#6: Are we human? Or are we Necrodancer?
February 2025: Nurikabe World, Daily Akari, Star of Providence, Rift of the Necrodancer, and more
I got a Steam Deck! It kind of has quadrupled my gaming time which is a good thing at least as far as having something to write in this newsletter. Besides that I continued playing a few of the games I wrote about in January, which I go into in the Small Thoughts section.
Big Thoughts
Japanese Logic Puzzles (Nurikabe World, Daily Akari)
I think the reason I’ve been on a logic puzzle game kick recently is because they’ve found themselves perfectly occupying the space in my day in which I used to scroll TikTok, which I guess is overall a much better exchange but also these puzzles are their own kind of sickness.
In case you didn’t know, there’s a whole world of logic puzzles that feature grids and lines and numbers that are informally lumped together as Japanese Logic Puzzles. They usually have a few simple rules and then require you to think through the implications of those rules across a puzzle. (Contrast these with the type of logic puzzles that you might have grown up with that feature a story, for example, a dinner party, and logical clues like “David is seated next to the person who ate fish” and “All the married couples ordered the same drink”). Many of them were invented in Japan, and have Japanese names, although sometimes it's more of an appropriated aesthetic than an honest history. The archetypical Japanese logic puzzle is Sudoku, but plenty of people know about Ken Ken, and if you play Queens or Tango on LinkedIn games, you’re in the club.
Japanese logic puzzles are, let's put it this way: for a specific type of nerd. You can tell because you can easily imagine Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory yelling “My Sudoku!” when Penny spills coffee on his newspaper or something. It's not going to earn you any gamer cred. But hey, that's the type of nerd I'm proud to be! If staring at numbers all day like I'm doing Macrodata Refinement is wrong then I don't want to be right.
Short tangent: as I was writing that last paragraph I went to google to double check to see if I was imagining this Big Bang Theory scene or not and I was unable to find any such reference to sudoku on the show, BUT Google’s AI search result 100% backs me up on this even though it’s absolutely false. Another win for AI!
Anyway I’ve been playing two Japanese logic puzzles recently, on different platforms and in different forms.
The first of these is Nurikabe World, a real deal Steam game that runs you a cool $10 and contains hundreds of Nurikabe puzzles. Japanese logic puzzles are all very abstract, but sometimes they have one metaphor that helps distinguish them from each other. In Nurikabe, you can think of some cells as a “river” separating “islands” of other cells. Nurikabe World makes this literal, and goes full zen mode with all its accoutrements. Quiet ambient nature sounds accompany your play. When you complete an island, cherry blossom trees slowly bloom. Leaves blow through the air and water gently gurgles as you stare at the rivers and the grass. When you complete a puzzle, a short jingle plays consisting of five descending notes, which the music theory nerd in me couldn't help but notice is a pentatonic scale ending on the tonic. Contrasted to other puzzle solution jingles (I could make an entire video about this) which typically ascend, or contain chords, Nurikabe World’s is more like a relaxing exhalation than a triumphant cheer.
On the other end of the spectrum is Daily Akari. Instead of a standalone game, Daily Akari is a website that publishes one puzzle a day. While in Nurikabe you’re shading cells to create a river, in Akari you're placing lightbulbs in cells to light up the entire grid. Daily Akari opts for a more spartan interface, with very flat colors and stark white lines. It’s not completely minimalistic though, with the board giving the slightest illusion of 3D perspective and juicy animations for every action. It feels like a game from within the universe of some cyberpunk world, with synthesized sound effects and a smiling emoticon face it uses for completed cells that would be very apt as a neon sign.
This newsletter is not the place to go into the detailed mechanics of each game, and honestly, most Japanese logic puzzles play very similarly when you zoom out far enough, so this is more of a general recommendation that both of these games are good for a certain kind of fix, the calming yet still brain stimulating flavor of challenge that works well right before you go to sleep or, often in my case, since these games don’t require activating the linguistic parts of my brain at all, while listening to a podcast or a gaming stream. Sometimes it’s nice to not have to witness character drama or dodge enemies or bullets, and instead just put some numbers in a grid.
Star of Providence
I feel like every Steam Deck owner has their one game that is THE Steam Deck game for them. Something not graphically intensive, playable in bite sized chunks, but addictive enough to consistently leave you wanting more. For many last year it was Balatro. For me, for these first few months of Steam Deck ownership, it’s Star of Providence.
In complete contrast to my logic puzzles, I also felt the need to play something twitch-y: something that relies more on your reflexes, something with quick thinking but not big thinking, rather than games in which you could, and often do, stare at the screen for ages thinking through every strategic option you could take until you identify the most optimized one. Enter Star of Providence, a game I actually mentioned in this newsletter as being on my radar last June.
Star of Providence is a shoot-em-up, or shmup; specifically it belongs to the sub-genre of shmups known as ‘bullet hell’ games. It’s also a roguelike in structure, as opposed to the arcade game structure most bullet hell games have. Its set of mechanics, especially how the environments are structured (2D-Zelda-like configurations of square rooms with North South East and West exits) makes it a very close relative to The Binding of Isaac, one of the foremost roguelikes of the 2010s.
I could heap some pretty standard videogame praise on this and say that the flying and dashing feel good, that the many guns feel good to shoot (a handful of main archetypes like fireball, laser, etc plus a bevy of keywords that drastically alter your weapon’s effects), that the boss designs are all very unique and are a meaningful step up in scale and difficulty. And all of that is really true. But there are literally hundreds of games like Star of Providence so what makes this one stand out? To me the answer is: tone.
Star of Providence is a game with a very deep well of content (it first came out in 2017, then called Monolith) and across the hundreds of enemies and items and upgrades and obstacles and secrets it makes lots of choices that together add up to something really unique and idiosyncratic. It’s humorous, but without feeling cartoonish or wacky, eccentric but not in an opaque way. It has quirks but it’s not quirky. Some examples, to illustrate.
Though your player avatar is a spaceship, your enemies are not space aliens or other spaceships: instead you fight wizards with ice and fire powers, bloody blobs of flesh like something out of an 80’s horror film, sentient mystical artifacts, ghosts with hats, and fish. One of the best weapons in the game is a big sword that makes you feel like a gundam. You can make cursed deals with demons or receive blessings from statues that offer you mysterious orbs. You can enter a room and suddenly a medieval knight is shooting lasers at you. Or a Wild West outlaw is challenging you to his virtual reality gauntlet. Or you might find an arcade machine and have to play a little mini-game. It does not sound like all of these things can fit together in one game, but somehow they do. And none of these things are, on their own, wholly original. But taken together, they make this game feel one of a kind. Games like these, ones that make you repeat runs over and over, live and die on how varied they can make your experience in each run. And Star of Providence surprised me at every turn. Every time I thought I understood what kind of game it was, it dashed out of the way.
Rift of the Necrodancer
I was raised on rhythm games. I owned a DDR mat and every Rock Band instrument, and I played hundreds of hours of drums in Rock Band to the point where I could kind of play drums in real life. Now in 2025, I am always kind of itching for a good rhythm game. I’ve written a little bit about Harmonix’s Fuser, which is actually more of a music game than a rhythm game, and last month I gave a shoutout to Rhythm Doctor, which is one of my all time favorites because of how inventive it is. This month, I played the newly released Rift of the Necrodancer, and decided it absolutely belongs in my personal rhythm game pantheon. But before we get into the Rift, we have to talk about the Crypt.
Crypt of the Necrodancer was a groundbreaking roguelike game released in 2015 that mashed up the traditional grid based dungeon crawling with rhythmic action: you had to move and dodge and attack on the beat to maintain your combo and do the most damage. For many years, Crypt of the Necrodancer sat on my to-play list gathering metaphorical dust. When I finally checked it out in 2021, its game design was six years old at that point and you could feel it. Many other games had come out since then and developed the roguelike formula and polished it down. Even though I could tell it was a fascinating game, I bounced off of it hard. “Rift” of the Necrodancer, the game’s follow-up (not counting the Zelda spinoff of the series called Cadence of Hyrule, released in 2019) is not actually a sequel. Instead, it casts aside all the roguelike combat and dungeon exploration completely, living squarely in the rhythm genre. It's just the familiar select-a-song, lane-based, just-press-the-right-button-at-the-right-time gameplay. But not without its twists.
In 99% of rhythm games, when you see a note coming down the lane, that is what you eventually will have to press. Those games get hard by increasing the speed at which those notes come at you as well as how many of them they are. Rift of the Necrodancer completely turns this around and imagines: what if the notes...were sentient? Every note on the lane in Necrodancer is a monster, and every monster has behavior that you have to memorize in order to decode what your actual eventual button press will be. Some monsters have to be hit twice, meaning one note is actually two. Some monsters will move around on the lane, so you have to figure out where they’ll end up. Some will do both and take two hits but also move in between. That alone makes even the simplest possible song already a bit of a puzzle. And it only gets more complicated from there: lest you think that Rift of the Necrodancer doesn’t also have charts that move at a blistering place and are crammed full of notes, go watch some YouTube videos of some of the Impossible difficulty levels.
My description of it sounds brutal, almost masochistic. But it actually does a good job at easing you in! The easier difficulties are fairly sparse, and there are mechanics for healing your health so you don’t fail as well as an equivalent to “Star Power” mode that makes you briefly invincible if you feel like you need it for one section. But once you feel comfortable enough with each monster, and you learn each track a little bit, (since all the monsters behave predictably and deterministically, memorization is always a tool you have) you can turn up the difficulty, and that’s when the real game starts. Rift of the Necrodancer is one of the hardest rhythm games I’ve ever played, but that’s also so much of the fun of it. For anyone who’s played a ton of rhythm games, the combination of both your dexterity and your visual processing firing on all cylinders is pretty thrilling. It’s like doing 120 puzzles a minute.
You don’t have to do this at all, but I have been playing this game on a fighting pad. Fighting pads are controllers specially made for fighting games that mimic the kinds of buttons you would have at an arcade, though some modern ones opt to use switches used for mechanical keyboards so while it’s not quite identical to an arcade button, it’s still a Premium Button Pressing Experience. Rhythm games are so fun to play on these because the slight clickiness and the much increased tactility really lend themselves to the experience, especially when you’re shredding at top speed. At the end of the day, many good rhythm games make you feel like you’re achieving mastery over an instrument, which is why lots of people play OSU with drawing tablets.
I would definitely give Rift of the Necrodancer a shot if you like rhythm games and especially if you think you're pretty good at them. The harder difficulties are definitely for a certain type of sicko (me) but the easier difficulties are still a great mix of rhythm and puzzle. I have been humbled by this game many times over, and I still keep coming back for more because it's just really fun. And I hope they release a ton of DLC for it.
Game Club
This is the part of the newsletter where I talk about a book club but for games I host at work. I was on vacation (and a bit sick) for a lot of February so we only met once. Well, we also met to discuss Severance Season 2, but I will write about that next month.
Lateral
Lateral is a podcast hosted by Tom Scott where guests attempt to answer lateral thinking questions—which are kind of like riddles but they usually are derived from real world situations. Recently they released a book of questions so I took everyone through a handful to see if they could figure them out. As an example, here's a video I sent everyone to demonstrate what the experience is like. This was really fun! It’s also kind of fun as a moderator to figure out how to guide the conversation in the right direction without giving too much away, but also not letting the players flounder for too long lest they get frustrated. It's a crucial role and the game can't really work without one. I 100% recommend listening to the podcast and if you like it pick up the book as well!
Small Thoughts
Void Stranger
After finishing Animal Well I was on the lookout for other games that one could describe as "inscrutable and filled with secrets" and Void Stranger came up many times. It’s ostensibly a straightforward sokoban (block pushing) game, where you have the ability to alter the map a bit by picking up and placing floor tiles. But mysterious things keep happening and occasionally I have found myself in what seemed to be a different game entirely. I haven’t gotten very far in it but I am excited about getting further and peeling back more layers of the onion.
Warptank
My new favorite UFO50 game. You play as a tank that can roll along the ground and shoot but in order to navigate the labyrinthian levels, your only other movement option is to teleport directly across from where you are, often onto the ceiling. It’s a fascinating game that fully explores its weird mechanics, and feels like a cool mix of a puzzle game and something more like Metroid (it’s not a full fledged Metroidvania but it feels like it got to intern as one at some point).
Roottreemania
At the end of The Roottrees Are Dead, the detective genealogy game I really loved in last month's newsletter, a message appears saying: “There’s another mystery to solve! Roottreemania is now unlocked as a New Game”. On my initial reading of that message I imagined some sort of New Game Plus mode, where you started over but there were a handful of more secrets to find, or a DLC-sized expansion that maybe added a new small branch to the family tree. Much to my excitement, I was dead wrong. Roottreemania is basically an entirely new game, a sequel even, just available to you immediately at the end of the first game. It actually took me longer to complete than the first part, 6.3 hours vs 5.4, according to Steam. It’s an amazing addition to the story that fleshes out some key characters and I was super grateful to get it just as I thought my time with the game was over. If you still haven’t checked out The Roottrees Are Dead, you really should.
100%ing Lok Digital
At the end of Lok Digital, a level appears that you solve which teaches you a new keyword. Once you know that keyword, an entire new world opens up to you (actually, 5 worlds). I love when games unlock content in this way - by giving you knowledge that recontextualizes your entire experience up to that point. This secret was so compelling, and the subsequently unlocked bonus worlds you get from completing the main story worlds were so inventive that I actually played until I completed 100% of the game, which I have not done maybe...ever? I am very much a “just reach credits” person so consider this basically the highest praise I can give a game. What do you get for reaching 100%? Why, a very sweet message from the development team (pictured above) of course.
Is Game Changer a British Panel Show?
I’ve been consuming a ton of both Dropout and Taskmaster recently so naturally my Youtube algorithm caught on and recommended me this video by James Woodall about the differences between American game shows and British panel shows, and whether or not Dropout’s Game Changer (and some of their other shows) fits into that mold. It’s a wonderful exploration that goes into tons of examples of shows both new and old, on both sides of the pond, and gets a little into what makes these shows tick both from an entertainment perspective but also a little bit from a game design perspective.
On My Radar
My former teacher Robert Yang announced he’s making a “Rugby RPG” game called Tryhard, which I am intrigued by on its own but also give their “manifesto” a read, about imagining a new type of sports game (neither FIFA nor e-Sports) and what the unexplored possibilities of those games might be.
The folks at Inkle, of 80 Days fame, released a new game called Expelled, about a student at a boarding school falsely accused of pushing a Prefect out of a window. Inkle’s games are always paragons of actually interesting narrative choices in games, and this one seems no different.
Draknek & Friends have developed some of my favorite puzzle games (as well as publishing them, like the aforementioned LOK Digital), and their latest game The Electrifying Incident is the third in a series of games (after A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build and A Monster’s Expedition), which are completely different in mechanically but star the same enigmatic monster.
The Bazaar is an auto-battler game that is kind of like if Hearthstone and Super Auto Pets had a baby, and all of the streamers I watch are obsessed with it. It was apparently created by a former Hearthstone pro player. I don’t think I like auto-battlers that much but this one seems to have a lot of crunchy interesting game bits to it.
Non-Games
Piece By Piece
I was seeing posters for this movie everywhere thinking “oh they made another Lego movie” but nobody prepared me for the fact that this is not just a Lego movie, it’s a Lego biography of Pharrell??? After the shock of that settled I did see the vision. Anyway I watched this on a plane and it’s a great plane movie.
Demi Adejuyigbe Will Do One Backflip
You might know Demi Adejuyigbe from his September videos or from his credits raps or for being a writer on The Good Place, but he also has an absolutely killer one man show. I don’t typically like writing about stuff you likely can’t experience, and this is a live show that as far as I know Demi will not perform again anytime soon. But I could not travel to see him do it in LA or Edinburgh, so when he was doing it for one night only in NYC (it ended up being two nights) I jumped at the chance. And I will tell you to jump at the chance too if you ever get to, because not only is Demi one of the funniest people on the planet, he’s a master at subverting audience expectations, and this show is that for 90 minutes. Well except for the big and obvious fact that he does indeed do One Backflip.
QC Spa
This is just a PSA that you should go to QC Spa on Governor’s Island when it’s cold and get in the heated pool and lie back, feel the jets on your body, and look out at the Manhattan skyline before you. The sunset is beautiful but it gets crowded at that time so just go earlier, it’s plenty serene.
The Leaderboard + Trivia
Last week I asked if you could identify 4 characters and also what they had in common. Shout-out to everyone who got it right: please take a bow. 🎀 That’s:
Garrett A, Amanda N, Lucia, April S, Natalie E, Skyler B, Gavin H, Diego G, Frances D, Tiffany S, Spencer B, Elisabeth C, Jun C, Bren P, Eva, Patricia, Avi B, Cindy Z, Tiffany P, Vernicia C, Mallory B, Kelsey N, Louise M, Joel C, Armand S, and Tati M! You’re all rock stars.
This month, let’s play Complete The Lyrics!
Third Eye Blind: “I wish you would step back from that ___ my friend”
Semisonic: “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s ___ "
Prince: “This is what it sounds like when ___ cry”
Nat King Cole: “___, is for the way you look at me”
Billie Eilish: “I’m the bad guy...___.”
Can you answer the meta question: What do you get when you put these words together?