The Secretive World
Is it worth playing more than once?
Stresses and strains
Rebel rebel
A non-Ballardian erection
Massive and beautiful singleplayer mod
Terraria [official site] has been around for quite some time now, but the game’s vast world, and the dev team’s continued dedication to maintaining it, keeps people coming back for more. The Terraria 1.3.2 update is out now, bringing parties, chest sorting, and more to the 2D sandbox adventure.
RPS Feature The Secretive World
The Bleeding Edges are a series of articles on games that blur reality and fiction.
There was once a wonderful thing on the internet: The Stone. It was when we were all tiny babies (1997), and Wikipedia was still a twinkle in Jimmy Wales’s twinkly eye. You got access to it by buying a physical object, a small stone pendant, and with the code imprinted upon it delved into a creepy online world of conspiracy and truth. The game was ostensibly a puzzle game, but you played it via Google, and even real life actual research. It was wonderful while it lived, and slightly clumsily lives on here. I constantly seek something else like it. The Black Watchmen [official site] – a tangential spin-off from The Secret World – while delivered more in the style of the more recent ARGs, certainly picks up some of its themes.
Clock Simulator [official site]. It’s one of those games that sounds like a joke. Something along the lines of Goat Simulator. But I played it out of curiosity and it’s a weird and interesting thing.
I’m going to caveat this by saying it’s entirely possible that you’d play it and still think it was a joke along the lines of Goat Simulator because all you’re really doing is clicking the mouse or pressing keyboard keys to measure out seconds as they tick by. It’s also repetitive by design and, for me, ridiculously difficult.
So I’ve been having fun playing Poly Bridge [official site] this morning. I feel like it’s the sort of game you can sink into and tinker with while binge watching something on another screen or maybe listening to a podcast. But I’ve started to see the parts where I’ve not quite got the hang of how the physics works and where the game is better and worse at helping me figure out why that might be.
It’s rather lovely when you learn of a tiny company consistently making splendid games is succeeding, rather than struggling to stay alive. Amanita Design, who RPS have championed for their witty, beautiful and smart adventure games since we launched, sent us some very interesting sales information about their robotic point-and-clicker, Machinarium [official site], after its four millionth sale.
We all get sick every once in a while. When certain unnameable stars are ascendant and the pollen count is high, the writers of RPS are stricken with a variety of ailments ranging from the mildly irritating Wheezing Calamities to the truly dreadful Kneecaps-A-Shudder that causes the sound of grinding bones to echo around our word-cubicles, day and night. We have a proud record of ‘zero plagues’ in 2016 though and that’s something to celebrate.
Crusader Kings II [official site] is set in more sickly times though and the next expansion to the bestest of all historical strategy games will explore illness, death and all that other good stuff.
RPS Feature Rebel rebel
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
This is a rare example of a ‘Have You Played’ entry about a game that I had completely forgotten about until RPS readers sent me messages saying, “haven’t you played Star Wars: Rebellion?” Yes, is the answer, but I’d entirely forgotten it until you asked.
