Messages

Thanks! I don't really know what I'm doing yet but I'd been sitting on that draft forever and wanted to get something out there. I'll be busy with other projects for the next week or so but I could try to collaborate on something after that if anyone wants.

*twitch* *twitch* "Argh, how do you even do this?"

"I dunno, you just kind of, like, flex and whip it. Are you focusing on-"

"YES, I'm focusing on it. Fuck's sake, who's ever heard of snapping just one finger?"

Nat shrugged. "I don't know what to tell you, it just..." She looked up at the cafeteria wall and snapped a finger.

Now, to a layperson it might have looked like the data sparked out from her fingertip. Common misconception. Think of it like a lighter: you press the switch and fire appears, but the fire doesn't come from the lighter; it's the product of a reaction with the air. Same principle here - the finger is a catalyst, pulling the magic out of the environment. In this case, that energy arced up and outward, cutting a ragged figure through the air as it bounced off the polished stone wall. It wove through the high ceiling before hitting and disabling a misconfigured light fixture.

"...works." She stretched, eyes fixed on the now very feathery light. "That probably shouldn't do that." Still watching the lamp, she hailed a passing SimpleBot and sent it to floor 14 to make a record of the incident.

There are a lot of ways to acquire magic - structured education, for instance, or long-term rigorous practice. Natalie's methods were... somewhat less orthodox. After rejecting an apparent attunement towards tech magic, she struggled to draw the same power from other less intuitive sources. Generously, she could be called a jack of many trades; more accurately, the potential energy crackled unpredictably based on momentary whims. The raw ability was there, waiting to be harnessed - and indeed it was, from time to time, in sharp bursts of study to solve individual problems - but it was at least as likely to be used on impulsive, flighty pursuits as it was for anything productive or helpful in maintaining the Refuge.

And so she lounged through the days in the common spaces, casting impulsive party tricks with the hope that one of them might turn into something more. Barring that, maybe they'd at least amuse one of the others.

Somebody was saying something, but Nat kept staring at that transfigured light high on the wall. There was a flicker of memory, some nth-degree connection to people and places outside the Refuge, and for a moment she was there again in a realm no travel rune would again reach. A bittersweet reminiscence. It lasted a bit too long.

She made her excuses, something about checking on construction, and wandered out of the tower. It was raining again. The unseen roof of the path slaked the water neatly into gutters, flowing into the gardens, but it didn't keep the wind chill out. She pulled her cardigan closed in a feeble protest against the storm and walked the grounds looking for someplace to be.

Welcome!

People continue to debate whether the trailer itself is AI-generated or assisted. I'm still not an expert in generative video and still not inclined to take a side on it, but if I had to make a wild guess, I'd say they created AI concept art and hired a team to flesh it out. But who knows? If someone shows examples and explains their claim, I could believe that the trailer uses generative AI in some capacity.

I appreciate the kind words. This sort of writing and research is fun, and it's rewarding when people get something out of it. My goal with this was to see if I could influence the discourse around Catly by doing the research that mainstream outlets weren't willing to, and tonight the gaming website 80 Level published an article based on my findings so I'm feeling pretty satisfied.

[Conclusion (tl;dr)]

I know this is sort of a different thing than normal here, but I just spent time researching this and I wanted to have someplace to save and share it in case it doesn't end up fitting anywhere else. Context for anyone who's confused: this is about Catly, a game which received a bizarre trailer at last night's The Game Awards.



---

There's been a lot of talk about Catly, the fever dream of a trailer revealed last night at The Game Awards. Rumours are swirling about the project's origins and intent, and claims have been made about the use of AI and other Web3 technologies. This post collates various sources and evidence that have come to light, some of which I've not seen anybody else talk about anywhere, which demonstrate that the game and its developer have strong ties to the use of generative AI and NFT/blockchain implementation.

Right off the bat, I want to make clear that I'm not going to be talking about the trailer. I'm not an expert in generative video, I have no way of knowing whether that tech is at this point yet. Lots of dissent is flying around. The trailer is not relevant to my findings.

First, the game's site: playcatly.com. The elements from the trailer, again, I'm not commenting on, but several of the assets throughout the site, such as the purple visor, the macaron bag, and the very strange vest-wearing cat for the gold sunglasses image under the Chic collection, have very strong indications of the type of poor physical logic and conceptual bleeding that's common in generative images. Not a smoking gun, but a point of interest.

On Catly's Steam page, there's a testimonial from League of Legends and Arcane producer Thomas Vu:

"This cat MMO is a triumph of innovation and heart, delivering an enchanting world that stands as a testament to the brilliance of its creators."

- THOMAS VU, Producer of League of Legends, Producer of Arcane, 2022 Emmy Awards Winner.

Vu is a prominent angel investor in the "GameFi" space, a term which is commonly associated with Web3, cryptocurrency, NFTs, blockchain, and other such technologies. Again, not a smoking gun, but we're building a pattern of associations here.

Information about the company, SuperAuthenti Co. Ltd., is very scarce, but we do know Kevin Yeung is their co-founder. Yeung previously co-founded TenthPlanet, a studio reported in 2022 to be working on multiple "metaverse" blockchain games. One of these was Alien Mews, a game described as a "digital cat life simulation metaverse." An archive of the company's github page from May 17, 2024 confirms their intent to use NFTs as a centerpiece of their other title Mech Angel.

We do, however, know that prior to adopting the name SuperAuthenti Co., they published another game: an app called Plantly: Mindful Gardening. Official info about Plantly has been scrubbed from the web pretty thoroughly, including its official app page, so I can only refer to this secondary source about it. (This site links to the URL https://www.authentigame.com/ for more info, but I can't find a trace of that site anywhere.) We know from this page that Plantly used these assorted GameFi technologies, from the description:

Your plants are not just digital tokens but emotional mementos

But we can go further. Note that Plantly uses the exact same font in its logo as Catly, but that's obviously incidental. But Plantly is listed here as being developed by Shanghai Binmao Technology Co., Ltd. It happens that we can find a resume for developer Yingzi Kong that lists three months of work experience for Binmao Technology working on "a metaverse game about cats" which is explicitly specified to be Catly. (Please don't bother Kong about this; I've not made contact and do not intend to.)



I suspect we could more conclusively tie these corporate entities together through this webpage which I believe contains business filing details for the Chinese company. I was able to briefly scroll through it once and did see SuperAuthenti Co. listed, but the site kicked me out for not being in mainland China and I'm unable to access it. If anybody is able to confirm this, it would help put a bow on the whole thing.

Conclusion (tl;dr)

Between the use of likely generative AI in assets used to market Catly, the co-founder's well documented history pursuing GameFi development, the attention of known Web3 investors and publications, and direct documented ties to previous blockchain app Plantly: Mindful Gardening, it is exceedingly likely that Catly, in whatever form it may eventually take, is aiming directly for a share of the AI/NFT/Web3 marketplace and will make extensive use of those methodologies. I hope this helps to clarify the coverage of this project going forward and confirms that this is not merely an unsubstantiated rumour.

I want to acknowledge a couple sources that were instrumental in this research: /u/retronomad_, who first made me aware of Plantly in this post, and Bluesky user @bleakvision.info, who identified the investing habits of Thomas Vu. Your work is very much appreciated.

---

Edit (2024/12/14)

Because of the attention this got on reddit (some of which was even positive!), I want to shout out a couple additional pieces of info people contributed that I found interesting.

I wanted to give some props to /u/Invertex for coming up with even more original research into both the game and Yeung's background and collaborators, including these unpublished webpages on the *Catly* website that show much less refined generative images:

https://www.playcatly.com/p2/detail/1 (Backup: https://archive.is/NxvrX)

https://www.playcatly.com/p2/detail/2 (Backup: (https://archive.is/Ikcou/image)

https://www.playcatly.com/p2/detail/3 (Backup: (https://archive.is/Cvrcj)

https://www.playcatly.com/p2/detail/4 (Backup: (https://archive.is/Rpqqn)

Please check out their full comment here if you find this rabbit hole interesting.

Also thanks to folks for reminding me about the Griffin Gaming Partners venture capital aspect - this comment from /u/happyhumorist and this one from /u/ikkir sourcing the Felicia Day connection are both great additions.

[Second:]

The Junitaki delegation arrives on the back of a large, shaggy dog. It pants as it lumbers into the meeting room, a saturated tongue lolling out of its mouth and leaving a visible trail of drool. The representative dismounts and hurries over to the table.

"I'm so sorry, I'm not late, am I?" They glance around the room taking stock of all one (1) persons present. "...Okay, I am late. I'm terribly sorry, this isn't like me at all, but you would not believe the traffic on the Skyrail today- anyway, I'm not here to bore you with excuses. Let's get brown to brash tax."

They gently slide the proposed text out from under the arm of the sleeping admin and give it a look. Regional Council... Million Dreams... tax haven... everything seemed to check out. They quietly scribbled their name under the Second: field, pushed it back across the polished oaken surface, and retreated to their mount.

[full]

One of the great joys of media is that through its abundance and the accessibility of creation, the most unlikely combinations of ideas can exist for the most unlikely subsections of an audience to enjoy. In gaming, years of innovation and trends falling in and out of favour have led indie developers to some unexpectedly intuitive crossroads, from casino games-meet-roguelikes to card games-meet-roguelikes to... maybe we're a little too fixated on Rogue these days.

Peglin is one such example: Peggle, but it's a roguelike. For the uninitiated, Peggle is like pachinko or Plinko or what have you, where you launch balls down into a board full of pegs, and your goal is to hit and eliminate them. It's earned a surprising level of respect and nostalgia in recent years and there isn't much like it on the market today. Roundguard attempted the same roguelike twist a few years ago and failed to fully capitalize on the concept, but Peglin recently came out of a years-long Early Access development to try and scratch the itch. This review was written based on the 1.0 Steam version on PC.

In terms of roguelikes, Peglin feels closest to Slay the Spire, containing a similar branching map system and elements of deckbuilding. The basic premise of a Peglin run is this: you select a character (each of which has different starting properties), select a starting relic (relics provide passive always-on abilities and perks), and start clearing rooms. After each encounter, you have a chance to buy some items or health, then shoot your ball through the remaining board to travel either left or right down the fork in the map to continue to the next room. At the bottom of the map is a boss; beat it and you go to the next world, beat all three worlds and your run is successful, and then you can go again on a higher difficulty.

Now, combat is pretty simple. You have an inventory of orbs - balls - which effectively constitute your deck. These orbs will have different properties and damage values, and at the start of each battle this deck of orbs will be randomized and presented to you in a linear order. Each turn, you shoot one of your orbs through a field of pegs. For each peg hit, the orb scores damage according to its stats, and if you hit the crit peg that damage is stepped up to the orb's crit value. At the top of your screen is a line of enemies advancing from right to left towards you. The sum of your shot is then dealt to whichever enemy you're targeting (or the closest one within line of sight to your target), and then the enemies will all move towards and/or attack you. Then it's your turn again, you use the next orb in your deck, rinse and repeat until you win or lose. You'll get gold from certain pegs and from killing enemies, and you can use that gold after each battle to restore HP and buy or upgrade orbs; the curation of the orbs in your inventory is where the game's deckbuilding components really come into play.

A typical encounter from early in a run.

With the basics laid out, we can talk about what goes wrong. First, you need to understand that there are two very different schools of thought when it comes to roguelike difficulty. The first entails making the game very difficult to complete even once, with individual runs asking a lot of the player and taking a long time to learn well enough to reasonably expect a chance at survival - for my (mildly subpar) skill level, Nuclear Throne is a good example of this. The other approach is to set the bar for completion a little lower, such that a player won't have to make too many attempts before they know enough to have a good shot at winning. In exchange, these games will allow the player to steadily unlock higher and higher difficulties with each win, turning the knobs up on that easier base gameplay. Balatro is a great example.

Peglin is very much like Balatro in this regard. Once you complete your first run, probably without more than a handful of solid attempts, you'll unlock the Cruciball. (I should mention now, this game is full of the worst, most on-the-nose puns you'll ever hear, so get used to hearing them.) The Cruciball is a 20-tier difficulty system in which each tier adds one additional handicap on top of all the previous ones. Beat the game on Cruciball level 1, you unlock level 2, and so on. I'll be upfront and say that this isn't my preferred style of game design, but I did spend a considerable amount of time with it, managing to reach Cruciball 12 during my ~40 hours of gameplay.

The Cruciball system has two substantial flaws. The first is that unlocking these difficulties on one character won't carry over to the others. Once you've played for a while, you don't really want to slog through the lower tiers again without a good reason, and the different characters aren't that different, so I felt compelled to limit my progress to the default rather than spend hours building it back up just to try with someone else. Secondly and more significantly, the difficulty curve relies on death by a thousand papercuts. Individually, none of the debuffs seem that substantial - enemies have a little more health, bombs do a little less damage, you get a little less gold, etc. But the sum result from dealing with them all at once is that after a point, maybe around level 9 or 10, the difficulty spikes quite a bit and you start losing more and more runs to bad luck and snowballing mistakes.

Part of this comes from the available strategies. At the end of the day, your core gameplay here is never going to change that much. In Hades, you might approach certain combat scenarios differently using a sword than you would a bow and arrows, or prioritize different aspects of your moveset like dash attacks. Peglin is pretty much always going to be shooting the ball towards whichever pegs are most valuable to your current build and hoping for the best. There are several main categories of builds you can work towards and none of them really change this. You can go for slime, applying different properties to some of the pegs you hit, but most of the options in this camp are unpredictable and don't give you a lot of control over what happens. There's Ballwark, which generates defense points to absorb incoming damage, but I never found a way to make it worthwhile and didn't feel like netdecking to find the combos. The one I went with pretty often is Spinfection, a poison ability that continues to inflict pain in the turns after landing a hit, and I'd usually try to pair it with piercing orbs to hit multiple foes each turn. But again, these effects really don't give you a lot of room for lateral thinking or alternate strategies. You shoot the ball and hope for a high number.

But for me, the difficulty level and tactical options are less important than the ability to play skillfully and make calculated decisions to overcome the odds. You can hone your mechanical execution in Hades and stand a chance at high heat levels, or play the odds in Balatro and go for a risky hand. But in Peglin, so much of the game is left up to chance that you can very abruptly lose a run without feeling like you made any major mistakes. Some of this is because certain encounters basically demand specific strategies, without which they become borderline impossible. Beating the Ballista boss without any piercing or overflow attacks is borderline impossible, and you might not even have access to any by the time you get there. The progression of the world map contributes to this as well. The map of each world has you traveling downward, electing to go either left or right after each room. You can see on the map which rooms are guaranteed encounters, which are guaranteed treasure or shops, and which ones are question marks which might contain any of the above or special events. But your choice of navigation is made by shooting your ball through the remaining pegs and getting it in the appropriate hole, and sometimes the layout of the pegs makes it virtually impossible to know which way you're going to go. Careful routing can be thrown off by a single bad bounce or an event space with an unpredictable board layout or even bad luck when the game decides which pegs to clear after a battle. And even if you navigate correctly, those question mark spaces have a good chance of either throwing you into a combat or even miniboss encounter you'll have no means of preparing for, or serving you up a negative event that'll eat some health or tamper with your deck in the worst ways.

The top portion of the first world's map - the dotted lines represent branching paths from each encounter.

One of the big differences between Peggle and Peglin is that you don't simply want to clear out all the pegs in a level; you actually want as many pegs around as possible to keep scoring on. To facilitate this, the board will always have a Refresh peg that spawns in a random location and stays there until hit, at which point the entire board is restored and the Refresh peg moves to a new location. Peggle would place some parameters on where its special pegs could spawn on each board, but Peglin seems to make no such exceptions; if it spawns somewhere obstructed, there are very few workarounds except to spend shot after shot chipping away at it while you soak up damage. Peglin's physics are decent, if less predictable and weighty than those of Peggle, but careful aim only helps so much when the shot you need is geometrically inaccessible. The same goes for the crit peg, which moves randomly after each shot, though at least that's easier to mitigate and not as crucial to every build, but in both cases a run of bad luck can make it pointless to continue the run even if you sqeak through.

See, your access to everything in this game is dependent on having gold. You can only heal by paying gold after battles. Orbs are primarily purchased and upgraded using gold. But even if you save up your money, you might never find anything you want to buy because access to different strategies is so unreliable. It's really the relics that dictate what's worth going for, and by the time you're past Cruciball 10 you start to question if you should even begin a run if you don't have a preferred relic in your starting options. Bad encounters mean you need to spend gold healing, which means you have less gold to buy and improve your orbs. This could lead you to think you should settle for less than ideal orb purchases to get by, but one of the biggest newb traps in the game is how difficult it is to selectively remove anything from the deck - expensive once-per-shop-space purchases and a scant few random events are the only controlled methods. Exercising tight control of what goes into your deck is the ticket to higher level wins, which makes the early game even more important to manage your finances and keep your health up. In fewer words, the game gradually devolves into "bad start -> restart -> repeat" until you get something going, at which point you hope you don't draw a tough battle... or get funneled into a more difficult path by bad post-battle RNG... or get heavily disruptive random events that skewer your strategy.

I'll also mention here that (as of the time of writing) the game is severely lacking in the level of polish I expect from a $20 indie title. The fast forward options are a little janky and, while necessary to remove some of the tedium, make the action feel quite a bit less satisfying. More than once I've had crit or refresh pegs fail to spawn, costing me the run, when none of my relics should have interfered with it. Turning the volume all the way down leaves the game slightly audible, and I had to mute the program in Windows to get it truly silent. Controls can't be rebound. Tapping the space bar will shoot even when you're viewing your map or inventory. I've had the game chug during busy turns, I've seen it hang after every shot for several additional seconds. Most of the time it's fine, sans a couple of annoyances, but at this price point it should have a much more refined user experience.

And with all that being said, I can't say the game is unfun. I had a really good time with it at first. The first time I found a broken combination and aced the final boss was great fun and some of the relics promote interesting and risky types of play that I wish were more viable. You can probably get a good 20 hours out of this before you get to the point of frustration - more if you level up the other characters - and with so few options in this genre, it's worth a try for diehard fans. But once you've seen most of the content, tried out a few different builds, notched a few victories, it simply doesn't have the depth to keep pushing through runs that die on the vine for reasons you couldn't control.

Recommended If You: Are desperate for more Peggle-like gameplay; want a game marginally more engaging than Roundguard; enjoy extremely forced puns.

[Recommended If You Like:]

What does it mean for a game to "respect the player's time"?

In some cases, this is easy to answer. Games that are full of busywork, whether it's in the form of high volumes of mandatory side quests or mobile game cooldown meters, want the player to stay with the game well past the point of reasonable time investment. Games like Red Dead Redemption II, with huge amounts of slow manual travel both in and out of quests, refuse the player convenience. (Whether RDR2 uses this to good effect is up to taste.) Where it gets more interesting is when a game commits a litany of minor sins which add up - inconvenient menuing, convoluted town layouts, long animations, a gameplay loop that creates frequent trips back to the shop - and causes an otherwise solid game to be bloated and run longer than necessary. Usually, however, these elements are discussed in the context of longer games where they can add up to many additional hours. What does it look like when a game doesn't respect your time but doesn't ask for much of it in the first place?

On a completely unrelated note, this is a review of Creature in the Well, an indie game from 2019 developed by multimedia studio Flight School, This playthrough was conducted on the Switch version via digital download, YMMV for other platforms or formats.

Creature in the Well takes place in a desert village called Mirage which exists within the eye of a sandstorm. The town's inhabitants have long been cut off from the rest of the world by these unending winds, stranded alone on this earth, only them and their gargantuan mechanized mountain of murky origin and purpose. You play as a "BOT-C" who was once an engineer on the machine who's now reawakened and ventured inside to fight off the mysterious creature and finish what was started. I'm going to tell you up front that I simply did not care about this game's story. I think it's pretty by-the-numbers and I struggled to buy in, but I was so disengaged that I don't even really want to give a negative impression since I didn't make much of an effort. Pretty much everything you get is through occasional one-sided conversations and reading old computer logs, and if that's your thing and you like the setting it's probably passable. (There's one exception we'll touch on a little later.)

Flight School describes CitW as "pinball with swords," which is a nice elevator pitch but not a great explanation. It's played in a top-down perspective similar to Hades as you travel through dungeons. Each room is going to have its own obstacles and challenges and such, and there will be ball spawners present. With the Y button, you can catch and charge up to three balls, increasing their power level, and with the X button you can swing your bat and punt them in the direction you're facing. Almost all obstacles in CitW will have a visible meter on them that fills up as they're hit, and once you've imparted enough power onto them they'll deactivate - it's a mix of pinball and block breaker elements. When balls connect with objects, you earn energy based on how much the ball was charged, and this acts as your currency for exactly two things: buying upgrades (and there's only one single linear upgrade option) and opening doors to proceed further into the dungeon. Clear all the objects in rooms with a pinball bumper thing sunk into the floor and it'll raise up and give you a bunch of energy as a reward.

An example of what normal play looks like later in the game.

The first quirk to note here is how the game's treatment of energy makes the sense of progression a little wonky. From what I could tell, you're not actually required to clear rooms to proceed, you can always just go through the next door as long as you can spend enough energy to do so. A lot of side paths in the dungeons are only to give you more energy, with the reward at the end just being a big room full of passive objects to score off of. In some games it's normal to receive cash as a prize, but the weird thing about CitW's energy is that it's limitless. Rooms reset if you leave the dungeon or wait long enough, so you can grind for energy in a lot of places. (Note: I witnessed this room reset behaviour in hostile rooms, but I didn't test its frequency in passive reward rooms.) This makes these rewards feel kind of hollow, even if they're ultimately necessary to stay on pace for max upgrades by the end of the game and make the bosses more manageable.

Most obstacles in the game are standard passive barriers which you damage for energy, but you'll also encounter fireball-shooting cannons, explosive towers, mob spawners, and such that put you under pressure. There are also optional timed challenges where you'll have to break a series of objects, each within a few seconds, in order to open up secret paths. These are where you'll find new items: cores, which are consumed to buy upgrades; banners, which are cosmetic capes you can wear; and charge and strike items which change your attack properties. Some of these weapons will have really useful abilities like healing you or giving you a laser sight, but others appear to have no unique functions - or if they do, they're sufficiently cryptic that I couldn't figure them out.

As a fan of this game's influences, my first and probably most fundamental complaint about Creature in the Well is a limitation in its gameplay. There doesn't appear to be a limit on the number of balls that can be on screen, at least not one that I noticed, but you're only ever allowed to hold and charge three at a time. Any additional balls that enter your range while you're charging will disappear. I understand that arbitrarily high volumes of balls would likely break the game, but I have the same disappointment here that I do with some modern block breaker games. Multiball play is one of the best parts of both Breakout and pinball, and not getting to ramp up the numbers even in the late game is a shame. Now, this limitation only applies to individual instances of charging - you could catch a few balls, charge them up, release them, and then go grab some more balls that have spawned or been fired by enemies and charge those ones up too. And indeed, you'll do this, sometimes inadvertantly, but I found that because the game is balanced around shooting highly charged balls, you're usually better off powering up a set of three, sniping something with them, and repeating. Any extra balls in play are gravy.

Numbers go up.

Like I said at the top, CitW is a short game. It consists of eight dungeons, plus a small hub area that serves very little purpose. Each of these dungeons is maybe half an hour long, and while the game promises unique themes and challenges in each of them, they end up feeling fairly similar. Each one will introduce a new idea, such as moving platforms or a new enemy type, but they mix in a lot of standard stuff along the way and the optional challenges sometimes use entirely different skills rather than having you master those introduced in that dungeon. The boss fight at the end of each area will have some relation to the central theme but even that's sometimes tenuous. Boss battles are a series of several rooms in a row where you have to dodge more enemies than usual and break all the things, and usually the boss will start resetting blocks if you don't clear things fast enough. None of these fights were exceedingly difficult but I did find myself wondering how I would have done a couple of them if I hadn't been exploring for extra gear. As it stood, I played Creature in the Well as a completionist, 100%ing every dungeon and finishing the game in just under five hours.

And in those five hours, there was a lot of downtime because Creature in the Well is severely lacking in consideration for the player. Suppose you get stuck on a particular room, such as I did with a side path in the North Star Conduit. You attempt the room, you die, and you respawn outside of the mountain in the town. You have to walk all the way back from the edge of town up into the level hub inside the mountain. You have to go to the healing pool and stand in it and wait because dying doesn't refill your health bar. Then you have to go back up into the level entrance and traverse the dungeon to get back to where you were. There's no real incentive to replay rooms you've completed on a previous visit, so you'll mostly be running through them trying not to get hit on your way to your real destination. The farther into a dungeon you get stuck, the longer this will take, and it's made worse by the sloppy implementation of running itself. Run is bound to the same button as dash, and in fact you can only run after having dashed; holding down the run button during a screen transition or while getting hit or even repressing it in the middle of a dash animation won't cut it. Running isn't even that much faster than walking and there's very little feedback to tell you which you're doing, so travel quickly becomes a chore. It almost feels like it's borrowing the format of roguelite action games where the post-death walk is your chance to breathe and tweak your build, but there's absolutely nothing to do here except go buy an upgrade if you have a core to spare.

There's also a lot of repetition. While the key challenges are unique, there are a lot of rooms that are cloned from place to place. This isn't a big deal for stuff like transitional hallways - though I do think those are a little too frequent and long - but you're going to run into a lot of minor rooms that are similar if not identical, again usually with no reason to spend time on them except to accumulate energy. And the gameplay itself becomes pretty hollow and repetitive once you get a feel for the rhythm of catch-and-release combat. Pinball is a game about reaction time, conservation of balls, predicting the physics of obstacles. If we take CitW instead to have block breaker DNA akin to Breakout (or more specifically the microgenre of Breakout-meets-tennis action games such as Sanrio World Smash Ball), those games heavily involve positioning and adapting to a changing board as objects go away. Creature in the Well doesn't play badly, but it feels rather inconsequential most of the time because the balls don't matter that much. Outside of a few specific cases, you never have to care much about what happens to them because more will always spawn, and their bounces off the walls and geometry are often completely unpredictable.

You're going to see a lot of small filler rooms like this.

Sorry but you are not allowed to view spoiler contents.

Really, the nail in the coffin is the price. $15 for a five hour game is steep but acceptable when there's a profound story to tell or a lot of replay value. A game like Vanquish has a short campaign but a lot to offer. With Creature in the Well, you just don't get that much, especially when you consider what portion of that play time is empty or redundant. If you can get it on sale you don't have a lot to lose, but the console ports never get discounted so you'd best stick to Steam.

Recommended If You Like: watching balls bounce around; mysterious post-disaster storytelling (but don't need snappy gameplay to back it up); sand

[Recommended If You:]

Thank you for the encouragement. Here are 2,400 words about breaking bricks.

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The block breaker is, I think, a deceptively interesting genre. Maybe you know it as Breakout, as Arkanoid, or more commonly as the world's oldest profession, but it's up there with Super Mario Bros. and Pac-Man as one of the archetypal ideas of what a video game is. If you're too young to agree to the CalRef CoC, block breaker games are an extension of the gameplay constructs established by Pong and applied to a single player experience: move a paddle around at the edge of the screen (usually the bottom), bounce a ball with it, hit blocks to break them, repeat. Breakout was largely the progenitor of this gameplay style and it dates back to 1976 - this genre is pushing 50 years old.

And that's what's so interesting to me: for a genre so long established, it's had strikingly little forward movement and innovation. Arkanoid, the game that helped establish features like level-based campaigns and bosses in block breakers, came out in 1986, and that's really the last time anything became a new standard. Sure, lots of games have attempted to break new ground - Firestriker turned it into a fantasy action game, Gunbarich added unwieldy pinball flippers, Wizorb added RPG elements - but the best they can hope for is being recognized as cute twists you can spend a couple hours on. For the most part, the games coming out today are rooted in the same design principles as those nearly 40 years ago.

None of this is meant to set Breakout: Recharged up for failure. I have a fondness for the block breaker in relatively pure forms. I want to see it succeed, the same way I wanted Arkanoid: Eternal Battle to. Both games were attempts to revitalize the two pillars of the genre, both released in 2022, and both landed without a lot of impact. This review is going to focus on Breakout largely because Eternal Battle isn't worth talking that much about - it's underwhelming and buggy and features frustrating level designs and it launched at a gallingly high $30 USD price tag ($40 if you wanted physical). Recharged comes in at a leaner $10, and I grabbed it on sale for $5, so know that this review is through the lens of a budget game. Gameplay for this review was conducted on the PS5 version, your mileage may vary with the other ports.

Co-developed by Adamvision Studios, whose portfolio includes some of Atari's other Recharged games as well as, uh, Lewdle, and SneakyBox, a porting and development studio, Breakout: Recharged is all about going back to basics: minimal menus, minimal window dressing, minimal music, and a mostly minimal visual design - we'll put a pin in that last one. Similarly minimal are its modes on offer - a classic endless arcade mode and a mission-based challenge mode are all you get. Both come in a co-op flavour too, but I was unable to test this because it would require forcing someone to come over and play multiple hours of Breakout.

A normal, sparse game state.

In Arcade mode, you're playing Breakout in a traditional sense. Blocks spawn, break the blocks, more blocks spawn, and your only goal is to see how long you can go and how high your score can get. This is a good chance to talk about what the game of Breakout actually looks like here, because in practice it's a fair bit different than you're likely to have seen in other clones. For one, powerups are a major part of the game. Arcade mode actually comes in three varities: Recharged features powerups and only gives you one life, Classic has no powerups and gives you three lives, and Classic Recharged has powerups as well as three lives. The Classic modes feel like afterthoughts, however, and you should count on powerups being present in the vast majority of your playtime. Most of these are pretty standard - you've got your paddle extender, multiball, a guiding line that shows the path the ball will take, and so on. The most interesting by far is the time warp, an effect which causes the ball to move slower when it's closer to your paddle and much faster when it's far away, and this is handled on a per-ball basis in the event that you can nab it while you've got multiple balls in play.

But mostly you're going to be dealing with shooting powerups, all of which fire automatically for a set duration. And unlike most block breakers, shooting is a huge component in this gameplay. We haven't talked about block types yet, and yeah, you have your standard blocks and your takes-a-few-hits-to-break blocks and your blows-up-the-nearby-blocks blocks - mercifully, indestructible blocks do not make an appearance - but most of your opposition is going to come from the blocks that shoot back. There are turret blocks which simply shoot on a timer, and there are trap blocks which fire a bullet when they're broken, and you're going to see a lot of both. This is less prevalent in the Arcade mode until you start reaching higher scores, and it becomes the primary source of difficulty in the aforementioned Challenge mode.

This is as good a time as any to mention the other core change Breakout: Recharged makes. Traditionally, these games will gradually increase the speed at which your ball moves the longer it's in play, making it harder and harder to keep up with. Recharged might be doing this, I didn't have a way of measuring it to tell, but if it does, it's milder than in any other game I've played, possibly intended to have an impact on the much longer single-life Arcade mode. Instead, the blocks periodically move one row closer to the paddle, Space Invaders style, and this is how the game attempts to glean some inevitability. The problem with this is that in a powerup-heavy round, you're going to be keeping the blocks under control pretty handily, which means you're not necessarily punished for slow, conservative play, but it also means that an errant bounce on a wide angle will always put the ball out of your control for an extended period, replacing the usually frantic late game state with one of building dread after a misplay as the blocks continue to encroach. This mechanic comes into play a lot more in Challenge mode when the timing gets ramped up, but in normal gameplay it'll mostly serve to randomly frustrate you by dodging the ball rather than putting you on a real timer.

There is, however, a tertiary source of difficulty, which I'll refer to with the shmup term of readability. Because Breakout: Recharged ends up feeling quite a bit like a shmup once it gets busy, with a constant barrage of bullets coming out of your paddle as long as you can keep grabbing powerups, sporadic waves of bullets coming back down towards you, and your ball bounding around in the middle of it. In games with a lot of visual data like this, being able to easily discern different gameplay elements is key, and I don't think Recharged does this particularly well. Part of this comes back to that earlier caveat about its presentation - while in most areas the game goes for sleek minimalism, it features a lot of visual effects in game. By default it uses some bloom-y lighting effects which can be disabled with the "Effects Off" toggle, but even then, the background pattern scrolls, particle effects pop off of blocks (and practically cover the screen when an explosive block goes off), bullets and your ball both have long trails and don't have distinct high contrast colours - in fact, the game seems to randomly shift the colour palette for vibes, which is kind of confusing in a genre that historically often colour-codes its blocks and powerups. It's very easy to get lost in the spectacle, or to autopilot your way directly into a brightly coloured bullet while you're trying to split your attention between the paddle and the ball, but I admit that I'm also just bad at this sort of thing.

A moderate example of visual clutter - it's hard to capture the full impact in a single screenshot.

As far as I can tell, Arcade mode doesn't have a lot else to it. I made it up past 8,000 points and it never threw anything completely unexpected at me, but maybe at higher thresholds the game amps up more. (This also put me in the top 50 on the scoreboard for Recharged mode, and based on my other scores I don't think more than 500 people have actually played this on PS5.) And this is fine, as long as your expectations are set accordingly, because Breakout is always pretty fun and it's an entirely servicable way to play it. Most of my time, however, was instead spent on Challenge mode. This consists of 50 handmade scenarios, each of which presents you with an objective such as clearing all the blocks, clearing X amount of Y type of block, scoring Z points, surviving for N seconds, and I'd say "and so on" here but I think that's pretty much all of them. Some of these levels have clever designs and get pretty difficult, and repetition aside I think Challenge mode is a pretty good experience in a vacuum as a thing you can spend a couple hours powering through.

In the cold, frictionless void of reality, it's a little more complicated, as we now have to begin to contend with several unfavourable factors. It's very common for block breaker games to present a lot of interesting ideas without making them all that fun to play, and I believe this very often comes down to perceived fairness. When the ball doesn't go where you feel it should have, or a powerup misbehaves, that undermines the sense of player agency. Very often this comes from the age old problem of hit detection on corners. When the ball strikes the lower right corner of a block, should it react as though it's being hit from the side or from below? What direction should it travel in? What about hitting the seam between two adjacent blocks - can you create a scenario in which these events play out intuitively?

Breakout: Recharged is not the game that solves these problems. Its physics engine isn't grossly unfair but definitely rough around the edges, with periodic "How did it bounce like that?" moments that catch you off guard, but it's the shmup firefight elements that really exacerbate this feeling of unfairness. Too often you're put into challenges that mix trap blocks with a slew of cannons which fire on fixed intervals but with random timing, if that makes sense, so each time you restart the level the pattern is going to work out differently, and between those and the near requirement to continually rely on shooting powerups which will further trigger traps whether you intend to or not, you frequently find yourself in situations where the ball simply ends up in the same location as a bullet. A lot of deaths in *Recharged* were my own fault, but these "What was I supposed to do about that?" failures are a significant blow to morale.

And for all its slick presentation, this game has a disappointing number of rough edges. The leaderboards for each mode and mission stopped loading for me after about half an hour; I was able to restore functionality by closing and reloading the game, but all my scores in the meantime went unranked. The guideline powerup shudders and changes slightly with each impact the ball makes and sometimes just flat out lies about its trajectory, which really reduces its efficacy, and the homing missile powerup almost seems coded to aim for whatever you least want it to hit, weaving across the screen and circling blocks inefficiently. At one point I both completed and failed a challenge simultaneously. (To its credit, the game gave me the win.) On another occasion I had a railgun powerup go off after the mission ended and the audio abruptly ramped to max volume and started clipping. It's more stable than Arkanoid: Eternal Battle was, but I had multiple game crashes with that game; the bar's really on the floor here.

Lack of options are another sore point. While I appreciate being able to toggle visuals and audio levels and the presence of multiple colourblind settings is welcome, I think more effort should be made in this genre to adopt new control methods. The original arcade cabinets for these sorts of games often used large knobs or dials to allow for fine control of left and right movements, and this would be replicated in the home market with "paddle controllers." Some games used trackballs, some console ports would allow the use of computer-style mice, but now that we have an obscene amount of tech in our controllers they're not even trying to adapt. No motion controls, no PS5 touchpad controls, no use of the triggers, not even the age old "hold a button to move faster/slower" a lot of games have had in the past. Recharged doesn't control badly, but its barebones approach to movement feels like a missed opportunity given that this is one of the highest profile entries this genre has had in years.

But in spite of all these flaws and disappointments, it's easy to have a good time here. The steady ball speed means it's easy to play long rounds and feel like you're doing well. For every challenge that's a frustrating slog of retries, there are several that are entirely reasonable and balanced. Most of the glitches I encountered don't have a strong impact on gameplay, and the visual clutter is less of an issue outside of the harder challenges. Breakout: Recharged is one of those games that falls into a weird space where it's entirely recommendable on a casual basis but there's really nothing it's great at. It skates by mostly on the virtues of the genre being intuitive and easy to pick up and that gets it a long way, but in a world where you can buy Shatter for $1.99, there's only a very narrow sector of people for whom it's a truly great fit.

Recommended If You: already played the better mainstream block breakers like Shatter; don't like the obstacle course design of Arkanoid-likes; don't have access to or the patience for deeper, weirder cuts like Puchi Carat

What a coincidence, I was just wondering the other day whether it'd be possible to make an alcoholic beverage where the condensation that forms on the outside would be alcoholic, to get around open container laws.

I had a lot of time to read in my hotel room this week, so I've almost finished Diary of a Misfit by Casey Parks. It's a really interesting one. The author grew up in this extremely rural southern town, and when she came out as a lesbian on a trip home from college, she was cast out of her church and harassed by peers and family members, but her grandmother decides to share a hometown story with her: "I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man." Years after this revelation, Parks, now a west coast journalist, begins a decade-long project to sleuth out the life story and fate of the man.

Subtitled "A Memoir and a Mystery," there are a number of layers to the book. There's the emerging story of Roy, of course, the mid-20th century trans man, and there's the journalistic journey Parks undertakes to get those answers, but because of the duration of the investigation she's able to be very retrospective and probing about her own actions and intents - the areas where she fell short as an investigator in the early years of the process, her failure to fully understand her motives, etc. The story of Roy intertwines with the story of finding out about him intertwines with the story of Parks' own life and growth during the same period, and that means getting into the history of her closest family members and the strained and traumatic relationship she has with her mother, who's herself a truly tragic figure. The overlapping threads make for a really interesting arc.

One of the persistent themes throughout the book (at least as far as I've gotten in it) is the way people know and identify and relate to Roy in different ways - with different pronouns, differing ideas about who he was and what he was and what drove him. That theme doubles back on the author as well. Parks talks quite a bit about her struggle to connect with people during the earlier years of her life and this project, and the lines she drew between different parts of herself and her life which made the problem worse. She couldn't recognize or admit that the project was on some level a personal endeavor for her, and she wouldn't tell her friends about how she grew up or what it meant to her or how deeply her mother's actions affected her.

I've been thinking a lot about my own tendencies to put up those sorts of barriers, to not really share anything with people. And I can say it's out of concern of doxxing myself or because there's just no need to get into this or that, but the truth is that I tend to wall things off because I've done a lot of things in my life that I'm not proud of, and I judge myself for those things plenty, and I resent and fear the idea of people I care about judging me in that same way even as I know, rationally, that it probably wouldn't happen, that there would be some understanding.

I feel like I need to learn to be less cagey with people so I'm not just left alone with my thoughts.

My headcanon is that Joshua is like 23, and nothing will convince me otherwise.

I spent too long trying to understand the accent.

This is exciting, I've always liked the world concept of FT and I'm keen to put some thought into how to approach it. It might take me a little while to figure out.

A lot of games have totally changed their art style for the sequel recently - Anodyne, Risk of Rain, Unexplored. I think the indie 3D look is in right now and everyone's keen to explore it, the same way everyone was doing uncanny pixel art several years ago. I'm not sure whether it's paid off for those devs but I kind of appreciate the willingness to do something new.

I feel like we ought to have an upcoming games thread. For future readers, the year is 2023, Baldur's Gate III is the most hotly-anticipated furry dating sim of all time, and a remake/remaster of Tomba! (a.k.a. Tombi!) has just been announced. What else are folks excited about on the horizon? Hebereke 2 was just announced at BitSummit, that's pretty crazy, and Marble It Up! is finally getting its DLC out of Apple Arcade hell. And I think we should get more details on Earthblade this year. Lots of excitement.

My earliest online hangouts were video game message boards back in the mid-'00s, places like GameFAQs that were probably not the right venue for 10-year-old me and where I never felt able to connect with the older crowds. It really wasn't until I found an internet radio site in my teens that I developed an online social life to make up for my lack of an in-person one. Hanging out in their chat all day, making friends, learning from people all around the world with different experiences and perspectives and careers. That's what opened my eyes to the potential of the internet to make connections I'd never be able to IRL. It's why I later sought out another online community, and eventually jumped from there into CalRef. Each of those places shaped my habits, my beliefs, my values, even the way I speak, and each of them brought me into contact with people I'd grow very close to and care deeply about. There are myriad little decisions and coincidences that could have nudged my path away from finding any of these communities, and I think a lot about the negative side of all those places and the mistakes that were made there, but regardless of the regrets I hold, I'm glad those experiences have brought me here.

Sometimes, what disappoints me about the modern internet just as much as consolidation and commodification is the premium placed on our time. I think about infinite scrolls and autoplaying videos and algorithmic recommendations and I wonder how much time I've spent on these that would have gone back into a hobby or a meaningful social interaction in the past. Maybe the increasing inability to search and filter the internet is a factor as well - you're made to feel that you have to read or watch or save what you find while you still have access to it.

I want to spend more time and energy here, doing and talking about and making things of substance. We should make the most of what we've built and what we're capable of.

Happy Refuge Day

P.S.: That postcard is amazing, Cat.

It started, as many things do, with a book-

That is, an all expenses paid booking on the immaculate Harbor!

With 34 stories, six masts, and no fewer than 6,000 autonomous propulsion devices, The Harbor offers an unprecedented fusion of technology and luxury. Featuring amenities including an open air pool park, a ballroom, an onboard game show, and so much more, guests will never be left wanting, and with our PureVision™ Crystallization Field, you'll be able to stargaze in style. Passengers can also expect

The infocard was still broken off there, just as it was the last time she'd looked at it. Ria allowed herself a scowl. Bad enough having to go on one of these things, she'd at least hoped to know what to expect. Gods, what was she even doing here? First the spines, now this- where were they? Daviik had never been the type for this sort of thing, not like these... tourists. She stole a glance across the gate at the passengers, almost all couples and families, and had to shake the longing from her head. Not the time.

A voice reverberated from the wall speaker. No, not a voice. The inflection was off, the cadence uncanny. Synthesized. "Thank you for your patience.  Your vessel of choice,  The Harbor,  is about to begin boarding.  Please proceed to the security line  at your earliest convenience.  Thank you for sailing with  "

The ending never came, so she decided to move on without it. Right. Go time. She started gathering her belongings: first, a backpack, an almost comically undersized green and brown number that slung over one shoulder. "Only the essentials," she told herself during packing, "only for emergencies." It remained uncertain whether this was one. Next was the duffel, this one blue with a yellow stripe and bulging at the seams; it lumbered large on her figure and fought to drag her astray. Then a visor - you never know what the weather might be like out there, someone had told her - a water bottle, an air bottle, and a handbag, which she stuffed her slate into. All things told, she couldn't tell whether she was over or underprepared. She watched a couple struggle to drag a cart full of luggage behind them. Across the platform, an old man with no bags or shoes ambled through the checkpoint.

Security went quickly - either the scan hadn't picked up the spines or they weren't out of the ordinary here - and then it was out the doors and onto the ramp, joining the procession. An usher scanned her ticket code and directed her to the right. It was only after 15 minutes of walking down the exterior corridor that the absurdity hit her. Finding anything on a ship of this size would be nigh on impossible under the best circumstances. Why had they thought she could do this?

The ship was divided into "neighborhoods" with too-cute names - Calico Cove, Bayside Boardwalk, the Harboretum, and so on. Ria's room was in Snapdragon Moor. Small, confined, discomforting. The bed took up an entire wall and, being an interior room, it had a screen with a camera feed in lieu of an actual window. By the time she'd placed all her belongings, half the floor space was gone. Best spend as little time as possible in here.

She tested the keychip, memorized the room number (SM0313), and traced the map to a bar called the Lofty Hideaway. She'd read stories about the jump and wanted a drink in her before it hit. Evidently, she wasn't the only one with the idea. She took one of the few open spaces at the bar and watched through the glass as the port workers made their final preparations. They collapsed the ramp they'd entered upon. Their last terrestrial bond was severed.

They'd been drifting unceremoniously, who knew for how long, when the TVs in the bar faded to an image of a smartly dressed crew member, fresh ascot and trimmed beard and crisp white-and-blue uniform and cap. His jacket hung unbuttoned and a gold ship's wheel pin seemed to barely hang on.

"This is the captain of The Harbor speaking. Ready yourselves for transport in 30 seconds, folks!" He spoke with the chirp of a TV presenter, and smiled the same. "All arms and legs inside the ride!"

The din of the bar softened, patrons anticipating the jump. A few cried out when the shaking started. Ria nursed her drink and focused on the sensation. The very matter in her skin seemed to stretch out, as though she was being pulled away from her own body, and her vision was blurred by the ship's sharp vibration. She bit back a yelp, though she couldn't claim to be in pain.

It ended. If the sudden stillness hadn't given it away, the twinkling black void behind the window would have. The bar began to stir, and Ria tore her attention from the distant stars.

"I suppose," she murmured, "this means it's time to get started."

What will happen to people with currently active exceptions?

Short stories are a good idea. For me, I absolutely can't do distracted reading though. I need to sit away from my computer and my phone and really immerse myself in the story and visualization, and I have trouble getting myself to go do that.