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Episode 10: Our Favourite Games of 2024 (with Joseph Mansfield)
321 Plays2 months ago
In this very special episode, hosts Alan and Syrenne are joined by co-hosts Mairi Nolan and Joseph Mansfield to discuss some of their favorite thinky games of 2024. This episode is pretty spoiler-free, so kick back, enjoy, and learn about why we love some of the games that came out last year.
Games discussed: No Case Shall Remain Unsolved, Is this Game Trying to Kill Me?, Duck Detective: The Secret Salami, Isles of Sea and Sky, Blue Prince (Demo), Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Star Stuff, Leap Year, Tactical Breach Wizards, Botany Manor, Rise of the Golden Idol, Leaf's Odyssey, LOK Digital, BOND, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Ouros, and Croquet Conundrum.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome to the Draknek & Friends official podcast, where we peel back the curtain on puzzle games and the people who make them. I'm Seren, the producer at Draknek & Friends, and I'm joined as always by Alan Hazilden, the head Draknek in Draknek & Friends. Hello. And today I'm joined also by Mari, the studio manager at Draknek & Friends.
00:00:43
Speaker
Hello. And also today we're joined by Joe Mansfield, who you may know from Joe Plays Puzzle Games and Thinkigames.com. Hello.
Joe Mansfield’s Work and Channel
00:00:54
Speaker
Before we get started, Joe, do you want to tell listeners a little bit more about yourself?
00:00:59
Speaker
Sure, thank you for having me. So yeah, I'm Joseph Mansfield, or Joe for short, and I run the Thinkigames website, thinkigames.com, with a wonderful team. ah We do everything we can to help people discover games they'll love to solve, which means we do things like news, reviews, the newsletter, videos, streams, all sorts of things, um just to share great, like, puzzle-y problems of news with people.
00:01:23
Speaker
um And yeah, as you mentioned separately, I also run a YouTube channel called Joe Plays Puzzle Games, um where I post like full playthroughs of puzzle games for people to watch if you like that kind of thing. Including if you like watching 40 minutes on one puzzle and lock digital. Yeah, exactly. so Yeah, my my videos are for a very special kind of person that likes to watch every single moment of confusion, frustration, whatever. It's delightful. game It's truly delightful. I'm a happy viewer myself.
00:01:50
Speaker
Awesome.
Favorite Puzzle Games of 2024
00:01:51
Speaker
So today, ah the four of us are here to talk about our favorite thinky puzzle games from 2024. We have each prior to this compiled a list of some of our favorite games, and we're each going to kind of take turns asking each other about them starting discussion. And we'll see how this goes. There's some overlap on some games. There's some games that have no overlap.
'No Case Shall Remain Unsolved' Discussion
00:02:15
Speaker
And I'm very excited to kick this off by asking Alan to talk to me about No Case Shall Remain Unsolved. Yeah. So this is a detective game where they I think kind of flew under the radar. Like I heard people talking about it as a under the radar game that was well worth playing. And it was one of the ones I squeezed in in the of the holiday period. So it's pretty fresh.
00:02:42
Speaker
you get these transcripts of people talking to each other, and it has some fun framing at the start of the game, and setting up why it's the way it is, but it's basically you get these segments of conversation, but you don't know who said what, and you don't know the order they happened in, and you're trying to rearrange them to figure out the timeline where the conversations make sense, and you're also, while you're ordering them, you're getting sentences like, oh, well, this person must be talking about that,
00:03:10
Speaker
And yeah, I think structurally it's really interesting to me. It's like, Cases of the Golden Idol is like very, like it really hits. And it was like this example of like, oh, you can take the same ah kind of ideas in something like ah Return of the Obra Dinn, but change the core UI of the game to convey the same kind of puzzle solving with a different user experience, it feels very differently. And I saw it when I played Case of Golden Idol. Wow, this is really interesting for how much it evolves that genre. Like, sure, it has a different story, but the thing I was interested in as a game designer is how the user experience of that game changed the way that the game itself felt. And I think this game, No Case Shall Remain Unsolved, is another really interesting example of
00:04:01
Speaker
different UI giving you a different game. Like you can feel it's in the same space. I think the the story it tells is like, no, it's a decent story. I think some people will fall in love with this game more than I did. I respect it more than it's something that I want to like shout to the world. Well, this is my favorite game of the year. Yeah, I think it's really, really interesting. And like a lot of people are really going to like it. So yeah, definitely worth checking out.
'Is This Game Trying to Kill Me?' Analysis
00:04:28
Speaker
the ah The editor on ah Finky Games, Rachel Watts, is a big fan of this game as well, and we include it in our top games of the year as well. ah like So you're restructuring these like conversations, right? You're rearranging them. oh they I always got the impression they were kind of like, is it like people texting each other or sending messages to each other? Or is it a transcript of ah like a spoken conversation?
00:04:48
Speaker
No, it's transcripts of spoken conversations. okay It's a detective and they are talking to various people in the world about a missing child's case. right and yeah I guess that there's a few trigger warnings. like it It's not as dark as it might seem initially. like There's some hard topics, but like it's not it's not a serial killer story. Sure.
00:05:11
Speaker
Awesome. Yeah. Now I'm very interested in this because this is a game that I bought based on some strong recommendations a few months ago and then have not actually gotten around to playing. Yeah. And I played it in like less than three hours. So I was going to say it's pretty short, right? Like it was very bingeable. It was like, oh, I'm i'm starting playing this. Oh, I'm still playing this. Oh, I'm done. Like, great.
00:05:36
Speaker
ah this despite This might be this this evening game for me. that By the time this goes out to listeners, I'll probably have already finished this game. You'll have to add an amendment to your voice recording. Cut in now to say what you think about the game. No, I'll definitely splice it in like right here. No. But no, i'm that that's very interesting and exciting. Also, bluntly, a lot of the games we're going to be talking about today are like slightly longer games. That's actually very exciting to me that there's a really digestible bite-sized game on this list. Yeah, so up next, I'm going to pick another game that I saw on these lists that I don't know much about, but I saw it when it came out. I'm like, oh, that's got an interesting vibe. Mari, can you tell me about, is this game trying to kill me?
00:06:22
Speaker
That is a very good question. Actually, I think you might have originally told me about this game, Alan. I think we were like discussing it for Thinky Third Thursday, and I went away and played it. I don't know if I had too many high expectations, but I really, really enjoyed it. um So the premise of, is this game trying to kill me? um It's quite an interesting one. you are trapped inside a cabin in the woods and there's kind of I don't know he's like a wizard or a vampire or something and he's he's keeping you in this weird cabin but you have in the center of your cabin an old PC terminal
00:06:55
Speaker
And kind of what happens is you jump onto the PC terminal, you play a kind of like top-down dungeon crawler. But as you're playing this game, things around you change in the cabin. So you press a button on the on the PC and in the game, and then something changes in the cabin. So you sort of get up from your desk, and then it turns into a first-person ah escape roomy game. And then you sort of move things around on the shelf in the escape room side of it. And again, something's changed on the PC.
00:07:20
Speaker
um I've heard it's very inspired by inscription, both in terms of gameplay and the vibes, but I actually haven't played inscription, so I can't compare the two. And and maybe, maybe inscription is better, but as my first sort of introduction to a game like this.
00:07:35
Speaker
I absolutely loved it. I mean, it's no surprise to anyone in this podcast, I'm a big fan of escape rooms, and it's very escape roomy. There are like a lot of ciphers, there's a lot of sort of picking things up, moving them around, finding the pattern, logic puzzles, keys, that kind of thing. um But it's just different. It's ah is it a little bit of a twist on the genre in that like, yeah, you've got this like, computer to work with, and and it all opens up very quickly as well. And sort of with the top down dungeon crawler, there's also boss battles, which aren't that puzzle-y, but they they break up the flow of the game really nicely. And actually, interesting, it's a very short game, so I wanted to like throw that into the ring. i think i When I added this to my list, I hadn't finished it, and I made sure I finished it before we jumped into this because I knew I wanted to talk about it. I did finish it. I think it comes in about three hours, and I'm saying that with a big caveat in that like I spent a lot of time fluffing around, but I'm pretty sure it's about sort of two to three hours, and there are multiple endings as well. so
00:08:34
Speaker
um It's a nice quick one if anyone wants to get into it. Again, I don't know if it's my game of the year, but it's really interesting and it's stuck in my mind a lot throughout this year. I played about an hour of it, I think, on the thinkigames stream, and was really enjoying it. I was very impressed by it. I think it's, yeah, I've also not really played Inscription, um but like, I think the kind of game within a game thing is like the comparison that people are making, right? In fact, it's kind of like a game with escape room stuff around it. um Yeah, it's very cool. I liked it.
00:09:05
Speaker
Yeah, that sounds, hearing the, as someone who did play and loved an inscription, hearing the inscription sort of call out is very, very interesting and fascinating to me. So I'm, I'm interested to see this. I'm also, I'm just loving how many short games we've got. Let's just keep it on. Let's just not talk about any long games on this podcast.
00:09:27
Speaker
One other thing I would mention about this game real quick, just for everyone's benefit, it is a horror game though. And when I first played it, it was quite dark and it did absolutely terrify me I scare so easily and there's a lot of like jump scares. Like you just imagine you're looking at a little computer screen within a game and something moves out of the corner of your eye and then you sort of step away from it and there's a jump scare. It's that level of horror vibes, which very fun. There reminds me of a detail on it, which is that like, I think all the ways you can die in the 2D game within the game ah they cause you to die in the cabin, right? And I think there's like a separate animation set up for every single way you can die in the game within a game. And and in the game outside of it, it's like very detailed. It's cool. Yeah, there are a lot of ways to die if the title wasn't a giveaway. It's trying to kill me. um The answer being yes.
00:10:18
Speaker
So yeah, if you like step on like spikes, then I think spikes come out the floor in the cabin that you're in. Or if you like walk in front of ah an arrow that shoots out the side, an arrow shoots out the side and hit you in the cabin that you're in. So yeah, it's very nice. All right, moving on.
'Duck Detective' Game Insights
00:10:32
Speaker
I'm looking at the list. um No surprise because I also love this game this year, but I would like to ask Seren about Duck Detective, please. Yes. OK, I love Duck Detective. ah Great choice in continuing to pick the short games. This game is about two hours long.
00:10:48
Speaker
ah This game is such a delight. So for people who didn't see Duck Detective, the full name is this Duck Detective colon The Secret Salami is a Golden Idol-like. It feels like 2024.
00:11:08
Speaker
was the first year where we got multiple real Golden Idol likes based on the sort of UX flow that Case of the Golden Idol managed to set up about basically having a journal or having a text entry field where you're trying to set up the mystery where it's like blank is being blank by blank in blank blank.
00:11:33
Speaker
basically a very, very much more complicated version of like Clue or Cluedo. And so you are going around and you are getting information and you are figuring things out and you are piecing together what has happened. The key caveat or the key difference with Duck Detective is that it is cute as hell.
00:11:53
Speaker
ah Doug Detective is by the developer Happy Broccoli Games, which also made Kraken Academy a few years ago. So this is very colorful, a lot of unique and funny characters. The lead detective's name is Eugene McQuacklin.
00:12:16
Speaker
This game is just generally very funny. It's not a really dark game. It is transposing a lot of the best parts of Golden Idol onto something, first of all, much more family friendly, much more all ages friendly, but then doing so in a very digestible manner of being a a cheaper game that is shorter, a game that let's say doesn't rely on orientalist depictions of indigenous peoples in the same way that the golden idol games do um especially the first one a just being able like every every in case it's not obvious from duck detective all of the characters are anthropomorphized animals usually in a like
00:13:06
Speaker
full human clothes attire, like a jumpsuit or overalls or a trench coat and a hat, light which is what Eugene McQuacklin wears. The writing is very, very funny. The vibes are immaculate. I thought that the sort of central mysteries and like how you are piecing together everything together and how it all comes together in the end without spoiling things, I thought it was actually pretty satisfying.
00:13:34
Speaker
So I came away from Duck Detective very impressed. I had been half paying attention to it like significantly before launch. I started paying attention to it a lot more because it was launching into cerebral puzzle showcase 2024. So in that sense, it was much more on my radar. And then once we got ah code for it. I kind of just played through the entire thing in like one sitting. I really, really enjoyed Duck Detective. Mari, I know this is also on your list. They've got a sequel coming out, right? Yes, Duck Detective 2 is coming out very soon. Is this the title for that? Do you remember? ah Yes, The Ghost of Glamping. Cool. um
00:14:25
Speaker
Yes, that was announced, I believe, at the end of year Nintendo Indie World. Really excited about that. Which, honestly, shout out shoutouts to this game for like getting first party console attention. ah Sorry, Mara, you i was ah this is also on your list.
00:14:44
Speaker
Yeah, no, I mean, honestly, I think you covered everything I absolutely love about this game. But this game has such a funny little story to me in that, as you mentioned, it launched into the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase. And one of our very first streamers at the Cerebral Puzzle Showcase was streaming it. And I was kind of doing that thing where I was like, I have to monitor the stream, but I can't watch. And I was looking at my fingers on my eyes, like, oh I don't want it to be spoiled kind of thing.
00:15:05
Speaker
And then two days later, I immediately played it myself. Loved it. I knew a bit of the story already from watching someone else stream it, but it's just so fun. Like, oh, it's unbelievably lighthearted, sweet. It's like full of puns as well. It's ah it's very punny. Very punny. I didn't know there were so many like duck related puns out there. um But yeah, no, it's just, it's such a delight. I would play it again. By now, I think I've forgotten all the answers. I think I could play it again now.
00:15:33
Speaker
Isn't there like a screen in there which is just called like deductions? Yes. Absolutely. that's That's the level of silly base level puns we're working on. Yeah. And it's it's funny that like if Case of the Golden Idol hadn't had their... I forget what they call it. is it the the It's not the deduction screen. is It's a thinking screen. Yes. If that hadn't had the thinking screen, would they have had the deduction screen? ah like I don't know. you know um yeah I'm just very, very, very pleased with this game. I'm also pleased with the... like This game is not in a vacuum of being inspired by Case of the Golden Idol. Also, this game is not embarrassed about being inspired by Case of the Golden Idol. I'm just very excited because I think that those mechanics are so ripe and like they figured out so many clever UI-UX hurdles.
00:16:31
Speaker
Yeah, I totally agree with this kind of game. And so to see other creators being able to take that as a starting point and work off of that and build like their own games around that, their own stories, their own structures, I'm actually just very excited. this is one like That is one thing that when I first played Case the Golden Idol, I was like, please, please, please let this be an inspiration to a generation of designers.
00:16:56
Speaker
There's like every now and then you can see a game where you're like, this should be an inspiration. And then it sometimes feels like it is or it isn't. And usually if it isn't, it's just because it's actually really hard to build off of. But in this case, I'm just very glad to see games being able to go from there.
Review of 'Isles of Sea and Sky'
00:17:13
Speaker
ah Joe. Hello. I have been waiting for about two years to hear you talk to me about Isles of Sea and Sky.
00:17:24
Speaker
Probably was that long ago, right? When we last talked about it, yeah. Two years. So please, Joe, talk to me about Isles of Sea and Sky. Sure, um so Isles of Sea and Sky by Cicada Games um is a kind of puzzle, soccer band, adventure, metroidvania thing. It has an art style that's very reminiscent of like classic Zelda and so i've I've been very interested in it for a long time because I saw the art style and I was just like this looks so much like
00:17:57
Speaker
Like Link's Awakening is my favorite Zelda game ever, the original. um And absolutely loved it. And this made me think of that. And so I absolutely wanted to play this. And it was also, as I see it, Sky was also our most anticipated game winner in the Thinky Awards last year. So I wasn't the only one excited to play it. So yeah, you're yeah you're a character who washes up on a beach of a kind of tropical island. And you just sort of go exploring the island and ah solving puzzles that you encounter along the way.
00:18:26
Speaker
and I kind of described it as circular because a lot of the puzzles are you know around like block pushing type things they're not all like that but it is a very prominent part of the puzzle solving it's also very dense with puzzles so these islands like you're going from screen to screen and like every screen has maybe like five puzzles on it like interwoven with each other I was gonna say at least like three it feels like have been above yeah probably and so like there might be one that you have to come to from a different direction or they might just literally be overlapping each other though you solve one puzzle
00:18:59
Speaker
and then you might want to come back to the room later with a because you because one part of this is that it is a kind of traditional metravania in that you get ability upgrades later on and there's these kind of like elemental spirit creature things that you can interact with that have their own abilities and you unlock those as you go.
00:19:17
Speaker
And so you might go through a room one time and there's no like elemental creatures in there. And then you come back later after you've unlocked them and there's suddenly these things in that room and you have to interact with them to solve different puzzles. And so you're sort of going around and solving these puzzles, collecting keys, collecting gems, and there's like these various islands that you go to. You you jump on the back of a ah turtle to like sail between these islands, which is really fun. ah And yeah, you you're just going between these islands trying to collect as much as you can, collect as many gems as you can.
00:19:48
Speaker
um One of the interesting aspects of it that is probably also the reason it gets like the most criticism um is that because of the fact you're unlocking abilities throughout the game you sometimes go through a room in the game and not know whether you can actually solve the puzzle or not because you're kind of looking at it going maybe this is possible maybe it's not possible and you know it's kind of a ah basic premise of a puzzle is that it should kind of seem impossible at first. And so determining whether a puzzle is like impossible just because it's it's difficult or impossible because you don't have the abilities is kind of part of the puzzle you've got to solve. um I actually didn't have any problems with that, although I've seen people say that that's like that kind of bothered them when they were playing the game. So if you don't like that kind of stuff, then you might not enjoy it. But
00:20:34
Speaker
if you like let yourself just kind of freely roam elsewhere and go solve some other puzzles and because if you if you look at a puzzle and you go i'm not sure if this is possible but i think it might not be you might come across an ability later that lets you solve it and then you'll be like oh i'm glad i went away from it instead of just bashing my head against the same puzzle You know flowers address that in a patch i have a feeling i saw them talking about like adding some kind of you i think and it feels like felt like it might be a kind of subtle you i think that you might not necessarily pick up on i'm sure so i was looking at that so like so i played the original version and i was looking at what they had updated since then.
00:21:11
Speaker
And there was a patch in September. um I'm not sure if it fixes that problem specifically. They do fix all sorts of things, though. And there were some ah there were a bunch of other issues with the game. At the beginning, like there were some puzzles that were kind of left in as teasers, but you couldn't actually solve them. And it was like hard to no know that you couldn't solve them. And like things like that have been cleared up. And like yeah if you look at the the patch notes of the September update, a load of great things have been fixed there. um I don't know if fully made it so that you always know whether you've got the right things like maybe that is something and i just haven't noticed it but it kind of feels like that is a sort of essential part of the gameplay because of its structure but yeah i've also heard that they're trying to do things that will improve that experience and maybe there's more updates coming i'm not entirely sure but yeah i was looking at the september notes and it looks like they've done a bunch of great stuff and in that update awesome yes no i
00:22:05
Speaker
full Full disclosure for everyone, the reason that I've been waiting for years is because ah I was working on this game in 2023 alongside the director, Jason, and Joe, who was my coworker at the time, kept any time that topic of this would come on, he would basically just rip his headphones off. with this leave Leave the call. yeah you just feel like I do not want to hear about this game. I want to go in pure, fresh eyes. I want the perfect pure experience. Do not tell me anything about this game in advance.
00:22:46
Speaker
so It's the kind of game that you, like, it's it's kind of about exploration and discovering things and learning how the rules work just by, like, like these, like, elemental creatures you encounter. like If you know that they're the turtle, then your expense would be ruined. Oh, no, I've spoiled it for everyone. Yes. So this is this is ah just particularly delightful for me to get the opportunity to finally, after all this time,
00:23:14
Speaker
here that yes, Joe did in fact like Isles of Sea and Sky after all this time. Indeed. It's a very cool game and just worth saying like there's a bunch of very strong puzzles in there. Oh yeah. There's also I think i think they've they've done a bunch of puzzle updates because there was like an ability in the game that kind of broke a lot of the puzzles which in some ways is like firm it's like oh you get this amazing ability and suddenly you don't have to do all these puzzles but i don't think it was intended and so i think they've updated some of the puzzles to make sure that they they still work after you've got that ability but yeah really well designed
00:23:47
Speaker
Yes, I mean, you can hear Jason's episode already on the podcast feed talking about a lot of the design iteration and like play test feedback. But ah just to reiterate one of his points there, which is that when you have a game this big and also this difficult, it's really hard to get comprehensive play test feedback.
00:24:11
Speaker
Oh yeah, sure. Especially when all the good playtesters refuse to play your game. Yeah, especially when the show is like, no, not until it's done. Thank you. I do have that problem in general. It's like, I want to i want to play games when they're out and like put it on the YouTube channel and stuff. And it's like, but I actually also would be helpful as a playtester. Yes, you sure would, because you would have been able to get to the end.
00:24:36
Speaker
Uh, which a genuinely shocking amount of play testers had not not enough time to do. indeed How many hours was the game completely to complete? Oh, that's a good question. I'm not entirely sure. Uh, let me go to our favorite. How long to beat dot.com. Uh, they say 13 to mainline at 26 to completionist. Okay. That feels right.
00:25:04
Speaker
All right, shall I throw to the next person? Yes, please. All right, let's go back to Mari, if that's all right.
Blueprints Demo Praise
00:25:12
Speaker
Let's talk about... Well, so you've got a demo on there. Shall we go to the Blueprints demo? Shall we do that? ah Sure. Oh, gosh, I have so much to say about the Blueprints demo. What, you mean Mari's Game of the Year 2025?
00:25:29
Speaker
Honestly, this demo alone is my game of the year of 2024. And um even if the full game is just the demo again with like two hours extra, it's going to be my game of the year 2025. I just love it. But yeah, I mean, hard to talk about the game in full because it is just a short demo. But the premise of the game that I understand it, ah you're physically building out this sort of 3D first person escape room-ish space.
00:25:55
Speaker
by laying out blueprint tiles on a map. So you start in this room, you can go up to a door and when you open a door, it kind of pops you out of the UI and it's like draw a tile from three options. So it might be like, oh, I want to go through a corridor, I want to go into the kitchen or I want to go into a bedroom. And every different type of room does a different thing and has different benefits inside it. And when you draw that card, that room is there.
00:26:19
Speaker
The whole premise of, I guess, the whole game, but especially the demo, is you want to get to the end of the house, so to the elusive room 46, if I remember correctly. um But it's quite hard because as you kind of get further and further into this house, it sort of really ramps up in complexity quite quickly.
00:26:36
Speaker
There are things like security doors, there are like special locked areas. There's like various items you need to collect along the way and items may or may not appear in certain rooms. And most importantly, every time you move, it costs you energy as well. So you could get pretty exhausted early on and fail too early.
00:26:55
Speaker
Uh, maybe doesn't sound that puzzley, but it very, very puzzley, very replayable for a very short demo. So the demo, when he goes over sort of three days in game time and you get to the end and whether or not you even find room 46 or no matter how far you get into the the demo, it kind of gets to the end of day three. And it's like, oh, thanks for playing the demo. At which point I immediately start again. I'm like, erase all my progress. Let's go again.
00:27:18
Speaker
And yeah, I think, again, I think it was you, Alan, that mentioned this game to me first. and We were looking at it for Thank You, Third Thursday. I think I played like the 30-minute demo, and I really enjoyed it. And then I played it again. And then I finished up work with Director and Friends for the day. And then I played it again. And then I blinked, and it was midnight. And then I went on Reddit. And I was like, I need to look up the secrets. I just kept playing this game for days. I just loved it. And And yeah, even now I still jump back in to like play it again. And I keep making a joke that like, I can't open blue sky, because every time I type like BL, it pops up like blueprints release dates, question mark. like Google to like search as well. Um, but yeah, I think I think probably my explanation here doesn't make it sound like
00:28:03
Speaker
Like, I don't know, it's so much puzzlier than I can possibly explain, but above everything, it's just so charming. Like, again, even if they just released the demo, it's still my game of the year for 2025. I absolutely love it. um Yeah, did anyone else play it out of interest? i I did not, but clearly they should have just released this as the full game with it doing well by itself. I know, absolutely. I wonder how much the full game's gonna add. I mean, probably a lot.
00:28:30
Speaker
I really don't know. um i guess i guess like I guess I could just keep repeating the days for a longer time and kind of the law could go quite deep. If I remember correctly, did Rachel play it at Thinkigames as well? I seem to remember she really enjoyed it. I think so, yeah. We've definitely had some coverage of it on the site, so there's a few articles about it. And yeah, I think I've seen a lot of people excited for it, but I did not play the demo, so I i i don't know what it's like. It's very reminiscent though of the board game Betrayal at House on the Hill. Yeah, and so I did play the demo, not nearly as much as Mari. um And when when I saw the trailer, I got very strong Betrayal at House on the Hill vibes.
00:29:09
Speaker
Playing the game, that's not actually okay like part of it. justin let' see You're moving through this mansion and you're placing rooms as you explore. That is like kind of like stuff from Betrayal, but like everything else is like very different. so like yeah when i When I saw the trailer, like that was the first place my head went to. but um It's very interesting how much that doesn't really feel like a reference point when you're actually playing um yeah Yeah, I played it i I maybe did like one three-day session of the demo and then stop there Yeah, I found a lot of interesting stuff. um I could see the way that could get much deeper It didn't quite get its hooks into me. I guess yeah, there there wasn't there wasn't like
00:29:58
Speaker
maybe Maybe I just didn't find and anything that would have like pushed me to go like, oh, whoa, this this means that, and that means that. um It was like more just like lots of small pieces like, oh, that could be used in that way. ah So yeah, i don't I don't really have a sense of the scope of the thing. um like Obviously, there's 45 rooms plus one, but like I don't have a sense of like Oh, I'm going to play this for like three hours and then I'm going to come to a satisfying conclusion. Or like, oh, is this going to be like 50 hours to like go into the depths and like figure everything out? And like, I don't know if I need that. And certainly I don't need that from a demo, but like, yeah, I came away from the demo, like not really sure what to expect from the full game in some way, which is interesting. It's interesting interesting because I guess guess since it's like randomly generated, some people might play the demo and not see the thing that that is the hooks and maybe Mari did see something else that got her hooked. I think that's very true. I think I wasn't really understanding the full game until probably my second or third playthrough, but i i you probably didn't even get to this. um But like things like at some point in the game, I realized there was sort of a world outside the house as well. And so I spent one of my playthroughs
00:31:17
Speaker
running around gardens. that At some point, someone on Reddit said something like, Oh, if you if you get to this room in this order with this item, ah you can get to this thing. And it was like only in the demo, but I was like, Oh, like there's actually like,
00:31:32
Speaker
secrets in this demo that do sort of suggest a much bigger complexity and and things like that. so sort of yeah it it feels like areas It feels like a really good game to play like in a small group of people, like crowdsourcing your discoveries. Absolutely. And I think that's probably what hooked me. I sort of started Googling it and found people on Reddit and things like that that kind of blew the game open a little bit more. And for a demo, yeah, I've played at least 10 hours, at least, and it's just the demo, so I love it. Okay, moving on.
Exploring 'Lorelai and the Laser Eyes'
00:32:06
Speaker
Speaking of spooky mansions in the countryside, um I'm looking at our list, and a lot of us recommended Lorelai and the Laser Eyes. I might jump to Seren, because I can see that near the top of your list. Seren, tell me about Lorelai and the Laser Eyes.
00:32:24
Speaker
Yes. So, man, i I was so pumped for Lorelei the moment they announced this. So, this is published by the former incarnation of Annapurn Interactive and um is developed by Simogo. And Simogo is a fascinating dev team that, like,
00:32:50
Speaker
You know, good future podcast episode. I would love to pick their brains about how they decide what game to make next because they are not strictly a thinky game developer. They've made ah Device Six, which is like interactive fiction. I mean, this is not their first game, but like they went from Device Six to Sayonara Wild Hearts, which is basically a Lana Del Rey pop album game.
00:33:17
Speaker
like That's the best way to describe it. and Then they made Lorelai and the Laser Eyes, which is a deeply meant-for-puzzle-sickos game. and I'm like, you only make bangers, but how are you deciding what what to go do?
00:33:34
Speaker
i don't even know what to say about Lorelei that isn't spoiling something. This is possibly the hardest game to talk about. I will say that ah my friend who was a game reviewer ah received a copy of this game and in the mail Anna Perna sent them a notebook for taking notes and a pen and a note that says, we do not expect you to roll credits.
00:34:03
Speaker
And then ah and basically just goes on to say, um so we expect actually very few of players to roll credits on this game because this game is very, very hard. That feels like maybe an exaggeration. I actually like to know how many. I like it is it i wonder if it's like comparable to other puzzle games. So, I mean, if if we want to like peel back all the layers on that, my instinct is that puzzle players have a relatively consistent clear rate and They're hoping that this hits way outside of the puzzle player audience Yeah in terms of like sales and that that audience will not be true. Yeah, that's very if I go to steam achievements You know
00:34:52
Speaker
That is a relatively low percentage if I'm being honest. So I'm trying to know exactly which achievement is, ah because because all of the achievements are phrased as like the Black Arts Coffee Club member of the month awarded for plentiful use of our services. But it looks for sure like it is below 10%. Okay, cool.
00:35:13
Speaker
So yes, if anyone else wants to jump in and try and help explain what... I don't mind trying to give like a little bit of a... Yeah, explain what the fuck this is. um so Sorry, I'm not on the score.
00:35:26
Speaker
um My first impression of the game was like, oh, it looks like classic Resident Evil in some way. It's like third person fixed cameras and you're walking around the kind of spooky mansion, like unlocking doors and all that kind of stuff. ah So it kind of is like that in the sense that it's it's got those those factors, but there's like no zombies or anything. I mean, well, but well. um let's This is such a hard game to talk about. It is, it is. um But the basic premise is that you are a woman that's just arrived in her car at a kind of manor and you've got a letter that's invited you there. And so your kind of first objective is just to try to go into that manor and start exploring it.
00:36:11
Speaker
um And it's a super weird vibe. It's very dreamlike. It reminds me a lot of Twin Peaks. There are some scenes that I'm like, this feels like it's just a homage to Twin Peaks. And it's it's, yeah, like you very quickly start to feel like I don't even know when we are or where we are, like or any of that, cut that's that's how it's kind of dreamlike. But the the thing that I was like most impressed by with this game, and I will say that I find it hard to pick favorites of the year, but this is definitely the game that's left the biggest impression on me this year. The narrative like really comes together. It's very weird and incomprehensible to begin with, but it really comes together and I think makes a lot of sense. And the narrative gets pieced together also.
00:36:57
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It's like it's like a puzzle in and of itself, ah like throughout the game, you're like figuring out like, who is this character? Is this even a real person? Like, is this the person the same as this other person? What? Yeah, is this and all that kind of stuff.
00:37:12
Speaker
um and yeah it's just really fun for that to come together and like in a lot of games if there was a lot of text i would be like oh it's just getting in the way of the puzzles but in this game like there are rooms where there's like loads of text and i was just really excited to read it because it's like you're figuring out like what on earth is going on here um and yeah i guess the other thing to mention is that the puzzles in this are, I think it's it's one of the very few games that really focuses on what I would call like cryptic puzzles. It's like, they're almost like the kind of like, if you got like a puzzle book for Christmas, it'd be full of like escape room puzzles. Yeah, yeah for sure. Yeah.
00:37:49
Speaker
to me this game is like everything right it is like it is a escape room it is a fascinating story it is immaculate vibes it is sicko level puzzles it is puzzle after puzzle after puzzle in like enshrined in mystery after mystery and then without saying anything holy cow the ending
00:38:13
Speaker
And actually actually, I say escape room puzzles. What I actually mean is puzzle hunt puzzles. Yeah. yeah um Which is not a reference point that's applicable to most people, but like, yeah, like it's very much like, yeah, oh, this is for sickos.
00:38:28
Speaker
And I guess the one thing it doesn't do like, like, oh, it does it a little bit. It it does. Okay, definitely does it a little bit. But most of the puzzles are very like self contained. They're like, oh, there's this door I've got to open and oh just of them there's like a puzzle like right next to it. And some of the discussion I've seen around the game, because at first, um in our Think Games article about Best Games of the Year, um Rachel wrote that like about how like well integrated the games are with the narrative. And at first, I had a bit of a reaction to that was like, but are they really? ah But it's i was I've been thinking about that more. And I think the reason I kind of didn't agree with that is that they they're very self-contained. They could almost, in fact,
00:39:12
Speaker
There's like randomization in like in the game, so like some of the puzzles can be in different places for different players. um So if you're like looking up how do I get through this particular door, the same puzzle might not be there for for you or somebody else. And I guess because of this randomization, these puzzles can be kind of lifted and put pretty much anywhere else in the game. But I do agree that thematically, they're really connected to the narrative. like your like every puzzle you do is tied into the theme of the game and what's actually going on there and it does all kind of make sense by the end. Yeah it's just cool to see a game that features those kinds of puzzles. Usually you only see them in in for example like a puzzle hunt or a kind of cryptic puzzle book that kind of stuff and there's like there's literally like a puzzle book within the game that you solve puzzles in. So yeah it's very cool to see that.
00:40:03
Speaker
One of the things I really liked about this game, which really you reminded me so much by saying all the puzzle hunt stuff, is that there are a lot of things, and I'm trying to say as well, spoilers, but there's a lot of things that reference real world stuff. Like in a lot of escape rooms or puzzle hunts, you don't really want to have something that requires too much outside knowledge. You sort of want everything to be there. but I remember there's like, you you get loads of like books and you can scroll through and everything you could possibly need to know in the game you have in one of like hundreds of books. So like, if you're not familiar with like Roman numerals or something, there is a book on Roman numerals. And I remember really appreciating that massive amount of reading and just like you, I did read everything.
00:40:43
Speaker
But I appreciated that, that they really did give you the tools. And sometimes I remember us sort of working the other way, like being stuck on a puzzle, but having something and knowing I have to use the thing, but not making the link yet. yeah Really clever the way they do that. I just liked it a lot. Yeah, the get the game has the like it calls it like photographic memory. Basically anything you read in the game is that you can just like look it up at any time. It is worth mentioning the kind of weird input system in this game. They've gone with a control scheme where there's lich like other than moving with the the joystick or D-pad, there's literally only one button. like Every button does the same thing. and It yeah does sometimes make the menus a little bit tedious, but you know I guess they were just being experimental.
00:41:26
Speaker
But yeah, so you've got this menu full of stuff you can look through, so you never... One thing going into the game is I was expecting to have to write a lot of notes, but because of the photographic memory in the game, I actually didn't end up writing too many. I probably did still fill my whiteboard, though, with, like, yeah like mad ravings. I wrote pages, pages and pages. I use scissors as well. I remember using scissors when I was... Hell yeah. I just assumed that the control scheme was, ah it's not available on mobile right now that I'm aware of, but I just assumed that this game, that that was around coming to mobile. Maybe, interesting. ah Because those are decisions that I might have made if I were trying to figure out how to adapt this game to mobile. Yeah, maybe.
00:42:11
Speaker
Awesome, yes, no, that's, i'm I'm excited that all of us were so ahead of our heels over this game. Alan, because you didn't chime in on that, I'm going to throw to you for star stuff.
Introduction to 'Star Stuff'
00:42:25
Speaker
Yeah. Great choice. ah What a lovely game. So you are controlling this character wandering around a space station, yeah so solving puzzles to collect star pieces to re-power a generator or something. And the puzzles themselves are programming puzzles. So you are a little person walking around a space, but you're also programming the behavior of these robots.
00:42:52
Speaker
And so you have to program the right behavior such that robots are gonna do the thing that you then interact with the robot and pick up something from over here and give it to this ah robot over there just before they pick it up and take it somewhere else. And so yeah, you're like a lot of programming games are very abstract and solitary and like, oh, I'm like looking at this from a God's perspective. And like, I'm just telling the robots what to do. I'm setting it up, I'm hitting play. And it's both more like countiful and playful than a lot of programming games.
00:43:20
Speaker
but it's also just a bit more interactive because you've got this character that's moving around at the same time. I think it's a really solid game, like it's very approachable but there's really really good puzzles and yeah I just had a lovely time. I did play test the game several times through development which meant that by the final like it's actually surprising that I did sit down with the final game and went like no I'm gonna I'm gonna play all this again and ah like I hadn't played a few versions before it came out but like yeah i still i still had a really good time that last time with the final build this game is so delightful i didn't put it on my list because i also worked on this game but man this game is so delightful
00:44:06
Speaker
Yeah, I love this game as well. I just want to make a point about this as well that it is a programming game, but it's not a programming game like a like a sectronics programming game. It's not like open-ended problems where you're like you sort of try whatever code happens to make it work and there's like lots of ways to do that. It is much more like a more traditional puzzle game where you're like trying to get your character to the end of the puzzle.
00:44:29
Speaker
And that involves like moving boxes around and putting them on buttons that make bridges appear and all that kind of stuff. But at the same time, you're having to like program these bots that will help you do that. And so I think there are a few puzzles where there's like multiple ways of solving it. But Usually it's like about just like, you've got a few steps that you need to program for the robots. And like, how do you get them to do the right things in the right order to help you get to the right place? Which I thought was really cool. I like haven't seen, at least I don't think I've played another game that uses programming in that way. And I'd like to see more of that for sure. Yeah. Just a delightful twist on mechanics, a delightful set of puzzles, a delightful aesthetic. I love this game. Absolutely love this game.
00:45:16
Speaker
I have one other thing to mention as well about it. I'm just looking at my notes. yeah So we were at EGX last year in London, running a kind of like part of the family gaming area in that space. So there were lots of families coming in with kids and playing a bunch of thinky games and There was a mom and a son that came in and played Star Stuff, and it was really fun seeing them playing it, and they were like having such a great time. But the mom then sent us an email afterwards, and I wanted to read ah what that email says, which is, just wanted to say thank you for showing my eight-year-old son on how to play Star Stuff today, and for telling me about your amazing organization. Michael was so happy to play this game, and I didn't realize he was the perfect age to start coding. And like that was just amazing to like realize that,
00:46:00
Speaker
like just showing them this game, encourage them to think about like, oh, maybe we can like learn to program, maybe we can learn to code, which I think is what they were hoping to do with Star Citizen as well. Yeah, I think, did I don't know if you shared that email with the day team? I did share that, yeah. Sounds that sounds great.
00:46:19
Speaker
Yes, what ah what a delight. I think we should do one more each and then a quick fire round of anything that we haven't brought up.
'Tactical Breach Wizards' Review
00:46:28
Speaker
Joe, let's talk about leap year. Oh yes, okay, leap year, cool. So leap year is a kind of platformer with a very, very ingenious premise. So it is a platformer where if you jump just normally, you will probably die. ah So you have um kind of fall damage and if you fall, you'll you'll die. But the the distance that you fall, like the distance you need to fall to die is like less than your normal jump height. So the funny thing with this game is as soon as you start playing it, um you will like just naturally as you do in any platform, you just start jumping around and you will just die over and over again because you're just constantly jumping and you can't jump in this game unless you plan out where you're jumping to and how you're going to make it from one platform to another. So yeah, so that's the kind of the basic premise. There's not like much of a story, just kind of exploring this this kind of weird cartoony world.
00:47:26
Speaker
figuring out how to make it through each room, how do you like jump without falling more than your normal jump height, and then there are just a bunch of like really cool discoveries as you go. It's kind of about you'll come across room and there'll be some like seemingly impossible obstacles to get across and then you'll learn something new about how you can use your jumping abilities to get somewhere where you didn't realize you could get to before. And yeah, it's also pretty short. I think it's probably about a couple of hours long. And yeah, just a great time. I don't think I have too much else to say about that. Do you Alan? Any other thoughts?
00:48:01
Speaker
Yeah, I just love the way that it kept surprising me with mechanical twists of like, oh, like this is kind of tricking you into discovering new mechanics in a really delightful way. I almost stopped just before the end. I was like, oh, I've got like 26 out of 28 things. um Like, i'm I'm not sure if I'm going to spend the time to find these last two pieces. I don't know.
00:48:25
Speaker
if I'm going to get much out of it. But I'm really glad I pushed through because that final section after you've got the 28th is yeah just a ah lovely like guided tour of some some cool cool things. It's worth saying. It like recontextualizes a lot of stuff in a really fun way.
00:48:46
Speaker
ah agreed and one of the fun things to mention so yeah you're exploring this world trying to collect like the days of the month i guess like on a calendar and they do the classic thing of like the very first room that you start in has one of the last numbers in it and so as soon as you start the game you're like wait what how am i supposed to ever get that and yeah it's fun to realize how that eventually comes together by the end of the game so uh let's go to saran with i want to choose tactical breach wizards Yeah, Tactical Breach Wizards is the latest game by Tom Francis and his team at, was it Suspicious Developments? Yeah, Suspicious Developments. Truly, like,
00:49:35
Speaker
um Okay, like if you if you don't know what this game is listener, I want you to close your eyes Imagine just about the best tactics game like tile based tactics game you can come up with where and it's all perfect information and You are very very specifically making movement and attack decisions and also there's a constant mechanic for defenestration, which is a fancy word for kicking a dude out a window. And it's the most satisfying thing every single time you do it and you get to do it like 10 times a puzzle. That is this game. Like, this game is everything I wanted it to be.
00:50:13
Speaker
I played a demo of it a while ago when the full game came out I just sat down and I played and I played and I said oh no this is dangerous this is I'm getting into this too much over the winter break I played more and more and I finished it this game rules this game is so so satisfying the way that different mechanics will sort of layer on top of each other because this is not just a tactical game about kicking people out of windows. You are also, ah as as much as in my heart, that's all it is. um You're running in, there's ah gangsters or terrorists or whoever on the other side, and you are wizards. And so you have a lot of very interesting mechanics at your disposal, such as the ability to chain together using like electricity, all of the different enemies that like all theoretically have line of sight against each other.
00:51:23
Speaker
and being able to use these mechanics in a way that like The way that the mechanics are fresh is something that I haven't experienced in the tactics games in a while. And because I haven't actually talked about it on here, I play a lot of tactics games. I'm big into Fire Emblem. I'm like big into grid-based strategy, fog of war, trying to figure everything out. This game does not do fog of war. This game does perfect information, which is much more puzzle-y, much more think-y, which
00:51:56
Speaker
I appreciate for the context of this because it means I get to sing its praises here. Doesn't it also have like basically unlimited rewinds? is that Absolutely does. okay And it has the best version of like a skill tree where you start ultra powerful and everything just basically makes you even more of ah of a like god and just everything is broken so everything is balanced.
00:52:21
Speaker
but and i joke about everything is broken so everything is balanced but like it actually like where you come to it from a game design perspective it is so intricately thought through Yeah, it's very impressive that you can have a game like this with a tech tree like this that that gives you... like Like, the starting powers are very, very powerful, but then the powers you get on top of that are extremely powerful. And, like, I haven't played the game through to completion, but what I've played, like, yeah, it doesn't feel broken at any point, or it feels broken in the right way, where you're just stomping on enemies and it feels great at every point. Exactly. Like, sometimes you're stomping on enemies... But it's not it's not so broken that it's too easy.
00:53:00
Speaker
No, absolutely. You're still thinking even even in the easier puzzles, you're still thinking. And because the game is so intricately designed around the ultra satisfying high power moves that you have. Um, it is such, such satisfying game design, I would strongly recommend like for like So in the other games that I've played, like Dr. Tactic, if you're really into mysteries, I would recommend. Like Lorelai, if you're a real puzzle sicko, I would recommend. I would recommend Tactic for each wizard to pretty much everyone that is comfortable with characters holding guns.
00:53:36
Speaker
Like if that is not a deal breaker for you in a video game, this game is a must play immediately. Like this game for people who are tactics fans, for people who are not tactics fans. I honestly think that this is, like take take a step back. I played over 100 games last year that were each more than at at least an hour or two put into it. I play a lot of video games. Tangle Breach Wizards is one of like my top 10 favorite games of last year, not thinky.
00:54:04
Speaker
like, tank over for each wizard absolutely rules. It is so, so fantastic. The last time I played a game that was a tactics-y that left me feeling this excited was ah Marvel's Midnight Suns, which Firaxis made a couple years ago. This is just giving me a lot of the same excitement and challenge and Yeah, i again, I could just rave about how happy this game makes me, but... It's also just very funny. it's Yes, it's very... In case Kick Dude out a window as a core mechanic didn't let you know, this game does not especially take itself very seriously. scheme Yeah, this game's very funny. ah If you're wondering, what else did this team make? This is the developer of Gunpoint and Heat Signature.
00:54:56
Speaker
and floating point. So if you've played any of those, and you're like, Oh, I think I get it. Yeah, yeah, this, i this is not me saying Tom Francis retire, but this feels almost like a magnum opus of design. So highly, highly, highly, highly recommend.
00:55:18
Speaker
High praise. Wow. and um Yes. i I think that anyone on this call that has not played a significant amount of tactical breach wizards, I implore you to dig in. ah This game is so good. It feels it feels unfair as as people who work in this space. All right.
Exploring 'Botany Manor'
00:55:39
Speaker
Mari, I'm going to throw to you on Botany Manor.
00:55:43
Speaker
Botany Manor. Great choice. Loved this game. um It's not super fresh in my mind because I did play it when it first came out back in, well, near the start of the year. I think April or May, but essentially Botany Manor is like a sweet first person escape room. You play this, like, retired. I think she's like an elderly botanist exploring her own manor house.
00:56:06
Speaker
It's kind of slow paced whimsical. It's very escape roomy. um The puzzles, I remember them being deeply satisfying. It really like prioritises sort of taking your time exploring and and kind of like really understanding like ah the plants and the sort of world you're in. Again, I don't really want to give any spoilers because I do think the story in this is absolutely beautiful as well. But It just prioritises really engaging with these sort of seeds and these plants and your growing plants and then sort of using the plants to progress to the next area of the house. I do remember the puzzles aren't especially challenging. um But the thing I enjoyed most was kind of that core mechanic of sort of learning about a new plant, figuring out how to grow it from a seed, what it needs. And they're all very fictional plants, like plants that can set fire to things, plants that can
00:56:54
Speaker
do all kinds of weird and wonderful things, like a one that produces light, I think. I might clear the fog. and And so yeah, in that way, it is an escape room game, but it has its own little twist. I always think when I play sort of first person escape room games on my computer, I'm like, how, how would I make this in real life? You couldn't make this in real life. And that's really a nice thing. It's a really, it's a real vibe. I know we mentioned before this, this podcast episode, talk about the vibes, but this for me is such a vibey game. Even though I played it so many months ago, thinking about my games of the year, it just stuck out real like,
00:57:30
Speaker
bright star in every game I played this year. I absolutely loved it. um Another thing about this game as well, I don't know how many ah how many other people have played this in this core, but this is the game I recommend to non-puzzle people as well. I always kind of have a bit of a hard time recommending sort of the hardcore puzzle games. I would never recommend Lorelei to some of my warm puzzle friends. Never. It would put them off video games for life and unless unless they were like really in a mood to solve puzzles. This one I recommend to everyone, just like you did with a Tactical Breach Wizards. This is the game that I'm like, yeah, you want to try a puzzle game? Try this one.
00:58:04
Speaker
um Yeah, I don't know what else to say other than really, really loved Botany Manor. It is very approachable, isn't it? um I was going to mention that it's funny describing it as an... It totally is like an escape room game, but you start outside and yeah you're breaking like into your own house. yeah oh Escape in game. yeah I mean, a few years ago, i was I produced Escape Academy, and one of the big like design ethos things of that was to sand off a lot of the edges that something like escape simulator has for people who are not super into the space um yeah like escape simulator is very for people who don't know that is a that is a simulator in so much as you could pick up everything and it has a lot of user generated content but it is also like
00:58:57
Speaker
daunting and overwhelming if you're just getting started in this kind of space. And Escape Academy was very much designed to be around like, okay, well, we're going to like limit points of interaction. We're going to design the puzzles around that. We're going to design this. Botany Manor honestly feels very in conversation with that ethos in a way that made me really happy.
00:59:18
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. It's some just so approachable. I think you do sort of pick things up and put them down, but someone correct me if I'm wrong, you don't have a big inventory system. I believe you just sort of have one thing in your hand at once and then sort of use it, put it down, which is which is unique. I think you can only interact with stuff that like is actually relevant to a puzzle. I think that problem then escapes it. Yeah, you can only pick up something and take it around if part of the puzzle is taking that thing somewhere else. Yeah, exactly.
00:59:46
Speaker
Although it doesn't seem to have a system for if you take something up and leave it in a stupid place and forget where you left it. well that's That's user error, Alan. That absolutely is. I would simply play better.
01:00:03
Speaker
I'm going to throw it back to Alan, just looking at the list. Alan, you haven't been in this round, right?
'Rise of the Golden Idol' Review
01:00:08
Speaker
yeah um Well, it's got to be Rise of the Golden Idol then. Alan, please tell me about Rise of the Golden Idol. and I mean, so this is the the one game that was on everyone's lists? Yep. Rise of the Golden Idol. It's more Golden Idol. Case closed. Moving on.
01:00:27
Speaker
Yeah, pretty much. That's quick. I mean, that's that's kind of all I feel like like it's ah I don't know. No, i I do have more to say about it. Like I think it innovates on the first game in interesting ways structurally. Like when I first played the demo for this game and saw that what they were doing with the chapter summary puzzles.
01:00:46
Speaker
I was like really intrigued and like oh wow this is really smart that's like a really sensible innovation that lets you do so much more and like lets you tell a story that doesn't have to be a lot more complicated but it means you can make sure that people are following and along in a way that they kind of just have one moment of like complicated twists in the first game, whereas you can do that like once a chapter in this game if you want to. um And so yeah, like I saw that I was like, oh, that's a really clever design exploration of how you can take that base system and take it further.
01:01:24
Speaker
One thing that's kind of interesting about this game is that with the first game, the two brothers like designed the whole thing themselves and did all the art and stuff. And in this one, they hired a team of, I think it was like five designers and like gave the cases out. And I guess there's a lot more cases in this game as well. But I think you can kind of get the feel that there's like more people involved in this. There's a lot more variety to the structure of the cases.
01:01:49
Speaker
and the kind of locations, yeah, it feels very varied, which makes it fun. There was one innovation that they've done is like like, or one thing they've changed about the original game is that they've like some of the UI stuff has changed, like you can open multiple things up at the same time. I actually kind of felt like that didn't really help me very much. I was kind of just opening everything and then closing everything, which made it not very different to just using the thinking panel from the first game.
01:02:18
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. I think that the simplicity of this is either open or closed was actually better. And I was constantly, even through the final case, I was constantly like clicking behind something and going, oh, no, I can't close that without closing the whole of the thinking stuff. of Like it just, I think it's not an unsolvable problem. I think that this version of the UI could be better, but I don't think this version of the UI that they shipped with is better. Yeah, I think it's cool that they're experimenting and trying to figure out a way to to make it a better UI. And a more platform scalable UI. Yeah, actually, interestingly, I hear that some of the puzzles are different on mobile. I would not be surprised.
01:03:02
Speaker
So I had ah i had a ah friend who's playing the game currently on the Switch and she was asking me like, oh, how do I solve ah this puzzle? And I was like, oh, and I was trying to give a hint. It's like, look at this particular thing. And there's a detail in the version I played on PC that just isn't in the Switch version.
01:03:19
Speaker
and i I assume that's just because it must have been done in an update or something, and they haven't been able to roll that out to Switch, but I thought that was... I was like saying, oh, like look at this detail, and she's like, what detail? There's nothing there. The impression I got from mobile is that they would break the puzzles up into more granular versions, that was more ah so that you could confirm smaller chunks of it at a time, and I got the sense that they would have done that as a um stay different audience.
01:03:47
Speaker
I mean, it's specifically, it's not just on mobile, it's it's Netflix. So I would very much assume that any change being made for the mobile version is being catered to a hyper casual audience.
01:04:00
Speaker
i I didn't like it as much as the original game, personally. um I thought that the story they were telling was slightly too convoluted um to feel clean and like, if this was a series of television, you would not find it had a satisfying arc, I think.
01:04:20
Speaker
It's very non-linear, which was really like, because I had to like a lot of the time go, wait, what year are we in now? And then look back and forth. It jumped back and forwards a lot, right? Yeah, I think, I guess they were, again, they're kind of experimenting with the format and maybe they sort of experimented a bit too much with like the narrative structure, because they not only made the game longer, but they also made it like non-linear in terms of time.
01:04:45
Speaker
ah And there's also a lot more characters, I think. um Some characters, like, you think, oh, this person is going to be important to the story, and then they're only in one case. And it's it's cool that they're like testing that out. But I think I agree that the structure of the story of the first one was better. But I think, like you said at the start, it is just more Case of the Golden Idol, and and Case of the Golden Idol was amazing, and this was amazing, too. so And there's what, two, three pieces of DLC coming soon? Something like that, yeah. It might even be four, is it four? I don't think it's four.
01:05:21
Speaker
I think you're just trying to will more games into such a job.
'Leif's Odyssey' Review
01:05:26
Speaker
So Joe, Leif's Odyssey. Yes, I was hoping we'd be able to bring this up. um So is this only on our list? I think it is, yeah. So Leif's Odyssey is a... I call them stepping games now. It's kind of in the same genre as a classic game called Drought or Deadly Rooms of Death.
01:05:47
Speaker
The premise being it's like 2D top-down, you're a ferret moving through various screens to kind of on an adventure and you go from screen to screen and and each screen is kind of like one big puzzle you've got to solve and on the screen there'll be a bunch of enemies that you have to defeat and then once you've defeated the enemies a door will open and you'll be able to move to the next room or like sometimes there's like branching paths you can go in different directions.
01:06:10
Speaker
um And so what kind of makes a stepping puzzle feel like a stepping puzzle is the fact that the enemies move when you move, like simultaneously. And the way these games kind of work is that it's all about understanding how the enemies move when you move.
01:06:28
Speaker
and So, like, one of the first enemies you're introduced to in Elite Odyssey is ah the flying snake, and it can like only move horizontally and vertically. It's trying to move towards the player, and it has, like, certain rules about when it will change direction and all that kind of stuff. And so part of the game is just figuring out, like, what are the rules behind this enemy, and how can I use those rules in order to get it into a certain position so that I can defeat it and get through to the next room? One of the things, like, I particularly loved about this game is that it took the kind of concept that I think most people associate with Drog and made it way more like I kind of feel it like it's like a modernized puzzle game version of Drog there's fewer enemy types I think that I don't know too much about Drog but I think the the enemy rules in this are kind of simpler but still interesting and the puzzles are a lot more
01:07:23
Speaker
kind of focused on like there's like a particular trick to figure out in this puzzle or a lot of them are kind of like there's an arrangement that the puzzle is just like an interesting arrangement of puzzle components um and you're trying to like first pass it and then figure out so like how to defeat all the enemies in that puzzle. And yeah, just a really fun game. it's It's a pretty hard game, but if if that kind of game of appeals to you, I think you'd enjoy it. Worth mentioning to the the developer of this game is Alex Diener, who also has a YouTube channel and basically was like the inspiration for me starting my YouTube channel. So I also have that kind of association with it. And oh ah another thing to mention is that it has a level editing game. So that's kind of, I kind of think that's like part of the Drog experience is like,
01:08:07
Speaker
There's a level editor in the huge community like makes loads of puzzles and Alex has gone with that approach ah with this and there's a level editor and he's been playing the levels that people have made like on his channel which is just really cool to see and it's cool to see that people have been making them. Yeah, Alan anything to add?
01:08:25
Speaker
Yeah. And so this, it's a challenging game. where There's a lot of very hard puzzles in this. And throughout the course of playing it, so I felt like I was constantly on the edge of like, ah, have I hit my limit? this Is this too much? am i Am I just going to stop here? I've had a really good time. I should just put it down. um And each time i I hit that point, I'd put it down and then I'd come back a bit later.
01:08:51
Speaker
And I would just about manage to solve that puzzle I was stuck on and I'd start being able to make more progress and then I'd be able to unlock like a few puzzles at a time and then you've got choices for where to solve next. um And um I'm really glad that I stuck with it and that I kept pushing through because yeah, there's some really, really solid puzzles in here. I um i really love the like the northern like snowy area. It's like awesome.
01:09:18
Speaker
I think probably yeah probably this game has the the best puzzles I've played ah this this in 2024 where we're in this game. um Second place to start stuff. Really impressive design. like it it's just It's got such a small set of pieces that it's making puzzles from. There's only like three or four enemy types, yep and it just keeps using them in newer, surprising ways.
01:09:47
Speaker
um it's got a cool um like when you're interacting with the enemies it'll add notes about how the enemies behave to a kind of like little book that you've got in a journal you've got in the game and so if you're ever a like oh i can't remember how this enemy behaves in this particular situation you can just look that up and that's really handy um i was gonna also say that I think one of the things I kind of get scared away from draw puzzles is that I think a lot of the enemies in draw have quite complicated rules with like lots of edge cases and I think the puzzles in this have been designed to avoid the edge cases of some of the like the rules that these enemies have do still have lots of edge cases in them but the puzzles aren't about those it's not about like oh I just I just didn't think of this particular move
01:10:33
Speaker
but because it's a weird edge case that I wasn't thinking about. No, the puzzle is about something bigger than that, and you don't really have to worry about those edge edge cases as much. All right, um so...
Game Shoutouts and Reflections
01:10:44
Speaker
Quick hits. Yeah, sure. ah Was that one of them? Maybe that was one of them. um No, no, that was the last full one. Yeah, that was the last full one. By God, that should not be the length of a quick hit.
01:10:56
Speaker
um I mean, I just want to quickly say Lock Digital has been amazing. I will thank you. Yeah, it's a fantastic game and just so satisfying to solve those puzzles. um I obviously already played the puzzle book and the digital version was... It was great to revisit the the concepts because it was kind of like solving them again. But also the extra stuff in the game is also really fun. I had a great time. ah yeah My quick one, Bond. ah Very niche, very under the radar. um But it's one of the eight games that I actually played through to completion this year. And like that's pretty impressive in it itself. um it's a
01:11:39
Speaker
It's a 3D grid-based puzzle game. um There's a lot of these. um i When I first played it, I thought, like oh, like these mechanics are going to be a bit fiddly, a bit awkward. um And so like even though there's really strong design here, like am i am i actually is there actually some sticking power here? And I was surprised to find out there was. um It's pretty short. There's not a ton of puzzles.
01:12:01
Speaker
I think I beat the whole thing in maybe three hours. um let People who play fewer grid-based 3D puzzle games will spend longer than that, but like um there's not an overwhelming amount of content, and it does keep it fresh pretty pretty consistently.
01:12:18
Speaker
Great. My quick hit is also an under the radar game that most people haven't heard of, ah Indiana Jones and the Great Circle um by ah Machine Games. This is not a thinky game. However, it has come up mostly when Alan asked me if I wanted to include it in Thinky Third Thursday. And people have asked me, what do you think about this game? Because everyone keeps praising the puzzles.
01:12:45
Speaker
um Here is my TLDR. ah There are a lot of mainstream games, AAA games, ah big budget, single player games that will throw puzzles in either as padding or usually just as gameplay variety. Towers of Hanoi.
01:13:03
Speaker
Yeah tower all all that shit um and those are frequently people's least like mainstream players these favorite parts Frequently there will be a companion character that tells you the solution the moment that you see that there is a puzzle um This has extremely good puzzles by that standard. ah If you come to this game because you want the entirety of the game, not just because it's a thinky game, I think you will be pleased with the puzzles. If you want to buy this game because you think it is a thinky puzzle game just in its own, you are going to be disappointed.
01:13:40
Speaker
However, if you love the idea of hitman meets dishonored, and specifically if you love the idea of putting on a silly outfit, crouching down, sneaking up between two fascists who are captured as fascist one and fascist two, and taking a violin, smashing it over somewhat one of their heads,
01:14:04
Speaker
making it super loud for you, but somehow the other character doesn't hear it so that you can just deck them from behind also. ah Yeah, this game rules. I don't know. I don't know what to say. This game rules. It's not a thinky game. It has a shocking amount of thinky elements for a non-thinky game, which is why I'm giving it a quick shout out here. Incredible.
01:14:26
Speaker
Alright, my quick shout out then will be Auros came out start of the year it's from Michael Kam. It's basically just a really um nice relaxing puzzle game, you start with a loop, you kind of pick edges of the loop and sort of Drag the loop so it goes through a number of sequential numbers. And in doing so, you make really pretty little tunes. It's very relaxing. It kind of scratches the same itch that games like mini Metro and stuff scratch for me. like I don't think I've completed all of the levels, but it's the kind of game I keep returning to throughout the year. um Really loved it. Yeah, it's a lovely game. Can I do one more quick one?
01:15:03
Speaker
Go for it. Yes, you haven't done a quick one yet. No, I have. I did. I guess I did long pitch. Oh, you did long pitch. Oh, yes. I'm going to do a cheeky extra one, which is I think the only free game that we've put on our list, which is Croquet Conundrum. um So like people can check that out now. It's it's it's very simple. It's like it's you know just enough polish to you know feel good to play. um It's got like the best clack sound when you like hit the ball. But basically, it's like a croquet themed puzzle game.
01:15:33
Speaker
where you're like hitting the ball through the the I guess they call them hoops even though they're not hoop shaped and it's just really good puzzles and has some cool like secret meta twists in it as well that are just really fun to discover and it's yeah it's just a good time like of all the free games I played this year that was the the one that's like stuck in my head the most And if you don't know what croquet is, that you are American or not born into privilege, or both. Is it called something else in America or just people no i just don't know about it? It's a very posh game. It's an unbelievably posh British exclusive game. Surely people have seen the like Disney, Alice in Wonderland, right?
01:16:14
Speaker
Yeah, so I was going to say it's an Alice in Wonderland thing. You mean the movie from a hundred years ago? Hey, hey, hey, Joe, why are you just assuming that everyone knows about this is this is like exclusively at like old money country clubs in the US. I have no idea what the rules of croquet are. So it might be nothing like the actual game. Okay, I just pretty close as I understand it. Okay, just want to point that out for our American not from old money listeners.
01:16:44
Speaker
um Awesome. Thank you so much. Joe, do you have anything that you want to plug? I mean, yeah, just ah check out the Think Games website, please. If you could like, follow us on socials, all that kind of stuff and join our newsletter. We'd love that. We're doing the Thinkie Awards very soon. And so there'll be public voting for that. um That may or may not be open at the time this goes out. If not, it'll be very soon after. um Yeah, just play lots of great Thinkie games.
01:17:11
Speaker
Absolutely. Thank you so much. And thank you for listening to the Track Nook and Friends official podcast. Our music is by Priscilla Snow, who you can find at ghoulnoise.bandcamp dot.com. Our podcast artwork is by Adam DeGrandis. Our podcast is edited by Melanie Zawodniak. Please rate and review us on your podcast service of choice and be sure to tune in next episode for more interesting conversations.