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> If you want some games that really revolutionize what games can be, check out Celeste, Secret Little Haven, Baba Is You, and Glittermitten Grove. All of these

> If you want some games that really revolutionize what games can be, check out Celeste, Secret Little Haven, Baba Is You, and Glittermitten Grove. All of these games really challenge what games can be and experiment with radically different kinds of art. I haven’t played most of these games but I have played a lot of Celeste and I don’t really see how it challenges what games can be or experiments with radically different kinds of art. Don’t get me wrong, it is an absolutely amazing game and one of the best platformers of all time with a sweet, well written story but at the end of the day it’s a 2D platformer. Yes the controls and art are much better than most but there is nothing in the gameplay fundamentally different than what the original Super Mario Bros had on the NES. I’m also not really a fan of the snobbish tone of the article. Horizon Zero Dawn is certainly not revolutionary in terms of game design but nobody claimed it was. Genres exist for a reason and just because a game (or TV show, or movie, etc) conforms to the expectations of the genre doesn’t make it bad. Also as a side note, I really resent them calling Aloy a “waifu” since Horizon is one of the few games with a female protagonist that is both undeniably a woman while also not being made as a sex object. Metroid is famous for being one of the first games with a female protagonist but for the entire game Samus might as well be a guy, non-binary, or a robot since all you see is her armor. You only find out she is a woman after beating the game and discovering that based on how much of the game you completed the more clothes you can strip off of her until she is left just wearing her underwear. Tomb Raider on the other hand had an obviously female protagonist but one that was intended as a sex object for guys to ogle with her large breasts, skimpy clothes, and near complete lack of personality. Meanwhile Horizon presents Aloy as a strong protagonist who doesn’t need men to save her at every turn while also not being sexualized to such extremes that you feel like the real reason she exists is so that men have someone to ogle at while playing the game. The fact that Horizon (and The Last of Us series which presents its female protagonists similarly) get such extreme hatred from capital G Gamers because “they made them look like men!” should be evidence enough that this is revolutionary in its own way in the industry.

sandworm101 4y ago
Games that challenge the standards, therefore making them good art: Factorio. Papers please. Obra Dinn. Prison Architect. Even old-school Minecraft did amazing work challenging definitions. (Subnautica?) I haven't seen an artistically interesting AAA game in decades.
- garaetjjte 4y ago
  Prison Architect though? It's not a bad game, but seems like ordinary entry in simulation/tycoon genre.
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    Except that it teaches you to care about prisoners. The "win" is to keep them happy. That makes the capital punishment sequence downright disturbing. It is also the only game I know of that was reported for violations of the Geneva convention. (Misuse of the red cross symbol.) That had to be worth some artistic credibility.
    - tweetle_beetle 4y ago
      Taking an atypical narrative stance seems like a low bar, in and of itself, for defining challenging standards. I'm in agreement with parent that it's well executed, but to reach for a lazy description, it's basically "[..] with a twist". I'd be surprised if it's remembered as milestone. (Your last sentence sounds like classic PR fare and not noteworthy.) This is reinforced by how it came to be. Basically Introversion spent too much time and money on a tech demo without any concept of turning it into a game [1]. Prison Architect took a safe, well-trodden paradigm that was easier to turn into a finished, profitable protect. Subversion was the sort of game that could have broken the mould if they'd ever figured it out. I remember being underwhelemed hearing about what their new project would be when they gave up on it. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion_(video_game) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion_(video_game)
- Arainach 4y ago
  When have AAA games ever been the source of challenging standards? AAA implies a level of budget at which that much risk isn't taken. If you look back multiple decades, it was so much cheaper to make a game that the definition of AAA doesn't makes sense. Even first-party major publishers were at most "AA". Doom challenged standards, but Doom could be made by 5 people crammed in a house. Metal Gear Solid. The Sims had more people credited for music than Programming, Design, and Graphics combined (21). Minecraft was one person for the most part. Look at the credits list for Morrowind: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Credits https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Credits And for Skyrim: https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/credits https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/elder-scrolls-v-skyri... At the time, development costs were estimated at $100M. The latest Skyrim Anniversary Edition remaster will surely have a credits list dramatically longer than the 2011 release. AAA games are expensive now, and no one's going to invest tens of millions on the hope that billions of people across the world understand your cryptic commentary about nuclear weapons or whatever.
somehnacct3757 4y ago
I've found people who extole Stanley Parable are not just capital G Gamers but also capital G Gatekeepers. Their game curation aesthetics have all the tact of Superman's Braniac collecting planets. Celeste is derivative of Donkey Kong Country. I agree that for an author who thinks derivation itself is stinky, using an overly reductive critical framework where every game is derivative of, I don't know, unaliving Donkey Kong at the arcades, it was odd to see Celeste as a counter example. Most of game innovation the past decade has been in the monetization model, moreso than mechanics. The author looks down their nose at microtransactions so they have probably missed all the innovation even as it continues to cross pollinate with every aspect of the games industry. No wonder they think Stanley Parable is still a noteworthy observation in 2022.
- alexb_ 4y ago
  LOL... If looking down on "innovative monetization models" is gatekeeping, I am the largest gatekeeper there is.
- xena 4y ago
  Hi, author of the article here. Microtransactions are an active cancer on the gaming world and I abhor their prevalence in modern gaming. The _only_ time I find them okay is for when they are for _cosmetic purchases only_, and even then the games industry has done a terrible job of making sure that is the case. Sometimes I want to play a game to play a game and immerse myself into that game's world. I don't want to have people manipulate money out of my wallet and into their bank account. Then again, I'm also someone who has been suckered into spending over USD$200 on Fortnite skins, so a lot of my rejection of microtransactions is rooted in the fact that I am vulnerable to their temptations and would rather they be anywhere but in the games that I play on a regular basis. Nintendo games are usually good about not trying to fleece you for cash in a game you paid full price for, so I play a lot of those.
  - somehnacct3757 4y ago
    Gaming as-you-define-it is surely dying and it took maybe 15 years for microtransactions to do it in. However, more people play video games than ever before and more games are released per year than at any other time in human history. So what died exactly? Certainly not an industry. Only a business model has died. A game's business model has always been inextricably tied to its design, going back to arcades. So designs you like are dying. This is why I classify your behavior as gatekeeping. All those happy gamers must be enjoying games wrong. The designs they like are not valid game designs because they aren't adherent to your design aesthetics. Do you miss paying a fixed price for a fixed amount of content, never to be updated? Nothing about that is incompatible with microtransactions. In the old days we called them expansions. These days they're called battle passes. Do you miss paying for access to a live game server? Those used to be called subscriptions. Now we've found a way to offer free subscriptions to any and all, subsidized by gamers who have the financial freedom to support their favorite games. [edit: for politeness]
CollinEMac 4y ago
I actually haven't played any of those games but I'm surprised the author(s?) didn't mention any of Daniel Mullins' games. Pony Island, The Hex, and Inscryption are all really interesting "meta" games in the same vain as The Stanley Parable. Inscryption being the one that I feel functions the best out of the three as both a commentary on games as well as actual gameplay.
- xena 4y ago
  Author of the article here. I haven't played those games so I can't really comment on them :)
  - CollinEMac 4y ago
    Highly recommended. Definitely seems like they'd be in your wheelhouse.
    - xena 4y ago
      I apparently have Pony Island in my Steam library. Gonna take a look at it after dinner I guess. Thanks for the suggestion!
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- saghm 4y ago
  I'll second this; while I haven't played them myself, I've watched playthroughs of all three of them, and they really do an amazing job of blurring the line between the player's character and the real-life person playing the game. Combined with having some hidden secrets being only unlockable by doing real-world things outside the game, it's hard for to decide whether he's basically created a new art form that transcends the game genre or just has gotten everyone who's played the game essentially to join a sort of AR/roleplaying game of which his video games are just some of the pieces.
shell-E 4y ago
I think that one of the biggest things that Celeste has going for it is its movement mechanics. It's this brilliant system where you are given all of the powers you need at the beginning but aren't taught how to use them until completing the game (i think a lot of the mechanics are actually revealed in the B and C sides). This also gives Celeste some killer replay-ability - there's nothing better than going back to early stages and using learned movement tech to break intended solutions. I think I could be convinced to categorize that as a bit of a revolution of game design. This is also something that Outer Wilds did really well imo.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  It's just a tight platformer with a small twist in the movement mechanic, that's not "a revolution of game design". Frankly, Outer Wilds plays like shit. The controls are extremely complicated and difficult to wrestle with. However, that really suits the exploratory nature of the game. However, in terms of game design, Outer Wilds is clearly _far_ more interesting and revolutionary than Celeste. Totally physics-based 3D platformer and space exploration game on a time loop is obviously far more mechanically interesting than a 2D platformer with a restricted mid-air dash...
  - shell-E 4y ago
    To be clear - Outer Wilds is another design system where everything is unlocked at the beginning, but obfuscated from the player until they play through long enough to learn the mechanics. Same concept, just applied to various game mechanics, but not movement mechanics.
  - neetle 4y ago
    I think there's a lot to be said about the restrictions you put on a system when it comes to design. I like Outer Wilds! It's fun, I'm currently playing through it. However, Celeste is the more mechanically interesting game when you combine the intentionally limited movement and the forgiving nature of its levels. My 9yo is currently trying to work her way through it, yet gives up on harder Mario levels. Celeste made hard, 2D platforming accessible.
bowsamic 4y ago
[flagged]
- Signez 4y ago
  Celeste was a big deal wayyyyy before the main character (and their main author) was officially characterized as trans, a year later after the game launched.
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    I'm talking about why it's considered so revolutionary now. Obviously the game design is not revolutionary
Phrodo_00 4y ago
Out of those I've only played Baba Is You and it's a great game, and certainly pushing game design. It's not too unlike other programming puzzle games from zachtronics or Tomorrow Corp, but its interface is a lot more abstracted and it feels like a different paradigm than those. I haven't played Glittermitten Grove, but Frog Fractions is a great meld and full of surprising genre shifts. It's not revolutionary, but it certainly has its own feel. I'd have added Return of the Obra Dinn and Papers Please to the list, though. Maybe instead of Celeste, like you said.
mrtranscendence 4y ago
> I’m also not really a fan of the snobbish tone of the article. As someone who really enjoyed Horizon Zero Dawn, I agree. It was a fun romp with a lot of spectacle, and there's surely room for that in the world. Not everything has to push the boundaries of the art form. I suppose it's true that basically no AAA publishers release anything that does push those boundaries, but that's unsurprising, since pushing boundaries isn't where the money is. For every Baba is You or Outer Wilds that takes off there are a thousand games that make next to nothing. It's similar with the visual arts or music; by challenging norms or experimenting with "radically different kinds of art" you're much likelier to end up with something that displeases almost everyone than you are to be the next Jackson Pollock or Ornette Coleman. > I really resent them calling Aloy a “waifu” Given the amount of hate Guerrilla got for not making Aloy ultra-sexy in Forbidden West, this was pretty unfortunate phrasing.
numpad0 4y ago
> I really resent them calling Aloy a “waifu” since Horizon is one of the few games with a female protagonist that is both undeniably a woman while also not being made as a sex object. Maybe they hate human protagonists on games wholesale. I’m on anime side and has a personal hate against a broad spectrum across Disney/furry/cartoon. Due to this background I am easily triggered and might go on to a rant of similar scale if, for example, a graphic, visually homosexual werewolf character would become an AAA protagonist. The author’s odd reaction to just a modern female protagonist seems to be on that kind of internal logic and magnitude.

sandworm101 4y ago

Games that challenge the standards, therefore making them good art: Factorio. Papers please. Obra Dinn. Prison Architect. Even old-school Minecraft did amazing work challenging definitions. (Subnautica?) I haven't seen an artistically interesting AAA game in decades.

garaetjjte 4y ago
Prison Architect though? It's not a bad game, but seems like ordinary entry in simulation/tycoon genre.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  Except that it teaches you to care about prisoners. The "win" is to keep them happy. That makes the capital punishment sequence downright disturbing. It is also the only game I know of that was reported for violations of the Geneva convention. (Misuse of the red cross symbol.) That had to be worth some artistic credibility.
  - tweetle_beetle 4y ago
    Taking an atypical narrative stance seems like a low bar, in and of itself, for defining challenging standards. I'm in agreement with parent that it's well executed, but to reach for a lazy description, it's basically "[..] with a twist". I'd be surprised if it's remembered as milestone. (Your last sentence sounds like classic PR fare and not noteworthy.) This is reinforced by how it came to be. Basically Introversion spent too much time and money on a tech demo without any concept of turning it into a game [1]. Prison Architect took a safe, well-trodden paradigm that was easier to turn into a finished, profitable protect. Subversion was the sort of game that could have broken the mould if they'd ever figured it out. I remember being underwhelemed hearing about what their new project would be when they gave up on it. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion_(video_game) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion_(video_game)
Arainach 4y ago
When have AAA games ever been the source of challenging standards? AAA implies a level of budget at which that much risk isn't taken. If you look back multiple decades, it was so much cheaper to make a game that the definition of AAA doesn't makes sense. Even first-party major publishers were at most "AA". Doom challenged standards, but Doom could be made by 5 people crammed in a house. Metal Gear Solid. The Sims had more people credited for music than Programming, Design, and Graphics combined (21). Minecraft was one person for the most part. Look at the credits list for Morrowind: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Credits https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Credits And for Skyrim: https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/credits https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/elder-scrolls-v-skyri... At the time, development costs were estimated at $100M. The latest Skyrim Anniversary Edition remaster will surely have a credits list dramatically longer than the 2011 release. AAA games are expensive now, and no one's going to invest tens of millions on the hope that billions of people across the world understand your cryptic commentary about nuclear weapons or whatever.

somehnacct3757 4y ago

I've found people who extole Stanley Parable are not just capital G Gamers but also capital G Gatekeepers. Their game curation aesthetics have all the tact of Superman's Braniac collecting planets. Celeste is derivative of Donkey Kong Country. I agree that for an author who thinks derivation itself is stinky, using an overly reductive critical framework where every game is derivative of, I don't know, unaliving Donkey Kong at the arcades, it was odd to see Celeste as a counter example. Most of game innovation the past decade has been in the monetization model, moreso than mechanics. The author looks down their nose at microtransactions so they have probably missed all the innovation even as it continues to cross pollinate with every aspect of the games industry. No wonder they think Stanley Parable is still a noteworthy observation in 2022.

alexb_ 4y ago
LOL... If looking down on "innovative monetization models" is gatekeeping, I am the largest gatekeeper there is.
xena 4y ago
Hi, author of the article here. Microtransactions are an active cancer on the gaming world and I abhor their prevalence in modern gaming. The _only_ time I find them okay is for when they are for _cosmetic purchases only_, and even then the games industry has done a terrible job of making sure that is the case. Sometimes I want to play a game to play a game and immerse myself into that game's world. I don't want to have people manipulate money out of my wallet and into their bank account. Then again, I'm also someone who has been suckered into spending over USD$200 on Fortnite skins, so a lot of my rejection of microtransactions is rooted in the fact that I am vulnerable to their temptations and would rather they be anywhere but in the games that I play on a regular basis. Nintendo games are usually good about not trying to fleece you for cash in a game you paid full price for, so I play a lot of those.
- somehnacct3757 4y ago
  Gaming as-you-define-it is surely dying and it took maybe 15 years for microtransactions to do it in. However, more people play video games than ever before and more games are released per year than at any other time in human history. So what died exactly? Certainly not an industry. Only a business model has died. A game's business model has always been inextricably tied to its design, going back to arcades. So designs you like are dying. This is why I classify your behavior as gatekeeping. All those happy gamers must be enjoying games wrong. The designs they like are not valid game designs because they aren't adherent to your design aesthetics. Do you miss paying a fixed price for a fixed amount of content, never to be updated? Nothing about that is incompatible with microtransactions. In the old days we called them expansions. These days they're called battle passes. Do you miss paying for access to a live game server? Those used to be called subscriptions. Now we've found a way to offer free subscriptions to any and all, subsidized by gamers who have the financial freedom to support their favorite games. [edit: for politeness]

CollinEMac 4y ago

I actually haven't played any of those games but I'm surprised the author(s?) didn't mention any of Daniel Mullins' games. Pony Island, The Hex, and Inscryption are all really interesting "meta" games in the same vain as The Stanley Parable. Inscryption being the one that I feel functions the best out of the three as both a commentary on games as well as actual gameplay.

xena 4y ago
Author of the article here. I haven't played those games so I can't really comment on them :)
- CollinEMac 4y ago
  Highly recommended. Definitely seems like they'd be in your wheelhouse.
  - xena 4y ago
    I apparently have Pony Island in my Steam library. Gonna take a look at it after dinner I guess. Thanks for the suggestion!
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
saghm 4y ago
I'll second this; while I haven't played them myself, I've watched playthroughs of all three of them, and they really do an amazing job of blurring the line between the player's character and the real-life person playing the game. Combined with having some hidden secrets being only unlockable by doing real-world things outside the game, it's hard for to decide whether he's basically created a new art form that transcends the game genre or just has gotten everyone who's played the game essentially to join a sort of AR/roleplaying game of which his video games are just some of the pieces.

shell-E 4y ago

I think that one of the biggest things that Celeste has going for it is its movement mechanics. It's this brilliant system where you are given all of the powers you need at the beginning but aren't taught how to use them until completing the game (i think a lot of the mechanics are actually revealed in the B and C sides). This also gives Celeste some killer replay-ability - there's nothing better than going back to early stages and using learned movement tech to break intended solutions. I think I could be convinced to categorize that as a bit of a revolution of game design. This is also something that Outer Wilds did really well imo.

bowsamic 4y ago
It's just a tight platformer with a small twist in the movement mechanic, that's not "a revolution of game design". Frankly, Outer Wilds plays like shit. The controls are extremely complicated and difficult to wrestle with. However, that really suits the exploratory nature of the game. However, in terms of game design, Outer Wilds is clearly _far_ more interesting and revolutionary than Celeste. Totally physics-based 3D platformer and space exploration game on a time loop is obviously far more mechanically interesting than a 2D platformer with a restricted mid-air dash...
- shell-E 4y ago
  To be clear - Outer Wilds is another design system where everything is unlocked at the beginning, but obfuscated from the player until they play through long enough to learn the mechanics. Same concept, just applied to various game mechanics, but not movement mechanics.
- neetle 4y ago
  I think there's a lot to be said about the restrictions you put on a system when it comes to design. I like Outer Wilds! It's fun, I'm currently playing through it. However, Celeste is the more mechanically interesting game when you combine the intentionally limited movement and the forgiving nature of its levels. My 9yo is currently trying to work her way through it, yet gives up on harder Mario levels. Celeste made hard, 2D platforming accessible.

bowsamic 4y ago

[flagged]

Signez 4y ago
Celeste was a big deal wayyyyy before the main character (and their main author) was officially characterized as trans, a year later after the game launched.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  I'm talking about why it's considered so revolutionary now. Obviously the game design is not revolutionary

Phrodo_00 4y ago

Out of those I've only played Baba Is You and it's a great game, and certainly pushing game design. It's not too unlike other programming puzzle games from zachtronics or Tomorrow Corp, but its interface is a lot more abstracted and it feels like a different paradigm than those. I haven't played Glittermitten Grove, but Frog Fractions is a great meld and full of surprising genre shifts. It's not revolutionary, but it certainly has its own feel. I'd have added Return of the Obra Dinn and Papers Please to the list, though. Maybe instead of Celeste, like you said.

mrtranscendence 4y ago

> I’m also not really a fan of the snobbish tone of the article. As someone who really enjoyed Horizon Zero Dawn, I agree. It was a fun romp with a lot of spectacle, and there's surely room for that in the world. Not everything has to push the boundaries of the art form. I suppose it's true that basically no AAA publishers release anything that does push those boundaries, but that's unsurprising, since pushing boundaries isn't where the money is. For every Baba is You or Outer Wilds that takes off there are a thousand games that make next to nothing. It's similar with the visual arts or music; by challenging norms or experimenting with "radically different kinds of art" you're much likelier to end up with something that displeases almost everyone than you are to be the next Jackson Pollock or Ornette Coleman. > I really resent them calling Aloy a “waifu” Given the amount of hate Guerrilla got for not making Aloy ultra-sexy in Forbidden West, this was pretty unfortunate phrasing.

numpad0 4y ago

> I really resent them calling Aloy a “waifu” since Horizon is one of the few games with a female protagonist that is both undeniably a woman while also not being made as a sex object. Maybe they hate human protagonists on games wholesale. I’m on anime side and has a personal hate against a broad spectrum across Disney/furry/cartoon. Due to this background I am easily triggered and might go on to a rant of similar scale if, for example, a graphic, visually homosexual werewolf character would become an AAA protagonist. The author’s odd reaction to just a modern female protagonist seems to be on that kind of internal logic and magnitude.