Thank you to crnahg_yhor for the game recs

[feotakahari]

Qube and Filament feel like very similar games. But Qube worked a lot better for me, and I’m not sure how to explain why. The most I can express is my subjective experience.

In Filament, I would start a puzzle by doing step A, then step B, then step C. I would realize step C must be wrong, so I would undo it and do steps A-B-D. Then I would realize that was wrong too, so I would undo and do steps A-E-F. Then I would realize step A was wrong and everything I did from that point forward was guaranteed to fail. I felt like there was supposed to be some point where I acquired “mastery,” but I was basically acting at random until I stumbled into solving the puzzle.

In Qube, I would see a starting point, and that starting point would usually be correct. Not because it had to be correct, or because the puzzle was so simple there was no other place to start. Rather, because I’d worked through enough simple puzzles in order, I was trained on how to handle the more complex puzzles. After a while, it felt like I had a sixth sense for which steps to take in which order to solve each puzzle.

I’m not sure how much this is on the devs and how much this is on me. In general, the more a puzzle game deals with physical objects with mass and volume, the more I struggle with it. (World of Goo was a nightmare for me.) But at the very least, I can say that Qube is incredibly well-designed.

(Next up: Carto.)

Comments

[crnahg_yhor]

Yeah, I don't think either of us acquired anything like mastery with Filament... at least, it didn't feel that way? Objectively, in the 5-puzzle series, 3 would usually be the one that took the longest (I know that some took over an hour), and then 4 and 5 would be fast. I would've assume (but don't know) that the 4th and 5th should be harder, which would imply that we did learn something... but it never felt like I learned anything, so anything we picked up was probably one step more unreliable than intuition.

(In retrospect, it feels a lot like how I smashed my head against all my math classes at university: each new week is a new set of topics, which don't really build on each other, except gradually and over years. This stinks of metaphor.)

Re Qube, I let my partner entirely drive; I only participated in maybe 10% of it, so I have a lot less to say on the matter (whereas with Filament I was much closer to 30 or 40%). I think at the time I compared it disfavorably to Talos Principle.

[crnahg_yhor]

thinking more closely, I think I did learn at a somewhat-consciously-accessible level for at least a few of the puzzles types in Filament; the constellation ones come to mind.

[feotakahari]

Ugh, Talos. I couldn’t get into the puzzles because the plot was so heavy-handed. I’m an atheist, but even I’m not that much of an atheist. Did get one really satisfying dialogue, though (spoilers):




Talking to the guy who always asks what you believe. Asking him to tell me, for once, what he believes in himself. Taking apart his entire worldview as incoherent.

[crnahg_yhor]

Yeah, that's a fair complaint. I think I liked the Road to Gehenna/the side thing's plot/framing somewhat better, but if it's too much, it's too much.