What are your game's rules?

I’ve had a few experiences recently where I have been playing a game and have had no idea what it wants from me. The header image for this newsletter is one. If you don’t recognise the game, this is from Blue Prince, a fairly straightforward puzzle based mystery game. Most of the puzzles in this game are explained fairly well. Crucially, some are not. One example is the Gallery. A room you only solve once, but a room where none of the rules are explained. There are four paintings on four walls, each with a set of letters in frames next to it. Each frame rotates between a selection of letters, and these change the title of the painting on the little identification card next to the painting. Classic art gallery stuff.

The problem is, there’s only one correct answer, and many many possible answers. I spent upwards of 45 minutes in this room when I discovered it, getting more and more frustrated, to the point where I was just inputting nonsense, the way you might just hit buttons in wordle when you’re stuck and hope it counts as a word.

Eventually I looked up the answer to this room. It wasn’t fun any more. The other culprit of this in Blue Prince is the dartboard game in the Billiards Room. You learn to read it as you play the game, but there are several points where you really can and should just look up what a symbol means, because otherwise how are you going to work out that a diamond symbolises reversing the numbers in the sum to get your final answer. While you technically can brute force both of these puzzles, it’s time consuming, repetitive, and boring to do so.

However, I’ve also had good experiences with not knowing the rules recently. This weekend was Next Fest, which I’ve talked about before, and I had fun on stream yesterday checking out a couple of demos. One that was very interesting was Occlude, a card game based on a unique version of Solitaire that uses coins to signify secret rules that you need to understand to finish the level “right”, but need to be deduced by the player.

The biggest difference here is this:

Occlude tells you the rules are secret, and lets you know immediately when something is right or wrong.

I was confused by Occlude, but I didn’t feel like I wanted to just look the puzzles up online to get them over and done with. Instead I knew I was chasing secret rules, looking out for clues, and able to quickly restart with a fresh shuffle when my coins turned to skulls.

The other difference is that the longer you spend in Occlude, the more exposure to the clues you get. You repeat actions, the coins move appropriately each time, and the feedback alerts you to possible solutions.

In Blue Prince’s Gallery, the longer you spend shuffling letters and staring at surrealist black and white pictures, the more you start overthinking the possible titles. The only one I got on my own was a pun that was painfully obvious to me - two others were so obtuse that even having seen this room in its solved state multiple times I cannot remember what they were. The final one had so many extraneous details that the answer, which in hindsight is also fairly obvious, was completely obscured to me.

You don’t have to have been an art history minor like I was to know that staring at a painting and looking for hidden meanings and patterns is a great way of spotting things that are completely incidental and convincing yourself there’s a deeper explanation.

The final difference is that Occlude rewards failure. Well, in a way. If you fail to get a deck out using the secret rules of Occlude, you will still get a snippet of story. You will get a different snippet if you found one but not all of the secret rules. It’s a really fun way of letting the player move on to other puzzles and come back to the one that is stumping them. Better at least than a complete lack of feedback on anything but success.

I also want to give an honourable mention to Neoclassical: Chromaticist, another demo I played on stream that had rules I didn’t understand. However, this game wasn’t story based it was tetris based, and I was perfectly satisfied with my mediocre scores and not really understanding because I was playing tetris and I like tetris.

The Next Fest demos are only guaranteed to be online until 10am Pacific on Monday, so if you want to check out Occlude you can do that here until then.

I also played demos for:

• Neoclassical: Chromaticist

• Hotel Galactic

• and Robert on Earth (this one off stream)

Housekeeping time.

This week is KiwiRPG week! Since 2023, KiwiRPG has hosted a week of streams, sales, and promotion for ttrpg designers and performers from Aotearoa. You can check out the full schedule for this year, and the bundles on itch and drivethrurpg at kiwirpg.com 

But if you’re reading this newsletter you may be most excited to hear that I will be joining one of the streams! On Tuesday night at 6:30pm NZT (11:30pm Monday for Pacific time) I’ll be playing Shadowrun In the Sprawl by Matthew Terry and I’m really excited. Hamish Cameron, writer of The Sprawl will also be playing, if that sweetens the deal for anyone.

You can find that stream, and the rest of the streams (there’s one every night at around the same time all week!) at twitch.tv/kemuwhakatauoaotearoa

And that’s it from me this week! See you in the morning for stream. We’ll be playing some more Long Dark, exploring Coastal Highway and continuing to try to get the blueprint for the furniture workbench.