Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Half-Life and Black Mesa and minor spoilers for Half-Life 2.

A Year in Games

Ask long-standing fixtures of video games the best year for the hobby, and chances are their modal response will be "1998". It marks the birthdays of Metal Gear Solid, Ocarina of Time, Spyro the Dragon, StarCraft, Banjo-Kazooie, and Dance Dance Revolution. It also fell within the heyday of the FPS. The first-person shooter was shocked to life with 1992's Wolfenstein 3D, and after that, gamers grew accustomed to the most discerning quality from the genre, spurred on by breakthroughs like 1993's Doom and 1996's Quake and Duke Nukem 3D. By '98, expectations had reached a fever pitch. But that didn't stop the newly-formed Valve Corporation from throwing their hat into the ring with Half-Life.

Half-Life had some stiff competition: Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six and the original Unreal muscled in on the shooter territory in the same year, but Valve's submission emerged as, if not more, lauded than both. The firm's name became synonymous with polished, punchy entertainment. Despite a lack of prior shipping, this Washington-based studio was able to develop one of the strongest games in one of the best years for the medium and on highly contested land. Half-Life sold one million copies by December 1999, putting the wind in the sails of the company that would eventually open PC gaming's largest marketplace.

Half-Life is also a bridge between worlds. By 1998, Id's games had made the opening speech for the FPS, providing an infosheet for what a level, weapon set, and enemy compendium should look like. Their games moved at vertiginous speeds that dared audiences to find matching reflexes. Still, six years after the release of Wolfenstein 3D, it wasn't yet clear what would come next. A little further down the line, we'll get the Halo archetype, with its recharging health and forward-thinking weaponry system, but in 1998, that hadn't come to fruition yet. Instead, Half-Life was what was next. It was received as a blessing, and other developers stitched its yarn into their works for a few reasons:

1. Half-Life strengthened the connection between players and setting.
2. Not content to be just a bunch of rooms with aliens in them, Half-Life introduces unique mechanics and scenarios for levels, with filmic schemes for how we outsmart every big bad.
3. Half-Life was making the FPS wow, even at a measured pace. It's hard enough to build a game where expedient movement and non-stop conflict get the audience's pulse racing. To keep them absorbed, even when the gunfire dies down, shows range.

Large sections of Half-Life also kind of suck.

Decay

Today, we'd see Valve's level and enemy design as violating The Big Book of Video Game No Nos. You've got two levels (Xen and On A Rail), which even megafans will tell you they hate. I'll save my commentary on Xen for later, but On A Rail blindsides the player with sneaky traps and subsections of it are impervious to navigation. Still, I've never understood why On A Rail is singled out for criticism when the same germs infect other levels. The problems are just, on average, more tightly packed in the minecart stage, which is itself needlessly long. To me, Surface Tension is as bad as or worse than On A Rail, being a drawn-out slog of invisible landmines and Snipers hiding in the battlements. Many of the doors through its canyons are slim fissures which vanish into the mountain edifice.

Half-Life wants to have these branching departments where you backtrack through previous areas to complete newly unlocked jobs, but never quite pulls it off because of its distaste for indicating where you should go next. The game also makes exploration and puzzle-solving obtuse by setting up rooms in such a way that you can't always see the effect of the switch you're flipping. And while Valve has a vibrant encounter palette to draw from, sometimes they just dump a bunch of Headcrabs on the floor and say, "This'll keep you occupied. I'm going for a smoke". For a long time after Half-Life's release, there was plenty of room for improvement to the game. Plenty of room for Black Mesa.

Retrofitting

Half-Life is a vehicle for Gordon Freeman, a doctor of physics at the Black Mesa Research Facility in New Mexico. When an experiment at this underground base opens up a portal to another universe, bloodthirsty aliens pour through and spare no time slaughtering the Black Mesa scientists. Freeman, the only surviving researcher from the experiment, gets his hands on an arsenal and must run the gauntlet of an alien invasion to reach the surface and safety.

Crowbar Collective is an international group of game developers who coordinate through the internet and got their start in the industry as hobbyists.^[1] They released their remake of Half-Life, Black Mesa, in 2020, after its early access probation. From about 2019 to today, we've been living through a golden era of remakes. You have the new Resident Evils, Demon's Souls, Final Fantasy VII Remake, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 + 2, to name a few. In the games industry, development budgets and standards keep ascending, and they haven't found a ceiling yet. Where companies would once upscale an old game of theirs and acquaint it with new hardware, some are now rebuilding them from the ground up, which is how Black Mesa was made. But Black Mesa is anomalous materials.

Crowbar started hammering away on their remake in 2004, long before the current generation of such revivals, and they don't even own the game they're remaking. Black Mesa is the sole example I can think of of a AAA game made by a small indie studio, and was only possible with the backing of Valve.^[1] Not to suggest that any big games corporation is the "good guy", but it is remarkable. Nintendo's over there sending DMCA takedowns to tiny fan games based on their properties, while Valve saw modders rebuilding a product they'd sold over 9 million copies of, and their response was to cut them a licensing deal.

Another exception Black Mesa found to industry rules: it heavily modifies the gameplay of its subject. In these video game remodels, design is often not considered up for reappraisal the same way that graphics are. This is both because tweaking mechanics can require more fundamental technical changes to a game and because of our extraordinary reverence for the sequences of nostalgia fodder. Crowbar's wisdom is in their brilliant discernment between what of Half-Life has aged like wine and what has aged like milk. The studio has enough love of the game to make it feel like 1998's bloody industrial demi-horror. However, they don't let sentimentality cloud their judgement when it comes to separating the wheat from the chaff. For example, consider how the Collective treats characterisation and setting.

Black Mesa

Half-Life was praised in its time for its unconventional choice of protagonist. It has also been the target of gentle mocking due to a perception that it's taken a generic action game protagonist, written "PhD" on his chest in Sharpie, and pretended he's an academic. Admittedly, there are long stretches in which the shooter's only salute to Freeman's career is you occasionally bumping into whitecoats who'll fire off a "Ah, a fellow scientist". It's also tough to justify why Freeman is more proficient with a gun than the hundreds of marines in Black Mesa. Half-Life gives us the ID card of a physicist, but we meet other physicists, and it's clear Gordon is a different breed.

On the other hand, you clearly embody someone who knows the ropes of this compound, and you play out plausible actions for a person with scientific and engineering knowledge. You launch a satellite, power up a nuclear reactor, and switch gauges on the facility's tramline. If that's not roleplaying a scientist, I don't know what is. While Duke 3D's interactive sinks and toilets were considered revolutionarily responsive environment in 1996, '98's Half-Life has a level where routing power, fuel, and oxygen into a control room lets you turn on a rocket booster to kill a giant tentacle alien. It's these scenarios that make Black Mesa able to stand out as a location and ensure each level is a dedicated mission with its own parameters.

Even the purely observational tram ride in the first chapter is about establishing a laboratory where new technologies are actively being produced, and all the cogs are turning each other. A robot arm welds a metal grill, eggheads studiously monitor computer equipment, and a vat of industrial waste leaks into a pool of the same. This chapter exists to give us an idea of the types of sparking industry we'll be exploring during the game and the long days of button-pressing we'll commit to here. We also get to see a fleeting glimpse of the New Mexico desert, both letting us situate Gordon's workplace in a larger location and teasing the midgame.

In comparison to the metal album environments of the shooter classics, Half-Life's techno-setting is positively down-to-earth, even if its enemies aren't. Such is the nature of an invasion. Half-Life can coach a relationship between the player and this workplace largely through its platforming and puzzles. Not a lot of science gets done with a machine gun, but it does get carried out with physical mechanisms and interfaces. So, it's when Half-Life has us thwart laser shielding, electrify Tesla coils, and brave the interior of a centrifuge that we become Doctor Freeman, physicist. With the shooting alone, we can't enter into conversation with Black Mesa as a research facility. With the engineering, we can.

That spirit of physics is even more present in Black Mesa, which believes that if we're a physicist, we should be thinking about weights, charges, and trajectories. It adopts the Source engine in all its thrust and dynamism, adding turrets that deactivate if you can tip them over, a bumper pack of rewiring puzzles, and a Shotgun that can knock enemies off their feet. I'll talk more about Black Mesa expanding Half-Life's physics motifs in the future. But weapons and enemies carry between levels, so to get a ground-level comprehension of what makes Half-Life Half-Life, let's study what we're firing and who we're firing at.

Lab Equipment

We're not going to cover all the weapons in the locker, but there's one that we have to talk about above all others: the Crowbar. The rule of thumb for video game bludgeons is that you get one strike for every time you press the "thump" button. But the Crowbar stays swinging for as long as you hold down the left-click, and at a frantic speed, too. It feels desperate to interact with the environment, and who are we to deny it? Black Mesa's contribution is to make its clangs less ear-splitting when it does find a surface.

Our entry-level gun, the 9mm Pistol, is not just a practical accessory but also becomes a generic "interact" button as we head further into the game. We can, for example, use it to flip the switches in On A Rail or detonate the mines in Black Mesa's version of Surface Tension. We're afforded more firepower by the Submachine Gun. The SMG would be fun enough as just a geyser of bullets, but its secondary fire, a grenade launcher, puts it over the edge. It may not prime explosions as large as the Hand Grenade or Rocket Launcher, but it can fire faster and hold more ammo than the Rocket Launcher, and its projectiles detonate faster than the Grenades do. You also don't need to switch away from the SMG to use that secondary. It is Christmas in a metal casing.

I wish I could get as excited about the original Shotgun. In Half-Life, you cannot afford to open yourself up to attacks unnecessarily, but the Shotgun demands you get up in the face of enemies to deal damage. Afterwards, it leaves them standing to continue assaulting you. Black Mesa's Shotgun is more ruthless in its butchery, and its operating range is less ambiguous. The remake also allowed me a besotted reunion with one of my favourite video game implements: the Half-Life 2 .357 Magnum. It is effectively a sniper rifle without a scope. Slow but devastating, with an unsparing ammo count, it is a testament to the steady aiming of the Source shooters.

There are two weapons I never find myself using, and those are the Hivehand and the Snarks. They both sound killer: the Hivehand shoots homing venomous insects, and the autonomous Snarks tear at anything that moves. So, you can damage aliens around corners and have bugs fight your battles for you. But the hornets are imprecise and take too long to reach a target. It is a disqualifying flaw in the original Half-Life, where you need to dispatch foes at the drop of a hat if you don't want to get vaporised by them. Meanwhile, the Snarks are as happy to nip at you as a Vortigaunt or Soldier.

Research Assistants

With all this talk of Half-Life's narrow permission for errors, you might conclude that it features fewer crutches for the player than its modern counterpart, Black Mesa. Surprisingly, it's the 1998 shooter that's fitted with auto-aim and a tutorial level, while the 2020 remake is free of both. It's not that Black Mesa is less obliging to the player; it's that rather than serving player aid on a side plate, it bakes it into the game as a whole. Black Mesa follows Half-Life 2's philosophy of making education one of the goals of its level design, teaching players how mechanics work organically rather than bluntly instructing them on what to do when. That the player must work out to crouch to pass through a door or shatter a barricade with their Crowbar means that they cannot let these techniques wash over them without absorbing them. They have had to actively think about how to apply them, and it's application that makes a lesson stick.

As for the auto-aim, in Half-Life, a few missed shots could give the enemy the opening they needed to smear your organs over the walls. The assisted targeting makes sure they don't get that chance. Although, even then, the auto-aim can be inaccurate at long distances, and the demarcating line between short and long distances is never explicitly established. In Black Mesa, flubbing a shot here or there is not the end of the world, so the game does not need a system that guarantees you can hit targets up to a couple hundred meters. I think people who want games to aggressively scrutinise their skills are frequently uncomfortable with the idea of enemy attack power being diluted, but here's an example of a developer doing that and it making the play more skill-dependent.

Everything Xen

More than any other enemy, it's the Headcrabs that bear the brunt of our equipment. Headcrabs are the first and most ubiquitous enemies of Half-Life, with memorable gameplay and monster designs that made them an anti-mascot for the series. Flat, parasitic creatures that can clamp down on a skull and pilot a dead body around, they're like cordyceps on an ant. But the Headcrab can only leave a scratch on you, and the Zombies they create move at a hobble. So, both are suitable opponents, even for a player who's just getting to grips with the game or genre. Because each parasite and host aren't too cumbersome to fight off, Valve can also add them to a great number of encounters without worrying it will push those beats above the acceptable threshold of difficulty.

Technically, the Barnacle gives the player less guff as it's a stationary enemy. But because Barnacles are sedentary and often avoidable, they don't create an action atmosphere, and so, cannot support a lot of combat on their own, whereas the Headcrabs can. Similarly, the mild threat Headcrabs and Zombies pose also means that designers don't have to spawn them in a space where players have a lot of cover, and the tiny Headcrab can fit into almost any size arena: even an air vent. Again, that means more stations for them to guard.

Despite its wimpy bite, the Headcrab is perfectly optimised to induce panic because it goes right for your face, and even if you do manage to sidestep one of these screeching pests, now it's behind you, and you don't know exactly where. If you've ever seen a spider in your bedroom, looked away, and then looked back to find it gone, you'll know this dance. The Shotgun is pure Heacrab's bane: a weapon with a wide spread is just what the doctor ordered when you have a tiny animal flying at your face like a speedball and no time to aim. But a Shotgun takes a second to cock and isn't blessed with the largest magazine. It inevitably creates stressful scenes where you're praying you can load shells into the chamber before the parasites get within striking range. The Pistol is a more economical solution to Black Mesa's infestation, but you can be lulled into a false sense of security, thinking you'll chip away at a Headcrab meters off, then before you know it, it's right on top of you, and you're madly blasting the handgun at it.

The Heacrab synthesises brilliantly with the other enemies. Try to shoot Headcrabs that get behind your back, and you take your eyes off another potentially more rotten foe. Similarly, those other enemies can distract you from the crab, only for it to sink its teeth in when you least expect it. In a disturbing setpiece in Office Complex, a Headcrab Zombie is trapped in front of a flashing computer screen, seizing. As an actor in the play, the Zombie is deeper than you might think. In Black Mesa, it obeys the HL2 rules wherein its Headcrab will detach and try to sick you if you kill it with body shots, but there'll be no such drama if you can nail it in the head. Even twenty years after Half-Life 2, the idea of a weak point not modifying damage or pushing the enemy into another state but changing whether or not they spawn a secondary enemy is novel.

Early in the game, the Zombie's slow speed allows a player less attuned to FPSs to practice positioning and aiming without needing to move constantly. Later enemies that can fire and are light on their feet, like the Vortigaunt or Houndeye, ask the user to develop a skillset to match. The Zombie's leisurely shamble can sometimes be its deceptive strength. When in a room with it and other enemies, you may choose to prioritise gun-toting monsters more distant than the Zombie because the undead can't hurt you until they can touch you. Yet, as with the Headcrab, if you put them out of your head for too long, you'll be lacerated. I wish enemy types intermingled more because the synchronicity between them can be stupendous.

One creature that doesn't play well with others is the Icythosaur, which, having made its home in Black Mesa's opaque waters, turns every river and canal you enter a mystery box which may or may not contain one of these giant piranhas. It's a classic survival horror guessing game: if the designer creates the possibility, but not the guarantee that a monster could appear in a number of areas, an atmosphere of terror settles over the entire game. Yet, because the player is not actually encountering the villain every time, they don't become desensitised or exhausted. For land aliens like the Bullsquid and Vortigaunt, all empty space becomes a monster closet as they can teleport in wherever they please.

The Icythosaur swims in a serpentine motion, except when it charges at you, lining itself up to leave a huge bite mark in your HP. Its lunges are breakpoints where you might be about to penetrate it with a Crossbow bolt, but you might also be about to get ripped limb from limb. The Icythosaur-Crossbow dilemma is a variation on a popular pattern in shooters, one you can find elsewhere in Half-Life: The moment during which an enemy is a sitting duck is also the point at which they have the strongest defensive capability. Throughout Gordon Freeman's war, you will see enemies like Vortigaunts, Bullsquids, and Grunts that will alternate between moving but not firing and firing but not moving. So, they frequently relocate to keep the combat changing and also provide continuous challenge while altering the nature of that challenge.

The enemy that sees the most improvement between Half-Life and Black Mesa is the Soldier. In 1998, gamers raved about Valve's intelligent military NPCs, and the trick here was as much their dialogue as their programming. They will verbalise their upcoming moves and seemingly report to each other if they have or have not found Freeman. Without their audio barks, they wouldn't seem to be strategically coordinating against you. With the dialogue, they come across as a living network. And then there's that spice the troops add to the combat by throwing Grenades. You get flushed out of cover, forced to show quick wits by finding a new hiding place.

So, what's the problem? Well, for one, you can't afford to be out in the open much due to bullets can go in you. And if you're in a Soldier-heavy encampment like On A Rail, there's not a lot of refuge to seek after you flee cover. So, you're at a strategic loss and don't get a lot of interesting choices when a frag lands next to you. But you'll find the real sore spot when you open fire on the Soldiers: they're meat shields. In Half-Life, they can take a volley of SMG bullets before they die, just crouching there and spurting blood. With such resilience, they don't register as human, and their lack of reaction causes our weapons to feel ineffectual. In the gameplay, they're hardy, trigger-happy, and stand in the open, which means that it often feels like there's no option to defeat them but sucking down damage, and the player should always have an alternative to failure. Black Mesa's decision to simply debuff the soldiers pays surprising dividends.

While the Marines are the most annoying about it, any enemy can pose an inappropriately outsized risk because this shooter uses a static rather than recharging health system. I dissect recharging health mechanics in more depth over here, but the bottom line is that if the player can enter the same room with 1 health or 100 health, a level's difficulty can deviate wildly. Half-Life is as good an example as any of how you can feel like you hit a brick wall in an action game because you entered a room with red HP, and there are no first-aid kits nearby.

As a game fitted with the same health mechanics, Black Mesa can't entirely avoid replicating this flaw, but it does a lot to loosen your belt. Full of Wolfenstein-like secret compartments of ammo and health, it can better regulate the degree of challenge while rewarding your exploration. However, breaching a plentiful supply hamper is always a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you're better equipped for battles in the near future. On the other hand, if the game thinks you need that concession, you've got a tough fight ahead of you.

Integral Functions

With these supply drops squirrelled away in the stages, you can see that while we can discuss enemies and items in isolation, it's when they stand against the backdrop of a level that we get their full effect. You can't understand the total horror of the Headcrab until you're stuck in a vent with it. The case is best made for the Crossbow when you have soldiers holed up on the other side of a courtyard, and you need to neutralise them without exposing yourself. Therefore, if we want to discuss weapons and enemies, we also have to analyse level design. But I'm afraid this is where I get off. We've covered a lot of ground today, enough to constitute a full blog. Next week, not only will we trawl the ruins of Black Mesa, we'll gaze upon the creatures on the other side of the portal to Xen, and that's when Half-Life gets really ugly. Until then, goodbye and thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Black Mesa: The 16 Year Project to Remake Half-Life by Noclip (March 15, 2022), YouTube.

All other sources are linked at the relevant points in the article.

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Cocoon and minor spoilers for Gorogoa.

Now and then, a game gets so popular within its niche that its magnetic field stretches beyond its genre's devotees, attracting players from across gaming's wide spectrum. Super Smash Bros. did this as a fighting game, The Last of Us did it in the narrative drama sector, and it's happened myriad times in the puzzle genre. We saw it with Baba Is You, Superliminal, and in late 2023, with Geometric's Cocoon.

Cocoon casts us as a humanoid insect born from an egg. Our infancy is a little bland; we learn the buttons of the environmental interface and go through the motions of some simple sequence puzzles. Our explorations hit a stride once we have a couple of orbs in our thrall. Orbs power up mechanisms like moving platforms and lifts, but eventually, they also provide unique utilities. For example, the orange orb reveals hidden gantries, and the green one lets you solidify clouds of mist. Each of these balls also contains a world. If you can find a circular pool, you can put the orb on the holder in the centre of the water. If you can put the orb on the holder, you can enter the orb and complete the puzzles inside. Rubbery pads inside the orb worlds let you ascend back to the level you entered them from.

Rather than advancing linearly through a series of chambers, we make a little headway in World A, which allows us to make some progress in World B, and that unlocks some gate in World A we can continue through, and so on. The progression is multi-threaded. Cocoon has also worked out that since people in real life can transport almost any object, if we could compress worlds into objects, we could relocate entire fields or industrial hubs. As we can hold orbs when we enter other orbs, we can also place orbs inside orbs and worlds inside worlds. If we could nest objects within each other in our universe, as we can in Cocoon, then we could add their capacities to each other, which is not possible with our physics. What I mean is that 6+3 = 9. However, if I'm in my garage and I have a box that is 6m³ and I place another box inside it that is 3m³, the first box doesn't now have a volume of 9m³. The first box has the same volume it always did, minus the space that the walls of the second box take up.

To see how Cocoon subverts this geometry, let's imagine a typical brainteaser we'd encounter in it. We have three orbs at our disposal: Orange, green, and purple. The orange and green spheres each have a single pool inside, and our goal is to cram two orbs into one orb. Whether I choose to place my orbs into the orange or green sphere, I find myself entering a world with only one orb holder and, so, it would seem, the capacity for only one orb.

We have to ask, are we deadlocked? No, because we can, for example, place the green sphere inside the orange and then the purple inside the green. We were able to add the capacity of the green orb to the orange orb's by placing it inside it. It is comparable to being able to drop a 1m³ box into a 1m³ box to get a 2m³ box. If you want to see another game that models additive spaces with more emphasis on volume, look no further than Tibia: the MMO launched by CipSoft in 1997. In this RPG, each container has a number of slots, but those slots can be filled with other containers, leading to adventurers placing bags inside of bags inside of bags to maximise their carrying capacity. The only limitation is weight. In Cocoon, challenges commonly call for this technique of using one container as a vessel for others.

In puzzle games, it's typical to define a "switch" as an object that we must place a weight on to produce some specific effect. We then define weights as the items we need to place on those switches to bring about the effect. This makes the spheres the weights of Cocoon, and the pedestals its switches. But there's more purpose bound up in Cocoon's spheroids than there is in the conventional weighted cube. The orbs unseal future zones and activate mechanisms, but they also are zones, containers, and bestowers of player abilities. Through the multi-faceted practicality of the spheres, Geometric Interactive instils in us bug mindset. I've looked at insects before and thought, "Wow, how could you care so much about one lousy dewdrop?" but in this ludonarrative, I feel hyped about my dewdrop and genuinely productive handling it.

As Cocoon is a puzzle game developed after 2007, it's mandatory that we compare it to Portal. For gameplay purposes, the exit pads in Cocoon's worlds are fixed portals, and the orbs are portals we can place. Although, we can only situate the orbs in a few developer-sanctioned locations. Unlike the portals in Valve's puzzler, Geometric's never link two places within the same instanced environment; they can only grant passage between environments. And distancing itself from Portal, Cocoon is not an active physics simulation. Designer Jeppe Carlsen had previously drawn up Limbo and Inside, games that had some grounding in the principles of momentum and collision. Cocoon is almost entirely absent of these concepts.

To add to that, most games that take place in a space are about moving entities around that space, whether that's pushing a cart along a track or running towards a net. Yet, the spaces themselves are immovable. In Cocoon, the geography is in flux. It's not the only game in which that's true: in The Pedestrian, ROOMS: The Toymaker's Mansion, or Gorogoa, the environment is sliced into sliding tiles that we must rearrange. Aligning them just so can make two halves of an object into a whole or give the protagonist an unobstructed climb to the next floor.

In fact, Gorogoa could be a long-lost uncle to Cocoon. We may zoom into its panels and find new scenes inside, often to step back at a later timestamp and discover the old world anew. The worlds also exist non-contiguously for much of runtime as well, and you'll leave some dimensions idle as you execute plans in others. To a point, you could peg us as playing multiple different interconnected levels at once, and that goes in either Gorogoa or Cocoon.

Where the distinction arises is that The Pedestrian, ROOMS, and Gorogoa more frequently have you thinking about the adjacency of spaces, while Cocoon takes a fiercer interest in their hierarchy. To be doubly clear, Gorogoa has more tricks up its sleeve than being a sliding tile toy, but it and the games I've grouped it with are full of these impasses where victory is a matter of deducing which two panels go next to each other. What these other games have little of, and what Cocoon has in spades, are areas where we don't just need to decide what spaces belong next to each other but how we should nest them inside each other.

Given the logic by which we mentally map places and the animations that accompany our entrance to and emergence from Cocoon's orbs, it would be natural to conceptualise the spheres and pads as existing above or below each other. Yet, if we compare them to objects positioned in regular 3D space, we can see that would be inaccurate, at least if we're using the common definitions of "above" or "below". Imagine you're standing on the second floor of a house and that there's a trampoline on the first floor, directly underneath your position. If you start walking across the second floor, away from your initial coordinates, that trampoline is no longer directly below you.

In Cocoon, we can jump off of an exit pad in one world and emerge out of the orb into the universe "above". It's like being able to jump from the trampoline downstairs to the spot on the second floor directly above it. It would be just jumping to a higher floor if we couldn't take that orb, carry it twenty kilometres north, place it in a pool, and still move "down" onto the same exit pad. Even though we are twenty meters away from the area that would have been "below" the springboard, we can still "descend" onto it. In a reversal of this relationship, any exit pad in any universe will rocket us to the location of the orb in the "above" universe, regardless of where we situated that orb.

Placing down an orb in Cocoon isn't like installing a lift in a building; our job is not to "line up" elements of the above world and the below world. Rather than picturing a straight tether linking the orbs and pads, I find it helpful to think of the universes in Cocoon like the folders in a directory tree. In Windows, you could be in C:\Program Files\, and that location could have an "Audacity" folder inside. If you were thinking of entering the Audacity directory, you wouldn't ask where in Audacity you'd come out relative to your previous position in Program Files. All you would say is that you were in C:\Program Files\, and then you were in C:\Program Files\Audacity\. In Cocoon, unlike in Portal, when you jump into a doorway, you don't think about the coordinates you'll emerge at on the other side. You don't get a choice. You simply know that previously, you existed in the hierarchy at, say, BaseWorld:\Orange\, and now you're entering BaseWorld:\Orange\Green\.

The folder simile extends to the preservation of which sub-worlds sit inside which worlds. In Gorogoa, I could have two tiles on my screen; we'll call them L and R. R exists to the right of L, and L exists to the left of R. If I slide L downwards, R does not slide down with it. The relative positioning of the two tiles is now different. But look at what happens if I do something similar in Windows Explorer. Let's say C:\Program Files\Audacity\Plug-Ins\ is a valid file path on my hard drive. If I move Audacity to the root (C:), Plug-Ins will remain a direct subfolder of Audacity. C:\Audacity\Plug-Ins\ will be a valid file path. Folders slide with each other. Likewise, if I have a hierarchy of orbs that goes BaseWorld:\Orange\Green\White\, and I move the green orb to exist directly inside of the base world, it will still have white as a direct sub-orb. I will be able to go to BaseWorld:\Green\White\. Please appreciate my Orb Notation.

To further extricate Gorogoa and Cocoon, in Gorogoa, worlds can be presented alongside each other, but in Cocoon, you are always fully immersed in whatever orb you have engaged with. So, hopping off of an exit pad in the latter game is like leaving a cinema and reconnecting with the city outside. However focused you were on the film, the exterior reality is a hundred times bigger than it. Reentering an environment you're already familiar with can still be awe-inspiring. Even the teleporters in Cocoon shook my worldview when I first stepped foot on them. In other games, disappearing from one location and spontaneously appearing at another is not too remarkable, but Cocoon gets us used to the idea that portals always take us into or out of other worlds. So, when we discover one that teleports us across the same world, we intuitively frame it as the exit pad transporting us up to the same world we're already in. How do you exit into the place you already exist in? Mind-boggling.

What's missing from my current description of Cocoon is a reason why you should care how the universes are nested. Say there's a puzzle you need to complete inside the purple sphere. What does it matter if the purple portal is inside the orange one, the green one, or no portal at all? It matters because of the powers that each orb confers. You need to hold a ball to activate its effects, but you cannot be in an orb and hold it at the same time (typically). Therefore, deciding the hierarchy of the orbs is deciding what abilities will be available to you where.

You'll recall that the orange orb makes invisible walkways visible. That means that if I'm inside BaseWorld:\Orange\Purple\, I can't use the orange orb to light up the hidden paths in the purple world. I'm unable to wield the orange orb here because I'm already inside it, and that will be an issue if I need to cross invisible bridges to get to the next area of the purple world. In fact, this limitation could be part of the puzzle. If I'm in BaseWorld:\White\Green, I can't use the white orb's power to fire bolts of energy.

The omni-solution would seem to be accessing all orbs from the base world at the top of the hierarchy, ensuring that we always have access to every power, minus that of the single orb we enter. Although, you're generally not tasked with using the green power inside the green orb or the purple power inside the purple orb as the designers understand that under regular conditions, this is impossible. If we can't enter all orbs from the base world, we'd at least want to be as high up the orb chain as possible because the fewer orbs "above" us, the fewer powers we are locked out of. That ideal scenario is frequently unattainable because:

1. We often don't have an exit pad nearby to retreat to exterior realities.
2. We may not have enough pools to place all the orbs in the base world and must often store some orbs in other worlds.
3. Within one orb, we may need to harness the powers of another orb to conquer an obstacle and so, cannot leave it in the base world.

Under limitations 2 and 3, we are forced to decide a hierarchy for the orbs, even if it's determining whether the white ball goes inside the green ball or the green ball goes inside the white ball. As we enter each orb, our suite of powers gets smaller, and abilities that were available to us before are stripped away. Again, we have to work out what powers we need on each level. Followers of Double Fine may recognise this pattern from Stacking, their 2011 Russian nesting doll game. Cocoon doesn't go as many layers deep as Stacking, but it does feature a Russian nesting universe.

Puzzle games often prohibit our use of certain powers or items at certain times in order to stop us from relying on the same reasoning and get us thinking with exciting new rubrics. However, just greying out a move on a radial menu would be frustratingly arbitrary: an egregious example of the designer reaching into the world and flicking a switch off because they don't like it. Stacking and Cocoon provide wonderful examples of how a designer can make a limitation feel reasonable, both by tying it to real-world logic and by having the player impose the limitation on themselves. We are the ones who shed the outer dolls in Stacking, and we'd never expect to be able to use an object after we've discarded it, so there's no disappointment when we can't.

In Cocoon, we wouldn't expect to be able to pass through a doorway and hold onto it, and we make the decision of how to layer the doorways, so there are fewer hard feelings when we can't put our insectoid mits on the sphere we want. The "catch" in plenty of Cocoon's conundrums is that it appears that we need to be inside an orb whose powers we must use. We often get unstuck when we find the loopholes that reveal how we can smuggle that one orb into another or when we realise that we don't need the orb hierarchy or power we thought we did.

Cocoon joins a long line of texts that depict the universe as an onion of concentric spheres, although most previous, significant entries in this legacy have been non-fictional. In the first half of the sixth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Anaximander said that the Earth, which was then thought to be the centre of the universe, was surrounded by a sphere or spheres. That sphere or those spheres would have been the night sky.^[1] Anaximedes, who is generally understood to have been Anaximder's student, added that the sky sphere was crystalline. Plato believed that the heavens moved in spherical patterns because spheres were the perfect shape. His pupil, Eudoxus, was completely orb-pilled, expounding a view of the universe that included 53 concentric spheres.^[1] Contrary to popular belief, Greeks as old as Pythagoras in ~350 B.C. knew that our world is a sphere.

For the dormant civilisation of Cocoon, their crystalline spheres are one of their finest technological triumphs. One of the reasons Cocoon didn't hit for me on my first session is that there have already been a lot of dead civilisation indie games: Journey, ABZÛ, Gris, Rime, Sable, Omno, Scorn, AER, the list goes on. Cocoon didn't feel much different until the spheres made their entrance. Another way Cocoon sets itself apart from those names is that it views technology as downstream from physiology. Its fallen world was built by insects, and fittingly, tiles take the shape of honeycomb cells, the technologists take the term "drone" literally, and bridges unfold in the image of dragonfly wings. Where we typically see the height of space travel in FTL drives, the people of this society looked into a dewdrop, saw a world reflected inside and wondered whether they could make such a thing a reality. They imagine you'd exit a teleporter as if you were a larva crawling from an egg.

If you can collect all the orbs, master layered reality, and make it to the throne of creation, you still won't really get Cocoon. You can only achieve a divine understanding of the celestial spheres by seeing the game through to its last seconds. The world elevator ascends you to godhood. You are reborn from tiny cicada to solar-system-spanning moth, and as it turns out, the whole game took place inside another orb: a sun. The spheres we were carrying weren't just like eggs: they were eggs, and they scatter from the star, hatching into planets. A new solar system roars to life, one we watch over with our moth wisdom. While we experienced a birth at the start of the game, it is at the end that we undergo our most miraculous emergence, with the whole ludonarrative proving to have been a chrysalis for a hierarchical cosmology. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Classical Astronomy by Robert Hollow and Helen Sim (2022), Australia National Telescope Facility.

All other sources are linked at the relevant points in the article.

Over the last decade and a half, the breakout stars of the puzzle genre have tended to be those titles that stun on sight. The showmen with core mechanics you can understand from the briefest flash, but that bend both reality and your mind. There is the Lego rule-rewriting of Baba Is You, self-cloning in The Swapper, the subjective resizing of objects in Superliminal, the time loops of Outer Wilds, you know the sort of thing. Not all puzzle games twist one of the fundamental axioms of our reality. The Witness is one of the best-acclaimed brainteasers of all time, and that's a catalogue of Buddhist placemat mazes, but experiences like The Witness are the exception rather than the rule.

It's curious because you don't see other fields of gaming relitigating the contract between player and environment as a default. Horizon: Forbidden West doesn't have you going back in time to reconsider how you might play the game every 20 minutes; in Baldur's Gate 3, perception is not reality; in Red Dead Redemption 2, you can't reprogram your horse. Not yet, at least. I don't want you to go away with the idea that strategy or action games are not worth your time because they aren't remixing their shit for every session. The takeaway should be the opposite: that they don't need to. Most games can keep a relatively consistent and shared notion of what reality looks like and still scintillate. And that leaves me asking: Why do so many successful puzzle games keep breaking the laws of nature when their friends in other formats don't?

The split goes back to what we're looking for from each gameplay genre and how each style of game generates challenge. When the draw of a gameplay section is its feel, it will stand up to replays because the pleasant sensations are there every time you return to it. You can also generally repeat hand-eye coordination courses in games without boredom. This is because having been able to contort your hands into the correct shapes at the correct times once does not mean you can do it again. The difficulty stands its ground.

Most experiences with games are also part scripted challenge and part procedurally-generated obstacles. Stages may have fixed objectives or layouts, but branch conditions and random elements, including AI behaviour, mean that you can play the same level multiple times, and it won't react to you the same way twice. The vendor's selection of items on the third floor will keep rotating, an enemy that may have dived right to escape a grenade once could dive left the next time. Not to mention, you exert a sway in how levels play out. Your behaviour changes with improvements in your skills, and designers offer choices to let you express yourself and take ownership of the experience.

Some puzzle games also allow for relatively freeform solutions to levels. You can see it in entertainment where we're building a solution rather than finding one, such as World of Goo or Space Engineers. It's further present in match-three games like Zuma or Royal Match. But a galaxy of puzzles exists outside of the match-three and systems construction genres. In the adventure, action-adventure, or environmental archetypes, we rarely get the same wiggle room for forming solutions that we do in match-three and systems construction games. And environmental puzzle games are in vogue. One may offer an alternative solution now and then, but sections in, say, Phantasmagoria or LEGO Builder's Journey are not open problems. They do not agree with the large majority of solutions we could offer and will not change their shape on replays.

With rigid rules, we know that if we've collected information about a puzzle once, we'll be able to apply it in the future to reach success. More than that, having a narrow band of valid solutions makes us put our thinking cap on when taking action. Because the locks of environmental puzzle games will not bend to fit your key, you need to seek a specific key instead of lazily picking one from the ring. And it's diligent deduction that makes us feel smart.

For puzzles that have very few answers or one answer, it follows that if the player beats it, they know the required steps for it, and the level can no longer offer the emotional reward for solving a mystery. You can't be tasked with finding the key if you're already holding it. Unlike levels in an action game, puzzle stages also rarely occupy you with hand-eye coordination tests or use stimulating game feel as a design pillar. Therefore, they have limited replay value. I am compartmentalising here; games often engage along multiple vectors simultaneously. Appeal through action, puzzles, and sensory attractions are not mutually exclusive, so some puzzle games retain charm even across concurrent playthroughs. Plus, over a long enough timespan, players will forget the steps to complete puzzles, opening those levels up to get their mental gears whirring again.

Still, environmental puzzles rely on audiences lacking an understanding of how to solve them out of the gate. Therefore, if they only employ the logic of the real world or other puzzle gauntlets, the player may already know how to steer that logic to solve the story mode's problems. If you keep setting the player the same puzzles across multiple games, they arrive with all the knowledge they need to bore themselves to death. But suppose the player finds that time, space, size, or other aspects of the game world do not operate like that of any world they are familiar with. That they can clone themselves, spontaneously grow and shrink objects, or teleport. There is now new logic to be unravelled. The player must commit to a lot of induction and deduction to manipulate the systems in the direction they'd like.

Players become perpetual tutees, always refreshing their mindset, thinking outside the box to succeed at exams. The complementary aesthetic to that twisting of our worldview is a warping of reality. Mechanics like carrying universes in our hands in Cocoon or the infinitely tiling world of Manifold Garden don't just embody a mechanical aesthetic but also influence how their respective games look and sound.

When puzzlers have a perspective skew or hook mechanic, the word "gimmick" is inevitably thrown in their face. But by definition, gimmicks are superficial. Like sparklers, they fizzle brightly for a little while and then burn out. Yet, most sensational puzzle games need play and aesthetics that can support a multi-hour story mode at the very least. Their single-player tests the depth of their mechanical premises. The worst puzzle games burn down to their base in no time, but the best produce hours of thought-provoking trials capable of changing how we see virtual worlds and our physical one, too. Thanks for reading.

Lo-Fi Plays is a series in which I set out in search of games that are compact, developed on little to no budget, or that otherwise lurk in the shadows of obscurity. This is not a safari of the technologically extraordinary; I am combing for pet projects that do something innovative, charming, or otherwise noteworthy. Here's the crop of downloadables for March 9th. Everything on this list is free or "name your own price", so jump right in if you see a title that interests you.

Windowkill

Windowkill resides in the burgeoning genre of "ya gotta see this thing". Most of the time a game tells you to "think outside the box" that's a metaphor, but not when developer torcado has their way. Windowkill is a twin-stick shooter where you take on that most heroic of narrative archetypes: the circle, and the walls are always closing in. Both you and the enemies collide with the boundaries of the window you play in, and without resistance, that window shrinks. If you don't do something, you'll be crushed. It's your bullets that come to the rescue. They serve an elegant dual function, shattering enemies but also pushing back the edges of the screen.

If you want to stay alive, you need to divide your shots judiciously between the walls of the window and the malevolent shapes that beset you on all sides. It doesn't sound like you'd have to dedicate more than nominal brain power to that, but in practice, the play feels like spinning plates. The metamorphic frame mangles the traditional wisdom about where media stops and where the outside environment begins. Like most innovative art, Windowkill transforms something that you didn't consider could be transformed.

While a Robotron or a Geometry Wars leaves an open highway of reward before you, Windowkill has regular progression checkpoints. Those checkpoints come in the form of items you can buy once you have the coins. Note how the rogue-like-like progression allows you to determine what goodies you get instead of the designer forcing new tools on you. My advice is don't be afraid to "restock" the perks; they are everything for your survivability. A fancier release of the game is available for $5, but here I'm reviewing the free 2.0.3 version. If you can beat my high score of 15 minutes, 34 seconds alive, I will let you have the keys to my house.

Windowkill is available on itch.io.

Dead Seater

In the Autumn of 2023, Zeekerss made a convincing case for the next frontier in multiplayer games with Lethal Company. Lethal Company is a cooperative farce of damned industrial facilities and ruthless quotas. Dead Seater, from 2021, is another Zeekerss special. It stands under its own power as a cavalcade of panic-inducing nighttime encounters, but it's also a treat for the video game historian. You can see how this developer had already cultivated so many of the stylistic trademarks from Lethal Company two and a half years earlier.

Dead Seater has that violent, accelerated animation and hapless fools running into danger torso-first. It's also got the brown-grey colour mush you love, the objective of collecting valuable items in dark places, even the metal shelving from Lethal Company's storage rooms. Sorry, I should go back and tell you what you're doing in this game: You're returning to your childhood home and sprucing the place up before Daddy gets here. Most of the play involves feeling around the house with the power off, all the while fumbling with a fixed camera and tank controls. It's the Resident Evil 1 interface, but in that game, slamming into walls and then rotating like a corkscrew undercut the horror. But put it alongside Dead Seater's headless chicken animations, and you get comedy gold.

The protagonist has an almost featureless face, and there's barely a shred of decoration in the house. However, the material the shack is made out of is painted with a Bob Ross degree of care. The message is that this place isn't humanising, it's not a home, but the material component of it is alive. On that note, there's another trademark of Lethal Company hiding in here, and I won't tell you exactly what it is, but I'll give you this clue: it's not friendly.

Dead Seater is available on Steam and itch.io.

Glitchspace

Glitchspace is another game pushing the envelope regarding what is fixed and what is variable. The platforms and bridges of its minimalist cyberspace are not proportioned or positioned appropriately to get you to the exits, so why not make them be? You can reprogram choice blocks of the environment to change their geometry and motion. Programming can be an undesirable method of interaction in games for a few reasons. One: its complexity can be intimidating. Two: its abstraction can make it unintuitive for the average user. Three: with a verbose enough language, the player has too much power.

The mop for all this mess? Node graphs! It's weird how concepts that are familiar to game devs often go unknown to an enthusiast audience. Node graphs appear in an array of development environments and allow software engineers to wire together different traits and actors to decide the flow of a program. In Glitchspace, you might spawn one module that says "Rotate" and connect it to another that says "Numbers: 90" to rotate a model by 90 degrees. The game also restricts the use of certain modules at certain times, so you're not just turning into a wizard and cheating the levels by creating a long-ass ramp to the exit.

If you've wanted to dip a toe into game programming but not been sure how to start, Glitchspace can put you in touch with some of the basic concepts. It can also get you thinking about a virtual world like a coder does: not as landscapes and people but as vectors, booleans, and the like. That abstraction in your approach is mirrored by the geometric, computerised setting of Glitchspace. It has modernist white skyscrapers with red denoting the objects of focus, reminiscent of Mirror's Edge.

Glitchspace is available on Steam.

I Commissioned Some Bees 0

Hidden object games are boring, right? Right. I mean, wrong. You've just probably never played one with as much panache as I Commissioned Some Bees 0. Where other item hunters have you searching for one or a few sprites in a single scene, studio Follow the Fun is able to fit so many more fluffy little insects into one picture than you'd think possible. It's a long-form easter egg hunt, a day of gold panning where there always seems to be another nugget to shake free of the sand.

The experience also aims to disprove the stereotype that hidden object dives have to be cosy. Drinking from the talents of multiple artists, I Commissioned Some Bees can be spooky, scrawly, mind-expanding, or downright weird, with music to match. Images that would fry the audience's brain with their business in other entertainment manage to find a home in this gentle therapy. This is because it needs drawings that retain depth even after minutes of searching, and by gum, it finds them.

I Commissioned Some Bees 0 is available on Steam.

Portal: Revolution

Portal: Revolution is a mod for, and fan-made sequel to, Portal 2. If you're familiar with the series, you might ask, "Why even bother?". Valve set up the Perpetual Testing Initiative so we'd have community levels until the end of time, minimum. But there's more to Portal than the test chambers: there is skulking through the backstage; there are the glitchy, ponderous acoustics; there are AI of questionable emotional stability. Second Face Software brings it all glooping back into your PC. You get the pure joy of flying out of an orange hole and arcing gracelessly through the air, as well as forty original test chambers that pose "What if" questions the previous two games never did. What if you had to survive even advanced tests without the benefit of both portals? What if destroying a cube let you trigger some beneficial effect in a level rather than resetting the stage? What if trapping a weight between two portals was a method of shelving it while you fussed with buttons and switches?

Revolution doesn't come with a warm welcome, exactly. Some early test chambers are laid out so that key interactables are not visible from all angles. The voice acting is also a little LEGO Movie for my tastes, but this mod is fitted with unique setpieces and fresh mechanics. Fans, breakers, and other remixers mean new chapters come with new perspectives from which to think about the portals. As in most quality puzzles games, the solutions here are often deceptively simple. If you're jumping through a lot of hoops (or portals) to tick off a single step of a level, you're probably doing it wrong. The set design of this jury-rigged Portal 3 gives you dimmer white rooms and the modern Aperture in a degree of dilapidation you've never seen before. Tiles are looser, walls have become trellises for encroaching ivy, and at its most picturesque, Revolution lets you stare through voids in the ceiling into a prepossessing turquoise sky.

Portal Revolution is available on Steam.

___

I've written the edition. Talk about it if you like, and thanks for reading.

This is Springdale, a Cities: Skylines sandbox, as it existed on 2nd March 2036. It's a sprawling hive of commerce and leisure with a population of 135,000 and has all the organs of a functional metropolis: roads, hospitals, shops, universities, and so on. But that population is about to fall precipitously, and all of Springdale's services will grind to an abrupt halt. This city is about to undergo what players call a death wave.

On 6th March, a retail worker, Edward Campbell, posts on social media:

"Who should I call if no one shows up to pick up the dead?"

With a single click, we can trace this complaint back to the northeast corner of a district called Prospect Park. Here, a red icon emblazoned with a skull pulses over a residential block. When someone dies in a Skylines city, a nearby cemetery or crematorium should send out a hearse to pick up the body. The red skull symbol shows that the corpse has sat in situ for days, and it's not the only one. On the other side of Springdale, a cadaver in an apartment goes neglected. In a distant suburb, a dead resident rots for the neighbours to smell. These skulls start spreading like flu in winter, popping up all over the map in areas entirely unconnected to each other.

The basic problem is that while the city's morgues can swallow a lot of bodies at a time, they're not made to dispatch whole convoys of hearses at once. Each crematorium has seven cars in the garage, meaning I don't have enough vehicles to transport corpses on this scale. Soon, every block in the region has a few stinking ex-humans sitting in it. Something invisible is culling the population, and it's getting worse. As black vans fill the streets, the traffic slows to a crawl, which only prolongs the collection of the bodies. I demolish shops and homes and construct more morgues in their place, but the citizens are expiring in surging numbers, and the new funeral homes aren't close to keeping up. Worse, every hearse is another four wheels on the street, clogging the concrete arteries.

As the highways and avenues freeze to a standstill, emergency vehicles fail to reach their destinations, and employees struggle to get to work. The population plummets, and everywhere, from hospitals to shops, wave goodbye to the staff that they'd need to keep their heads above water. It incubates all the societal diseases you'd expect. Without adequate healthcare, more people get sick and die. With fewer firefighters, more residents burn to death. With a dwindling police force, more crime occurs.^[1] As refuse stops getting picked up, we get pandemics. None of the new dead can be removed from the buildings where they died, and a plague of bodies elsewhere only further spreads germs.

The whole supply chain breaks down. This city is meant to import raw materials for industrial workers to process into goods. Those goods should then get sold by shops. But the materials are not delivered to industrial sectors, fewer secondary labourers are arriving at their jobs, goods are not being driven to retail zones, and retail staff are not showing up to stores. The economy enters a debilitating recession at the same time as governmental costs are rising to get more hearses on the roads. As business revenues shrivel, so does the amount of tax collected, meaning there's less to spend on the city, creating a spiral of decay. Soon, my residents are living in the equivalent of a failed state: A sprawl of endless, impoverished apartment blocks filling with dead bodies and no one coming to help.

Illusions in Media

There are almost no wholly accurate simulations in video games. We're accustomed to programs like "Flight Simulator", "Farming Simulator", or "Cult Simulator", and yet, all these pieces of software employ skeuomorphism in the sensory and mechanical modelling of their subject matter. There is a discrepancy between the verbiage and aesthetic experience of the simulator game and the mechanisms and aesthetic experiences of the real tasks they represent. Additionally, the underlying mathematical and logical systems behind these pieces of software do not mirror reality. Games, like films, are powerful illusions, illusions more convincing than teleporting your card into the middle of an apple or having the Statue of Liberty disappear. Games create the impression of whole worlds, characters, and systems through only the sliver of them they depict.

That hallucination is possible because we infer conclusions from limited data. When you hear the sound of the rubbish truck outside your house, you don't go to investigate and learn what a rubbish truck is and the sound it makes all over again. You access your existing memory, and you fill in the blank of the rubbish truck based on the sounds you remember. If you see someone checking their watch and then running quickly down the street, you don't have to speculate much about their motivation for moving so fast. You fill in the blank from previous experience: they're late for something.

We need this inductive reasoning to operate in our day-to-day life. Otherwise, we'd be researching everything from scratch each time we encountered it. Media exploits the assumptions we make based on context clues. Film creators only compose what sits inside the frame. However, the frame's contents and the audio that cohabits with them encourage us to imagine whole universes outside the frame that the creators have not constructed in detail.

If we hear a scream from behind an on-screen door, we imagine a person back there, terrified. For a more detailed example, consider a film scene in which one character shoots another. An actor can use a prop gun to fire blanks towards another actor, and an effects team can then detonate squibs on the target to create the impression of bullet impacts before the target actor falls and remains perfectly still. The impression given is of a gun that can fire live ammunition, a round that soared through the air, and then reactions of force and lead poisoning in the victim's body, which caused death.

Of course, none of those objects or phenomena are real, but we made assumptions about systems and technologies based on observations. The film creators don't need to add any of the above "real" elements to the scene. What matters is the audience's perception. If a technically realistic inclusion in the art does not change that perception, it's superfluous to requirements. Part of the practice of TV, films, radio, and video games is knowing what you do and do not need to show your audience to get the impressions you intend.

Illusions in Games

Video games are a systemic medium, so we cannot just discuss what sights and sounds are perceptible at any one time. Not that video games are just films with mechanics added, but given that most games have us interact with systems, we should pay attention to what games do and don't leave in the systemic frame. What events or mechanisms within our vision suggest which events and mechanisms outside of our view?

If guests come sauntering through our door in PlateUp!, we will assume they travelled from a home, workplace, or place of leisure to get to our restaurant. We imagine they have lives outside of our business that have earned them the capacity to visit our restaurant and that they will take memories of their meal out into the world with them. This is true within the narrative of the game, but in-engine, the guests are spawned just outside the business and will be deleted shortly after leaving.

Or we can look at what a barrel roll in Microsoft Flight Simulator constitutes. The physics for the manoeuvre come across as shockingly real. We can feel a true-to-life sense of momentum, drag, and gravity on the plane as we turn it through 360 degrees of movement. But however realistic the physics of a game feel, they are never immaculate recreations of real-world physics. A complete simulation would require modelling every quantum particle that makes up the world, as well as all the interactions between those particles. It is not only outside of the scope of real-time processing, it's pointless, and is an excellent example of how more realistic systems do not necessarily enrich the user's experience.

The Illusion Dissapates

Of course, no creator is perfect, and time and resources are never unlimited, so the illusion that media presents us sometimes shatters. In the cases when it does, those hidden elements that create the false reality become apparent to the audience. Sometimes, it's those elements coming to the surface that constitute the fourth wall break. Maybe the viewer of our film can see a camera operator in the corner of a mirror. Perhaps the gun is obviously a cheap prop. The reader of a novel might work out that its timeline is broken so that a character would have to be in two places simultaneously. Here, the strings by which the writer is puppetting their characters become visible.

Just as we must analyse the systemic nature of games when looking at the illusions they create, we must keep the same aspect of them in mind when picking apart how their simulations disintegrate. Because illusions are created both through gameplay systems and technological ones, the shattering of illusions can occur through the failure of either. Technologically, maybe our character falls through the ground, or we see polygons z-fighting. But systemically, maybe someone who is meant to be weak acts as a bullet shield, or an entire city spontaneously drops dead.

The Mechanics of the Death Wave

So, what happened to Springdale? We know the city's flaw can't be too few crematoriums or cemeteries. Our increase in neglected bodies happened very suddenly, with no complaints of a lack of deathcare beforehand. Sure enough, if we check the city's analytics, we can see a spike in deaths. Now, there are a lot of things that can cut a Skyliner's life short: Poor sanitation, noxious pollution, an unsafe water supply, meagre medical facilities, and fires are all killers in waiting. But none of the communication from my citizens nor metrics in the UI report those problems with the city before the death wave.

This is very weird because if no plague or fire spontaneously gripped the city, that means tens of thousands of perfectly healthy citizens dropped dead out of nowhere. It gets stranger. If we look at the statistics behind Springdale, we can see this has happened before, multiple times.

The birth rate tises relatively steadily, then suddenly, there is an equivalent sheer drop-off of citizens, and around the same time an influx of citizens in proportional numbers. The menace of it is that every time this reaper, whatever it is, returns, it takes more people than the last time. As the jolts in deaths grow higher on every occasion, so do the spikes in population increase, until now, when deaths finally outweigh births and immigration. That relationship between the population booms and busts is the clue as to what causes the death wave.

Have you worked it out yet? Because I didn't until I started reading the posts of crafty hackers who'd gotten access to the numbers underlying the simulation. I have to give shoutouts to Spec. Tater's thread, The Short Life and Random Death of Cims on the Paradox Forums and to Blake Walsh's guide, Preventing "Not enough workers" and minimising Death Waves, which, more than anything else, formed the basis for my understanding of death waves. The essential piece of information you need is that in the original Skylines, when citizens would immigrate into a residential area, they'd all start at the same age. People generally move into a metropolis that will satisfy their needs. Good public amenities, a place to live, and job opportunities can combine to make your society oh-so enticing for an out-of-towner. Because they'd immigrate at the same age, they'd die at roughly the same age.

That explains the deaths, but not the waves, and why the waves amplify each time. We can, however, explore the causes behind those patterns by looking at how typical player behaviour influences NPC behaviour. Around the dawn of a new city, we're likely to expand it hastily. Building a quiet suburb into a bustling mid-sized town is manageable and unlocks some of those urban essentials like buses, taxis, and plazas. That early growth entails a sudden influx of new residents. Because all these people enter the town simultaneously, they'll die around the same time, so just through the act of expansion, the player is arming a ticking time bomb.

When that bomb goes off, and the population plummets, residential demand rises as homes empty out, and taxes on homes go unpaid without owners in those properties. We may also notice that our population, and likely our economy, are on the decline. So, how can we balloon the citizenry, and how do we usually respond to residential demand? We build more flats and houses. The shelter with the best ratio of nests to price is high-density residential housing, but such housing is more likely to attract young people and is not where citizens generally choose to start families. So, while building skyscrapers for people to live in might bounce your city back to health after a death wave, it doesn't create the conditions in which people might raise the children who would replace them after they die.

Keep in mind that at this point, we don't necessarily know that the reason there's all this residential demand is because of a rush of deaths. We might just be responding to the direct incentives of falling income and population and a rising call to fill housing. But if we're relying on immigrants to fill those empty domiciles and then building whole blocks of shiny new apartments alongside them, we're going to get a bigger population jump than the previous time we expanded our city. So, when the death wave for this generation of immigrants hits down the line, it'll be even more devastating than the last.

If we keep using this same technique of building new housing, especially cheap, low-footprint housing, every time we're low on humans and high on demand, we're going to keep amplifying the death waves. Eventually, a point will come when we can't move new citizens in fast enough to replace the old ones dying off, and the house of cards will topple.

Death Waves as Simulatory Failure

Death waves were a common blight on Skylines games, and part of what makes them interesting is that the player creates and perpetuates these mass extinction events, probably without realising. Why the developers thought citizens should all arrive in their new homes at the same age, we don't know for certain. I'd hazard a guess that the designers biased the systems towards the young so that players would get the most out of all their urbanites. If every alternate citizen out of our intake pipe were a senior, we'd spend more resources taking care of them than we'd get back from their labour. If everyone that enters our apartments comes in as the equivalent of a bright-eyed twenty-year-old, things will go much better for us.

Further, flattening the ages of the immigrants prevents erratic patterns in supply and demand that could make cities unmanageable. If details like whether immigrants will need education, whether they'll add to the city's GDP, or how long they'll be a net drain on resources are pseudo-random, it becomes harder to plan for the future. Ironically, what may be a plan to keep citizens' activity more controllable can make it impossible to work with.

What happened to Springdale was an example of the simulatory failure I talked about in section two. The systems intended to generate an illusion failed. Interrogation into that failure further makes the systems visible, stopping us from suspending our disbelief. We are incentivised towards that interrogation because Cities: Skylines is a game about systems engineering. It is a rough simulation of a city: trains carry passengers to destinations, farms produce food, loans need repayment. Almost everything in the game works, fundamentally, as it does in the real world, and so the game is an exercise of identifying the kind of problems we'd see in the real world (e.g. A lack of demand for products, a district with too little recreational space), and responding with the solutions we'd see in the real world (e.g. Exporting surplus goods, zoning more parks and entertainment districts).

If we could pop the game's hood and see the data that runs it, we'd have a very different view of our city. We'd be able to review the dice rolls and hard maths that underlie what looks, from the air, to be an organic and human series of choices and relations. We'd perceive our city less as a world of cafes and offices, and more as a structure of variables and algorithms. We would also notice all the missing components we'd expect to see in a real city, causing the diegesis to fall away.

The lack of a window into the base logic that drives the systems is, more often than not, no ball and chain on our planning. The underlying logical operations performed by the game's code translate into phenomena we can understand because they correspond to real-world states and events. Those states and events are relayed to us by the UI. Heatmaps highlight where parks are lacking, icons above retailers show where product is backing up, fires appear on the facades of buildings, and so on.

The death wave problem occurred because the game performed corner-cutting logic, resulting in a problem that we couldn't solve through intuition. We couldn't solve it because it didn't emerge from real-world logic and because the UI did not actively express what was going on. Therefore, we had to analyse the problem not as one of a city's population bottoming out but as a software hitch. This is why much of the community research into death waves had to be conducted by spying on the data within the game rather than playing the game as it was shipped. Modders, and eventually the official Skylines team, patched the death waves by making the age at which immigrants arrive in population centres pseudo-random, meaning new arrivals won't later all die at once. The fix was to keep age data as obfuscated as ever but bring the simulation in line with real-world expectations.

This is not the only scenario in which the game does not clearly externalise the information a player needs, but it is the most catastrophic example of it, as well as a highly common one. The logic of immigration and ageing in Cities: Skylines were the mirror that film director missed, the clashing chronology that took the reader out of the moment. Of course, the game's interactive nature makes the simulatory problem manifest very differently than it would in a movie or book. The believability of the world is broken, but the greater casualty is the sense of fairness and control that the game promises.

Lessons Learned

The specific simulatory failure we see in Cities: Skylines teaches us a few different lessons about how this phenomenon often occurs in games specifically and how its knife can be twisted. Firstly, it's useful to note that there would be no issue if all games simulated the real world perfectly, but besides being technologically and developmentally unfeasible, it would often be undesirable from a design standpoint for them to do this. Games simplify how the world works (e.g. A character can put on clothing in a fraction of a second, players can "fast travel" to teleport across the world) to more effectively achieve their aesthetic goals.

That usually means making the game funner and systems easier to understand than the real-world areas of activity they represent. However, by doing so, they violate the concept of simulation. That is permissible if the player is aware of the non-realistic element of the game or if the consequences for not being aware of that element are not significantly negative. However, if the player's success rests on treating the game as a simulation, and they're not aware that the designer may not be running a simulation, that's where trouble starts to arise. To streamline communication and sustain the fiction, the designers only surface the information they believe would be practical for the player to know and which would be emotionally appropriate for the specific game. The developers of Cities: Skylines believed player age to fall outside of that category, so we were left in the dark as to when a death wave was coming or why it was happening.

Secondly, the reason that a death wave is so devastating is because the ageing system is closely connected to a series of other gearboxes that are pivotal in the success or failure of a player. Also, because the ageing system pushes on these other structures with robust force. This will not be the case with every system that undergoes simulatory failure. If a character's face disappears in Assassin's Creed: Unity or their weapons clip into their model in Skyrim, that's not inconsequential from an experiential standpoint. However, it's not like the wider systems of these games are reliant on objects being kept from intersecting or the rendering of faces. Whereas, in Cities: Skylines, everything from the sewage lines to healthcare are leaning on zoning, immigration, and ageing. Therefore, when the player is unable to act in an informed and constructive manner with respect to one pivotal system, it creates a domino effect that fells all of them.

Conclusion

In review, all fiction is fundamentally reliant on simulation. Creators use sensory phenomena that we can perceive to lure us into assumptions about the areas of the world that we can't. Should this sensory level fail to convince us, then we will no longer be able to suspend our disbelief. In video games, this simulation has components of fairness and empowerment and exists on an interactive level. If the systems we interact with do not behave in a logically consistent manner, the metaphorical curtain falls.

Systems sliding out of alignment with our expectations can have dire effects because we rely on seeing real-world elements appear in games as cues for how we should act. The wrong cues can lead us to make catastrophically poor decisions in play without even realising it. In Cities: Skylines, the death wave was triggered by misinformed decisions. We can see that the failure is possible because this is a simulation, because designers hide play-critical information to maintain the simulation, and because the systems these failures occur in are closely related to other key systems in the game. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. In the real world, police are not to crime as firefighters are to fires, but this is the way it works in Cities: Skylines.

Note: The following article contains moderate spoilers for Potion Craft, and mild spoilers for COLDLINE, Runescape, and Terraria.

What Are Information Spaces?

Back when I wrote about COLDINE, I said something is a space if you can exist at a range of positions within it but only move to the points adjacent to your position. What it means for two points to be adjacent is that you can pass directly from one to another without travelling through any intermediary points. When talking about spaces under that definition, I said that phone menus are spaces, but we can also apply this logic to a lot of datasets and diagrams like the colour wheel or the periodic table. In these fields, the regular spatial labels of up/down/left/right or north/south/west/east are accompanied or replaced by new attributes. Moving right along the rows on the periodic table means a higher atomic number, and scanning leftwards means a lower one. On the colour wheel, "redder" and "bluer" become directions. This is how we ended up referring to sRGB and ProPhoto RGB as "colour spaces".

By arranging concepts or entities according to attributes, these information spaces show how those concepts or entities relate to each other. We can map that yellow is a hotter colour than green or that lithium is lighter than beryllium (assuming we're talking about non-isotopes). Information spaces also provide a guide for how we might modify some object or concept to move across the diagram. They indicate that if we add red to our purple, we get pink, or if we add two protons to our indium, we make antimony. Because distances between points are supplanted by other differences (e.g. Atomic numbers or redness), movement across the space is performed by transformations other than conventional travel, such as adding or subtracting particles or mixing in certain pigments.

Potion Craft in Abstract

niceplay's 2022 game, Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator, is about brewing elixirs, draughts, things of this nature. In each phase, a customer requests a potion, and you must mix a product to match. In many games where alchemy is possible, we pour some specific resources in and get some item out. In Runescape, we can craft a Woodcutting Potion with some Clean Avantoe and Timber Fungus. In Terraria, we can rustle up an Invisibility Potion by combining Bottled Water, Blinkroot, and Moonglow.

niceplay supports a wider range of possible routes to potions through a system where it's not fundamentally the ingredients that determine what tonic you'll produce. Instead, it's the essences those ingredients lend the drink; fans of The Witcher will have seen the same idea at work in CD Projekt Red's RPG. In Potion Craft, two variables underlie the mixing system. We're going to call those variables waterness and airness. For each potion, there is a target waterness and airness that the concoction in our cauldron must satisfy.

If my potion's waterness is somewhere between 23 and 30 and its airness is somewhere between -10 and -17, it could add a "healing" property. Or if its waterness is around -40 and its airness is around 35, it will become explosive. I haven't pulled these figures from the real code for the game; they're hypotheticals to demonstrate general principles. I'm calling these quantities waterness and airness because if your potion has a positive air value, it can exhibit traits associated with that element, such as levitation or swiftness. If it's at a positive water value, you get water effects like freeze. A negative air number gives your product an earth attribute like growth, and a negative water number aligns it with the fire element; you can make a potion of light, for example.

There are also failure values that our two variables can hit. In that event, the potion is spoiled, our ingredients are wasted, and the airness and waterness are reset to 0. Within this system, the importance of ingredients is that they allow you to increase or decrease the waterness and airness by certain amounts. Again, I've simplified a little to establish some base knowledge, but we're getting the flavour of the gameplay. Like most systems represented in a highly abstracted manner, the number-adjusting game I've just described isn't very sexy. It's not giving the player much to look at and doesn't conceptualise data in a wrapper that most users can compare to everyday experiences.

Potion Craft in Space

Due to the gap between how the game works and how players are used to processing visual information, they are liable to experience mental strain trying to decode the raw data. If the magic vision modifier is at air 15 and water 20, and the sleep effect is at air -15 and water 30, and our potion is currently at air 5 and water 22, which of these two traits is our potion closer to? It takes some working out. Most designers want audiences to push themselves at least a little but also to be cognisant of what's happening in the game and have some concept of how they could alter the game state to their advantage. niceplay achieves that by representing the information spatially, like the drafters of the colour wheel and periodic table.

On the mixing table for Potion Craft, we stare down at a map. The X-axis on that map represents the waterness of our potion, and the Y-axis represents the airness. A bottle on that map stands in for the air and water values of our potions, and outlines of flasks mark the target range of coordinates to add new traits. So, if our liquid currently has -7 waterness and -19 airness, it will appear at the coordinates -7, -19. If a potion trait requires us to get our mix to 0 waterness and 28 airness, the marker for that trait will appear at coordinates 0, 28. When we add ingredients to the pot, a line extends from our potion bottle, showing the range of coordinates it will move through when we stir our cauldron.

By rendering the data in the same medium that the player experiences the real world (spatially), the developer makes the data readable to the player. If the user understands the game board and their tools, they can then make informed choices about how to affect that board. Creating a spatial representation of the data also implicitly leads to a graphical experience for the player, and that has aesthetic implications. Potion Craft uses the visual metaphor of an old seafaring map in order to respect its themes of spatial representation, anachronism, and discovery. As in our earlier examples, in Potion Craft, we can understand the act of changing some value to be synonymous with moving around a space. The game's interface constitutes an alchemist's periodic table.

Misconceptions

Recognise that information spaces exist whether or not we present their information spatially. Even if Potion Craft didn't spread its numbers out on a map, they would meet our definition of a space. On the flip side, having visual elements represent data across a space does not necessarily mean the graphics stand in for an information space. It's having a set of adjacent information that we can move through rather than just having some information visually encoded or even arranged by a property that makes something a space.

In the management play of Weappy's This is the Police, we see the officers under our command listed across the bottom of the screen in order from highest to lowest professionalism score. Here, we might say there is spatial representation as the ranks of the officers determine their positions in the space. Still, we know the officer cards do not constitute a space in themselves, as there's nothing and no one that could traverse them. What would it mean to "move" from Officer Calhoun to Officer Rocha? Or, in Mortal Kombat 11's Krypt, we can journey around a mausoleum with chests we can open. However, it's not like we can only crack chests adjacent to one we occupy or have occupied, nor does the relative layout of these lootboxes tell us anything about their nature. Therefore, the chests do not comprise a space even if we find them contained in one.

Information Spaces in More Games

It is the norm for games to represent at least some otherwise abstract information spatially; it's not just Potion Craft's idea. We can argue that any game staged across a physical space takes abstract coordinates and presents them spatially. But more than that, any time you have data plotted on a spectrum or graph, you have an information space and a spatial realisation of data. Obviously, health bars or Zoo Tycoon's revenue graph would qualify, but a space doesn't have to be a line or square. So, whenever a game contains a meter, that's a space-based visualisation of figures, even if it's in the form of a radial meter like the stamina gauge in Zelda: Breath of the Wild or the speedometer in Winning Run. It would also apply for one of the radar charts that represent stats in Ragnarok Online or Brain Age.

Under our opening definition, an information space does not have to be numerically-based either. I started this article looking at a phone menu, but also think about tournament ladders or the unlock trees in titles like Monster Hunter: World or Dead by Daylight. Those spaces don't represent one or two numbers in a system. Nonetheless, they have discrete points we can move between, some adjacent and some non-adjacent. And as when I introduced Potion Craft, we can speculate about the alternative. Imagine if Dead by Daylight gave you a list of every perk and, for each one, the abilities you needed to already possess to unlock it: an unthinkable hell. Once again, the power of representing information spatially is that it clarifies the relationship between entities in the information space.

When games present information spatially, it becomes the job of the developer to translate the abstracted data in the information space into the physical representation that is the most legible to the reader: A radar graph to show relative equalities or inequalities between values, an unlock tree to represent progression contingent on reaching previous points in the information space, and so on. The gifted designer can find hugely successful representative schemas that most other people wouldn't consider, like niceplay's cartography expressing attributes of potions.

For the player, the challenge in these systems is in traversing the information space. As in games that use physical spaces, there are goal locations, limitations to the abilities we use to pass through the space, and regions that are punitive to land in. In Potion Craft, points of failure are represented by deadly shoals, while potion effects are desirable land. We might view the bottom of Breath of the Wild's stamina gauge as being like a platformer's spike pit or the far end of Ragnarok Online's strength meter as having similarities with a brick wall.

Conclusion

With that, we come to the end of this brief glance at information spaces and spatial representation of information in games. We reiterated that a space is where you can exist at a range of positions but only move to adjacent points and not non-adjacent ones. We looked at how rendering information spatially, rather than in an abstract style, reduces cognitive load on the player and provides a basis for graphics. We also talked about the spatial representation of information in a variety of forms, from meters to graphs to trees, and how they can integrate with the act of play. Thanks for reading.

Note: This article contains major spoilers for Pikmin 3 and moderate spoilers for Dead Space and Dead Space 2.

Pikmin 1 and 2 are widely considered banner releases for the Nintendo GameCube. That makes it confusing that there was no original Pikmin on Nintendo's follow-up console, the Wii. Shigeru Miyamoto had floated the news of Nintendo working on Pikmin 3 as early as 2008, but it was 2013 by the time it arrived. When it did, it touched down on the virgin surface of the Wii U. I know there are all sorts of complex development reasons that get releases delayed, but it's impossible to imagine a mainline Nintendo console that didn't get a Mario and Zelda, or a handheld that went sans Pokémon. If Nintendo has a profitable series it wants to see on a new platform, it brings the heat. So, we had to conclude that faltering revenues from the first two games were a factor in the lack of a Pikmin for the Wii.

Pikmin in the Charts

In July 2023, Miyamoto explained that the Pikmin franchise has never "exploded" as a money-maker. And 27 months after the release of Pikmin 2, Edge Magazine reported that the combined sales of it and its predecessor only added up to 1.1 million units. Those numbers pale in comparison to the 6.3 million copies of Super Mario Sunshine sold or the 4.6 million Wind Waker discs that found their way into hands worldwide. And for context, the industry considered Wind Waker to have underperformed.

In the 2000s, Pikmin was a new franchise that had not yet made a name for itself. It also wasn't designed to woo fans of any other existing genre because, as we covered in the first article in this series, Pikmin is its own genre. It asked players to learn a foreign control scheme and apply it to high-difficulty problems while trying to freak them out with its creature designs. I suspect that it's only because of Nintendo's seal of quality that Pikmin didn't fade into history as one of those cult relics like Chulip or Seaman. A likely story emerges: the prickliness of Pikmin 1 and 2 hurt it in the quarterly reports, so Pikmin 3 was fitted with a softer tone. It consolidated the two GameCube titles before it but sweetened them for casual and family audiences: the audiences that the Wii and DS threw open the gates to.

Putting the assessment scheme from my last essay back on the whiteboard, there are three key decisions that the Pikmin games make that overwhelmingly define how they play:

1. The number of protagonists.
2. The items you collect.
3. The pikmin you use to collect them.

In Pikmin 1, we were a single character adjuring red, yellow, and blue labourers to salvage spaceship parts. Pikmin 2 had us jack into two humanoids to hoard gleaming treasures, that time with white and purple pikmin in tow. Pikmin 3 is about three explorers using five subspecies of pikmin to pick fruits. Although, they're not the five you knew. We're going to break down what these three changes mean for Nintendo's superstar strategy game.

Autopilot

To dust off one of my old chestnuts, scaling up a system often entails not just adding more components but incorporating new features. In the case that a system allows users to manage some entities, when you increase the number and types of entities, you also need to provide features that empower the operator to better analyse and control them. If you went from asking your player to select between a few different items in their satchel to letting them choose from an inventory of a hundred, options to sort items by categories (like type and level) would be a good idea. If your adventure goes from taking place in a couple of rooms to a labyrinthine mansion, you need to provide players with a map. And so on.

In Pikmin 2, switching characters meant being able to switch control of groups of pikmin instantly, even if there was a whole level in between those parties. However, we could only pilot one pilot at a time, leaving the other idle. The game didn't allow us to tap the full potential of these characters, and that restriction felt unrealistic. Olimar and Louie are otherwise depicted as two individuals with their own agency, so why can't they behave that way during a mission? It's unusual in the context of a series about units that can act outside of your direct control.

Pikmin 3 has 50% more player characters in every bottle, so if it didn't have a method for you to utilise them in parallel, that would be a gross amount of wastage. You'll also notice that the more player characters you add to the game, the less map coverage each new character provides. If you have two avatars, you could split the map into halves, and each character could rule 50% of it, maximum. If you have three characters and they're all optimally spaced out, each only has jurisdiction over a third of the map. You didn't get that much more reach. One way to make those character additions feel more significant is to have the salvagers perform active functions when we're not controlling them. In Pikmin 3, those functions are enabled through the new autopilot.

At any point while playing, we can place a marker on the map, and our character will follow a path to it. The mechanic lets us skip over the errand of manually marching our Pikmin from A to B, leaving active play consisting only of the moments where we're problem-solving and extracting rewards. As technical as this navigational aid sounds on paper, in practice, it's the life of the party. You feel optimally productive when you can get your three astronauts working simultaneously like a well-oiled machine. And there are gleeful surprises where you're dismantling a blockage on a path or laying claim to a pellet only to unexpectedly be told that a transport task completed in the background. Pikmin 3 is idler-adjacent.

As we have more explorers trotting about without supervision, the game has to reduce the number and potency of enemies on the map. You can see why it would have been difficult for Nintendo to implement an autopilot back in 2004 while keeping the series combat-focused. Pikmin 3 is a game of autonomous movement, reduced threat density, and an overhauled battle system. In comparison to its predecessors, it spends more time testing us with scheduling exercises and less time having us fight beasties.

Lock-On

I should elaborate on those changes to the battle system. There are two big ones:

1. You can no longer have pikmin march around you independent of your movement.
2. The free-aiming cursor for throwing pikmin moves too quickly to be precise, but can now lock on.

These handicaps boil away almost every dreg of hand-eye coordination challenge. It might sound like Nintendo dropped the ball here, but I do have some sympathy for their position. Fitting a control scheme to Pikmin 3 sounds simple enough. You need to move your astronauts and throw units in different directions, so why not use the twin-stick shooter template? The left stick would position you, and the right stick would aim your troops. But a complication arises because twin-stick shooters only need you to express the direction in which a bullet should move, whereas, in Pikmin, you also have to mark the distance you want your living bullets to travel.

Pikmin are not meant to fly continuously in one direction when thrown; you are aiming for them to fall near or on top of terrain, an object, or an animal. It takes patience and practice to move your avatar while keeping the pinpoint reticle exactly where you need it. Add the game's trust that you can control the camera and orient your Pikmin while aiming, and you've got a lot to wrap your head around. While Pikmin 1 and 2 got away with forcing the player to manage the coordinates of all these entities at once, you also have to remember it was the early 00s. Releasing in October 2001, Pikmin predated Halo: Combat Evolved, which wrote the book on how a 3D shooter should assign movement and aiming to the controller. But Pikmin 3 arrived in 2013 and with a more pronounced concern for the casual player.

Unfortunately, the lock-on can hinder both the Pikmin tourist and the long-term resident because it's excessively magnetic. I'll press ZR, expecting the cursor to snap to a Bulborb over here, and it'll go and affix itself to a Pellet Posy over there. The Bulborb that thinks it just spotted dinner is still lumbering towards me as I fumble with the stick and shoulder button. The drawback isn't just the imprecision. A shotgun with a wide spread would be imprecise, but you could still probably tell from the reticle the range within which it could fire. But who can tell where the invisible bounds of the Pikmin 3 lock-on begin and end?

I'm giving the game a bit of a hard time. Pikmin 3 has to maintain an extreme distance between camera and characters for it to establish its scale model appearance. Its zoomed-outness also gives us ample information about nearby treasures and threats. That cinematography will impede the casual player's cursor control, whether the designer has the pointer move quickly or slowly. Have it move fast, and the typical player will find it blows past the objects and organisms they try to target; have it move slow, and now it takes ages to cover the length of the screen. Pikmin 3's compromise is a cursor that's a little too slippery to move onto a bug's head in the blink of an eye but that you can get 80% of the way there with an auto-aim that picks up the last 20% for you.

Difficulty

Really, the lock-on doesn't need to alienate hunter-gatherers who've been with the series since 2001. A lot of the arguments we have about where a game should pitch its difficulty are pure sophistry. Designers have known for a long time that people with different skill levels and seeking different levels of challenge are going to be playing the same game. It's why they invented difficulty settings. Granted, having a game fully accommodate a range of players requires more than just turning the AI intelligence or damage numbers up or down, but indulging a diverse player base is possible.

Sadly, Pikmin 3 has no option to disable the lock-on, and even if it did, the whole game is designed around a cursor that moves at Mach 10. There is also no setting that alters the behaviour of the fauna. You need your pikmin to clamp onto hostile wildlife to hurt them. Much of the challenge of previous Pikmins was in knowing when to call back your eco-warriors so they wouldn't get thrown off an enemy and swallowed up; you couldn't get greedy. But with longer windows for attack, Pikmin 3 doesn't have you bringing as much of your attention to the combat. The original version of 3 also lacks difficulty settings. Difficulties were introduced in Pikmin 3 Deluxe, but even in Deluxe, the difficulty knob only increases or decreases enemy health. It doesn't change predators' aggressiveness or intelligence, with the design often confusing making the game more time-consuming for making it tougher.

Fruit

If Pikmin 3 had a constrictive time limit, long battles could cost you, and the game almost has a pressurising limit. Pikmin 1's thirty-day deadline was a double-edged sword. You felt accomplished when you used your limited time on the planet wisely, and the cap added real stakes to every conquest. It also made it so that you could enter your final week on the planet only to find that your playthrough was on a hiding to nowhere and had to be scrapped. Pikmin 2 did away with that problem by removing the time limit, but it also meant that the overworld lacked the tension of the original game's. Sure, you could lose pikmin, but infinite time to grow replacements extended you an effectively infinite workforce.

The third entry in the series vies for a middle ground between the intensity of Pikmin 1 and the reasonableness of Pikmin 2. Where we collect parts in the first game and pilfer treasure in the second, in the third, we forage for fruit, and fruit is expendable. The home planet of the Pikmin 3 astronauts, Koppai, is starving, so they visit Earth to restock their larder. When you deliver fruit to their spaceship, the S.S. Drake, it is broken down into juice, with some foods producing more liquid than others. How fortunate the game's ending is for the people of Koppai depends on how many fruits you collect. The point is not just that more juice means less chance of starvation on Koppai. By collecting the bounty, the explorers also learn organisational strategies that they can use to manage Koppai's economy. But the juice is not a one-trick pony. In addition to being the pass to better endings, it is also your lifeline. You arrive on the planet with 7 bottles, and your foragers drink a little each day. If you run out of sustenance, it's game over.

In concept, the system is smart: You start with a little juice in your cup, and it drains every day. As long as the amount of juice you produce matches the amount your crew drink, you're perpetually dangling above the piranha pit of failure, indefinitely a few drinks from them keeling over. Quantitively, the system is too lenient. Even playing on the Hard difficulty, it's easy to blend more juice than you consume. In the original Pikmin 3, which conforms roughly or exactly (it's hard to tell) to the Hard mode of 3 Deluxe, there is enough total juice on the planet to survive almost 100 days. So, you can build up a buffer of rations so ample that you won't get within an astronomical unit of starving; all the weight is taken off your chest. The Ultra-Spicy difficulty has you guzzling double the drink per day, but that's still about fifty days of food, and a new save system makes it easy to roll back to any previous checkpoint. You can also only unlock Ultra-Spicy after you beat the game on Hard, by which point you've already gotten a lot of practice at the fighting and foraging, and know the location of every kiwi and mango.

It would be one thing if Pikmin 3 was trading cutthroat combat for brutal survival, but players of the first two games are unlikely to find the game taxing in either area. This is fine for the Easy and Normal settings, but it means that the Hard and Ultra-Spicy modes are not catering to their prospective audiences. Systemically, it feels like most of the life in Pikmin 3 is secluded outside the main campaign. The bonus side missions add back that special sauce: the time limit. They can do this without making you suffer long-term for mistakes because that time limit only applies to the next ~ten minutes of play. If you fail out, a doover is just around the corner. The challenge missions make up for a deficiency of pushback elsewhere in the game. However, as you're just competing for a rank in them and no merits in these side-tasks affect the main game, they are not a replacement for a single-player that would reward maximum resourcefulness and coordination.

Creature Design

Depending on when you jumped into the series, your mileage with the enemy design of Pikmin 3 may vary. Like in the Pikmin of the past, some of 3's creepy crawlies look like the last thing you'd want to find at the bottom of your garden. The Pyroclasmic Slooch with its sliding bands of orange and the Quaggled Mireclops with its Pale Man eyes represent new directions for the series while remaining curiously unsettling. Yet, for the first time, some animals are a little more pop-up book, like the Vehemoth Phasbat with its Gruffalo expressions or the Scornet Maestro, which I could almost imagine in Cuphead. It's not a "bad aesthetic"; it's just not Pikmin to me. But it is worth sticking with 3 until the end because its concluding sequence is a feast of horror.

In the final area, The Formidable Oak, we rescue Captain Olimar, who has been kidnapped by a gelatinous shapeshifter called the Plasm Wraith. Every time the Captain tries to escape, this slimeball sedates him and drags him back to the top of the tree. At first, the Wraith, like the Ubermorph from Dead Space, cannot be defeated; only slowed. To do battle with it, we have to heave Olimar away from it, tearing down gates and building bridges until we reach the base of the oak, but the blob is chasing us every step of the way. For most players, confronting the boss is a matter of replaying this section more than once, cutting new shortcuts into the bark on each run before being dragged back to the start by the Plasm, living a miniaturisation of the repetition that had become Olimar's life. The ludonarrative of the area follows from the design of the Plasm Wraith, and the design of the Plasm Wraith is surreal.

Last but not least, let's talk about the pikmin themselves. Outside of the challenge stages, purple and white pikmin have been excommunicated. The two variants Nintendo subbed in, flying and rock pikmin, are fine, but they're no purple or white. As I said last time, the danger in designing fresh pikmin is that every time, you imagine a new hazard and then come up with a colour that overcomes that hazard, so the design becomes cookie-cutter: the red pikmin are fire-proof, the yellow pikmin are shock-proof, and so on. Pikmin 2 added purple, a colour that doesn't resist any one hazard, and so avoids that lackadaisical colour matching, but both of Pikmin 3's new subspecies are assigned a new interactible each. There are stalks in the ground that only flying pikmin can uproot and crystals that only rock pikmin can smash.

The flying and rock subspecies have auxiliary powers, but they don't expand the interactive possibilities to the extent purple and white did. Flying pikmin are pushovers in a fight but can haul items through the air. That makes them uncannily similar to the blue, which are weak in combat but can carry items through water. Rock pikmin can incur extra damage when thrown onto enemies, but it's a pretty blunt ability that also overlaps with red's prodigious attack stat. There's a lot of the colours stepping on each others' toes. And where purple pikmin were perfect for carrying any item, flying only improve on the other characters at reeling in this one type of plant.

Ending

Pikmin 3 goes down too smoothly to feel like you are fending for your life in an alien expanse. It also does not reach the heights of character design we saw in 1 and 2, and flounders in executing its concept for an extendable time limit. But Pikmin also conforms to the pizza rule; even when it's bad Pikmin, it's still pretty good. And while I'd have loved to play a more direct inheritor of the first two games' philosophies, deep down, I know we series veterans got two excellent strategy titles out of this series. It's fair that the general public received a Pikmin made first and foremost for them, and on that mission, Nintendo returned home a hero. Thanks for reading.

Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Pikmin and Pikmin 2.

There are a few details which remain inconsistent between the first three Pikmins yet are vital for the character of each:

1. The number of protagonists.
2. The items you collect.
3. The pikmin you use to collect them.

We're going to deconstruct how Pikmin 2 handles these areas of the ludonarrative. But before we can start talking about sumo wrestler plant men and picking biscuits out of the dirt, we should ask, what's even going on in Pikmin 2?

Return to the Planet of the Pikmin

Pikmin 2's story starts hot on the heels of the original. While Captain Olimar was absent from his job at Hocotate Freight, his employer became mired in debt, and its president sold off his beloved S.S. Dolphin to pay the piper. But Olimar and The President inadvertently discover that a bottlecap from Earth is worth mucho "pokos", the local currency. They hatch a plan for our weary protagonist to return to the Planet of the Pikmin with a copilot, Louie. There, Olimar and Louie will try to scrape together 10,000 pokos' worth of "treasure" and put Hocotate Freight back in the black. You have to feel for the captain here. As soon as he lands home, he's being shipped back to the remote world he came from.

You may already know about Nintendo's nod to the Super Mario games in here: Olimar, the short, stout protagonist, has a name that contains all the letters in "Mario", while Louie, the taller, skinnier one, has the first two syllables of "Luigi" for a name. Olimar describes Louie as quiet and enigmatic, with a keen interest in insects. The two are joined by a newer, shabbier, talking Hocotate Rocket that gives its two pokos on fresh mechanics and other topics, while journal entries and emails peel back the layers of The President, the astronauts, and their families.

We can switch between Olimar and Louie at any time by pressing the Y button, with each of them having the full suite of powers to shepherd the pikmin. This means that you can now split the party to get more jobs done at once, and have one foreman oversee one crew while another does the same or performs more active work with a second group. Character switching allows for a denser volume of activity throughout the in-game day and less time marching around the map wrangling workers, as you now have two pairs of feet to cover a level. This is especially useful at the end of days when any pikmin not in your party or near the onions are eaten alive. Instead of the sun setting on you doing your rounds to return your troops to shelter, you can spend the final hours productive.

This improved capacity for multitasking is counterbalanced by the mental tax of dividing the workforce between the two protagonists. If you send Olimar to one side of a region with a bunch of red pikmin and Louie to the other side with a bunch of blue pikmin, and then find out Louie needs some red Pikmin, it's going to take a long time to make the hand-off. Forethought is everything as we need to harmonise the characters' actions with each other. That mechanical cooperation, along with the increased linguistic communication between Hocotations in this sequel, reflects the nature of your trip. It isn't a freak stranding as in the first game, but a coordinated mission. We could summarise Pikmin 2 as a co-op game where you control both avatars.

In addition to being a second pair of hands, Louie is extra company on the planet, even when he isn't on screen, because you always have to think about what the second commander is doing. He guards against the gnawing loneliness of this home away from home. If only there was actually a need to forage and defend yourself efficiently in the overworld.

The Longview

Pikmin 2 abolishes the original game's 30-day time limit, sanctioning you to plunder the planet to your heart's content. The upside is reduced stress, increased freedom, and the knowledge that you won't plug eight hours into the game only to reach the bad ending. As time is now an infinite resource, the levels also can't mislead you into wasting it collecting non-essential parts.

But if resources are infinite, how can we prove our resourcefulness? You could only finish Pikmin 1 inside 30 days with plenty of planning, decent hand-eye coordination, and a sixth sense for timing, especially if you wanted the bragging rights of 100%ing it. To complete Pikmin was to receive a certification of your organisational and manual skills. But when you can beat Pikmin 2 by wasting daylight and squandering your supplies, finishing it is no proof of exceptional aptitude. It's Resident Evil 7 without the Baker Family or Anno but with unlimited money. If Pikmin 2 introduced an equivalent macro-scale barrier to replace the time limit, that would be one thing, but it does away with such restrictions altogether.

The scrapping of the clock also means that you can never experience the euphoria of being ahead or behind schedule because schedules imply deadlines. In the original entry, if I retrieve 18/30 parts in 14/30 days, I'm being expedient. If I only land 10 parts in 14 days, I'm dragging my feet. But if I have 7,000/10,000 pokos and there are infinite days left, that doesn't say anything about me as a player. Still, there's nothing wrong with having a points threshold as a long-term goal. It reminds me of some of the earliest adventure games. And that number of 10,000 is not a coincidence.

Using a power of ten as the target score allows us to calculate our progress through the game with no sweat. If we were aiming for 7,209 points and had 5,961, who knows what percentage we would be towards the credits. If we have 4,290/10,000 pokos, you don't need a calculator to know we are 42.9% of the way to the finish line. As you would expect for a sequel where the jackpot is 10,000 coins, this game's collection rate is a far cry from its big brother's. Under Pikmin 1's progress curve, you'd collect 0-2 shards of your rocket a day; you were one person dragging jewels and detectors back to camp to glue them together. Pikmin 2 is a frantic gold rush, a mission to locate and grab any treasure not nailed down, and that means a higher influx of valuables.

An increase in the sheer volume of collectables is possible because the juicy goal meat is sliced thinner this time. We're not collecting 30 things; we're collecting 10,000. With a faster throughput of items and a lot of granularity in the scoring, Pikmin 2 can also vary the worth of each collectable without short-shafting you. In the original, collecting an item that turns out to be trivial to the mission gives you a sinking feeling because each expedition takes a large chunk of the clock. In Pikmin 2, if it turns out some tat is only worth 30 pokos, it's fine. There's no time to waste and another trinket will be brought back to the Rocket soon enough, probably one valued higher than the last. We get that compulsive slot machine effect as there's the chance the next reward could always be worth a lot or a little.

You'll notice that in the interim between the first and second game, Pikmin has moved its interest from the items that could be found on Hocotate to those that exist on Earth. The inaugural entry wants us to encounter the biology of our world as foreign, and 2 shares that impulse, while also forcing us to discover the possessions on Earth as if they were alien. Our trash is literally another person's treasure, and there is a whimsical novelty in seeing our guests put names and descriptions to objects they have no context for. A cookie becomes a "Succulent Mattress", and a cat bobblehead is dubbed the "Wiggle Noggin". But it wouldn't be Pikmin if it wasn't bittersweet, and all this human treasure without the humans makes you wonder, where did the people go?

Caves

Like all gold, Pikmin 2's is found in the ground. See, it's not that there's no resistance from this system. It's just that you won't find it on the surface, and it's less top-down. The challenge has burrowed into the Earth, seeped into the soil, and settled there as the game's caves. Jump into one of the rocky holes on the terra firma, and Olimar, Louie, and their current party will plunge into a multi-level dungeon.

In these instances, you do not have access to your full military, only the 100 (or less) pikmin you entered with. If you lose any humanoids in your descent to the bottom floor, you don't have the onions to grow more and will have to do without until you beat the area. That can be a sharp thorn in your side when there are plenty of obstacles you need specific colours of pikmin to neutralise, and you're splitting the crew you take into the cave between five different colours. If, for example, you find yourself in a maze of electrodes with no yellow pikmin at your back, you're going to have to step very gingerly.

In the above world, we lack a measuring stick for our success, but in these trenches, it's returned to us. It comes in the form of the number of remaining Pikmin in our party. Although, that stick burns up at the exit to the dungeon and we have no quantitative target to compare that number against. It's not set in stone that you need to have forty or thirty pikmin by the end of an instance, for example. The spelunking missions capture the uncertainty of diving into a deep, dark hollow because we never know what we will encounter on the next floor or even how many floors there are. But in many of the tunnels, Pikmin 2 crosses over the line from being frictive to being anti-player. You may exit a cave at any time, but if you do that without finding a "geyser", which only exist at the end of caves, or at deep checkpoints in them, you lose all the treasure you've collected.

To say the underground is punishing would be to imply that when bad things happen to you, it's because of something you did wrong, and that can be true, but these stages consider tearing a line through your pikmin as a matter of course. In the final battle of Pikmin 1, Emperor Bulblax can eradicate the better part of your squad in a single lick, but in Pikmin 2, even mid-game enemies in the caves can do the same. Gatling gronks are impervious to strikes from the front and shoot missiles from well off-screen, while decorated cannon larvae spit homing boulders. Some floors pit you against creatures that you must rapidly throw Pikmin onto, but those predators dwell on narrow concourses and may flit about furtively, making it easy to throw Pikmin off the level. The game has spawned me in front of a Bulborb that can gobble down prey at lightning speed and on top of a beetle that can fart out clouds of poison.

The caves also get fixated on pulling pranks on you using their very own whoopie cushions: the bomb rocks. This dynamite has a fuse of a few seconds. I first encountered these explosives when Pikmin 2 dropped them from the ceiling without warning or any signal this could happen. I only had a few seconds to skedaddle and keep my pikmin from being turned to confetti. Then, the game dropped an egg full of nectar from above that initially registered to me as a bomb: a scary bit of misdirection. Next, it dispensed one of these eggs, but when I rallied my soldiers to drink its contents and power up, a bomb rock fell onto them. The game will give you enough time to forget about these grenades, then deploy one again, or rig one above a piece of treasure. It means you can unknowingly walk your workers into the path of danger and get them trapped behind valuables to be blown to smithereens.

I've checked suspect alcoves of caves with Olimar and had no trap sprung on me, but when I sent pikmin in, one triggered without any trouble. There was a floor of one cavern where a rock dropped down, and I avoided it, then it grew legs and skittered towards my minions. I grabbed them and ran, discovering that the whole level was a nest of exploding spider paratroopers. On some floors, I resorted to ditching the pikmin altogether and wailing on enemies with Olimar or Louie's antennae. Does this take forever? Yes. Do the gameplay loops of Pikmin still captivate without the pikmin? No. But if you're attacking with the astronauts, you're not risking their underlings, and unlike the pikmin, Olimar and Louie can be steered away from a monster or bomb rock at the first sign of trouble. I have vivid memories of tumbling down floor after floor of these caves, praying that the next one would be the last. I'm basically like one of those guys who died in army.

It's not above these bunkers to throw you a bone. It can come in the form of nectar, which powers up pikmin, or "candypop buds", which allow you to change the colour of a few of your helpers. If heaven smiles on you, you might find the rare candypop that clones pikmin. These bonuses, as well as buried treasure, are often sequestered in recesses in the rock, sometimes behind a gate you must bust down. The destructible walls prevent you from carting out a fortune under the wildlife's noses. You must have your pikmin stand in place, drilling away at the stone for a while, which you can only do if they won't be subject to assault during their work routine. Although, in the game's final crevice, the Dream Den, these nooks mostly contain nothing. Their reason for existence is to disappoint you.

The final boss, the Titan Dweevil, slumbers on the fourteenth floor of the Dream Den, and weaponises fire, electricity, water, and poison. You must pummel each of its guns with pikmin to detach them from its body and open it up to damage. However, this bug's height and our distant, angled camera mean that it's tough to position yourself so you can latch pikmin onto its thorax. That is, unless you have plenty of the high-flying yellow variant, but you can't know that you need yellows before you've put in all the muscle it takes to get to the fourteenth floor. Additionally, none of the Dweevil's guns have a health bar, and by this point, you probably only have a handful of soldiers, so it's a long grind without a lot of positive feedback. It's not the note anyone would want their game to go out on.

Reset

Gameplay in a Nintendo game doesn't get much spicier than this, and it's an outlier for a studio that had softened from their "Nintendo hard" front in the 80s to welcoming casual and family audiences through the 00s. Pikmin again becomes a laboratory for the company to experiment in without soiling the friendly reputation of their best-selling series. Realistically, I don't think the majority of Pikmin 2 players were going to see the game out without liberal use of the reset button. Less often because they "lost" and more often because if you're leading too few pikmin in a dungeon, your odds of completing it are slim.

The 2001 Pikmin approved of you loading your save to redo subpar runs. With the 2004 Pikmin, the etiquette is more ambiguous. In a dungeon, no menu offers you the option to return to the start of a day. If you want to backtrack, you have to give in to the temptation of the "Reset" switch on the GameCube's bonnet. It feels criminal. We can all see that the option to reload the floor doesn't exist because of a developer decision but because of a feature of the electronics that the studio has no control over. That feeling of deviance in hitting the button is magnified because of the ceremony of getting up and pressing it, and because resetting rerolls which level layout you get.

Then again, if the game's not playing fair, and you give yourself an advantage, isn't that evening the odds instead of cheating them? Some level designs are more beatable than others, so you can "fix" the difficulty by rerolling them. And couldn't we see the legitimate features of a game as developed not just by studios but also hardware manufacturers? Even if they weren't, I don't see how you would prove that the most authentic or "correct" version of a game is the one that the designer made for you and not one that you have added house rules to.

Purple and White

The tunnels aren't all flatulent bugs and aerial bombardments. They're also the only places you can grow the two new pikmin colours: purple and white. A staple of the Pikmin games is having your couriers ferry goods back to your rocket or onions. There is a minimum number of pikmin required to lift each object, and the more carriers you have for a body, the faster you can shift it. The stocky purple subspecies are slower than any other, but on the carry count, one purple pikmin qualifies as ten regular pikmin. Purple pikmin also stun monsters for the itty bittiest amount of time if you can land one directly on top of them. A deft player can kill a relatively robust animal by throwing a chain of purple pikmin onto its back so it doesn't have time to react before its health is depleted. The svelter white pikmin are resistant to poison and hurt predators that eat them. They are nature's silica gel packet.

The designs of these two new colours are refreshing. The most memorable features of the original pikmin are their invulnerabilities to elements: fire, electricity, or water. If the designers were plucking the low-hanging fruit, they'd just make the new pikmin resistant to new hazards: a teal pikmin that resists the cold, a grey pikmin immune to gift card scams, etc. Not content to phone in the play, Nintendo thinks about systems that all colours of pikmin have interacted with identically and sketches new pikmin that can interface with them differently. In the original title, there was a set amount of lifting power and speed that every pikmin had, and one getting eaten was always a loss. No more.

Flipping the mechanics over, consider that if each pikmin was just there for their threat resistance, that would be five different kinds of hazard in the world. It would then follow that all pikmin, old and new, would have a smaller square footage of the planet in which they'd be useful. Even more than yellow or blue (although perhaps not red), the purple and white species are powerful allies in a range of contexts. Not every patch of earth is going to contain water, loose wires, or high ledges, but most screens do have goodies to be hauled off or carnivores to be killed, giving the purple and white space to shine. The purples' multiplied lifting strength is also necessary in the subterranea where dwindling pikmin numbers mean you could otherwise be left with too few magpies to extract your hard-earned treasure.

Berries

If the dungeons leave you feeling in over your head, you will find some comfort in another new mechanic: spiderwort berries. Bring ten spiderwort berries back to the Rocket, and you'll get one spray. Red berries crush into the Ultra-Spicy Spray, which increases your pikmins' attack for a limited time. Purple berries liquify into the Ultra-Bitter Spray, which petrifies enemies temporarily. Again, there's some nice variation here as it's not that both sprays buff your pikmin or debuff your foes; one does the first thing, and one does the second thing.

A lot of the player powers we could dream up would ablate the challenge if they stuck around. However, designers can give us immense abilities while preserving the difficulty balance. They can do this by letting us implement those powers only in the short term. If we have to manually trigger a perk instead of the systems passively applying it for us, it also tests our judgement and gives us the gratification of knowing we matched the right tool to the right job. This is how Pikmin's sprays work. But most fruits of the environments are one-per-customer for a reason. Treasures never respawn, and dead animals and flowers only repopulate overnight. But if you pick all the berries on a plant, a fresh bushel grows in their place immediately. So, the game encourages us to grind the berries. Instead of running around the map, crossing off a lot of different chores, we're just sending the little guys back to the spiderworts every time.

Controls

We do get another leg up, one that involves no monotonous farming. With the D-Pad, we can change which colour pikmin we'll throw when we press A. It's a feature that was sorely missing from the original entry. The directional pad went unused in Pikmin 1, so there's no reason this control couldn't have existed all along. But it's here now and is a vital inclusion now that we have five shades of buddy to organise.

Endings

All of this, the caves, the new Pikmin, the treasure, has to swell towards some kind of ending, or endings. If I tell you that Pikmin 2 has three endings, you might think, "Of course, like Pikmin 1", but in that game, you experienced one of three based on your performance on the planet. This time around, the endings are lined up in a row. When we pay off the 10,000 poko debt, we get a cutscene in which Olimar blasts off on a well-deserved return to his pining family. As the Rocket readies to go to warp, he looks back through the empty passenger seat of his craft to see images of the Pikmin overlayed onto Earth. For him, they are the planet. Then, in a genuinely hilarious physical gag, he double-takes at that empty passenger seat. We forgot Louie! Cut to credits.

After spending this long on a microscopic Earth, we've habituated to it, but the vignettes in the outro make it weird again. They situate Louie in live-action footage of real plants. Once all the names have rolled by, he looks longingly at the sky, probably wondering why his superior left him, and then stares at us, the viewer. I don't like that. To exfiltrate Louie, Olimar has to make his third trip to the planet without a break, this time with The President standing in for his first mate. Even as the game appears to be drawing to a close, there's so much left to do as we unlock a new area with three caves. With ice, grass, water, and autumnal biomes now on our radar, Pikmin 2 presents the seasons as places rather than times. It's under the amber-leaved canopies of the Wistful Wild that we descend to meet the Titan Dweevil and its small arsenal. That's how we get Louie back. He's worth 10 pokos if you were wondering.

In one more creepy twist, the game all but confirms that it was Louie (now insisting on being called the "King of Bugs") that took control of the Dweevil's brain and turned it against Olimar. Perhaps like Olimar in the first game, Louie also adapted to the planet, but through technological superiority rather than physiology. And maybe he wasn't too eager to go home after all. This is effectively a second conclusion to the game, but a third is still available.

Disconnecting Louie from the arachnid doesn't mean we've collected all the treasure. The most irritating task on the road to 100% is acquiring a dumbbell that the characters call the "Doomsday Apparatus", although I prefer the name from the German version of the game: the "Hellmachine". Hellmachine is right because you need 100 purple pikmin to carry it back to base. As you can only grow purples in dungeons, and they can be killed off by attackers in those same instances, you might have to flush yourself through the same caves ad nasuseum to plant 100 bodybuilders.

Ending

The million poko question is whether Pikmin 2 is better or worse than its sensei, and the answer is you can't think about them like that. Pikmin 2 is so self-possessed that some mechanics don't have an equivalent in Pikmin 1 we could compare them against. The sequel is a far more generous helping of everything fans loved about the original: settings, treasures, and enemies. As fondly as Pikmin 1 is remembered, if you tried to release a full-price eight-hour game today, there'd be riots in the streets.

Pikmin 2 is also a much more frustrating foray into Earth's undergrowth, one that, at times, is oppositional to the player's goal of having fun. But it's not that Pikmin 2 makes the predictable game sequel mistake of broadening scale while relaxing quality. This isn't a AAA blockbuster with a bunch of half-baked side-quests thrown in. Despite the unpalatable booby traps and inability to replace lost troops in its dungeons, Pikmin 2 is a game that, rather than just increasing the volume of "content", is thinking about what systems it didn't let you tweak before and how it might give you the keys to manipulate them this time. It's a game that wants to experiment with structure and that gives you a new perspective on your home. And it's a game that, for all its annoying howlers, is hard not to appreciate as an imaginative exercise in design. Thanks for reading.

Note: This article includes major spoilers for Pikmin and Planet of the Apes, and mild spoilers for Alien and Undertale.

Pikmin is a game about evolution. Both evolution as media growing towards new generational competencies and the ape kind. One type of ape is humans, and one human is Shigeru Miyamoto, who, with his work on Pikmin, held a mirror to himself as a seasoned developer. You see a pioneer who's been around the block a few times and is searching for new horizons. After more than twenty years in the industry, Miyamoto was stepping back, assessing what games are and reimagining what they could be, engaging that same creativity that kickstarted his most magnificent series in the first place.

Shigeru Miyamoto

From 1981 to 1983, Miyamoto invented the platforming genre with Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., and Super Mario Bros. Between '83 and '84, Nintendo released Baseball, Golf, Tennis, Devil World, Clu Clu Land, Hogan's Alley, Wild Gunman (NES), Duck Hunt, and Excitebike, and Miyamoto served as designer, director, or producer on every one of them. He also supervised the creation of 1985's Ice Climber, and in 1986, he and Takashi Tezuka lit the torch of modern action-adventure games with The Legend of Zelda. In the afterglow of the NES era, Miyamoto's attention turned away from wholly original creation and towards refining what Nintendo had already lathed. The designer lent his charmed touch to sequels like Earthbound in '94 and Metroid Prime in '02, as well as spin-offs like Mario Party and Mario Golf.

There are non-sequels attached to Miyamoto during and past the 90s. Take a cheeky peep of F-Zero and Pilotwings in 1990, Wave Race in 1992, and Star Fox in 1993. I'm also not trying to denigrate Miyamoto's output during this period or suggest that you can't introduce new concepts and standards to a medium within existing series. World and Sunshine are two of my favourite Mario games, and they're follow-ups. Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time provided a blueprint for 3D character action games that designers base their work on to this day, and they released in 1996 and 1998, respectively. But whatever value you place on newness, there's a lower density of Miyamoto originals after Nintendo found its feet in the console market, and maybe Star Fox aside, the company doesn't find an iconic new first-party series during the SNES and N64 generations. For two decades after Donkey Kong, no other Miyamoto game would be the apotheosis of a new genre either. Such is the prestige of the ape.

But then, around this seam between the 20th and 21st century, Miyamoto took up gardening and more than flowers would bloom in his backyard. One day, the designer sat among the foliage and saw a platoon of ants carrying leaves back to their nest. He imagined what it would be like for the player of a game to be one of those insects, not trying to fill a glass to a target level or dunk on an opponent but cooperating with others, sharing a purpose.^[1] He questioned the mandate that games have to be competitive. It's with this scepticism towards the established rules that Miyamoto would later contribute to the Wii, which asked why the traditional audience for video games is its audience and why our controllers are our controllers. But closer to our mile marker of the year 2000, Miyamoto would knead his ant awakening into Pikmin.

His concepts of uniting players and forgoing competition did not make it to disc. However, an insectoid scale, back garden stomping grounds, and cooperation between natural couriers did all see the light of day in the 2001 stratege-'em-up, Pikmin. Pikmin, like many of Nintendo's other series, follows the beautifully simple logic that if you have an unlikely source of inspiration, you'll get a unique game. Mario stands out because it was reinventing classic American iconography. Zelda is an alternative fantasy game, partly because it came from Miyamoto's childhood rambling around the Kyoto countryside, and Pikmin is individual because no one thought about what it would be like if they were an ant and an astronaut at the same time.

Pikmin's imperilled protagonist is Captain Olimar, a faster-than-light freight haulier from the planet Hocotate who happens to be about an inch tall. During a routine flight, his rocket, the S.S. Dolphin, is hit by an asteroid. He crashes on a planet that is clearly Earth, although is never named as such. His ship is far too damaged to regain flight, the surrounding environment is home to hungry predators, and his air supply will only last him for another thirty days. Oxygen is poisonous to Hocotations, and Olimar presumably breathes some other gas abundant in Hocotate's atmosphere. But for all of his woes, the captain is lucky enough to meet the pikmin, a species of plant-like humanoids that see him as a queen pikmin and do his bidding. Through the avatar of Olimar, we must command these vegetable workers to defeat enemies, break down obstacles, and ultimately, recover all essential parts of the S.S. Dolphin before thirty in-game days elapse.

Mascots

Arguably, Pikmin breaks the golden rule of branding in that it doesn't have a single prolific icon you can associate with the product. Miyamoto's most successful series had travelled the world on the recognisability of their superstars: Mario, Link, and Donkey Kong. It takes a lot of bandwidth to communicate all the features that make up a piece of media, but associate that media with a symbol and communicate that symbol instead, and it becomes faster and easier to transmit the essence of that product. Thereby, more people gain awareness of it.

In Japan, everything from power plants to prefectures have mascots to embody them. It may explain why Japanese companies inundated the gaming space with mascots through the 80s and 90s: Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, Sonic, Mario, Bonk, Toru Iwatani. This place setting caused the West to follow with their own spokesanimals like Crash Bandicoot, Spyro the Dragon, and the alluring Bubsy. Even Solid Snake and Lara Croft are mascots. They serve the same semantic role for their games as Ms. Pac-Man or Banjo, even if they don't have the Pixar eyes. Mascots have made for highly memetic symbols in the past because, as people, we understand and recognise other people easily, at least at a shallow level, and a mascot can humanise a piece of media. Pac-Man is eating humanised, Sonic is speed and edginess humanised. A mascot is a logo you can relate to.

Miyamoto is a master of the instantly recognisable character, and his predilection for protagonist-led games may be a product of his education. While we often speak about the man as if he popped out of an egg in his late 20s, he studied as an artist at the Kanazawa College of Art and joined Nintendo as an artist. But with Pikmin, he doesn't draw Nintendo one main character to slap on the box: they get hundreds. Even Pokémon, with its 151 original animals, had Pikachu. Pikmin does have Captain Olimar at the helm, but the game's not called Olimar. It's called Pikmin.

We could attribute this mascot multiplication to the development team beyond Miyamoto. While I've taken this opportunity to talk about the Mario creator's impact on the series, Pikmin is not The Shigeru Miyamoto Show. Miyamoto produced, but the game had other directors (Shigefumi Hino and Masamichi Abe), another designer (Hiroaki Takenaka), and another writer (Motoi Okamoto). Yet, Miyamoto is still relevant here because a superabundance of title characters was part of the vision he had for the game back in his garden. In media about wide-scale mutual cooperation, bringing one character to the forefront is impossible.

The start of the new millennium marks the end of the golden age of video game mascots. You still get plenty of releases that prominently feature a protagonist in the window, but proportionally, the culture becomes more interested in the worlds and ephemeral aesthetic aspects of titles, and games are less often named for some leading animal. Crash Bandicoot, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Spyro the Dragon are out, GTA III, Fable, and Snake the War Man are in. When even Nintendo is launching a new series without a cuddly individual on the dashboard, you know the idea's gotten somewhat fatigued.

Speaking about that emphasis on worlds, you'll see that the full delight of the pikmin only comes across when you consider them in relation to their environment. Half the fun is how tiny they are. I don't normally discuss manuals in these articles as they were not part of the games themselves, but they did inform the average user's experience with the media. So, it bears mentioning that the Pikmin manual doesn't just instruct you on how to play; it also shows you a scale image of a pikmin and Olimar next to a GameCube disc, controller, and memory card. By using the hardware needed to play the game as points of reference, Nintendo guarantees that the objects they use for size comparison are ones the player will have to hand. Having compared the pikmin to some possessions in the room, it is easy to then imagine them making themselves at home alongside other items you own, running around table legs and peeking out from behind coffee cups. The booklet invites you to "Compare them to ordinary objects around you, if you will". I will.

The game's animations go on to fill out the personalities and physicality of Olimar and the pikmin wonderfully. The movement of these characters confirms that they are lightweight and spry. In the case of Olimar, we also see someone equipped with some nifty future tech whose antenna leaves an afterglow behind him like you've been staring at a lamp. His helpers are visibly attentive but easily startled humanoids who jump to attention at the sound of his whistle and bob along behind him, looking a little lost as their arms flail at their sides. When you relinquish an item to an onion (one of the pikmins' nests), it bounces upwards, making you feel like you've delivered some weighty treasure back to the mothership.

Super Mario 128

To have both an engine and a console that could run a hundred LGSs (Little Guy Simulations) at any one time was proof of the GameCube's technological chops. Every one of the pikmin has to be able to cooperate with each other to calculate paths and traverse terrain. The Pikmin's home console, the GameCube, was earlier codenamed "the Dolphin". During the sixth console generation, Sony and Microsoft had auras of being the companies serious about computing power, while Nintendo was thought to rely more on stylistic charm. However, in terms of raw number-crunching muscle, the Dolphin was no slouch. There is no one measure of hardware capability, and gamers forget that architecture, in addition to the flat speed of parts, is a decisive performance factor. But for what it's worth, the GameCube's CPU ran about 200MHz faster than the PS2's, and by FLOPS, it had 50% more graphical processing power.^[2]

But Nintendo was never going to boast their new hotrod with polygon counts and reflection models alone. That's too wooden for who they are. Their most memorable tech demo in the run-up to the GameCube was at the Space World expo in 2000. There, the developer ran a sandbox in which 128 Marios could be active at the same time, running atop a flat surface, and picking up and throwing objects. The demo operators then deformed and shook the ground, with the Marios imprisoned in the TV physically reacting to these transformations. This demo was titled "Super Mario 128", the name also associated with the sequel to Mario 64. You don't hear about it now, but through the 00s, you couldn't move for rumours and speculation about Super Mario 128.

Yet, by 2007, the game had not materialised, which left many fans climbing the walls. At that year's GDC, Miyamoto revealed that unbeknownst to players, they'd already played Super Mario 128 in the form of Pikmin. Nintendo also smuggled elements of the 128 prototype into Mario Galaxy, but it was Pikmin that directly incorporated 128's platform for hosting over 99 cooperative AIs.^[3] Just as much as any open-world game, Pikmin was a demonstration of accelerating hardware power. And it was using that silicon and cooper not to just slap a layer of paint on dated tropes, but to imagine play that would have been impossible in previous generations.

The Division of Powers

Pikmin had to break the patterns of Miyamoto and Nintendo's character action games because it divests the player abilities from one big guy into 101 small guys. If Olimar encounters a stone wall, he cannot do what Link would and throw a blinking bomb at it. If he's accosted by an enemy, he cannot blast it with a well-timed laser pulse like Fox McCloud. Instead, he's reliant on other animals to do the heavy lifting, and each of those animals contributes only a tiny bit of the task-solving power that one regular game protagonist could. It's as though the lasers and bombs have been cut gossamer thin, and a piece distributed to each pikmin. It is the puny power of each of the plantmen that means we must command a whole hive of them to make an impact.

The need for collective organisation of a group of entities might make Pikmin sound like a real-time strategy game, but Pikmin and RTSs have us use different gloves to drop our units into those DLZs. Compared to a war game, Nintendo's title also has more construction tasks. Channelling the industriousness of the social insect, the pikmin don't just fend off predators. They can unroll bridges, break down walls, and carry parts and organic matter many times larger than them back to base camp. While other games have you complete tasks and then reward you with valuables, the diminutive stature of the pikmin means that collecting valuables is itself a task. It looks like Olimar is once again hauling freight.

Collection

Writers who want to make their storytelling engaging usually need a protagonist who surmounts problems personally meaningful to them. The hero will duel a shogun who threatens to destroy the village they've lived their whole life in, a student will have to pass a test that decides whether they get into a prestigious college, etc. In games, however, it's common for the enemies, locations, or items to have no meaningful relation to the protagonist. Pikmin feels at least a couple of degrees warmer because every milestone item Olimar gathers is a part of his beloved rocket. Appropriate to the tiny scale it takes place on, the primary goal of Pikmin is to build a model spaceship. The game takes the time to showcase every whimsical whirring doodad, from the Omega Stabilizer to the Anti-Dioxin Filter. It can do this because every one is relatively humongous and has to be slowly transported back to the ship.

Because Nintendo gives you thirty items to collect in thirty days, you can quickly calculate whether you are on track to beat the campaign. You compare the number of parts you've salvaged with the number of days elapsed. To win, you must, on average, recover one part per 24 hours. You quickly learn, however, that some chunks of the Dolphin take longer to win back than others, and that the further across the planet you venture, the more time it takes to reclaim metal from the landfill of Earth. So, even if the number of components you have hovers around the number of days you've spent on the Planet of the Pikmin, you're aware of the stressful possibility that you could fall short of your target in the future and be permanently stranded.

That apprehension can turn to anger, though, when you realise that not all systems are essential for your ship, but you can't get a clue as to whether a technology is necessary until you're standing in front of it. At that point, you're more than halfway to collecting the part anyway. It's one more source of encouragement to manipulate the save system to your advantage. I know what you're thinking: that's save scumming, the dark arts, but it's like Pikmin wants you to do it. At the end of every day, the UI gives you the option not to save, implicitly asking if you'd like to roll back your file. The Pause menu also lets you reload your previous save with a few button presses, and as in plenty of Nintendo games, we can clone a save file. As reloading saves lets you travel back in time, a system for save manipulation is welcome in a game where time is a precious resource.

To Pikmin, the save system is not just a management utility but is part of the gameplay as much as the onions that store your units or the whistle that calls them. On the GameCube's hardware proper, you can do with game states what people would be doing in emulators years later. Although, with only three save slots, if there's another person on that same memory card, one of you can't write a backup save. If there are three of you on the same card, no one can. And when Pikmin doesn't give you a crash course on save manipulation, many players were unlikely to work out it was an option at all, leaving them with no respite from the red herring items.

Multitasking

If you want to secure Olimar passage home, and especially if you want to 100% the game, you'll need to master the art of multitasking, which the pikmin are perfect for. To reiterate, Pikmin takes the abilities that, in a character action game, would be housed in a single avatar, and splits them among a population. It would be understandable if you thought that whether you have one character performing a big attack or a hundred characters performing attacks a hundredth as strong, you have the same net amount of labour power. That is not the case, as the quantisation of our abilities, combined with the autonomy of the pikmin, means we can get multiple jobs done at once.

As Metroid Prime's Samus, we might kill a Space Pirate, then sprint along a ledge and shoot open a door at the end, then turn into the Morph Ball and roll into a slot where we can use our bomb to activate a mechanism. This is a linear mode of interacting with a level, but in Pikmin, tasks like these can all be done in parallel because of our ability to split the pack. The game's levels are full of jobs which require continual input over time to complete, like demolishing walls and transporting pellet poseys, so we can leave more than one huddle of pikmin chipping away at a problem unsupervised. The successful Pikmin player is someone who can complete three tasks in the same time it would take a beginner to complete one.

The trade-off is that pikmin require timing and micromanagement to coordinate. Unlike in an RTS, we can't drag a box over these panicky plants to select them and can't teleport anywhere on the map to issue marching orders at that location. The interface believes in nothing less than artisanal, hand-made player direction. We can only gather pikmin on the same screen as our avatar and must lead them to any water we want them to drink. This means that if some of our organisms have opened a path or finished transporting a dead bulborb on the other side of the forest, and we're not there, they sit languishing, unutilised until we can arrive and put them to a new task. To act with efficiency, you must time your routes through the level to arrive as soon as possible after each group of pikmin has finished a job, ready to escort them to the next operation.

While Pikmin is not a straight character action game, Nintendo introduces staples of character action to the strategy biome through these direct interactions between avatar and world, transforming both formats in the process. Via Olimar, Nintendo solved the age-old problem of how to speak to a strategy game with a controller. Try and dump a whole box of base-building and unit actions onto the console, and you'll end up with more unit abilities than buttons to access them through. However, we do know that all the powers in a character action game can be mapped to a controller, so it's possible to make a strategy game for console by having all strategy action ordinated through a player character. Ingenious.

Pikmin as a Shooter

This hands-on coordination persists into the combat. If we want the pikmin to fight an enemy, we can have them crowd around it, but this approach almost always leaves them open to becoming predator chum. Enemies are humungous and don't pull punches; pikmin are tiny and gentle. In a synergistic display of uppies, Olimar can throw pikmin onto enemies' backs to have them dish out pain while staying out of harm's way. By requiring us to catapult projectiles at our targets like a spirited pitcher, Pikmin actually ends up sharing some ideas with shooters. Although, in this regard too, it is determined to be a misfit.

Where most bullets in shooters cut a straight line to a target, the pikmin arc. This curving path means we can land them on the other side of objects in our way, provided that the apex of their arc is higher than the top of the obstacle. It also means that we can select any spot to retrieve our pikmin from, as long as it's within the map's boundaries. We'll want to do that as our bullets are recyclable. The split-second cooldown when throwing these creatures is integral to Pikmin's game feel. One of the most satisfying actions in the play is to maniacally hammer on the A button, flinging troopers towards the sky with all the speed we can muster.

In Pikmin, a bullet that lands on an enemy doesn't just inflict damage and despawn; it continuously damages the animals until they shake them off or we call our rounds back. This dynamic tests our accuracy, but also asks us to regulate an internal clock, as we must get a feel for when a foe will shrug off the pikmin. We must slip into a rhythm where we call our fighters to retreat right before they're scattered and redeploy them immediately. It's left-field mechanics like these that sell Pikmin's fantasy of discovering Earth as an alien world. It's very Planet of the Apes.

Extraterrestrial Earth

Even Pikmin's GUI, blobby and cellular, exists where the minuscule meets the biologically foreign. Hajime Wakai's soundtrack also does its best to trip you out. The track for Impact Site is split into irregular phrases with jolting starts and stops. There's minimal repeating pattern in the melodies, which makes it hard to tell what's coming next. Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which Wakai directed the audio for, also uses sound that pokes its nose in and out of view to mystify. The music for The Distant Spring is shimmering and sleepy, and The Final Trial sounds like a song written to be merry and then shifted into a poisonous minor key. All these tracks follow Pikmin's conviction that what lives down in the undergrowth is creepy, kinda cute, and would happily eat you alive if you were any smaller than a GameCube disc.

Evolution

Given enough time, evolution would make the life on any familiar planet alien. The pikmin themselves are marvels of natural selection and reflect an understanding of the compatibility that develops between animals and their environments. Playing Pikmin 3, skittering about under willow-sized bananas, I began to think about a film series that also embraces evolution: Alien. Alien plays with our expectation to see ourselves at the top of the food chain. Homo sapiens have grown to become the apex predator on Earth. We're so dominant that we don't even have to think about existing within a pecking order.

But chances are there's life on other planets, and if you roll the evolutionary dice often enough, eventually, you're going to land on something more formidable than us, which is what happens in Alien. The crew of the Nostromo find an animal capable of parasitic impregnation with acid for blood and a hearing that borders on ESP. For the first time in a long time, humans become prey. Video games, a medium that has often thrived on great power imbalances, gobbled up this series' tropes with gusto. Yet, parking the apex extraterrestrial within a fair gameplay context has always required some finessing.

The ruthlessness of the Xenomorph or any stand-in for it means it would rip through the typical player character like tissue paper. Series like Dead Space dealt with this by radically tamping down the power of the monster relative to the player, but when you do that, you stop depicting the power dynamic in Alien. No, if you want to retain that power asymmetry, you need to do what Carrion does and make the player the beast, or use the Alien: Isolation method and not try to have the game be about overcoming the enemy. Embrace the imbalance. Pikmin is a more roundabout solution to the disparity: the pikmin sum to make up the Xenomorph. Nintendo gives us creatures that are scarily well-adapted for their environment, but only when they act as a group, so there's no one button you can hit in the game and bite clean through a crewman's head.

With the fragility of the pikmin, you might think of them as nature's bar snack rather than the next stage of Earthling evolution, but they are tremendously strong for their size and multiply like rabbits. Based on subspecies, they can stand unharmed in jets of fire, breathe underwater, and stay insulated against any electrical charge. I can barely do one of those. Victory arrives when we align our pikmins' abilities to the environmental challenges they're adapted to withstand. But like the weapons in Breath of the Wild, the subspecies in Pikmin don't harbour single traits, so the game is not a rote exercise in pattern matching.

Red are inflammable and pack the most wallop. Yellow can not only handle a shock, they fly higher when thrown and can pick up bomb rocks. The amphibious blue have access to more map than any other colour due to how much of it is covered in water, but blue are the colour that folds fastest in a fight. As in Breath of the Wild, the combination of different properties in single play tools means those tools can remain relevant even as environments change. If you are entering The Distant Spring, the game's water area, you could go in with all blue pikmin to scoop up every sunken treasure in its ponds, but when you know the blue pikmin are liable to get thrashed by wollyhops sitting on the shores, you need to figure out how to offset your blues with other colours that can better defend themselves. If yellow pikmin were just shock-proof, you might leave them at home when hiking into fiery caverns, but if they can reach high cliffs in those caves that other pikmin can't, you now need to find an equilibrium between red and yellow alien boys.

Just like I don't normally discuss manuals because they are not part of the game proper, I don't usually discuss marketing, but again, it can be part of the holistic player experience. So, I'll happily tell you that Nintendo's commitment to depicting biological adaptation goes far enough that they had a lifeform genetically engineered to promote Pikmin. Nintendo commissioned Syngenta to breed bacopa cabana, a plant that looks like the bloom at the top of a Pikmin's head. It makes you wonder, if Sony was really so committed to their mascot games, why did they never clone a Gex?

A perpetuity throughout Pikmin is that there are no signs of any animals bigger than about a guinea pig, which raises the possibility that the game may take place in the future and that, over time, life downsized. This has happened on Earth before. There used to be a lot more megafauna on this planet, but for a number of reasons, many of them to do with the impracticality of large bodies in warm climates, the average animal size dropped like a lead weight before humans showed up on the scene. Even now, rising temperatures are shrinking animals as a lower mass means you run cooler. Perhaps when Olimar lives, being the size of a pretzel is just good acclimatisation for the planet's thermodynamics.

The Final Trial

At the very end, Pikmin's expectations for your adaptation outstrip what's possible with Olimar's simple gauntlets and whistle. If you can collect 29 ship parts, a secret area opens up: The Final Trial. Remember, 5 of the 30 Dolphin components are non-essential, so you don't have to beat The Final Trial to complete the game, but you do if you want to 100% it. The jewel of the region is Emperor Bulblax, a remorseless eating machine. For most players, Bulblax is not just the game's most formidable boss; he also constitutes a moral threshold similar to those in Undertale's violence run. His sudden wide-area attacks can wipe out tens of your adorable allies in an instant. So, if you want that perfect score, you probably have to get comfortable with laying waste to the whole pikmin population. The game can let you say goodbye to most of your little buddies at this point because you won't need them after you've finished the last challenge.

But the final boss needn't be this hard, nor require copious sacrifice. There's an intended methodology for playing David to Bulblax's Goliath: You have a yellow pikmin carry a bomb rock over to him, bait him into eating it, and when it blows up, he will slouch into a prone position for a few seconds, allowing you to pile your pikmin (especially the aggressive red ones) onto him. Then, beat a hasty retreat before he can find his feet again. Rinse, repeat.

The operation demands a lot of switching between colours of pikmin, summoning and dismissing. It's not a reasonable ask because you don't have the precision to pinch one colour of pikmin from the bowl at short notice. Your only means of calling them is a selection circle, which quickly expands outwards from your cursor when you press B. If you want to separate your minions into hues, all you can do is command all of them to stand at ease and then beckon the ones you need back to you. But once dismissed, these creatures are sitting ducks for a brute like Bulblax to devour. It leaves sizeable room for improvement.

Endings

Both Pikmin's "best" and "worst" endings trade in the theme of environmental adaptation. If you can't repair Olimar's ship within the thirty days, he collapses, and the pikmin carry him back to an onion. The onion remakes him as a Hocotatian-pikmin hybrid. It's not hard to imagine that he might be permanently moored to the planet by this change. He wouldn't survive in another ecosystem, having irreversibly habituated to this one. This ending must be non-canon throughout the rest of the series, as Olimar arrives back at Hocotate in Pikmin 2 with no red skin or petals. It's an example of the goals of sequelising media and writing conclusive endings for characters clashing.

The basic close sees Olimar salute the pikmin and leave the planet, but if you fully reconstitute his ship, then after he does, his newfound friends attack a nearby bulborb. The implication is that the pikmin have learned to independently defend themselves from their time with Olimar. This is the next stage of their development: not the biological development that takes course over millions of years, but the educational development that allows a sapient species to adapt at the drop of a pin. Command a pikmin to fight, and it will live another day; teach a pikmin to fight, and it will live to its maximum lifespan. There is also a scene in which a colourful range of onions lift off the planet, letting our imagination run wild with what the other pikmin subspecies might be capable of, although most of them will not be included in the coming series.

Ending

Pikmin's originality becomes most apparent when you try to succinctly explain what it is. There are other games that we can convey the gist of with simple genre labels or comparisons to other titles. We pick adjectives like "Roguelikes", "Soulsbornes", or "Sim racers". But which of these names would we apply to Pikmin? It is a strategy game that takes place in real-time, but to describe it as an RTS would be a denial of the avatar-based interfacing and lack of free unit construction. We could stamp it an action-adventure, but then we would lose the pikmin bit of Pikmin. I most commonly hear it compared to Lemmings, but not only does Lemmings not put you in charge of an avatar, it uses a side-on camera, narrower roles for each entity, and ultimately, different goals.

Pikmin is probably closer to 2007's Overlord, but that is more of a traditional fantasy combat game, and not a useful point of reference when explaining Pikmin because it is obscurer. Both the protagonist and minions in Overlord are also less vulnerable, and the player is more directly involved in fights, with the ability to cast spells and buy equipment. Overlord also prominently features a morality system nowhere to be found in Pikmin. Pikmin's nearest neighbour is probably Tinykin, but only by virtue of Tinykin being made as a Pikmin-like. And what about setting and narrative? Pikmin doesn't feature the earthen caves of Lemmings, the grotty medieval burgs of Overlord, or the cozy domesticity of Tinykin. It shares a resemblance with Obsidian's Grounded, another game about being very small and very outdoors. But not only do we then end up with the gameplay comparison problem again; Grounded lacks the otherworldly mystique of Pikmin.

In attempting to prove Pikmin's link to other media, you only end up explaining how self-possessed it is. Pikmin is in a genre of one, and I think that's beautiful. Nintendo, and Miyamoto's games, especially, have a reputation for obstinately adhering to a formula. Not pushing the boat out too far for fear of forcing players into unfamiliar, and therefore, uncomfortable waters. But Pikmin shows a studio and a producer that, even after more than twenty years in the business, still had deep wells of creativity to plumb. Pikmin was a reassurance that after a lifetime of exploring, there were still new planets for Nintendo to explore. It was evolution for the start of a new millennium, and it managed to be so enticingly alien that, even two decades on, there's nothing quite like it. Thanks for reading.

Sources

1. Pikmin Has The Best Origin Story by Yannick LeJacq (November 11, 2014), Kotaku.
2. Hennessy, J.L., Patterson, D.A. (2002). Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, 3rd Edition. Morgan Kaufmann. (p. 481).
3. Feature: Remembering Super Mario 128, The Groundbreaking Masterpiece That Never Really Existed by Damien McFerran (October 3, 2018), Nintendo Life.

All other sources are linked at the relevant points in the article.

I was in two minds about whether to write this. The question of whether Halo Infinite is now a professional, finished game is moot. Of course, it's not; it's Halo Infinite. It's like asking whether the Sun comes out at night now. But that's not why I had misgivings about this blog; what held me back were the precise bumps and scratches that never buff off of Infinite. There's the danger that in regularly surveying a game that is stuck in its ways, I end up with a series of articles that is the same. Am I adding anything to the conversation by repeating that, in Infinite, dead bodies still hang in mid-air? That match wait times continue to be unacceptable? That the multiplayer still can't get the total MMR in the red column to reflect the MMR in the blue column? All these things remain true, but they were true six months ago and six months before that. I'd bet they'll be true six months in the future.

Evidently, though, I did write this article, and I did it because once you push through the familiar, you can see Halo has had another growth spurt since July. The new toys are slim comfort when you can't put them to good use. Wearing some fresh armour or wielding the latest rifle while getting demolished still feels like getting demolished. So, whenever you see me giving a thumbs up to a feature in the updates, remember that it only brightens the game, provided you can find a match where the skill levels are normalised, and I wouldn't hold your breath on that.

Census

In theory, Forge and the deluge of new cosmetics should have caused a population boom, giving the matchmaker more players to pull from and letting it recruit Spartans closer to your weight division. But whether Halo has seen more than a pimple on its population graph depends on where you start measuring. If we check Steam Charts, we can see a steady rise in enrollment numbers through Season 4, and then when Season 5 dawns in October, the player figures increase by 80%, with only a 17% contraction in the following months. This looks like a windfall until you compare the current numbers with the earliest for the game and realise that we have only gone from having about 2.6% of the original population count to about 5%. Even assuming relatively large discrepancies between the Steam and Xbox numbers, it's not enough to level out the seesaws of matches. Halo Infinite is the only game I've seen where the beta was more popular than the final product by orders of magnitude.

Extraction

Those limp player figures are not for a lack of new content. Just this October, 343 reintroduced Halo 4's Extraction. Insiders reported the gametype was almost complete as early as January, but weaknesses with the engine hindered its introduction.^[1] I wouldn't blame you if you don't remember this mode. It's not a million miles from other "capture the points" exercises like Strongholds or Land Grab, but with one crucial difference. In Extraction, you don't need to stand inside an area to claim it. All you need to do is to reach the point and freeze for a few seconds as you activate your team's transmitter. From there, the zone's meter will fill. If it fills to the top, that's a point for your team, but if someone from the other team can run through the same long animation, they "convert" it, undoing your progress and starting the bar over for them.

As you're not bolted to the spot through the whole capture, you and your opponents can play a lot with distance. The closer you are to the point, the easier it is for enemies to find you, but the faster you can respond to attempted conversions. The further you wander, the slower your response time, but the stealthier you can be. Enemies can't wipe your squad by shooting a rocket into a capture circle, and you may be able to hide around the corner near a point, waiting until an opponent tries to assimilate it, then running up and back-smacking them. The tension is in finding the right amount of space between you and the device. Because you only win the point if you fill the meter all the way, you get clutch moments where you defend it just long enough to prevent the enemy from extracting or cry out in exasperation as red manages to skirt over the line.

Weapons and Equipment

The Bandit Evo

Nuanced changes to mechanics are most deeply felt by those fully immersed in them. So, it makes sense that the other subtle addition in Season 5 was a weapon for ranked competition. When the Bandit was unwrapped earlier this year, I pushed back on the characterisation of it as a new DMR. The Bandit and DMR are both steadily paced single-shot rifles. However, the DMR was a mid-long-range scoped weapon, while the Bandit was a roughly mid-range non-scoped firearm. The Bandit also had a mean kickback, whereas the DMR didn't. But the new Bandit Evo told the recoil to take a hike, threw a scope over its shoulder, and ended up a stone's throw from the DMR. It had to both drop the kickback and adopt the scope or be a walking contradiction: the scope makes it a precision weapon, but if it slammed into your chin every time you pulled the trigger, precision would be impossible.

The Evo replaces the BR75 Battle Rifle as the default implement for ranked matches, so let's measure them against each other. You need a sharper aim to kill with the Evo than you did with the BR. The Battle Rifle used a three-shot burst, meaning that even if you missed the first shot, if you corrected your aim as you unloaded, some of your projectiles would connect. But the Evo expels one bullet per button press, so you either line up your shot correctly or you don't. And the window for alignment is thinner when the Battle Rifle has a 2.5x scope, but the Evo only has a 1.6x. Yet, the range on the Evo is longer, and assuming you shoot perfectly, it kills about 20% faster than the Battle Rifle.

So, the Evo is a smaller needle to thread but with potentially higher damage per second, meaning it's made for the esports crowd. The kind of people who have YouTube channels about the Halo multiplayer are giddy about this pseudo-sniper. They see it as sorting the pros from the pretenders, and I feel totally different. Ranked takes the thin slice of gamers that is the Infinite following and subdivides it further to leave you with only the most elite combatants. Give one of those players a boomstick that can kill in two seconds and leave me with a gun that demands refined targeting, and I can't compete. It's annoying getting descoped over and over by someone with faster fingers. And this is coming from a user who ranked well into the Platinum League when the game launched.

I know everyone is hyped about a faster Halo, but one of the things I love about this series is that it often doesn't let one player kill another just because they spotted them first. It gives you time to react to being targeted and the space to dodge or return fire. There's meat to every encounter and the opportunity to reverse your fortunes. When another player can murder you in a couple of seconds, that capacity for response is lost. Sometimes, you're dead as soon as you know you're under attack. With its unforgiving aim, the Bandit Evo also biases itself towards mouse and keyboard players. You have to keep in mind the auto-aim on the gamepad was watered down in this edition. If you know Infinite's UI, you'll be asking, "Why don't you just filter out PC users?" but the menu option to except them is greyed out. It hasn't done anything from the day it was implemented. For what it's worth, if another player quits a ranked game, you can now leave behind them without incurring any punishment, and I like that.

The Repair Field

To pair with our new weapon, we have a new piece of equipment: the Repair Field. This is effectively the Regenerator from Halo 3, and the Regenerator from Halo 3 is good. The bonus here is that it can also put vehicles back together and, like some other gadgets, can be attached to automobiles, so you can create a mobile repair truck. As with other equipment that creates a temporary object, your opponent can benefit from a Repair Field as well as you can, so you have to place it strategically within your territory or keep the enemy team at bay while you heal up.

If you want a vehicle to be fully rejuvenated by a Field on the ground, you need to park it, which leaves it a sitting duck for Skewers and Rockets. But the Field doesn't spawn in enough locations for me to feel well-acquainted with it, and I never end up using it on a vehicle because the chance of encountering a vehicle and holding a Repair Field at the same time, outside of Big Team Battle, are about as good as winning the lottery. I could play Big Team Battle, but then, I could stick my hand on my oven hob. There's a difference between "can do" and "want to do".

Firefight

Background

If epic battles against massing armies are your cup of tea, you'll be interested in the arrival of Firefight. I'd recommend not responding to that interest. Firefight doesn't get an exclusive submenu, so all three of its difficulties were thrown atop the matchmaking stack, pushing other gametypes out of immediate view. But it's the mode itself, more than the buttons to start it, that's the liability. To date, Firefight's most egregious fault was that it left players climbing over each other to crack the skulls of the same AI. You could fire a shot at the head of a Grunt only to find a teammate had done the same milliseconds earlier, letting them steal the kill. You could plug the better part of an AR clip into a Hunter, only to have another Spartan finish it off and, at best, be credited with an assist.

The scramble for points meant that squad members broke off from the pack to bag the tags before anyone else could and would get themselves massacred doing so, docking one of your precious shared lives. There was confusion about whether other players were your allies or your competition, your angles or your devils. And to have your team perform brilliantly was often to have one conqueror cleaning house while the rest of you could do little more than stand and watch. The oldest incarnations of Firefight also had you trying to outplay your team to get control of weapons, like kids fighting over a doll.

I could give Halo 5 a sloppy wet kiss for disgorging unlimited weapons and vehicles while still awarding them meritocratically. As you played 5, you earned perishable cards that could requisition guns and other fun treats in Firefight. So, if you wanted a full squad, all with Rocket Launchers, overkilling Prometheans on sight, you could have that. If you and your friends wanted to touch the heavens with Wasps, soaring over the heads of aliens and firing missiles into their midst, you could have that, too. Mwah! Infinite finds a way to undo the progress of 5 and only stoke the problems of the mode overall.

The New Objective

It's not that 343 hasn't been thinking about how to improve on the mistakes of the past. They picked up on players' anger over allies wasting lives and found a middle ground between retracting penalties for dying and letting your team burn through all its supplies in the first round. If you croak, you'll respawn after a lengthy time delay or when a fellow supersoldier revives you. If all members of your team are dead at the same time, it's game over.

Reviving a player wins both the revived and revivist an Overshield. The shield ensures you can't be picked up to be crushed again immediately and incentivises teammates to get you back in the game when you're knocked down. But as players can be resurrected in mere seconds, 343 has to find a lose condition not based on lives expended. Every lose condition is effectively a failure to fulfil some objective, so here, the studio borrows an objective from another game mode: King of the Hill. In the 2023 Firefight, if you capture three of five hills, you win. If the Banished does, they win.

In addition to solving the lose condition problem, this also allows for rousing comebacks that weren't possible before. In previous Firefights, there was no formal "succeeding" status for foes to occupy, and they weren't winning until they'd won. If your team went from 7 lives to 3 lives, it wasn't so much that the enemy was in the black; there was just less cushioning for you to fall back on. And foes would present a threat, but often not in the immediate, as you had a long fuse to burn through before it was "Game Over".

In Infinite, you can see your foes surge into a hill, and it flash red. You know then and there that if you can't evict them within about a minute, they'll have a point for their team. The design gives an explicit location you don't want the Banished to occupy and quantifiable notches on their collective belt. There is always the possibility of them being a short way from something that's useful to them. When your team respawns and comes galavanting across a road or hill to reclaim a capture point, it's a turning of the tides you didn't get in classic Firefight.

What sort of asshole would have a bone to pick with this more dynamic design? That would be me. See, players are still running ahead to try and snap necks before the next soldier, but this time, when they do, they leave the hill behind to be stolen. It's a time-honoured tradition to have Halo matches where the words "Capture the Flag" appear on the screen, the announcer tells you to "Capture the Flag", a marker appears on the HUD to represent the flag, and teammates proceed to do anything but capture the flag. They don't need any more encouragement to ignore objectives, and being a responsible Firefight player can sometimes consist of loitering in the capture territory alone while your allies go out and have all the fun.

Killing Trouble

When you are staring at the enemy down the barrel of a gun, you probably can't whip out a Pistol and pop a chain of Grunt heads in a row. The ability to do that in times of old was premised on a certain amount of auto-aim that is not present in Infinite. Sometimes, even the ammunition to kill one Grunt can be elusive. The gun racks you saw in ODST and Reach do not make a return, and while the UI does highlight available weapons between rounds, it highlights all of them. It's really difficult to sort through a bunch of outlines of dropped rifles, trying to recognise a power tool, and the game will blithely direct you to empty weapon pads. Your favoured tools might not be available anyway. Historically, this mode left a lot of firepower sitting on the dirt when the dust cleared. Yet, in Infinite, guns ceded by enemies despawn relatively promptly, presumably because the Slipspace Engine can't accommodate many objects in memory. I find myself passing on those exhilarating power weapons because they go light on rounds, and you need to hang onto magazines like they're life preservers.

Rewards

If you can keep chewing through the combos, you might feel short-changed on your reward because the HUD no longer displays your score, and you don't have a points curve to surf. Your revenue does not change based on the ranks of the enemies you defeat. So, if you kill one of the basic, relatively flimsy Elites, you get 25 points. If you despatch a boss Elite with Active Camo, an Energy Sword, and a titanium-strong shield, you also get 25 points.

And there are no score multipliers from skulls. Firefight used to be this pit brawl where, if you could survive the hardships of modifiers like Catch, Tough Luck, and Black Eye, you'd collect a fat stack for defeating even just a few enemies. The mode's principal attraction was that it went big in scale: lots of belligerents, lots of firepower, and lots of points. Those points are a thing of the past. And if you have fond memories of jumping into a Warthog with a pal and forming a deadly duo, you should know that driver assists are now worth 0 score and no medals. Not only do you want players to feel like their rewards are just, but it's Game Design 101 that if you keep giving players the same reward, they become numb to it. Infinite isn't up to Game Design 101 yet.

But okay, we don't just turn to Firefight for short-term rewards, but those that live on past any single match. Previous drops had Firefight challenges to complete and medals to pin on your combat log. Obviously, the ease of netting, say, a killtacular in Firefight compared to PvP, means that 343 can't throw those medals in with your matchmaking service record, but you could have a Firefight-specific medal cabinet. Not that Infinite does. At the end of a match, all your commendations are effectively deleted.

You'll also notice that in previous Halos, you needed more kills to receive a streak medal in Firefight than its equivalent in PvP. It's logical when five kills in Firefight without dying doesn't mean as much as five kills in the Arena. Infinite keeps the same medal requirements across the board, which means that after you've arrived at a forty-kill chain, there are no more streak pips to earn until you die. Your reward for survival is fewer accolades. You also won't find challenges designed for Firefight in Halo Infinite. There are some general challenges that you can progress through by playing Firefight, but others you can't, and the game refuses to clarify which are which.

Maps and Engine

The trailer for this mode advertised nine "Firefight maps" to not be rewarded on, but don't be fooled: these are not new maps. They are a combination of player creations, repurposed Arena grounds, the House of Reckoning from the Campaign, and Deadlock from Big Team Battle. There are generally more Forge settings in the game's hoppers than there were six months ago, and they're never the prettiest environments. You might have expected to see more of 343's original Big Team Battle landscapes in Firefight, especially because that's where you get behind the wheel of the most earth-shattering vehicles. The Scorpions and Banshees were a rush to unleash on invaders in Halo 5.

It's possible the big team battlegrounds are too big for players to journey across expediently, but I also suspect they represent a performance threshold that Infinite can't surpass. In purely competitive BTB, you have dirty textures and choppy vehicle animations, so I doubt that these sandboxes could host Phantoms full of enemies and remain stable. Even some maps designed for 4 vs. 4 matches, like Critical Dewpoint, have choking framerates, and while Firefight was nowhere near as rickety at launch as, say, Last Spartan Standing, it's subject to that perennial Infinite jank. You don't get points for killing the Phantom gunner, there's a gap between getting the final point and the match concluding that throws off the pacing, I've seen enemies slide out of a dropship without animating, etc.

Chances are the stuttering technicalities and long lead time to splice in features are consequences of an engine that wasn't engineered enough. This would be why 343 wants to adapt Infinite to Unreal, although there's no word on how that's going.^[1] Firefight's exceptional reputation in previous Halo games was well-deserved; it's a shame to see it in this ramshackle state. I can't give you a reason to play Infinite's Firefight when the Master Chief Collection's is sitting right there.

I think the community can be too quick to forward the MCC as an alternative to Infinite. They're not the same thing: the most recent Halo is faster, lighter, and looser, with a cut-back weapon cabinet. But they are both Halo, and there's less of a difference between the Firefights than there is between the Arenas. Your Spartan opponents in Infinite are flightier than those in the earlier entries and have different weapons and equipment than were available to them from 5 backwards. Your Banished opponents carry a few new armaments, but many are still rocking Plasma Pistols and Needlers, and a Grunt is still a Grunt, a Brute is still a Brute. So, why not just fight Grunts and Brutes in ODST or Reach, where challenges are tailored for it, and reward is proportional to effort?

Forge

Even Infinite's Forge is in partial competition with Firefight, as players can now architect pseudo-Campaign missions by placing enemies in maps. You can go as far as writing the AI's logic in node graphs. And there are hundreds more models to place in the environments. The Forge maps might not be the most lustrous gems in the window, but 343 is much better at giving players the tools to build battles than they are at making their own. This could be because new maps and modes require the studio to develop the base assets and then the structure around them. Whereas, Forge updates usually involve only shipping the player the assets or building a structure around those that already exist in the Campaign.

Cosmetics

Forge, Firefight, the Bandit Evo, and the Repair Field are all produce of either Season 5 or the annual Christmas update. The cosmetics from the fifth season are an extrapolation of those from the fourth season, and I appreciate the continuity. Where the armour from the "Infection" Battle Pass were hazmat suits that sealed out the Flood, the "Reckoning's" body horror items suggest you've lost the struggle. Cosmetics run from a patch of rotten flesh covering your knee to a swollen biomass that subsumes your entire form. They are refreshing because, unlike previous pieces, they are organic, not synthetic, and can redraw your Spartan's silhouette.

There are also changes to the Battle Pass as a value proposition, which get a little into the weeds, but the headline is that Battle Passes now compress the same unlocks that you would have gotten in 100 tiers into 50 tiers. It's only sensible when people aren't spending the amount of time in the game 343 expected them to be. You're also, for the first time, unlocking helmets that screw onto any "rig". But most armour pieces still aren't outfit agnostic, and it's still not like you can skin any of the non-UNSC guns.

Miscellanea

In the last few months, 343 has been further let down from the outside. The Xbox 360 Halos let you store screenshots on their native servers. The Halos on the One, Series S, and Series X don't, but what's the harm? You can save captures permanently on the Xbox servers. Or you could until Microsoft started deleting every screenshot or video older than 90 days. It's a stinging insult to all the fans who create and share media on the service.

It might just be me, but I've also run into more hate speech and high-latency matches recently. I saw a user with a slur written in their name in plaintext that the filter didn't catch. One had an explicitly racist gamertag, and when I reported them to Microsoft, I was told they didn't warrant moderation. There's also nowhere you can view your reports and their status. As for the ping, I want to reiterate that connections are lightyears ahead of where they were during the game's first year, but networking improvement is ongoing.

Conclusion

I hope you don't think I'm ragging on Halo Infinite for the sake of it. I've praised the game in previous blogs, and even in the last six months, there were bright spots. But where other studios started with nothing and had to graft for every fan they made, Infinite was a game that launched with a city worth of people ready to play just based on the Halo name. It then squandered every bit of that goodwill until only a tiny coterie within the fandom remained. So far, Season 4 has been the high point for the shooter, and that was a broken, unfinished warping of what Halo should be. Since then, it's all been downhill. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Microsoft Studio Behind Halo Faces a Reboot on Years of Turmoil by Jason Schreier (January 31, 2023), Bloomberg.

All other sources linked at relevant points in article.