I've been a pretty consistent fan of Bennett Foddy's work. I love Getting Over It to the point where I got a Gold Pot by accident, just by casually playing over and over again. I've even had the pleasure to hang out with Foddy, giving a talk with him on troll games in a time so long ago it feels like The Old Internet(It was called fucking ROFLCON). There, also I had the pleasure of also meeting and talking games with Maxi Boch, one of the other co-creators of Baby Steps. Some of the conve...

I was, as is my normal way, not on the hype train for Silksong. I wasn't reading updates, I wasn't Silkposting. I wasn't desperately waiting for a release date. I had no emotional stakes in its existence.

I really liked Hollow Knight, but I didn't crave more of it. It genuinely helped remind me what the weird, vibey 'genre' we clumsily call Metroidvanias are actually about. They aren't about color coded doorway and breaking blocks, but exploration. Yet the tools that could be used to create a sense of exploration became the genre in peoples minds. Hollow Knight forwent most of those tools, most of the "Quality of Life", and let players get lost. It rewarded them for getting lost, by making sure there was real, substantial content in every direction. You weren't left struggling to find the golden path, because there was, at least relative to the rest of the genre, little sequence to break.

Hollow Knight... woke me up, in a sense. The first hour or two of playing it, I assumed it wasn't actually that great. The map just seemed wrong... the flow seemed wrong... areas seemed too samey -- how am I going to avoid getting lost, if you're designing like this? Isn't your invisible hand supposed to be guiding me?

... And then I actually got lost.

I didn't particularly care for the art style(I don't get why THIS is the thing every HK inspired game chooses to copy) (Though I respected it). I didn't really dig the whole bug thing(I wasn't a bug mother yet, okay?). I didn't enjoy most of the bosses that people swore were really good. None of that mattered. Playing a game that rejected 10 years of indie metroidvania "common knowledge" revitalized my mind.

Silksong revitalized my heart.

With comments like "Lunacid sure isn't that much like King's Field or Shadow Tower" there was a lot of "Okay so when are you going to play Tears of the Moon?"

Lunacid: Tears of the Moon, is a breezy prequel to Lunacid, notably made with the ancient Sword of Moonlight: King's Field Making Tool. It's janky, it's hard to get to display right, and it was one of the few times I was happy about Steam Input profiles(Though when I turned it on for this game, the universal 'control windows' chords became active and I wish I could tell Valve and Microsoft that no, I NEVER, EVER want to control my actual PC with a controller, please fuck off). Look, it can't be helped, these are primitive tools from a primitive yet beautiful age.

Inglorious Basterds was famously a hard movie to end. How do you end a WW2 period piece that so diverges from real history? How do you come up with a believable ending, without throwing away all the credibility you've built up? How do you untangle the knot that you yourself created, without undoing your story and your creative voice?

Well, you stop caring and shoot Hitler in the face with a tommy gun.

Faux retro games hit this problem a lot too, as I would know from experience. Whether you're doing a tribute/revival game or a period piece(No, really, we should start calling games like this 'period pieces', I'm serious. That's what they are.), there is a personal line you have to decide on for how much are you serving the past, and how much is the past serving you. How much do you owe the things you take influence from to represent them, and their item, with care and accuracy. How much do you owe your inspirations?

Lunacid, for its part, would choose to shoot Hitler in the face.

I've known about, and even wanted to play Uncharted Waters ever since I was a kid, but given how many games there are, I had never gotten to it. In fact, I may have never gotten to it. Often games like this just fall slowly down the mental list, until they become forgotten.

It it can feel weird and arbitrary what old game I end up going back to. I don't go back through a queue of games, based on which I think would be the best, or most important to play. It almost ends up happening thro...