MathWizard
Good things are good
No bio...
User ID: 164
The Order of the Sinking Star might be the best puzzle game I have ever played. That's not a super high bar, because I don't play a lot of puzzle games, but it does a really good job and avoids most of the problems that turn me away from other puzzle games.
Created by Jonathan Blow, the creator of Braid and The Witness, it shares enough commonalities with them that it's recognizably one of his works, while being much higher quality in my opinion. Fundamentally, it's a grid-based block puzzle game. You move in one of four directions, you push blocks onto buttons, or into pits to create platforms, or to block line of sight for lasers or monsters, or to push other objects. There have been many games like this, It reminds me of Baba is You without the text rule interactions. But there is a LOT of depth and complexity here that replaces the need for those.
There are four different worlds, each having their own characters (with unique mechanics) and several puzzle elements (with unique mechanics) beyond just pushing blocks. One world has monsters that kill you if you get too close, or kill each other, and has a bunch of heroes that do stuff like teleport or transform objects. Another world has mirrors that reflect characters or objects and lots of water. Another world has laser beams with different effects.
But, after doing the initial levels for each world, you unlock the intersections between them. To the North is Hero world where you learn about those mechanics, and to the East is Mirror world where you learn about those mechanics. Then all the levels to the Northeast are at the dimensional boundary, where levels have mechanics and characters from both of these two worlds. Now you have monsters with mirrors, and the teleporting guy interacting with mirrors. Also it turns out there person who has an invincibility field against monsters can float on top of water, but only while being threatened by monsters. Every pair of worlds has levels dedicated to that combination, and involves cool and different interactions between the mechanics in each of the other worlds. This allows for a LOT of puzzles that don't feel repetitive. The game does a good job of introducing new mechanics naturally with simple puzzles where there's not very much to do other than mess around until you discover the new mechanic, followed immediately by more complicated puzzles that involve using that mechanic in various less trivial circumstances.
I'm still only partway through the game, so I don't yet know for sure, but I suspect the end levels might involve mechanics from all four worlds simultaneously.
The game is not perfect. The story, as far as it exists, is mostly just lore dumps from characters about the background of their world. A lot of the dialogue and voice acting is kind of lefty artsy cringe. It's not really political so much as, quirky girl is respectful and affirming of the culture of these people from another world she just met, while girlboss explains how her sentient boat is a "spirit" which are respected members of society, not a "ghost". And on the overworld there is some guy anthropologically talking about how he's watching the people in these worlds and has a suspicion that some greater being might be watching him (oooooh, it's yoooou, it's threatening the fourth waaaaall). Nothing unexpected if you've played Braid or The Witness. Jonathan Blow is really good at making puzzles, but he's got a bit of a pretentious artsy streak.
...I just checked and apparently he got a lot of leftists mad at him for supporting Donald Trump, being against DEI, and stuff like that. Which confuses me, because there are a lot of what I would consider cringe lefty cultural characters in this game. I think it's just from being born and raised in California, he absorbed enough of the culture around him even as he rejected their politics.
Anyway, all that said, the story and characters are less than 1% of the game. This is a mechanics based puzzle game, not a narrative puzzle game. And the mechanical puzzles are really really good. They're difficult enough not to just trivially blow through, while not too complicated to be frustrating or obscure. The ability to rewind any of your steps allows easy experimentation without having to redo parts you already understand after every mistake. And the grid base prevents a lot of the stupid meta puzzles in The Witness where something is just hidden behind a rock in the overworld. There are finitely many actions you can do at any time, and the rules are well-defined, you just have to figure them out and put them together.
I'm about 20 hours in and it feels like I'm maybe halfway through the content. Maybe a little more, it's hard to tell how much secret end game stuff there will be. But it's long and it's good. I highly recommend it.
MathWizard
Good things are good
24d ago
Video game thread. What have you been playing?
Posting mine in a response to this because it's long and I don't want to derail everyone else.
MathWizard
Good things are good
27d ago
Good riddance. As a lifelong Pennsylvanian, I hope they shut down the casinos next, though I doubt it due to the greedy greedy revenue. Which is effectively fake because it's siphoned away from idiot rubes and then paid back out to them in welfare and crime, minus the cut the casinos take. The State should not be a revenue maximizer, it should be a utility maximizer, and the utility is summed over the people, not the politicians.
MathWizard
Good things are good
27d ago
I think the point of it is just to discourage it in the first place. It's a difficult enough game that only moderately intelligent and competent people are going to be able to complete the skilled play, and moderately intelligent and competent people aren't going to voluntarily work at this for $5.50 an hour. The vast majority of establishments won't need to do anything because nobody is going to get good at it and sit there consistently doing it without getting bored. The payoff is just too tiny for anyone to care.
MathWizard
Good things are good
27d ago
Yeah, and? I think you're mostly just proving my point for me. The more of them there are the worse things get. It's not all or nothing. An internet with 10,000,000 PvP hackers is worse than an internet with 1,000,000 PvP hackers, is worse than an internet with 100,000 PvP hackers. Every single hacker contributes to making the internet a slightly worse place. More subtle flaws in more niche places will get exploited faster with additional scumbags.
Similarly, a community with 0.1% shoplifters might have stores just ignore them and eat the cost. A community with 1% shoplifters might lock up valuable items or hire security guards (raising prices to meet the excess demand). A community with 10% shoplifters is going to have stores close up and seek opportunities elsewhere, turning into a food dessert. Each scumbag contributes to making things a worse place for everyone else.
My point isn't that you should "expect" people to be good, in terms of predicting that they will be good. My point is that bad people are still bad even when you expect them and prepare for them. Their predictability does not negate their badness, it only allows you to mitigate it. Therefore they are still bad.
MathWizard
Good things are good
27d ago
...no?
First and foremost, this is less about the literal law and more about the moral law. If the government suddenly legalized rape, all the rapists would still be just as horrible people, still cause as much harm, and still be worthy of blame for ruining people's lives. Similarly, the hackers are bad people regardless of what the law says. Rape is not bad because the law says it's bad, it's bad because it causes harm. It's illegal because it's bad, not the other way around.
But also... there are laws against hacking. They are criminals, 100% literally, they broke actual laws doing what they did. The internet might metaphorically be compared to another world where people can do things anonymously and act like avatars disconnected from their physical selves, but in a literal sense it is not. It is a series of electronic signals made by physical computers, taking place in the physical world, and manipulated by physical humans pressing buttons on their physical keyboards. When someone does anything on the internet, they are literally performing actions, and those actions can be made illegal. Enforcement is way more difficult, which is why they usually get away with it, but they still deserve blame for breaking laws and causing harm.
MathWizard
Good things are good
28d ago
You're missing the point. Low trust societies are worse than high trust societies, because even when you take all of the appropriate security measures, those measures inherently come with costs and friction that wouldn't be necessary if there weren't untrustworthy people around. The actual perpetrators are the people directly inflicting all of the costs, both the damages when they get away with something and the security costs when people move to stop them. The naive people are indirectly responsible for the costs caused by insufficient security measures. If they weren't naive OR if there weren't scumbags around, they wouldn't get sabotaged so drastically, but no matter how cynical they are there's nothing they can do to prevent the security costs and friction forced upon them by the scumbags. There's a clear asymmetry here.
I wonder if the issue is just treating criminals as sub-human or something, the fargroup, and thus absolving them of responsibility because you're not even being thinking of them as rational agents in the interaction. They're not just some environment, like wandering into the woods and getting mauled by a bear. They're people and thus deserve blame when they inflict harm.
MathWizard
Good things are good
28d ago
This is a poetry of stupid and the hackers are the least guilty party here.
I despise this framing, and it is obviously false. The most guilty party in any situation is always the actual guilty party. When a women walks down a dark alley in skimpy clothing and gets raped, the most guilty party is the rapist. When a farm sets out an unattended stand with fresh produce and a box to put money in and someone comes and steals everything, the most guilty party is the thief. When a supermarket doesn't put locks on their toothpaste and someone comes and shoplifts a bunch of toothpaste, the most guilty party is the shoplifter. When someone puts refrigerators on the internet and they get hacked, the most guilty party is the hacker.
Yes, you need to be vigilant and aware that bad people exist and take precautions to protect yourself from them. If someone is in a low trust environment where bad people are prevalent, it is irresponsible and negligent not to take precautions, and anyone who fails to do so does share some of the blame for the obvious outcome where the bad people harm them. But they share less than half of the blame, because if the bad people didn't exist then obviously no harm would happen at all and the precautions wouldn't be necessary. There is a finite amount of blame to distribute, and the majority always belongs with the bad people who actually do bad things.
MathWizard
Good things are good
29d ago
Have you played Soulstone Survivors? I thought it was decent, roughly comparable to Deep Rock Galactic Survivor. I haven't played Brotato though, or any survivors game I would consider S tier.
YES!!!
My wife and I have 300 hours in Gloomhaven on Steam. We dated long distance for several years and I credit a non-negligible part of our relationship success to playing hours and hours of Gloomhaven on the internet with voice chat. I've had this on my wishlist since it entered early access, but was too busy playing other games and didn't notice it had finally come out for real.
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