Why I Dropped Void Stranger

sorry

[@charl2182]

yo if you dropped it you should pick it back up. like, if you leave it there, someone might trip over it and fall

[@SumioMondoKTP]

lol

[@lancesmith8298]

Or worse, you dropped it in the Haha Funny Spoiler Spot and now they gotta do it again

[@BookWyrmOnAString]

Put it away in the toy box for safety

[@birchwwolf]

i'd file Outer Wilds and Myst under "mystery". the player assumes the role of detective and must piece the clues of the situation together. There's no puzzle mechanics because the events already took place, you're simply there to solve the mystery; and mystery fiction often involves riddles as the genre is primarily novel-based.

[@catmacopter8545]

pretty much unrelated but for some reasons youtube decided to highlight "outer wilds" in blue like a link but without the underline, and put a little magnifying glass on the top right of it. When tapping on it, it redirected me to a yt search for outer wilds??? Wtf??? And when I went back it was gone??????

[@crenando8259]

Same no idea what that was about lol​@@catmacopter8545

[@prototane]

​@@catmacopter8545what the freak i saw that too!

[@MxPokirby]

This design of "you either have an eligible brain to intuit the dev's solution or you don't" is the reason I felt no guilt over looking up a guide to finish The Witness. Or just, in games in general. An accessibility issue in design that can't ever have a fix.

[@lancesmith8298]

And on the flipside, my willingness to start looking everything up after one bite of forbidden spoilers completely blinded me to the fact that there had to be real solutions in the game *somewhere*, and that my enjoyment of the game was on the shoulders of giants. Maybe I should have learned this after my enthusiasm petered out upon learning of a definitive true ending, but hearing the actual, game-given solution for Brands makes me realize that this game is not reasonable to finish without a spoiler Sherpa or being fluent in wizard speak. The thin layer between me loving the riddle game, the riddle media in general a la ARGs, versus me never bothering with them ever again, is the people who chewed it for me.

[@nickziegler1904]

On the other hand there is something immensely satisfying about being stuck on a riddle and realizing the trick, the hidden assumption the dev was basing the riddle on and solving it from there. It's kinda an impasse thing and very subject to taste. Take the Layton games for example. Like half of the puzzles are actually riddles and cannot be solved unless you clue into an assumption the puzzle designer purposely hid from you. Finding that hidden assumption is the challenge and overcoming it is satisfying.

[@psymar]

​@@nickziegler1904The layton games at least usually have an available hint to explain the trick. Although sometimes the hint is shit and doesn't explain crap

[@Saltine3022]

and also part of the reasons those kinds of mystery games are compelling to those of us who enjoy them. Getting into the dev's head by the vibes of their art and trying to make deductions based on what expectations the text sets are their own forms of immersion, at least to me.

[@sprigtherecluse6741]

this is largely why i dont play puzzle games as a whole, a majority of the time i find myself stuck in the same thought loop of an attempted solution and cant get out without a very large amount of effort, and trying to see what the devs wanted me to see is very hard when im stuck in my head like that

[@wreztesser8010]

I like how you have jokes from past vids hanging from the top like trinkets jangling from a car windshield

[@topcatfan]

I voided on the 1st screen did a few chapters then realised eating a strange fruit from a demon in the underworld is 100% bad ending coded

[@MeowC07120]

“I’ve recently been getting swallowed WHOLE” - Patriccia, 2024

[@asdfhsfdtehaed]

vore

[@TurbopropPuppy]

vore 😳

[@Mynti_Dragon]

vore

[@timofeydyudin4226]

vore stranger

[@RangeCMYK]

vore

[@bugdracula1662]

Idk if this makes sense but “I interpreted the words one layer too literally” reminds me of how it feels to be autistic and talk to people ever (of note my autism is self diagnosed so idk if that’s actually true)

[@EriLed12]

I feel the Outer wilds is not a puzzle game or even really a riddle game it’s nearly a pure exploration game (it’s kinda a platformer too lol)

[@obtusemooose]

yes. not to say that you can play a game wrong but i do think thats viewing it in a way thats uncharitable to how it wants to be played, if that makes sense

[@android19willpwn]

yeah it straight-up gives you the answers to most of its "riddles" through exploration. It's a game about the thrill of discovery, rather than the satisfaction of a solution.

[@Longshotrider]

I was coming down here to say the same thing lmao. I watched a friend play it and they became increasingly frustrated at their inability to do certain things as they came across them, and in many cases, were attempting to brute-force sections of the game as if they were logical puzzles to be solved within the game world. I can't fault them for this because the game didn't adequately communicate to them the general mindset of "you can't do this right now, go away and find out how to do it" when they came across these "puzzles" and knowledge checks. They're normally not skill checks or tests of cleverness, but knowledge checks to push you to investigate or explore for answers. The lack of feedback for trying to find solutions without exploration is understandably frustrating, though.

[@timofeydyudin4226]

​@@LongshotriderI haven't played the game but don't you kind of describe exactly what the complaint with so-named here riddle games is? Like lack of a feedback and necessity to interpret things some correct way, with only exception that this way can be found inside the game world? But even in this video there was a complaint about a hint that was "not good"/had to be interpreted and applied to correct places but was too vague to be useful in this specific situation?

[@ninjabunny9526]

@@timofeydyudin4226 "riddles" as stated here more so rely on guessing internal logic rather than just having to stumble upon the answer, as the answer isn't just flatly given to you in void strangers but it is for outer wilds. Riddles also thrive on vagueness, which is pretty key for void strangers, where you have to just kinda think through the devs logic to solve the puzzle, whereas you just gotta explore more to solve it in Outer Wilds.

[@FaustianBargainBin]

fascinating. I love riddle type games, I often have trouble relating to people so I really love that moment where my brain wave manages to sync up with a strangers over a vague clue, or when I look up the answer and get to go "oh, i never would've thought of that, that's so cool". But I'm also a lot more likely with a riddle to go "well that's just stupid" when I hear the solution than with a more rules-based puzzle. But yeah being sold one and given another definitely sounds frustrating.

[@xenathcytrin202]

I feel like this video very well lays out the difference between a riddle and a puzzle. Both have answers, but they bring you to these answers in very different ways. Puzzles will lay out their rules in clear terms. Whether by saying them directly or through showing them, at some point the rules will be spelled out. Discovery of the solution comes in fully understanding the implications of those rules and designing the solution to the puzzle. There is clear, direct feedback when you have the wrong solution, and you can work through the issues. Riddles on the other hand may operate on a set of universal rules, but they do not have to, and often times they are not explained. Clues are given towards what a solution might be, and there is little feedback other than you got it right or you did not. Leaps in logic are almost always required and you are expected to form connections between different ideas in different areas. You solve a puzzle by making a solution, you solve a riddle by finding the solution. For a puzzle any solution that works works. For a riddle, only the solution works. This isn't to say that riddles cant have multiple solutions and that puzzles cant have only one, simply that this is the premise of how solving them goes. Riddles at their most simple form have only one answer, and puzzles at their base form have any number of answers. A good puzzle will add constraints that narrow down possible solutions to one or a handfull. In the same way a good riddle will expand their solutions out to every answer that is correct in some way, or at the least give hints to point in the right direction from those incorrect answers.

[@nickziegler1904]

I think another thing that makes a good riddle is that it will try to actively mislead you from the solution. A puzzle presents a Situation and makes the rules to solve it clear. A riddle makes it unclear what it really even wants from you in the first place. That isn't a bad thing either. It's super satisfying to realize how the riddle was trying to trick you. it feels like you're outsmarting the problem.

[@jessehunter362]

As someone who loves both puzzle games and, as you phrase it, riddle games, I have to disagree on the idea that they're *only* built to simulate the good vibes of puzzle solving. Probably most of them, because it's really easy to make a riddle by accident! But they're also good to give a driving force for exploration and theorizing, and some of us like the struggle of figuring out bullshit riddles. It's not the same kind of pleasure as a good puzzle, but it can be nice! Totally get not liking it though! It's definitely an acquired taste, and Void Stranger's... especially harsh. Exclusively made for a) people who really like the process of riddling and are willing to push through a great deal of mostly quite mediocre puzzles for the sake of it and b) people who are REALLY invested in the story and want to learn more. I don't know that i would reccomend riddle games in general, and Void Stranger in particular, to anyone.

[@ZannyAisling]

yeah that puts it pretty well i think (this vid actually does get me kinda interested in VS, lol. “wow that sounds like a bad gameplay experience for you! i’d like it!! sounds cool 4 me!! except the locked-into-infinite-lives bit (which is avoidable with this information!)!”

[@CloudCuckooCountry]

I completely agree with your distinction between "puzzle games" and "riddle games". Recently I was trying to explain to friends why I dropped Outer Wilds and the best I could come up with is pointing at Steven's Sausage Roll and saying "I prefer puzzles like those". I prefer following logic that's clear, consistent, and solvable, as opposed to trying to guess the subjective logic of the puzzle designer Also Steven's Sausage Roll doesn't kick me out of a puzzle and make me travel all the way back to it if I don't solve it in 10-15 minutes

[@jartism]

I understand but I enjoy riddle games and awful lot as well, but for different reasons. I like feeling like I'm in a dialogue with the designer through the medium of the puzzle, attuning myself through early mistakes and logic leaps to what is expected of me and to be forced to look at things from differing perspectives

[@ninjabunny9526]

@@jartism im very glad you said this bc i feel the exact same way, but wasn't sure if anyone else would!

[@AshGreytree]

It's legitimately comforting to know that there is someone else who dropped Outer Wilds for its riddle game systems. It was that as well as deaths that felt so cheap. I gave up at Brittle Hollow. I still have no idea why the game is lauded so heavily.

[@FluffiestTail]

​@AshGreytree it is lauded as a cohesive narrative exploration game about unraveling a mystery piece by piece using consistent experimentation and occasional haphazard extreme risks! It is not lauded as a puzzle game. The people who praise it praise it for what it is, not what it isn't.

[@Squalidarity]

I recognize the difference in taste, but as someone who really enjoyed Outer Wilds, I don’t think calling it “trying to guess the subjective logic of the designer” is quite fair. It may be guesswork, sure, but it’s _educated_ guesswork. Each loop is structured like a science experiment: you review uncovered information, form a hypothesis, plan an expedition, experiment, observe, gain new information, repeat. And yet, the game still very much discourages brute forcing its puzzles with how information is carefully distributed throughout. Throughout my playthrough, I’d repeatedly put a puzzle that stumped me on the backburner to explore or chase other leads, then return once I had uncovered new information. Positive feedback is immediate too; figure out a way past a roadblock, and you’ll immediately be greeted with a new area, new information, and/or something weird happening. I trusted that the game would eventually provide the pieces I needed, and- barring one minor frustration owing to some missed signposting- it always made good on that trust. The game’s systems and timeline are very much clear, consistent, and solvable, but only if you treat the solar system as a cohesive whole, rather than a series of independent planet-based challenges to be ticked off one after the other; only if you take the time to understand it holistically, and are able to recognize when you don’t have enough information and come back later.

[@nevinmyers1245]

The problem might be that these "riddle" games are being marketed as puzzle games despite having fundamentally different gameplay loops, meaning riddle games are attracting the puzzle game crowd who would rather have a more logic and rules-based experience.

[@ninjabunny9526]

I 100% get the more logical puzzle solving vs the more vibes based puzzle solving dichotomy you talk about. As someone who grew up playing point and click adventure games i am firmly the kind of person this game and its puzzles seem to be made for. I tend to find proper logical puzzles really boring but I love trying to parse the solution to a puzzle like "how are you opening this lock?" and you have to find some wire cutters lying around and then use them on a coat hanger to fashion it into a lockpick to open the lock (real ones will get the reference). I tend to feel more satisfied from these puzzles bc they rely less on mastery of some system of logic and more on engaging narratively with it. By that, I mean that you just have to feel what the story wants, and while it is very frustrating and annoying when you aren't connecting in that way with the game, it's extremely satisfying when you do; plus being frustrated is fun too, sometimes. Maybe a simpler way of defining it is that these "riddles" are based more on what is emotionally logically the right solution rather than what is logically logically the right solution. Hopefully that all makes sense to you, since it makes a lot of sense to me but I fear I haven't been able to truly articulate what I'm saying. Perhaps you just need a brain like mine, totally destroyed by years of lucasarts and humongous entertainment games, to parse what I've just said.

[@android19willpwn]

If I might put a different spin on the fun of "riddles" it's the difference between whether someone prefers figuring out rules or applying rules. At the start of any puzzle game is a portion of time where you don't know how anything works or fits together, and you poke and prod at things in different ways until you understand what each element does in each context. More traditional "puzzles" have you learning the rules quickly and then applying those known rules in ever more complicated, intricate, and/or strict scenarios. On the other hand "riddles" keep you in that initial state by each riddle essentially having its own rules. You can build intuition from the game's overall logic, but each trial is about poking and prodding, crossing off incorrect ideas and putting the pieces together in new ways to form new ideas. Once you know the rules, the riddle is solved and the rules change again.

[@phoebeandromeda]

i can definitely get your frustration! but i do think saying it's only meant to simulate the feeling of solving a puzzle is a bit harsh & reductive - it's a radically different type of puzzle, and it's more subjective, yes, but just cuz it's different & doesn't work for you doesn't mean it's fundamentally invalid i actually found the rest of the video pretty cathartic, and there are games like baba is you, oneshot, animal well, and rain world that I really relate to that frustration on. i can't even fully understand the framework some of their puzzles function as "puzzles" within, but i don't think that's a good reason to dismiss them as only being mindless simulations of puzzles

[@madelinecarlson5814]

This is super fascinating to me because the description that you gave of how the puzzles felt with permadeath was pretty much the EXACT experience I had playing through the game, because I managed to get all the way to Gray's ending without ever seeing the Game Over screen by playing extremely carefully throughout. I had many, many close calls, but I managed to have the crunchy permadeath puzzling that you described and ended up fairly smitten with the game. I wasn't even aware that you could get infinite lives (at risk of a bad ending) until after I finished Gray's run! While I think the bad ending you get for eating the void fruit is extremely cool in terms of presentation, I'm also a bit sad that it's even an option, in hindsight. The kind of harsh, tense, messy experience that playing the whole of Gray's run blind with the threat of permadeath hanging over me wasn't something I've gotten from any other game. I think it would've been more interesting if the developers fully committed to that, or at least made the void fruit something you had to deliberately obtain instead of just offering it to you the first time you died for real, so more people could've experienced what I did. While I really liked Void Stranger, and I get why you don't, but I DO think that you can actually get a good puzzle game experience from it without engaging with the "riddle" elements of the game at all, though, since I found that... (SPOILERS) Just playing through the following run with Lillie was good enough, as the puzzles in Lillie's run are genuinely challenging (at least, they were to me). You can get more puzzles and another ending by engaging with the game's riddles, but I don't really feel like it's required, especially if you don't like engaging with riddles. I only did so after I completed both of the initial runs! Totally fair if you never try the game again, though. It's not for everyone.

[@DemonixTB]

5:28 Has me confused because, Outer Wilds just ... isn't a puzzle game, like At all? You go out and have a fun space adventure and you die over and over, sure that's just one more chance to go out and have an adventure somewhere, see what happens at this place, it's mysterious how it all happened but as you adventure you come across little bits of the story that your ship even keeps track of for you, and eventually you find the right places that tell you exactly what to do for the places that are harder to get to, and ultimately you get told what happened and the game ends. and the beautiful thing is just, the scale, the tactile interconectedness of the world and the way they are shaped by natural forces and peoples inhabiting them. It's not a puzzle, it's an interactive book that isn't told from beginning to end in a linear way. It's my favourite game of all time, but I would never compare it to a sokoban puzzler.

[@rrtolkein4221]

I believe Outer Wilds was mentioned because it's a game that Patricia has used on tumblr as an example to build her dichotomy of games that have puzzles vs riddles, not because it's anything like a Sokoban puzzler. She's saying it /isn't/ like Sokoban puzzlers, the "problem solving" elements of Outer wilds are more like riddles to her than Sokoban style Puzzles.

[@crumpetsancheese2197]

yeah, she's not comparing it to sokoban, she's comparing it to void stranger.

[@ConvincingPeople]

See, what’s fascinating about this is, I’m way more of a “riddle game” person than I am a systems-oriented puzzle game person, so I see your frustration and respect it, and I do enjoy hearing someone with your level of expertise and delight in the subject _talk_ about systems puzzles, but when it comes to actual _play…_ gimme hard lateral thinking and oblique language games every time. I adored Riven as a wee bairn and I continue to be a menace. Call it being at the other corner of the autism spectrum when it comes to video games, if you will. That said, I do think you could have worded some of this in a less unintentionally insulting fashion? An open-ended question with a specific answer in a specific context isn’t purely about guessing; it simply utilises an entirely different set of reasoning skills from a clearly delineated nigh-mathematical system with a very specific set of inputs and outputs. It’s similar to how functional harmony and serialism rely on entirely different internal logics but are both still theoretical frameworks for creating music and can be used to create compelling if very different artworks.

[@oke5403]

as a mathematician i have a similar comparison between the genres, puzzle games are like, well they're like a form of logic puzzle. Wheras "riddle games" are more like category theory to me, about discovering connections, mapping out a greater whole, how the systems interact. And while I can have sometimes just playing around with expressions in various logical systems, I'm much more fascinated by the bigger picture approach. So I also prefer "riddle games" Edit: Actually thinking about it, I realised I treat "riddle games" a lot like immersive sims, another genre I enjoy a lot.

[@Aondeug]

Yeah I'm similar. I really love riddle oriented adventure games and because these are called "puzzles" and because I like the Legend of Zelda I assumed I'd like puzzle game puzzle games. And I kind of just. Don't. Baba is You is cute and charming but I find it uniquely frustrating in a way that made me drop the game. And this has been the case with every single systems based puzzle game I've played. The single worst experience I've ever had in tabletop roleplaying has also been when a number based logic puzzle was implemented as opposed to a weird little riddle. I just can't do the kind of thinking they require well and it makes me feel like shit. Weird ass language games, knowledge of various literary references and lateral thinking though that's my shit. Gimme that. Those are kinds of reasoning I'm actually good at.

[@Plain--Jane]

that last bit is what frustrates me so much about discourse online is it really so insanely difficult to consider how you're phrasing what you're saying?? or to consider how it might be interpreted from the other position? It's not the end of the world but it absolutely 100% causes discussions to go haywire

[@thrownstair]

1. I think "riddle games" should be adopted more. Baba is You and Opus Magnum have more in common with each other than Baba is You and Myst. 2. The Witness seems like Jon Blow tried to make a game with both at the same time but ended up making a game that switches between the two moment to moment without ever properly merging. 3. I don't know which side would get Portal in the divorce.

[@fairy-shotgun]

What part of Portal would be a riddle game? It’s all pure puzzles, systems interacting, except for arguably the ending of Portal 2, but that comes with so many hints and such obvious flagging it’d be hard to call it a ‘riddle’. Seems purely a puzzle game to me.

[@Lulink013]

I really don't get the dichotomy here. It's all puzzle games to me. What part of myst would make it something else?

[@KeithBallardA]

I see Myst as being a puzzle game series, but it's definitely an investigative, explorative genre. Like you're solving puzzles every step of the way, and they do have a logical basis that isn't just totally random correlations, but it's rarely about defining a single ruleset and then iterating on it like more "Puzzle Chamber" type games like Portal etc. In Myst games, you often genuinely need to read characters' journals, learn about their motivations and the local culture, and gain a complete understanding of what exactly is going on. Then you can begin to piece together what these strange devices are, what they do, and what you want them to do, etc. It's extremely satisfying when done right, like the new remake of Riven and all of its changes really knocked it out of the park. But recommending it to someone because they like Infinifactory or Stephen's Sausage Roll, as if any of those things have inherent overlap with each other, would be unhinged. I think they're all neat, but each is a very separate opt-in.

[@teejayburger2136]

Yeah, it's the issue with the genre "puzzle games" it is incredibly broad. It would be like if people treated "Action" as a video game genre and said "Oh you like Halo 3? You should play Teardown, thats a great puzzle game!" the puzzle "genre" is insanely varied and shouldnt be treated as some kind of monolyth

[@Saltine3022]

I was thinking like "oh wait this is probably why she said she doesn't like Outer Wilds" the whole time until you mentioned it. Different types of pawtism. People are titling the funny secret-hunting tree games like Outer Wilds and Animal Well "metroidbrainia" and I hate it. It might be the most vile genre name since the original metroidvania tbqh, but yeah they're totally considered a different genre now, and I am so confused when people tell me they're puzzle games. They're conspiracy games! They're literally about assembling a bunch of disparit knowledge gradually until you can see the whole picture and if you've played any conspiracy-themed puzzler or really any well-made detective game the genre trappings are all there, OW even arranges its journal like a conspiracy board lmao. I love "metroidbrainias" (dry heave) but I don't really like traditional puzzle games with the exception of a couple of spatial puzzle games with immaculate mechanical pacing like the portal games.

[@lancesmith8298]

To be completely fair, my gut instinct is to call them “ARGs”, in spite of the fact they are self-contained fiction. Arcane code cracking is the norm there, so it makes sense I processed Void Stranger as one. And then I gave up on Void Stranger myself, because the map had already been charted, and I would only see it for myself by copying people’s solutions for nine hundred and ninety-nine floors of tedium. Or at least two hours with shortcuts. Maybe less with the other way to shortcut. Still, even a couple hundred anythings is absurd

[@TurbopropPuppy]

i like "riddle game" and i really like "conspiracy game" as far better and more descriptive alternatives to the loathsome "metroidbrainia"

[@lightningninja6905]

No, the metroidbrainia genre title makes sense, as in these games you use your brain, as opposed to all the other games where you use the gallbladder/s

[@kingturboturtlednoc5722]

Metroidvania is already a notoriously awful genre name, why would we name another one after it 😭

[@vallraffs]

I love conspiracy games. The most on point example is probably A Hand With Many Fingers, where you're literally connecting newspaper clippings with red strings on a corkboard to piece together the outline of a real-world confirmed CIA cold war conspiracy. I would probably say the actual game genre they fall into is more the Investigation/Deduction genre. Alongside titles like Return of the Obra Dinn

[@roondar6141]

Myst and Outer Wilds are interesting examples because they're not puzzle games, they're adventure games. The puzzles aren't there for you to fully understand a mechanical system and explore it to its limits, they're mostly there to get you to explore and look around, to notice details and provide mystery or intrigue. Being recommended an adventure game because you like puzzles would be like recommending The Witness or Antichamber because they like first person shooters. Yes it contains some of what you like, but it's not really the main focus.

[@EliasPluto]

As a fan of outer wilds I never saw it really as a puzzle game, idk why people think it is

[@ZannyAisling]

less puzzles and more like, information-based -vania powerups. theres some deductive stuff i guess but its mostly ‘heres problem. explore everywhere else to find the solution to problem. come back and learn Another thing.’ it feels pretty organic in-game (i love it to death) but it is actually a kinda simple loop reduced like that

[@android19willpwn]

they don't know what else to call it, I guess. Even the medroidvania-via-info kind of misses the point, I feel, since most things you learn are specific keys that fit specific locks. They're a highlight, but they're not really what the game is about. But then, what the game *is* about is more nebulous. So people just call it a puzzle game.

[@ZannyAisling]

@@android19willpwn Yeah actually, agreed. Theres a few thinks you learn which are more broadly applicable but the metroid comparison’s a bit tenuous in that regard

[@crtchicanery9605]

The riddle-puzzle distinction makes a lot of sense. "Puzzle game" is too broad a term in other cases as well. Like, Tetris obviously belongs to its own lineage of games distinct from what you've discussed here, but it's most commonly just called a "puzzle game." As someone who's passionate about that specific style of game, it's frustrating to be like "I love puzzle games!" and then have to disambiguate because that's such an ill defined term.

[@puppyhelictriangle]

tetris isnt a puzzle game but i think it is a "Puzzler" of a sort. arcade puzzler, action puzzler.

[@crtchicanery9605]

​@@puppyhelictriangle Action puzzler isn't bad, it does a decent job of embodying what I like about those games. I do think a fair number of people's first thought would be like, Portal, though. But I guess that stops being a problem if the term reaches widespread adoption. I have a number of issues with arcade puzzler. I kinda like versus puzzler because that's how I engage with these games and it's hard to confuse for anything else, but it obviously fails to acknowledge the manner in which a really large number of people play them.

[@undeniablySomeGuy]

For me, tetris is an inventory-management fighting game

[@Saltine3022]

I will say after talking with a bunch of people in the comments about the Outer Wilds-alike genre that they are definitely not puzzle games, you're right on the money. "Riddle game" as a genre name has kind of a mild derogatory bent to it the feels reclaimable in the way that Walking Sim does, actually, which is fascinating to me They really are just a fantastical subgenre of traditional detective games ultimately, where you assemble clues you receive in a vacuum in-context and as you get different pools of information they link up to get you bigger pools of information which let you solve the final layer of the mystery and complete the final knowledge check. The expectations set up by calling them puzzle games are super super backwards.

[@CoolExcite]

Kind of reminds me of why I have mixed feelings on La Mulana. Like it has some very clever riddle puzzles, but the problem is its a metroidvania with one of the biggest maps I've ever seen in the genre, and it's fairly time consuming and costs consumable items to get from point, and it has puzzles that span across multiple map areas. So the game starts off great, but then you get to a point where you have so many areas unlocked that if you hypothetically saw a sign mentioning "birthplace" you'd have no idea whether it was hinting towards the first area of the game, or a statue of a baby from 5 areas ago, or the area "the chamber of birth", or the room 2 over you haven't been to yet, or if the sign wasn't a hint at all and was just lore, or if the sign is a hint to a puzzle you won't have the item to complete for 3 more areas and you're actually supposed to be backtracking right now, and it'll take at least 15 minutes to thoroughly investigate any of these possibilities. A shame because the good puzzles, the art style, and the platforming are all great it's just the bad parts really drag the rest of the game down

[@smartone90125]

It’s funny you should mention outer wilds and myst as different experiences from what you enjoy, because I COMPLETELY agree. However I prefer those experiences. For me it’s the “pure puzzle” games that mess with my head. I can’t keep all of the variables in my head and failing to find just the right combination of the variables and failing when they get too complex makes me feel stupid. On the other hand, intuiting rules or making associations and deductions on a series of environmental riddles is very rewarding for me. The witness also serves as an example for me. I LOVED figuring out the rules to each puzzle element, but as soon as I had to find the right combo of lines I felt like I was an idiot because those kinds of chess-like long complex solutions are just out of my grasp. I too get frustrated by recommendations because when I want a deduction style puzzle game, everyone keeps recommending super hard “pure” puzzlers lol

[@kezi_]

Void Stranger is La Mulana, I think that feels cogent as a comparison. Everything I've ever heard you mention about riddle games totally applies to La Mulana and yet they're not even slightly in the same conversation for people, which is interesting.

[@Iwakura-id6hz]

its because void stranger is more popular and recent by la mulana by far. people who are aware of both games *absolutely* put them in the same conversation

[@kezi_]

@@Iwakura-id6hz Yeah that's fair.

[@lancesmith8298]

Because my first exposure with La Mulana was a deadpan man telling me in no uncertain terms “you’d have to give this game to your grandchildren without solutions”. And then I saw somebody bring it up in the same sentence as Void Stranger. Like, no, that is a puzzle game in the same way the original King’s Quest is an adventure game. You are technically correct, but for the sins of VS, those are not in the same galaxy

[@fy8798]

@@lancesmith8298 Void stranger and La Mulana absolutely belong in the same category, and the same kind of thinking is used to solve various of its puzzles. They give me the exact same feeling and I always put them into the same category.

[@CaecusYT]

Does Void Stranger give you the same information as La Mulana though? When I picked up La Mulana I was told "Don't look anything up, all the answers are hidden" I went into it blind except for that, the tablets give you a lot of answers and hints which I proceeded to write down into a book while playing through the game which helped a lot.

[@JoraffProductions]

Beyond the tenuous connection of "I kinda like puzzle games", I have pretty much nothing in common with you or your interests. I am not queer, furry, or autistic. And yet, since I discovered this channel, I have been DEVOURING your content. You are one of the most compelling and natural presenters I've seen on here; you articulate your points so thoughtfully and convincingly that I can't help but get sucked in, despite being an "outsider" of sorts. Keep up the good work!

[@fadedtyrant1604]

It's cool to hear a nice explanation of how someone bounced right off a game that basically consumed me for a few weeks. My girlfriend (who was the one who introduced me to the game!) has had some of the same consternation around the lives/obviously-bad-fruit systems. I found the main thing was to just forget about that and push forward because the story continues and as the story develops, the ways you interact with the world and characters evolve. But my gf's a completionist who also doesn't have a lot of time for gaming, so the prospect of getting the "bad" ending and revisiting rooms has basically ground her to a halt on it, despite enjoying the gameplay and premise. (And there's no real bad ending, but yeah, spoilerrrrsss...) It can be a bit frustrating since I think this game was one of the finest experiences in the medium, but no one should play a boring/shitty game just because others think it's awesome. It's the revelations about the world and the systems in it that makes it so great (like Outer Wilds, another game-changer of a game), but explaining that to someone is basically a spoiler, and many people despise spoilers. I'm just glad that developers sometimes have the space to stick to their sometimes-alienating vision in the indie scene. It still sucks when a masterpiece to some can be actively unfun for others, but I guess that's just art. Games just tend to take much more investment than things like music.

[@freshlybakedfeline]

It is VERY funny seeing this in my feed as Im going through it myself and absolutely adoring it

[@BotchFrivarg]

I like your distinction between riddle and puzzle, as someone who enjoys both (kinda) the reason I enjoy them is for different reasons. As I see it the difference is in a riddle game the puzzles are often simple, but the rules are obscured, while in a puzzle game the puzzles are harder but all the rules are clear. From this point I think most of the "good" riddle games are less about the "Aha!" you get from solving a puzzle directly, but more of a "Oooh, if I combine this piece of information I learned over there, with this other bit of information I just learned..." and the puzzle being more of a lock gated by knowledge (if done properly), or a test. In a way a lot of puzzles in riddle games feel closer to classic Sierra/Lucas-Art adventure game puzzles, than something like sokoban.

[@Aondeug]

The appeal of riddles and riddle games for me isn't that I want to feel smart, which kind of feels insulting honestly. It's that I like being presented with a thing and then being left to sit and argue with myself (or my friends) about the thing in question. I like that I have to debate what the rules in play actually are and that I at times need to make use of referential knowledge I have. The subjectivity of the experience is part of what I like. That and the fun moments of connection and logic leaps. I'm honestly kind of odd in that while being autistic I kind of really don't like heavily rules based logic puzzles because they're just too hard for me. I don't have a brain that is designed to deal with them. I do have a brain designed to handle things like Myst or Shadowgate, though. It's something honestly leaves me feeling left out at times? Especially when coupled with things like my being absolutely wretched at math but generally very good at language. Good at language as in that while I do have comunicational disabilities and I had a language delay, I am very good at peeling language apart and analyzing its parts.

[@SecondAlias]

8:03 spoiler warning if you didn't watch up to that point in the video I don't disagree with anything you've said up to this point, but you are being dismissive. I am sorry the experience wasn't for you, and that's fine. I'm even at the point where I find this game hard to reccommend, but I still enjoyed finding that solution. I don't think it's an invalid puzzle just because the game doesn't tell you that the puzzle exists and that you need to intuit an answer. I understand that it's an intentionally cryptic game, but you put in a lot of blind faith thinking that the game just wasn't indicating that you solved the puzzle correctly when in reality you did not solve the puzzle.

[@sgtkilborn]

As somebody head over heels in love with games like Outer Wilds, I guess I gotta give Void Stranger a try now. But honestly your point about building riddles on top of a supposedly system-driven game sounds a lot like something I won't like. That was the shit I hated most about The Witness, even though I ended up enjoying that game. Every time I couldn't work out a puzzle, I felt like I had no way of knowing if I had a system problem to solve or a riddle to solve. Do I just needed to think on it more or am I lacking information and wasting my time until I come back armed with more knowledge? I felt like a clever little boy when I noticed the audio cues in the forest, but I NEVER noticed the audio cues in the shipwreck and I felt like a very not clever fucking idiot when somebody pointed it out. There's no satisfaction to that, just frustration. Dunno if you've played it yet, but Obra Dinn might be the best 'riddle' type game for someone who prefers systems, because it lays out clearly right from the start exactly what information you're trying to laterally-think your way to. You need to match a name and fate to every person on the ship. It feels a lot more like an actual logical process and a lot less like stabbing in the dark, I think, when the goal at least is clear.

[@ZannyAisling]

it can get pretty easy to resort to stabbing in the dark with Obra Dinn but i think its good to try to resist temptation with regards to some of the tougher names…. also you put the problem with the witness REALLY well. didn’t think to describe it like that but. god. not knowing when something’s a skill issue (lol) versus an Information That I Know And Comprehend issue can kill the sense of player agency & momentum dead

[@godlyvex5543]

I don't really think it's an issue in void stranger. Basically all of the puzzles are puzzles and can be solved like them. Only once or twice is the solution to a puzzle a riddle.

[@revoblam7975]

i believe dropping a puzzle game because you can't vibe with it is an experience that applies to nearly any puzzle game and is perfectly valid to do, the game will remain there, i can keep it in my periphery, absorb it through other means, get some time and come back wiser, whatever. Void Stranger is also very much a game with a deep story that WANTS to service its story first but is also very deeply entrenched and confusing about getting its secrets out. ZeroRanger (same developer) has a very similarly deep story with a wealth of secrets but because the genre is different a lot of the secrets are hid in way less obtuse ways, mostly reaction to what you do in the few sections you have control to do things. in a way it feels like Zeroranger almost railroads you into finding all the little things hidden in the dialogue (Coop Route true end) while Void Stranger leaves you butt ass naked in the middle of nowhere with a funny staff. i guess they target the kind of lorefiend that goes on forums and rambles their teeth off trying to figure stuff out, more like an ARG game than a puzzle game? I love them regardless.

[@benisser]

The game does have some really good hard puzzles that utilize all of the "cheat" items as part of their design but it's buried under playing 200+ basic ones multiple times doing a secret hunt. I don't think the devs are unaware this would be considered "bad design" and piss a lot of people off but still went with this weird fucking game so I really respect that.

[@frostedbricks1828]

Personally I didn't think anything of the lives system because after finishing it voided you get infinite lives and didn't even realize there was an expectation to go through the game without the infinite lives or without being voided for a very long time at which point I had a much better understanding of the advantages of having lives. I also didn't ever use a brand room or riddle them out until well, well after the "cheats" would have benefited me. I'm glad I had the experience I did even if it was much more difficult and rigorous than figuring the brand rooms earlier in my playthrough. The puzzles in the hard mode were incredibly difficult but felt very satisfying to complete. I think there are definitely some problems with the "secret" puzzles in this game it can be hard to intuit how you're supposed to solve some (I can only imagine what you would have to say about the tail puzzle). But overall the way you slowly uncover the story, lore, and gameplay mechanics, transforming the game from a series of puzzles to one single puzzle itself is *chef's kiss*. Starting weak and with little understanding of the game to becoming a puzzle god and the ability to warp the game to your will is one of the craziest and awesome experiences I've had with any media ever. It's definitely not for everyone, but I would say the shared experience of becoming "obsessed" with Void Stranger makes something about it special.

[@moonsweater]

Yes... yes! The Puzzle-riddle distinction is catching on! Bwahaha!

[@GolfJuliettWhiskey]

(spoilers) My approach in Void Stranger was: a fairy is offering me to eat the fruit of the realm. I will not eat the fruit, ever. As a consequence I restarted the game several times, passing by the first brand room repeatedly and eventually coming across the solution by the 'instant feedback'. From that point on the puzzle became "how to inscribe the other brands" and how to inscribe my brand. Much later, because I was not voided, I discovered a collectible inside the UI and that the UI was something the void rod could manipulate, allowing me to leap back and forth between floors by swapping numbers, leading me eventually to the overarching puzzle involving the seals and eventually the final brand that takes you to the ending and the other bossfights. I agree that calling it "a puzzle game" is incomplete, much like calling Undertale "a RPG" is incomplete. It was more stubbornness and luck that opened the game up me and I probably would have had similar accessibility issues as described in the video if those weren't the case. I wasn't filtered out by the accessibility issues it has, so I consider it a good game with bad qualities, but if I was, I would likely 100% agree with you.

[@Blaineworld]

this does give me an idea which is to have a riddle in a game but every possible interpretation is correct and they all lead to different paths (if i use this, it’ll go in my quirky indie rpg)

[@meowlorypurplecat]

This game seems interesting, but it feels weird that people recommended this game to you as like... a pure puzzle game. Like, I wouldn't recommend Frog Fractions/Glittermitten Grove/Inscryption to people looking for a standard experience in those three games purported initial genre spaces.

[@kingturboturtlednoc5722]

This element of "its not really a puzzle to solve you just have to have thought about it the same way the developers did" is why i really didnt enjoy the vast majority of the witness. Like, i'd repeatedly bash my head against a tile until giving up and assuming its just explained somewhere else, only to google it later and it turns out no that is actually the tutorial one, im just supposed to extrapolate the one specific rule from a basic tile with a solution that could mean infinite things about what they mean(quarry in particular was awful about this until i gave up and just googled what the three-prong thingies mean) At least the environmental puzzles were good, it's pretty much the only reason i consider my overall experience of The Witness positive aside from a couple specific areas that actually involved working through the logical conclusion of a set of rules instead of just guessing what the dev thought would have been obvious by this point, like the treehouses

[@EvdogMusic]

Got a puzzle game recommendation for you: _Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows_ The logic's pretty straightforward, gaining complexity by building upon itself. And it has a few great 'Aha!' moments that makes you feel like you're breaking the game. Also, the artstyle's very cute :3

[@julianb188]

I think Outer Wilds is less puzzle or riddle game and more metroidvania of information. Instead of upgrades opening areas with more upgrades, you learn information that opens up areas with more information. You can do "skips" and figure something out on your own or by accident, and these can be some of the coolest moments in the game, but the web of information is always there as a backup and to hopefully ensure you can complete the game. There's a few proper leaps of logic, like the way into the ATP or the quantum pilgrimage tower by the black hole, but it's mostly fair about giving you the answers if you explore for them. And I think that the exploration is the key appeal with riddle solving as a side dish if you're lucky or really in sync with the devs. Void Stranger is a little bit like this. Learning secrets gives you cheats, but some of the secrets open up wholly new avenues of progress and ways to fuck with the game, or unlock new areas with new secrets to find. To me the big difference is the loop time. Without cheats or skips, a living run can take hours and you might lose all the progress at any time or accidentally go past the floor you wanted to try something at. Outer Wilds resets the solar system every 30 minutes or so, which gives you much more freedom to iterate and much less frustration if you waste a loop. And Outer Wilds always gives you the option of going somewhere else to follow a different lead, whereas Void Stranger usually sits you down and expects you to figure out the specific next step of the game. I beat it with hints, which was fun enough for me in a theme park sort of way, but if you rightly expect games to be enjoyable without outside help? I can see why you'd bounce off it.

[@hwithumlaut8288]

I really like how well you explain your own taste.

[@camilleg8126]

I feel like you'll LOVE Paquerette Down the Bunborrows, if you didn't play it yet. 100% mechanics based, no riddles, extremely satisfying to figure out mechanically Also I love your puzzle games related videos, I discovered Beans and Nothingness thanks to you and I'm grateful! And the way you extract what is good (or not) feels very unique, and resonates with my brain just right (like your music does. Shoutout to the album Gelb, I litterally listened at least a hundred time in the last months) Thank you for sharing your thoughts and musics!

[@elenaschmidt9476]

so what I'm getting from the way you phrased it here is that riddle games are... neurotypical. Like, the issue in communicating the actual game mechanics you talked about literally sounded like autistic frustration with neurotypicals would in like, retail

[@puppyhelictriangle]

"how dare you, i'm supposed to be POWERFUL here" -me, after misinterpreting 1 bit of metaphorical language

[@godlyvex5543]

Don't agree whatsoever. The frustration I have with neurotypicals is that I have to guess something right the first time. With riddle type games I can try as many times as I like and it's a fun challenge.

[@abacussssss]

i think you would enjoy elyot grant's series of videos on puzzle design. i can't do it justice in a comment, but he calls these points where the player isn't told what's going on "intransparencies", discussing how it can get a solver completely brick-wall stuck in a way that system-based puzzles don't

[@MaybeNotARobot]

real ones were there to watch patricia become a hater for this game in real time on tumblr

[@ianmurphy7460]

Void Stranger begins as puzzles, but transitions into riddles as the layers peel back. The inclusion of riddles isn’t a mistake, it’s thematically consistent. As one’s understanding of the game evolves so too does the gameplay, from concepts like lives, locusts, and floors, into brands, arcane secrets, and [REDACTED]. But it doesn’t stop there, it continues to evolve itself into new unexpected shapes. The short of it is that Void Stranger is a game about messy human connections, and it depicts that through gameplay. The act of playing Void Stranger is a lot like learning about a person. It can be confusing at first, but you’ll uncover what makes them tick, their logical thought process. Go deeper and you’ll find their irrational and wayward beliefs. Hit the bottom and you’ll discover the idiosyncrasies of their spirit. Even then, you’re always left wondering if there might be a little more. Wanting Void Stranger to just be a cool, high-quality sokoban game is, to be blunt, missing the forest for the trees, though I completely understand why anyone would want to give up on for a myriad of reasons. (Also thank you for acknowledging the existence of the pro-life ending, I thought I was the only one.)

[@lancesmith8298]

@@ianmurphy7460 I’m not blind or anything, but I do want to know which ending I need to look up before I start tacitly agreeing with that reading

[@ianmurphy7460]

@@lancesmith8298 My reading isn’t informed by any particular ending, but rather the aggregate of visual novel segments interspersed throughout the game. It’s no coincidence that as you travel through the layers of sokoban puzzles, you also travel through the layers of the story. Your understanding of the gameplay directly parallels the character’s understanding of their situation and each other. Conversely, skipping sections of gameplay can skip parts of the story. The place you go after the final brand makes this more explicit, but is still quite difficult to parse. Sorry I can’t provide a single ending to look up.

[@godlyvex5543]

The ending isn't pro life, what is everyone talking about? One character makes a pro-life decision, and it was at a time when they were forced to make the decision for someone else. I mentioned this to patricia on tumblr but it looks like she didn't really agree, or maybe she just didn't see what I wrote.

[@ianmurphy7460]

@@godlyvex5543 I meant it half jokingly, but there’s a very real argument to be made that it represents a pro-life view. Throughout the game you can often make decisions and dialogue choices when interacting with other characters. However, when Gray is explicitly prompted to choose between a mother’s life or a fetus’s life, there is only one outcome. The game shows that it’s against pro-choice by literally just not giving you a choice. You may also notice that Gray is pro-life FOR Lily. Of course that’s what the circumstances necessitated, but the game purposely sets up a situation in which Lily’s consent is disregarded. Had the game just wanted to present an isolated pro-choice decision, it would have been Lily choosing for herself. Hopefully that clears things up.

[@godlyvex5543]

@@ianmurphy7460 I don't know what you really mean when it comes to making choices like that, yeah technically you get different outcomes based on your accomplishments but you never get presented with two options and pick one which has an impact on the story going forward. Gray also makes a decision without our consent to send lillie to the military. Is the game now pro-military? Is it in favor of punishing your children by hitting them, since gray did that too, without our consent? Gray's choices were motivated by her scarred womb and inability to ever raise a child of her own. Calling it pro-life assigns a political motivation that, while not out of the question, is much more easily explained by the subtext of gray being infertile.

[@axelprino]

I understand the frustration if what you're expecting from puzzle games is for them to always have a solution that makes sense, but I usually don't mind games that are literally impossible to solve unless you happen to think the same way as the developers because when I get stuck I just look up a guide, I feel no shame in admitting that I can't wrap my mind around some things. That or I'm too used to playing point and click adventure games, a genre infamous for containing puzzles that make no sense whatsoever.

[@Chofoot]

I do think Void Stranger is a great puzzle game without secret "riddle" stuffs. Especially later levels that make the player fully utilize "cheats" that you mentioned. Really great levels. That being said you do need to find secrets in order to get to the harder levels.

[@trainerwsm]

First I should say that I more or less enjoyed this review minus one very, very big point at the end that's borderline misinformation. Just to put my biases on the table, I think VS is probably one of my favorite games in recent memory, it's something that came to me relatively naturally and I've sunken well over 60 hours into it and I'm still not quite done with it yet. I find this review very insightful as the few videos I've seen covering it are very praiseworthy if not a little bit cliché toward the video essay genre where they tend to explain the events of the game verbatim with relatively little commentary toward their thoughts on the game itself, so hearing why someone clashed against a game that markets itself as frustrating (especially given the track record of System Erasure's willingness to push player comfort through subverting traditional gameplay experiences) honestly helps me gain a greater appreciation for the game and why I find it so special I'm not going to try and convince you that you're wrong and that the game gets better if you just keep pushing, that you're stupid and just don't get it, or that there's some plot beat that completely recontextualizes the gameplay experience and will make it turn into a glowing masterpiece in your eyes because I think you've given it a fair shake after 20 hours. But the stinger at the end at 8:50 where well over 90% of the video is over on the first ending being pro-life is something that I feel bares refuting as I feel it's frankly a harmful misconception (one that, I will not lie, I had as a knee jerk reaction upon seeing it for the first time and thought it was too) that I should clarify for anyone interested in this game whatsoever who may be weary about supporting supposedly pro-life developers. Short-ish answer for those who might be interested in the game but have those aforementioned reservations: No the game nor developers (to my knowledge, they don’t interact very much with the public so there isn’t direct evidence toward one position or the other but based on this being the game with an entire court of Non-Binary characters and quite a few lesbians I feel like it’s not a huge leap to assume they're are) very much are not pro-life but without further context or a great understanding of the characters it can be a knee jerk assumption that some may have. Long and VERY spoilery Answer: The narrative of the first act, Void Stranger Gray, is relatively surface level compared to the later act (not to say the story isn't engaging, just that the narrative depth GREATLY expands around the second to last cutscene) so the tonal dissonance between that and this moral conundrum may be a lot to take in at first. I would say there are two very different but equally valid ways of refuting the notion that the game is pro-life (for clarification I am very VERY much pro-choice) but first, some background: The Background: At the very end of the first route, Gray (the protagonist) is given the choice between bringing either Lily (the person she entered the void to save) or the fetus (that she did not know existed until reaching this cutscene) with her, both with the exception that she cannot return the void to save the other. Gray does not know that she will not be returned to her time (1994 from what’s likely somewhere in the 1200s-1500s). And from what I know, and considering how close royalty was to the church in that time, the act of abortion (if you could even consider this that) would be punishable with both of their deaths. Finally, this decision has Lily unconscious and unable to tell Gray what she wants to happen, leaving it to Gray to interpret what she wants. If Gray were to take Lily back with her, the fetus would be left inside the void, and as Gray is not allowed to return, nor can Lily make a second contract with the Void Court (i’m like 99% sure this is how it works) to reclaim the fetus, she nor Lily could reenter the void and bring it back with them leaving it for all intents and purposes dead (essentially making Lily have an abortion without her consent) Or Gray could take the fetus and raise it to go through the void and get Lily back. This is the choice Gray makes and as I’ll explain later on she has quite a bit of grief over the situation of being forced to choose for the person she wished to save, and how the fetus grows up to be a bit disdainful towards Gray for how she ended up being raised. 1. (Meta)Narratively Gray had chosen to take the child (Lillie) Lily had in order to raise her to go back to the void and save her. Raising your child for the purpose of entering what is for all intents and purposes a torture labyrinth in order to save someone who you don’t know (Lillie very much does not know Gray isn’t her mother until a pivotal moment later in the story, much less that Lily exists) is a really shitty parenting move and that serve’s the second act’s narrative purposes (Void Stranger Lillie) very well as it focuses on her complex feelings towards Gray. At the same time, Gray was given a choice between taking Lily back or her child, and chose the option she guessed Lily would want most. This was a situation that she has an immense amount of self hatred and regret over. Were this game to be pro-life I would say that NEITHER of those two major plot elements would be handled in a way where someone grieves over the lack of agency someone had over a potential forced abortion. 2. Understanding the thought process via in universe lore Despite the fact that In this universe it is very much stated by the void judge on the right (Cif) that the blastocyst (not even a fetus yet really) is in the process of obtaining or at least does have a soul (this was likely done solely for this moment of the story’s drama), The choice Gray made was NOT that of whether or not the fetus deserves to live at the expense of Lily’s own life, but solely which of the two options she thought Lily would want. Given the situation, where Lily is essentially unconscious and unable to be asked as to whether or not she wants to be brought back herself or to have the blastocyst brought back instead, this only leaves Gray with the choice to infer which option she would most likely go with. It would be logical for Gray to assume that upon returning, she would be sent back to the time she came from and not sent to 1994. Even if they knew they would be sent to 1994 Finland where where abortion was very much legal if the person carrying was either 16 or under (like lily), the fetus would come out deformed or the person was sexually assaulted (lily was 16 and Johann, the father, was probably in his mid 20’s so this would certainly classify as that (Johann, in the cutscene directly before it which takes place before Lily was sent to the void, reveals that he has been manipulating Lily the entire time and attempts to sacrifice her to the void to essentially become a god A La Berserk))). This would not mean that an abortion would be possible as the fetus would be stuck in the void with nobody able to reach it (Gray has been explicitly banned from the void and Lily, who can still likely go back, can’t form another contract with the void court as she offered to be sent there in order to save Gray’s life from Johann) If Gray were to take the child on the other hand, Lily would not have to live through the trauma of childbirth or anything related to her carrying the child to that birth (i.e potential death, her not having the capability to raise the child (Gray would be the one raising it since Lily would still be in the void, asleep) or the myriad of things related to how it was conceived) Both situations leave Lily without agency but I believe Gray chooses the one that makes the least decisions and assumptions from Lily as the fetus is quite literally magically teleported out of Lily and into her hands. Overall I would say while this is a very complicated situation at a first glance (i.e which one gives Lily the most bodily autonomy (i.e which one did Gray think she would choose which is what the latter plot surrounds)). And frankly I’m not necessarily sure as to whether a pro-life or pro-choice (I think you could reasonably take this one more given context as there is no tirade about how abortion is evil) stance can be taken from this game as this scene is not about whether or not abortion is ethical, but solely what Gray interprets as the outcome to a binary choice she is given about someone else and her grappling with the outcome of that. Are there criticisms that can be made? Of course, I for one don’t think we hear much from Lily after the fact on her thoughts on the situation but I could be forgetting something. Sorry for the essay but this is not only a complex philosophical situation so length may be necessary , but writing this also further helped me understand the game and it's characters.

[@godlyvex5543]

This is a lot of writing for something that isn't really that complicated. A character choosing to do something in a story does not mean the story endorses that thing. See how easy that is to explain without going into 20 paragraphs of lore? And if you want more nuance, you STILL don't have to explain that much. The character was forced to choose between saving a newborn and the parent. This context means you could give a good argument for both. But abortion doesn't even factor into the situation because the child is already old enough to be born, and is literally born then and there when the choice is made to save the child. Most pro-choice arguments already agree that aborting babies this close to birth is not good. So why are we making this an argument about choice vs life? It's just dishonest to frame the situation like this.

[@trainerwsm]

⁠​⁠​⁠​⁠@@godlyvex5543 ​​⁠​⁠​⁠First paragraph i agree full stop. Second paragraph, the game specifically notes that it’s a blastocyst, that means it’s been between 5-12 days since conception which is so lenient that some right leaning places in america allow that. In the cutscene directly after it doesn’t look older than like 2 months which is where the pro life accusations stem from as on a very surface level, the main character did choose the blastocyst over the person and refuting that was the whole point of this? I can vaguely agree that calling it “more pro-choice” would probably just invite the argument to continue more.

[@godlyvex5543]

@@trainerwsm In the cutscene where they say blastocyst, it's in past tense. And the baby survives being born which implies it's at least around 24 weeks old. But anyway I think it's just not sensible to call it pro-life, there is too much nuance involved that throws things into question.

[@trainerwsm]

@@godlyvex5543 without arguing on the age of the fetus (i personally think it looks less than 10 weeks), in the nicest way possible, that is the entire point of the original comment, explaining that nuance.

[@godlyvex5543]

@@trainerwsm Well, yeah, I'm just saying that explaining that nuance shouldn't even have been necessary, people who played the game should've understood that it was nuanced and not just a random pro life twist.

[@SyankaCreature]

I completely agree with your point here, as someone who has more or less "fully completed" the game (got all the main endings as of now), this definitely leans more towards a riddle/vibe based puzzle game as it progresses. While the endgame puzzles do get significantly harder and interesting by being made with the burdens in mind, if you want to dive deeper into the game you cannot ignore the riddles and secrets. The whole "this is a puzzle game for people who don't enjoy puzzle games" take i got from this video is 100% true in my opinion, lots of people who played Void Stranger (including myself at the time) had very little experience with other puzzle games or none at all and felt like these types of games were simply unnaprocheable, i feel like for a lot of these people the more riddley nature of VS appeals heavily towards the more exploration and secret hunting enjoyers, the type of people who wouldn't mind something like the brand puzzles due to enjoying simply experimenting around and testing hypothesis, funnily enough when I got to the brand puzzles for the first time i also made the *exact* same assumption as you, replacing one of the tiles with the staircase and holding onto the tile, when it fails i went "right so that didn't work, what else can i do... I guess i could try falling into a pit there? It is the only other interaction I can think off". I think this is ultimately the main difference between "riddle" puzzle games and "logical" puzzle games, one leans heavily towards exploration and experimentation, the other is more about mastery of a system/set of rules. Honestly i think this distinction is actually pretty huge considering pretty much any game that requires a lot of thinking skill and isn't a strategy game just ends up being considered a puzzle game. Quite unfortunate that you didn't really enjoy the game, it is one of my all time favorites but i can totally see your reasoning here, specially with how vague and cryptic the game's description is there was definitely no way you could see this coming lol, im very glad you gave it a honest shot though! Maybe one day you might consinder trying to get into these more riddley puzzle games, i can assure you there is definitely fun to be had in the whole experimenting and secret hunting aspect of them, but no pressure or anything :P (Also thanks for that Bean and Nothingness video, it's awesome and i'll be playing that game eventually, seems really damn cool! ok bye)

[@hyperflares2879]

interpreting the words slightly wrong is why i stopped even trying riddles and riddle games. i would get the first step entirely repeatedly wrong, then the next 90 tries were wrong even if they were internally consistent and based on what i thought it should be

[@Person.1234]

Yeah, for riddles I'll gladly look up answers for, I'm a lot less interested in having figured them out for myself compared to figuring out puzzles for myself

[@scrungybungingi5171]

I dropped Void Stranger mainly bc of the lives system, but I now know that if I stuck through with it I'd still have to stop and look at a guide bc there is no way I'd figure out that I had to intentionally fall in the void with specifically the stairs in my inventory. You mention Outer Wilds as a similar game and while it does have similar trappings, it was much easier for me to progress because I didn't have to clear the first world of Stephen's Sausage Roll to get to Brittle Hollow. The distinction of a 'riddle game' would probably include point-and-click adventure games, where instead of a few mechanics being built upon you have to intuit the correct sequence of interactions to progress, with some disconnected puzzles (e.g. sliding tiles) sprinkled in. I think these games work best when they're nonlinear so the player has multiple threads to pull at. You could even have redundant clues/paths to prevent a single riddle from 'bottlenecking' players. The last riddler type game I played was Kryptic, a cryptography themed game. I started playing it thinking 'I'm good at mathematics, so I must be good at this.' and promptly reached multiple puzzles I couldn't solve because I couldn't parse the developer's logic and the hints were like: 'Those pairs of numbers in brackets separated by commas look like coordinates' coordinates to what? a grid in a different puzzle? Which puzzle? Luckily I didn't have to solve every puzzle because the endgame puzzles took each letter of the solution from different earlier puzzles. It turns out that it's easy to guess the last 3 letters in an 8 letter word. But when I finished the game had the gall to go 'I can't believe you didn't solve every puzzle, you dumb bitch.' And I'm like, why am I getting the bad ending for solving a puzzle with incomplete information using my intuition? If you wanted me to solve every puzzle you could've just made the solutions arbitrary strings of characters instead of actual words.

[@jatsko3113]

Haven't played Kryptic, but it sounds exactly like the type of game that, if personified, would be the archetype of "person at the bar that has things to say, but is saying them in a way that makes you realize you're going to have to do a lot of sitting and listening in order to piece together what their points are" Which I think is what makes a riddle game a riddle game, as it's being defined. They definitely tend to be unique experiences.

[@emisocks42]

Thank you for putting this out there. I had a very similar experience and dropped the game at around the same time. Honestly my biggest gripe is how solving the riddles requires going through the game over and over and over, trying things even if you don't know if they'll work, and fast traversal options are super limited and awkward and STILL very time consuming. I felt like it was asking for so much of my time and effort and giving basically nothing in return. The one difference in my experience was that I am not very good at sokoban, so the block pushing puzzles WERE substantially difficult for me. I... still didn't find them particularly fun though. They were just very repetitive and took a lot of trial and error. That said, I absolutely LOVED the vibes and aesthetic of the game. They were just not enough to keep me playing through the awful experience of the puzzles.

[@oscarjames3777]

Very interesting definition of puzzles and riddles!!!! I adore void stranger, but totally get why you don't!

[@sososo3906]

Separating the task to understand requirements or functionality from puzzles is so cool

[@JakAttack12345]

I'm going to do the opposite of this video's impetus and heavily suggest you NOT play La Mulana and La Mulana 2, if you haven't already. I have a friend with extremely wide tastes in puzzle games and from everything they've described it sounds like the kind of game you might get recommended, and have a similarly bad time with.

[@eithanknife]

I’m not a VS shooter but I get where you’re coming from. For me what made VS work was that I felt it was similar to the dev’s previous game: zeroranger. The idea being that you replay the first non-hard mode run again and again and learn to route it trying to solve the bigger “riddle” in a shmup-like fashion was really fun

[@holdmeclosertinyprancer]

genuinely felt a chill when I got to the end and realized "thanks for watching" wasn't cut off at all

[@mxjf]

whoa i got recommended a 5 minute old video from patty in my feed :DDDDDD Love you girl :3

[@onesaltydoge3105]

Big agree, recommending Outer Qilds (and presumably this game; if it's like Outer Wilds) as a puzzle game is very inaccurate. I've heard the genre called Metriodbrainia's and Discovery games, but I think Riddle games works just as well

[@Hasselia]

This video has solved a key aspect of why I hate ARGs. It's all communication, where the solution of the puzzle is solved based on varying degrees of how well you can bend "common sense" ( the cultural expectations) of the game master / developer. I'm autistic. I literally have a communication disability! Riddle games and ARGs are literally inaccessible to me. I don't think that means they should go away, but maybe certain creators & communities should temper their expectations for how many people are physically able to join. Even if it's a text based riddle.

[@good-sofa]

honestly this is a little bizzare for me, but i guess it makes sense

[@stardustknight99]

For me, the appeal of riddle games is a sense of secrecy, almost feeling like I'm trespassing onto something I wasn't supposed to see. Void Stranger's execution of it does this very well--you transcend the rules of the game and defy what you're told is the structure of it. I get a similar kick from things like Dark Souls 1, where the world is harsh and difficult to navigate, and requires genuine study to find the best ways through and figure where secrets must be hiding. I wonder if my neurodivergence plays into it--I'm schizophrenic, and this sort of epiphanic thinking comes easy to me. I've bounced off of Sokoban-likes in similar ways, I think, because I struggle with that rigorous chipping away at solutions. Worse than that, I'll solve a puzzle on some unconscious level and just suddenly 'see' the solution, which both fails to teach me how to work within the game's systems and also feels deeply unsatisfying. When it happens as a riddle, though, I don't feel cheated out of it in the same way; and in the very best examples, things like Outer Wilds, I come away with a better idea of the symbol-set and the shape of what lies behind the riddles. Symbol-set in a puzzle-game-like sense of game pieces, but also in a poetic sense, of the symbolism that the riddles run on. Taxxon wonders if the appeal of riddle games is replicating the sensation of solving a puzzle, without having to solve anything; I think it's closer to the sensation of understanding a particular rule or interaction, especially the kind that reframes everything. Side note, but man, "puzzle game" is definitely an absurdly broad genre. I think there's been a trend of breaking it into more sub-genres lately, and I hope that continues, because trying to say that things like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes are of a kind with something like Beans and Nothingness is absurd. Especially when it comes to recommendations--I don't really believe Patricia Taxxon would've liked Void Stranger if she knew what it was going in, but at bare minimum, "Void Stranger is a sokoban-like" is wildly misleading.

[@phantomkitten73]

I like Portal.

[@dustycrustyhomelessman1648]

very polarizing and exremely controversial take. very brave of u to say this but i must say i agree

[@AshnSilvercorp]

I would say you should pick it back up, but this is an interesting point. Maybe its expectation? I haven't played a sokoban game in ages, but I got along with what it was doing. It was how deep the rabbit hole took me that kept me going. It felt like I was unraveling something. But maybe expecting to get a hint everywhere does ruin the experience. But I do agree. Without knowledge of how the "permadeath" works, it's easy to feel crushed by it. I can say this though, you've sniffed the surface of an interesting game. And that "permadeath" does not stay relevant to gameplay for long in the way you think it does.

[@arkorat3239]

Nothing hurts more than youtuber i like, not enjoying game i like. Do agree with all your points tough. Think there was a riddle in the game where the only reason I figured it out was because a friend was watching me play. And me getting it wrong upset them enough that they broke the shackles of "no spoilers".

[@bossgoji]

I'll be honest, the phrasing 'simulates the feeling of solving a puzzle' is kind of dire and condemnatory for what amounts to an ideological disagreement over what makes for a good puzzle. I'm also not a fan of disqualifying a given game as 'not really a puzzle game' based on whether or not a particular reasoning methodology works well for it. A puzzle that relies on interpretive wordplay, abstraction, and digging for clues isn't failing to be a puzzle, it's just a puzzle that isn't going to be solved easily by certain approaches. Describing it the way this video does feels kind of like 'this is just a way for people who aren't good at real puzzles to pretend they're smart' and... I don't know if I care for that.

[@Person.1234]

I can see how that comes off harsh, but I do still feel it's useful and necessary to categorize puzzles vs riddles since they're vastly different and these two separate name's shes come up with work great for the distinction

[@Person.1234]

It's like pointing out the distinction between two genres, like say house and techno, it's not being elitist to say "this isn't x it's y" it's being useful

[@big_egg953]

i think it's an interesting and possibly useful genre distinction, but that wasn't all that was being said in the video - it was also saying that they aren't puzzles and only exist to feel like puzzles for those who don't like the type of puzzle Patricia likes, which comes across kind of insulting and a little pompous (not to say that was intentional). it feels really bizarre to me to not say "this is a type of puzzle that i really do not enjoy" but rather "this does not count as a puzzle" when it just requires a different type of thinking than the kind you're interested in. 'puzzle game' (and by extension 'puzzle') is an incredibly broad term, i don't get why you would pigeonhole it into just one type of thing and discount anything that requires a distinct type of reasoning as not part of it. it's not like 'adventure game' or something where the words have always referred to a specific kind of game but the genre just has an unintuitive name, it's a brand new definition that (in my opinion) is way too overly restrictive. like, Tetris is just as much of a puzzle game as something like Return of the Obra Dinn, it's just that Tetris is testing your ability to think quickly about a simple spatial problem while Obra Dinn is testing your ability to logically deduce a solution based on the information you've been given. they're testing different facets of knowledge which both deserve to be considered as being part of knowledge. both are puzzles, they're just within different subgenres within the greater genre of puzzle

[@Person.1234]

@@big_egg953 I think the current definition of puzzles is basically as broad as adventure and still deserves to have a more defined description, like Tetris is even further away from a puzzle because that kinda thing is far more about reaction times and pattern recognition, rather than taking your time to experiment and form hypotheses

[@Person.1234]

Maybe we could just make up an even broader term, like the community I'm in has a great one: Thinky!

[@Teethmafia]

“I’m something of a void fruit myself.”

[@Emmycron]

[insert giving up mining for diamonds meme]

[@Person.1234]

Tbh having gotten further into the game, it's just more like, iron

[@invader_vin]

i dont even like puzzle games i like playing resident evil and pikmin and minecraft. however your videos about puzzle games intrigue me and mayhaps i will try one of the ones you like

[@invader_vin]

actually i did play ONE puzzle game on the ds when I was a kid that i really liked, i think it took place in a hotel and you played as a guy named 'x' or something (?) and it was fun even though i didn't really understand it at the time. maybe i will unlock the dormant puzzle joy inside me

[@francolmable]

your review made me want to play the game. i don't know how nor why but it did

[@anzo.7806]

Void Stranger is a riddle game with puzzle elements. I did enjoy solving puzzle, and I do think that there is something substantial/appealing with the game revealing itself more than what it appeared/first presented itself as. Like "Oh wait what the fuck ? You can do that ? Holy shit is there more than like, puzzle elements ?" I would even say that the game being spoiled / you getting pushed to play more was a mistake. Those kind of moment is much more appealing if it takes you by surprise. As you said Void Stranger is totally like OW. A game where thou shall not spoil, where elements must be hidden, that only pretends to be a puzzle game just to lead to a bigger payoff. It is no puzzle game.

[@benisser]

Now imagine OW adventure game guy stuck in the Mon pit with the golems arguing it's not a riddle game because "the bigger payoff" is actual puzzles.

[@godlyvex5543]

I don't really agree, it's just a puzzle game and a riddle game. Almost every level is a conventional puzzle, and many riddle solves are necessary to win. Why is there such an obsession with trying to say the game isn't 'really' a puzzle game? It clearly is. Just because it's combined with another thing you don't like doesn't make it primarily that thing. It's both.

[@r4masami]

wait you made captain disillusion progressively spin faster over the video, has this been happening the entire time and I just haven't noticed it

[@mutantfreak48]

yea

[@hunterm1113]

I remain very interested to see if you'll give ZeroRanger a try, and if you end up having any thoughts on it as well. (I mean, I love hearing your hot takes on whatever, so it's cool lol) It also is a bit of an experiment in bending its genre, to mixed-mostly-positive results, but I know it's a bit split between people who saw it as a great onboarder for shmups (me), and those who saw it as the Undertaleification of its genre, Baby's First Kind-of-subversive Shooter haha. System Erasure definitely caught my attention over the last year, and I'm gonna be paying attention to whatever they develop in the future!

[@benisser]

I don't think ZR is bending anything, it's a very straightforward arcade shmup. It has a clever trick to try to encourage casual players to go for a 1cc but I don't see how it's subversive.

[@hunterm1113]

@@benisser That's true, it's actually pretty straightforward when you're more familiar with shmups, but it was pitched to me by friends as like "ooh it has A Story with Clever Twists" etc

[@jatsko3113]

Intrigued as to what token this video will add to the growing upper left corner. I've been away from Outer Wilds for long enough that I think it's worth revisiting to see exactly what you mean when you try to differentiate it from other puzzle games and call it a "riddle game" instead. I feel like I can accept seeing something like Myst or any number of room escape or adventure games as "riddle games", but not OW for some reason. I do understand that Outer Wilds has things that you need to work out in your head instead of in a more physical sense, but a part of me questions whether both of those are just different forms of a same base logic pattern - one internal and in the form of a narrative, and one external and in in the form of a more explicit ruleset, or something. There's also the part of me that immediately thinks "some puzzle games make you spend time figuring out how the developer thinks and understanding their thought processes in order to play it effectively" and I imagine that is very much its own (partially connected) delineating thing - differentiating games with "esoteric logic" or "moon logic" from those that are easier and more obvious or expected to discern. And from there I think about why the easier types of thought patterns are easier; how much of that is based on how they're prevalent in social communication? Great video, it's very motivating and I might check out Void Stranger in the future, if not to just see if I can get into the head of the game and see how I feel about it!

[@griffinhunter3206]

This is really interesting to consider in the context of this video = kzbin.info/www/bejne/npOsmZStgZx3f6c Someone who loved Void Stranger (and hates Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy) talking about how they got into sokoban vs someone who loves puzzle games and (and loves Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy) talking about why they could not getting into Void Stranger. You get a real sense of what the creators of the videos want in games, and how they see the world. also i really hope i am remebering my youtubers right and you like GOIW Bennett Foddy cause its kidna awkward if not.

[@puppyhelictriangle]

yeah im the getting over it girl

[@griffinhunter3206]

@@puppyhelictriangle poggers uwu

[@kenkoopa7903]

This was a very interesting video to see from you during my binge of ZeroRanger, System Erasure's prior game, which is an immensely cogent take on its genre of choice compared to this game, it seems. I wonder a little if they wanted to escalate on the "secret depths" of ZeroRanger (which it's not really a game with "secret depths" anyway? you're gonna see everything the game has to offer just doing the main path), and with them having far less experience developing puzzle games, it kinda leads to a shallower take on the genre? I mean, with the right mindset, any puzzle game can certainly become a riddle game, the player taking answers by faith even when the solution is systemic in nature.

[@benburke3015]

Looking at the comments, I look forward to the follow up addressing the Outer Wilds remarks. Lol.

[@sportsracer48]

As someone who really loves Outer Wilds: you are completely right in your criticism of it. I wish the community wasn't so secretive about what the game is like. The toxic positivity and 'everything is spoilers' attitude leads to a lot of people expecting it to be god's gift to gamers, and they are rightly disappointed. At least it doesn't pull and 'Amneisa: The Bunker' with a pop up that says 'this game works like real life (tm) just do what you think would really work and it will probably work here too :)' which is of course only true if you happen to think just like the devs.

[@DemonixTB]

People are like that because unlike most games, it has no replay value, once you know something about it's world, that's it. It isn't a puzzle game, it doesn't have mechanics you can combine in endless ways, it's a story, a mystery novel, and the way you interact with it is unique for each person, telling anyone about the impactful discoveries really is like spoiling a major plot point of a book, it's just bad manners, there isn't anything toxic about wanting that to not happen to people. I don't want to bash on you, but it's hard to conceive to me what is the game like to you, that you think the community hides by not wanting to say anything.

[@mutantfreak48]

amnesia: the bunker seems more grounded in reality and it's fairly limited in its setting, i don't think it's quite as sprawling as the outer wilds

[@Saltine3022]

The reason we are protective of the game's spoilers is because they can literally rob you of playing segments of the game which is not the same problem spoilers share in most instances, where you can get the same experience just a reduced impact of that experience. I think a misconception a lot of people have when they fell off of outer wilds mid-way cause it just isn't for them is exactly this semi-derogatory "riddle-game" concept where people perceive incomplete information as a riddle that is ready to solve rather than realizing there must be information still missing, and this is largely because many of OW's stages can be solved with that intuition if you're clever at connecting dots, and many who are clever immediately do this for one of the early puzzles and assume the whole game is like that, especially after they've been to all the planets once and assume they've "seen most of it" In actuality as you probably already know, there is only one major solve in Outer Wilds that requires any inference on the part of the player (For those of you brain-poisoned like me, here's a spoiler-free acronym to explain which one: "ATP TP"). Every single other major bit of progression in Outer Wilds is done with concrete, actionable information that the game will breadcrumb you to. The ship's log is arranged in a conspiracy-board structure to exactly assist in this breadcrumbing of required information. There isn't an air of toxic positivity either, there are multiple points in this comment alone where I am critical of certain structural flaws the game has in teaching the player the metagame (and the way to access ATP in particular cause I've seen it trip up so many people) but I fully understand why it looks that way from without and believe me I've had to contend with how annoying it can be to try and convince somebody to play something they know almost nothing about from the other side. Just like it takes a particular kind of brain to enjoy puzzle games with hard, complex rules it takes a particular type of brain to enjoy a fantastical detective game set in outer space. It's fine to not like it, and in my experience about 30% of people bounce off before visiting any planet and another ~20% or so bounce off at that turning point and having visited every planet and feeling stuck. One of those people is my best friend and partner and I don't hold it against them beyond prodding them to maybe boot it up again once in a bit. Your level of hostility here is deeply frustrating but I've tried to make this comment as kind as possible because again, I know where it comes from knowing this game intimately.

[@stanley8006]

👏obra👏👏dinn👏 Black and white?? Check Based beyond all comprehension?? Check, please dear comment reader, please play it

[@plushloler]

I really liked void stranger though I get your issues with it. The second brand is really hard to figure out, I had to get lots of hints and at the end looked it up anyway, and while the solution made sense it didn’t even look satisfying, and what I felt then is similar to what you describe with brands in general. I think the cheats and all the secrets come in too early, I actually liked the game for what it is, so I cleared hard mode without the burdens because I wanted to play the really hard puzzles normally, but it’s like the game doesn’t really want you to do that. I think the game has an issue of making really harsh choices, and then also adding something to make itself much easier, and it doesn’t balance out to being normal, it either stays way too hard or becomes trivial. There are more things I didn’t like about the game, but overall it was mostly a good experience for me, it’s a shame you couldn’t enjoy it. I think there are places where the puzzles get really good, but it would not be worth it to get there.

[@complexrolls]

She's so mad the outro finished. :O

[@davidfenneran]

"Void Stranger, Outer Wilds, and Myst are something else. a totally different genre that I cannot stand where instead of puzzles there are riddles" it's funny you say that because Adam Millard JUST released a video arguing this same point. It is called "The Greatest Videogame Genre You Didn't Know Existed" and he basically argues that these types of games are separate from puzzle games in much the same way you elucidated: you don't "solve puzzles" as much as you "discover clues". He calls them "Discovery Games" and it could just be the case that you like puzzle games but hate discovery games.

[@sprigtherecluse6741]

if we’re talking abt riddle games then we GOTTA mention the riddle school series

[@BurnerWah]

I've recently become interested in void stranger, but that has nothing to do with puzzles TBH It just looks like a weird and interesting game, but all the stuff that makes it look weird and interesting to me makes it also sound like a terrible puzzle game

[@bropen5]

I'm now very curious if you would consider La Mulana a riddle game or a puzzle game

[@sportsracer48]

very clearly a riddle game for the most part

[@grant9637]

Im curious what you would think of the lok & abdec puzzle books by letibus designs. They are very definitively puzzles, but they rely upon the pen & paper medium & its inability to confirm whether or not you are correct.

[@Person.1234]

They're so cool! It's really interesting to see how they teach its mechanics through design alone! As for the puzzles bit, id say there's like a riddle phase where you try to find the rules, and then the puzzle phase when you already know them. But figuring out rules can also get a bit puzzly as well

[@sepiar7682]

Interesting, I had the complete opposite reason for putting it down - I love "mystery" games like Outer Wilds and went in to Void Stranger looking for that, but really dislike little self-contained puzzles like Sokoban games, so I found the endless trudge through Sokoban puzzles to get to any interesting secrets too annoying so I put it down. Seems like if you love Sokoban games *and* mystery games it's the game for you, but if you just like either then it's kinda hard to get in to

[@Person.1234]

I mean, it's not really that good of a sokoban game either, id say a good example of self contained sokoban puzzles (and beginner friendly) is Patrick's Parabox, oh and Microban also works

[@colorcrims0n]

Will there be a Block Koala review too

[@emmadrew50]

Would you consider Obra Dinn to be riddle game?

[@mutantfreak48]

yea it kinda is, though it's much more grounded in our own reality and requires less abstract interpretation and more direct knowledge on marine/naval structure, cultural signifiers, etc(obviously it's not perfect about it of course). it's usually billed as a detective game

[@federicoandrade6978]

why is Technology Connections doing Drag and spinning?

[@ElHuesudoII]

if only it was that

[@fy8798]

Yeah, this is why I love what you call riddle games. The real way to solve them is experimenting - you call that pure guesswork, but its actually purposeful experimenting :P That's not really about just happening to align with the designers - there's lots of these games around, with different designs. I can't just happen to align with ALL of those designers. It's not just you either immediately knowing to pick up the stairs, it's noticing that the brand already exists, but nothing happens - what does that mean - and then experimenting with it. Stairs + pit was not my immediate guess, but I arrived at it as the solution after testing several other hypotheses. THAT is the joy and why I prefer them over just games that keep using the same mechanics over and over until the end. If that's not for you, that's understandable! but it really isn't about just guessing once or aligning with the designer at all. That's really mischaracterizing the genre, in my opinion. Agreed on the prolife end though. Rubbed me wrong too.

[@tristanmiller7573]

I think of these as “communication puzzles”, where the designer tries to communicate the solution to the solver in a deliberately obtuse way. I like them but they have some major failure modes, like if you don’t trust the designer. I consider Void stranger a metroidbrainia which is set in a sokoban puzzler-but the sokoban isn’t the point, it’s just the medium. Usually when people bounce off it’s because of the sokoban part!

[@lancesmith8298]

I love the riddles (when they aren’t terrible), but even with my evil spoiler knowledge, and all the tools that gives me, the amount of busywork to play through all of it is never going to be worth it

[@VCheesey]

I've never played Void Stranger but I NEED you to elaborate on what the "weird pro-life twist" ending is

[@godlyvex5543]

it's an exaggeration, it's not really pro-life in any conventional way other than that a character chose to save a newborn baby instead of the parent. The parent had no choice in the matter

[@mesoseven1633]

I agree with that your problem is that you have to think similarly to the devs, but I guess I don't understand how outer wilds is like that, IMO that game gives you all the info you need completely literally?