Lmst

Year Walk | Revisiting The Folklore Horror Classic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhrjEtvASHQ&ab_channel=KrinxTV
#KrinxTV #YearWalk #Simogo #HorrorGame #HorrorGames #HorrorGaming

If you haven't already done so, now is the perfect time to check out (or replay) Sayonara Wild Hearts. It is a hard to describe, but easy to fall in love with music based game with a decent story that has just been re-released to PS5 with a free upgrade for those who already own the PS4 version of the game :drake_yes: :applause:

I love it! :pixelheart:

#brothersofx #brox #stonedflowers #bonk #sayonarawildhearts #simogo #annapurna #ps4 #ps5 #playstation #photomode #videogamephotography

A screenshot I took in the video game Sayonara Wild Hearts. It shows the two counterparts of the protagonist during the "Parallel Universe" section of the game high-fiving mid-air. It's also my favorite section of the game.

My #Twitch stream of the demo of Yellow House and the playthrough of Year Walk saved to Youtube :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T26n6OT6iq8

#YellowHouse #basandaikagames #YearWalk #Simogo #HorrorGame #HorrorGames #HorrorGaming

The demo of Yellow House turned out to be rather short so I ended up plowing through the creepy game Year Walk as well. Please check out my #Twitch stream and please boost this post as I'm a #SmallStreamer

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2314586527

#SmallStreamersConnect #SmallStreamersUnite #SupportSmallStreamers #YellowHouse #basandaikagames #YearWalk #Simogo #HorrorGame #HorrorGames #HorrorGaming

Relistened to this great poetic tale from the seas by #Simogo. Perfect podcast for this Saturday morning, via #antennapod

The Lighthouse Painting

https://simogo.com/work/the-sailors-dream/the-lighthouse-painting/

Me ha gustado mucho #LoreleiAndTheLaserEyes y creo que su diseño expansivo es maravilloso pero tengo problemas con su final y la forma en la que, desde #Simogo, confirman que no creen en los jugadores.
https://culturacanibal.com/cuando-el-lenguaje-del-videojuego-no-tiene-que-ser-explicado/

Cuando el lenguaje del videojuego no tiene que ser explicado

Desde Simogo están tan preocupados por cerrar la historia con contundencia, porque nadie se quede atrás y pueda hacerse, quizás, alguna pregunta, que expanden lo que debería ser el clímax de la historia hasta convertirlo en un examen tipo test.

#Crítica #LoreleiAndTheLaserEyes #Simogo #Videojuegos

https://culturacanibal.com/b/3A

j'ai encore sévi sur
#TikTok

#loreleiandthelasereyes #Latla est une jeu formidable de #simogo édité par #AnnapurnaInteractive !

Je raconte pourquoi dans cette nouvelle vidéo (en attendant le gros truc que je prépare !)

https://www.tiktok.com/@estebangrine/video/7376230047994121504

vignette tiktok lorelei and the laser eyes

Watch on YouTube

Warning to anyone who is fearful of spoilers. I don’t know how to say the things I’d like to say without digging into the content of at least 2 of the 3 games I’m talking about today. Those games are Lorelei and the Laser Eyes and Animal Well. I will not spoil the ending of Lorelei, but I will be discussing the credits and after credits of Animal Well.

I do discuss Elden Ring a good bit, but not enough to put a warning on it. I’ll be using footage from the beginning of all 3 games, so don’t worry too much about mid-to-late game spoilers.

Do with this info what you will.

I think there’s something wrong with me. There’s this thing inside me that is constantly going, spinning, and tugging at me to make something. It’s this hamster in a little wheel in my chest that is always going and the only way to calm him down is to create something new and put it out in the world. It’s my little anxiety that I can sometimes get to shut up if I just write something or make a new video or record a new podcast episode or even sometimes, just have a really fulfilling conversation with a friend.

This drive is so deep it’s essential. It’s not a part of my identity. It kind of is my identity. I am Matt, the singer, the engineer, the writer, the thinker.

But the messed up part? Making things doesn’t come easy to me. Writing everyone of these videos, especially this one, takes days of working up the energy to get started. Sometimes multiple times within the same script. Eventually, maybe the third or fourth time, it will snowball and I’ll become obsessed with finishing the project. Sometimes finishing a script, recording, and editing it in a single evening.

People who have more applicable degrees than me sometimes call this particular ADHD peculiarity the “Wall of Awful.” The concept is that people with brains like mine don’t just see a simple task. We see the task, but all of the tiny little tasks and decisions and minor complications that lead up to that task build up a giant, terrible wall that we have to scale before we can even get close to that task.

So if I want to get started writing a video, my brain skips right to the fact that it’s hot in my office because I forgot to leave the door open and that I could grab my laptop and write in the kitchen, but I left it downstairs and it isn’t even charged. And in fact my stomach has been killing me and it’s getting close to dinner time for our dog, and it’s been really difficult to get her to eat lately. So by the time I’m done with that, it’ll probably be time to figure out dinner for my husband and me. And that means I really only have like…two hours to write anything before my husband wants to go to bed and I don’t want to bother him with my hobbies, because for some reason that’s something I think pretty often without questioning why he would be bothered. And when I get started, do I even have anything valuable to say right now? Does anyone actually care about my navel-gazing video essays that claim to be about video games or tech but are often just a form of public therapy?

Those are all real things that have raced through my mind when considering sitting down to write this exact video. They all come quickly, often just in a few seconds after I’ve thought “Hey, I have some time to write tonight, probably.” Brick by brick they build an obstacle that can feel impossible to tear down.

So in this ridiculous metaphor, I’ve got a brick wall of awful in front of me and a hamster wheel of anxiety pressing me forward head first. It’s a recipe for something more explosive than edible.

But you know what? I do keep finishing videos. I do, in fact, manage to produce a podcast every 2 weeks during our seasons. And I manage to keep my job, keep playing games, and keep spending time with my husband and our friends.

It’s not that I can’t do it. There is so much proof that I can and that I want to and that it’s fulfilling. It’s just that, for me, it’s hard.

Simogo has been one of my favorite game developers for a very long time. I played their mobile game Device 6 shortly after it came out in 2013. Device 6, like many of their games, is a narrative puzzle game with really thoughtful interaction design and sound design. The game they released just before that, Year Walk, blew me away by requiring the player to look beyond the boundaries of the actual game in order to see its true ending.

They also made one of my favorite games of 2019, Sayonara Wild Hearts. It’s a playable pop album with music I adore and some really surprising rhythm game mechanics.

Simogo’s latest game is Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. Lorelei is a return to Simogo’s spooky puzzle-box style. I’ve heard people say that it’s kind of like if Resident Evil took out all the zombies and amped up the puzzles, but I’ve personally never played a Resident Evil game.

The trailer for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes at the most recent Nintendo Switch event completely sold me on playing it. Visually it is dark and monotone, with only a bright red, almost fuchsia, punctuating the blacks, grays, and whites of the empty hotel the game takes place inside. It operates with a semi-fixed camera, and they do this really cool visual trick where there are other images that shift as the character moves almost superimposed onto the textures. I really can’t tell if this trick is an overlay, like the VHS filter that gets used in places here too, or if it’s really a trick with the textures.

And of course, it wouldn’t be Simogo if they didn’t nail the music and sound design. Musicians Daniel Olsén, Linnea Olsson, & Jonathan Eng return from Sayonara Wild Hearts to craft a perfect piano-driven soundtrack for Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, with plenty of synth and a little guitar thrown in for effect.

The puzzles in this game could not be more for me. They can get very hard, honestly, but they’re very mathy. And that’s a good thing to me. Puzzles often span multiple rooms, and some of them span nearly the whole game.

I think some people hear that and they think they’re going to miss out on something or mess something up. You can’t really mess anything up. You will get stuck and not be able to progress at some points, but you should know when you have all the pieces to complete a puzzle. If you aren’t sure, it’s better to move on and solve something else. The game will deftly guide you from one place to the next, even if you don’t realize it, with puzzles diverging and converging into little inflection points in a way that culminates the game’s big ending.

The game keeps track of every task the main character sets for herself, and she has access to nearly every piece of paper, image, vision, or video via her photographic memory in the game’s menu. This significantly reduces the backtracking you need to do, though I didn’t find this game’s map that difficult to navigate anyway.

There’s lots of great little quality of life additions in this game. One I’ll call out here is that when you exit the red maze, which I’ll say no more about, there’s a built-in way to return to the maze and retain your progress. I will say that navigating the game’s menus can be unnecessarily difficult, as the game only gives you a single confirmation button. The game really could use a back button as well as dedicated menu and map buttons, but I didn’t find that that significantly hindered my experience.

I played Lorelei and the Laser Eyes in a matter of a few days, using a ton of my brain to just burrow straight through its very tough, but very stimulating puzzles. It really clicked for me. The characters and story worked for me. The puzzle designs themselves are exactly the kinds of puzzles I like to see in games. Honestly, the whole thing reminded me of this absolutely incredible escape room I did back in 2015 at the Palace of the Fine Arts in San Francisco. The Houdini room at Palace Games. It’s an experience that I measure these kinds of games and other escape rooms against all the time, and it is rare that they live up.

All of this kept me interested and pulled me through enough to keep trying when I got stuck. I ended up only needing a nudge in the right direction from a friend 1 or 2 times. I felt like Lorelei’s puzzles respected me and didn’t have any bizarre or out-of-nowhere solutions. This meant that I kept pushing, even though it was hard, because the whole package was thrilling.

The thing about the Wall of Awful is that it can be easily torn down, but only in very specific circumstances. If a task is extremely personally important, urgent, or interesting, many people who struggle with ADHD will be able to get that thing done.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes was interesting to me. It set a kind of perfect tone for my particular interests and had a puzzle structure and a mechanical focus that matched what I was looking for.

But there is another vaguely spooky puzzler game that came out recently that didn’t get this balance right.

I wasn’t planning on playing Animal Well. There was lots of hype for it, largely due to it being one of Bigmode’s first published games. If you don’t know, Bigmode is a publisher created by the YouTuber Dunkey. I am not a Dunkey viewer. His name meant nothing to me before trailer for Animal Well started getting attached to it.

I’m also not a metroidvania super fan. I love Metroid games specifically, and I enjoy many games in that style, but as for the genre overall? I kind of “nothing” metroidvanias. I enjoy the process of getting to the end and doing all the combat in those games. But I’m not interested in exploring any deeper than the game makes obvious. I do not take a beat before the final boss to go find all the upgrades I missed along the way. Largely because in most metroidvanias, navigation is tedious and the maps are enormous.

So I was going to wait Animal Well and see if, simply as a metroidvania, it got talked about enough for me to pick it up.

But then someone shared this article. (https://www.ign.com/articles/animal-well-review) IGN loved this game, and more power to the reviewer on that. They compared the game to Tunic and FEZ. Tunic, you might know, is a game I devoured and 100%’d. I loved the way that game treated puzzles within its exploration, and unlike many people who couldn’t finish the game, I really enjoyed the combat.

Fez is another one of these puzzle box games. It might arguably be the first of its kind. I’ve never finished Fez, though I played it back when it first arrived on macOS, but a lot of people I respect who have similar taste in games love Fez in the way I love Tunic.

It was absolutely these comparisons that got me to pick up Animal Well. But a couple hours into the game, I started to realize that while it was a perfectly enjoyable metroidvania, the puzzle box aspect I was looking for could be completely ignored if you just want to hit credits. In fact, I hesitate to call most of Animal Well a puzzle game at all.

When I realized this, a lot of the cracks in the game started to show. Remember how I don’t love navigating giant maps and retreading areas in Metroidvanias? Well Animal Well has a fast travel mechanic, but it’s extremely limited. The game is also full of extremely precise platforming expectations. There’s a whole section with a ghost dog that chases you across screens that I had to retry, no exaggeration, more than 20 times, even though I knew exactly what path to take.

For me, Animal Well’s platforming was at least doable. I did casually pick up and finish Celeste in an evening. But Animal Well’s platforming just didn’t feel like it needed to be that precise. All it did was take away from the stuff this game was trying to sell me, and there really wasn’t much to take.

Most of the puzzles before you hit credits the first time are environmental, but specifically in a platform-y way. It’s about raising gates and occasionally about discovering paths you didn’t notice. The puzzles I enjoy in games, the puzzles that Tunic and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes rely on, are not themselves about navigation, even if they unlock new ways to navigate the space. Instead, they often require to you to think outside of the game space, maybe even taking notes in order to do so. These puzzles play more like ARGs than video games, more often than not.

There are a couple of these in Animal Well, but they’re relegated to side content or things that are only meaningful post-credits, in the second and third layers of the game’s completion. I did enjoy these moments but I was looking for far more of them throughout.

After you do reach credits the first time, one of the things you’ll need to do to hit 2nd credits is hunt down 64 secret eggs. You’ll likely have many of them before you finish the main game. I had 39 I believe. Many of these egg hunts are enjoyable, but again, they require you to pour over the map looking for the tiniest little areas you haven’t reached, and you still have to walk over there and figure out how to get them. Or worse they ask you to simply revisit areas looking for anything suspicious.

The thing I have come to realize about Animal Well is that it is a game about the things I dislike about metroidvanias. The core game as well as its secrets are about retreading your steps and looking in dark corners. They are about really specific platforming tricks. Among all of the exclamations calling Animal Well an instant classic and making comparisons to my favorite games, what had gotten missed was that the things people were excited about were the things I found annoying. And the comparisons they were making to Tunic were not actually the things I enjoyed about that game.

Now I’m making a point, so I seem way more down on this game than I am. I enjoyed it. I think a lot of the items you get are really clever and unexpected, and they often have multiple uses that are really smart and interesting. As a metroidvania goes, it’s a good one, even if I find its save point system and limited fast travel annoying.

But folks, one thing unlocked the endgame of Animal Well for me. One thing made me have 3 uninterrupted hours of fun.

And that was getting over myself and using a guide. I started to have a really good time when I decided that I didn’t need to find all this stuff on my own. I didn’t even enjoy what this game thinks a puzzle is, so why hold myself to the idea of not using a guide? I could still see what the game wanted to show me even if I used a guide to find those last 15 or so eggs.

The best time I had with Animal Well was after I finally gave into the guides. I was finally getting to see this game as it wanted me to, I just didn’t have to fight to get on the same page as its puzzle design. I did still have to navigate a world I didn’t love jumping around, but at this point I had all the items. So that was much easier.

The night I put the game down for good, I felt genuinely fulfilled. I didn’t find every egg or every secret, but I got to see the kinds of things Billy Basso wanted me to. I made an adaptation to fit my needs as a player, and that adaptation made things easier and more enjoyable for me.

One of the ways I can get things done despite the wall of awful is to intentionally make things easier. This year I’ve done a few things to be intentional about how I make videos. First of all, I made a plan to make 1 video a month. Just having that plan, that commitment, makes the task important to me, which can sometimes trick my brain into just getting something done.

The second thing I did was share that plan with you. At the end of last year, I posted my plan over on MattHorton.live and on a bunch of social media, committing to the world that I would stick to this plan.

But the most important thing I did was make my commitment simple. It’s 1 video a month. And only 4 of them need to be in my signature style of longform deep dives and interspersed personal essays. Like this video. The rest of my videos have no boundaries. As long as they’re horizontal and longer than 60 seconds, it counts!

Making the task smaller makes the wall smaller.

I made an adaptation, and it made things easier on me.

I’ve never played a real Souls game.

I played the Jedi games, Fallen Order and Survivor, which borrow many of the elements of Souls games to let the player more convincingly role-play as a space wizard with a laser sword. And I played Tunic which uses Souls mechanics to echo the difficulty of its puzzles using the difficulty of its combat. I also have an unexplained desire to play Lies of P without playing any of the games that inspired it. I just fundamentally am not interested in a game whose entire premise is “git gud.”

So I did not want to touch Elden Ring. It was a whole thing when I decided to try and play it. My friends thought I was going to rage quit on the game an hour in and attempt to refund the purchase. That didn’t happen, and that’s not usually my style. It’s very rare that a game is as offensive to my sensibilities as Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen was.

What mostly happened was that my anxiety about the difficult of Elden Ring made me worse at the game. I would go into every fight scared and not wanting to engage, because I wasn’t sure if I was ready to handle it yet. I ended up playing too safe. It was this cycle of getting worse and worse at the game.

But the cycle was pretty quickly broken. Something happened that helped me figure out how to get past all of that anxiety and just play the game.

I got a guide.

No. Not like that. A guide.

This is my husband Jonatan. When Elden Ring came out he played it constantly. He hated Souls games before Elden Ring for the same reasons I did, but the ability to explore and become super powerful before ever following the main quest line was what pulled him in.

So when I sat down to play, he was interested and sat there with me. Just naturally, he started to push me to go certain directions or say things like “Oh you can totally handle that fight.” For a couple weeks there, we just started sitting down to play together, even if I was the only one holding the controller.

He’d tell me things like “Oh with your build you should go here and get this item.” Or “Hey if you want to go for this stat, there’s a really good sword in that cave over there.” And this stuff was genuinely revelatory for me. Pretty early on, he helped me get my Astrologer the Meteorite staff and the Rock Sling spell, which together made lots of fights I had encountered feel like nothing.

Listen, I didn’t get super far into Elden Ring, and I’m not sure I’ll ever pick it up again. But my time playing it was really fun. Because I had someone to guide me through it.

He actually wasn’t sitting with me when it happened, but between my summon, my wolf spirit ash, the meteorite staff, and rock sling, I beat Margit my first try. I asked those same friends who were taking bets on when I would give up if Margit was supposed to be easy which was a pretty funny conversation, you might imagine. If you’re not aware, Margit is the first skill check in the game. He’s supposed to be pretty hard.

But the thing that made this work was knowing my limit and not submitting to the inner voice that said I needed to just “git gud.” Instead I listened to the one that said that video games are supposed to be fun, and it literally doesn’t matter how you play them if you enjoy them.

So use the damn guide already. Or don’t. Whatever makes you happy. Just be honest with yourself about what that is.

Hey folks, thanks for watching and for sticking through all the way to this part. If you’ve made it here, you’re who I write for.

Hey I have a favor to ask. Can you share this with someone you think might enjoy it? Just send them the link and a reason why they should check it out. Or send another of my videos or blogs.

I really do want to make even more of my YouTube channel. I’d love to make real money doing this but I’m not yet at the viewership where that is realistic. The thing I don’t want to do is make videos that are exclusively built to fit whichever algorithm YouTube is favoring today. I’d rather make videos for people like you who appreciate the intentionality and purpose I try to put into my work. I’d rather grow slowly and have a group of people watching my videos that I trust and who trust me to make consistently meaningful art.

Thanks for watching and thanks for sharing. It really means the most.

Catch y’all next time.

https://matthorton.live/2024/06/02/dont-be-stubborn-use-a-guide/

#animalWell #dunkey #eldenRing #gameGuides #games #gaming #indieGames #LoreleiAndTheLaserEyes #metroidvania #review #simogo #videoGames

Lorelei And The Laser Eyes doesn’t let its surreal creativity strip its puzzles of logic - https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/lorelei-and-the-laser-eyes-doesnt-let-its-surreal-creativity-strip-its-puzzles-of-logic #LoreleiAndTheLaserEyes #ActionAdventure #Indiescovery #SinglePlayer #Simogo #Horror #Puzzle #Indie

https://n2s.altervista.org/blog/presentato-lorelei-and-the-laser-eyes-per-nintendo-switch/

Durante la Indie World Nintendo di oggi è stato presentato Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, in arrivo su Nintendo Switch il 16 maggio 2024.

#NintendoSwitch #Switch #IndieWorld #Indie #AnnapurnaInteractive #Simogo #LoreleiAndTheLaserEyes

Lorelei And The Laser Eyes is a new notebook-is-mandatory puzzle stunner from the Sayonara Wild Hearts devs - https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/lorelei-and-the-laser-eyes-is-a-new-notebook-is-mandatory-puzzle-stunner-from-the-sayonara-wild-hearts-devs?utm_source=feed&utm;_medium=rss&utm;_campaign=feed #LoreleiAndTheLaserEyes #AnnapurnaInteractive #ActionAdventure #SinglePlayer #Previews #Puzzle #Simogo #Indie

Sayonara Wild Hearts - Daniel Olsén, Jonathan Eng, Linnea Olsson, la quintessence de la pop électro comme on l'aime. Rien que la revisite du Clair de Lune de Debussy met une patate à pas mal de compositions. Voici l'intégralité de l'œuvre

#music #originalsoundtrack #ost #videogames #videogame #indiegame #indiegames #nintendo #nintendoswitch #musique #nintendodifference #bandeoriginale #sayonarawildhearts #danielolsen #JonathanEng #LinneaOlsson #simogo