Just watched a friend play through PROXIMATE by cain @cmddx and it was lovely. Great little bite-size horror thing! Highly recommend

https://cmddx.itch.io/proximate
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2957800/PROXIMATE/

One of my top games of 2024 was PROXIMATE by @cmddx, a short horror game taking place on an undersea research base where Something Has Happened™ and you're blinded by experimental AI.

I fucking loved this game and finally wrote about it here: https://www.electrondance.com/the-maw/

@everest i mean it *does* glow in the dark

@johnny hell yea, keen to hear what you think!

i'm not working today, i don't need my adhd meds

*leaves battle jacket at train station and has to spend half an hour backtracking to find it*

proximate is 20% off for steam's winter sale fyi c:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2957800/PROXIMATE/

yea :))

@cmddx steam review with at least 2 hours played so you know they didn't refund it

t4t only, cis men have to leave a steam review first

i've had an increase in local sales since mentioning PROXIMATE in my grindr bio. impressed that this is a genuine marketing strategy

@zanchey oh my god that's incredible

just got an email from someone written entirely in comic sans. should i reply back in papyrus

the cool thing about breakups though is that i am, for a brief window of time, allowed to do things that i'll be cringing at in a month, such as: making patches with twin peaks quotes

working on some pants

@DamonWakes i was lucky enough to have gotten into the series when i was still pretty young - the games were clunky even then in comparison to similar titles but i was too 14 to really care. geneforge 2: infestation is the latest remake and it's definitely the shiniest!

@SnoopJ oh yeah Failing to Fail is probably one of my fav GDC talks, so good

getting back into the geneforge series after not playing it in over a decade and it's still great. probably the gamedev epitome of "if it ain't broke." exact same game released 7 times with barely even a reskin and each of them are perfect. thank you jeff vogel

@SnoopJ ooo i read Watts' Blindsight (partly what proximate was inspired by) and loved it, i'll check out Starfish too!

@SnoopJ 💖 🥰

feeling caught between wanting to make a roguelike / systems-based game vs the fact that i really love writing narrative and dialogue. i'm pretty sure it's a cursed problem because i have no idea how to reconcile the procedural, unlimited gameplay aspects of systems games with the need for bespoke content that good narrative requires.

i know there's games that have done it well, like hades and caves of qud, but even then there's a dissonance. the writing in qud is gorgeous but i am not reading any of it on my 200th playthrough