What I've been playing

Half-Life: Alyx making-of, Inside, Lethal Company, Moose Life, NieR: Automata

(Or watching the playing of.) Over the past three years. Part 1, part 2, part 3.

1. Half-Life Alyx: The Final Hours

The interactive-ish story of the making of Half-Life: Alyx (a VR game). This you want to read a “making of” for, because it has so many constraints that each development decision is an interesting puzzle.

There are at least four important life lessons, but crucially: the G-Man voice actor also voices the “That was easy!” Staples button.

Valve built all of Alyx, then didn’t like massive parts of the tone and story (too serious and too irrelevant) and changed as much as possible along the edges, without changing anything about the core because there was no time.

Developing the Source 2 engine from 2007-2015 spectacularly slowed down Valve’s game-making:

The quote at the bottom is applicable to lots of things in life…

For Source 2, we wanted to create a “polygon soup.”

In 2013 they’re still making Source 2 and like seven different games, and Valve’s structure where anyone-can-work-on-anything is harmful at that time.

It’s an enormous thing to start something new if only two other projects are going on. But if there are ten other projects, it’s a lot easier to create yet another branch.

“We sort of became the highest paid blog post writers of all time,“ remembers Portal 2 writer Jay Pinkerton, who gave up and quit Valve in 2017 after not shipping a new game for 5 years.

And this seems important and correct, and I think about this for my life:

“We sort of had to collectively admit we were wrong on the premise that you will be happiest if you work on something you personally want to work on the most. Instead we decided as a group that we would all be happier if we worked on a big thing, even if it’s not exactly what we wanted to work on.” (Robin Walker)

The old Stockholm telephone tower inspired the under-construction Citadel in the game.

“We started imagining the under-construction Citadel as this huge LAN party with wires everywhere, sort of like a huge Wi-Fi router.” - Tristan Reidford

In tone, Alyx was much more “dark, serious and laborious” when all the main gameplay elements were completed, before Valve did a “fun pass” on the game.

“I am so lonely playing this game.” (Designer Matt Scott)

And during development you had to touch this enormous gold key to the normal lock and both would disappear and the door would open; I kind of like this.

2. Inside

Jonathan Blow has a kind of “best of the best” list on Steam. I am a little surprised Inside is on it, but I get it. Because it is basically a 2D side-scroller, the constraints are fun — how good of a game can a 2D side-scroller be? (Braid is one, too.)

During any part of the game, I never feel like Inside can challenge the player for too long; there are not enough gameplay elements. As a journey it is wonderful, and the right mix of game-to-experience to show someone who doesn’t play games often. But sometimes it is literally for 7-year-olds.

Best: the atmosphere and pulsating sounds of the 20-person platform section and the bridge thereafter. Worst: moving the platform with the wheel, over and over, after the part where you gain the power to breathe underwater.

Great pulses and animations on death. And for a 2D game, it’s striking that it has pretty good easter eggs.

Looks like nothing much, but: the best atmosphere of the game. If you look at the background, you can try to guess.

3. Lethal Company

Probably the single best experience of discovering enemies and their capabilities. You do it with your friends, scared and panicked and adrenalined up, and each enemy is a puzzle, and the focus isn’t really on killing them, but existing alongside them. I want to play Lethal Company more than any Souls-like, so this is my favorite stack of enemies in any game.

And there are crackly walkie-talkies and somewhat-reliable radar and the ship door doesn’t stay closed. It is really a spectacular thing. But the game loop of finding stuff to sell, to buy more stuff — sadly not interesting in the long run. But the “long run” might not come until 20 hours…

If there is ever a Lethal Company-like that is a co-op puzzle of figuring out how to defeat Lethal Company enemies, that might be a top-five all-time game.

If you are very sure you will never play this, you can watch alter ego’s series on the AI of each enemy.

4. Moose Life

Also on Jon Blow’s Steam list. It’s Moose Life.

You want me to discuss this? With text on a blog post?

5. NieR: Automata

Regarding all my uncompleted lists of media, I sometimes think: if I just wait, I will realize that some of these things aren’t actually essential for me to experience, and won’t have to spend time on them. I still gave NieR: Automata about 90 minutes of clicking around on YouTube and reading the plot.