errantsignal

Prey: Mooncrash

Added 2018-09-01 06:10:19 +0000 UTC

Hey all,

*whistles* This one's coming in just under the cutoff for the month. I blame August ending on a Friday. Regardless: Prey Mooncrash! It's a game! Well, it's DLC, but hey! It's a thing! And I'm gonna talk about it for 20 minutes!

The TL;DR of the video is that Mooncrash takes a genre known for creative, expressive problem solving and uses Roguelite mechanics to turn it in to a game that forces creative problem solving by putting you up against a wall. It's hard to capture that feeling by just describing the game, but it tapped into some cool scrappy-but-desperate creativity I didn't know games could do. I've played other scrappy games, but they're just tough games, not games that asked me to be creative. And I've played creative games, but they were never particularly hard. Mooncrash scratches this particular itch really well, and I've kind of been in love with it ever since.

I'm still torn on how to handle these more mechanically driven episodes - on one hand it feels like it's worthwhile to dip my toe in to more formal systems-y stuff and not necessarily be driven by themes and ideas alone. On the other hand, I worry that the material tends to be a bit dry. First, because ideas and themes have emotional and personal resonance, systems typically don't. But also, it's hard to judge where the line is between "talking about why a system does/doesn't work" and just "straight up regurgitating a description of the system back at you." So if you have any strong feeling about how this turned out, good or bad, let me know!