[the_af]

I can't tell if this is a joke or an actual game, but I find this blurring of the lines interesting.

Another game that blurred the lines that is actually one of my all-time favorites is Papers, Please. This is a game about being an immigration officer, a bureaucrat stamping papers and examining work permits... and it's brilliant and tremendously engaging. It can only exist as an indie game, of course -- imagine EA saying "yes, let's spend money on building and publishing a bureaucrat simulator".

[frob]

I feel just about anything by Zachtronics fits this category. Spacechem was the title that got me back into indie gaming in 2012, but almost every single one of their games is essentially programming for fun. They really dropped the facade with Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100. The beautiful part about those games is how much story and narrative is pushed through design docs and specs and hidden man pages.

I feel Factorio also sits right on the edge of this category. You do get to shoot bugs, but in the end, you're really just debugging a giant wafer.

[the_af]

Factorio is amazing and for a brief time I got really addicted to it. Like you said, you're debugging an giant circuit.

In the end I stoppped playing though. It felt like too much work, and rang too close to my day job. Fortunately, I'm neither an immigrations bureaucrat nor a 19th century insurance investigator, so those themes seem more fascinating to me!

[frob]

I've been playing the demo for a few hours a week over the past month. Any game that gets me to restart on the second level not because I'm dieing but because I think to myself, "No, I can do better than this," is a winner in my book. Also, if I've derived more fun from this demo than I have from many other $30 and $60 games, so I'm already leaving towards paying for the full game.

I understand what you mean about the day job thing. I got about 60% of the way through Shenzhen before walking away. Fortunately, I'm not a chip-designer, so hopefully that horizon is farther away with Factorio.

[the_af]

Don't get me wrong -- I bought Factorio and adored every second of the first level or so. But the thought of going through it all a second time proved too mentally exhausting.

I commend its creators, I just avoid the game now. Who knows, in a couple of years I may get hooked again.

[eru]

The author of Papers Please also made The Return of the Obra Dinn.

It's another game about bureaucracy. This time you play as an insurance investigator.

[the_af]

Yes, of course, I love Obra Dinn too. But that's a more traditional tale of adventure, by the author's own admission -- that the player is an insurance investigator barely matters. You're on board a mysterious ship and must investigate its fate... sounds intriguing by definition!

[ansible]

I never got around to finishing that one.

There's an article out there about how the 1-bit color rendering works, which I found quite interesting:

https://blog.playstation.com/archive/2019/10/17/lucas-pope-o...

[the_af]

You should try to finish it, it's pretty satisfying.

Do note some mysteries have more than one solution. It makes sense, when you think that "who" did "what" to "whom" has more than one possible interpretation, and the game tends to accept most of them as valid!

[jcranmer]

My recollection is that most of the multiple solutions are actually just cases where you're supposed to identify one correct solution, but how that solution actually maps to the very limited possible choices is ambiguous.

This is most annoying in (I think) chapter 5, which is where you get some of the more difficult characters to identify, dying deaths that are somewhat ambiguous, involving some of the supernatural aspects of the story, all in scenes that can only be visited by going through other scenes (so it's hard to go back and check them).

[the_af]

I know what you mean, but didn't find it annoying. I'm also in the camp of people who enjoy that there's not teleport within the ship -- you must walk everywhere, and if this is tedious tough luck! Walking inside actual ships requires walking.

As for the other ambiguous situation I mentioned, I found it hilarious in the "guns don't kill people, other people do" sense ;)

At this point I have blind faith in anything Lukas Pope creates.

[eru]

The ship is fairly small and compact, so I didn't mind the lack of teleport very much.