Monument Valley

I've had "write a review of Monument Valley" on my to-do list since July, which is a little ridiculous - whatever I wanted to say about it isn't getting any more fresh or coherent by waiting. It's only going to keep getting worse, though, so. Monument Valley.

I play almost no "video games", as they are usually thought of - I've always been fond of things in the Tetris/Gunshy/Arkanoid/Columns/Snood/BreakThru/Tesserae/Bejeweled/Minesweeper/BitBubbles family (man, I don't even want to know how many hours of my life is represented in that string there), and card/board games in their app versions (Klondike and Spider, more recently Dominion and Ticket to Ride and now Splendor), but almost nothing in the entire many genres of "there is something on the screen that is You and you are moving it around to Do Things". Crystal Quest, I guess, is the closest thing to that? Oh, or Spectre, the tank game, that definitely counts, although I was never very good at that. (Or Beyond Dark Castle, although I was *really* never any good at that.) Anyways, I've been pretty baffled by more modern games of this ilk that I've tried... someone showed me the Miraculous Ladybug game (probably Michelle?) and despite trying multiple times I wasn't able to get through the tutorial, or even really understand what I was supposed to be doing or how it was possible to do it. (I mean, I guess I get it, it just seems like you'd have to have inhumanly fast reaction times?? Or, really, I assume, people who play a lot of video games develop that kind of reaction time and those of us who don't, don't?)

Anyways, Monument Valley was a video game I could actually play, because there is a figure you're navigating around, but no time component, except for a couple of levels where you need to move something while something else is in the right part of a repetitive motion. But even then if you miss you can just try again. It's also visually *stunning* and such a clever concept, and, I don't know, I was really struck by how much narrative it felt like it had, how, like, emotionally involving it was, how much feeling and drama the different environments conveyed, how strongly I reacted to various developments, for something so nominally simple. (Trying to stay completely spoiler-free here.) Plus some satisfying puzzles. Someday when I feel like I need something that absorbing again I'm going to buy the sequel.

(Monument Valley, Forgotten Shores, and Ida's Dream were all free for me in some Amazon promotion, but I think they're definitely worth buying, which is weird for me... I've almost never bought a computer game myself, just played free games or things that other people have bought (or, uh, acquired, I seem to recall my dad just sort of coming home with interesting floppies sometimes. (In my head, he brought Tetris home from a Russian cruise, although I'm not sure that's actually right. But I'm pretty sure "we're at sea so obviously we're all going to pirate anything remotely entertaining from each other" came into this somewhere.)) But I guess I've bought a bunch of TTR boards, so this is something I do now, thirty years into my computer-gaming life? (Radical Castle, in something like 1986 or '87. And then Crystal Quest and Cairo Shootout and Stunt Copter and GunShy. Man I miss the Mac SE. Also *man* I'm apparently full of nostalgia today. Welp. I guess it's better than yelling at the clouds.))

tabletop for tinies

I've had "write about our further adventures with No Thank You Evil" on my to-do list since August, and my to-do list needs... well, I almost wrote "to die", but what it really needs is some aggressive cycling off of old lingering items so that I don't feel overwhelmed adding a bunch of new items. So!

We've now played three more times, after the first time... I wrote a continuation of the first boxed adventure, which we played out over two sessions, and we also played the second boxed adventure. I definitely felt like I was improving as a DM for my specific kids with practice... still sometimes underestimating their risk-aversion! "No, *really*, I *really* think you're likely to be able to sneak by the owls, *please* go the rest of the way down this tunnel and find your plot coupon for the next part." I mean, obviously, grown-up parties don't always do what you want them to either, but I feel like grownups are more likely to get actively hung up on the wrong thing than just be like "there is only one interesting thing here but we're scared of it." I guess *as* a grown-up gamer, I have this trust that the DM has chosen reasonable challenges for the party so that whatever happens will be interesting to play (and has maybe even done some math on how dangerous this encounter is), and as newbie gamers the kids haven't formed that yet, especially when they learned in the first session that I was willing to let them take damage, which for them feels too much like "getting hurt" to be fun. So, I mean, I guess we established a basic level of *dis*trust there. Even though the system tries to make it really clear that when you take damage it's more like getting tired than getting injured, that sense of losing something/having something taken away was too upsetting for them. Which is a neat challenge, in a way, to try to *really* shake up my "damage and danger" mindset for how I think about what happens in a game - maybe those aren't important aspects at all! - and also try to think beyond damage to an entirely positive or additive system where things can be gained or not gained but not lost. (Which is... not really the No Thank You Evil system, but I like to think of it more as a launchpad than a blueprint.)

Anyways, things the kids like, an incomplete list: funny voices for NPCs, non-being threats to fight like grappling roots (non-being is awkward but I mean things that aren't either persons or animals), pictures of what places look like as well as maps, win-win scenarios where success is figuring out what you and the NPCs want and how to help each other, simple puzzles like using the size-changing mushroom to shrink to fit into the tiny tunnel. Possibly my very clever "to find the dragon's heart, remember the dragon's scale" wordplay, or at least I think Junie appreciated that, I'm not sure Quentin did. (They had been picturing the heart as a handheld object, but the dragon was like hill-sized, so the heart was like room-sized... unfortunately I think both of them jumped mentally to like a weighing scale rather than either skin-covering scales or size-proportion, which muddled things.)

For their next quest, Junie has expressed a wish to go shopping, having acquired a number of coins, so I need to come up with some kind of plot that kicks off from there. Presumably either Find A Thing or Deal With Someone Causing Trouble, the two basic D&D plots. I haven't been feeling inspired but I think I need to remember they'll care more about me drawing a nice picture of the setting and doing funny voices than the plot being interesting. :)