All of this, though, at the discretion of the player.
Second Wave put a lot of power in the players' hands.
Onward and outward - those are just the first three options Second Wave offered.
I love Second Wave because it feels like a great compliment to the player to be offered it.
You, Second Wave suggests, are a player of great creativity and attention to detail.
You’re in the kitchen up to your elbows in spaghetti sauce.
You leave Post-it notes to yourself about home bio-hacking projects and you do your own translations of the classics.
It’s gorgeous stuff.
Its card system is proper magic.
Basically, as you play you unlock variables for the game in the form of these cards.
Equally, they might offer changes to the basic rules.
They might throw more balls in, or give you bigger tables to play on.
This is lovely, and it’s a great unlock system to give the game a bit of shape.
But more than that, I love how it’s implemented.
The end result reminds me a bit of playing Skyrim with random mods added.
You load into a match and you don’t know what you’re going to be up against.
Pretty soon, I was up to my elbows in spaghetti sauce.
I’m terrified of breaking things and not being able to fix them.
That gives me access to a world that I am normally shut out of.
I wish more games would do this.
I have explained a number of games to people while only just scraping by in terms of understanding them.
These are games that become old friends.
Because they reveal that tweaking the parameters is perhaps where the deepest of all games is found.
