That’s a great point. I suppose one could tell how healthy the relationship is between developer and publisher by looking at how many dev companies on the roster have created a second great game. Of course, that’s tough even with a great publisher, so maybe that’s not realistic.

Wow. I’ve always trusted games published by Annapurna to be something exciting, new, and high quality. I’m devastated to hear that this publishing company is floundering.

I play a lot of board games. And I own a lot of board games. Not all of my games get played very much, so I like to track each play and over time see which games are forgotten gems or which games I’d be best to just trade away.

In the board game community, you might come across people talking about the “Friendless” metric of their collection. It’s a totally made up measurement, invented by a person with the user name Friendless. In that way, it’s like the Elo rating in chess and other games. I find it’s useful to know when I’m “done” with something that doesn’t really have an end, like playing board games. You can always play one more game.

Friendless hypothesized that if you play a game 10 times, you’ve gained 90% of its remaining utility. So after 10 plays, you consumed 90% of the game play that game provides. After another 10 plays, you’re at 99%. By the time you reach 30 plays, you’ve consumed 99.9% of the game.

You can do the same with games. Maybe the number of plays changes a bit. Maybe it’s not the number of plays, but the number of hours. I would say that games of Civ are like games of any other board game: 10 = 90% utility gained. Matches in COD, probably not the same.

Thanks for this! I had no idea about the history of the game.

Wandersong is a game about happiness that made me really happy while I was playing it. Not all the way through; there are parts that are sad too. But I’m thinking of replaying it because it made me feel really happy when I played it the first time.

Yes! For most genres of games, I’ve noped out of some games but completed others. It wasn’t until you mentioned it that I realized I’ve never completed a Zachtronic game. I absolutely adore what Witness was doing, but I haven’t finished it. I should go back to it.

I read those when I was younger and re-read them recently. They are surprisingly good considering they were written by game developers.

Loved this game! Got completely consumed by it.

If I had been the one to decide what features this sequel should have, I never would have considered including a playable New Jerusalem or having NPC companions or any of the new stuff. And if you had asked me what I thought about those features before the game came out, I would have said it sounds like they don’t understand what people liked about the first game.

But this game surprised me in numerous ways and I honestly loved every hour of my playthrough.

This is fascinating and I would have never heard about it without you. Thanks!

I love seeing recommendations for Wandersong. It’s a completely different type of adventure game with a unique, and lovely, plot.

Thanks for sharing this interview and article. It was a really interesting read. I feel like I understand a lot more about how the game came to be now that I’ve read it

Thanks for that! I actually had to put the game down for several months because my child had just been born and I couldn’t handle one of the scenes in the game. It was heavily telegraphed, so I had time to stop the game before anything upsetting happened. And when I went back to it months later it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it might be. But yeah, it’s a game about the death of many family members, told through metaphor and fanatical imagery.

Oh man, I just want to give a shout out to the Splatoon ink mechanic.

The game is a competitive arena shooter. That would be pretty uninteresting, but instead of competing for kills or holding objectives, the teams are competing to cover the largest surface area with ink or paint. That’s pretty neat. But there’s more.

Every player has a special “squid mode” they can use when standing on ink of their colour. When in squid mode players travel much faster, can travel up walls, and are extremely hard to spot, but can not attack or lay new ink.

This makes the laying ink in specific areas valuable, as it makes it faster to get from the spawn point to the front faster and easier. It also rewards holding contiguous trails of ink, or conversely, cutting off your opponent’s ink trails.

I was going to say that Serious Sam isn’t terribly unique. But you’re right about the scale of the battles being far larger than anything else like it. Good call.

There is really something very different about this game. If you point to any individual part of it, there are other games that do that thing. But all together, it’s quite unique. And it’s a pretty fun game.

I come back to play Duskers often and I always enjoy it. There’s not much else like it.

Wow. I’m super impressed with all the suggestions here. I’ll add a few of my own that haven’t been mentioned yet.

Her Story - you query a police archive database for video clips, eventually revealing the plot. Kind of a mash between a murder mystery book with the pages out of order and Google. If you like it, check out Immortality

What Remains of Edith Finch - all you can do is walk around a very unusual house. The narrative reveals itself as you do so. That narrative is fantastical and heartbreaking and also very sweet.

Crawl - multiplayer game - you are all trying to escape a monster and trap filled dungeon. One of you is alive and the rest are spirits who can possess the monsters and traps. Any time a spirit kills the living player, they become the living player. Unique boss fight at the end where multiple spirits control parts of a huge boss monster.

Please consider WanderSong. It’s a small game and was made with so much love. Games can have a huge variety of plots and environments. But the vast majority of games, regardless of what they are about, are actually about victory. You’re a space dwarf mining for minerals, but the game is all about mastery and winning. You’re a dragon-kin with magic shouts, but every quest is about achieving a victory over a challenge. And so on.

I would say that WanderSong is not a game about victory. It’s a game about happiness. The character, the mechanics, the plot, the environments; they all serve first to explore the meaning of happiness. There’s nothing else quite like it. You can find it here.

Hard space: Shipbreaker was my go to comfort game for a long time. Dive in, cut some walls, and toss some junk. Just perfect.

I knew that I was going to enjoy A Short Hike before I played it. What I didn’t expect was how much I enjoyed it. There’s so much more there than I anticipated and some of it is really lovely.