Some of the other things on our minds when we weren’t doing everything else
WEB GAME
The subgenre created by Return OfThe Obra Dinn is now big enough to birth its own event: December’s The Case Of The Thinky Game Jam challenged developers to make their own deductive logic puzzles in the space of a fortnight. The submissions range from various Golden Idol reskins to broader interpretations of the remit, including a written riddle by Draknek & Friends and a tabletop RPG scenario. This entry is an unexpected highlight, transplanting to a school yearbook the premise of matching faces to names. The theme proves fertile ground for identifying clues: social cliques, romantic connections, classclown pranks, and so on. But as you flip through photos, they take a strange turn – your first hint of a shadowy subplot that lingers in the background, even once the more mundane mysteries have been solved.
TV
It would be easy to dismiss this stop-motion animated mini-series as blandly undemanding kids’ fare. At first blush, its hand-crafted creatures boast an attention to detail that is comparatively lacking in the script. But as high-strung Haru begins her new role at this idyllic resort, the story becomes a gentle paean to the value of self-care, touching upon the difficulties (and benefits) of learning to switch off in our alwaysconnected world. It feels tailormade for a ‘cosy’ videogame adaptation, too – Switch’s successor should have the horsepower to do justice to those Fuzzy Felt textures.
WEB GAME
Namco’s arcade classic has been remixed umpteen times, its pill-gobbling formula embellished in a variety of ways. Kenta Cho’s worryingly compulsive take adopts the opposite approach, downsizing the playspace to a single wraparound passage as a legally distinct green Pac-Man faces a lone ghost, with the player’s input reduced to one command: turn. It requires more thought than you’d imagine: your pursuer moves quicker than you and doesn’t stay prey for long once you’ve munched a power pill. Racing after them, then, isn’t always wise, and you’ll want to keep to the middle before their replacement shows up. Often, it becomes a game of chicken, as you purposely attract the ghost’s attention so it can give chase, leaving the last pills unguarded so you can grab them and reset the corridor.
HARDWARE
Konami’s PC Engine Mini range offered a cheap and cheer
