Yahtzee Croshaw (Zero Punctuation, Fully Ramblomatic)

You're right; I slightly misremembered the points he made.

It’s Time to Rename the Soulslike Genre | Slightly Civil War and the accompanying podcast

Ooh, it's not a debate format this time, but more of a brainstorming one. Also, I did not know that Jack and Yahtz renamed "Metroidvainias" "sprawlers". I kind of like that one, but it hasn't caught on yet.

Jack offers "Fight or Flight" games because Soulslikes are based on difficult combat and respawning enemies, so entering combat isn't a necessity so much as a moment-to-moment decision as to whether it's worthwhile. Yahtz doesn't like it because it ignores the mandatory boss fights that are also key to the genre.

Yahtzee offers "Dungeoneering" as a throwback to the old game Knightmare. Jack likes it but thinks that "dungeon" may limit the setting too much.

Jack is still thinking about the combat: parrying, blocking, dodging, and always being prepared. He proposes "On-Guard Combat Game", or "OGC". Meh. Yahtz thinks that the core combat isn't the point.

Yahtzee's more clinical suggestion, "Recursive", is based on the fact that the one common element to all of these games is flinging yourself at the challenges over and over until you break through. Being an adjective lets you tack it onto nouns like RPG, allowing the various subtypes to be differentiated. Jack likes this one too.

Jack offers "Poke 'n roll", which is terrible. Bad Jack.

Next week on Jack vs. Yahtzee: Are side quests better than main quests?

I respect the attempts, but I think that out of all of Yahtzee's attempts at naming stuff (spunkgargleweewee, jiminy cockthroat, the actually-descriptive spectacle fighter) the only one that's stuck is PC Master Race, and that one everyone wishes hadn't.

I've seen movement (not a movement, just disjointed motion from disorganized groups and individuals) to use the term "search action" instead of metroidvania. It's reasonably descriptive and allegedly a direct translation of what they already call the genre in Japanese.

Hmm. I hate it.

For all the talk of them being undescriptive, you know exactly what kind of game a "Metroidvania" or a "Soulslike" is. You don't need to have played Metroid to know what the term means. If they were actually useless, they would have been replaced by now. Like how "First-Person Shooter" replaced "Doom Clone" and "Sandbox" replaced "GTA Clone".

I feel like people only want to replace them because of some personal pet peeve, not because they are actually inferior to some other term. "Science Fiction" is a pretty useless descriptor on its own, but I don't see anyone rushing to replace that.

That's just a self-justification. "The name is popular because the name is popular." You could say the same thing if Metroidvania had been called "Blurglesplortch".

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 2nd 2021 at 10:55:34 AM

> "Science Fiction" is a pretty useless descriptor on its own, but I don't see anyone rushing to replace that.

Compared to Metroidvania I think it's clearer,my only problem with Science Fiction is how widely the term is applied,some shows are better off being called Science Fantasy

"Metroidvania" is a relatively specific term that describes a game with a number of particular qualities. Metroidvania's main feature would be a giant, interconnected world where you can unlock shortcuts for efficient traversal, sometimes through acquiring new abilities or simply diligent search. It's been around for a while and I haven't really seen people take much issue with it.

"Souls-like" is a different animal, because game journalists applied the tag to just about everything they could think of until it became a target of ridicule - and it's much fresher in public memory.

I think the amount of influence Yahtzee has on gaming lingo is a bit overstated here.

Not quite. Soulslike is relatively specific, if a bit fuzzy at the edges. The mockery of games journalists (more so than the usual, that is) was the overuse of the term "the Dark Souls of [X]", which isn't the same. Usually applied to any game without an easy mode.

Or, as Yahtzee once put it: "the media calls every milk float with a slightly stiff brake pedal "the Dark Souls of commercial transportation equipment""

Little Nightmares 2 (Zero Punctuation)

As we've been discussing already, this is an indie game that ticks all the boxes for The Indie Game™: "small child, scary world, oppressive atmosphere, terrible story, terrible gameplay".

Look, I too am tired of the AAA game hand-holding where they lead you through the set-pieces like a young child in a learning support program and hand out participation trophies for walking onto the field without breaking both legs, but there must be a middle ground between that and murdering you without mercy if you fail a series of millisecond-accuracy timing puzzles that you couldn't possibly anticipate.

Next week: Breathedge

Oh, my. It's another indie survival/crafting game that thinks that subversive, fourth-wall-breaking humor lets you forget about having an actual plot.

Edited by Fighteer on Mar 3rd 2021 at 12:27:28 PM

...Yeah, I don’t think I need to make any further comments. You could basically swap this game with Journey to the Savage Planet, and it would work nearly as well.

but there must be a middle ground between that and murdering you without mercy if you fail a series of millisecond-accuracy timing puzzles that you couldn't possibly anticipate.

As someone currently suffering through Crash Bandicoot 4 out of mainly spite (as accurately predicted by Yahtzee), I feel this.

That's sort of the issue in horror. You have to make the player feel like they're in danger, but if the player dies the danger turns from a threat to a challenge. Soulslikes (or Recursive Sprawlers, if we decide on calling them that) are ironicallly one of the worst genres for horror, despite their grim settings and overwhelming odds.

I guess one solution is to construct scenes such that they are a lot less difficult than they seem. But that comes with its own pitfalls as it can create a situation where any player who is brave enough can just walk right back to the enemy and make raspberries at it, instantly breaking the illusion.

You can always fall back on jump scares...

Or just make it really short.

There's a reason so many short indie games are short, as Yahtzee once said: horror doesn't need too long to pull you in, probably because fear for our own safety is not that hard a feeling to cause in your audience, being a hardwired survival instinct and all that.

A horror game with no actual monsters but a scary atmosphere instead,is that a thing yet?

I do know that is a thing. Though for the life of me I can’t remember it’s name.

Edited by Pokesamus on Mar 3rd 2021 at 12:26:07 PM

For a long time, I had been cooking this idea for a Yume Nikki-esque horror game that sort of uses Antepiece as a way to balance this. Basically, this game is divided between the real world and a Dream world you can access by sleeping and takes place over the course of a month. Dying at any time in the real world brings you back to the beginning of the month, effectively resetting the game.

However, for most of the game, dying in the real world is very difficult. You have to actively jump off a cliff or something like that. The real world is creepy, but most of the scares take place in the dream world, where dying only wakes you up (and possibly incurs some other, comparatively minor penalty). This should serve to avoid players feeling too frustrated when they're just learning the ropes.

But once you get far enough into the game, some of the more common horrors from your dreams start appearing in the real world. By then you should have encountered these horrors in your dreams often enough to know full well how to deal with them, so you aren't very likely to die to them. But having them around and knowing that any moment, they can end your entire run, should keep things nice and tense.

The FEAR series accomplishes it (depending on your point of view, of course) by alternating the action sections, which generally involve shooting at people and reloading if you die, with horror sections that have little or no gameplay risk to the player. The horror is achieved via a combination of suspense, when tension builds in anticipation of what's going to happen next, and jump scares, when things happen very quickly.

It's one of my favorite such series.

Resident Evil works by making gameplay not kill you instantly, but wear you down and use up your resources. In addition to the story and jump scares, tension is built up by the constant decisions about whether to expend resources or try to avoid threats.

True scares work by building up the anticipation of something happening and then keeping the player guessing as to when that thing will actually happen. If the window shatters and dogs jump out every time you go near one, it just becomes a thing to deal with. If you don't know which ones will break, there's real tension.

Gone Home obviously isn't a horror game, but with it's downright eerie atmosphere it wouldn't take much to get it there.

I seem to remember hearing that it started life as a mod for Amnesia, actually.

I love games that use suspenseful atmospheres, even if the gameplay itself doesn't give you jump scares or horror set pieces.

For example, System Shock 2, in which you start out knowing something is horribly wrong but the only character explaining things to you is obviously lying/and or evil, so you never know what's true and what isn't. You're piecing it together from clues.

Or Portal, which pulls it off by giving you absolutely no information whatsoever and having the narrator be obviously insane as well as responsible for your current situation. (Portal 2 is not suspenseful in the same way, but it's not going for that so it gets a pass.)

Or Disco Elysium, in which the surface narrative is about a character trying to recover their identity but the setting reveals increasing levels of eldritch horror as you learn more about it.

Horror games with no actual threats are a thing, though I can't remember any of the names off the top of my head. They stop being effective once the player notices they're not actually in danger

I think survival horror is the best way to actually make the player feel afraid—There's a definite threat of failure, but it shouldn't actually happen that often

It's not really a horror game, but I recall experiencing quite a bit of suspense in Bioshock when hearing Big Daddies walking around in the distance.