The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for doing a little dance in the kitchen. Go on. No-one’s watching. Raise that tin opener to the roof. Before you get carried away and fling errant globules of mushy pea all over your freshly sponged worktops, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

For Paste, Perry Gottschalk wrote about the “folkloric distortions” of Indika.

Indika needs you to understand it as a folk story, because the tradition of folk is pivotal to understanding Indika’s crisis of faith. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the idea of God in folk music, and how different that feels from what’s normally preached in churches. The discographies of American folk revival artists don’t sing His praises or elate Him for the sake of elation—they paint Him as a figure that just exists. The God of folk music is someone you’re told about through stories passed down through the ages, but can never truly know for yourself. This is the God that Indika believes in, or rather, is told to believe in by her convent sisters. She has never seen Him perform the miracles He is supposedly capable of; she has never had a reason to believe in Him beyond being told to do so. Indika is folk because God is folk.

For Aftermath, Riley McLeod finally said what everyone else is too scared to say about printers. I cannot overstate the genuine emotional damage printers have caused me over the years, and this spoke to me on metaphysical level.

You probably know all this, and as such do not own a printer. You probably do what I used to do, and use your job’s printer, or print at the office supply store, or the library, or from one of your idiot friends like me who owns a printer. But me, your idiot friend, cannot print things for you, because even though it is 2024 in America, a country that has put a man on the moon, I cannot print things at home by pressing "print" on the machine designed specifically for the purpose of printing. I can merely spend hours cursing the heavens, wondering where in the three feet of ether my print job has gone, while a shitty app tells me it can sell me more ink.

I really enjoyed this Game Developer interview on the making of Thank Goodness You're Here! - and how the game was initially much more freeform 'verb' orientated gameplay until the team realised they'd rather drill down on the humour.

"Early on, we really had no clue [how to make it work]. We tried to come up with bits and then ask 'how do we get from A to B,'" says Todd. "We got really experimental with it, but I think what worked was very slowly teasing gameplay and narrative out of the gags. If we were still laughing after a week we asked 'how does this fit? What does the player do on-screen while this is happening? Should it just be a cutscene or should we have interaction in there?'"

Thank Goodness You're Here! was initially a more non-linear experience. Players were able to complete tasks in any order, ambling through Barnsworth at their own behest. The idea was to give players more freedom, but playtesting proved that's not always a boon. "We found that people were often in the wrong areas, just doing laps through pathways and missing the one thing they were supposed to do," says Todd. "So basically we just realized we should just put this on-rails and it'll still work. We can have a more tight, curated experience where you can only do certain things enough times to see the jokes unfold."

PC Gamer have alerted me to the amount of squirrels in the upcoming MTG set, Bloomburrow, and I might have to buy a couple one two several handfuls of packs. That, or I’ll just continue to watch more Squirrels At The Window every time I’m mildly stressed at anything. This a good takedown of a sudden wave of fawning over Zuckerberg. Please enjoy this alchemic synthesis of Titanic and Conan. I don't think it's new but it's the first time I've seen it. Here's a 1987 stopmotion thing based on Gormenghast I never knew existed. Music this week is John Wick by Soft Play. Have a great weekend!