A few of the things that have us hooked this week.
29th March 2024
Hello!
This week: swimming pools, crates and tombs.
Pools demo, PC
My wife is completely fascinated by the whole liminal spaces scene online.
Loads of people make these clips, share them, discuss them.
And quite a lot of these clips revolve around swimming pools.
There will be tiles, lapping water, a bizarre slide tunnel.
We finally got round the demo this week.
Its creepy and mysterious and brilliant.
And its so simple.
Theres the sense of being pursued, no, of being driven forward deeper into the building.
Pools is very beautiful, and very doomy.
Its like navigating a very strange burial chamber.
Which I guess means that the game is onto something.
Super Crate Box itself remains as infuriatingly perfect as ever.
I am so slow now, so sluggish, so empty of head and clumsy of hands.
Super Crate Box is a wonderful arcade game.
The genius comes from the crates themselves, though.
These spawn randomly around the level, one at a time, and you collect them to score points.
But they also swap out your current weapon, and this can properly mess you up.
Sometimes its a flamethrower and youre off to the races.
Sometimes its a mine or the bazooka, which has a long reload.
Oh the ways you’ve got the option to die.
I guess what I mean is that people arent just playing the games, theyre playing the controls.
This is all done in a lovely spirit and its very enjoyable to watch.
Games are so easy to misremember - certainly for me to misremember.
It frightens me a little.
We were having a conversation in the office recently about Monaco, which I love.
But how can I love it when I can barely recall what it does?
I was describing the game to someone and describing this incredibly precise game about pulling off heists.
