Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Quick update RE: apple store subscriptions

So if you're subscribed to other patreon people you've probably already heard about this but just in case you're not I'll tell you about it as well.

For Capitalism Reasons apple is forcing patreon to give them a cut of all patreon pledges made through the IOS app (30%), and in response Patreon have enabled an automatic price increase for all subscriptions made on apple products to compensate which sucks for anyone subscribing to this page using the patreon app.

Luckily, existing patreon pledges are unchanged as are prices on every other platform so if you are thinking of changing how much you support the channel by or are a first-time supporter please do it on a platform that isn't the IOS Patreon app in order to save some money - I get paid the same either way!

Hope that helps clear some things up/helps!

Adam

How "Good Design" Ruins Games

Check out Katie and Catburger!: https://www.youtube.com/c/KatieandCatburger

Arctic Eggs is a badly designed game. It's unfair, it's confusing and it's controls, well, they barely work. Under every possible metric it is designed wrong - in a way that's counter to what's generally accepted to be good design, both for cooking games and games in general...

But what if that's a good thing?

After inhaling the fumes of one too many burned eggs, The Architect has come up with an idea - what if a rigid, narrow idea of good design can actually hold games back? What if sometimes games need to break the rules and be made badly in order to teach us new ways of playing?

You Saw:

Arctic Eggs - 2024

Cook Serve Delicious 2 - 2017

Final Fantasy 14 - 2010

Venba - 2023

Overcooked 2 - 2018

DOOM 2016 - There's simply no way of knowing

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 2017

Metal Slug 3 - 2000

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - 2022

A Hat In Time - 2017

Ape Escape - 1999

Alien: Resurrection - 2000

ASTRO BOT - not out yet

Dark Souls - 2012

Another Crab's Treasure = 2024

Lies of P - 2013

Dune Spice Wars - 2022

Dune 2 - 1992

Starcraft 2 - 2010

Command and Conquer 3 - 2007

Age of Empires 4 - 2021

Super Metroid - 1994

Hollow Knight - 2017

Ori and the Blind Forest - 2015

Guacamelee 2 - 2019

Slay The Spire - 2019

Across the Obelisk - 2021

Monster Train - 2022

Griftlands - 2021

Far Cry 5 - 2018

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth - 2024

Horizon Forbidden West - 2022

Mirror's Edge - 2008

Uncharted 2 - 2009

Resident Evil 4 Remake - 2023

Cruelty Squad - 2021

Golden Light - 2020

Moon: Remix RPG Adventure - 1997

Toodee and Topdee - 2021

Teardown - 2022

Yume Nikki - 2004

Hatoful Boyfriend - 2011

Hylics 2 - 2020

Dragon Quest 3 Remake - not out yet

BABA is YOU - 2019

Outer Wilds - 2019

Fez - 2012

Viewfinder - 2023

Undertale - 2015

Super Mario Brothers - 1985

Shovel Knight - 2014

Mario Bros - 1983

Mario Odyssey - 2017

Sonic Generations - 2011

Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy - 2017

Bubsy 3D - 1996

Parcel Corps - not out yet

Neon White - 2022

Portal - 2007

Pepper Grinder - 2024

Verlet Swing - 2018

Titanfall 2 - 2016

VVVVVV - 2010

Downwell - 2015

Snake pass - 2017

Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom - 2024

MO Astray - 2019

Tinertia - 2014

Splodey - 2023

Super Magbot - 2021

Getting Over It - 2017

I Am Bread - 2014

Sniper Elite 5 - 2022

Halo 1 - 2001

DOOM - 1996

Halo 2 - 2004

Halo Infinite - 2021

Metal Gear Solid - 1998

Resident Evil - 1996

Resident Evil 4 - 2005

Dead Space - 2008

SIGNALIS - 2023

Crow County - 2024

Resident Evil 2 Remake - 2019

Resident Evil 2 - 1998

Prey - 2017

Indkika - 2024

Mario Kart 8 - 2014

Mario Kart Double Dash - 2003

Resident Evil 8 - 2021

Magic The Gathering Arena - 2018

Call of Duty Black Ops 3 - 2015

Metal Gear Solid 2 - 2001

Minecraft - 2011

Splatoon 3 - 2022

Deep Rock Galactic - 2018

Vermintide 2 - 2018

Left 4 Dead 2 - 2009

GTFO - 2019

Stacklands - 2022

Witchhand - 2024

Cultist Sim - 2018

XCOM: Enemy Unknown - 2012

Final Fantasy Tactics A2 - 2007

Into The Breach - 2018

Tactical Breach Wizards - not out yet

Shadow of War - 2017

Far Cry 3 - 2012

Sable - 2021

Spiderman 1 - 2018

Death Stranding - 2019

Psychonauts 2 - 2021

Wandersong - 2018

Superliminal - 2019

Buckshot Roulette - 2023

Ultrakill - Early Access

Street Fighter 6 - 2023

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - 2023

Catherine - 2011

The Eternal Cylinder - 2021

Borderlands 3 - 2019

Dreamquest - 2014

Rogue Legacy - 2013

Hades 2 - Early Access

Returnal - 2021

Apex Legends - 2019

Zero Seivert - Early Access

Dark and Darker - Early Access

Ghost of Tsushima - 2020

Super Mario World - 1990

New Super Mario Bros Wii - 2009

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 - 2022

Pokemon Scarlet - 2022

Overwatch - 2022

Mosa Lina - 2023

QWOP - 2010

Surgeon Sim - 2013

Dishonored 2 - 2016

Chants of Sennaar - 2023

Katamari Damacy - 2004

Destiny 2 - 2017

Architect Address June 2024

Hello hello and welcome to this, the Architect Address, a very special series of videos just for you patrons all about what’s going on with the channel lately and what irritating delays I’ve been dealing with. Whhooof. Okay, so before we get into any of the stuff I actually want to talk about let’s just quickly run over me getting sick/ I made a whooole song and dance about feeling really psyched for the next video but lo and behold that’s when the world decided to give me Covid. Or - at least what I think was covid. I couldn’t speak without coughing a bunch, my sinuses were so inflamed they were pressing on my tearducts and making me cry randomly, it was pretty miserable and I wasn’t up to doing anything for just under two weeks, putting me way behind. I’m about 90% sure it’s some new variant going around, a lot of people I know that I didn’t infect if you’re wondering have had something similar so hopefully i’m immune now and we can all move on with our lives. Bleh.

Right. As for things I actually think are worth discussing, let’s talk about the music in the videos because I’ve seen a few people asking about that and I can’t recall if I’ve ever spoken about it before. So, unless you’re completely not paying attention you’ll know I like to only take music from the games I talk about in any given video and I’ll be completely honest, I don’t actually know why I do this - it’s one of those little rules that just become slowly embedded into the way you think about making stuff. I think it’s a nice change of pace from a lot of youtube videos which use this horribly generic podcast background music or just ingame sound effects which I always find horribly jarring - especially when they do both. It is, however, quite hard to find music sometimes because I can never quite work out what makes for good background music, there’ll be some stuff I really like that just constantly distracts from me talking and then I’ll stumble onto some rando unanmed track in a videogame soundtrack out of desperation and it’ll be a perfect fit. I think I’ve had the most luck with quote and quote chill music and there’s probably something to be said about having music with a beat that matches the cadence of human speech if it’s too fast I feel like I’m talking over it rather than it accompanying the speech, and too slow and droning and it fucks with how easy it is to hear. 

I occasionally consider dropping this tradition and just using generic theme appropriate game music but I think I’d run into the problem of searching for the exact right track and it actually taking just as long to find what I’m looking for. I do always manage to come up with something though, as I recall the only video I outright gave up on for that was the among us video way back in the day where most of the games I was talking about literally didn’t even have music and even then among us only has like, one. So I think I’ll keep doing it, hopefully I’ve managed to show people some cool videogame tracks as well, I consider a lot of it, especially the after the video segment where I get to come up with some dumb catchy music to be all part of the recommendations side of the channel which is something I really enjoy doing.

Right, anyway, onto the videos and lemme tell you we’ve had two stinkers, one mild whiff and one big rancid mess. Let’s do the first one first and by that I mean let’s start with the one all about Elements. So, the interesting thing about this one is that the framing around elements didn’t come until surprisingly late in the project and that’s due to two reasons. First is that I couldn’t really find a good name for the concept I wanted to discuss, originally I was going to go with ontologies which was complicated, or categorization systems which was too wordy and eventually I settled on typologies because the elements were literally the listed example of what one of those was and I figured it’s a good enough foundation to base things around. 

Second, is that for reasons that I can literally only put down to divine providence, I had a conversation with someone about fortnite, went to download it out of curiosity to see how the game had changed in the three years or so since I’d played and found out they were doing an avatar the last airbender themed event which gave me an excuse to do a silly intro gag and also gave me lots of footage to use for various parts of the video. For the intro I had to really lean on google translate to not just translate my jokes into a format that displayed nicely but also made sense and I think I was mostly successful? A few people seemed to get the gags which was fine with me but they were predictably riddled with errors. Ultimately I’m not sure whether making a reference to a coming up on 20 year old childrens cartoon for my video was a great idea but I had fun with it and like I said just having some nice background footage of stuff that looks nice was sorely needed in this video because it’s surprisingly hard to get nice footage of just… someone using a fire attack or wind magic or whatever. A lot of the games that feature elemental systems have really clunky UIs all over the place and very complex displays that aren’t very intuitive at a glance so getting footage for this one was harder than you’d think.

I think one thing that I was mixed on for this video was how much to dumb it down, because I really didn’t want to fall into the trap of oh wow red is da colour of blood and angry it mean danger because not only was that insulting intellectually but I’d also… er… already done it before. However, focusing purely on high level more abstract stuff might put people off and I definitely spent too long talking about the history of the elements and the sociological roots of typological thinking even if I personally find it very interesting. End of the day I think I struck a decent balance but it’s always a struggle to know how much intellectual groundwork to lay and how much to actually talk about games because I think my intros have a tendency to get a little waffly.

Overall the video did… not great but not awful, I think the thumbnail is to blame here - it’s really hard to display the elements in a visually interesting way without literally ripping off the avatar symbols or doing some VFX work I have neither the skill nor time for. I ended up settling on just pasting some cool looking creatures over a magic the gathering card landscape that reflected all the elements but it’s not a very dynamic image. Once again I just hate hate hate the marketing side of this job. I am so bad at it but looking back at my earlier work I am definitely getting better. Kind of. So I suppose that’s something.

And finally we get onto the most recent video which… bleh… what a mess this one was. So first of all, emergent narratives is a really really hard subject to get footage of because you need to be able to communicate a changing context clearly and quickly just in the background footage because that’s… all you’re talking about so getting the right footage that actually told these little visual stories was so much harder than usual and that’s not even considering that by their nature most emergent narrative games involve lots of menus and small text and basically this video was a recipe for being not very interesting to watch. I tried my best to purposefully capture specific clips to match what I’m talking about but there’s only so much you can do to make contextless footage of a paradox game interesting. 

Luckily, at least Rimworld is an interesting game to look at at certain points and I had a lot of fun finding what storyline across my many many playthroughs I actually wanted to focus on the Jerbear one I ended up settling on because I felt like it had the most conclusive endpoint a lot of these emergent stories sort of spin out forever and this one had a nice arc of start to end with Jerbear getting executed that made it a good way to intro the concept without having to awkwardly come up with my own ending. Honestly I was spoiled for choice though, I had a doctor that was dying from alzheimer's and desperately tried to turn herself into a zombie to prolong her usefulness and there was another one where I accidentally rolled some sort of special modded scenario where you’re some sort of lizard woman defending a clutch of eggs who all hatch right around the first winter which was hard as nails - loads of options but the Jerbear one was the neatest.

Unfortunately in terms of performance, this one did… maybe the worst in a while. Like, really really bad. I want to put it down to the delay but maybe this one just didn’t resonate with people for some other reason, the storytelling centric videos I like making but never tend do to very well so maybe it’s a perfect storm of bad stuff happening but it’s still a real gutpunch to see all those grey downward arrows and youtube pitying you for your video doing badly. Bleh. Right, I can feel myself wanting to complain more about that but I’m not going to, instead I’ll leave you on the happy note that the elden ring DLC is really really good, hard as nails but really good, go pick it up it’s absolutely massive, way bigger and longer than I thought, great stuff.

How YOU Wrote Rimworld's Best Story

(Hi! Sorry for the lateness of this video, as I talk about at the end, I got Covid and it knocked me on my ass for a few weeks which really put a dent in my whole speech in the last video, I'll talk about it more in the Architect Address just want to say sorry here too!)

Check out Filmotter: https://www.youtube.com/c/filmotter

Rimworld's best story didn't exist until you played the game - in fact, if you hadn't picked it up, generated a few colonists and spent a few hours trying to stop them getting eaten by megaspiders, it wouldn't have had a story at all! Somehow, without you even thinking about it, you stepped into the role of Rimworld's storyteller and a narrative that was entirely unique formed around you... how?

After spending a few hours stranded on an alien planet fighting off a spaceborn pathogen, The Architect has gotten a few ideas. More and more, games are eschewing the traditional relationship between author and audience, allowing the players themselves to tell their own stories their own way, but how can games be designed to facilitate this unique kind of fun, and how much freedom should us players have in creating our own emergent narratives?

Videogames Will Never Escape The Elements (and neither will you)

Check out the Beef and Dairy Network Podcast! https://maximumfun.org/podcasts/beef-and-dairy-network/

It seems like you can't take two steps inside a videogaming without running into elemental weaknesses and resistances, elemental systemic mechanics, characters with elemental theming and even entire worlds split into elementally-themed chunks... but why? What makes the elements so special that makes them such a common theme that everyone seems to be able to interpret in the same way?

Well, The Architect, after taking a quick sojourn to ancient Greece, stopping by Azeroth and sauntering through the forgotten realms - all whilst trying to avoid Nickelodeon's lawyers - has an answer. The elements aren't just a cornerstone of culture, they're an inherent part of our psychology too - and that means no matter how hard we try, we'll never be entirely rid of them... but is that a good thing?

Architect Address March 2024

Hello one and all and welcome to this - the architect address, wow huh I said I’d make the next few videos quickly and boy was I wrong wasn’t I jeeeeesus christ. Yeah, so, after taking a bit of a break post christmas it turns out everything that could have gone wrong went wrong and uh, to be honest it was pretty miserable but I’m not going to dwell on that because it would be what is known in the business as a bummer. So, instead I’m going to talk about sponsorships because it’s something that I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated about and I thought it might be interesting to let you all know sort of how they work.

Now, obligatory disclaimer here that whilst I personally am never likely to take any sort of sponsorship for anything because I am cursed with too much pride, I absolutely do not begrudge anyone else on youtube or elsewhere for doing them because people need to eat and honestly I think doing the occasional ad read or bit of sponsored content is the lesser of two evils compared to reducing your output to horrible algorithm sludge so please don’t assume anyone doing sponsorships or whatever is a cynical sellout or whatever.

Now a large part of this is because sponsorships probably pay a damn sight more than people on the outside of video making often assume, for reasons of professional ethics I’m not going to name any specifics here but for putting a brief thirty second mention of a product at the start of a video or whatever I could quite easily make a four digit sum and that number only goes up as you increase how… err… intrusive the advert is. Doing something like making a baked in midroll advert or sharing an affiliate link or even doing a ten minute dedicated video of whatever it is would easily pay several months worth of rent and I’m not a particularly large channel. It’s a big moneymaker and I do not enjoy thinking about how much money I leave on the table because I want the videos to be good.

Basically the reason why companies pay so much to youtubers is because direct targeted advertising through youtube videos is waaaay more efficient in terms of people actually checking out the product than more traditional styles of advertising and these ad companies get to cut out the middleman that is youtube by going directly to creators so a few thousand bucks to one fairly large youtuber can often be just as effective as an advertising campaign on social media with ten times the budget, it’s a big industry and that sort of targeted micro sponsorships is really only going to get bigger as the internet gets more atomized.

As for why I don’t do this stuff, really it’s just a matter of I don’t want it colouring what I say - the moment I take cash from anyone even remotely involved in the games industry, you can’t trust a word out of my mouth on… basically anything because there’s always the question of whether I’m giving someone favourable coverage because they paid me, or that I’m overcompensating in being negative because they gave me money or whether I’m being nice or mean to someone else because they didn’t give me money and it corrupts the whole thing forever pretty much. I’m sure many people would be fine with me making some extra cash but honestly I value the quality of my work too much for that to be a real option currently and it’s why I value patreon so much as a means of generating cash. I am obviously professionally tainted in favour of all of you but that’s not going to affect my judgement when I talk about games and people generally seem to like the after the video segment so it’s not making the things I make worse either. I hope that clears some things up… I guess.

Anyway, on to the actual videos and these two are both ones that I had a real DOOZY of a time getting together my god.

So, the first video I want to talk about was all about games with layers and this one I owe almost entirely to the snap decision to give Void Stranger a second chance. Normally I can find myself getting on with almost any genre of game but for the life of me I just do not gel with block pushing sokoban games and so I was willing to chalk void stranger up to being a puzzle game that I understood the vibe and appeal of that just wasn’t for me. However, I for reasons I don’t quite remember went back to the game to play a little bit more and ended up stumbling into one of the game’s biggest secrets waaaaay earlier than I should have and that ended up with me figuring out that the game was way more interesting and way more tailored to my specific tastes than I thought and wow what a game!

I think basically the entire video sprang up around the idea of realising that I’ll never be able to look at the puzzles and story in quite the same way again and that there’s some complicated emotions behind that feeling. On one hand I desperately want to be able to experience those emotions again but equally I feel the warning signs that this is my brain being poisoned by nostalgia in a way that will prevent me from having any new experiences that build on my old ones. Originally in this video I had this whole segment going off on people who think that videogames have gotten worse and that the golden age of the medium is behind them - you see these kinds of youtube videos pop up now and again - and whilst me bashing these people for playing precisely two different multiplayer shooters and then having the gall to say that gaming is dead and also blaming themselves getting older on the medium was more or less accurate and debatably on theme it didn’t quite hit the vibe.

In terms of writing the script, the big breakthrough and the idea I’m most proud of is the notion that our ignorance, or the layers of a game we still have yet to uncover are a finite resource and games can spend our lack of knowledge in different ways for different effects. It’s kind of an unintuitive idea I think and I’m not quite sure how well I explained it, god knows I went through a million drafts trying to nail the concept down but equally I’ve never heard anything quite like it and it’s a unique lens to view the idea through I think.

Relatedly, this topic made finding footage for the video really hard indeed because not only did I not want to spoil people for obvious reasons, but it’s also really hard to demonstrate the process of having your perspective changed purely through little gameplay clips because whoever’s watching, ironically doesn’t have the context to see how your perception has changed, so I did a LOT of googling for games with like, perspective changing mechanics or mechanics that let you see through walls or physically change how the world is presented to you because I literally had no idea how to demonstrate the idea visually. Is my commitment to having zero B-roll and having every frame be directly relevant to what I’m talking about a curse? Yes, yes absolutely it is.

Performance wise this one did, eh, it did okay I got a lot of lovely feedback from people and it seems that void stranger has a bit of a cult fanbase, some of whom found the game through my 2023 end of year video so seeing them jump in and say how glad they are to have given the game a chance is really cool. They also informed me that the creator has another game called zero ranger which is initially a top down shmup which plays with a lot of the same ideas so I’ll need to check that out at some point and so will you.

Finally, the other video released recently was… recently is doing some heavy lifting there isn’t it… all about the fun of breaking games except it kind of wasn’t except it kind of was, look I wanted to talk about Balatro and man did I have a tricky time coming up with explaining what, exactly this one was about. Broadly, I wanted to talk about the idea that whilst power fantasies in games are a very common draw we often misinterpret where they really come from. SO much of the discussions and perhaps more importantly the advertising of power fantasy games are framed around ideas of ultraviolence and super insane spectawcle and whilst those things can absolutely be sources of power fantasies it’s not the only way to go about it as Balatro helpfully proves. I really wanted to avoid the obvious route of handwringing about ooh waaaah games are too obsessed with killing people because I think that line of inquiry also doesn’t get to the heart of things, murdering powerful bad guys with cool weapons does feel cool, the real question is WHY that feels cool, which is the thing we often forget.

One thing I dislike about this video is that I was never able to come up with a good bit of terminology for power fantasy because not only is that a very loaded term but it’s also kind of… inelegant when it comes to actually talking about it, I wanted something pithy, single word just an idea that means feeling powerful and in control without the inherent baggage of the word power because that kinds of drags us right back into the exact subject area I wanted to get rid of.

That kind of brings me onto the title and the thumbnail, now the thumbnail is something I am genuinely super proud of it took me ages to cut Raiden out of that metal gear rising key art and my photoshop art of the balatro joker getting cut in half I think is pretty good. However, the fun of breaking games or whatever it’s called is… I dunno it’s accurate but I can’t help but feel like it’s a little on the clickbaity side. Me figuring out the fun of breaking Balatro and doing all those cool infinite combos was the genesis of the video and I do talk about it a fair bit but equally it isn’t the WHOLE topic and I’m not sure whether that makes it manipulative or not and whether that’s okay to do, I have complex feelings about it.

One thing I don’t have complex feelings about though is Balatro, wow what a fucking game it’s so good, I’m so glad that it’s become massive because stumbling upon it in a steam demo event I could INSTANTLY see it’s potential to be an all-timer game changer. It’s so slick there’s loads of depth to it, loads of things to do and the core mechanics are so cleverly expanded upon seriously if you don’t like deckbuilder roguelikes I really suggest you at least check it out because it’s a truly special game and the person behind it is great. Not felt that instant lightningbolt of “oh wow this is genius” in a long time.

As for the video, eeeh not great both videos this time did slightly below average but I’m not too broken up about it because they were very good, for reasons that aren’t clear to me for patreon uptake so that’s something. I think it’s just a speed issue so I’ll try my best, still not feeling 100% to be honest but I have some fun plans and that you all won’t wait too long. With that, I’ll be off, hope you all had a good… uh… easter? Yeah easter if you celebrate, if you don’t hope you enjoyed the cheap chocolate and if you don’t eat chocolate then um, you know, hope you have a nice life. Bye!

EARLY ACCESS The Forbidden Fun of Breaking Games

Check out Quinn's Quest: https://www.youtube.com/@Quinns_Quest

There's nothing more satisfying in videogames than a big fun power fantasy - what could compare to the awesome feeling of crushing your enemies in style and becoming master of all you survey?... But if power fantasies are so simple, then why do so many games suck at creating them?

This is a mystery that The Architect has been pondering for some time, and it was only until they unexpectedly stumbled on one of gaming's greatest power fantasies contained within a humble card game that things finally started to make sense. The feeling of power in games doesn't come from violence or from spectacle, but from a feeling of control, and there's no better way to feel in control than to break a game wide open.

EARLY ACCESS - You Can Never Play The Same Game Twice

Check Out ThorHighHeels! - https://www.youtube.com/user/thorhighheels

There's no more frustrating feeling in videogaming than wanting to  recapture an experience that you've already had and can never find  again. Solving a puzzle for the first time, uncovering a secret, the  feeling of playing a game before it got boring - videogames are littered  with one-time moments that we can never see again.  

It's very tempting to try and recapture our lost glories and relive our  favorite moments from our favorite games all over again, but what if the  opposite was not healthier, but would also cure us of this weird  nostalgic curse? The Architect should know - between venturing into  multiple versions of Hyrule, politically sensitive battlefields and more  than one version of the same haunted house, one thing has become clear,  whilst it is impossible to see a game for the first time twice, that's -  spoilers - not always a bad thing.

You Saw:

Outer Wilds - 2019

Portal - 2007

Dark Souls - 2012

Breath of the Wild - 2017

Disco Elysium - 2019

Celeste - 2018

Super Paper Mario - 2007

Neon White - 2022

Portal 2 - 2011

Dark Souls 3 - 2016

Final Fantasy 14 - 2010

Super Smash Bros Ultimate - 2018

Cooking Mama Cookstar - 2020

XCOM: Enemy Unknown - 2012

God of War - 2018

Resident Evil 4 Remake - 2023

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - 1998

Journey - 2012

Super Mario Odyssey - 2017

Minecraft - 2011

Dishonored 2 - 2016

Overwatch - 2016

Terraria - 2011

Potionomics - 2022

Spelunky 2 - 2020

Dead Estate - 2021

Void Stranger - 2023

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe - 2022

Tunic - 2022

Void Train - Early Access

Palworld - 2024

Antichamber - 2013

Outer Wilds - 2019

Return of the Obra Dinn - 2018

Chants of Senaar - 2018

Dave The Diver - 2023

Tunic- 2022

Braid - 2008

Yakuza 0 - 2015

Baldur's Gate 3 - 2023

Counter Strike: Global Offensive - 2012

Fez - 2012

Pikmin 4 - 2023

Marvel's Avengers - 2020

XCOM: UFO Defence - 1994

Street Fighter 6 - 2023

Magic The Gathering Arena - 2018

Dark Souls 2 - 2014

Runescape - 2001

Destiny - 2014

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - 2011

Borderlands 3 - 2019

Mass Effect - 2007

Bioshock - 2007

Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga - 2007

Xenoblade 2 - 2017

Hollow Knight - 2017

Elden Ring - 2022

Cuphead - 2017

Megaman X - 2020

Undertale - 2015

Final Fantasy 7 Remake - 2020

Talos Principle 2 - 2023

Telltale's The Walking Dead Season 2 - 2013

Tales From the Borderlands - 2014

Metroid Prime - 2002

My House. Wad - 2023

Age of Empires 4 - 2021

Borderlands 2 - 2012

Planescape Torment - 1999

Hi-Fi Rush - 2023

Devil May Cry 3 - 2005

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 - 2022

Spec Ops: The Line - 2012

Kirby and the Forgotten Land - 2022

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - 2023

Super Mario 64 - 1996

Umurangi Generation - 2020

Architect Address - 2023 In Review

Hello hello and welcome to this, the architect address! In case you didn't know, and that’s looking to be quite a few of you because damn we’ve got quite a few fresh faces around here since I last did one of these, this is a sort of irregular slightly improvised wrap up thing I release once every few videos to catch you up on my thoughts about particular videos, what’s going on with the channel lately, all that sort of stuff.

And on that note let’s talk about what things were like for the channel in 2023 which was, I think all in all - a bit mixed. I’ve had some real successes with a few videos towards the start of the year, with the vampire survivors one and the terra nil one doing really well but equally I’ve had a fair few stinkers and generally fairly slow growth over the course of the year. I think a lot of that has to do with a lack of uploads, I know I said I’d do more videos this year and wow that really didn’t come true, things slowed down a little bit and I think that’s because I ended up focusing on some more complex, abstract topic this year rather than just talking about why particular games were good and why I liked them which was interesting but I don’t think paid off in any material way.

I think that’s the widest lesson to take away from this year, for some stuff I put a lot of effort into addressing topics that were… I don’t know, a bit more profound or artistic or… those are terrible ways of describing what I’m getting at - y’know, stuff that’s a bit more high minded, and for a variety of reasons I don’t really feel like they worked very well. The two videos I talked about last time, the lovecraftian one and the creativity one I feel like had slightly more pretentious ambitions than a lot of the stuff I make but that didn’t really seem to work out very well. I think I work best when I sneak in the artistic and cultural insight whilst keeping things light rather than it being the focus because I’m not built for the sort of sentimentality and emotional pathos required by a lot of this stuff. In a weird way I’m kind of envious of a lot of youtubers who do these whole deeply personal videos about stuff that’s really meaningful to them because… I just do not think that way at all, I’m all about the detached big picture view and I think I need to play to that strength more.

Anyway, for next or rather this year I need to properly knuckle down and get stuff out faster, I know I just said I didn’t keep to that pledge last year get off my back but it’s the one thing that caused the lack of growth in 2023 because good videos can’t build momentum very effectively and bad ones absolutely kill any engagement on the channel for like, a month, it sucks - but hopefully with a better upload rate that won’t be quite so much of an issue.

Speaking of things I uploaded recently though, let’s have a little chat about the three most recent videos I released shall we? The first video is all about comedies, specifically focusing on Lethal Company, a fantastic game that I was very lucky to find out about as I was writing a video all about funny games. I think talking about jokes is really hard because you kind of have to spoil them in order to explain why they work. There’s a famous routine about explaining a joke being like dissecting a frog, you learn something but the frog dies and you see the reason why that’s funny is because… you get the picture.

The idea that really inspired me to make this video was an offhanded thought about there not being any current, universally liked comedy games like portal or the stanley parable, it seems like for the last decade and a bit we’ve more and more games that try to include humour and yet a lower success rate of actually funny games - with the root cause ultimately stemming from the fact that comedy writing in games, and to be honest writing in general for games being very different than writing for movies or TV or whatever. So all these writers who have experience in these other mediums, or alternative all the games people who wish they were writing for a different medium, can’t quite make jokes that work because they lack that player connection that you really need to keep in mind, and I think that’s a useful lens to view a lot of gaming writing through.

One of the interesting things I did in this one, partially because of necessity, was to do more cutaways from me talking than… I think I’ve ever done before, I included quite a few examples of jokes in games that either did or didn’t work as well as some of me and my friends playing lethal company and I’m normally reticent to do this as videogame dialogue or 3rd party quotes can be a bit of a tempo interruption from my usual lightning fast style of speech. However, I think not including them here would’ve been for the worst because I think with writing you need to include a few concrete examples to really demonstrate what you’re talking about and also I think those lethal company clips are really funny. Particularly the one with the turret my friend thinks is deactivated - I laugh every time.

Overall, the video did… okay I think, broadly fine, lots of positive comments and surprisingly few angry gamer babies opposing my half hearted defence of forespoken as well. Look it’s a bad game but it’s not… THAT bad okay, it’s just sort of consistently below average and whilst I obviously have no evidence for this, I suspect it would have gotten a bit less hate from certain circles if the protagonist wasn’t a black lady. The video though, yeah broadly fine, I think vids that are me writing about writing tend to be a bit on the risky side views wise but I really like doing them because it’s for once me speaking with any degree of authority at all so I’m going to keep doing them. I’ve always wanted to do a video on worldbuilding and why games are bad at that so maybe expect something along those lines this year. Who knows.

The next video I’d like to chat about and the final real episode of this year is one all about clones and lemme tell you it’s done substantially better than I thought it was going to do and WAAAAY better than last year’s sprint to the finish bash one out at the end video which is one of the worst performing vids I’ve ever made. Even more surprising, I put it out on boxing day which is something you’re not supposed to do especially if it’s a topic that’s not holiday or new year related and that didn’t seem to matter either, weird.

I guess soulslikes are a fairly crowdpleasy topic and the thesis of the video is mostly something people agree with anyway, lies of p is good, lords of the fallen is bad, remnant and jedi fallen order are just okay but I think I do have a bit of a chance to say some interesting stuff about clones and the way we look at the relationship between games as well. A lot of the time I think we’re quite harsh towards games that are iterations on a formula rather than being totally unique and conveniently forget about that when we look back and realise how good they were the whole time. Way back in the day a lot of people shittalked Terraria and look at that game now, woah.

I did notice some weird things about this video though, first being that I seem to find myself talking about the original doom a lot and that’s weird given that I don’t think it holds up particularly well, it’s older than me and I only first played it a few years ago - I guess it’s a very influential game but still, it’s in danger of becoming another XCOM that I sort of refer to by default and I want to have a broader spread of references. Also, something I’m pleased to see is people disagreeing with me and saying they like remnant 2 without being dicks about it, I really like the fact that a) I’m not treated as gospel because I am not an expert and b) I’ve cultivated an environment of… mostly, good faith disagreement, I don’t get involved very often but I think a lot of the discussions in the comments of my videos are generally pretty good. Not amazing because it’s still youtube but okay in the grand scheme and that’s heartening to see.

Speaking earlier of leaning into the channel’s strengths I quite like making these, sort of culture of videogames talking about how we think about games videos rather than directly looking at their design ones, that feels like something I do quite well that doesn’t really appear very often elsewhere on youtube. All in all though, solid video if not a super memorable one in my opinion, it might be the holiday blitz but I barely remember making it but hopefully it’s one people enjoyed.

Finally, we’ve got the last video of the year and that’s games you should have played 2023 and my god do I like making these but also they sure do take it out of me, cobbling together an entire video in the space of just under a week is very hard work and not something I relish having to do often, but I do like getting a chance to spend the last month ish of the year playing through all the really good games I missed and coming up with fun ways to tell you all how good they are.

Honestly I missed some absolute crackers this year, void stranger and your only move is hustle were very late entries that seem to have gone down very well, and it seems like I didn’t include too many obvious picks everyone’s already heard of either. It’s always a struggle which games to cut because of notoriety, a very long time ago I cut celeste from the list because I thought it was too popular despite being great and that was a real mistake and so I’m a bit paranoid about which games to keep and which to cut. Pizza tower and lethal company went out because they’re basically the biggest indie games of the year but I think maybe dredge and myhouse dot wad could’ve gotten cut as well as the former was in the game awards and is therefore automatically mainstream and the other was all over the place on youtube, who knows it’s impossible to make a perfect list given the unique criteria my vid operates on so I’m not too fussed.

One thing I AM fussed about, however, is my little slay the princess amateur dramatics at the end, not only was that entire segment cobbled together at like 3AM when I was very sleep deprived and not deserving of the praise it got, but also people thought I was the main male voice actor Jonathan Sims who’s actually talented and more importantly sounds nothing like me - I guess we’re both english? But unfortunately that does make anyone who confused us racist. Slay the princess is great by the way. It was a real fight for top place but I think STP wins purely on uniqueness value alone and I’ve not seen any big outlets talking about it so hopefully the game gets the players it rightfully deserves.

Any more stray thoughts… uhhh… I think my comedy bits this year for the end of the year video were a bit on the weak side and I could’ve stood to mention the fact that although we got a lot of great games, a bunch of developers also lost their jobs so it might be the last good year for games but I just couldn’t quite squeeze it in somewhere natural sounding, I dunno. But broadly the video did about as well as I could have expected, the end segment drew a LOAD of new patrons who I am very glad to see, seriously that decision I made I think last year or the year before to have my runners up be patron exclusives was very clever well done me. Aaaaand that’s it, I can’t think of anything else.

This has been a marathon video so I think I’ll leave it there, hope you’re all looking forward to 2024, oh that’s one more thing I said 2014 instead of 2024 at the end of that video and it was very embarrassing I’m a dumbdumb, anyway, bye!

Architect Address November 2023

Oh well look who it is it’s… you… you’ve got a lot of nerve showing up here after what you did back in 92 heck, well in case you’ve forgotten in your many years as a fugitive this is, err, the architect address that thing I do where I talk about some stuff, cool right?

Anyway I tend to ramble a bit too long at the start of these things so let’s get right into talking about an interesting question I was asked about how I pick games for the yearly games you should have played video and that’s an interesting one because contrary to a lot of my work I do actually have… sort of a system for that. So basically throughout the year I will make a note of promising indie games that are going to come out this year or have come out and sort them all into a biiiig list of stuff I want to play that looks cool - note this is usually how and why I end up playing big indie games and talking about them later than everyone else because they’re later on my list!

Anyway, so after I play a game enough to get a feel for it, it gets sorted into one of four categories, the first being disqualified because I don’t like it or because it for whatever reason got too popular, a lot of games I really like end up in here like vampire survivors last year or Celeste from a few years back or Baldur’s Gate 3 which I really should have anticipated being absolutely massive and it’s barely even an indie game at this point but oh well. The series is about games you should have played not games you definitely already had the chance to play. Next is the sure things, these are games I absolutely love and will fight to put on the list, usually this is only maybe between five and eight games and all of the top 3 will come from this group, almost always these games will have a video dedicated to them already so you can probably tell what they are beforehand if you’re really paying attention.

The other two are a bit more straightforward, the Play More’s and the Maybes - basically the drafting process for any given games you should have played ends up with me playing all the play more games to get a bead on them, then me whittling down the fifty or so maybes into about fifteen to round out the rest of the list. It’s a bit more complex than it just being the best games of that group because I like to get a good spread of genres and vibes so that everyone can find something they like. Some years, like last year, there were lots of sort of simulation style games that were really good like hardspace shipbreaker and power wash sim and I cut a few to make room for other more varied kinds of games I think deserved the spotlight more, I actually kind of have some mixed ish feelings on Signalis, despite it being a critical darling elsewhere but it’s a really cool game that I knew some people would really love if they heard about it and so I put it on the list despite thinking it has issues.

It’s weird, ultimately there are so many good games out there that the end list is ultimately kind of… political - I decide based on a lot of factors beyond the quality of the games because at a certain point their level of goodness is kind of arbitrary and it’s more about which ones deserve the spotlight and whether I’m unduly focusing on a particular kind of game. Lots of puzzles and horror games this time around hoo boy I’ve got some tough cuts to make.

Next up let’s talk about some videos shall we and these two are interesting in of the fact that they both sort of, uh, failed, for different reasons that I think are at the very least worth exploring. The first one is can a game be too realistic slash Starfield versus reality which I think is a cracking title really and this one is one of those videos that just sort of comes to me and is powered almost exclusively by frustration because man is Starfield just… kind of shit. I really think I went a bit soft on the game in this video because I thought maybe my disappointment with it would cool as I played more or saw other people playing the fun bits but man no it’s just this bland dry husk of a videogame. Like, every single decision they made was to make the game have as little personality and take as few risks as possible and although starfield is of course going to be financially successful I’m surprised to see as many people as I did sort of turning on the game because it sort of deserves it.

As for the body of the video, realism and what I ended up calling idealism for a joke is one of those things that’s kind of hard to pin down and I’m not sure I did a greaaaat job in this one to be honest but I do think that it’s an important thing to talk about. A lot of games are obsessed with this idea of providing a true to life simulation, which, y’know, fair enough go for it, AND a totally fantastical world that warps around the player at every turn and that’s invariably a recipe for disaster. Honestly this conflict is the rot at the heart of basically every Bethesda game and it’s why stuff like, say, The Witcher is able to deliver a setting that just feels so much deeper and more lived in that you can actually get immersed in, and why the likes of a Bioware game back when they were good can give you that great feeling of agency in the way your Skyrims or your Oblivions simply can’t. I find it interesting and it’s possibly something I could’ve stood to talk about some more that idealism and realism are two diametrically opposed ways of doing things but they both ultimately work towards the same aim of immersion, it’s something you don’t see very often in games and I think that’s an interesting dynamic we don’t explore very much and can explain why games that are on the surface very different end up satisfying that itch to sink into a world in different ways.

Overall, this video was… briefly, pretty successful but it dropped off hard and I think that’s because I like and IDIOT forgot to put tags on it and by the time I’d realized it was too late. Really bummed about that one because it seemed like it was doing well and I was pretty ahead of the curve on the now pretty ubiquitous Starfield dislike but oh well it was bound to happen eventually that is a mistake I’m not going to make again.

The other video I want to talk about is H.P Lovecraft Lives Inside Your Computer and let’s just get this one out of the way, this video did awfully and I think that’s a shame because it’s a really cool topic but I didn’t get it done until after Halloween and it’s got a weird as hell title that I like and evidently no-one else does so no-one watched it, bleh. Not great to have two stinkers in a row but what are you gonna do.

ANYWAY the thing I really really like about this video is that it talks about a thing I’ve been annoyed about for years and that is that there are loads and loads of Lovecraftian games out there and they’re all absolutely terrible at doing justice to Lovecraft’s actual writing, I think a lot of them get so wrapped up in the tentacle monsters and the theme of insanity that they forget to do anything actually insane. The comparisons to Freud and the uncanny too are pretty interesting, nothing that hasn’t been seen before in academia but it’s a pretty novel comparison when it comes to games that I haven’t seen anyone else do yet.

Also, the central metaphor of computers being Lovecrafian, I’m kind of surprised by that being not as much of a talking point or thing to loudly disagree with as I thought, I was expecting a few people to say that I was nuts for calling computers Lovecraftian and saying that the reason why we’re attracted to glitches and creepy pastas and in fact the broken bits of all media is because it reflects the uncertainty of our uncanny relationship with art, that’s a nice little observation.

One thing I DID see coming were the Lovecraft defenders getting very upset that I called him racist, and I did have more to say on that subject in the video but I cut it out because I didn’t want to be needlessly inflammatory not to mention going on too many tangents but part of me wishes I kept it? Denying Lovecraft was a huge racist isn’t just categorically incorrect revisionism, particularly in the case of Lovecraft it kind of shows a lack of understanding of his work. If Lovecraft WASN’T a fearful bigoted little bubble boy then he never would’ve tapped into that existential fear that the whole world couldn’t be trusted. So, people why try and say he wasn’t racist are really just outing themselves as not really understanding the man himself or his work and also revealing what everyone already knew that they were more interested in defending racism than defending Lovecraft all along, shocker.

On a lighter, ish, note myhouse dot wad is great and I was really glad to have an experience as unique as that one to pin the video around seriously i’ve never played anything quite like it. It’s constantly surprising, has a great I think possibly queer love story at the center and on top of that is just a mod with really well designed combat and puzzles to boot, the final fight with the song I played during the credits is a sublime experience and well worth powering through to get to. If you’ve not played very much of the original dooms I hardly blame you and would recommend looking up one of the many sort of tiered spoiler guides on the internet that go through the map step by step and letting you only see spoilers for stuff you want, they’re good!

Anyway I’ll stop there because youuu need to play myhouse in case you couldn’t guess, a little spoiler for you patrons, it’s definitely going on the end of year list, yeah I know it’s pretty popular but it’s my thing and I’m allowed to bend the rules if I want so there.  Bye!

I was on a podcast (bonus!)

Hi patrons, as you might recall from the most recent video, I was on a podcast! This is the bonus segment kindly provided by Darkfry for your viewing enjoyment as well in which I immediately get the definition of the word eminent wrong. 

Architect Address Sept 2023

Well well well wot do we have here then a couple of miscreants up to no good if I do say so myself probably lookin' to watch and or read some of that there architect address aren’t you well… you’re in the right place! Hello there and welcome to this, the architect address, a very special perk of patreon access which mostly comprises me rambling on for a few minutes about my thoughts on the latest videos and what’s being going on with the channel lately.

Now my usual talking about YouTube and general channel updates are going to take a bit of a backseat this time because I want to talk about patreon and how it kind of accidentally was dicking me over for years and I didn’t even realize!

So, as you are hopefully aware I have a special limited ten dollars per month tier on my patreon which gets you on the read your name out at the end list, it’s an iconic part of the channel, everyone likes it - even non patrons - and I’m a big fan too. It’s a bit of a hassle to record every time but I don’t mind because it’s a pretty significant portion of my patreon income. However, unbeknownst to me, in the event someone can’t pay for the $10 tier, like for example if their card gets declined then they are automatically removed from the list of people I see that are getting the $10 reward, but they’re aren’t removed from the limited pool of fifty people reserved for that tier in case they come back.

So, what this has meant over the years is that people on the $10 tier have stopped paying or their cards had expired or whatever and they’ve just been sat there not getting any reward and stopping actual paying people from signing up, and there’s literally no way to remove them without blocking and then unblocking them. I estimate this has cost me close to a four digit sum and let me tell you I am LIVID. Very upset with patreon but hopefully the issue is fixed and we’re going to be seeing a bunch of new faces at the end which will be fun!

Special thanks by the way to Ty Gurin who pointed this issue out to me, literally saved me a couple of hundred quid a year thanks buddy really appreciate it.

Anyway, let’s move onto actual video talk and take a look at the first video I want to talk about and that is RPGs were never about roleplaying and brace yourselves here because this is a video, wait for it, I think is actually quite good. I think the angle of it being a sort of evolutionary look at how RPGs have changed and diverged over time is great, I genuinely love my little graph showing how different RPG types are distinct and my tying things back into how Darwin's finch isn’t actually a finch was the last second fun fact that I think really tied everything together. It’s a good vid!

I think the historical angle is an element that I don’t tend to do very often because I’m always wary of just spending an entire video rewording a wikipedia article which is something that really hacky video essay people do and one of the hardest bits of the video was balancing my more typical analysis and observation with telling the more straightforward story of how all these genres branched off.

Actually getting everything down to those four categories of dungeon crawler, crpg, jrpg and narrative RPG was actually the hardest part of the project and I had to kind of fight my way through some common misconceptions in order to make a model that more or less made sense. Stuff like fallout or the witcher or mass effect are very tempting to sort of bundle in with other western RPG types particularly in the case of fallout which as a franchise straddles multiple RPG genres but actually thinking about what these games set out to do and how they play makes them quite different even if they share a lot of the same mechanical and design aesthetic space. Narrative RPGs in particular were a fairly late addition to the format and honestly rounding it out into four distinct groups with narrative RPGs kind of acting as a counterweight to dungeon crawlers in capturing the two distinct ways people tried to adapt dungeons and dragons is really what brought everything together. (ADAM'S LATER NOTE, NO IDEA WHY I SAID TWO SEPARATE THINGS TIED EVERYTHING TOGETHER MOMENTS APART, THAT'S DUMB OF ME)

One thing that I wish I did more of or at the very least had the patience to do was actually plan in advance and play more of these big long RPGs for myself, I did not have a good time just trying to rush through the intros to stuff like elder scrolls arena which is fairly miserable and trying to get halfway decent footage for baldur’s gate 1 and ultima underworld and the witchery games was similarly… not great. RPGs are very long usually so I can’t play all of them but still.

All in all the video did well, people seemed to respond more positively to the idea that role playing game is a silly term than I thought, there weren’t too many oldschool tabletop RPG grognards being boring and the video performed pretty well too, result I think. Yeah not much to complain about either really.

The next video why do we still hate tutorials… I think I’ve got a few more issues with, kind of a eeehh conflicted one for a variety of reasons. Ultimately my problem with this one is that I didn’t really get to talk about the thing I realized too late was the actually most interesting part of the video for anywhere near as long as I like. Videogames existing as sort of a continuum and there being entry level games and advanced games that expect you to know certain concepts is an idea that clearly exists but I don’t think I’ve ever seen directly articulated. I’ve touched on it a few times in recent videos and I think maybe it deserves a spotlight onto itself.

One of the challenging things about making this video, on that note, is that it was surprisingly difficult to find tutorials in games that showed the kind of bad habits and annoying bits I wanted to showcase in a visually obvious way. Often tutorials being annoying is more of a persistently subtle thing so meta stuff that knowingly and obviously does this like Toriel in Undertale and far cry blood dragon was actually quite helpful to give a big obvious highlight of the examples. On the subject of far cry blood dragon, that game is kind of fascinating because it makes fun of terrible unhelpful tutorials by giving you a really shitty tutorial and also the main character is complaining about having to do a tutorial. It’s a sort of very self-conscious irony that really we’ve kind of grown out of comedically and so it really doesn’t work at all which was surprising.

As for the rest of the vid, one thing I found quite interesting when making it was that I initially started with the premise that tutorials are bad and suck, which is the prevailing gamer opinion but the more research I did and the more I tried to construct the argument around that point the more I realized it just… isn’t really true anymore - if it ever was. I think one thing I do want to take away from this video is that the channel has a lot of potential to challenge some of the deeply set gamer opinions we kind of take for granted, and I should probably do more of that going forwards because whilst some people did miss the point I think also I did strike a chord with people too, sort of putting voice to a quite specific complaint not with tutorials specifically but how they get used which was good to see.

I think the video did… okay? I’ll cop to the thumbnail being really bad and the title’s a little bleh for my liking but it’s another case of having quite a complex central thesis and no way to get it across in a pithy way so I went for a more mainstream hook, playing off that initial assumption all tutorials are bad but equally that kind of made the video look a bit generic I think - it’s a tricky one. The marketing and social media side of the channel continues to be the worst part of the job for me, just… I do not have the brain for it or the talent to make pretty thumbnails which is a shame but DAMN if I'll let anyone else do it, no way.

Anyway I should probably get to work on the next video, no prizes for guessing which… slightly underwhelming space game it’s going to be about, and I’ll see you around - bye!

EARLY ACCESS - Why Do We STILL Hate Tutorials?

Check out Video Gems! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpLFhiwQt3Q&
Check out Aranock https://www.youtube.com/c/Aranock

Teaching people how to play videogames is a subject that's gotten more and more attention in recent years. Where once videogame tutorials existed as a single boring training room or an incomprehensible list of the controls, now videogame tutorials span epic quests, cinematic adventures and concise, easy-to-digest lessons... So why, in spite of all these improvements do tutorials still not work for many different games?

Try as they might, game designers can't seem to get us up to grips with games through just tutorials alone, and so it falls to The Architect to dive into wormholes, defend ancients and explore strange new lands to try and find out why this is the case. As it turns out, we've been neglecting a bunch of different ways to teach videogames that tutorials have been overshadowing for years, each with their own strengths, and their own weaknesses.

You Saw:
The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword - 2011
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 - 2022
Hi Fi Rush - 2023
Dark Souls - 2012
Terra Nil - 2023
Team Fortress 2 - 2007
Undertale - 2015
Star Wars the force unleashed - 2008
Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon - 2013
High On Life - 2022
marvel's Spider Man - 2018
God of War Ragnarok - 2022
Total War Warhammer 3 - 2022
Shadow of Mordor - 2014
En Garde! - 2023
The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess - 2006
Project Zomboid - 2013
Magic the Gathering: Arena - 2018
Stardew Valley - 2018
Dota 2 - 2013
Counter Strike: Global Offensive - 2012
A Hat In Time - 2017
Hollow Knight - 2017
Runescape - 2001
Celeste - 2018
Kirby and the Forgotten Land - 2022
The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time - 1998
Persona 5 Royal - 2017
Baba is You - 2019
Starcraft 2 - 2010
The Witness - 2016
Titanfall 2 - 2016
Metroid Dread - 2021
Tunic - 2022
Crusader Kings 3 - 2020
Doom Eternal - 2020
Dead Space Remake - 2023
Road to Ballhalla - 2016
Cuphead - 2017
The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom - 2023
Teardown - 2022
Minecraft - 2011
Portal - 2007
Portal 2 - 2011
LOK - not out yet
Meroid Prime - 2002
Terraria - 2011
Super Metroid - 1994
Toki Tori 2 - 2013
Elden Ring - 2022
Satisfactory - Early Access
Factorio - 2020
Paper Mario The Thousand Year Door - 2004
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth - 2011
World of Warcraft - 2004
Splatoon 3 - 2022
Armored Core 6 - 2023
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim - 2011
Outer Wilds - 2019
Street Fighter 6 - 2023
Fire Emblem 3 Houses - 2019
Dark Souls 3 - 2015
DOOM - 2016
Super Mario 3D World - 2013
Super Mario Odyssey - 2017
Half Life 2 - 2004
Can of Wormholes - 2023
Psychonauts 2 - 2021
Resident Evil 4 Remake - 2023
XCOM 2 - 2016
Hearts of Iron 4 - 2016
Cook Serve Delicious 2 - 2017
Baldur's Gate 3 - 2023
Prey - 2017
Metal Gear Solid 4 - 2008
Hearthstone - 2014
Marvel Snap - 2022
Slay the Spire - 2019
Offworld Trading Company - 2016
Pikmin - 2001
Manic Miners - 2023
Pikmin 4 - 2023
Super Smash Bros Ultimate - 2018
Dusk - 2018
Chop Goblins - 2022
My Friendly Neighbourhood - 2023
Warframe - 2013
Oxygen Not Included - 2019
Risk of Rain 2 - 2019
Fortnite - 2017
Gears of War 5 - 2018
Kingdom Hearts 2 - 2005
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker - 2002
There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension - 2020
Descenders - 2018

RPGs Were Never About Roleplaying

Check Out Moon Channel! https://www.youtube.com/@moon-channel

Role Playing Games, as they are sometimes called, are some of the longest-lived and most popular genres of videogame out there - to the point that they're older than videogames themselves. However,  in spite of their consistent presence in our culture, it's increasingly feeling like no-one knows what RPGs are actually about... and it isn't, as one would naturally assume... role playing.

So, the sacred duty to navigate the realm find the eight sacred crystals, determine the fate of reality and slay a few dragons along the way falls once again, to The Architect, who on top of saving the world also needs try and find out where the RPG came from, and where it's going - with the answer coming from a rather... unconventional source.

Architect Address July 2023

What’s up, how are you doing and welcome one and all to this: the architect address - hoo boy it’s a hot one right now I have been melting all week and I’ve got my windows closed to record this so let’s get on with it. This is what’s known in certain circles as the Architect Address, a secret update video especially for you lovely patrons where I talk about some stuff that’s been going on with the channel, answer some questions and chat about the videos that came out recently.

The first thing I want to talk about is a question a few people have asked me about recently and that’s how I record, archive and deal with footage because for this job my god do I need of it. So basically, actually recording stuff is the easy part - back in the day you were stuck with crappy software like fraps or hypercam 2 or whatever it’s called but nowadays there’s lots of really lightweight software I’ve been relying on for years, and will have running more or less whenever I’m playing a game. For PC stuff I’ll use OBS which is software most associated with streaming but is a pretty powerful piece of kit with a lot of  useful plugins if you’re okay with a slightly unintuitive interface and for console stuff, usually the switch I’ll use the built in Elgato recorder.

All that stuff gets collected in a raw, uncompressed state in a hard drive dedicated to current footage, generally speaking this equals maybe a terabyte every two ish months, high quality footage if you didn’t know is HUGE particularly when there’s a lot going on onscreen and it’s THIS which is a source of the actual problems. See, big footage is harder and more clunky to import into stuff, it’s more likely to get corrupted and it’s also expensive to store because it eats up hard drive space like nobody’s business, what this means is that it needs to be encoded into a more manageable form using a program like handbrake which will cut the size of footage by about two thirds. Encoding is very hard on your computer’s processor and take a very long time but is well worth doing in my experience because particularly aging not very fast storage drives often can’t cope with uncompressed video very well but do just fine with properly encoded footage.

After that, or sometimes before depending on how much I’ve procrastinated, it’s time to name the footage so I can find it later. Anyone who is planning on doing what I do and recording a bunch of footage, DO THIS, DO NOT HAVE A BUNCH OF RANDOMLY NAMED FILES because it will become unmanageable and a pain in the ass to go back and rename everything very quickly. I spent a few hours manually renaming a lot of my old footage to list the game I was playing because I got sick of scanning through thumbnails to find what I needed like an idiot.

Even after all that admin, though you’ve still got hundreds of gigs of footage clogging up your drives and so I have at time of writing three distinct storage drives plugged into my PC with complete archives going back to 2017, that’s not when I started the channel but prior to starting archiving I used to delete all my footage after every video meaning some classic shots and moments are forever lost to time - storage drives are not that expensive in the grand scheme, but at the volumes you need for footage, we’re talking double digit terabytes they can get pretty pricey so my advice would either be prepared to shell out a lot of cash or be really aggressive with encoding to pack those files in as efficiently as possible.

That’s… sort of it, that’s a verbal guide to how I handle footage and let me tell you it’s a pain in the backside but well worth doing once you’ve got years of archives to work with like I do, hope that helps people who asked!

Next up is the first video I’ve released recently and that is how tears of the kingdom keeps you playing forever and let’s be honest I was never NOT going to release a tears of the kingdom video, come on - the interesting problem I had to solve when it came to thinking about this one though was what I was going to make the video about because err, as good as the game is it kind of does all the same things well and has all the same weaknesses as Breath of the Wild, so I’d kind of be repeating myself if I just talked about systemic mechanics again, it was a tricky one.

Eventually, however, I settled on zeroing in on the one thing that ToTK does better than breath of the wild and that’s how it handles its core gameplay loop, I think in retrospect the previous game is a little… bland? Compared to tears and once you’re kind of sick of the shrines there’s not that much to encourage you to keep adventuring but right up until the end of TOTK and I was still getting lost and going on weirdo side journeys so that was great fun and well work making the video about.

One slightly awkward thing about writing this one though is I’ve already done a sort of dedicated video on both beginnings and endings, neither of which I think were… that great, to be honest - so I enjoyed getting to revisit those topics even if it was just a bit of a flyby. In particular, I really liked getting to talk about the forza horizons 5 intro it’s one of the best introductions I’ve ever seen, to the point that it tricked me into playing a kind of game I don’t really enjoy that much. Equally, I quite like the messaging of the video at the end, of sort of having a relationship with a game on your own terms, you don’t have to end a game when the credits roll of you get all the achievements, it’s more about finding a suitable wrapup for your experience for yourself and having the self control to call it there… something I sort of lack.

As an aside, I kind of want to voice my dissatisfaction with Terra Invicta in particular, that game literally only gets a mention because I was very upset with how it’s so very nearly the game I have always wanted to play and it’s just too bloated and slow and fiddly for its own good. I could’ve put a whole host of other much more visually interesting games in there to be honest but nope, I needed to vent and so Terra Invicta gets dunked on.

This video’s performance started out a little on the slow side but it’s done pretty well with the benefit of about a month’s hindsight which is good - I’d hate to make such an obvious video on such a rich subject and have it do poorly, that’d suck wouldn’t it ahahahaha

Anyway so the video that just came out is one all about creativity and honestly I can’t escape the feeling I kind of fucked this one. Longtime viewers may remember me talking about wanting to make exactly this video a very long time ago and it’s been kind of a white whale for me ever since. I tried to make it work for a long time but my god could I just not quite fit everything I wanted to talk about in or play all the games I wanted to play or just say what I felt I needed to get across. Honestly I could’ve spent another month on this one getting it right but equally I reckon I made the right call getting it out in a state that’s at least okay rather than going around the rewrite drain for a fifth time, yeesh.

I think the difficulty of this video comes in two parts, first of all is the inherent challenge of explaining why creativity is fun and what makes it fun in a somewhat objective manner. Usually with these sorts of questions I can skate around the incredibly difficult to write problem of explaining what fun is and how it works which sort of by its nature is intuitive but very hard to put into words and here in particular it’s fairly elemental to the premise of the video so I couldn’t really avoid it and so needed to spend a lot of very tiresome effort just sort of gesturing at the idea that yes making things is inherently fun but it’s the job of games to empower that fun which is difficult to explain or elaborate upon in a way that’s interesting.

Second is that for a variety of reasons I’m not the most visually or aesthetically gifted person in the world, and video is a visual medium so I had to get a lot of footage of me painting, building and designing things that invariably would look like shit and make it really hard to actually illustrate my point. Equally I don’t know how to compose music and you can’t really show that process in a way that’s interesting, nor can you really quickly and efficiently demonstrate any other creative process because a lot of the fun and the challenge is internally derived which is both the problem at the core of the video’s topic and the core of why it didn’t turn out so good. Y’see how this is a harder topic than you might think to explain right, a lot of my videos kind of slide into these positions where I’m asked to explain and justify the nature of a fundamental aspect of human psychology or art and let me tell you it’s hard every time. Why is problem solving fun, why is tension fun why is creativity fun they just are you already know they are can we just roll with it?

I think another more obvious error I should’ve really caught was my choice of framing narrative, I think music as a whole was a strong example to use because it’s a very common theme for games but like everything else there are no games really about composition, so it’s hard to use to make a complete point. Why are there lots of games about music but none that are about making music isn’t exactly an attention grabbing pitch and even then it doesn’t really explain what I’m talking about very well. Maybe I should’ve leaned into painting or something and made passpartout the focus a little more or maybe I should’ve just gone with a more generic look at creativity,  , it’s a bit of a mess. Under the circumstances I think this one not doing very well at all is pretty justified though not quite as badly as the companions video which I thought was quite good so who even knows.

What do I like about the video? Let’s see if I can come up with something… err… I think that… the conclusion relating to art being a function of human perception and therefore outside the limits of what we can do with computers is a pretty salient one, particularly as it relates to AI stuff and that whole emerging sphere which I think I quite rightly declined to really go into, because that would’ve lit the comments on fire.

Anyway, I think that’s quite enough, this feels like it’s quite a long one as it is, I’ll see ya around, bye!

EARLY ACCESS: Videogames Have A Creativity Problem (and it's not the one you think)

Check out the Psychodyssey!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKoy_KMVIyU

Creativity, artistry and self expression are all universal aspects of  human existence - they've been around since the dawn of history, and will be around much longer than any of us... so why is it seemingly so difficult for videogames to make this stuff work? 

All across the gaming landscape titles try to encourage us to be creative or reward lateral thinking, but always end up falling into the same pitfalls - are videogames themselves simply not up to the task, or is there something more fundamental at work here? Either way, it's going  to mean the Architect's greatest intellectual undertaking of all time: understanding what makes the stupid, slow, biased human brain more powerful than any computer in the multiverse.

How Tears Of The Kingdom Keeps You Playing Forever

Check out Guess The Game!: https://guessthe.game/

Tears of the Kingdom is a compulsively playable game, with many people losing hundreds of hours to its impossible-to-resist charms - but what distinguishes Link's latest outing from the many many games stuck languishing in our backlogs that we intended to keep playing, but could never quite find the enthusiasm to go back to?

After diving into the depths and ascending to the skies, The Architect has gotten a few ideas - maybe the secret to a game that keeps us playing, and stops us from burning out is one that doesn't just distract us, but makes us care about what's going on? And just maybe, could it be that the secret to creating a sense of investment lies not in the work of developers, but our own minds?

You Saw:  

Redfall - 2023
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - 2023
Gone Home
Fallout 4
Divinity Original Sin 2
From Dust
Super Mario 3D World
Hades
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 2017
Resident Evil 4 Remake - 2023
The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe - 2022
Vampire Survivors - 2021
Persona 5 Royale - 2019
Star Wars Jedi Survivor - 2023
Psychonauts 2 - 2021
The Legend of Zelda - Twilight Princess - 2006
Forza Horizon 5 - 2021
Final Fantasy 7 Remake - 2020
Cassette Beasts - 2023
Fortnite - 2017
Marvel Snap - 2022
Dark Souls 3 - 2016
Far Cry 5 - 2018
Metroid Prime - 2002
Metroid Prime 2: Echoes - 2004
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - 1997
Xenoblade Chronicles - 2020
Dredge - 2023
Journey - 2012
Yume Nikki - 2004
Doom Eternal - 2020
Terra Invicta - EARLY ACCESS
Sid Meir's Civilization 6 - 2016
Wildfrost - 2023
Elden Ring - 2022
Lonely Mountain Downhill - 2019
Nier Automata - 2017
The Pathless - 2020
Half Life Alyx - 2020
DOOM - 2016
Fallout New Vegas - 2010
The Witness - 2016
Dishonored - 2012
Super Mario Odyssey - 2017
Terra Nil - 2023
Celeste - 2018
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - 2016
Mass Effect 3 - 2012
Minecraft - 2011
Metal Gear Rising: Revengance - 2013
Hi-Fi Rush - 2023
Undertale - 2015
Chrono Trigger - 1995
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask - 2000
It Takes Two - 2021
Death Stranding - 2019
Mario Kart 8 - 2014
Kirby and the Forgotten Land - 2022
Genshin Impact - 2020
God of War: Ragnarok - 2022
Xenoblade Chronicles 2 - 2017
Atomic Heart - 2023

Architect Address May 2023

Hello! Welcome to the architect address! It’s a special patrons only series of videos where you and me, yeah that’s right just us two, have a little chat about some things that have been going on with the channel lately and I talk about some videos that have come out recently too.

So, first up, I want to talk about where we are right now, the patreon, as you might recall I’ve been doing some experiments with an $8 tier as a little extra bonus version of the five dollar get your name in the credits tier and it’s… been kind of a weird one. On one hand, there’s been a decent uptake of people to it, and I’m very grateful for that - on the other… the actual reward which is to get a little shoutout at the end of the video… that’s not really been something people seem to want to engage with. It’s basically at the point where like two people have given me any shoutouts and as funny as it would be to just read out Jinkleoid’s posts at the end of every video, I kind of think that the lack of enthusiasm is indicative of a failed system. And that’s left me in a weird spot.

Because, the intent of the $8 is a little extra thing for people who want to go above and beyond and so I want it to exist, but I don’t want it to take up as much runtime as the credits readout tier does or  be as much work as something like this because I want to concentrate the actual content of the patreon at the lower tiers so people don’t miss out - the higher tiers are for accolades and thanks only. I think as some of the $8 peeps have suggested I’m leaning in the direction of just making it a shinier version of appearing int he credits, maybe with some fancy gold lettering - but that feels a little lazy? I dunno.

I imagine special discord server access and getting to play games with me or whatever would probably do quite well as rewards but it’s just not the vibe I want to encourage. I’ve taken several steps to ensure that this isn’t an adam millard the architect of games fanclub and whilst that’s a poor financial decision I’m going to stand by it. I guess I’ll have a bit more of a think about it but I like the vibe of the patreon as is, so it’ll just be a matter of figuring out something that fits with that ethos.

Beyond that, let’s talk about some videos huh? First up is Why Atomic Heart Fails to live up to its inspiration, this one was a concept that leaped out to me the moment I booted up atomic heart - the game is trying so hard to be bioshock that it’s impossible not to notice, from the vibe, to the weapons and even to the story - I didn’t go into that during the video for spoilery reasons but let’s just say that implying atomic heart is inspired by bioshock on a story level is… kind of a huge spoiler in of itself. Honestly atomic heart’s writing might be one of the most atrocious parts of a game I really didn’t like, the main character just sort of hating the idea of being the main character of a videogame and having to do things is such a baffling choice.

As for the actual concept of the video being based around metagaming, I am actually quite surprised by how little pushback I got with that phrasing, because I know that the most common usages of the word are to do with either, using out of game knowledge to inform your decision making in an rpg, or studying the competitive tactics and strategies of a game on a player versus player level, but really when you think about it, the thought processes that go into this stuff are the same as looking at singleplayer games from a big picture perspective and using out of game information to determine your goals and strategies. I know a hallmark of the channel at this point is me just sort of making up my own terminology because screw convention but I genuinely think this fits without any generously broad interpretation.

Getting to replay bioshock was actually pretty interesting too because it’s strange which areas of that game have aged well and which ones have aged badly. A lot of the most celebrated parts of bioshock have really started to show their age, the morality system is basically garbage and doesn’t work on a gameplay or thematic level, the much hyped horror angle is mostly just spooky shadows and a few cheap jumpscares and the big daddies were pretty disappointing too, they’re way easier than I remember and there’s only like two kinds. On the other hand on a gameplay level I thought bioshock was pretty good, sure the guns feel awful and particularly on higher difficulties the enemies are pretty bulletspongey but there’s loads of tactics, lots of different approaches and the game even functions pretty well as a survival horror game. At least, it would, were it not for the vita chambers which are… just bizarre. Not really sure why they exist. Really I think what brings out the strengths of Bioshock’s combat is that comparison to atomic heart which is 15 years newer and has almost no ideas of its own, and the stuff it did change made the game worse! It’s genuinely insane how the game doesn’t let you do stuff like zap water or blow up barrels or whatever, the sort of low level gameplay wrinkles that made bioshock’s combat have this fun improvisation feel are totally absent in atomic heart so it’s just sort of a boring shooter.

All in all, as is the way with these things, I was decently pleased with the video, I got to air some grievances with games that have had it coming for a while like ARK and of course that means the video did… badly. Yeah, I think it’s probably a combination of a not particularly engaging title and the fact that the internet was oversaturated by atomic heart by the time the video came out. Ah well, at least it was a good excuse to root out a bunch of people who got very triggered at the idea of me donating to charity.

The other video that came out recently was all about Terra Nil, a game I just can’t quite decide whether I like or not, which was sort of the key point I based the video around. On one hand, it is a game that kind of has a lot of problems, particularly when compared to other minimalist building optimization games like slipways but equally it’s kind of got some interesting stuff going on on a thematic level so who knows?

I think broadly that this video… isn’t great, I just don’t think I handled the intro or the outro very well at all in a way that makes my point kind of unclear and difficult to understand. Whilst I’ll stand by the fact that anti and reverse are different things, youtube commenters, I could’ve conveyed that difference a little better and also probably a little earlier. I also think that I really messed up with mentioning that terra nil kind of has an anti humanity environmental message because whilst that’s absolutely what the game implies, intentionally or not, it’s not what *I* believe personally, and I didn’t convey that very well either.

During the making of this video I was initially intending to talk a lot about sequels and remakes and how they affect things when it comes to prior expectations but I sort of backed off of that idea because I’ve spoken about it before. That’s actually something I’m increasingly finding as I keep making videos - I end up treading on my own toes a lot and covering ideas that I’ve covered in other videos before, and whilst I definitely think I’m a loooong way off running out of concepts for videos it’s an interesting challenge to write and approach the same ideas but in a different way or offer a different perspective in a way that can give people something new to think about. Case in point this video has a bit of crossover with the metagames video and the ugly games video but I leaning into the “why do normal games get stale after a while?” angle gives this one its own identity and vibe beyond those other two. I done more than 100 of these things now and I remember all of them it’s torture sometimes to realise, oh, wait, this good point I’m making was the centre of a different video, damn.

Strangely, as many issues as I have with this video, it’s done unaccountably very well! I dunno why. Once again enduring proof that these goddamn youtubes may as well be essentially random, I swear to god. Actually on that note, I have a friend who I won’t name but his assessment on which videos are good or bad, which I often end up agreeing with, is scarily inversely related to which videos do well. He hated this one, he didn’t like the longing video or the open worldy one, all did really well, and he really liked a lot of the worst performing videos on the channel. And I actually think that’s a good thing because it means I’m making a mix of more accessible stuff for the average viewer and more indepth slightly less interesting things for real aficionados.

Right I’ll end things there, have fun day or evening I guess depending on where you are and remember that videogames… are fun… yeah... Bye!

Terra Nil Claims It's A Reverse Citybuilder. It Isn't.

Terra Nil is a weird videogame, it claims to be a citybuilder with a reversed environmental theme, and yet, when it comes to delivering the fun you'd expect out of a citybuilder... Terra Nil just can't deliver - what gives? Is Terra Nil just a bad game coasting on false advertising, or is there something more going on here?

After clawing their way out from the ruins of their fallen civilization, and pouring over so many ancient tomes that they started to lose their charm, The Architect has gotten a few ideas about what's really happening with Terra Nil - it's a game that is specifically designed not to reverse the citybuilder, but to invert it, and that's a pretty big difference. 

Check out Arcane Workshop: https://www.youtube.com/@arcaneworkshop4323

EARLY ACCESS - Why Atomic Heart Fails To Live Up To Its Inspiration

Support the channel on Patreon!: https://www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames

Follow me on twitter!: https://twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot

Atomic Heart and Bioshock are two games that are inexorably linked across time, one established many genre conventions we still use to this day and defined an entire era of gaming, the other feels compelled to replicate and improve upon as much of Bioshock's success as possible, but somehow misses what made it's inspiration so cherished - what gives? How could Atomic Heart, a game with such clear reverence for Bioshock, not understand what made Bioshock great? Well, the answer lies in the ever-tricky to understand Metagame.

The Architect has had to plunder multiple dystopias, command vast armies and even scrabble through a few fourth walls in order to truly understand what makes Metagames so special and also what makes them so tricky to get right. Maybe, the success of a metagame lies not in how complex it is, or even how balanced it is, but in how it makes us think, and how fun it is to figure out?

Donate to charity, be a good person: https://donation.dec.org.uk/ukraine-humanitarian-appeal

Check out Umami!: https://www.youtube.com/c/umamianimations

You Saw: 

Atomic Heart- 2023

Resident Evil 8 -2021

Bioshock - 2007

Bioshock 2 - 2010

DOOM Eternal - 2020

Psychonauts 2 - 2021

Warhammer Total War 3 - 2022

Neon White - 2022

Xenoblade 3 - 2022

Counter Strike: Global Offensive - 2012

Baldur's Gate 3 - Early Access

Monster Hunter: World - 2018

Slay the Spire - 2019

Minecraft - 2011

Teardown - 2022

Persona 5 Royal - 2019

Genshin Impact - 2020

Dwarf Fortress - 2023

Half Life Alyx - 2020

Pikmin 3- 2013

The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe- 2022

Gears Tactics - 2020

Pokemon Fire Red - 2004

Dark Souls 3 - 2016

Elden Ring - 2022

Dishonored 2 - 2016

Portal 2 - 2011

Dune: Spice Wars - Early Access

Rounds - 2021

Starcraft 2 - 2012

Super Smash Brothers Ultimate - 2018

Dota 2 - 2013

Rivals of Aether - 2017

The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim - 2011

Deus Ex -  2000

Deathloop - 2021

XCOM 2 - 2014

Across The Obelisk - 2022

Monster Train - 2021

Magic The Gathering: Arena - 2018

Potionomics - 2022

Rimworld - 2018

The Long Dark - 2014

Subnautica: Below Zero - 2021

Don't Starve - 2013

Transistor - 2014

ARK: Survival Evolve - 2015

Escape From Tarkov - Early Access

Destiny 2 - 2017

Fallout 4 - 2015

Pokemon Emerald - 2004

Phantom Brigade - 2023

Prey - 2017

Surviving Mars - 2018

Cities Skylines - 2015

Oxygen Not Included - 2017

Path of Exile - 2013

Enter The Gungeon - 2016

Hades - 2020

Against The Storm - Early Access

Hitman 3 - 2021

Evolve - 2015

Hand of Fate 2 - 2017

Hi-Fi Rush - 2023

Terra Nil - 2023

Architect Address March 2023

Hey what’s up it’s the architect address! Welcome one and all come in come in take a seat there are biscuits  off to the side only take one each though they’re very expensive okay right you good? Awesome, let’s get on with things. This is an… infrequent series of videos I create  for you patrons in order to give some extra insight into the last few videos and what’s been going on with the channel lately, I also used to answer questions posed to me by you lot but that kind of stopped. Hell screw it, if you want some questions answered chuck ‘em down in the comments, let’s bring that back - this isn’t even in my notes but I’m bringing back questions, that is assuming people are interested.

Anyway, one thing I wanted to talk about was my attitude to marketing videos in regards to thumbnails and titles and stuff because with the last few, some of which I’ll get into later - I’ve tried to be a little more… I dunno, I’m trying to avoid the word clickbaity here because it makes me feel bad but a bit more attention grabby with the titles and presentation. I’ll retire before I go full WOAH CRAZY GONE SEXUAL 7 THINGS YOU WON’tT BELIEVE or doing the new video essay thing which is to be super vague and esoteric with video presentation but I did feel like there was a point where I kind of fell into a bit of a rut of doing “how X does Y” or “why Z is good” sort of stuff and it became a tad predictable. I dunno it might be in my head and I’ve not really got enough data to confirm whether that’s a worthwhile approach but it’s interesting to think about. As much as I wish I could just put the videos on the internet and for people to be able to see them, there is a certain amount of game-playing inherent to youtube as a platform that I try to engage with as little as possible but still occasionally has to be done .

When it comes to thumbnails, as you are all no doubt aware I have the artistic skills of a toddler and am also too proud to hire someone to do pretty thumbnail pictures for me so I tend to go with quite bold, graphically simplistic designs and I guess I don’t really know how well they work because I’ve never done anything different? I think one thing I have started doing which is effective is to use the thumbnail as kind of a second title, rather than just re-stating what the video is called I can use the thumbnail to offer a second, tangentially related hook that serves as a bit of a backup in case the title doesn’t land.

ANyway, enough about that - let’s move right on to discussing the first vid I want to talk about and that is Vampire Survivors Only Works Because We’re Stupid  which is a title I really like it’s very silly and I think it kind of has a little bit of a surprise in it when I gradually reveal us being stupid is a good thing! I think actually explaining… why that is was one aspect of the video that I really struggled with though. When writing, trying to make maths and numbers a concept I could explain in an engaging way was really hard. Because.. It’s an interesting subject area but I didn’t want to bog people down in a bunch of complicated formulas and ratios and comparisons so I instead leaned really hard into the more psychological angle which I think was definitely a good move!

One thing I didn’t actually know about vampire survivors was that the guy who made it worked in gambling before he went into independent gamedev and that really does explain why vampire survivors is so good at pushing all those little mental buttons and, even more interestingly showcasing that all these gambly loot boxy quote-and-quote manipulative mechanic can be used in an ethical way if divorced from direct financial incentive. That idea is a weird one actually, because initially I was planning to just talk about our relationship with how videogames present numbers and figures and the whole time I was writing I kept feeling that pressure of “okay, but isn’t this a little bit evil?” changing over me and I just don’t feel like the script quite works without that element because it is kind of the natural next step, and it’s important to address the fact that the lines we draw between ethical and unethical game design are fairly arbitrary. A lot of people tried to boil things down to “oh it’s bad when you do it for money” and to those people I ask, what was the foundational principle of vampire survivor’s word of mouth advertising? How addictive it was and how much content there was relative to the price - it’s designed to turn a profit just like anything else, it just respected us in the process.

One other thing that’s worth mentioning about this video is actually how popular it was - it’s crazy because I was convinced it would be super boring and no-one would like it but it outclassed every video I released last year fairly comfortably. I actually have very little idea WHY this was, it might be the thumbnail or the popularity of Vampire Survivors or more likely it might just be sheer dumb luck. It even got to the point where massive streamers like Asmongold watched the video and gave it the official W seal of approval which as far as I’m aware didn’t really contribute to any patreon uptake or extra subscribers because they already watched the video on his channel. Maybe I should file a copyright strike against him, that’ll show him. Ultimately I’m glad the video struck a chord with people and yeah I think it’s one I was glad to be wrong about. Turns out maths is fun after all.

The other video I want to talk about is Why dark souls (probably) taught you cowardice and oh boy… this one upset some people. I think that’s partially my fault, I struggled to come up with a good title here and I think the one I went with is a little too negatively framed in retrospect but also… I think I kind of ended up walking into some unexpected crossfire with this one.

See, for those who don’t know, the great Hbomberguy, a far bigger youtuber than me made a video about bloodborne before I even started my channel I think that made a lot of the same criticisms of dark souls and shields as I did in this video, albeit in a slightly more inflammatory way. Now, Hbomb is a bit more polarising of a youtuber than me and has his fair share of haters as well as his fair share of fanatics, and I think people kind of jumped the gun seeing that we make kiiind of the same argument on the surface and alternately accused me of stealing his copyrighted ideas which I didn’t and/or getting very defensive about their beloved shields before really even seeing what I had to say. I think in actuality, not only do I disagree with Harris in some key areas, for one I actually don’t think bloodborne solves this particular problem very well, but I also think that playing with a shield is cool and a valid way to play dark souls, it’s just something that doesn’t really gel with the rest of the mechanics very well and so kind of ends up a bit boring,

Maybe if I’m going to lead with a slightly spicy take, I need to get the thesis statement and the nuance across a bit more quickly and spend less time antagonising people so as to avoid people locking in their opinions based on other videos that made them angry before I’ve laid things out. Ehh, we’ll see. Anyway, the idea that games are good at tutorialising but bad at that next step and encouraging people to play a little better is an idea I’ve seen mentioned but never discussed in depth and man are there a lot of things I *wished* I could have talked about here but just didn’t have the time, it meant that this video is a bit of a frankenstein's monster of various bits I chopped and changed through the writing process and I think that does come across particularly towards the back half.

Fun fact here, the dark souls shield thing was actually added midway through writing and, as is so often the way with these things, the video was SUPPOSED to be about hi-fi rush and how effective it is at encouraging mastery, but I needed a good strong central example to build from that that game didn’t quite provide. There’s also an alternate video idea about music/rhythm games in there somewhere that I may have to give a go at one of these days but that’s something for another time.

All in all this video did… okay? I guess? It started off quite slow but it’s looking like it has a strong tail on it and has been slowly creeping up the rankings as other things drop off. The dislike ratio is actually more or less fine so I think any complaints might be a bit of a vocal minority - it’s certainly way better than a video I got an equivalent amount of hate for which was the toxicity video, that one’s on about 90% likes, this is on about 96% which is on the low end of average. Actually looking into it my most disliked video is my old-ass one on the dawn of war games, I’ve got no idea why that actually is but strangely in spite of the fact that I dish out my fair share of spicy opinions in every video my most disliked ones all involve some games with infamously sensitive fanbases crazy coincidence that one - no no I need to stop it I need to stop being bitchy, that’s it I’m stopping the recording now, have a good one, bye

DIRECTOR'S CUT- How Dark Souls (accidentally) Taught You Cowardice

Hello hello hello and welcome one and all to this, the Director’s cut, a little bonus bit of patreon-exclusive goodness where I talk about something that I couldn’t squeeze into an already overstuffed video! This time, I want to talk about scoring - and how it relates to all the entry level strategy stuff that I was talking about in the main video.

See, in today’s modern videogaming climate we tend to look down on arcade-era mechanics and design themes, mostly with good reason. Unfair difficulty and punitive failure states are very much an artefact of oldschool games, as are lives - which don’t serve that much of a purpose any more even in games that do still use them. One thing that arcade games prioritized that I think newer games could stand to benefit from, however, is scores.

Everyone knows score systems - you do stuff in a game, you get points and your points give you a position on a leaderboard or a ranking or something at the end, it’s very simple - back in the olden days, score systems, and specifically hi-score tables were mostly used as a way to get people coming back to a game and trying to beat their rival’s scores, something that ceased to be relevant as videogames moved into the home rather than public spaces.

Hooooweeever, I think this may have been an overcorrection. One thing that score systems, and scoring in general were great at was inspiring players to give a game a second try and shoot for a better result, necessitating higher level, more fun play without making a game any less fun or challenging for newer players.

Take Rollerdrome for example, one of my favourite games from last year, it’s an arcadey arena based rollerblading game where you shoot baddies and pull off cool tricks, it’s pretty fun! Actually beating each level is decently tricky, particularly once you get to the late stages, but there is something… motivating about squeaking through a level only for the game to tell you that some made up character got a higher score than you that really inspires you to go back and have another go, working in more tricks to now-familiar level structures and dispatching enemies more efficiently, it’s great! Without that competitive need to place myself at the top of the score table, I never would’ve felt a motivation to practice the tricks and optimizations that make up higher level play, and I never would’ve seen the depth of the game for myself.

Points are also a great way to add some additional risks, the threat of missing out on a point reward for, say, not getting hit or failing to finish a level in a given time gives expert players something more to worry about and keep repeat playthroughs fresh whilst also going completely over the heads of newbies who’ll likely never qualify for this stuff until they’re much better.

By tying these sorts of minute, optional challenges not to power or content but to points, games manage to create the same invisible layers of gameplay that the likes of celeste do with hidden levels without actually having to design new locations at all. Two players of different skill levels in Descenders, a downhill mountainbiking game, will engage with a given level in completely different ways - the newbie will have an exhilarating time just trying to get down the hill whereas an expert, knowing survival is more or less assured, can instead shoot for points by trying to fit in flips, near misses and risky no-handers wherever they can, effectively creating brand new challenges that the new player doesn’t have to engage with at all.

Really, just like I mentioned at the start of the video, it all comes down to motivation, and points are a very safe way to do this because players automatically value those lovely big numbers on their screen, but points often aren’t connected to any other gameplay systems that could be imbalance by multiple styles of play interacting getting different rewards from same challenges. Of course, that’s not to stop some games from tying points into power by turning them into a currency which ends up with skilled players rapidly outpacing a game’s intended difficulty curve, and leaving new players in the dust.

Inkeeping with how the latest video is a little bit of a frankenstein's monster behind the scenes, this is something I *also* wanted to talk about in the vampire survivors vid but could never quite fit it in! Maybe there’s a whole video on points and scoring systems to be uncovered somewhere down the line? That’ll probably involve me having to get good enough at various oldschool arcade games to get footage of hi-scores actually so don’t hold your breath on that one!

EARLY ACCESS - How Dark Souls (accidentally) Taught You Cowardice

As tough as its reputation may be, Dark Souls tries its best to give brand new players a helping hand as they find their barings in its hardcore world - unfortunately, the manner Dark Souls does this... accidentally tricks people into playing in a cowardly, risk averse way - meaning they have less fun, and are less willing to try and master the  game's intricacies.

Entry Level Strategies are a powerful and crucial tool that allow  videogames to ease in beginner players, but sometimes, they're too helpful for their own good, and end up ruining otherwise great games - how do they do this? and how did Elden Ring finally fix From Soft's most persistent design problem? One thing's for sure, in order to solve this particular conundrum, the Architect is going to need more than that  100% block shield they've been carrying around since the start of the game.

Check out Liam Triforce! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWQfbcMGyrPDlIU7wV7aAOQ

You Saw:
Dark Souls 2 - 2014

Dark Souls - 2012

Dark Souls 3 - 2016

Overwatch 1 - 2019

Super Smash Bros Ultimate - 2018

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - 2021

Dota 2 - 2013

Final Fantasy 7 Remake - 2020

XCOM 2 - 2016

Counter Strike: Global Offensive

Hitman: World Of Assasination - 2023

Bioshock - 2007

Pokemon: Fire Red - 2004

Hi Fi Rush - 2023

Elden Ring - 2022

Street Fighter 4 - 2008

Metal Gear Rising - 2012

Celeste - 2018

Monster Hunter: World - 2018

Resident Evil 8 - 2021

DOOM - 2016

Wonderful 101 Remastered - 2020

Apex Legends - 2019

Batman Arkham Asylum - 2009

XCOM: EU - 2012

Half Life Alyx - 2020

Halo: Master Chef Collection - 2014

Dead Space - 2008

Titanfall 2 - 2016

Factorio - 2016

Satisfactory - Early Access

Street Fighter 5 - 2016

Magic: The Gathering Arena - 2018

Sonic Mania - 2017

Dark and Darker - Early Access

Super Mario 3D world - 2013

Mario Kart 8 - 2014

Burnout Paradise Remastered - 2018

Descenders - 2018

F Zero GX - 2003

Spelunky 2 - 2020

Hades - 2020

THe Binding of Isaac: Rebirth - 2014

Duck Game - 2015

Bayonetta 2 - 2014

Rollerdrome - 2022

Pizza Tower - 2023

Darkest Dungeon - 2016

Marvel's Midnight Suns - 2022

DOOM Eternal - 2020

Hollow Knight - 2017

Persona 5 Royal - 2019

The Witness - 2016

Neon White - 2022

Getting Over It with Bennet Foddy - 2017

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice - 2019

Bloodborne - 2015

Stardew Valley - 2016

Atomic Heart - 2023

EARLY ACCESS- Vampire Survivors Only Works Because We're Stupid

You are terrible at maths. Sorry, someone had to say it. However, it's  not all bad news - so is every other human being ever to live! You're  ALL awful when it comes to numbers! Whilst you don't always realize it,  humans have an incredibly flawed understanding of everything from size  to statistics, changing the way we perceive and think about numbers,  particularly in videogames - but does this make them better or worse? 

After clearing out a few suspiciously similar milk factories and  plumbing the darkest depths of the human psyche, The Architect has  determined that although the  brain might be flawed, it's these flaws  that can lead to some very fun game design, and no game knows this  better than Vampire Survivors.  

You Saw:
Vampire Survivors - 2022
God of War: Ragnarok - 2022
Pentiment - 2022
Magic Survival
Power Wash Sim - 2022
Undertale - 2015
Persona 5: Royale - 2019
The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe - 2022
Signalis - 2022
Super Mario Bros Movie - Not Out Yet
Super Mario Bros. - 1993
Psychonauts
Minecraft
Super Mario 3D World
Pinball FX 3
Pokémon Pinball: Ruby & Sapphire
Wonderputt Forever
Hitman: World of Assasination - 2023
Disgaea - 2003
Borderlands 2 - 2012
Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance - 2015
Xenoblade 3 - 2022
Diablo 3 - 2012
Clicker Heroes - 2015
Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn - 2014
World of Warcraft - 2022
New Super Mario Bros Wii U - 2012
Superliminal - 2019
Portal 2 - 2011
THe Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 20017
Marvel's Midnight Suns - 2013
Pikmin - 2004
Super Metroid - 1994
Pizza Tower - 2023
Counter Strike: Global Offensive - 2012
Sonic Generations - 2011
Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator - 2021
Descenders - 2018
Satisfactory - Early Access
Resident Evil 2 Remake - 2019
Resident Evil 4 - 2005
Adventure Capitalist - 2014
Frog Fractions 3 - 2020
Destiny 2 - 2017
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim - 2011
Fallout: New Vegas - 2013
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door - 2004
Bug Fables - 2019
Bioshock Infinite - 2013
Slice and Dice - 2021
Family Fortunes Wii U - 2013
Monster Hunter World - 2018
Pokemon Scarlet - 2023
Pokemon Black 2 - 2012
Baldur's Gate 3- Early Access
XCOM: Enemy Unknown - 2012
XCOM 2 - 2016
Spelunky 2 - 2020
Super Smash Bros Ultimate - 2018
Sid Meirs Civilization 6 - 2016
Dota 2 - 2013
Genshin Impact - 2020
Konami's Castlevania: Grimoire Of Souls - 2021
Runescape - 2004
Ni no Kuni: Cross Worlds - 2022
Diablo Immortal - 2021
Terraria - 2011
Super Smash Bros Brawl - 2008
The Last of Us 2 - 2020
Luck Be A Landlord - 2023
Deus Ex Mankind Divided - 2016
Passpatout: The Starving Artist - 2017
Lootbox Simulator - 2018
Hi-Fi Rush - 2023

Check out Videogames Are Bad: https://www.youtube.com/@VideoGamesAreBad

Architect Address - January 2023

Well hello there, it’s been a little while but I’m back and ready to dazzle you all with the first architect address of 2023, which is… somewhat predictably not actually about 2023 at all and is instead a little look back at the previous year, and some of the videos I released in the last hectic dash to the finish line.

Let’s start with 2022 at large and I think it’s been an interesting year? There were some ups, some downs and whilst I think on balance it’s been a slower year for growth I’m mostly entirely happy with the videos I did put out. A large factor in that is the decision I made to shoot for slightly longer video lengths this year simply having more time spent editing or writing gives me a little more wiggle room to fix mistakes or structural stuff that doesn’t work and I think with one or two major exceptions I’ll get back to later there aren’t many videos from 2022 that I outright dislike.

However, of course, this higher number of longer videos approach has come with some downsides - simply due to the fact I put out fewer videos it meant that fewer new eyeballs got put on the channel but it is heartening to know that in spite of the lower youtube uptake, I think these longer, slightly more detailed videos resulted in better patreon uptake per video, though I’d need to do a bit of maths to be sure of that. Either way, very glad to have you all here new patrons.

In terms of the patreon itself, I made a little shakeup with the addition of the $8 tier, and I’ve got to say it’s… not been a huge success? I am obviously super grateful to everyone who has jumped on that tier but I assumed getting the opportunity to have me say whatever you want would be more… alluring? I dunno, I think I’ll stick with it for now but it’s certainly been less successful than I’d like. I think I had a similar problem with the architect address actually which was originally supposed to be more of a Q&A format but people weren’t really interested in that portion so I just shelved it. Maybe audience participation is overrated? I guess I go out of my way to stop parasocial attachments from forming so I imagine that’s an element too, hmm.

More generally, I think my big objective for this year is to really knuckle down and make more stuff faster, with less screwing around - I really hate that it took almost a month to make some of these videos and whilst I don’t want the quality to drop, the fact that I put out three videos in december is proof that I can do it I just need a bit more discipline and work ethic. I also want to maybe look into expanding the sort of thing I do…  Not sure if I want to figure out youtube shorts or maybe look into some sort of audio content, who knows - actually if there’s anything else you’d like to see out of me, let me know! That’s a thing I can do, why did I not think about that before?

Anyway, enough about broad stuff let’s get serious and look at the last few videos starting with the one all about economies. MAN this one was a real tricksy one to put together I think my broad structure went through about five or six different iterations here and I couldn’t quite figure out a way to make economies as a subject interesting because it always felt like if enough time passed, they always became boring because you work out the optimal way to play. And that was when I figured out that that’s exactly the point! They’re all broken!

I think getting my head around this “all economies are broken” idea was kind of the cornerstone of making the video work and it gave me a lot of interesting ways to talk about the more traditional game designy topics of how economies can encourage us or discourage us from playing in particular ways and what makes economic games, y’know, fun. This video was a chance to play quite a few management or trading games that I’d not really had a reason to check out before and honestly I was surprised by which ones I liked, recettear and diaries of a spaceport janitor were a real highlight despite being fairly ancient and cumbersome whereas Moonlighter, a game I thought was pretty popular was a real disappointment I just found both sides of its dungeoneering and shopkeeping loop really dull and shallow.

What I wasn’t expecting out of the video was for me to get quite so… overtly political with it - usually I don’t like to get preachy in my videos because it’s a bit boring and doesn’t really fit the vibe but there’s this inescapable conclusion at the heart of the why aren’t videogame economies realistic question and that’s that the real economy isn’t designed to be fun or fair. I feel like you can’t really talk about broken economies without addressing that particular elephant in the room and the games that use the flawed nature of digital economies to talk about real ones. Overall the video did well and I’m pretty happy with it, I think it’s a bit long in the tooth and I probably whine about EVE online a bit too much but broadly, it’s okay.

The next video, I should probably remind you of because… no one watched it, yep, the companion characters vid is by far the worst performing video of the year and I’m fairly sure that’s because I released it late on the 23rd of december, whoops. However, one of the other least watched vids on the channel, my old one about FF15 is also on the subject of companion characters so maybe people just don’t like that particular topic? Who Knows?

I think maybe part of the mistake here was the emphasis on Marvel’s Midnight Suns which I really like as a game but a lot of people apparently don’t because of it’s fairly massive cheesy dialogue factor which… you know what I can’t really blame people on that one but I love anything even resembling XCOM so it’s all good in my books.

Anyway as for the video itself I think it’s kind of an interesting central premise that a lot of character’s we’re ostensibly supposed to like end up being kind of annoying because it’s often their role as part of the game to stop us from doing things, creating this interesting ludonarrative disconnect between what the game wants you to feel and what we as players actually want. Honestly a huuuge help making the video came from the director’s commentary mode on half life 2 which genuinely is one of the single best features I’ve ever seen in any game it’s got so much really cool design insight and behind the scenes bits

At one stage I was literally going to make the whole video about Alyx because a lot of the conclusions I reach in the video and a lot of mistakes games make to this day valve already identified and fixed. It’s such a small change to have Alyx and the other NPCs constantly demonstrate their usefulness rather than being helpless and follow the player rather than leading but it really goes a long way towards making half life 2 work. Literally the answers are right there just do that video games, god.

And finally we’ve got 2022 games you should have played. As I mentioned in the video, this was one of the single hardest years worth of games to narrow down to 20, I think at one point there were 50 things on the shortlist and I’ve really had to part with a lot of games I really liked over the year to get things down. I’m surprised to see how well my top list seemed to match up with other people’s though, usually my top game is totally off the wall and no-one else likes it but citizen sleeper seems to be doing very well for itself as does neon white. It’s an interesting balance I have to strike with these videos because there are lots of really obscure games I *could* recommend, but I also feel I should be showcasing good games as well, and it’s a matter of finding games that are underrated without already being popular. Stuff like Vampire Survivors was an early entry on the list and is a great game I hope to talk more about at some point but it’s just too popular so I couldn’t talk about it!

I actually can’t think of too many major omissions that people wrote me up about, Hyper Demon is one mentioned that I neglected to show simply because it’s borderline nauseating to watch and it’s a relatively safe sequel to devil daggers, Curse of the Golden Idol was great but I didn’t have the chance to play it until recently and I saw NORCO pop up a few times and I just genuinely don’t really rate it, it’s a good looking game but i’ve seen the same thing done better elsewhere in my opinion.

I think 2022, even outside the scope of my yearly wrapup might be one of the strongest years ever for games, so much great stuff came out, presumably as we catch back up from things delayed over the pandemic which means that 2023 has a LOT to live up to and honestly I can’t wait I’ve already played at least one game which has gotten a spot on the preliminary list so we’ll have to see how big it gets this time.

Phew, this is an incredibly long architect address so I think I’ll leave it there, thank you for watching, joining the patreon and generally supporting the channel, and I’ll be back with you soon for another proper video, won’t that be fun? Okay, bye!

DIRECTOR'S CUT - 5 More 2022 Games You Should Have Played

Hey hey hey, it’s me, here with a very special end-of-year replacement for the Director’s cut. Normally this is a segment that goes out to $3 people and above but I thought seeing as it’s just game recommendations I could be charitable and let you all see five bonus games that I really wanted to put on the Games You Should Have Played list but wasn’t able to for a variety of reasons. What are they? Well, I’m glad you asked, let’s start things off with…

You Suck at Parking, a manically paced precision third person driving game in which you’ve got to park your little car in increasingly fiddlier and more insane spots, all with limited fuel and without ever stopping. You Suck At Parking easily could’ve been one of many janky rage-bait games but thanks to its smooth controls and very creative level design that sees you flinging your little toy car into the air and gliding it around minefields with ease, it actually transforms a comparatively simple concept into something with a very high skill ceiling and a whole host of fun optimizations as you try to hit each spot in a level with one car each, and carefully setting up subsequent attempts with your first drive through a level. This game is the best kind of whiteknuckle stress inducing and that’s even more true in the multiplayer which is one step short of absolute chaos, and thus is even better than the singleplayer. (Greenmangaming £11.89)

Speaking of vehicular games, next up is Iron Lung, a game that - in the manner of these things - takes place in a submarine sinking into an ocean of blood on a strange alien planet. Oh yeah, the door has also been welded shut behind you. Iron lung is weird, because the entire experience is presented from the inside of your sealed cockpit, you never actually see the outside world except via the medium of your craft’s camera, which can only capture grainy black and white photos, leaving you to speculate about what those noises coming from outside are, and who’s been leaving all those skeletons around. I won’t spoil how Iron Lung’s ninety minute playtime ends but rest assured it’s one of the best bitesize horror experiences around, with some very creative and, err, realistically fiddly movement mechanics. (Steam: £4.31)

Stray is another game with really interesting traversal systems, taking all your assumptions about what typically humanoid movement and navigation should feel like and upending them by making you play as, well, a cat. Stray is, predictably, adorable, but what struck me about it is just how fun getting around is - the game expertly leverages the natural agility of a cat to have you bounding between rooftops and shimmying into little crevices and shelves so that you can knock things over arbitrarily like all good cats are dutybound to do. Stray’s not the most complex game on the list and the story’s not too much to write home about either - but in terms of gorgeous cinematic action games that are chill enough to be played with a stomach full of party food then Stray is a top-tier pick. (Steam: £19.19)

Next up, we’ve got Sifu which is about as heavily inspired by visceral Hong Kong kung fu action movies as you can get without just being one. The game is an absolutely brutally difficult brawler that has you cinematically beating up armies of thugs using improvised weapons and an awesome rough and tumble combat style that flows together beautifully even when you’re bad at the game like I am. On that note, death in Sifu is encouraged and expected, and when you do, you don’t get a game over, you instead come back to life a few years older, ready to try again, introducing an interesting failure spectrum where the older you become, the more damage you do, but the frailer you are. Getting to the end of sifu will take some real skills, so it’s a good thing every inch of the game feels absolutely perfect to play because you’re going to be seeing the outside of the bar level a LOT. (Fanatical: £18.55)

And after that there’s Across The Obelisk, which is what you get if you take your average deck building roguelike and multiply everything by four. See, rather than just managing a mere one character with a measly single deck, in across the obelisk you have to contend with four characters, each with their own decks and entirely separate cardpools. This introduces a whole new layer to deckbuilding as in order to win you have to construct synergies across your whole party, setting up enemies for a smackdown with your healer and tank before dealing the killing blow with your damage dealers. Across the Obelisk is the next logical step from a genre that’s become a little oversaturated and I really appreciated its increased complexity and variety relative to everything else on the market. If you consider yourself a deckbuilding expert then be sure to give it a look. (Steam: £12.74)

And there we have it, there’s five more games for you to take a look at! Ultimately, there were unique reasons for each game that lead to me deciding to include or not include them, from being too popular to just not looking very good as footage. However, it mostly just came down to which ones I thought were the most unique and interesting rather than necessarily good - there’s one game on the list this year I genuinely didn’t like but I thought was too special to exclude, see if you can figure out which one it is!

Anyway, I’ll be putting up an end-of-year retrospective Architect Address in about a week after I’ve had a well-earned break. I hope you all have a good new year and I’ll see you in 2023!

… time to get to work on next year’s list…

EARLY ACCESS - 20(22) Games You Should Have Played

Okay I really need to look into youtube processing this one took HOURS!

As 2022 comes to a close, it's time to look back and reflect on a jam-packed year in videogaming - so many great games got released in the last twelve months from fast paced action thrillrides to thought provoking genre-busters that it's no wonder that a bunch of great videogames didn't get the time in the spotlight that they rightly deserve.

Luckily for you, after combing through the archives, and playing quite frankly too many games over the last year, The Architect has emerged from their post-holiday meditation chamber with a list of the twenty games from the last year that most deserve your attention - and that you probably haven't already heard of. 

You Saw:

Xenoblade 3 (2022)

Kirby and the forgotten land (2022)

Cult of the Lamb (2022)

Horizon: Forbidden West (2022)

Stray (2022)

Elden Ring (2022)

Vampire Survivors (2022)

Overwatch 1 (2016)

Sifu (2022)

Scorn (2022)

You Suck At Parking (2022)

Iron Lung (2022)

Super Mario Bros 2 (1988)

Weird West (2022)

Strange Horticulture (2022)

Grapple Dog (2022)

God Of War: Ragnarok (2022)

Grounded (2022)

Trombone Champ (2022)

Symphony Of War: The Nephelim Saga (2022)

Tunic (2022)

Immortality (2022)

Potionomics (2022)

Power Wash Simulator (2022)

Golden Light (2022)

How Fish Is Made (2022)

Rollerdrome (2022)

Hardspace Shipbreaker (2022)

Pentiment (2022)

Hyperbolica (2022)

The Looker (2022)

Foxhole (2022)

CTRL ALT EGO (2022)

Signalis (2022)

Not For Broadcast (2022)

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014)

Teardown (2022)

Neon White (2022)

Citizen Sleeper (2022)

wow crazy they almost all came out in 2022 what a weird coincidence

EARLY ACCESS - What Makes A Good Companion Character?

Check out Ludiscere: https://www.youtube.com/@Ludiscere

Where would we be without companions: The sidekicks, allies and general hangers-on that accompany us through all the best videogames? Honestly, we'd probably be a lot happier, because most of them are annoying as hell - but why is that? Why are so many characters literally designed to be our friends and to help us so often irritating, pushy and generally useless, and what makes those few companions worth investing time into work so well?

The Architect is glad you asked - they've been flying through trans-dimensional abbeys, alternate versions of japan and a fair few dystopias in search of the ultimate companion, and what they found was that the ultimate videogame sidekick has less to do with how nice they are, and more about the person behind the keyboard. Yeah, you!

You Saw: 

Marvel's Midnight suns - 2022

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword - 2011

God of War Ragnarok - 2022

Grand Theft Auto IV - 2008

Resident Evil 4 - 2005

The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion - 2006

Bioshock: Infinite - 2013

Persona 5 Royal - 2019

Pokemon Sword and Shield - 2019

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - 1998

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel - 2014

Fallout 4 - 2015

Undertale - 2015

Dark Souls - 2012

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 - 2004

Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness - 2022

Half Life 2 - 2004

Halo: Infinite - 2021

Crosscode - 2015

Portal 2 - 2011

Ico - 2001

Final Fantasy 7 Remake - 2020

Hitman - 2016

Fire Emblem Awakening - 2012

Jedi: Fallen Order - 2019

Portal - 2007

Mass Effect 2 - 2010

Puella Magi Madoka Magica - 2011

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim - 2011

The Witcher 3 - 2016

OneShot - 2016

The Outer Worlds - 2019

Pokemon Fire Red - 2004

The Last of Us 2 - 2020

Half Life 2 Episode 1 - 2006

Psychonauts 2 - 2021

God of War - 2018

Pokemon Scarlet - 2022

Monster Hunter World - 2018

Mario and Luigi Dream Team - 2013

Shadow of the Tomb Raider - 2018

Ace Attorney Investigations 2 - 2011

High On Life - 2022

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - 2022

Symphony of War: The Nephelim Saga - 2022

Fire Emblem 3 Houses - 2019

The Banner Saga 3 - 2018

Titanfall 2 - 2016

Dragon Age Origins - 2009

Nier Automata - 2017

Genshin Impact - 2020

Earthbound - 1994

Final Fantasy 7 Demake - 1990

Left 4 Dead 2 - 2009

Grand Theft Auto V - 2013

Yoshi's Island - 1995

Spyro Reignited Trilogy - 2018

Stardew Valley - 2016

Mass Effect 3 - 2014

Disco Elysium - 2019

Dream Daddy - 2016

Potionomics - 2022

Half Life Alyx - 2020

Borderlands 3 - 2019

Watch Dogs 2 - 2016

Fallout 3 - 2008

Half Life 2 Episode 2 - 2007

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess - 2006

Kirby and the Forgotten Land - 2022

Deltarune - NOT OUT YET

Stray - 2022

EARLY ACCESS - Why Is It So Easy To Break Videogame Economies?

Check out the Jingle Jam: https://jinglejam.tiltify.com/

There's something... off about videogame economics. Regardless of when  the game was made, who by and what it's about - it's remarkably easy to  crack a game's systems open and use them to find the optimal means of  making money, even when that means doing things that aren't actually fun.

Why is this? Why can't game designers simply make economies just as  fair, balanced and well thought out as the real life economy?  Well, that's a mystery The Architect has been studying for some time and  it's, predictably, lead to even more questions. Between realms of the  mind, post apocalypses and cities far beyond the stars, there's  something strange going on with videogame economics, and the answer may  just lie in our relationship with reality...

You Saw:

Yakuza 0 - 2015

Moonlighter - 2018

Final Fantasy 14

Doom Eternal - 2020

Persona 5 royal - 2019

Witcher 3 - 2015

Horizon Zero Dawn - 2017

pokemon scarlet and violet - 2022

Runescape - 2001

Dragon Quest 11 - 2017

Valheim - 2021

Forager - 2019

Minecraft - 2011

Diablo 2 - 2000

Starcraft 2 - 2010

Monster hunter world - 2018

Potionomics - 2022

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim - 2011

Enter The Gungeon - 2016

Civilization 6 - 2016

Borderlands 3 - 2016

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice - 2019

Offworld Trading Company - 2016

Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator - 2021

Mario Galaxy 2 - 2010

EVE: Online - 2003

Destiny 2 - 2017

Destiny - 2014

Death and Taxes - 2020

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 2017

The Long Dark - 2017

Resident Evil 4 - 2005

Fallout New Vegas - 2010

Perfect Heist 2 - 2021

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - 2011

Untitled Goose Game - 2019

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time 3D - 2011

The Binding of Issaac Rebirth - 2014

Super Mario World - 1990

Hunt: Showdown - 2018

Resident Evil 2 Remake - 2019

Deus Ex - 2000

Dishonored - 2012

Dishonored 2 - 2016

Bioshock - 2007

Signalis - 2022

Age of Empires 4 - 2021

Command and Conquer 3

Dune Spice Wars - Early Access

Tooth and Tail - 2017

Steamworld Dig 2 - 2017

Yakuza 7 - 2020

Fallout 4 - 2015

Elden Ring - 2022

Wario Land: Shake It!- 2008

Deep Rock Galactic - 2020

Subnautica - 2017

Don't Starve - 2013

Rogue Legacy - 2013

Hades - 2020

Pokemon sword and shield - 2018

Recettear - 2007

Frostpunk - 2017

World of Warcraft - 2004

New World - 2021

Super Paper Mario - 2007

Watchdogs Legion - 2020

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor - 2016

Citizen Sleeper - 2022

Hardspace Shipbreaker - 2022

Fifa 2023

There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension - 2020

Genshin Impact - 2020

Teardown - 2022

Rollerdrome - 2022

Architect Address - November 2022

Whaaaat!? It’s the architect address!? Crazy! Who could have possibly seen this coming??? Err, you probably seeing as you clicked on this video. Anyway, the architect address is a semi regular what I’ve been up to recently mini vlog thing that I put out occasionally for all patrons where I just sort of ramble on for about five minutes about a variety of topics and the first one on my list is the subject of video lengths.

As we close in on the end of the year I’m evaluating what it was like making a lower number of longer videos, previously my average was anywhere between twelve to fifteen minutes now they’re all pushing 20 plus and I’m middling on it as an experiment. I think by far the longest part of my writing process is the messing around trying to get my ideas in order so I can actually start writing the damn thing portion and so in a weird way making longer videos is more efficient but equally I think I’m kind of feeling things get a little… algorithmy in the process.

So if you don’t know youtube absolutely loooooves either super long videos or really really short videos and seeing that youtube shorts are a terrible medium for video essays, many creators end up making these marathon multi hour deep dives and I’ll be honest I think the overwhelming majority of these are bloated monstrosities that I would love to take a bonesaw to but I can kind of see why they end up like that. You get to do less editing, keep more of your precious baby favourite anecdotes and get financially rewarded for it! It’s great! But I think maybe I’ve been a little bit less disciplined in that regard this year than I’d like to have been, lots of stuff that I think could, in retrospect just be cut out of a lot of videos but I kept in because it’s just sort of interesting even if it doesn’t service the core point.

On the other hand maybe the slightly expanded length fits my bigger picture more abstract style? I’m not the kind of person who likes talking about a single game or a single mechanic and I like to draw influence from across the gaming space to talk about these big broad subjects so maybe pulling in a lot of different examples is better? I dunno, eager to hear some feedback there because I’m oscillating between thinking that I’m either hanging onto bloat or arbitrarily cutting potentially interesting ideas purely to keep length down. I’m saying this as someone who thinks my hour long video on disco elysium is a monument to self indulgence and something that I could EASILY get down to two thirds of that length if I had another crack at it, when many people in the same space wouldn’t bat an eye at a video two or three times its length. WHO KNOWS!

Anyway, one of the videos that came out recently is Why Classes are D&D’s best idea and my god was that a surprisingly contentious title. Lots of tabletop rpg people are REALLY not into classes as an idea and I totally didn’t see that coming. Weird. Now, talking about more traditional tabletop games on the channel is hard because there are no accompanying visuals I can easily get but I think what D&D either does or doesn’t do well is an interesting conversation. Because… for the world’s flagship roleplaying game it is BAD at a lot of stuff.

Combat in D&D historically takes absolutely forever, there’s a lot of really fiddly granular systems and generally if you’re not doing dungeon crawls the skill system doesn’t really feel well balanced, with stuff like persuasion being hilariously overpowered and survival being even more borderline uses. As for classes, I think actually D&D does them pretty well though a lot of people don’t like the hard and fast roleplay restrictions that D&D usually bundles in with them like making paladins commit to certain oaths or druids have to do druidy things but speaking from experience actually running campaigns, players need as many incentives to actually make interesting characters and roleplay them well as possible.

Alright, as far as the actual vid goes, this one really came together in my head when I made it less about how to make classes good which is always a dicy and not very interesting position to start from and more of a focus on WHY they as a system have stuck around so long. Seriously, once you figure out that classes are in just about everything you’ll realise that their utility is so much more than just balance or creating a specific class fantasy - the need to categorise things into particular roles is just a natural part of psychology and so it’s only natural that the most enduring gameplay systems would end up reflecting that in some way.

Honestly, with how passionate people are about RPGs and dungeons and dragons and stuff I honestly thought the video would do… better? I guess it’s just a matter of luck at the end of the day but this video did kind of… eh.. When it comes down to it. Maybe that’s due to the framing around baldur’s gate 3 as the sort of spotlight game and people didn’t want spoilers? Maybe. God that game is really good by the way, I legitimately had to stop playing it because I want the complete experience when it’s done in… I dunno ten years.

Adn the second video that’s come out recently is Losing Is Fun, and let me tell you this is maybe the biggest case of title first development I’ve ever had, I just knew there was a killer video idea orbiting around that concept and by god I found it. One thing i did discover though is that I made a video waaay back sort of about failure states already which is a bit of a shame because I had to avoid repeating myself in a few instances and also that video called finding the fun in failure MIGHT be one of the worst ones on the channel, it’s a fuckin mess, real bad stuff.

Anyway, I think a lot of my stance in this video is sort of a reaction to the classic gamer take of oooh errghhh stop dumbing down games for casual babies waaaaahh which is… mostly nonsense and also misses the point of why the most successful really hard games work so well - it’s because they’re not the masochistic and actually have quite lenient and forgiving approaches to death.

Related to the sort of self flagellation subversion that I did in the video is I was really really wondering what the thumbnail was going to be over the entire writing process, sometimes I have a vision of something cool I want to do and other times I really struggle and this one ended in me looking over wallpapers of various games I was featuring eventually leading to me seeing the flagellant from darkest dungeon and I just fell in love, he’s such a perfect fit for the title and premise, love it.

Performance wise I think this video was a bit weird, it started off doing kind of bad, then it had a big old spike of popularity and now at time of writing it’s starting to tail off quite quickly meaning that it sort of did broadly above average overall which I can’t complain about. I think a LARGE factor here is people “correcting” me about dwarf fortress or reminding me that dwarf fortress is getting a steam release soon even though I… use the trailer for exactly that in the video. Oh well, more engagement for me!

Alright I’ll leave it there, hope my nonsense bullshit ramblings were interesting, I’ll see you next time!