I think I’ll take a break from FFIX and play this instead.
This game seems so large! I’ve spent tons of time on it and I feel like it’s only started.
Maybe I should play Sting instead. It’s been on my list for a while.
Enjoying all the replies!
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Grooverland by Mathbrush, although that was partly research to see what a winning IFComp game is like. Besides that, AMFV, which I’m still only a little ways into.
A more important topic:
Last, really? I’ve been playing Zachtronics games, off and on, for a long time. Hope he releases some other games sometime.
Every play Manufactoria? It’s gone now, since it was Flash, but it was just about the best programming game I’ve ever played. Very similar to Space Chem, etc. An updated game called Manufactoria 2022 is due (Manufactoria 2022 on Steam). Haven’t played the demo yet.
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I also played Quadrilateral Cowboy, which I really enjoyed. Can anyone recommend other scripting/programming/hacking puzzle games in that vein?
My level of knowledge: I don’t know much beyond Sugarcube and Inform 7 and a bit of bash scripting, so I am looking for something fairly basic. Not that all hacking games use programming languages or command prompts, etc., but you get the idea.
I tried to play Spider and Web earlier this year but got badly stuck.
I’m intimidated by pretty much everything I see, especially Uplink.
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Yesss… let’s all play Sting.
Well, when the game was initially announced, the story was that the company (Zachtronics) was shutting down, and the guy (Zach) was quitting game development to teach coding to high-school students. But after a few more rounds of interviews, it eventuated that he’d actually already done a year of the teaching gig, decided it wasn’t actually for him, and he’d be returning to game development, though the company is still 100% done. So Zach will be making more games, and presumably they’ll be Zach-like, but without the artists and others who made the games so distinctive they might not technically be Zachlikes (thus the marketing).
Oh, interesting, will need to check that out!
…actually, since we’re talking about Zachlikes on an IF forum, everybody knows about Language Arts, right? It was entered into the 2019 IF Comp, where the bemused judges understandably put it in 47th place, but it’s an amazingly well-done independent Zachlike, where you write rules to rearrange letter-tiles to “edit” documents – like, to implement a spell-checker that catches i-before-e rules, or switch British to American spellings, though it gets way more complex than that. It’s super fun (and even has a cool retro-Mac interface), and at 5ish hours way less of a commitment than a standard Zachlike. Highly, highly recommended.
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Well, the Zachlikes we’ve been talking about are programming games, with a range on the intimidation scale that goes from “cute rotator arms do alchemy” to “literally assembly language”, but they’re all straight puzzle games so wouldn’t be that similar to Quadrilateral Cowboy.
If you’re looking at Uplink but find it intimidating, Hacknet is a more recent, gentler take on the same idea. If you’re looking for something that’s got the coding embedded in an adventure context, like QC, I’ve heard Else Heart.Break() is quite good though I haven’t played it myself. And I feel like there’s another game in this vein, like an RPG where you can zip to the code layer and mess around with enemies’ properties and stuff like that, but I don’t remember what it’s called and Googling and Steam searches aren’t turning it up, so that’s not very helpful.
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@DeusIrae Else Heart.Break() looks user- (player?) friendly, the adventure aspect helps.
This reminds me that I got through quite a bit of Baba is You. Not having to do every single puzzle helps make it less of a threat, not sure if that applies here.
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The Magic Circle maybe? I didn’t like it much though.
No, I seem to recall it was a traditional, top-down fantasy RPG in presentation, and you could do stuff like set a particular enemy to be vulnerable to fire, or put their max HP down to 1… but I’ve spent fifteen minutes trying to find it to no avail, so there is an alarming possibility I’m just suffering from the Shazaam effect here.
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Just finished Aura: Fate of the Ages, the audio puzzles were exhausting 
but the visual ones were good, so i’ll pick the sequel next. It’s fun to play Mystlikes from before they went full 3D, the navigation is so easy because the devs had a viewpoint budget.
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Played (read/watched) Saving Maggie (interactive comic from 2018) and T’was The Devil (interactive film from 2021). Enjoyed both, but in general I enjoy interactive comics more than films.
Also, regularly playing Telehack - a mud-like simulation of 1980s and early 1990s Internet with BBSes, usenet and simulated hacking. Lots of text games and files distributed over 26000 simulated hosts.
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Between this thread and another conversation on Twitter, I have added so many games to my backlog.
must… finish… writing my own game
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Yes. We your testers are all tapping our feet, looking at our watches, and waiting for the next version. The penalty for not finishing it for IFComp will be a stern look and a heavy sigh. And nobody wants that.
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I’ve scarcely had any playing time in the last three years while writing my own game in small pockets of free time (or very late nights) between “life”, but a couple of times in those 3 years I forced myself to take a couple weeks off game making to let the soil in my mind rest. Last played Thaumistry, and before that Counterfeit Monkey. Both well done, and of course CM has an ingenious mechanic, but I find I get more drawn into games that are either pure fantasy or historical before the industrial revolution…
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No, that I played straight through. It’s very well executed. Although, the experience showed me that I really know nothing about steering boats or nautical terminology.
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Hack N’ Slash! That’s what I was thinking of. Geez that took a while to find, “8 year old game with generic name” doesn’t make for easy googling (and of course I was thinking “it came out like three, four years ago”). Anyway not sure whether it’s any good either, but apparently it’s a Zelda-alike by Double Fine where when you stab enemies you can reprogram them.
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I have a soft spot for else Heart.Break() although it feels more like a toy than a complete game, or perhaps a sandbox without much of a main quest. I recommend playing it in Swedish if you can. I’m not sure whether it was written in Swedish first and then translated to English, but the Swedish writing is a lot better.
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I’ve not played many games recently, but last week I finished Illuminismo Iniziato. A really fun work of IF that’s been on my to be played pile for ages. Surprisingly for me I didn’t need too many hints, and the way they’re implemented is awesome. I agree with @rovarsson that it’s a shame you can’t ride the pterosaur.
I also thought I’d see how far I could get in Andy Philips’ Heist without using a walkthrough. I didn’t last long. When I looked at it I was like I would’ve never thought of that in a million years.
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A restart of Cyan’s Obduction. After that I’m thinking of restarting The Witness. I started both when they came out, got 1/4 the way through of each, and then got distracted by other things and never finished.
I’ve got Last Call BBS on my Steam wish list. Haven’t bought it yet but I probably will. And can’t forget all these games on my IFDB Wish List to take a look at. Just have to find the time…
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IF: Enchanter (I’m in the final boss battle, no spoilers please!)
non-IF: Civ 6 (I won for the first time! Science victory on Prince level but it’s a start…)
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What a great game! One of my all-time faves.