#2: Are we...out of Shapes already?

June 2024: Destiny 2 The Final Shape, The Great Gotham Challenge, Sudoku, The Case of the Golden Idol, and more

When I first started writing this newsletter I was like, “I didn’t play many games this month because it happened to just be one of those really busy months in life in general”, and it was: work really picked up, my side project hit a big milestone, and I was trying to spend every possible second outdoors and with friends while it was still nice (the Spring to Summer transition in NYC has a goldilocks period akin to the amount of time an avocado is ripe for). But then I wrote down everything and it ended up being a ton actually, and that’s even after I cut out my initial thoughts about 1000xResist which I finished (as of this writing) 4 days ago. So thanks in advance for going along on this long ride with me!

June was also The Game Announcement Month, and this being the first year where E3 is Officially Dead, although it’s been in hospice for a few years now, its pallbearers (Summer Geoff Fest as well as lots of companies’ individualized, Direct-To-Consumer showcases) had a strong showing this summer and heralded a bunch of games that I am looking forward to and then in classic Robert fashion will never end up making time to play.

Speaking of not playing: I did not play the Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree this month, mostly because did you hear how outside I was? But also because my save is actually only 80% through and thus I did not end up meeting the requirements to unlock it and the thought of having to disinter my save file and relearn my dodge roll muscle memory again frightened me more than I would like to admit. However I have been really enjoying seeing clips from it and watching deep dive lore videos (my favorite part of playing these games, let’s be honest), and the more I see of it the more I second guess this decision. We’ll check back in next month!

Big Thoughts

Destiny 2: The Final Shape

I took an entire day off work to play the latest Destiny 2 campaign and this is my attempt to write about both how that was but also what this game has meant to me over the past 4 years, so bear with me!

The place to start I think is that Destiny 2 was an incredible comfort for me in the pandemic, when I had to switch from seeing my board game friends weekly to figuring out what activities we could play together virtually instead. We played a ton of Valorant but that got too toxic so Destiny was a salve in that regard; it was cooperative and the community was nicer and also I’ve been a Bungie fan since childhood so Destiny felt like home in a way.

I don’t have to spend too much time explaining the game here right? You’re a space wizard and there are a lot of guns? It’s kind of like an MMO but also not? It’s been ongoing for 10 years and is arguably the popularizer of the category of games we call live-service?

Anyway. Over the last few years my friends and I have dipped in and out, as many people do with these games, checking out big content drops and moving on when we see the bones of the gameplay we’ve done before for a few hundred hours show through under the new skin. Destiny does go through long periods of “grind the same few activities for guns that are 3% better than your old guns” but whenever a big new Campaign or Raid or Dungeon comes out, I really do think the game is unmatched: the combination of some of the best art direction in shooters and mechanical design that really sells some very cool action fantasies (for example: a snowy medieval castle, a Ridley Scott-esque alien lair, a retrofuturistic cryogenic lab). The highs of defeating very tightly designed challenges that test your coordination and communication are some of gaming’s best.

I thought that what I would spend time writing about was The Final Shape’s incredible set pieces and skyboxes, how the guns still feel great to shoot, how the new abilities let you kind of break the game a bit, and whether or not they were able to successfully deliver on their promise of ending a 10+ year saga with a satisfying story arc. And I do think it managed everything it set out to! But instead what is sticking with me is how acutely my playthrough of The Final Shape exposed the contrast between how much Destiny sings when you’re playing it with other people, and how flat it feels in comparison when you’re not.

Despite having the whole day, my friends and I didn’t finish the whole campaign. We were very rusty and had to consign ourselves to doing Normal difficulty instead of Legendary which is how we’ve beaten every campaign thus far, but we get through about 80% of it. A few weeks later I booted it up to try and finish the campaign by myself, and did well enough on the penultimate mission. But then, on the final boss, I hit a wall and decided to make a concession: getting some help. Destiny recently added an in-game Looking For Group feature: a lobby system that allows players to select an activity they want to play and be shown a list of other people who want to play too. Before, you’d have to do this externally, on a Discord or a forum or technically they have a first party app but it’s a bit clunky. The in-game feature is Direct and fairly competent, so after a few tries, learning the logistics of it, I finally got a 3 person party together to take on the final boss, and wow am I glad I did that. I didn’t need 3 people because of difficulty; Destiny’s campaigns are actually smartly tuned based on player count, but there was a particular mechanic I wasn’t intuiting and being solo I was forced to restart from the beginning every time I failed.

I’m going to spoil this mechanic here because I’m certain that 95% of the people reading this will never play Destiny 2 ever (and the other two of you probably beat this the first day it was out). After dealing a certain amount of damage to a mini-boss in the arena, a shield will spawn that you can pick up and use in various ways. (This shield is a known entity in Destiny and it’s called an aegis and it originates from Destiny’s first ever raid, the Vault of Glass). One of the things it can do is create a bubble force field that protects you from incoming damage. So of course shortly after you acquire the shield, the boss does a completely unblock-able and undodge-able attack that covers the entire arena. Your only respite is the shield, which only one player can hold, so you must hunker down together while you wait out the storm. If you’re playing alone, this little segment is a little bump, more of an annoyance than anything, a stopgap in between the phases of the actual fight where you can run and gun like you’re used to. But in a full fireteam it plays out differently: you require each other, and you really feel like you three are the last bastion of humanity and the hope you have in each other is the only thing preventing the ultimate end. You lean on each other and must imagine a statue being erected of this moment. It’s a great example of inducing a specific emotion with a game mechanic, textbook even. And all the other design pieces coming together in that moment, the boss design, the arena you’re fighting in, the music, it comes together remarkably well.

I did that with 2 strangers I didn’t know until 5 seconds before and we didn’t even say a word to each other (A much appreciated feature of the in-game player finder is that you can find groups where no mic is required) and I’m really really glad both that I did that and that the game made it easy for me.

There’s a much longer essay here about the intertwining of The Final Shape’s narrative (Bungie chooses in this expansion to laser focus on the “main trio” of NPCs, including the tragically recast Commander Zavala (RIP Lance Reddick, although Keith David is doing a great job and is only adding to the Bungie nostalgia)) with mechanics like the one I mentioned specifically tailored to 3 and 6 player groups. And I haven’t even gotten to play the new, 12 player activity that they specifically designed to be the true denouement of the story, which was only unlocked after the entire community came together to race through the new raid (which came in at a record-shattering difficulty, taking the fastest(!) team over 19 hours).

I have so much to say about Destiny and how it played host to some of my absolute favorite gaming memories the last few years. I’ll save it for the memoir. But I’ll throw out that if you’ve ever been curious, I’ll gladly jump in with you. And teach you about all the Lore.

The Great Gotham Challenge

A few months ago I participated in an in-person puzzle hunt that took place entirely within Grand Central Terminal; it involved rushing around the station solving puzzles that the organizers had integrated into the environment, which I found really novel and delightful: as an example, one puzzle required us to track down an actor running around the main concourse and scan a tag on their suitcase to unlock the next part of the puzzle.

Though it had a few logistical speed bumps, I enjoyed it enough to stay on their mailing list and found out about the eponymous and annual Great Gotham Challenge: a similar puzzle hunt but much larger in scale, across the whole city for most of the day. So I immediately got a team of 4 together and signed up. When we arrived and gathered on the steps of the post office above Moynihan, the organizers outlined the actual bounds: 7th ave to the Hudson River, 34th st to 14th st. That meant we spent a lot of time on the High Line, down to Chelsea Market, and also inside the train terminal (did you know there’s a Jacob’s Pickles in there??).

I was again struck by the inventive and imaginative production. Puzzle hunt puzzles can get pretty creative when they’re digital: lots of ARG-style internet archaeology where your materials are website source code and file metadata. Physical puzzle hunts in my experience tend to be a lot more limited in scope: sometimes you have to cut and fold paper but that’s as far as it goes. But the Great Gotham Challenge managed to really flex a wide array of materialities and ways of conversing with aspects of the city that normally we take really for granted. There was a puzzle on popsicle sticks only revealed after eating the popsicles, a puzzle spray-painted onto the sidewalk that had to be seen from a specific vantage point, a puzzle printed on UV-sensitive t-shirts acquired from inside a dryer at a laundromat. We had to use all 5 senses, and both our thinking and walking muscles.

It was a great day spent not just doing puzzles but also walking around the city and learning a bit about its history as well, via the flavor text of the puzzles. In the end, we finished in about 4 hours, placing 18th out of 65 teams! I would 100% do it again—get on their mailing list to hear about next year’s when it happens.

Sudoku

This isn’t so much of a “review” of Sudoku (the hubris I would have to possess) but a rumination on some sudoku-related game design thoughts that I feel like would be at home in this newsletter. I have two.

One is something I don’t have a great term for but am calling a “strategy disjuncture”—it’s the idea that there are certain games wherein the learning and difficulty curve has at least one big discrete step rather than a smooth curve from low skill strategies to high skill strategies. It creates games where high skilled players are almost playing a separate game than lower skilled players. One example of this is Chess, where knowing “how to play” chess, i.e. how all the pieces move, gets you basically nowhere in terms of strategies to increase your skill. Another is billiards, where there’s a big jump in between playing to simply sink the balls (which itself is a skill that takes time to develop), to considering not only what you’ll sink but also where the ensuing cueball position leaves both you and your opponent.

A strategy disjuncture requires both a mindset shift and also a large leveling up in terms of how complicated the techniques are required to perform at that level.

Sudoku has this disjoint too, I think. When Good Sudoku came out I remember listening to an interview where the developers talked about how “the game they thought was sudoku” was not actually “real” sudoku (I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find this soundbyte). In sudoku you can understand the rules and apply them straightforwardly, but there’s a certain level you hit once you start understanding the more advanced logical techniques that requires an amount of abstraction that I think perfectly qualifies as a skill disjuncture. And I think anyone who’s had the experience of trying to get better at sudoku and then having to learn what an X-Wing is can relate (and that’s one of the easier ones imo!)

Number two, and this take might be my magnum opus so get ready: Sudoku is a Metroidvania.

Sudoku is about exploring a single interconnected large space made up of smaller spaces. As you explore, you encounter areas that you do not possess the tools or information to solve. You annotate your map in order to prioritize navigation and to remember where you’ve been and what you learned there. New information you unlock allows you to go back to older areas with new perspective and allows you to deal with challenges there you couldn’t before. And then once the map is filled in, you’re done.

One of my favorite things about becoming better at Sudoku is having an honest to god “see the matrix” moment where as you learn more advanced techniques you learn to visualize the “flow” of information that happens as you fill out a puzzle. Information “travels” from place to place on a Sudoku board, it ripples outwards from numbers being placed and it nestles in columns and rows near and far to create a dynamic and constantly shifting space that feels as intrepid to navigate as any videogame world. And I think that’s actually beautiful.

More about Sudoku in the Game Club section of this newsletter.

An as of yet unnamed game you can play with your remote coworkers

At a casual work social meeting I had late in June I was tasked with figuring out a game we could all play. Eschewing the traditional skribbl.io or Codenames I drew inspiration from a live task from the amazing British comedy panel game show Taskmaster (a perennial game design inspiration, tbh) that I saw on TikTok.

Here’s how the game works. We used Figjam but you could probably do this with any online whiteboarding tool like Miro or something, as long as folks have edit access. You’ll need at least one person to be a host who is not playing.

1. Have everyone pick a letter from the alphabet. If your tool lets you create discrete objects you can do it such that every player has to pick a different letter. Give everyone somewhere to write their answers.

2. The host asks a question like: Write down the name of an animal that starts with your letter.

3. Give everyone very little time to answer. In the taskmaster live game, the last person to put down a correct answer is eliminated. I didn’t want to do player elimination that early, so I altered this rule slightly: I put 10 seconds on the clock and then if you couldn’t answer in 10 seconds (or your answer was wrong) you got a strike. 3 strikes and you’re eliminated.

4. Increase the complexity of the questions and decrease the amount of time allotted in repeated rounds until more and more players are out. Last person standing wins.

Step 4 is where this game gets interesting and will require creativity on the part of the host. On Taskmaster, the taskmaster mixes it up by requiring that the contestants do some alphabet math, for example, “2 letters after your letter in the alphabet” or “5 letters before your letter”. By metering both the category of thing being asked for as well as how it relates to what letter you chose, you can keep people on their toes. Some examples are helpful here! I asked people for…

- something you can buy at a hardware store

- a country

- the full name of someone who works on the Games team

- a movie title

- an Olympic sport

and got creative with how it involved their letter:

- …that does not have your letter in it

- …that contains your letter anywhere except the first letter

- …that contains your letter 2nd

- …that contains your letter twice

- …that starts with a letter that nobody picked this round

One of the other benefits of doing a discrete “you have x seconds to answer” rather than the realtime “last place elimination” is that as the host I can verify the correctness of everyone’s answers without also being time pressured to check in on who is losing the race. For example if someone were to finish quickly but not realize their answer is wrong, the host might not get around to them in time for them to fix it. And that might technically make them the loser even though they finished before others. Having a “pencils down” moment (ideally enforced by the software although we got along fine without that) means we could take the time to check.

When it came down to the last 3 players, I switched to elimination mode (it’s easier to verify correctness of answers with a small player count) and also made everyone pick 2 letters instead of one. This allows you to get even more creative with the letter prompts:

- …that contains both of your letters

- …that starts with one of your letters and ends with the other

- …that has neither of your letters

- …that contains your first letter but not your second one

Some things to watch out for if you’re running this:

1. Make sure you’re really clear about the wording of the rules. At one point I said “that doesn’t contain your letter first” when I meant “that contains your letter anywhere except for first”. Which are different things.

2. Watch out for situations where people end up with X, Q, Z ,etc. I didn’t even make those letters as an option to choose initially but if you’re playing with alphabet positionality (e.g. the letter 2 before yours) it can still happen.

3. The difficulty balance is a dance between how specific the category is (a mammal vs an animal) how hard it is to figure out how to use your letter, and how much time you give players.

Let me know if you try this! My coworkers apparently thought it was pretty fun and now I have to check to see if I can transform any other Taskmaster activities into team bonding exercises.

Small Thoughts

Slice & Dice

Slice and Dice is a dice roguelike for your phone, which there are not a lot of but it’s weird that it happened twice.

You’re an adventuring party where each member has one die with various abilities on each side: attack for 1, shield, heal, etc. Each party member can be different classes and there are tons of different abilities, you get items that you can equip that do things like alter the sides of your dice or the power level of certain abilities, there are tons of enemy types and your heroes can upgrade into more specialized classes. For example, instead of just having their stats go up, you could upgrade a Defender (lots of shields, relatively generic attacks) into a Monk (some attacking, some healing). This class upgrade tree is pretty diverse and branching. I think there are like, 200 total classes?

I picked this up again (and I do every now and then) after listening to the Eggplant podcast’s excellent Into The Depths series about this. I typically bounce off of games whose thing is that they’re a huge sandbox of content mostly because I don’t have time for that kind of exploration, but since Slice and Dice is on my phone it’s easy to just jump in and jump out. I finished what you can consider to be the unspoken tutorial which is a single complete run of medium difficulty (the difficulty goes up to “Unfair”) and I’m excited to get back in!

1000xResist

I actually finished this game (in 3 sittings because I found it incredibly compelling) but I’m still gathering thoughts about this so I want to elevate it to the Big Thoughts section next month. For now let me give it a high high recommendation: it’s one of the most ambitious narrative games I’ve played in a while, it’s novel-like in scope and its themes are intense and existential and beautiful and tragic all at once.

Spoiling all the Animal Well Secrets

I found 3 rabbits in Animal Well (if that means anything to you) and I realized that I wanted to know everything there is to know but I didn’t have it in me to wander around hunting for pixels. So instead I watched this Fury Forged video about all of Animal Well’s secrets and by god, it goes so deep. I very much recommend playing it (read last month’s newsletter for my more specific thoughts about it) and then after figuring out what your tolerance is for crypticness you can revisit the video.

Game Club

Here are the games my team talked about this month in our (usually but not always) weekly Game Club meeting.

The Case of the Golden Idol

Every now and then it’s fun to do a Game Club in which we just play a game together. I streamed to our Google Hangout and we just played the first few levels of The Case of the Golden Idol, and I’m pretty sure I convinced a bunch of folks to keep playing it after our hour with it.

Golden Idol is a point and click puzzle mystery game where every level is a dollhouse-like vignette of the moment of someone’s death. Frozen in time, you can click around and investigate: read notes in people’s pockets, look in trash cans for discarded ephemera, read signs on the wall. You switch between this exploratory mode and a “thinking” mode where you piece together the story of what happens using mad-libs style fill in the blanks. “____ was angry that he was left off of ___’s will so he travelled to ____ to ____ his ____”. The compelling bit is the meta-narrative in between each level: the game is about an aristocratic family that steals a precious artifact of a colonial culture, which curses them for generations. There might be years or even decades between each level but eventually you catch on to the recurring characters and what has been going on in the background.

One of the things I think is very cool is that the game actually does not ask you to keep track of this meta narrative. All it requires to beat is to figure out each individual death; the only time it ever asks you to put the pieces together is in an optional Epilogue segment. That to me makes it all the more thrilling when you realize, for example, who is behind certain inciting incidents, which characters are actually not who they are presented as, and the inverse: which separate characters only mentioned by name were actually the same person the whole time.

Cracking The Cryptic

This is why I’ve been thinking about Sudoku lately. A YouTube channel turned logic-puzzle-empire originally dedicated to solving Cryptic Crossword puzzles, two charming British gentlemen solve bespoke and editorial puzzles as well as walk you through advanced solving techniques. (Occasionally they also play more traditional Video Games, like The Witness or the excellent Chants of Sennaar).

I really think that the realm of editorially created Sudoku puzzles is a very cool world that most people might not be aware of, and it’s a new way of looking at logic puzzles that goes counter to their more classic reputation as something easily computer generated; infinitely variable, but very subject to the 10,000 Bowls of Oatmeal problem.

The one caveat being that the difficulty of these puzzles can be a stopping point for a lot of people. These are made by sudoku enthusiasts for sudoku enthusiasts, and that means very very few of them are accessible at an entry level. Maybe that’s a niche to fill that could be successful! I’d certainly play a lot of those if they existed.

On My Radar

Ok there are way too many Summer Games Fest demos that came out that I dowloaded but didn’t get a chance to put any time into, but here’s my top list:

Tactical Breach Wizards, from Tom Francis, an XCOM-style tactics game that is also in large part a narrative about titular wizards who employ both magical spells and riot gear in equal measure.

Lok Digital, one of my favorite paper puzzle games (I will write about this someday), “ported” to digital. An extremely creative central mechanic about crossing out letters to create a “spell” that allows you to cross out more letters until the board is full, it gets a ton of mileage out of essentially one rule. I highly recommend the paper version while you await the digital one.

Arranger applies a swiping puzzle mechanic to the entire universe of the game, apparently in a way that is diegetic? You swipe to rearrange both yourself and the environment, and it seems like though there are individual puzzles they lie on a singular, ultimately interconnected grid.

The Crush House asks: what would it be like to play a 00s reality dating show as a videogame? Seemingly equal parts funny raunchy and cryptic. A few years ago I met Nicole (the game director) at an event and she mentioned how inspired this game was by Terrace House which was an instant sell for me.

Star of Providence: Dunkey’s videogame publishing arm is 2 for 2 on publishing games that were already on my Steam wishlist. This one apparently has been out for a while already but is getting a big update soon. Very stylish shoot-em-up with some roguelike mechanics; seems like a winning combination.

Thank Goodness You’re Here! I Have heard very high praise about how funny this game is and you know I love funny games. Like the antics of Untitled Goose Game x the pastoral slice-of-life-ness of I Am Dead?

Wanderstop: A new game from Davey Wreden, who worked on The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide, it seems like a meta commentary on what “coziness” means in videogames, which I am very excited to hear, since Davey really excels at meta commentary.

Battle Vision Network: 1v1 puzzle battler game that seems like it has some interesting meta mechanics. From the creators of Grindstone, which I thought was pretty good. Not to be confused with Bravery Network Online.

Non-Games

Smiling Friends seems inescapable so you’ve probably at least seen its two main characters referenced somewhere without realizing it. I was late to the party but let me be the person to hopefully finally convince you. Sure it’s got your expected Adult Swim sensibilities but it brings a lot of uniqueness to the table that surprised me, including a great showcase of and appreciation for every single animation style under the sun: claymation, rotoscoping, low-poly 3D, that weird style of 3d art where people are shiny and rubbery at the same time. My favorite thing about it though is that it will often pull back from the silly and surreal and wring lots of humor out of very mundane and real conversations: watch the Brazil episode in its entirety for the best and most concentrated example of this.

Konban is a Japanese restaurant in Chelsea (17th and 8th) that has some of the best katsu I’ve ever had. We’ve been twice and tried all the types so I can say that confidently: the meat is tender and the panko is light and crisp, the rice has a body and an earthiness to it and the sauce is spiced and sweet. And then you’re going to want to eat their corn dessert which is sweet corn ice cream encased in a white chocolate shell molded to look like a cob. Why isn’t it easier to find sweet corn ice cream in the US? I kind of thought we were the corn continent.

It’s Brat summer and I feel more justified than ever to wear my Leo-ness on my sleeve. Charli and I were born two weeks apart and not only does that make the iconic album cover feel like a secret code between us August babies (it’s peridot…the August birthstone), it also means that when she sings existentially about being in your 30s, about your friends having kids, about being ever so slightly out of touch with the youth, about not being able to decide what kind of success you want, it resonates with me deeply like she’s holding a subwoofer up to my chest.

My second favorite album release of the month: Joey Valence and Brae’s No Hands. They sound like the Beastie Boys yeah, that’s their schtick, but also their beats break hard and the references…you know what I’m just going to list some of my favorite bars from this album in no particular order.

• You cannot compete, you’re tryna keep up / Your name’s not Olivia you don’t got the GUTS

• She said she wanna see a party trick / This ain’t a watch it’s an Omnitrix

• How much swag do I got, million / You ain’t fancy son, Squilliam

• Eat a booty like a Titan I attack that / Full metal in the bank gotta have that / Full metal on the wrist gotta add that

• Doctor’s confused why I gotta extra pulse / You ain’t even seen shit yet, just wait till i use my ult / feelin like I’m Mercy / I end every show with a curtsy

Tiktok shop can definitely be the bane of my existence but one of the better things I’ve found on there are Penny Pins; decorative bits of metal that slot into the penny slot of your penny loafers. I own four pairs of penny loafers, so these are very exciting to me.

I don’t have a glowing review of Hit Man but I do have a glowing review of Glen Powell, who I had only ever seen in Top Gun Maverick before this. The range on display here is impressive as well as a level of charisma that feels like it must be dangerous to be exposed to without safety precautions. I could have done with less self-indulgent philosophizing and I could have used some more dimensionality to Adria Arjona’s character (this was sold to me as a romcom but if you look at it through that lens you’ll find it underbaked) but overall I enjoyed myself well enough.

If you have the means to see Stereophonic you absolutely should; it’s a play about a 70s band that makes music that sounds like Fleetwood Mac and the drama around making their album that plays out like it did for Fleetwood Mac. It feels like a documentary (like the Get Back AppleTV+ series) but the actors are doing it in front of you and that includes playing their instruments, and sometimes because of the plot, playing their instruments wrong, which is hard to do! The set design feels like they plucked an actual recording studio out of time, chopped off the fourth wall and plopped it into the theater, the costumes are gorgeous, and all the actors are giving star turn performances.

The Leaderboard + Trivia

Last month I asked about some actresses and what they had in common: Megan Fox, Vanessa Kirby, Edie Falco, and Daisy Ridley. A special Super-Smash-Shoutout to Sam Ezersky, Mike Rugnetta, Angus Walker, and Benjamin Xie, who got the meta correct.

This month, the trivia comes in twos. Tell me—which roles did these pairs of actors both play?

1. Anne Hathaway and Halle Berry

2. Chris Pratt and Bill Murray

3. Matthew Broderick and Donald Glover

4. Idris Elba and George Sanders

And then this should be pretty obvious if you got all 4 but I think is also figure-out-able if you don’t: What do all 4 roles have in common?