Tag Archives: exploration

Ludus Novus 029 – The Goalless Path of Bernband

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Ludus Novus
Ludus Novus
Ludus Novus 029 - The Goalless Path of Bernband
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What do people actually mean when they say “walking simulator?” Bernband by Tom van den Boogaart doesn’t even seem to have a goal. But then why do you keep playing it?

Bernband: https://gamejolt.com/games/bernband/34864
Bernband Remake Twitter: https://twitter.com/bernband

Youtube (MP3 below):

Transcript: Transcript for this episode

If you like this episode, check out the other podcasts I’m involved in: Audacious Compassion and The Future Proof Podcast

The Ludus Novus podcast is supported by my patrons. To help, please visit my Patreon.

The theme music is “A Foolish Game (Vox Harmony Adds)” by Snowflake, Admiral Bob, and Sackjo22, available on ccMixter under a ccby3.0 license.

REFERENCES
Ashe, Pat. “Walking Simulator Simulator.” Feral Vector, 2014. https://soundcloud.com/thepatashe/walking-simulator-simulator (Transcript on The Pat Ashe, 6 July 2014. https://web.archive.org/web/20141007075156/http://thepatashe.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/walking-simulator-simulator/ )

Barlow, Sam. Her Story. 2015. http://www.herstorygame.com/

The Fullbright Company. Gone Home. 2013. https://gonehome.game/

Goodwin, Joel. “Screw Your Walking Simulators.” Electron Dance, 16 July 2014. http://www.electrondance.com/screw-your-walking-simulators/

Juul, Jesper. “Without a goal”. In Tanya Krzywinska and Barry Atkins (eds):Videogame/Player/Text. Manchester University Press, 2007.
http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/withoutagoal/

Key, Ed and David Kanaga. Proteus. 2013. http://twistedtreegames.com/proteus/

Koster, Raph. A Theory of Fun for Game Design. 2nd ed., O’Reilly Media, 2013.

Nygren, Nicklas. Knytt. 2006. https://web.archive.org/web/20170509070555/http://nifflas.ni2.se/?page=Knytt

Schell, Jesse. The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. 2nd ed., CRC Press, 2015.

van den Boogaart, Tom. Bernband. https://gamejolt.com/games/bernband/34864

A Stillness of Mind, Skill Honed Sharp – Hyper Light Drifter

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Screenshot of Hyper Light Drifter from Steam user 芊一.
Screenshot of Hyper Light Drifter from Steam user 芊一.
Hyper Light Drifter, from Heart Machine1, is an inscrutable game: one which presents you with various mysteries and challenges, inviting you to overcome them, but doesn’t bother guiding you along that path. It’s part of a new trend in so-called “retro-inspired” games that recontextualizes the challenge and low fidelity of console game from the 1980s as intentional, stylistic choices. Because of these choices, it has limited accessibility but provides a specific mood and emotional journey that would be difficult to evoke in a more populist game.

Continue reading A Stillness of Mind, Skill Honed Sharp – Hyper Light Drifter →

Show 1 footnote

  1. A company with whom I feel a sort of kinship, as their logo has some strong similarities with that of my company, Future Proof Games. ↩

Playing With My Food

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I played one of my favorite games today: grocery shopping.

I am a geek: a person inclined to get excited over the minutia of a topic or topics. One of the ways I manifest this is by being a foodie. I enjoy the history, science, and craft of food preparation and consumption. Food has more in common with games than one might think. In fact, everything about food can be appreciated in the same way as a game.

The first-world way we approach food fundamentally a luxury. We need to eat, but our basic needs can be taken care of by any number of inexpensive and simple foods. The countless choices available at a grocery store and the multitude of preparations are frivolous from the perspective of our pre-technological ancestors or even from the perspective of a less-well-off third- or second-world citizen.

That means that my grocery experience was only a short hop away from being a game.
Continue reading Playing With My Food →

Phenomenon 32 and the Cinders of Earth

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I’ve been playing a game lately about exploring a place where a man-made disaster has bent the very fabric of reality itself, creating bizarre anomalies and strange creatures. I explore the abandoned remnants of cities and laboratories, scrabbling for resources and seeking answers to the nature of the disaster.

This game is so good, it’s distracted me from playing STALKER.

Jonas Kyratzes‘s new game Phenomenon 32 has a similar setting to GSC Game World‘s Chernobyl shooter: the familiar modern world, distorted by the folly of science unbounded by ethics into a place where the very rules of reality can’t be trusted. This isn’t a new premise: STALKER is indirectly based on the 1972 novel Roadside Picnic, and the seminal work for this concept is probably the “Dying Earth” series. It’s sheer coincidence that I was playing these two games at the same time, but there are several good reasons why Phenomenon 32 is winning out.
Continue reading Phenomenon 32 and the Cinders of Earth →

Ludus Novus 013: Over the Next Hill

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Ludus Novus
Ludus Novus
Ludus Novus 013: Over the Next Hill
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In this podcast, I talk about exploration games. Exploration games, as I categorize them, are games with an open world that offer an array of paths at any one time. They’re awesome because they appeal to players’ curiosity and completionism, and they help deal with player frustration.

References:

The music for this episode is “Space Doggity” by Jonathan Coulton, and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license.