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I came across this game while going through Eurogamer, and on a whim I checked out the included video (narrated by Alan Watts). I was impressed.

It's been made by the guy who made the game sequence in the movie 'Her,' who previously made the game 'Mountain,' another one of my meditative choices (for when you don't feel like taking on another quest or a nation or a problem), but just sit back and relax. I'll most likely be picking it up when it's out on PC next month, but the video included was interesting enough I thought it worth sharing.

Link to Eurogamer article

Tell me how it is when you play it.

You have a blog? Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised actually. 

Certainly interesting, though I'm not sure I can get behind something that is literally nonsense visuals for a philosophy I already have a grip on. Of, I'm speaking from a purely consumer position; artistically speaking it is very satisfying for its simplicity.

I think I could sit and listen to Alan Watts' voice until I develop bed sores, it is very amicable.

Apparently the dev tied up with the estate of Alan Watts, so outside of the inevitable YouTube vids that will come out of this, you can't hear him anywhere else. The concept itself seems fun, scratching an itch neither Spore nor Plague inc, nor many others have really scratched.

Another release this year, Birthdays the Beginning does do animal model animation better (by far), but you have to give credit to the dev of this for thinking at scale. This is one of those weird cool things that make gaming vast and fun.

The genre really doesn't see the needle move often, which makes this one more appealing. Speaking of games with cool voiceovers, The Witness delivers in spades.

The Mountain was utter shit. I don't know how or why an overpriced webtoy got the buzz it did, but I suppose if you paint enough of an artistic veneer over something, people will come. Nearly any farm, exploration, or puzzle game offers the same relaxing experience without the pretention and emptiness. On the other hand, it seems like with Everything, Alan actually managed to communicate his philosophical ideas without making a pretentious nothing-ball where anything resembling interactivity is an Easter Egg.

I guess Everything qualifies as some sort of game. My only complaint is that all those little low-polygon, semi-cell-shaded objects cluttering this space, and being able to gather them up into one little area, triggers my inner Katamari so hard not to be able to roll them up that I felt genuine irritation in the early stages of the game.

Ehhh.... Between these two and LiS, I do start to doubt your taste here, but I get it, sometimes we need to go out of our way and sacrifice some qualities to prove that Roger Ebert was just a cranky old man.

Mountain is, as I've said, an overpriced webtoy. You can get the exact same experience for free from a philosophical webcomic and a piano app/website. Throwing a screensaver together and tying it together with the kind of apps and toys you make for an introductory Computer Science course does not a dollar-eating game make. Hell, he could've replaced the pricetag with ads instead and nobody would've called him out on it if it were just attached to a webpage.  If it were a Patreon reward, or it was a pay-what-you-want promotion to get people on his website and looking at his other projects, it'd certainly fall into the realms of "Not my cup of tea, but the attention to detail was praiseworthy, I guess". But, as it stands, being sold as a complete, standalone experience, I think I'd maybe have picked it up if it were literally a gumball machine prize.

And hey, that'd be a great business model to have. If you want to be the gaming artiste, put a bunch of these different interactive screensavers in SD cards and ask if you can put your machines in some venues, then put your own website thing on the tank. It'll get on local news at least, and you'll have traffic for eons. As it stands, just being put up as a standalone for a dollar, it's not impressive nor is it really worth it.

And again, I get what you're saying, but it's still just... Not that great. It's made a point, it's fun for a bit, and it's meditative, but plenty of games do that, all of which have longer shelf lives and have a better capacity to hold your attention. None quite in the same scope or way, but I still wouldn't exactly call it essential. It demonstrates something that only games can do, but when you come away with "Eh, okay" it's not exactly justifying the existence or explaining the power of medium very well, it's just an example piece. It's the Mona Lisa of games I guess. Nice in quality, nothing exceptional or bar-raising, but at least it's an iconic demonstration of art in its given medium. I'd put it above Mona in this case, I suppose, because it has a quantifiable point to it, and it's not just a portrait of some weird stranger.

As a designer, I still believe Everything and Mountain are excellent examples of designed serenity. Both are heavily reliant on player driven narrative, and as experiences they're so off the beaten path they take the idea and run with it. Everything instills a sense of wonder whenever you see the variety of well, things, it thinks of, and Mountain was something smaller but still a good example of designed serenity for the time (Everything knocks it out of the park).

It's almost always easier to design conflict than serenity, and hence both have my respect, though I agree Mountain was the lesser experience (Everything is Essential, Mountain is a nice to play). In the case of Mountain, sure, you can run a piano side by side by a real screensaver, but by that point you're into emergent design - in which case you could honestly go for gold by adding in a cinnamon for additional sensory input - the point being that you can create your own experiences as you like, what Mountain offered was a combination of two ideas that worked. It wasn't a Michelangelo painting, or even 'high art' but it was a nice concept for its time. Because it was easy to make once you know what you wanted to make (and accordingly easy to clone) doesn't undermine the initial design work and final product in my eyes (otherwise by that logic we'd lose all respect for simple games like Tetris or Pong, yes I know that's not a perfect analogy).

Regarding the Essential rating, it earns it for both being faithful for its scope (its central tenet is that Everything is Everything, and the staging in which it builds upon that premise is solid and very well done), and for bringing something new to the game design table for discussion. Like the Witness (Essential), Everything does something new in an innovative way, and games (and their designers) on a whole are better for their existence. Furthermore, both have a very low intelligence floor to enter, I could set up a five year old with Everything for giggles and that'd make more sense than unleashing them on say a Planescape Torment. Accessibility without pandering to the lowest denominator is something I can appreciate. On an unrelated note, I do expect Everything will wind up in hospital wards as a therapeutic experience (there are precedents), and that's fine. To be rude, Everything is Asset Tourism - The Game, to be kind it's a gentle exploration of perspective and existence. Between those two end-points is a fine experience that I would say is Essential to game designers as a breed, and the general public as well.

I know I'm opening a can of worms with this, but why the hate for LiS (Recommended)? Yes, it never explained her powers nor why she had to make a choice (in my headcanon the first game was just a training sequence for time manipulators where the passing answer was to let the friend die - the way the timeline had planned for Chloe anyway). The music was excellent, as was the aesthetic style. The plot was serviceable, with the multiple jump backs in the final episode via any available photos being a high-mark for that series. The option to euthanize alternate Chloe was interesting as well. I like that the designers there knew that players rewind critical decisions in games with knowledge of the outcome (Hello save scumming, particularly XCOM save scumming), they built a game format around the knowledge, and that was neat. I could care less about the social commentary / ships / SJWs / SJW ships LiS was responsible for, but as a game it was nicely done (and a viable alternative to Telltale's increasingly cringe inducingly stagnant version of adventure gameplay)

I guess so. I can't offer up any real counter-arguments to this, since I don't really disagree with anything you just said. At the same time, I have experienced serenity (designed and unintentional) in games*, that I left both games not feeling much good. Decidedly unimpressed in the case of Everything, and unsatisfied consternation in the case of The Mountain. I guess, though, if you need a good case of designed serenity, this is a good example for the beginning designer to work off of.

Open a can of worms you did. Life Is Strange is absolute edgy cancer. Not the Suicide Squad Edgy that we're used to dealing with and cringing at, but the variety that's just subtle enough to leave a bad taste behind every scene. It has absolutely nothing to do with SJWs. Hell. the time I actually played the game was during a cringeworthy era where I harbored several quasi-SJW beliefs based on buzzwords and not evidence or experience. I really wanted this game to be great. I went in wanting to love fucking everything, and for it to be that one game that brought the female protagonists to the forefront or whatever was my yen back then. But that didn't really happen, and it only got worse as the game went on.

I could have given less of a shit about her powers, nonsensical as her actions (And their results) are, time travel doesn't make any sense in the first place, so how she got them, why she has to make a choice, and how her actions and alternate timelines aren't confuckling themselves shouldn't be as much of a problem if the story is good... But it really, really isn't. It's a fairly obvious Scooby Doo gimmick where the red herring is a red herring because he's a dick, and the guy whodunnit is the guy whodunnit because he was there all the time, and every character is an obnoxious cunt, and every sound in the soundtrack is hipstery garbage. It sure had pretty colors, and the graphics were nice for the time, but it got to the point where I felt like my ears had been raped by every word and song.

Chloe, most of all. God damn Chloe. I've had my fair share of characters in Video Games that I didn't like. I've hated characters that I was supposed to like before. Characters that were designed for me to hate, like SHODAN and Tom Nook, and characters that weren't really designed with opinions in mind, like the Civilian in Team Fortress Classic, or the Bean Salesman in Ocarina of Time. Never, (Outside of, maybe everyone in Fable) have I hated a character I was genuinely supposed to like. Chloe in this game is an absolute obnoxious shit with no redeeming qualities, and by the time I slogged to the end of this boring shitfest, for a few good seconds I didn't understand why the music was sad when you let her die. I also didn't understand why Euthanising Wheelchair Chloe was even an option. She got to be a genuinely good person for once, as opposed to, y'know, constantly upsetting trailer trash. Oh, but it's SAAAAD because now she can't be the wild rockstar tiger she used to be! She's a sad zoo tiger now! Oh fuck off, she was a fucking dick and this was her redemption, the only reason I put her down was because I figured the game would let me go full Terminator and travel through time killing off all extant versions of Chloe just as long as it got to play sad music and pretend it was a great loss. Wishful thinking, of course, but when you're sitting for hours through the world's most pretentious cutscene, wishful thinking is all you fucking have. Never have I wished more for a "Let the character die" option to be replaced by "Just fucking murder her", even if it broke what little characterization brown-bob-hair had.

I honestly vastly preferred Remember Me. And that may be me misremembering it, but fucking hell, at least I could misremember it. Plot holes and vagueness can be ignored when your epic visuals and passable gameplay surround everything. Was it an exceedingly good game? Not at all. But I'd rather have seen that same money and attention get thrown into a reworking of RM than a ride of Telltale's "'Adventure Game' means that everything's puzzles and quicktime, right?" coattails.

(I'll hand it to Telltale, what they had going with Borderlands and Batman was good, but just about everything else overstayed its welcome like a front-lawn squatter that yells racial slurs while masturbating.)

*Walking the walls of any castle you own in Mount and Blade is a big one. Knowing that this is your perfect lair and sanctum is one thing, but the fact that time doesn't pass here, and despite all the complex political shenanigans and actual mortal danger you throw yourself into, you'll never have to leave this beautiful place, never stop pretending you're having a party or looking out over your little town, that really takes the edge off an otherwise high-octane, man-chopping game in ways I can't quite describe.

There's also sailing your boat anywhere in Wind Waker. It takes just long enough that you just start to take in all the shapes and the colors around you. Despite the fact that it throws threats at you to keep the wait from overstaying its welcome, it feels perfectly peaceful and beautiful between encounters.

It's amazing enough that you can really tell a developer knows what they're doing when they take it away. If you would've told me as a 7/8 year old that I'd be genuinely scared of a blowfish helicopter, I would've laughed in your face. But have something spiny and unknown charge at me like a torpedo in the middle of a little meditative experience and stare at me to the tune of random fucking theramin music, and I'd have to pause the game and take a break for a few minutes.

I know that's not proving my point in any way at all, but it does create a very peaceful atmosphere, to the point where sometimes I just took the sail off and slowly coasted, or even just sat still in open ocean playing around with the grappling hook and the telescope, just to continue the experience and watch the sky and stars change. That was one of the most serene experiences I've had in a game.

Hell, driving like a normal person in any GTA clone. Especially when you've got a fancy car, and especially around the obligatory coastal regions. That's serenity. Also driving any vehicle in Zerahypt. Zerahypt itself is a serene experience if you don't run around steppimg on people's toes.

Oh, LiS was born from RM's rewind sequences, the only real part of that game I liked (barring the art design). Yes, Time Travel is patently impossible, but this one was a nice possible interpretation of a what-if (The Butterfly Effect and Steins;Gate are far better works though). From India I've been pretty isolated from the entire hipster wave that washed over the states, so the music didn't have any social baggage for me and I enjoyed it as such.

To be honest, yeah, I hated Chloe as well, but she wasn't really central to my enjoyment of the game, it was everything and everyone other than her who made the game interesting to me.

Telltale hit its peak with TWD1, The Wolf Among Us, and Tales from the Borderlands. Everything since has been repetitive and downhill. Batman was an alternate Batman Year 0, and an inferior one at that.

*Should I get Warband or wait for Bannerlord?

It wasn't really about the social baggage at the time, because I really did want to be that guy. It was just that the music wasn't good. I guess tastes can be different, but even from the stance of someone hating Nu-Wave everything, it's not even Nu-Wave music that's good. The new Prairie Home Companion guy is kind of okay, and I've listened to a few college radio things that play some okay songs, but this is sappy vapid airy bulsch that I absolutely cannot jive to.

I couldn't really get into the other characters either. They felt very basic and were, aside from a few, either largely unprodded (or unproddable during the time I actually bothered to pay attention.) nobody felt at all interesting or purposeful. It all felt very much like these were deliberate side characters meant to fill in the world slightly so that Chloe doesn't fully pop out as the magical pixie girl Mary Sue that she is.

Eh, I was very burnt out on both zombies and fairy tales by the time those two came out, so I never really got into them in any meaningful way. Batman, story wise, was pretty great. Just because it's the inferior origin story doesn't mean the interactivity doesn't make it worth it. It gets to the heart of simulating what Batman really is- The world's greatest Detective. Combat here is a foregone conclusion with a few button presses, everything else is investigation, dialogue, and planning, which I really got into. I daresay it was better at being batman than the Arkham games were.

*Bannerlord's not going to have any mods when it first comes out. Which is fine, since the base experience of a Mount and Blade game is tremendous enough on its own... However, you will be missing out on a lot of very unique experiences. Anything from WWI Calradia to Warhammer, from Cowboys to Star Wars, from Middle Earth to... Some sort of Anime-Esque surrealist nightmare. Mount and Blade is a series with about as many complete game overhauls as Doom.

I believe the operative difference between our perspectives therefore is path dependency. I honestly didn't (and don't) know what Nu-Wave is, but for anyone beyond a connoisseur, the LiS soundtrack may well have been underwhelming. Your disinterest at that time in Fables and TWD, and my disinterest in a lesser Batman origin stories are again contextual based on what we've seen and experienced till that date.

Out of curiousity, have you played the Ace Attorney and/or Professor Layton series?

* I usually don't go for mods, just never got into the habit. Bannerlord's graphics atleast looked like a major improvement over Warband. Will pickup Warband if it's on sale again.

Well since this seems to be a general video game thread now, I'll just put this here.

While looking for a short game to waste time with, I found one called Final Station. They do the whole pixel graphics thing to look retro and it's 2-D but so far it's sort of interesting.

You're this train conductor going from city to city in a post apocalyptic world. You have to keep your passengers safe and fed while keeping the train running which is prone to system failures at times.

When you stop at the cities, you wander about on foot to get the passcode so you can move on to the next station, along with collecting more food, passengers, money, medicine, etc.

I haven't gotten too far in the game yet, but the cities so far are pretty different, and they're starting to get worse. The one I started out in still has a semblance of civilization and doesn't seem too bad. The next one was okay too, then the third one had military patrolling about and the one I just got to looks like it might be mostly abandoned. You can find out bits of back story about the world by talking to the people or listening to your passengers talking when you're near them.

Haven't encountered the zombies yet, but I imagine it won't be long.