Architect Address- November 2020 (Patreon)

What’s up? It’s the architect address! I’m here today to chat for a few minutes about the videos that have come out recently and go over what I think of them, how well I think they did and some other details.

Before that though, I want to talk about the release schedule, or lack thereof. RIght now the average time for me to get a video out is around three weeks, which is a little longer than this time last year, I dunno - I’ve received nothing but patience from people on the patreon and I have been making some longer ones recently but it feels like I’ve been making them too slowly. I’ve been going on about this for literally YEARS but I just wish I could write these damn things faster, I’ve got so many ideas I want to get out there but seemingly I just can’t get the videos out fast enough, blehg, whatever, maybe that’s something for a new year’s resolution?

Anyway, let’s talk about the first vid that came out recently and that is What Among Us Has To Do With Soviet Psychology. What a title huh? It’s a bit crazy, but I wanted to it to reflect the kind of crazy origins of hidden role games that I don’t think is popular knowledge at all.

I was absolutely floored when I found out that mafia was the result of some high-profile psych experiment and honestly reading a lot of the writing that dimitry davidoff has produced since I think I was right on the money about hidden role games being, primarily, tests of social dynamics but in a controlled environment - I think that’s why I like them so much, there’s comparatively less to deal with compared to actual, real social interaction. Anyway.

I’ve wanted to do a hidden role game video for YEARS now and I’ve been a big fan of them for ages, and among us provided the perfect opportunity to talk about the genre. For all of its mass appeal and streamerbaity nature I think the game is really cleverly designed. The way it pairs back a lot of the more combat-centric takes on the hidden role formula allows it to really focus on the social element rather than invariably being balanced around who shot first or who knows the roles the best.

The map design is also fantastic, all the little blindspots and walls go a long way towards depriving the crewmates of crucial information, allowing the impostors to get a much needed leg up when it comes to controlling the flow of the game and overall making the whole thing more fun.

I think the game does suffer a little at high levels though, where the simplicity of among us starts to work against it. Top level play is really all about memorising timings and how long it takes to run places or abusing visual tasks and that isn’t much fun at all. THe game is great for causal play though, just don’t play it too much or you’ll ruin it.

As for the political content of the video some people complained about that but I think it’s pretty much impossible to separate the context in which mafia was produced and the social slash political climate that among us became popular in. Maybe I went a little heavy but I don’t want capital G gamers hanging around in my comment sections anyway.

The other video that came out recently was one all about Spelunky 2 and why it’s veryvery hard and why that’s actually a good thing.

I think this video turned out pretty well, even if it was fairly long and I spent most of it talking about one game. Difficulty in games has always been really interesting to me because I seem to fall right in the middle of the hardcore I only play games that hate me camp and the I only like easy story games camp. I really enjoy both!

Whilst spelunky 2 absolutely falls into the former group it does constantly surprise me how forgiving and fun the game is even if you’re absolute crap at it. The day it came out I played the game for… it must’ve been 3 hours straight and I never once reached olmec but I still had an absolute blast figuring out how everything worked and how all the systems fit together. I had to actually play as much of the game as possible before spoiling the hell out of myself for the inevitable video, and it was amazing how much of the game I missed - I thought I was fairly close to seeing everything but no way, there were entire levels I had no idea existed. Spelunky 2 is great.

However, I do think that its lack of any sort of accessibility features does stick out a little bit particularly in the context of all the other games I was discussing. Just being able to slow the game down or hell even have seeded runs unlocked from the start would be great not juust for accessibility but also for testing purposes. I had to farm the game for like an hour to get footage of an eggplant just because I’d not unlocked enough characters which was a bit frustrating.

Accessibility modes are a fairly big deal in games criticism but I’ve always struggled to talk about them in a way that’s interesting. These modes absolutely weren’t the focus here but I think I was able to touch on them and say something more than “they’re a good idea” in the context of them creating different gameplay states and preserving the intended feel of a game but I dunno, it would be impossible to spin a whole video out of the topic because there’s no real questions to answer there? Are accessibility modes good? Err, yeah yeah they are. Honestly a little mark next to someone’s save that says “hey they used the accessability mode” and an upfront warning to only use the mode if you really need it is enough to prevent speedrun cheating or anything whilst also letting everyone play the game as intended.

As for the other games, I could’ve really made Hades the focus of this video but I’d sort of already talked about it in the difficulty loops one so I was wary of repeating myself. It absolutely rules though, I played it a lot through early access and the game sort of felt like it was missing something until the devs sorted out the endgame progression system and the pact of punishment and now the game is great. I highly recommend trying it out. Of course it was also always good to talk about celeste again which is really the gold standard of accessibility stuff, Maddy Thorson and the team really knocked it out of the park there.

Hope that clears up any stray details about the videos released recently, now if you don’t mind I’ve got to psyche myself up into getting to work on the next one so I’ll see you around! Bye!