Everybody's Talking At Once

Damien Crawford makes games that revel in experimentation, and in taking an idea arguably too far. Faer latest game Purgatory Dungeoneer isn't not that, but it's definitely something else, too: It's a reflection on trauma, and on being a hero well past when you're young and heedless.

It's a strategic RPG, a roguelike-like, and a townbuilder. It sees Damien staking out some new territory, both mechanically and narratively, while also building on the classes fae started exploring in It's Six Random Characters and a Single Floor Dungeon, That's the Whole Game.

Here Damien talks about the game in detail for the first time, and also reflects on more than half a decade of making RPG Maker do things it almost certainly shouldn't be able to do.

You can wishlist Purgatory Dungeoneer on Steam.

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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

When David Galindo came by to reveal ChefSquad, he mentioned that his studio was working on its biggest game yet. We now know that the game in question is Cook Serve Forever, and game that isn't a continuation of the Cook, Serve, Delicious! trilogy—but it also isn't not a continuation of that series. Cooke Serve Forever is every which way an attempt to think beyond the Cook, Serve, Delicious! games, carrying forward their apocalyptic timeline into a solarpunk post-post-apocolypse, while also rethinking what the mechanics of a cooking game can be.

You can wishlist Cook Serve Forever on Steam.

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• If you want some more from the mind of Xalavier Nelson Jr. (and who doesn't?) then do check out our interview with him, mostly about An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs.

• Likewise, if you want to hear about Masao Kobayashi's exploits on TikTok, in podcasting, and of course in game design, we had him on late last year.

• Here's us talking to Nils Deneken about the (long!) development process of Mutazione.

• And here's Spenser Starke talking to us about games never being more important than players.

• Do check out this year's Charity EP Jam as well!

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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

William Pugh's studio Crows Crows Crows has just released The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. It's a remake. It's also a lot more than that. But like The Stanley Parable itself, what exactly it is can be slippery to explain, and slipperier still to talk around. Here William goes into that, as well as into Crows Crows Crows' other work, from their superlative newsletter, to The Temple of No, to Accounting+, to Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist.

SPOILERS FOR THE STANLEY PARABLE: ULTRA DELUXE BEGIN AT 0:21:55.

You can get The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe on Steam, Playstation, Xbox, and Switch.

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• For more on the 2013 version of The Stanley Parable, you can listen to our conversation with William's partner in all this Stanley, Davey Wreden. Drew also wrote about that version, and the spoiler-avoiding striptease attendant thereto.

• We also had Brendon Chung on, along with Laura Michet, to talk about the past and future of Blendo Games (among, of course, myriad other topics). Do give that a listen if William's talk of Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving intrigued you.

• A bunch of Justin Roiland's early "punk cartoons" are still findable. Lucio and I once watched House of Cosbys straight through, and emerged from that experience changed.

• Tanya Watson is COO at Bad Robot.

• Drew was trying to get at just how much of The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe, as it currently exists, was reflected in the initial pitch documents. That remains a partial mystery, for now.

• Here's the interview with TrueAchievements that Drew mentions.

• Here's a good example of William's press appearances trending toward performance art, and here specifically is the what Drew was referring to when he mentioned The Witness.

• Here the hell is Cat Burglar.

• And here's Davey Wreden talking about the removed gag from the 2013 Stanley Parable, which remains removed in Ultra Deluxe (Let the record show that Davey is not the one who used that all-time hall-of-famer in the weasel-nonsense lexicon, "racially charged").

• It was indeed People Make Games who did a fairy scathing investigation into the exploitative aspects of Roblox, and then a follow-up on the attempts to shut them up.

• Game Maker's Toolkit is really good too, though.

• Just about last and definitely least, here's DJ Khaled's appearance on Hot Ones.

• Actually-last, here's Issue #37 of the Crows Crows Crows Newsletter, which is auditory-like.

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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Marina Kittaka and Melos Han-Tani return to talk about their narrative-rich platformer-but-also-more-than-that, Sephonie. It's quite a different game from Anodyne 2, and as such, this is a fairly different conversation than the one they had with Drew about Anodyne 2. It's equal parts a conversation about oscillating between hope and not-hope, and about the arcana of platformer design—from the flattening predominance of "mairoism" in platformers, to the mind-expanding exercise of reading Anor Londo and Sen's Fortress in Dark Souls as platformer levels, to the unique and sometimes revelatory pleasures of playing games with bad controls.

We begin FLIRTING WITH SPOILERS for Sephonie at 36:16.

You can get Seponie on Steam, GOG, and itch.io.

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• This Elden Ring speedrun prominently features "zipping," and is also notable for having a pinned comment that explains how exactly the zipping works in some detail.

• Melos did in fact post the code for player character movement in Sephonie!

• Here's the interview where Marina and Melos talked about double-jumping.

• Here's NitroRad's YouTube channel.

• And here's 20th Century Frog on MyAbandonware.

• This is the Everything Everywhere All At Once interview that I was remembering.

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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Rather than try to cram all of what we've been playing into a single year-end round-up, this year we've decided to check in every three months or so. This time around, Drew, Lucio, and L talk mostly about Pokémon Legends: Arceus (with the two main Ni No Kuni games on the side), Graveyard Keeper, Death's Door, Dungeon Encounters, and Guilty Gear Strive—plus a bit about Yonder, Pupperazzi, Wytchwood, Littlewood, and Garden Story, and Nobody Saves the World.

Elden Ring is not a major topic here, but it does sort of haunt all of the other topics.

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• If you do want to hear Drew and Lucio lose their minds about It Takes Two, here's the stream (with, once again, apologies for the first episode being more or less lost to time).

• And here's Drew tidying his inventory in Destiny 2.

• Here's a roundup I did about you-monstering, and the history and effect thereof.

• And here's that Noah Caldwell-Gervais megavideoessay on Dark Souls, as well as the time Lucio and I played through Dark Souls III and mused on things.

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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Glen Henry is something of a leading voice in the Jamaican game development scene, partly by accident (by virtue of simply being a "persistent" voice in the space) and partly on purpose (by virtue of his own podcast Build It and They Will Play, where he talks to other creative folks in the Caribbean sphere about what they do, how they do it, and how they keep it sustainable).

Here he talks about that role—and also, of course, about his own growing catalog of games, which take an experimental approach to genre, and to combinations of genres, in service of making things that his ten-year-old self would have found cool.

You can get Questlike: Pocket on Android, and the rest of the Spritewrench catalog on Steam.

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• Here's Glen's panel at PAX Online East 2021, as well as his co-presentation with Graham Reid and Zane Francis for the IGDA.

• For those who want to follow (and/or support) the development of Street Boy.

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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Spenser Starke stops by to talk about his "silent role-playing game" Alice Is Missing, the importance of players' emotional safety, tabletop systems as "subgenre generators," and the undersung virtue of finely crafted vibes.

You can get the digital version of Alice Is Missing on Roll20 and DriveThruRPG.

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• "Type 2 Fun," for those who don't know, refers to those kinds of fun that aren't fun in the traditional sense, but are still rewarding—experiences that are engaging in other ways in the moment, and/or that prove valuable and meaningful in retrospect.

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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Osama Dorias' career stretches back to the pre-iPhone days of mobile gaming, and on through a great many shifts in the industry—including shift he's been an instrumental part of, like improving Muslim repression in games and the teams that make them. (It's often two steps forward, one step back, as he says in this interview). He recent left WB Games after finishing up his work as Lead Designer on Gotham Knights, and while he emphatically cannot talk about that game just yet, this moment offered a great opportunity to talk to him about lots else.

You can follow Osama on Twitter, and listen to The Habibis wherever pods be cast.

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• The Video Game History Hour is definitely one of our favorite podcasts. Their recent episode about different forms of preservation is what I had in mind while talking to Osama.

• Here's a decent summary of the DAO that bought a copy of the preproduction book for Alejandro Jodorowsky's unmade Dune film. If that sentence only confused you more, which would be more than understandable, then here's a documentary about said unmade film, and here's an explanation of what DAOs (or Digital Autonomous Organizations) even are.

• And here's the story of that unauthorized id Software PC port of Super Mario Bros. 3 coming to light. (That Video Game History Hour episode linked above touches on it a bit as well).

• The Nice Games Podcast also recently reposted their interview with Osama, which is almost entirely about making games with his kids.

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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Dean Razavi is an indie-developer-turned-indie-producer, currently working at Akupara Games. Here is talks about that studio's newest release, Kardboard Kings, as well the "indies for indies" ethos that drives his work. Along the way, we talk about the importance of collaboration even on solo projects, the challenge of building and rebuilding communities around games, and the gravitation pull of games that become genres (or at least genre touchpoints) unto themselves.

You can get Kardboard Kings on Steam starting February 10.

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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Star St. Germain has worked in an uncommonly wide variety of media, from music to comics to gallery art—all within a consistent and unified practice, which she talks us through here, and which she also brings to ArcaniteCo's debut game HoloVista. In talking about that project, we also talk about the existential perils of social media saturation, the unique possibilities of generative image-making, the real technologies and possibilities behind the Web3 hype, and the many things we mean when we say mixed reality.

You can get HoloVista for iPhone and iPad in the Apple App Store.

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• Nick Tierce and Steve Peters are indeed genuine luminaries of the ARG scene.

• Tender Claws' Tempest has more or less come and gone, as Star says.

• Our conversation with Jordan Thomas about The Blackout Club doesn't touch on the game's theatrical/mixed reality elements, because those hadn't started —but it does offer an interesting look of what the game looked like before it became what it eventually became.

• Our talk with Russel Quinn is definitely closely related to Star's more expansive, tech-and-medium-agnostic definition of mixed reality.

• Here's CAGES, which Wolf and the Wondershow is currently putting on in Los Angeles.

• And here's Rami Ismail's thread about dice.

• Monographs, the precursors to NFTs, were indeed created by Anil Dash and Kevin McCoy as a solution to the quite specific problem of wealthy art collectors wanting to "own" digital art.

• Thinking though that notion of commissions on aftermarket sales of the NFTs associated with artworks, yeah, that's absolutely something that we could achieve without the blockchain, using ordinary contracts, royalties, and chains of trust—but it's also an example of a potentially useful idea that could get normalized in the course of our current, NFT-crazed market moment.

• Dan Olson's truly excellent video on NFTs wasn't out at time of recording. Drew did however have his then-recent conversation with Matt Condon and Jonathan Mann in mind. (Also, the Foldable Human himself had already read a draft of the script for his video on stream).

• Generative Adversarial Networks are utterly fascinating, and they have enormous potential.

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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.