Hardhat Wombat – Fixed in Post(-game)

Abandon all self-seriousness, ye who enter here. Hardhat Wombat is all in on the cube-shaped poop of its eponymous critter. Yes, the platformer/puzzle gameplay revolves around eating different materials and "processing" them into the building blocks needed for your construction projects. Expect many a fart sound and poo pun. BUT (a big "but," I'll admit) underneath the premise's inherent juvenility and a ho-hum campaign, there's an ingenious puzzle game that defies convention and delivers a surprisingly deep mechanical experience.

A guiding ethos of modern puzzle design is that the time spent between solving a puzzle mentally and translating that solution through gameplay should be as minimal as possible. Hardhat Wombat is anomalous in that the solutions are already provided for you—translating the solution through gameplay is the entire conceit. In fact the puzzle isn't really the end product, but instead the steps taken to get there.

You're provided a "blueprint" of your end goal, as seen above.

That understanding informs the rest of the game's design. The "solutions"—overlaid on the background of each level—are deliberately open-ended, allowing for numerous means of achieving them. You can only carry ten blocks at a time, so you'll have to refill your reserves constantly by walking back to the edges of the level. The blocks themselves and their properties vary, with the ice block melting after a short while, the bubble gum block floating away if unimpeded, and the egg block cracking if stepped on (to name a few). All of these elements are designed not to empower the player, but to hinder them.

These refill lunchboxes are relegated to the sides of levels,
creating the aforementioned back-and-forth loop.

And those hindrances, no matter how intentional, make for a tiresome campaign. It gets in your way but doesn't demand anything from you. Its self-explanatory puzzles, limited resources, and lack of a time limit leave little to challenge, thrill, or entice.

Unchallenged, unthrilled, and unenticed, I decided after about 15 minutes that Hardhat Wombat was audiobook fodder. With my attention diverted, I brute-forced my way through each and every level, maintaining a meandering pace that allowed for lots of listening and minimal thinking; after all, the game's expectations of me were so lax that reaching the end was a question of time, rather than ability.

I was woefully unprepared for what awaited me…

Hardhat Wombat's post-game turns up the heat by measuring your ability *against* time. It's a simple change (time trials aren't revolutionary), but one that recontextualizes everything that made the campaign so dull. You must now make on-the-fly assessments of each random level: determining the fastest route to translate the solution, calculating how few trips you can get away with to place the requisite blocks, and ensuring that you haven't boxed yourself in. All of those considerations are present in the campaign but given no weight—the principles of play don't change in the post-game, but the metric of success does.

Note the timer in the upper left corner (please).

And it's a ton of fun! Under the threat of the clock (and the promise of leaderboards), Hardhat Wombat's economy of time and movement becomes challenging, thinky, and addictive. The random selection of hand-crafted levels is reminiscent of Spelunky,* in that skill expression isn't through the performance of a routine but through the intimate understanding of systems and their interactions.

I continue to enjoy Hardhat Wombat, and I foresee the daily time trial becoming a quick, go-to brain tickler. But the fact that the best content—daily time trial included—is locked behind a tedious campaign (that doesn't even prepare you for the post-game!) makes the experience a tough one to recommend.

*Andy Hull was a programmer for both Hardhat Wombat and Spelunky HD, interestingly enough.

Fatal Frame – I Am Miku, Miku Is Me

Since entering the third dimension, the survival horror genre has tried time and again to answer one critical question: what should be done with the camera? Fatal Frame—in which you, Miku Hinasaki, explore a haunted mansion in search of your brother—responds by equipping the protagonist with a diegetic camera, allowing for a perspective shift that marries the game's mechanical ambitions with the genre's narrative conventions.

With regards to the non-diegetic camera, Fatal Frame locks the player's perspective to fixed angles; move to the boundaries of the current view, and the perspective will shift. This camera system preserves a tension in every room, an air of mystery in that an enemy can be out of view without necessarily being out of reach. The genius of Fatal Frame, then, is that using the diegetic camera changes your perspective to a first-person view, piercing through the aforementioned mystery and recontextualizing the game's combat encounters.

Fatal Frame uses Shintoism to anchor its horror in the real world,
much like Resident Evil uses Big Pharma.

And of combat encounters—which pit you and your Kodak* against the mansion's spirits—, there are plenty. Resident Evil, the survival horror game to popularize the genre, locked zombies to certain hallways and rooms with the expectation that players would easily outrun their languid shambling. That's not as viable an option in Fatal Frame. Ghosts, true to their incorporeal form, will chase you through walls, forcing you to at some point stand your ground and take some pics.

Yet the controls don't make that an easy task. Sure, you use the left stick to walk around, like in every other game. But when you enter first-person view with your camera, it's now the right stick that controls character movement, while the left stick allows you to adjust your shot. 

In practice, you are switching between perspectives and sticks constantly: coming to a halt to plant your feet and pull out your camera (move with left), getting in a few snaps of the specter while repositioning as needed (move with right), and running away before rinsing and repeating (move with left).

I couldn't center the late-game ghosts and take a screenshot simultaneously
(they're so fast!), so here's the first ghost encounter of the game.

It's unwieldy, at first, and counterintuitive to decades-old gaming habits. But looking past the unconventionality, it's remarkable as mechanical and narrative cohesion made manifest—the player's insecurities mirror the protagonist's!

You've seen the movie: after faltering in her early encounters with The Big Bad, The Final Girl regains her confidence, steels her nerves, and takes the villain down in a cathartic display of badassery. And that's the progression curve of Fatal Frame for both the player and the protagonist—short bursts of awkward, counterintuitive controls and perspective shifts make early encounters more harrowing, but they give way to a sense of mastery (or at least competence) by the end of a six-hour playthrough.

By demanding that you see through Miku's eyes, the game molds you BOTH into The Final Girl.

That Miku is a civilian normie (unlike Resident Evil's Jill Valentine, e.g.)
further bolsters the arc of The Final Girl.

I was blown away by Fatal Frame; I haven't even touched on its best-in-class level design or layered storytelling (delivered with as much camp as possible, of course). But those features only enhance a fundamentally sound experience that understands the survival horror genre on both a mechanical and narrative level.

What should be done with the camera? Fatal Frame answers this perennial question by distinguishing between fixed and first-person perspectives, the effect of which is mirrored, Final Girl-esque progression curves for both the player and Miku alike. Over 20 years later, it's a solution that remains as fresh as ever.

*It's not actually a Kodak; I just got tired of the word "camera." Here's an interesting (if dubious) developer interview that discusses the aesthetic inspirations for the diegetic camera.

Persona 5 Royal – Impoverish Me, Atlus!

It's a quintessential high school predicament: with the first taste of financial independence still fresh on your tongue and a part-time paycheck burning a hole in your pocket, you have to choose whether to go out with friends or to put the cash towards The Big Purchase. As with everything in high school, the stakes of this choice are life and death.

How strange, then, that in Persona 5, money is meaningless. No stakes to be found. Coins rain from enemies like candy from a piñata. Items that exist exclusively for resale are littered throughout every dungeon. For being a game of two (supposedly) complementary halves—a high school life sim and a dungeon crawler—, the economic nuances of the former are flattened by the latter at every turn.

A low-level mook halfway through Mementos yields over ¥2600.
An untold number can be farmed in a given afternoon.

I say "flattened" because instead of merging the shared design language of both genres, Persona 5 stacks them one on top of the other. Why do dungeon enemies drop money when there are part-time jobs to be had? Why do dungeon chests contain gear and equipment when there are stores selling clothes and accessories? Similar overlaps are found everywhere.

But these overlaps do not mean that both halves are given equal weight—the free-form structure of the life sim (where you define your goals) means that it is forever secondary to the dungeon crawler (where the game defines your goals). You do not *have* to work a part-time job. You *have* to fight enemies in the dungeons. They both reward comparable sums of yen. Guess which one, across 100+ hours, will eventually fall by the wayside?

A part-time job occupies a full afternoon and yields ¥3500.
And they wonder why nobody wants to work anymore.  

There are simply too many sources of money, to the point that opportunity cost (once integral to the series and still integral to the real-life high school experience) is all but non-existent. You can have it all. And it feels hollow.

So Atlus, here's some advice for reinforcing the high school role-playing fantasy in the inevitable Persona 5 Remake*—isolate the life sim's economy. Make me show up to work on a weekend. Make me wince when I shell out for new equipment. Make me miss my date with Sumire (the best girl, tee hee) because I can't afford to take the subway. Atlus, bust my balls so that the paychecks feel more substantial, the upgrades more tangible, and the social links more meaningful—so that pissing away disposable income is once again a matter of life and death.

...

...

...

...Video games as escapism, you say?!? 

Preposterous.

*Persona 5: Repeat Offender

Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil – Not a Sundae, Just Neapolitan Ice Cream

Instead of offering isolated "Easy" or "Hard" modes, platformers both 2D and 3D alike tend to provide complementing, simultaneous flavors of challenge: think vanilla and chocolate. The level geometry and enemy placement? Vanilla. The extra lives and hard-to-reach collectibles? Chocolate.

Challenge, as standardized within the genre, is often relegated to these two flavors. We like them. We feel comfortable with them. And why shouldn't we? They're classics for a reason. But because of their established popularity, the design language for platformers has stagnated. Innovation now comes from outside the genre. ("Bro, check out my platformer that's part shmup, part dating sim.") Enter Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil, which pushes the genre forward not with superfluous toppings, but by adding a third flavor of ice cream to complement its well-rounded foundation of vanilla and chocolate.

And that foundation? Klonoa can grab and throw enemies to jump higher, organically integrating them into the level design. That's the vanilla. Scattered across each level are six collectibles that follow the genre's tried-and-true formula: you complete a small platforming challenge to nab them, and nabbing them all unlocks a bonus stage. That's the chocolate. The vanilla is required, but you can opt for the chocolate anytime you're ready to broaden your palette. Both flavors are scaled thoughtfully over the course of the game and are backed by clever stage motifs.

A Stalingrad-inspired stage motif? Your move, Mario.

So Klonoa 2 does the classics well. Great. But where is the fabled third flavor? 

It's found in the 150 gems (to Klonoa as coins are to Mario) placed deliberately in each level. Their contribution to the experience is deceptively simple: they add another layer of opt-in difficulty by stretching those bite-sized platforming challenges across longer sections of the stage—they test stamina (not unlike arcade games!). 

Klonoa 2's many autoscrollers benefit the most from the additional flavor in that they naturally encourage you to route and master your path. But mastery isn't the only reason to go for all 150 gems; collecting them earns you a picture in the in-game scrapbook. It's an innocuous incentive that rewards skilled play without locking away bona fide "content" (e.g., the Stars/Shines in 3D Mario's 100 Coin Challenges).

Klonoa 2 is conspicuously absent from Wikipedia's "List of snowboarding video games"

So many other platformers are preoccupied with making sundaes out of their vanilla and chocolate ice cream—adding varied game modes, combat and progression systems, etc. And sometimes a sundae hits the spot! But the platformer genre has always been a simple one, and Klonoa 2—by repurposing the existing design language of coins—elegantly maintains that simplicity. Its new flavor of challenge isn't a topping. It's just more, simple ice cream. It's strawberry. And with three layers of difficulty to choose from, I'd gladly take the bowl of Neapolitan that is Klonoa 2 any day of the week.

Logic Bombs – O Come, All Ye Faithful

Logic Bombs—a puzzle game from Matthewmatosis (of YouTube fame) that mixes Nonagrams with Bomberman—wears its old-school sensibilities on its sleeve, flaunting a "purity" of design that could easily be labeled as snobby or pretentious. As evidence, I present to you a line pulled straight from the game's Steam Page:

"No Nonsense: There are no secrets, meta puzzles, or other distractions.
Focus on what's logical."

Any and all extrinsic motivation falls under these umbrellas of "nonsense" and "distraction." There are no achievements. In just one of its 160 panels, the game teases the existence of another solution but refuses to reward its discovery. That the bombs explode when you solve a puzzle feels like a compromise of the game's proudly austere design. Get intrinsically motivated or get out, nerd.

The panel in question.

Why make such a pen and paper-adjacent experience—without a rewind feature, an undo button, or even music—a video game? I don't know. Contempt, maybe? Using the hint system is sacrilege to puzzle purists, so even its inclusion feels like a critique of the modern gamer. "Oh, you blasted a hole through the mountain instead of cresting its peak? Enjoy slogging through the next self-imposed obstacle in your backlog as you turn your hobby into another job."

Logic Bombs exists not to baptize new fans of the puzzle genre, but to massage the egos of the faithful. And to that end it's pretty successful, if a little insufferable.