋 @vampiress I just learned about #AnimalWell from a friend who’s playing it, very interested to hear your opinion on it 👀

So far on Animal Well: I've got like 25 eggs, the bubble wand, the flute, the disc, and the slinky. I've managed to avoid spoiling myself the game by consulting guides up til now. It's so good.

#AnimalWell

Demo out on @itch.io !

LINK : https://buine1.itch.io/chromatic-crisis-demo

Inspired by #hollowknight #supermario #animalwell and more

🔁❤️

#indiegame #gamedev #indiedev #metroidvania #Madewithgodot #pixelart #game

[SP] Animal Well (2024) (Metroidvania, Puzzle) (Nintendo Switch) [GAMEPLAY] [FR] [HD]

#Switch #AnimalWell #NintendoSwitch #2024 #jgo #johnnygameover #videogame #gameplay #games #gaming #short #shorts #play #shortplay #sp

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8bWmILUjRXM

Rushing to collect the last few eggs in Animal Well before Silksong is released today. AW is such a great game, just the right side of difficulty for me. I completed about 90% of it without spoilers.
Expecting Silksong to be a damn sight harder.

#nintendoswitch #animalwell #silksong

Really enjoying Animal Well on the Switch. Smaller in scale and ambition than Hollow Knight, not as maddeningly tough as Celeste, a sayisfying ‘dank’ platformer.

The environment graphic effects are gorgeous, such attention to detail. Everything moves, glistens, sways. You’d be forgiven to want to just wander around interacting will all of it.

Gameplay is constantly augmented with extra little gadgets and pickups. The initial “how on earth am I going to do that” is always rewarded with “ah ha!” moments.

Is it a toy or a game?

#animalwell #nintendoswitch

I need a #metroidvania list or video which introduces me to the must plays of this genre. So far I have the following on the list. #deadcells #hollowknight #oriwillofthewisps #blasphemous #AnimalWell #MetroidDread
I am looking more of an outsider perspective who doesn't play these kind of games exclusively, but would love to explore the hidden gems of it. #games #NintendoSwitch #steam

I need a #metroidvania list or video which introduces me to the must plays of this genre. So far I have the following on the list. #deadcells #hollowknight #oriwillofthewisps #blasphemous #AnimalWell #MetroidDread
I am looking more of an outsider perspective who doesn't play these kind of games exclusively, but would love to explore the hidden gems of it. #games #NintendoSwitch #steam

I need a #metroidvania list or video which introduces me to the must plays of this genre. So far I have the following on the list. #deadcells #hollowknight #oriwillofthewisps #blasphemous #AnimalWell #MetroidDread
I am looking more of an outsider perspective who doesn't play these kind of games exclusively, but would love to explore the hidden gems of it. #games #NintendoSwitch #steam

I need a #metroidvania list or video which introduces me to the must plays of this genre. So far I have the following on the list. #deadcells #hollowknight #oriwillofthewisps #blasphemous #AnimalWell #MetroidDread
I am looking more of an outsider perspective who doesn't play these kind of games exclusively, but would love to explore the hidden gems of it. #games #NintendoSwitch #steam

Rolled credits on Animal Well tonight! Might go collect a few more eggs, but yeah, really cool puzzle platformer. Worth a playthrough!

#gaming #animalwell

Animal Well is so damn good. Finally playing it, and it's one of the best platformers I've played in a while ❤️

#animalWell #indieGames #gaming #platformers

I finally started playing #animalWell , it's been sitting in my library since release
It's really fun and a great choice when I don't really have the energy for heavier games

I'm pretty sure I approached it entirely backwards in regards to the order of items and areas. It's cool I was able to do that, though

Not sure If i'll go secret hunting, first I want to complete a chill playthrough

BTW, if you haven't played #AnimalWell yet. Please go play it :blobcat_fishnom:

Specially if you like puzzles and misteries

Le dernier jeu qui m'a complètement scotché, c'est #AnimalWell . Une pure merveille, à mon sens!

Malheureusement, je ne trouve plus rien qui m'accroche autant. Je laisse vite tomber, je deviens vieux 😉

Tenter #CultOfTheLamb ? Un #RPG ? Y'a #balatro mais je ne le compte même pas comme "jeu" tellement ça m'énerve 😂

I love the game #AnimalWell! Definitely worth a play! They just released a new #Documentary too! The Making of Animal Well. https://youtu.be/tffo3U4owwE?si=uepESoNDgHRyYv4W

What are you playing this weekend?

I’m playing #ProjectXZone on the #3DS and #AnimalWell

@Azurakumo is playing #trailsintoreverie and #DeadOrAlive4

It’s quiet before #MonsterHunterWilds

There is an short but interesting Article by Billy Basso on how he did rendering in #AnimalWell but the GIFs in the article are not available anymore. I digged them out of the internet archive, so I will post them here: https://blog.playstation.com/2022/07/20/how-animal-well-taps-into-ps5-hardware-to-elevate-2d-pixel-art-platforming/
#gamedesign #pixelart #shadermagic

Awesome documentary “The making of Animal Well”. This game is such an inspiration to indy devs. I just love everything about it! #GameDev #IndyGames #AnimalWell https://youtu.be/LCOBpIFpmrc?si=nQwclO5zK_SvPdgE

If you play #AnimalWell, you might want to go check on a certain little groundhog friend before the date changes to Feb 3rd!

Balatro: Entwickler bedauert Indie-Hit – und ist dennoch dankbar
„Balatro“ gehört zu den Überraschungserfolgen des Jahres 2024. Das Poker-Roguelite wurde vom Indie-Entwickler LocalThunk entworfen und hat nicht nur bei Spieler:innen, sondern auch in der Fachwelt Anerk
https://www.apfeltalk.de/magazin/news/balatro-entwickler-bedauert-indie-hit-und-ist-dennoch-dankbar/
#News #Services #AnimalWell #Balatro #IndieHit #LocalThunk #Playstack #PokerRoguelite #Spieleentwicklung #Spieleindustrie

The 2024 Bossies: Indie Game of the Year Award Nominations Announced by Stephanie Klimov - The second annual Bossies are upon us, and the nominees for Indie Game of the Year are announced. #The2024Bossies #BeBetter #WeAreBossRush #IndieGames #IndieDevs #IndieGameDevs #IndieDev #AnimalWell #Balatro #GoriCuddlyCarnage #NEVA #UFO50 https://buff.ly/4gpiogI

Best Video Games of 2024 - It was supposed to be a sleepy year for the video game industry. Then came surprise hits ... - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/05/arts/best-video-games-of-2024.html #eldenring:shadowoftheerdtree(videogame) #princeofpersia:thelostcrown(videogame) #finalfantasyviirebirth(videogame) #metaphor:refantazio(videogame) #silenthill2(2024)(videogame) #stillwakesthedeep(videogame) #helldivers2(videogame) #computerandvideogames #twothousandtwentyfour #animalwell(videogame)

Warning to anyone who is fearful of spoilers. I don’t know how to say the things I’d like to say without digging into the content of at least 2 of the 3 games I’m talking about today. Those games are Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and Animal Well. I will not spoil the ending of Lorelei, but I will be discussing the credits and after credits of Animal Well.

I do discuss Elden Ring a good bit, but not enough to put a warning on it. I’ll be using footage from the beginning of all 3 games, so don’t worry too much about mid-to-late game spoilers.

Do with this info what you will.

I think there’s something wrong with me. There’s this thing inside me that is constantly going, spinning, and tugging at me to make something. It’s this hamster in a little wheel in my chest that is always going and the only way to calm him down is to create something new and put it out in the world. It’s my little anxiety that I can sometimes get to shut up if I just write something or make a new video or record a new podcast episode or even sometimes, just have a really fulfilling conversation with a friend.

This drive is so deep it’s essential. It’s not a part of my identity. It kind of is my identity. I am Matt, the singer, the engineer, the writer, the thinker.

But the messed up part? Making things doesn’t come easy to me. Writing everyone of these videos, especially this one, takes days of working up the energy to get started. Sometimes multiple times within the same script. Eventually, maybe the third or fourth time, it will snowball and I’ll become obsessed with finishing the project. Sometimes finishing a script, recording, and editing it in a single evening.

People who have more applicable degrees than me sometimes call this particular ADHD peculiarity the “Wall of Awful.” The concept is that people with brains like mine don’t just see a simple task. We see the task, but all of the tiny little tasks and decisions and minor complications that lead up to that task build up a giant, terrible wall that we have to scale before we can even get close to that task.

So if I want to get started writing a video, my brain skips right to the fact that it’s hot in my office because I forgot to leave the door open and that I could grab my laptop and write in the kitchen, but I left it downstairs and it isn’t even charged. And in fact my stomach has been killing me and it’s getting close to dinner time for our dog, and it’s been really difficult to get her to eat lately. So by the time I’m done with that, it’ll probably be time to figure out dinner for my husband and me. And that means I really only have like…two hours to write anything before my husband wants to go to bed and I don’t want to bother him with my hobbies, because for some reason that’s something I think pretty often without questioning why he would be bothered. And when I get started, do I even have anything valuable to say right now? Does anyone actually care about my navel-gazing video essays that claim to be about video games or tech but are often just a form of public therapy?

Those are all real things that have raced through my mind when considering sitting down to write this exact video. They all come quickly, often just in a few seconds after I’ve thought “Hey, I have some time to write tonight, probably.” Brick by brick they build an obstacle that can feel impossible to tear down.

So in this ridiculous metaphor, I’ve got a brick wall of awful in front of me and a hamster wheel of anxiety pressing me forward head first. It’s a recipe for something more explosive than edible.

But you know what? I do keep finishing videos. I do, in fact, manage to produce a podcast every 2 weeks during our seasons. And I manage to keep my job, keep playing games, and keep spending time with my husband and our friends.

It’s not that I can’t do it. There is so much proof that I can and that I want to and that it’s fulfilling. It’s just that, for me, it’s hard.

Simogo has been one of my favorite game developers for a very long time. I played their mobile game Device 6 shortly after it came out in 2013. Device 6, like many of their games, is a narrative puzzle game with really thoughtful interaction design and sound design. The game they released just before that, Year Walk, blew me away by requiring the player to look beyond the boundaries of the actual game in order to see its true ending.

They also made one of my favorite games of 2019, Sayonara Wild Hearts. It’s a playable pop album with music I adore and some really surprising rhythm game mechanics.

Simogo’s latest game is Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Lorelei is a return to Simogo’s spooky puzzle-box style. I’ve heard people say that it’s kind of like if Resident Evil took out all the zombies and amped up the puzzles, but I’ve personally never played a Resident Evil game.

The trailer for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes at the most recent Nintendo Switch event (check) completely sold me on playing it. Visually it is dark and monotone, with only a bright red, almost fuchsia, punctuating the blacks, grays, and whites of the empty hotel the game takes place inside. It operates with a semi-fixed camera, and they do this really cool visual trick where there are other images that shift as the character moves almost superimposed onto the textures. I really can’t tell if this trick is an overlay, like the VHS filter that gets used in places here too, or if it’s really a trick with the textures.

And of course, it wouldn’t be Simogo if they didn’t nail the music and sound design. Musicians Daniel Olsén, Linnea Olsson, & Jonathan Eng return from Sayonara Wild Hearts to craft a perfect piano-driven soundtrack for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, with plenty of synth and a little guitar thrown in for effect.

The puzzles in this game could not be more for me. They can get very hard, honestly, but they’re very mathy. And that’s a good thing to me. Puzzles often span multiple rooms, and some of them span nearly the whole game.

I think some people hear that and they think they’re going to miss out on something or mess something up. You can’t really mess anything up. You will get stuck and not be able to progress at some points, but you should know when you have all the pieces to complete a puzzle. If you aren’t sure, it’s better to move on and solve something else. The game will deftly guide you from one place to the next, even if you don’t realize it, with puzzles diverging and converging into little inflection points in a way that culminates the game’s big ending.

The game keeps track of every task the main character sets for herself, and she has access to nearly every piece of paper, image, vision, or video via her photographic memory in the game’s menu. This significantly reduces the backtracking you need to do, though I didn’t find this game’s map that difficult to navigate anyway.

There’s lots of great little quality of life additions in this game. One I’ll call out here is that when you exit the red maze, which I’ll say no more about, there’s a built-in way to return to the maze and retain your progress. I will say that navigating the game’s menus can be unnecessarily difficult, as the game only gives you a single confirmation button. The game really could use a back button as well as dedicated menu and map buttons, but I didn’t find that that significantly hindered my experience.

I played Lorelei and the Laser Eyes in a matter of a few days, using a ton of my brain to just burrow straight through its very tough, but very stimulating puzzles. It really clicked for me. The characters and story worked for me. The puzzle designs themselves are exactly the kinds of puzzles I like to see in games. Honestly, the whole thing reminded me of this absolutely incredible escape room I did back in 2015 at the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco. The Houdini room at Palace Games. It’s an experience that I measure these kinds of games and other escape rooms against all the time, and it is rare that they live up.

All of this kept me interested and pulled me through enough to keep trying when I got stuck. I ended up only needing a nudge in the right direction from a friend 1 or 2 times. I felt like Lorelei’s puzzles respected me and didn’t have any bizarre or out-of-nowhere solutions. This meant that I kept pushing, even though it was hard, because the whole package was thrilling.

The thing about the Wall of Awful is that it can be easily torn down, but only in very specific circumstances. If a task is extremely personally important, urgent, or interesting, many people who struggle with ADHD will be able to get that thing done.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes was interesting to me. It set a kind of perfect tone for my particular interests and had a puzzle structure and a mechanical focus that matched what I was looking for.

But there is another vaguely spooky puzzler game that came out recently that didn’t get this balance right.

I wasn’t planning on playing Animal Well. There was lots of hype for it, largely due to it being one of Bigmode’s first published games. If you don’t know, Bigmode is a publisher created by the YouTuber Dunkey (check). I am not a Dunkey viewer. His name meant nothing to me before trailer for Animal Well started getting attached to it.

I’m also not a metroidvania super fan. I love Metroid games specifically, and I enjoy many games in that style, but as for the genre overall? I kind of “nothing” metroidvanias. I enjoy the process of getting to the end and doing all the combat in those games. But I’m not interested in exploring any deeper than the game makes obvious. I do not take a beat before the final boss to go find all the upgrades I missed along the way. Largely because in most metroidvanias, navigation is tedious and the maps are enormous.

So I was going to wait Animal Well and see if, simply as a metroidvania, it got talked about enough for me to pick it up.

But then someone shared this article. (https://www.ign.com/articles/animal-well-review) IGN loved this game, and more power to the reviewer on that. They compared the game to Tunic and FEZ. Tunic, you might know, is a game I devoured and 100%’d. I loved the way that game treated puzzles within its exploration, and unlike many people who couldn’t finish the game, I really enjoyed the combat.

Fez is another one of these puzzle box games. It might arguably be the first of its kind. I’ve never finished Fez, though I played it back when it first arrived on macOS, but a lot of people I respect who have similar taste in games love Fez in the way I love Tunic.

It was absolutely these comparisons that got me to pick up Animal Well. But a couple hours into the game, I started to realize that while it was a perfectly enjoyable metroidvania, the puzzle box aspect I was looking for could be completely ignored if you just want to hit credits. In fact, I hesitate to call most of Animal Well a puzzle game at all.

When I realized this, a lot of the cracks in the game started to show. Remember how I don’t love navigating giant maps and retreading areas in Metroidvanias? Well Animal Well has a fast travel mechanic, but it’s extremely limited. The game is also full of extremely precise platforming expectations. There’s a whole section with a ghost dog that chases you across screens that I had to retry, no exaggeration, more than 20 times, even though I knew exactly what path to take.

For me, Animal Well’s platforming was at least doable. I did casually pick up and finish Celeste in an evening. But Animal Well’s platforming just didn’t feel like it needed to be that precise. All it did was take away from the stuff this game was trying to sell me, and there really wasn’t much to take.

Most of the puzzles before you hit credits the first time are environmental, but specifically in a platform-y way. It’s about raising gates and occasionally about discovering paths you didn’t notice. The puzzles I enjoy in games, the puzzles that Tunic and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes rely on, are not themselves about navigation, even if they unlock new ways to navigate the space. Instead, they often require to you to think outside of the game space, maybe even taking notes in order to do so. These puzzles play more like ARGs than video games, more often than not.

There are a couple of these in Animal Well, but they’re relegated to side content or things that are only meaningful post-credits, in the second and third layers of the game’s completion. I did enjoy these moments but I was looking for far more of them throughout.

After you do reach credits the first time, one of the things you’ll need to do to hit 2nd credits is hunt down 64 secret eggs. You’ll likely have many of them before you finish the main game. I had 39 I believe. Many of these egg hunts are enjoyable, but again, they require you to pour over the map looking for the tiniest little areas you haven’t reached, and you still have to walk over there and figure out how to get them. Or worse they ask you to simply revisit areas looking for anything suspicious.

The thing I have come to realize about Animal Well is that it is a game about the things I dislike about metroidvanias. The core game as well as its secrets are about retreading your steps and looking in dark corners. They are about really specific platforming tricks. Among all of the exclamations calling Animal Well an instant classic and making comparisons to my favorite games, what had gotten missed was that the things people were excited about were the things I found annoying. And the comparisons they were making to Tunic were not actually the things I enjoyed about that game.

Now I’m making a point, so I seem way more down on this game than I am. I enjoyed it. I think a lot of the items you get are really clever and unexpected, and they often have multiple uses that are really smart and interesting. As a metroidvania goes, it’s a good one, even if I find its save point system and limited fast travel annoying.

But folks, one thing unlocked the endgame of Animal Well for me. One thing made me have 3 uninterrupted hours of fun.

And that was getting over myself and using a guide. I started to have a really good time when I decided that I didn’t need to find all this stuff on my own. I didn’t even enjoy what this game thinks a puzzle is, so why hold myself to the idea of not using a guide? I could still see what the game wanted to show me even if I used a guide to find those last 15 or so eggs.

The best time I had with Animal Well was after I finally gave into the guides. I was finally getting to see this game as it wanted me to, I just didn’t have to fight to get on the same page as its puzzle design. I did still have to navigate a world I didn’t love jumping around, but at this point I had all the items. So that was much easier.

The night I put the game down for good, I felt genuinely fulfilled. I didn’t find every egg or every secret, but I got to see the kinds of things Billy Basso wanted me to. I made an adaptation to fit my needs as a player, and that adaptation made things easier and more enjoyable for me.

One of the ways I can get things done despite the wall of awful is to intentionally make things easier. This year I’ve done a few things to be intentional about how I make videos. First of all, I made a plan to make 1 video a month. Just having that plan, that commitment, makes the task important to me, which can sometimes trick my brain into just getting something done.

The second thing I did was share that plan with you. At the end of last year, I posted my plan over on MattHorton.live and on a bunch of social media, committing to the world that I would stick to this plan.

But the most important thing I did was make my commitment simple. It’s 1 video a month. And only 4 of them need to be in my signature style of longform deep dives and interspersed personal essays. Like this video. The rest of my videos have no boundaries. As long as they’re horizontal and longer than 60 seconds, it counts!

Making the task smaller makes the wall smaller.

I made an adaptation, and it made things easier on me.

I’ve never played a real Souls game.

I played the Jedi games, Fallen Order and Survivor, which borrow many of the elements of Souls games to let the player more convincingly role-play as a space wizard with a laser sword. And I played Tunic which uses Souls mechanics to echo the difficulty of its puzzles using the difficulty of its combat. I also have an unexplained desire to play Lies of P without playing any of the games that inspired it. I just fundamentally am not interested in a game whose entire premise is “git gud.”

So I did not want to touch Elden Ring. It was a whole thing when I decided to try and play it. My friends thought I was going to rage quit on the game an hour in and attempt to refund the purchase. That didn’t happen, and that’s not usually my style. It’s very rare that a game is as offensive to my sensibilities as Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen was.

What mostly happened was that my anxiety about the difficult of Elden Ring made me worse at the game. I would go into every fight scared and not wanting to engage, because I wasn’t sure if I was ready to handle it yet. I ended up playing too safe. It was this cycle of getting worse and worse at the game.

But the cycle was pretty quickly broken. Something happened that helped me figure out how to get past all of that anxiety and just play the game.

I got a guide.

No. Not like that. A guide.

This is my husband Jonatan. When Elden Ring came out he played it constantly. He hated Souls games before Elden Ring for the same reasons I did, but the ability to explore and become super powerful before ever following the main quest line was what pulled him in.

So when I sat down to play, he was interested and sat there with me. Just naturally, he started to push me to go certain directions or say things like “Oh you can totally handle that fight.” For a couple weeks there, we just started sitting down to play together, even if I was the only one holding the controller.

He’d tell me things like “Oh with your build you should go here and get this item.” Or “Hey if you want to go for this stat, there’s a really good sword in that cave over there.” And this stuff was genuinely revelatory for me. Pretty early on, he helped me get my Astrologer the Meteorite staff and the Rock Sling spell, which together made lots of fights I had encountered feel like nothing.

Listen, I didn’t get super far into Elden Ring, and I’m not sure I’ll ever pick it up again. But my time playing it was really fun. Because I had someone to guide me through it.

He actually wasn’t sitting with me when it happened, but between my summon, my wolf spirit ash, the meteorite staff, and rock sling, I beat Margit my first try. I asked those same friends who were taking bets on when I would give up if Margit was supposed to be easy which was a pretty funny conversation, you might imagine. If you’re not aware, Margit is the first skill check in the game. He’s supposed to be pretty hard.

But the thing that made this work was knowing my limit and not submitting to the inner voice that said I needed to just “git gud.” Instead I listened to the one that said that video games are supposed to be fun, and it literally doesn’t matter how you play them if you enjoy them.

So use the damn guide already. Or don’t. Whatever makes you happy. Just be honest with yourself about what that is.

Hey folks, thanks for watching and for sticking through all the way to this part. If you’ve made it here, you’re who I write for.

Hey I have a favor to ask. Can you share this with someone you think might enjoy it? Just send them the link and a reason why they should check it out. Or send another of my videos or blogs.

I really do want to make even more of my YouTube channel. I’d love to make real money doing this but I’m not yet at the viewership where that is realistic. The thing I don’t want to do is make videos that are exclusively built to fit whichever algorithm YouTube is favoring today. I’d rather make videos for people like you who appreciate the intentionality and purpose I try to put into my work. I’d rather grow slowly and have a group of people watching my videos that I trust and who trust me to make consistently meaningful art.

Thanks for watching and thanks for sharing. It really means the most.

Catch y’all next time.

https://matthorton.live/2024/06/02/dont-be-stubborn-use-a-guide/

#animalWell #dunkey #eldenRing #gameGuides #indieGames #LoreleiAndTheLaserEyes #simogo #videoGames

Warning to anyone who is fearful of spoilers. I don’t know how to say the things I’d like to say without digging into the content of at least 2 of the 3 games I’m talking about today. Those games are Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and Animal Well. I will not spoil the ending of Lorelei, but I will be discussing the credits and after credits of Animal Well.

I do discuss Elden Ring a good bit, but not enough to put a warning on it. I’ll be using footage from the beginning of all 3 games, so don’t worry too much about mid-to-late game spoilers.

Do with this info what you will.

I think there’s something wrong with me. There’s this thing inside me that is constantly going, spinning, and tugging at me to make something. It’s this hamster in a little wheel in my chest that is always going and the only way to calm him down is to create something new and put it out in the world. It’s my little anxiety that I can sometimes get to shut up if I just write something or make a new video or record a new podcast episode or even sometimes, just have a really fulfilling conversation with a friend.

This drive is so deep it’s essential. It’s not a part of my identity. It kind of is my identity. I am Matt, the singer, the engineer, the writer, the thinker.

But the messed up part? Making things doesn’t come easy to me. Writing everyone of these videos, especially this one, takes days of working up the energy to get started. Sometimes multiple times within the same script. Eventually, maybe the third or fourth time, it will snowball and I’ll become obsessed with finishing the project. Sometimes finishing a script, recording, and editing it in a single evening.

People who have more applicable degrees than me sometimes call this particular ADHD peculiarity the “Wall of Awful.” The concept is that people with brains like mine don’t just see a simple task. We see the task, but all of the tiny little tasks and decisions and minor complications that lead up to that task build up a giant, terrible wall that we have to scale before we can even get close to that task.

So if I want to get started writing a video, my brain skips right to the fact that it’s hot in my office because I forgot to leave the door open and that I could grab my laptop and write in the kitchen, but I left it downstairs and it isn’t even charged. And in fact my stomach has been killing me and it’s getting close to dinner time for our dog, and it’s been really difficult to get her to eat lately. So by the time I’m done with that, it’ll probably be time to figure out dinner for my husband and me. And that means I really only have like…two hours to write anything before my husband wants to go to bed and I don’t want to bother him with my hobbies, because for some reason that’s something I think pretty often without questioning why he would be bothered. And when I get started, do I even have anything valuable to say right now? Does anyone actually care about my navel-gazing video essays that claim to be about video games or tech but are often just a form of public therapy?

Those are all real things that have raced through my mind when considering sitting down to write this exact video. They all come quickly, often just in a few seconds after I’ve thought “Hey, I have some time to write tonight, probably.” Brick by brick they build an obstacle that can feel impossible to tear down.

So in this ridiculous metaphor, I’ve got a brick wall of awful in front of me and a hamster wheel of anxiety pressing me forward head first. It’s a recipe for something more explosive than edible.

But you know what? I do keep finishing videos. I do, in fact, manage to produce a podcast every 2 weeks during our seasons. And I manage to keep my job, keep playing games, and keep spending time with my husband and our friends.

It’s not that I can’t do it. There is so much proof that I can and that I want to and that it’s fulfilling. It’s just that, for me, it’s hard.

Simogo has been one of my favorite game developers for a very long time. I played their mobile game Device 6 shortly after it came out in 2013. Device 6, like many of their games, is a narrative puzzle game with really thoughtful interaction design and sound design. The game they released just before that, Year Walk, blew me away by requiring the player to look beyond the boundaries of the actual game in order to see its true ending.

They also made one of my favorite games of 2019, Sayonara Wild Hearts. It’s a playable pop album with music I adore and some really surprising rhythm game mechanics.

Simogo’s latest game is Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Lorelei is a return to Simogo’s spooky puzzle-box style. I’ve heard people say that it’s kind of like if Resident Evil took out all the zombies and amped up the puzzles, but I’ve personally never played a Resident Evil game.

The trailer for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes at the most recent Nintendo Switch event completely sold me on playing it. Visually it is dark and monotone, with only a bright red, almost fuchsia, punctuating the blacks, grays, and whites of the empty hotel the game takes place inside. It operates with a semi-fixed camera, and they do this really cool visual trick where there are other images that shift as the character moves almost superimposed onto the textures. I really can’t tell if this trick is an overlay, like the VHS filter that gets used in places here too, or if it’s really a trick with the textures.

And of course, it wouldn’t be Simogo if they didn’t nail the music and sound design. Musicians Daniel Olsén, Linnea Olsson, & Jonathan Eng return from Sayonara Wild Hearts to craft a perfect piano-driven soundtrack for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, with plenty of synth and a little guitar thrown in for effect.

The puzzles in this game could not be more for me. They can get very hard, honestly, but they’re very mathy. And that’s a good thing to me. Puzzles often span multiple rooms, and some of them span nearly the whole game.

I think some people hear that and they think they’re going to miss out on something or mess something up. You can’t really mess anything up. You will get stuck and not be able to progress at some points, but you should know when you have all the pieces to complete a puzzle. If you aren’t sure, it’s better to move on and solve something else. The game will deftly guide you from one place to the next, even if you don’t realize it, with puzzles diverging and converging into little inflection points in a way that culminates the game’s big ending.

The game keeps track of every task the main character sets for herself, and she has access to nearly every piece of paper, image, vision, or video via her photographic memory in the game’s menu. This significantly reduces the backtracking you need to do, though I didn’t find this game’s map that difficult to navigate anyway.

There’s lots of great little quality of life additions in this game. One I’ll call out here is that when you exit the red maze, which I’ll say no more about, there’s a built-in way to return to the maze and retain your progress. I will say that navigating the game’s menus can be unnecessarily difficult, as the game only gives you a single confirmation button. The game really could use a back button as well as dedicated menu and map buttons, but I didn’t find that that significantly hindered my experience.

I played Lorelei and the Laser Eyes in a matter of a few days, using a ton of my brain to just burrow straight through its very tough, but very stimulating puzzles. It really clicked for me. The characters and story worked for me. The puzzle designs themselves are exactly the kinds of puzzles I like to see in games. Honestly, the whole thing reminded me of this absolutely incredible escape room I did back in 2015 at the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco. The Houdini room at Palace Games. It’s an experience that I measure these kinds of games and other escape rooms against all the time, and it is rare that they live up.

All of this kept me interested and pulled me through enough to keep trying when I got stuck. I ended up only needing a nudge in the right direction from a friend 1 or 2 times. I felt like Lorelei’s puzzles respected me and didn’t have any bizarre or out-of-nowhere solutions. This meant that I kept pushing, even though it was hard, because the whole package was thrilling.

The thing about the Wall of Awful is that it can be easily torn down, but only in very specific circumstances. If a task is extremely personally important, urgent, or interesting, many people who struggle with ADHD will be able to get that thing done.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes was interesting to me. It set a kind of perfect tone for my particular interests and had a puzzle structure and a mechanical focus that matched what I was looking for.

But there is another vaguely spooky puzzler game that came out recently that didn’t get this balance right.

I wasn’t planning on playing Animal Well. There was lots of hype for it, largely due to it being one of Bigmode’s first published games. If you don’t know, Bigmode is a publisher created by the YouTuber Dunkey. I am not a Dunkey viewer. His name meant nothing to me before trailer for Animal Well started getting attached to it.

I’m also not a metroidvania super fan. I love Metroid games specifically, and I enjoy many games in that style, but as for the genre overall? I kind of “nothing” metroidvanias. I enjoy the process of getting to the end and doing all the combat in those games. But I’m not interested in exploring any deeper than the game makes obvious. I do not take a beat before the final boss to go find all the upgrades I missed along the way. Largely because in most metroidvanias, navigation is tedious and the maps are enormous.

So I was going to wait Animal Well and see if, simply as a metroidvania, it got talked about enough for me to pick it up.

But then someone shared this article. (https://www.ign.com/articles/animal-well-review) IGN loved this game, and more power to the reviewer on that. They compared the game to Tunic and FEZ. Tunic, you might know, is a game I devoured and 100%’d. I loved the way that game treated puzzles within its exploration, and unlike many people who couldn’t finish the game, I really enjoyed the combat.

Fez is another one of these puzzle box games. It might arguably be the first of its kind. I’ve never finished Fez, though I played it back when it first arrived on macOS, but a lot of people I respect who have similar taste in games love Fez in the way I love Tunic.

It was absolutely these comparisons that got me to pick up Animal Well. But a couple hours into the game, I started to realize that while it was a perfectly enjoyable metroidvania, the puzzle box aspect I was looking for could be completely ignored if you just want to hit credits. In fact, I hesitate to call most of Animal Well a puzzle game at all.

When I realized this, a lot of the cracks in the game started to show. Remember how I don’t love navigating giant maps and retreading areas in Metroidvanias? Well Animal Well has a fast travel mechanic, but it’s extremely limited. The game is also full of extremely precise platforming expectations. There’s a whole section with a ghost dog that chases you across screens that I had to retry, no exaggeration, more than 20 times, even though I knew exactly what path to take.

For me, Animal Well’s platforming was at least doable. I did casually pick up and finish Celeste in an evening. But Animal Well’s platforming just didn’t feel like it needed to be that precise. All it did was take away from the stuff this game was trying to sell me, and there really wasn’t much to take.

Most of the puzzles before you hit credits the first time are environmental, but specifically in a platform-y way. It’s about raising gates and occasionally about discovering paths you didn’t notice. The puzzles I enjoy in games, the puzzles that Tunic and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes rely on, are not themselves about navigation, even if they unlock new ways to navigate the space. Instead, they often require to you to think outside of the game space, maybe even taking notes in order to do so. These puzzles play more like ARGs than video games, more often than not.

There are a couple of these in Animal Well, but they’re relegated to side content or things that are only meaningful post-credits, in the second and third layers of the game’s completion. I did enjoy these moments but I was looking for far more of them throughout.

After you do reach credits the first time, one of the things you’ll need to do to hit 2nd credits is hunt down 64 secret eggs. You’ll likely have many of them before you finish the main game. I had 39 I believe. Many of these egg hunts are enjoyable, but again, they require you to pour over the map looking for the tiniest little areas you haven’t reached, and you still have to walk over there and figure out how to get them. Or worse they ask you to simply revisit areas looking for anything suspicious.

The thing I have come to realize about Animal Well is that it is a game about the things I dislike about metroidvanias. The core game as well as its secrets are about retreading your steps and looking in dark corners. They are about really specific platforming tricks. Among all of the exclamations calling Animal Well an instant classic and making comparisons to my favorite games, what had gotten missed was that the things people were excited about were the things I found annoying. And the comparisons they were making to Tunic were not actually the things I enjoyed about that game.

Now I’m making a point, so I seem way more down on this game than I am. I enjoyed it. I think a lot of the items you get are really clever and unexpected, and they often have multiple uses that are really smart and interesting. As a metroidvania goes, it’s a good one, even if I find its save point system and limited fast travel annoying.

But folks, one thing unlocked the endgame of Animal Well for me. One thing made me have 3 uninterrupted hours of fun.

And that was getting over myself and using a guide. I started to have a really good time when I decided that I didn’t need to find all this stuff on my own. I didn’t even enjoy what this game thinks a puzzle is, so why hold myself to the idea of not using a guide? I could still see what the game wanted to show me even if I used a guide to find those last 15 or so eggs.

The best time I had with Animal Well was after I finally gave into the guides. I was finally getting to see this game as it wanted me to, I just didn’t have to fight to get on the same page as its puzzle design. I did still have to navigate a world I didn’t love jumping around, but at this point I had all the items. So that was much easier.

The night I put the game down for good, I felt genuinely fulfilled. I didn’t find every egg or every secret, but I got to see the kinds of things Billy Basso wanted me to. I made an adaptation to fit my needs as a player, and that adaptation made things easier and more enjoyable for me.

One of the ways I can get things done despite the wall of awful is to intentionally make things easier. This year I’ve done a few things to be intentional about how I make videos. First of all, I made a plan to make 1 video a month. Just having that plan, that commitment, makes the task important to me, which can sometimes trick my brain into just getting something done.

The second thing I did was share that plan with you. At the end of last year, I posted my plan over on MattHorton.live and on a bunch of social media, committing to the world that I would stick to this plan.

But the most important thing I did was make my commitment simple. It’s 1 video a month. And only 4 of them need to be in my signature style of longform deep dives and interspersed personal essays. Like this video. The rest of my videos have no boundaries. As long as they’re horizontal and longer than 60 seconds, it counts!

Making the task smaller makes the wall smaller.

I made an adaptation, and it made things easier on me.

I’ve never played a real Souls game.

I played the Jedi games, Fallen Order and Survivor, which borrow many of the elements of Souls games to let the player more convincingly role-play as a space wizard with a laser sword. And I played Tunic which uses Souls mechanics to echo the difficulty of its puzzles using the difficulty of its combat. I also have an unexplained desire to play Lies of P without playing any of the games that inspired it. I just fundamentally am not interested in a game whose entire premise is “git gud.”

So I did not want to touch Elden Ring. It was a whole thing when I decided to try and play it. My friends thought I was going to rage quit on the game an hour in and attempt to refund the purchase. That didn’t happen, and that’s not usually my style. It’s very rare that a game is as offensive to my sensibilities as Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen was.

What mostly happened was that my anxiety about the difficult of Elden Ring made me worse at the game. I would go into every fight scared and not wanting to engage, because I wasn’t sure if I was ready to handle it yet. I ended up playing too safe. It was this cycle of getting worse and worse at the game.

But the cycle was pretty quickly broken. Something happened that helped me figure out how to get past all of that anxiety and just play the game.

I got a guide.

No. Not like that. A guide.

This is my husband Jonatan. When Elden Ring came out he played it constantly. He hated Souls games before Elden Ring for the same reasons I did, but the ability to explore and become super powerful before ever following the main quest line was what pulled him in.

So when I sat down to play, he was interested and sat there with me. Just naturally, he started to push me to go certain directions or say things like “Oh you can totally handle that fight.” For a couple weeks there, we just started sitting down to play together, even if I was the only one holding the controller.

He’d tell me things like “Oh with your build you should go here and get this item.” Or “Hey if you want to go for this stat, there’s a really good sword in that cave over there.” And this stuff was genuinely revelatory for me. Pretty early on, he helped me get my Astrologer the Meteorite staff and the Rock Sling spell, which together made lots of fights I had encountered feel like nothing.

Listen, I didn’t get super far into Elden Ring, and I’m not sure I’ll ever pick it up again. But my time playing it was really fun. Because I had someone to guide me through it.

He actually wasn’t sitting with me when it happened, but between my summon, my wolf spirit ash, the meteorite staff, and rock sling, I beat Margit my first try. I asked those same friends who were taking bets on when I would give up if Margit was supposed to be easy which was a pretty funny conversation, you might imagine. If you’re not aware, Margit is the first skill check in the game. He’s supposed to be pretty hard.

But the thing that made this work was knowing my limit and not submitting to the inner voice that said I needed to just “git gud.” Instead I listened to the one that said that video games are supposed to be fun, and it literally doesn’t matter how you play them if you enjoy them.

So use the damn guide already. Or don’t. Whatever makes you happy. Just be honest with yourself about what that is.

Hey folks, thanks for watching and for sticking through all the way to this part. If you’ve made it here, you’re who I write for.

Hey I have a favor to ask. Can you share this with someone you think might enjoy it? Just send them the link and a reason why they should check it out. Or send another of my videos or blogs.

I really do want to make even more of my YouTube channel. I’d love to make real money doing this but I’m not yet at the viewership where that is realistic. The thing I don’t want to do is make videos that are exclusively built to fit whichever algorithm YouTube is favoring today. I’d rather make videos for people like you who appreciate the intentionality and purpose I try to put into my work. I’d rather grow slowly and have a group of people watching my videos that I trust and who trust me to make consistently meaningful art.

Thanks for watching and thanks for sharing. It really means the most.

Catch y’all next time.

https://matthorton.live/2024/06/02/dont-be-stubborn-use-a-guide/

#animalWell #dunkey #eldenRing #gameGuides #games #gaming #indieGames #LoreleiAndTheLaserEyes #metroidvania #review #simogo #videoGames

Warning to anyone who is fearful of spoilers. I don’t know how to say the things I’d like to say without digging into the content of at least 2 of the 3 games I’m talking about today. Those games are Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and Animal Well. I will not spoil the ending of Lorelei, but I will be discussing the credits and after credits of Animal Well.

I do discuss Elden Ring a good bit, but not enough to put a warning on it. I’ll be using footage from the beginning of all 3 games, so don’t worry too much about mid-to-late game spoilers.

Do with this info what you will.

I think there’s something wrong with me. There’s this thing inside me that is constantly going, spinning, and tugging at me to make something. It’s this hamster in a little wheel in my chest that is always going and the only way to calm him down is to create something new and put it out in the world. It’s my little anxiety that I can sometimes get to shut up if I just write something or make a new video or record a new podcast episode or even sometimes, just have a really fulfilling conversation with a friend.

This drive is so deep it’s essential. It’s not a part of my identity. It kind of is my identity. I am Matt, the singer, the engineer, the writer, the thinker.

But the messed up part? Making things doesn’t come easy to me. Writing everyone of these videos, especially this one, takes days of working up the energy to get started. Sometimes multiple times within the same script. Eventually, maybe the third or fourth time, it will snowball and I’ll become obsessed with finishing the project. Sometimes finishing a script, recording, and editing it in a single evening.

People who have more applicable degrees than me sometimes call this particular ADHD peculiarity the “Wall of Awful.” The concept is that people with brains like mine don’t just see a simple task. We see the task, but all of the tiny little tasks and decisions and minor complications that lead up to that task build up a giant, terrible wall that we have to scale before we can even get close to that task.

So if I want to get started writing a video, my brain skips right to the fact that it’s hot in my office because I forgot to leave the door open and that I could grab my laptop and write in the kitchen, but I left it downstairs and it isn’t even charged. And in fact my stomach has been killing me and it’s getting close to dinner time for our dog, and it’s been really difficult to get her to eat lately. So by the time I’m done with that, it’ll probably be time to figure out dinner for my husband and me. And that means I really only have like…two hours to write anything before my husband wants to go to bed and I don’t want to bother him with my hobbies, because for some reason that’s something I think pretty often without questioning why he would be bothered. And when I get started, do I even have anything valuable to say right now? Does anyone actually care about my navel-gazing video essays that claim to be about video games or tech but are often just a form of public therapy?

Those are all real things that have raced through my mind when considering sitting down to write this exact video. They all come quickly, often just in a few seconds after I’ve thought “Hey, I have some time to write tonight, probably.” Brick by brick they build an obstacle that can feel impossible to tear down.

So in this ridiculous metaphor, I’ve got a brick wall of awful in front of me and a hamster wheel of anxiety pressing me forward head first. It’s a recipe for something more explosive than edible.

But you know what? I do keep finishing videos. I do, in fact, manage to produce a podcast every 2 weeks during our seasons. And I manage to keep my job, keep playing games, and keep spending time with my husband and our friends.

It’s not that I can’t do it. There is so much proof that I can and that I want to and that it’s fulfilling. It’s just that, for me, it’s hard.

Simogo has been one of my favorite game developers for a very long time. I played their mobile game Device 6 shortly after it came out in 2013. Device 6, like many of their games, is a narrative puzzle game with really thoughtful interaction design and sound design. The game they released just before that, Year Walk, blew me away by requiring the player to look beyond the boundaries of the actual game in order to see its true ending.

They also made one of my favorite games of 2019, Sayonara Wild Hearts. It’s a playable pop album with music I adore and some really surprising rhythm game mechanics.

Simogo’s latest game is Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Lorelei is a return to Simogo’s spooky puzzle-box style. I’ve heard people say that it’s kind of like if Resident Evil took out all the zombies and amped up the puzzles, but I’ve personally never played a Resident Evil game.

The trailer for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes at the most recent Nintendo Switch event (check) completely sold me on playing it. Visually it is dark and monotone, with only a bright red, almost fuchsia, punctuating the blacks, grays, and whites of the empty hotel the game takes place inside. It operates with a semi-fixed camera, and they do this really cool visual trick where there are other images that shift as the character moves almost superimposed onto the textures. I really can’t tell if this trick is an overlay, like the VHS filter that gets used in places here too, or if it’s really a trick with the textures.

And of course, it wouldn’t be Simogo if they didn’t nail the music and sound design. Musicians Daniel Olsén, Linnea Olsson, & Jonathan Eng return from Sayonara Wild Hearts to craft a perfect piano-driven soundtrack for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, with plenty of synth and a little guitar thrown in for effect.

The puzzles in this game could not be more for me. They can get very hard, honestly, but they’re very mathy. And that’s a good thing to me. Puzzles often span multiple rooms, and some of them span nearly the whole game.

I think some people hear that and they think they’re going to miss out on something or mess something up. You can’t really mess anything up. You will get stuck and not be able to progress at some points, but you should know when you have all the pieces to complete a puzzle. If you aren’t sure, it’s better to move on and solve something else. The game will deftly guide you from one place to the next, even if you don’t realize it, with puzzles diverging and converging into little inflection points in a way that culminates the game’s big ending.

The game keeps track of every task the main character sets for herself, and she has access to nearly every piece of paper, image, vision, or video via her photographic memory in the game’s menu. This significantly reduces the backtracking you need to do, though I didn’t find this game’s map that difficult to navigate anyway.

There’s lots of great little quality of life additions in this game. One I’ll call out here is that when you exit the red maze, which I’ll say no more about, there’s a built-in way to return to the maze and retain your progress. I will say that navigating the game’s menus can be unnecessarily difficult, as the game only gives you a single confirmation button. The game really could use a back button as well as dedicated menu and map buttons, but I didn’t find that that significantly hindered my experience.

I played Lorelei and the Laser Eyes in a matter of a few days, using a ton of my brain to just burrow straight through its very tough, but very stimulating puzzles. It really clicked for me. The characters and story worked for me. The puzzle designs themselves are exactly the kinds of puzzles I like to see in games. Honestly, the whole thing reminded me of this absolutely incredible escape room I did back in 2015 at the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco. The Houdini room at Palace Games. It’s an experience that I measure these kinds of games and other escape rooms against all the time, and it is rare that they live up.

All of this kept me interested and pulled me through enough to keep trying when I got stuck. I ended up only needing a nudge in the right direction from a friend 1 or 2 times. I felt like Lorelei’s puzzles respected me and didn’t have any bizarre or out-of-nowhere solutions. This meant that I kept pushing, even though it was hard, because the whole package was thrilling.

The thing about the Wall of Awful is that it can be easily torn down, but only in very specific circumstances. If a task is extremely personally important, urgent, or interesting, many people who struggle with ADHD will be able to get that thing done.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes was interesting to me. It set a kind of perfect tone for my particular interests and had a puzzle structure and a mechanical focus that matched what I was looking for.

But there is another vaguely spooky puzzler game that came out recently that didn’t get this balance right.

I wasn’t planning on playing Animal Well. There was lots of hype for it, largely due to it being one of Bigmode’s first published games. If you don’t know, Bigmode is a publisher created by the YouTuber Dunkey (check). I am not a Dunkey viewer. His name meant nothing to me before trailer for Animal Well started getting attached to it.

I’m also not a metroidvania super fan. I love Metroid games specifically, and I enjoy many games in that style, but as for the genre overall? I kind of “nothing” metroidvanias. I enjoy the process of getting to the end and doing all the combat in those games. But I’m not interested in exploring any deeper than the game makes obvious. I do not take a beat before the final boss to go find all the upgrades I missed along the way. Largely because in most metroidvanias, navigation is tedious and the maps are enormous.

So I was going to wait Animal Well and see if, simply as a metroidvania, it got talked about enough for me to pick it up.

But then someone shared this article. (https://www.ign.com/articles/animal-well-review) IGN loved this game, and more power to the reviewer on that. They compared the game to Tunic and FEZ. Tunic, you might know, is a game I devoured and 100%’d. I loved the way that game treated puzzles within its exploration, and unlike many people who couldn’t finish the game, I really enjoyed the combat.

Fez is another one of these puzzle box games. It might arguably be the first of its kind. I’ve never finished Fez, though I played it back when it first arrived on macOS, but a lot of people I respect who have similar taste in games love Fez in the way I love Tunic.

It was absolutely these comparisons that got me to pick up Animal Well. But a couple hours into the game, I started to realize that while it was a perfectly enjoyable metroidvania, the puzzle box aspect I was looking for could be completely ignored if you just want to hit credits. In fact, I hesitate to call most of Animal Well a puzzle game at all.

When I realized this, a lot of the cracks in the game started to show. Remember how I don’t love navigating giant maps and retreading areas in Metroidvanias? Well Animal Well has a fast travel mechanic, but it’s extremely limited. The game is also full of extremely precise platforming expectations. There’s a whole section with a ghost dog that chases you across screens that I had to retry, no exaggeration, more than 20 times, even though I knew exactly what path to take.

For me, Animal Well’s platforming was at least doable. I did casually pick up and finish Celeste in an evening. But Animal Well’s platforming just didn’t feel like it needed to be that precise. All it did was take away from the stuff this game was trying to sell me, and there really wasn’t much to take.

Most of the puzzles before you hit credits the first time are environmental, but specifically in a platform-y way. It’s about raising gates and occasionally about discovering paths you didn’t notice. The puzzles I enjoy in games, the puzzles that Tunic and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes rely on, are not themselves about navigation, even if they unlock new ways to navigate the space. Instead, they often require to you to think outside of the game space, maybe even taking notes in order to do so. These puzzles play more like ARGs than video games, more often than not.

There are a couple of these in Animal Well, but they’re relegated to side content or things that are only meaningful post-credits, in the second and third layers of the game’s completion. I did enjoy these moments but I was looking for far more of them throughout.

After you do reach credits the first time, one of the things you’ll need to do to hit 2nd credits is hunt down 64 secret eggs. You’ll likely have many of them before you finish the main game. I had 39 I believe. Many of these egg hunts are enjoyable, but again, they require you to pour over the map looking for the tiniest little areas you haven’t reached, and you still have to walk over there and figure out how to get them. Or worse they ask you to simply revisit areas looking for anything suspicious.

The thing I have come to realize about Animal Well is that it is a game about the things I dislike about metroidvanias. The core game as well as its secrets are about retreading your steps and looking in dark corners. They are about really specific platforming tricks. Among all of the exclamations calling Animal Well an instant classic and making comparisons to my favorite games, what had gotten missed was that the things people were excited about were the things I found annoying. And the comparisons they were making to Tunic were not actually the things I enjoyed about that game.

Now I’m making a point, so I seem way more down on this game than I am. I enjoyed it. I think a lot of the items you get are really clever and unexpected, and they often have multiple uses that are really smart and interesting. As a metroidvania goes, it’s a good one, even if I find its save point system and limited fast travel annoying.

But folks, one thing unlocked the endgame of Animal Well for me. One thing made me have 3 uninterrupted hours of fun.

And that was getting over myself and using a guide. I started to have a really good time when I decided that I didn’t need to find all this stuff on my own. I didn’t even enjoy what this game thinks a puzzle is, so why hold myself to the idea of not using a guide? I could still see what the game wanted to show me even if I used a guide to find those last 15 or so eggs.

The best time I had with Animal Well was after I finally gave into the guides. I was finally getting to see this game as it wanted me to, I just didn’t have to fight to get on the same page as its puzzle design. I did still have to navigate a world I didn’t love jumping around, but at this point I had all the items. So that was much easier.

The night I put the game down for good, I felt genuinely fulfilled. I didn’t find every egg or every secret, but I got to see the kinds of things Billy Basso wanted me to. I made an adaptation to fit my needs as a player, and that adaptation made things easier and more enjoyable for me.

One of the ways I can get things done despite the wall of awful is to intentionally make things easier. This year I’ve done a few things to be intentional about how I make videos. First of all, I made a plan to make 1 video a month. Just having that plan, that commitment, makes the task important to me, which can sometimes trick my brain into just getting something done.

The second thing I did was share that plan with you. At the end of last year, I posted my plan over on MattHorton.live and on a bunch of social media, committing to the world that I would stick to this plan.

But the most important thing I did was make my commitment simple. It’s 1 video a month. And only 4 of them need to be in my signature style of longform deep dives and interspersed personal essays. Like this video. The rest of my videos have no boundaries. As long as they’re horizontal and longer than 60 seconds, it counts!

Making the task smaller makes the wall smaller.

I made an adaptation, and it made things easier on me.

I’ve never played a real Souls game.

I played the Jedi games, Fallen Order and Survivor, which borrow many of the elements of Souls games to let the player more convincingly role-play as a space wizard with a laser sword. And I played Tunic which uses Souls mechanics to echo the difficulty of its puzzles using the difficulty of its combat. I also have an unexplained desire to play Lies of P without playing any of the games that inspired it. I just fundamentally am not interested in a game whose entire premise is “git gud.”

So I did not want to touch Elden Ring. It was a whole thing when I decided to try and play it. My friends thought I was going to rage quit on the game an hour in and attempt to refund the purchase. That didn’t happen, and that’s not usually my style. It’s very rare that a game is as offensive to my sensibilities as Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen was.

What mostly happened was that my anxiety about the difficult of Elden Ring made me worse at the game. I would go into every fight scared and not wanting to engage, because I wasn’t sure if I was ready to handle it yet. I ended up playing too safe. It was this cycle of getting worse and worse at the game.

But the cycle was pretty quickly broken. Something happened that helped me figure out how to get past all of that anxiety and just play the game.

I got a guide.

No. Not like that. A guide.

This is my husband Jonatan. When Elden Ring came out he played it constantly. He hated Souls games before Elden Ring for the same reasons I did, but the ability to explore and become super powerful before ever following the main quest line was what pulled him in.

So when I sat down to play, he was interested and sat there with me. Just naturally, he started to push me to go certain directions or say things like “Oh you can totally handle that fight.” For a couple weeks there, we just started sitting down to play together, even if I was the only one holding the controller.

He’d tell me things like “Oh with your build you should go here and get this item.” Or “Hey if you want to go for this stat, there’s a really good sword in that cave over there.” And this stuff was genuinely revelatory for me. Pretty early on, he helped me get my Astrologer the Meteorite staff and the Rock Sling spell, which together made lots of fights I had encountered feel like nothing.

Listen, I didn’t get super far into Elden Ring, and I’m not sure I’ll ever pick it up again. But my time playing it was really fun. Because I had someone to guide me through it.

He actually wasn’t sitting with me when it happened, but between my summon, my wolf spirit ash, the meteorite staff, and rock sling, I beat Margit my first try. I asked those same friends who were taking bets on when I would give up if Margit was supposed to be easy which was a pretty funny conversation, you might imagine. If you’re not aware, Margit is the first skill check in the game. He’s supposed to be pretty hard.

But the thing that made this work was knowing my limit and not submitting to the inner voice that said I needed to just “git gud.” Instead I listened to the one that said that video games are supposed to be fun, and it literally doesn’t matter how you play them if you enjoy them.

So use the damn guide already. Or don’t. Whatever makes you happy. Just be honest with yourself about what that is.

Hey folks, thanks for watching and for sticking through all the way to this part. If you’ve made it here, you’re who I write for.

Hey I have a favor to ask. Can you share this with someone you think might enjoy it? Just send them the link and a reason why they should check it out. Or send another of my videos or blogs.

I really do want to make even more of my YouTube channel. I’d love to make real money doing this but I’m not yet at the viewership where that is realistic. The thing I don’t want to do is make videos that are exclusively built to fit whichever algorithm YouTube is favoring today. I’d rather make videos for people like you who appreciate the intentionality and purpose I try to put into my work. I’d rather grow slowly and have a group of people watching my videos that I trust and who trust me to make consistently meaningful art.

Thanks for watching and thanks for sharing. It really means the most.

Catch y’all next time.

https://matthorton.live/2024/06/02/dont-be-stubborn-use-a-guide/

#animalWell #dunkey #eldenRing #gameGuides #indieGames #LoreleiAndTheLaserEyes #simogo #videoGames

Warning to anyone who is fearful of spoilers. I don’t know how to say the things I’d like to say without digging into the content of at least 2 of the 3 games I’m talking about today. Those games are Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and Animal Well. I will not spoil the ending of Lorelei, but I will be discussing the credits and after credits of Animal Well.

I do discuss Elden Ring a good bit, but not enough to put a warning on it. I’ll be using footage from the beginning of all 3 games, so don’t worry too much about mid-to-late game spoilers.

Do with this info what you will.

I think there’s something wrong with me. There’s this thing inside me that is constantly going, spinning, and tugging at me to make something. It’s this hamster in a little wheel in my chest that is always going and the only way to calm him down is to create something new and put it out in the world. It’s my little anxiety that I can sometimes get to shut up if I just write something or make a new video or record a new podcast episode or even sometimes, just have a really fulfilling conversation with a friend.

This drive is so deep it’s essential. It’s not a part of my identity. It kind of is my identity. I am Matt, the singer, the engineer, the writer, the thinker.

But the messed up part? Making things doesn’t come easy to me. Writing everyone of these videos, especially this one, takes days of working up the energy to get started. Sometimes multiple times within the same script. Eventually, maybe the third or fourth time, it will snowball and I’ll become obsessed with finishing the project. Sometimes finishing a script, recording, and editing it in a single evening.

People who have more applicable degrees than me sometimes call this particular ADHD peculiarity the “Wall of Awful.” The concept is that people with brains like mine don’t just see a simple task. We see the task, but all of the tiny little tasks and decisions and minor complications that lead up to that task build up a giant, terrible wall that we have to scale before we can even get close to that task.

So if I want to get started writing a video, my brain skips right to the fact that it’s hot in my office because I forgot to leave the door open and that I could grab my laptop and write in the kitchen, but I left it downstairs and it isn’t even charged. And in fact my stomach has been killing me and it’s getting close to dinner time for our dog, and it’s been really difficult to get her to eat lately. So by the time I’m done with that, it’ll probably be time to figure out dinner for my husband and me. And that means I really only have like…two hours to write anything before my husband wants to go to bed and I don’t want to bother him with my hobbies, because for some reason that’s something I think pretty often without questioning why he would be bothered. And when I get started, do I even have anything valuable to say right now? Does anyone actually care about my navel-gazing video essays that claim to be about video games or tech but are often just a form of public therapy?

Those are all real things that have raced through my mind when considering sitting down to write this exact video. They all come quickly, often just in a few seconds after I’ve thought “Hey, I have some time to write tonight, probably.” Brick by brick they build an obstacle that can feel impossible to tear down.

So in this ridiculous metaphor, I’ve got a brick wall of awful in front of me and a hamster wheel of anxiety pressing me forward head first. It’s a recipe for something more explosive than edible.

But you know what? I do keep finishing videos. I do, in fact, manage to produce a podcast every 2 weeks during our seasons. And I manage to keep my job, keep playing games, and keep spending time with my husband and our friends.

It’s not that I can’t do it. There is so much proof that I can and that I want to and that it’s fulfilling. It’s just that, for me, it’s hard.

Simogo has been one of my favorite game developers for a very long time. I played their mobile game Device 6 shortly after it came out in 2013. Device 6, like many of their games, is a narrative puzzle game with really thoughtful interaction design and sound design. The game they released just before that, Year Walk, blew me away by requiring the player to look beyond the boundaries of the actual game in order to see its true ending.

They also made one of my favorite games of 2019, Sayonara Wild Hearts. It’s a playable pop album with music I adore and some really surprising rhythm game mechanics.

Simogo’s latest game is Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Lorelei is a return to Simogo’s spooky puzzle-box style. I’ve heard people say that it’s kind of like if Resident Evil took out all the zombies and amped up the puzzles, but I’ve personally never played a Resident Evil game.

The trailer for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes at the most recent Nintendo Switch event (check) completely sold me on playing it. Visually it is dark and monotone, with only a bright red, almost fuchsia, punctuating the blacks, grays, and whites of the empty hotel the game takes place inside. It operates with a semi-fixed camera, and they do this really cool visual trick where there are other images that shift as the character moves almost superimposed onto the textures. I really can’t tell if this trick is an overlay, like the VHS filter that gets used in places here too, or if it’s really a trick with the textures.

And of course, it wouldn’t be Simogo if they didn’t nail the music and sound design. Musicians Daniel Olsén, Linnea Olsson, & Jonathan Eng return from Sayonara Wild Hearts to craft a perfect piano-driven soundtrack for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, with plenty of synth and a little guitar thrown in for effect.

The puzzles in this game could not be more for me. They can get very hard, honestly, but they’re very mathy. And that’s a good thing to me. Puzzles often span multiple rooms, and some of them span nearly the whole game.

I think some people hear that and they think they’re going to miss out on something or mess something up. You can’t really mess anything up. You will get stuck and not be able to progress at some points, but you should know when you have all the pieces to complete a puzzle. If you aren’t sure, it’s better to move on and solve something else. The game will deftly guide you from one place to the next, even if you don’t realize it, with puzzles diverging and converging into little inflection points in a way that culminates the game’s big ending.

The game keeps track of every task the main character sets for herself, and she has access to nearly every piece of paper, image, vision, or video via her photographic memory in the game’s menu. This significantly reduces the backtracking you need to do, though I didn’t find this game’s map that difficult to navigate anyway.

There’s lots of great little quality of life additions in this game. One I’ll call out here is that when you exit the red maze, which I’ll say no more about, there’s a built-in way to return to the maze and retain your progress. I will say that navigating the game’s menus can be unnecessarily difficult, as the game only gives you a single confirmation button. The game really could use a back button as well as dedicated menu and map buttons, but I didn’t find that that significantly hindered my experience.

I played Lorelei and the Laser Eyes in a matter of a few days, using a ton of my brain to just burrow straight through its very tough, but very stimulating puzzles. It really clicked for me. The characters and story worked for me. The puzzle designs themselves are exactly the kinds of puzzles I like to see in games. Honestly, the whole thing reminded me of this absolutely incredible escape room I did back in 2015 at the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco. The Houdini room at Palace Games. It’s an experience that I measure these kinds of games and other escape rooms against all the time, and it is rare that they live up.

All of this kept me interested and pulled me through enough to keep trying when I got stuck. I ended up only needing a nudge in the right direction from a friend 1 or 2 times. I felt like Lorelei’s puzzles respected me and didn’t have any bizarre or out-of-nowhere solutions. This meant that I kept pushing, even though it was hard, because the whole package was thrilling.

The thing about the Wall of Awful is that it can be easily torn down, but only in very specific circumstances. If a task is extremely personally important, urgent, or interesting, many people who struggle with ADHD will be able to get that thing done.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes was interesting to me. It set a kind of perfect tone for my particular interests and had a puzzle structure and a mechanical focus that matched what I was looking for.

But there is another vaguely spooky puzzler game that came out recently that didn’t get this balance right.

I wasn’t planning on playing Animal Well. There was lots of hype for it, largely due to it being one of Bigmode’s first published games. If you don’t know, Bigmode is a publisher created by the YouTuber Dunkey (check). I am not a Dunkey viewer. His name meant nothing to me before trailer for Animal Well started getting attached to it.

I’m also not a metroidvania super fan. I love Metroid games specifically, and I enjoy many games in that style, but as for the genre overall? I kind of “nothing” metroidvanias. I enjoy the process of getting to the end and doing all the combat in those games. But I’m not interested in exploring any deeper than the game makes obvious. I do not take a beat before the final boss to go find all the upgrades I missed along the way. Largely because in most metroidvanias, navigation is tedious and the maps are enormous.

So I was going to wait Animal Well and see if, simply as a metroidvania, it got talked about enough for me to pick it up.

But then someone shared this article. (https://www.ign.com/articles/animal-well-review) IGN loved this game, and more power to the reviewer on that. They compared the game to Tunic and FEZ. Tunic, you might know, is a game I devoured and 100%’d. I loved the way that game treated puzzles within its exploration, and unlike many people who couldn’t finish the game, I really enjoyed the combat.

Fez is another one of these puzzle box games. It might arguably be the first of its kind. I’ve never finished Fez, though I played it back when it first arrived on macOS, but a lot of people I respect who have similar taste in games love Fez in the way I love Tunic.

It was absolutely these comparisons that got me to pick up Animal Well. But a couple hours into the game, I started to realize that while it was a perfectly enjoyable metroidvania, the puzzle box aspect I was looking for could be completely ignored if you just want to hit credits. In fact, I hesitate to call most of Animal Well a puzzle game at all.

When I realized this, a lot of the cracks in the game started to show. Remember how I don’t love navigating giant maps and retreading areas in Metroidvanias? Well Animal Well has a fast travel mechanic, but it’s extremely limited. The game is also full of extremely precise platforming expectations. There’s a whole section with a ghost dog that chases you across screens that I had to retry, no exaggeration, more than 20 times, even though I knew exactly what path to take.

For me, Animal Well’s platforming was at least doable. I did casually pick up and finish Celeste in an evening. But Animal Well’s platforming just didn’t feel like it needed to be that precise. All it did was take away from the stuff this game was trying to sell me, and there really wasn’t much to take.

Most of the puzzles before you hit credits the first time are environmental, but specifically in a platform-y way. It’s about raising gates and occasionally about discovering paths you didn’t notice. The puzzles I enjoy in games, the puzzles that Tunic and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes rely on, are not themselves about navigation, even if they unlock new ways to navigate the space. Instead, they often require to you to think outside of the game space, maybe even taking notes in order to do so. These puzzles play more like ARGs than video games, more often than not.

There are a couple of these in Animal Well, but they’re relegated to side content or things that are only meaningful post-credits, in the second and third layers of the game’s completion. I did enjoy these moments but I was looking for far more of them throughout.

After you do reach credits the first time, one of the things you’ll need to do to hit 2nd credits is hunt down 64 secret eggs. You’ll likely have many of them before you finish the main game. I had 39 I believe. Many of these egg hunts are enjoyable, but again, they require you to pour over the map looking for the tiniest little areas you haven’t reached, and you still have to walk over there and figure out how to get them. Or worse they ask you to simply revisit areas looking for anything suspicious.

The thing I have come to realize about Animal Well is that it is a game about the things I dislike about metroidvanias. The core game as well as its secrets are about retreading your steps and looking in dark corners. They are about really specific platforming tricks. Among all of the exclamations calling Animal Well an instant classic and making comparisons to my favorite games, what had gotten missed was that the things people were excited about were the things I found annoying. And the comparisons they were making to Tunic were not actually the things I enjoyed about that game.

Now I’m making a point, so I seem way more down on this game than I am. I enjoyed it. I think a lot of the items you get are really clever and unexpected, and they often have multiple uses that are really smart and interesting. As a metroidvania goes, it’s a good one, even if I find its save point system and limited fast travel annoying.

But folks, one thing unlocked the endgame of Animal Well for me. One thing made me have 3 uninterrupted hours of fun.

And that was getting over myself and using a guide. I started to have a really good time when I decided that I didn’t need to find all this stuff on my own. I didn’t even enjoy what this game thinks a puzzle is, so why hold myself to the idea of not using a guide? I could still see what the game wanted to show me even if I used a guide to find those last 15 or so eggs.

The best time I had with Animal Well was after I finally gave into the guides. I was finally getting to see this game as it wanted me to, I just didn’t have to fight to get on the same page as its puzzle design. I did still have to navigate a world I didn’t love jumping around, but at this point I had all the items. So that was much easier.

The night I put the game down for good, I felt genuinely fulfilled. I didn’t find every egg or every secret, but I got to see the kinds of things Billy Basso wanted me to. I made an adaptation to fit my needs as a player, and that adaptation made things easier and more enjoyable for me.

One of the ways I can get things done despite the wall of awful is to intentionally make things easier. This year I’ve done a few things to be intentional about how I make videos. First of all, I made a plan to make 1 video a month. Just having that plan, that commitment, makes the task important to me, which can sometimes trick my brain into just getting something done.

The second thing I did was share that plan with you. At the end of last year, I posted my plan over on MattHorton.live and on a bunch of social media, committing to the world that I would stick to this plan.

But the most important thing I did was make my commitment simple. It’s 1 video a month. And only 4 of them need to be in my signature style of longform deep dives and interspersed personal essays. Like this video. The rest of my videos have no boundaries. As long as they’re horizontal and longer than 60 seconds, it counts!

Making the task smaller makes the wall smaller.

I made an adaptation, and it made things easier on me.

I’ve never played a real Souls game.

I played the Jedi games, Fallen Order and Survivor, which borrow many of the elements of Souls games to let the player more convincingly role-play as a space wizard with a laser sword. And I played Tunic which uses Souls mechanics to echo the difficulty of its puzzles using the difficulty of its combat. I also have an unexplained desire to play Lies of P without playing any of the games that inspired it. I just fundamentally am not interested in a game whose entire premise is “git gud.”

So I did not want to touch Elden Ring. It was a whole thing when I decided to try and play it. My friends thought I was going to rage quit on the game an hour in and attempt to refund the purchase. That didn’t happen, and that’s not usually my style. It’s very rare that a game is as offensive to my sensibilities as Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen was.

What mostly happened was that my anxiety about the difficult of Elden Ring made me worse at the game. I would go into every fight scared and not wanting to engage, because I wasn’t sure if I was ready to handle it yet. I ended up playing too safe. It was this cycle of getting worse and worse at the game.

But the cycle was pretty quickly broken. Something happened that helped me figure out how to get past all of that anxiety and just play the game.

I got a guide.

No. Not like that. A guide.

This is my husband Jonatan. When Elden Ring came out he played it constantly. He hated Souls games before Elden Ring for the same reasons I did, but the ability to explore and become super powerful before ever following the main quest line was what pulled him in.

So when I sat down to play, he was interested and sat there with me. Just naturally, he started to push me to go certain directions or say things like “Oh you can totally handle that fight.” For a couple weeks there, we just started sitting down to play together, even if I was the only one holding the controller.

He’d tell me things like “Oh with your build you should go here and get this item.” Or “Hey if you want to go for this stat, there’s a really good sword in that cave over there.” And this stuff was genuinely revelatory for me. Pretty early on, he helped me get my Astrologer the Meteorite staff and the Rock Sling spell, which together made lots of fights I had encountered feel like nothing.

Listen, I didn’t get super far into Elden Ring, and I’m not sure I’ll ever pick it up again. But my time playing it was really fun. Because I had someone to guide me through it.

He actually wasn’t sitting with me when it happened, but between my summon, my wolf spirit ash, the meteorite staff, and rock sling, I beat Margit my first try. I asked those same friends who were taking bets on when I would give up if Margit was supposed to be easy which was a pretty funny conversation, you might imagine. If you’re not aware, Margit is the first skill check in the game. He’s supposed to be pretty hard.

But the thing that made this work was knowing my limit and not submitting to the inner voice that said I needed to just “git gud.” Instead I listened to the one that said that video games are supposed to be fun, and it literally doesn’t matter how you play them if you enjoy them.

So use the damn guide already. Or don’t. Whatever makes you happy. Just be honest with yourself about what that is.

Hey folks, thanks for watching and for sticking through all the way to this part. If you’ve made it here, you’re who I write for.

Hey I have a favor to ask. Can you share this with someone you think might enjoy it? Just send them the link and a reason why they should check it out. Or send another of my videos or blogs.

I really do want to make even more of my YouTube channel. I’d love to make real money doing this but I’m not yet at the viewership where that is realistic. The thing I don’t want to do is make videos that are exclusively built to fit whichever algorithm YouTube is favoring today. I’d rather make videos for people like you who appreciate the intentionality and purpose I try to put into my work. I’d rather grow slowly and have a group of people watching my videos that I trust and who trust me to make consistently meaningful art.

Thanks for watching and thanks for sharing. It really means the most.

Catch y’all next time.

https://matthorton.live/2024/06/02/dont-be-stubborn-use-a-guide/

#animalWell #dunkey #eldenRing #gameGuides #indieGames #LoreleiAndTheLaserEyes #simogo #videoGames

Warning to anyone who is fearful of spoilers. I don’t know how to say the things I’d like to say without digging into the content of at least 2 of the 3 games I’m talking about today. Those games are Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and Animal Well. I will not spoil the ending of Lorelei, but I will be discussing the credits and after credits of Animal Well.

I do discuss Elden Ring a good bit, but not enough to put a warning on it. I’ll be using footage from the beginning of all 3 games, so don’t worry too much about mid-to-late game spoilers.

Do with this info what you will.

I think there’s something wrong with me. There’s this thing inside me that is constantly going, spinning, and tugging at me to make something. It’s this hamster in a little wheel in my chest that is always going and the only way to calm him down is to create something new and put it out in the world. It’s my little anxiety that I can sometimes get to shut up if I just write something or make a new video or record a new podcast episode or even sometimes, just have a really fulfilling conversation with a friend.

This drive is so deep it’s essential. It’s not a part of my identity. It kind of is my identity. I am Matt, the singer, the engineer, the writer, the thinker.

But the messed up part? Making things doesn’t come easy to me. Writing everyone of these videos, especially this one, takes days of working up the energy to get started. Sometimes multiple times within the same script. Eventually, maybe the third or fourth time, it will snowball and I’ll become obsessed with finishing the project. Sometimes finishing a script, recording, and editing it in a single evening.

People who have more applicable degrees than me sometimes call this particular ADHD peculiarity the “Wall of Awful.” The concept is that people with brains like mine don’t just see a simple task. We see the task, but all of the tiny little tasks and decisions and minor complications that lead up to that task build up a giant, terrible wall that we have to scale before we can even get close to that task.

So if I want to get started writing a video, my brain skips right to the fact that it’s hot in my office because I forgot to leave the door open and that I could grab my laptop and write in the kitchen, but I left it downstairs and it isn’t even charged. And in fact my stomach has been killing me and it’s getting close to dinner time for our dog, and it’s been really difficult to get her to eat lately. So by the time I’m done with that, it’ll probably be time to figure out dinner for my husband and me. And that means I really only have like…two hours to write anything before my husband wants to go to bed and I don’t want to bother him with my hobbies, because for some reason that’s something I think pretty often without questioning why he would be bothered. And when I get started, do I even have anything valuable to say right now? Does anyone actually care about my navel-gazing video essays that claim to be about video games or tech but are often just a form of public therapy?

Those are all real things that have raced through my mind when considering sitting down to write this exact video. They all come quickly, often just in a few seconds after I’ve thought “Hey, I have some time to write tonight, probably.” Brick by brick they build an obstacle that can feel impossible to tear down.

So in this ridiculous metaphor, I’ve got a brick wall of awful in front of me and a hamster wheel of anxiety pressing me forward head first. It’s a recipe for something more explosive than edible.

But you know what? I do keep finishing videos. I do, in fact, manage to produce a podcast every 2 weeks during our seasons. And I manage to keep my job, keep playing games, and keep spending time with my husband and our friends.

It’s not that I can’t do it. There is so much proof that I can and that I want to and that it’s fulfilling. It’s just that, for me, it’s hard.

Simogo has been one of my favorite game developers for a very long time. I played their mobile game Device 6 shortly after it came out in 2013. Device 6, like many of their games, is a narrative puzzle game with really thoughtful interaction design and sound design. The game they released just before that, Year Walk, blew me away by requiring the player to look beyond the boundaries of the actual game in order to see its true ending.

They also made one of my favorite games of 2019, Sayonara Wild Hearts. It’s a playable pop album with music I adore and some really surprising rhythm game mechanics.

Simogo’s latest game is Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Lorelei is a return to Simogo’s spooky puzzle-box style. I’ve heard people say that it’s kind of like if Resident Evil took out all the zombies and amped up the puzzles, but I’ve personally never played a Resident Evil game.

The trailer for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes at the most recent Nintendo Switch event (check) completely sold me on playing it. Visually it is dark and monotone, with only a bright red, almost fuchsia, punctuating the blacks, grays, and whites of the empty hotel the game takes place inside. It operates with a semi-fixed camera, and they do this really cool visual trick where there are other images that shift as the character moves almost superimposed onto the textures. I really can’t tell if this trick is an overlay, like the VHS filter that gets used in places here too, or if it’s really a trick with the textures.

And of course, it wouldn’t be Simogo if they didn’t nail the music and sound design. Musicians Daniel Olsén, Linnea Olsson, & Jonathan Eng return from Sayonara Wild Hearts to craft a perfect piano-driven soundtrack for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, with plenty of synth and a little guitar thrown in for effect.

The puzzles in this game could not be more for me. They can get very hard, honestly, but they’re very mathy. And that’s a good thing to me. Puzzles often span multiple rooms, and some of them span nearly the whole game.

I think some people hear that and they think they’re going to miss out on something or mess something up. You can’t really mess anything up. You will get stuck and not be able to progress at some points, but you should know when you have all the pieces to complete a puzzle. If you aren’t sure, it’s better to move on and solve something else. The game will deftly guide you from one place to the next, even if you don’t realize it, with puzzles diverging and converging into little inflection points in a way that culminates the game’s big ending.

The game keeps track of every task the main character sets for herself, and she has access to nearly every piece of paper, image, vision, or video via her photographic memory in the game’s menu. This significantly reduces the backtracking you need to do, though I didn’t find this game’s map that difficult to navigate anyway.

There’s lots of great little quality of life additions in this game. One I’ll call out here is that when you exit the red maze, which I’ll say no more about, there’s a built-in way to return to the maze and retain your progress. I will say that navigating the game’s menus can be unnecessarily difficult, as the game only gives you a single confirmation button. The game really could use a back button as well as dedicated menu and map buttons, but I didn’t find that that significantly hindered my experience.

I played Lorelei and the Laser Eyes in a matter of a few days, using a ton of my brain to just burrow straight through its very tough, but very stimulating puzzles. It really clicked for me. The characters and story worked for me. The puzzle designs themselves are exactly the kinds of puzzles I like to see in games. Honestly, the whole thing reminded me of this absolutely incredible escape room I did back in 2015 at the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco. The Houdini room at Palace Games. It’s an experience that I measure these kinds of games and other escape rooms against all the time, and it is rare that they live up.

All of this kept me interested and pulled me through enough to keep trying when I got stuck. I ended up only needing a nudge in the right direction from a friend 1 or 2 times. I felt like Lorelei’s puzzles respected me and didn’t have any bizarre or out-of-nowhere solutions. This meant that I kept pushing, even though it was hard, because the whole package was thrilling.

The thing about the Wall of Awful is that it can be easily torn down, but only in very specific circumstances. If a task is extremely personally important, urgent, or interesting, many people who struggle with ADHD will be able to get that thing done.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes was interesting to me. It set a kind of perfect tone for my particular interests and had a puzzle structure and a mechanical focus that matched what I was looking for.

But there is another vaguely spooky puzzler game that came out recently that didn’t get this balance right.

I wasn’t planning on playing Animal Well. There was lots of hype for it, largely due to it being one of Bigmode’s first published games. If you don’t know, Bigmode is a publisher created by the YouTuber Dunkey (check). I am not a Dunkey viewer. His name meant nothing to me before trailer for Animal Well started getting attached to it.

I’m also not a metroidvania super fan. I love Metroid games specifically, and I enjoy many games in that style, but as for the genre overall? I kind of “nothing” metroidvanias. I enjoy the process of getting to the end and doing all the combat in those games. But I’m not interested in exploring any deeper than the game makes obvious. I do not take a beat before the final boss to go find all the upgrades I missed along the way. Largely because in most metroidvanias, navigation is tedious and the maps are enormous.

So I was going to wait Animal Well and see if, simply as a metroidvania, it got talked about enough for me to pick it up.

But then someone shared this article. (https://www.ign.com/articles/animal-well-review) IGN loved this game, and more power to the reviewer on that. They compared the game to Tunic and FEZ. Tunic, you might know, is a game I devoured and 100%’d. I loved the way that game treated puzzles within its exploration, and unlike many people who couldn’t finish the game, I really enjoyed the combat.

Fez is another one of these puzzle box games. It might arguably be the first of its kind. I’ve never finished Fez, though I played it back when it first arrived on macOS, but a lot of people I respect who have similar taste in games love Fez in the way I love Tunic.

It was absolutely these comparisons that got me to pick up Animal Well. But a couple hours into the game, I started to realize that while it was a perfectly enjoyable metroidvania, the puzzle box aspect I was looking for could be completely ignored if you just want to hit credits. In fact, I hesitate to call most of Animal Well a puzzle game at all.

When I realized this, a lot of the cracks in the game started to show. Remember how I don’t love navigating giant maps and retreading areas in Metroidvanias? Well Animal Well has a fast travel mechanic, but it’s extremely limited. The game is also full of extremely precise platforming expectations. There’s a whole section with a ghost dog that chases you across screens that I had to retry, no exaggeration, more than 20 times, even though I knew exactly what path to take.

For me, Animal Well’s platforming was at least doable. I did casually pick up and finish Celeste in an evening. But Animal Well’s platforming just didn’t feel like it needed to be that precise. All it did was take away from the stuff this game was trying to sell me, and there really wasn’t much to take.

Most of the puzzles before you hit credits the first time are environmental, but specifically in a platform-y way. It’s about raising gates and occasionally about discovering paths you didn’t notice. The puzzles I enjoy in games, the puzzles that Tunic and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes rely on, are not themselves about navigation, even if they unlock new ways to navigate the space. Instead, they often require to you to think outside of the game space, maybe even taking notes in order to do so. These puzzles play more like ARGs than video games, more often than not.

There are a couple of these in Animal Well, but they’re relegated to side content or things that are only meaningful post-credits, in the second and third layers of the game’s completion. I did enjoy these moments but I was looking for far more of them throughout.

After you do reach credits the first time, one of the things you’ll need to do to hit 2nd credits is hunt down 64 secret eggs. You’ll likely have many of them before you finish the main game. I had 39 I believe. Many of these egg hunts are enjoyable, but again, they require you to pour over the map looking for the tiniest little areas you haven’t reached, and you still have to walk over there and figure out how to get them. Or worse they ask you to simply revisit areas looking for anything suspicious.

The thing I have come to realize about Animal Well is that it is a game about the things I dislike about metroidvanias. The core game as well as its secrets are about retreading your steps and looking in dark corners. They are about really specific platforming tricks. Among all of the exclamations calling Animal Well an instant classic and making comparisons to my favorite games, what had gotten missed was that the things people were excited about were the things I found annoying. And the comparisons they were making to Tunic were not actually the things I enjoyed about that game.

Now I’m making a point, so I seem way more down on this game than I am. I enjoyed it. I think a lot of the items you get are really clever and unexpected, and they often have multiple uses that are really smart and interesting. As a metroidvania goes, it’s a good one, even if I find its save point system and limited fast travel annoying.

But folks, one thing unlocked the endgame of Animal Well for me. One thing made me have 3 uninterrupted hours of fun.

And that was getting over myself and using a guide. I started to have a really good time when I decided that I didn’t need to find all this stuff on my own. I didn’t even enjoy what this game thinks a puzzle is, so why hold myself to the idea of not using a guide? I could still see what the game wanted to show me even if I used a guide to find those last 15 or so eggs.

The best time I had with Animal Well was after I finally gave into the guides. I was finally getting to see this game as it wanted me to, I just didn’t have to fight to get on the same page as its puzzle design. I did still have to navigate a world I didn’t love jumping around, but at this point I had all the items. So that was much easier.

The night I put the game down for good, I felt genuinely fulfilled. I didn’t find every egg or every secret, but I got to see the kinds of things Billy Basso wanted me to. I made an adaptation to fit my needs as a player, and that adaptation made things easier and more enjoyable for me.

One of the ways I can get things done despite the wall of awful is to intentionally make things easier. This year I’ve done a few things to be intentional about how I make videos. First of all, I made a plan to make 1 video a month. Just having that plan, that commitment, makes the task important to me, which can sometimes trick my brain into just getting something done.

The second thing I did was share that plan with you. At the end of last year, I posted my plan over on MattHorton.live and on a bunch of social media, committing to the world that I would stick to this plan.

But the most important thing I did was make my commitment simple. It’s 1 video a month. And only 4 of them need to be in my signature style of longform deep dives and interspersed personal essays. Like this video. The rest of my videos have no boundaries. As long as they’re horizontal and longer than 60 seconds, it counts!

Making the task smaller makes the wall smaller.

I made an adaptation, and it made things easier on me.

I’ve never played a real Souls game.

I played the Jedi games, Fallen Order and Survivor, which borrow many of the elements of Souls games to let the player more convincingly role-play as a space wizard with a laser sword. And I played Tunic which uses Souls mechanics to echo the difficulty of its puzzles using the difficulty of its combat. I also have an unexplained desire to play Lies of P without playing any of the games that inspired it. I just fundamentally am not interested in a game whose entire premise is “git gud.”

So I did not want to touch Elden Ring. It was a whole thing when I decided to try and play it. My friends thought I was going to rage quit on the game an hour in and attempt to refund the purchase. That didn’t happen, and that’s not usually my style. It’s very rare that a game is as offensive to my sensibilities as Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen was.

What mostly happened was that my anxiety about the difficult of Elden Ring made me worse at the game. I would go into every fight scared and not wanting to engage, because I wasn’t sure if I was ready to handle it yet. I ended up playing too safe. It was this cycle of getting worse and worse at the game.

But the cycle was pretty quickly broken. Something happened that helped me figure out how to get past all of that anxiety and just play the game.

I got a guide.

No. Not like that. A guide.

This is my husband Jonatan. When Elden Ring came out he played it constantly. He hated Souls games before Elden Ring for the same reasons I did, but the ability to explore and become super powerful before ever following the main quest line was what pulled him in.

So when I sat down to play, he was interested and sat there with me. Just naturally, he started to push me to go certain directions or say things like “Oh you can totally handle that fight.” For a couple weeks there, we just started sitting down to play together, even if I was the only one holding the controller.

He’d tell me things like “Oh with your build you should go here and get this item.” Or “Hey if you want to go for this stat, there’s a really good sword in that cave over there.” And this stuff was genuinely revelatory for me. Pretty early on, he helped me get my Astrologer the Meteorite staff and the Rock Sling spell, which together made lots of fights I had encountered feel like nothing.

Listen, I didn’t get super far into Elden Ring, and I’m not sure I’ll ever pick it up again. But my time playing it was really fun. Because I had someone to guide me through it.

He actually wasn’t sitting with me when it happened, but between my summon, my wolf spirit ash, the meteorite staff, and rock sling, I beat Margit my first try. I asked those same friends who were taking bets on when I would give up if Margit was supposed to be easy which was a pretty funny conversation, you might imagine. If you’re not aware, Margit is the first skill check in the game. He’s supposed to be pretty hard.

But the thing that made this work was knowing my limit and not submitting to the inner voice that said I needed to just “git gud.” Instead I listened to the one that said that video games are supposed to be fun, and it literally doesn’t matter how you play them if you enjoy them.

So use the damn guide already. Or don’t. Whatever makes you happy. Just be honest with yourself about what that is.

Hey folks, thanks for watching and for sticking through all the way to this part. If you’ve made it here, you’re who I write for.

Hey I have a favor to ask. Can you share this with someone you think might enjoy it? Just send them the link and a reason why they should check it out. Or send another of my videos or blogs.

I really do want to make even more of my YouTube channel. I’d love to make real money doing this but I’m not yet at the viewership where that is realistic. The thing I don’t want to do is make videos that are exclusively built to fit whichever algorithm YouTube is favoring today. I’d rather make videos for people like you who appreciate the intentionality and purpose I try to put into my work. I’d rather grow slowly and have a group of people watching my videos that I trust and who trust me to make consistently meaningful art.

Thanks for watching and thanks for sharing. It really means the most.

Catch y’all next time.

https://matthorton.live/2024/06/02/dont-be-stubborn-use-a-guide/

#animalWell #dunkey #eldenRing #gameGuides #games #gaming #indieGames #LoreleiAndTheLaserEyes #metroidvania #review #simogo #videoGames

Animal Well, un metroidvania d’autor

Animal Well (Billy Basso, 2024) és un metroidvània críptic i atmosfèric amb un art pixelat de baixa resolució.

https://ludica.cat/animal-well-un-metroidvania-autor/

#Crtica #AnimalWell #indie #metroidvnia

#AnimalWell has got a choke hole on me that hasn't happened since #ObraDinn. Some games just scratch the brain sooo well.

This week's schedule with an early access to a new release!!! (crazy, I know!)
🧣 Tuesday - Paper trail (new)
🧣 Thursday - Paper trail (new)
🐾 Friday - Animal well

See you LIVE!
- from 2pm AEST -
#twitch #twitchstreaming #youtubestreaming #puzzle #puzzlegame #puzzlevideogame #animalwell #PaperTrailGame #indiegame

Hey Folks! Another week another show! Firstly Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there.

This week we discussed:
-- #Bluey Surprise!
-- #GW2 Living World Season 1
-- Why the #Fallout Series Worked
-- #WyldeFlowers
-- #LittleKittyBigCity
-- #AnimalWell
-- #StarCitizen 3.23
-- Virtual Tabletops
-- Bel Beating "The Feared"

AggroChat #477 - Why Fallout Works
https://aggronaut.com/2024/05/12/aggrochat-477-why-fallout-works/

#AggroChat #Podcast

I remember all the pricks commenting on #Dunkey opening up an indie publisher and thinking he would fail and many even wishing him failing for whatever reason, that were never applied to all the game executive assholes at AAA studios.

Well... Looks like their first published game #AnimalWell is a critically smash hit with a metascore above 90.

#gaming #videogames #indiegames

I remember all the pricks commenting on #Dunkey opening up an indie publisher and thinking he would fail and many even wishing him failing for whatever reason, that were never applied to all the game executive assholes at AAA studios.

Well... Looks like their first published game #AnimalWell is a critically smash hit with a metascore above 90.

#gaming #videogames #indiegames

I remember all the pricks commenting on #Dunkey opening up an indie publisher and thinking he would fail and many even wishing him failing for whatever reason, that were never applied to all the game executive assholes at AAA studios.

Well... Looks like their first published game #AnimalWell is a critically smash hit with a metascore above 90.

#gaming #videogames #indiegames

I remember all the pricks commenting on #Dunkey opening up an indie publisher and thinking he would fail and many even wishing him failing for whatever reason, that were never applied to all the game executive assholes at AAA studios.

Well... Looks like their first published game #AnimalWell is a critically smash hit with a metascore above 90.

#gaming #videogames #indiegames

I remember all the pricks commenting on #Dunkey opening up an indie publisher and thinking he would fail and many even wishing him failing for whatever reason, that were never applied to all the game executive assholes at AAA studios.

Well... Looks like their first published game #AnimalWell is a critically smash hit with a metascore above 90.

#gaming #videogames #indiegames