Architect Address April 2021 (Patreon)

Hi hello and welcome to yet another Architect Address, how are you doing? Cool. Good to hear.

So, what’s been happening over the past few weeks over here in Architect HQ? Well quite a few things, first and foremost is that I’m ramping up to another big video along the lines of the undertale one and the Near A Tomato one, this time about Disco Elysium - I’m not sure when I’ll fully commit to it or if it’ll ever actually come out but it’s in the planning stages right now - there’ll definitely be at least one or two more videos to go before that though so don’t hold your breath.

Speaking of that, I’m saying it here mostly as a way to get myself to actually do it but I’ve gotta get videos out faster. I’ve been feeling a bit sluggish lately and it’s probably pandemic stress but I’ve got so many ideas I’m leaving on the backburner right now and I want to get them out - so, here’s hoping.

That’s all plans for the future though, what about videos I released recently? Well, the first of those is How to Make a Legendary Swordfighting game which oh boy is a bit of a mouthful. Swordfighting games have always been a passion of mine, I love soulslikes, I love platinum games I love Furi and I’ve made craploads of videos about those individual factors so it’s only right I unified them into a video that’s in many ways kind of a culmination of several of my previous ones and I think it turned out well, even if I did get the predictable nerds in the replies critiquing my history knowledge.

One of my most interesting experiences as part of research for this video was playing Sekiro for the first time and true to FromSoft tradition it’s a… nearly really good game? I dunno this isn’t the place to complain about Sekiro but whilst its big bossfights are absolutely sublime and basically faultless, there’s a lot of weird bullshit in between like the skill trees and prosthetic tools that feed into some fairly fiddly micromanagement and some boring binary weakness play which almost but not quite spoils the fantastic swordplay.

All in all it was a good video and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out! Though I do agree with some of the commenters that I should’ve used a slightly newer game than Bushido Blade - I had to borrow some footage and even then the quality wasn’t great, I dunno - maybe I should into Hellish Quart…

The other video released was: what we can learn from a 2000 year old puzzle which like I say in the video was a bit of a doozy to put together, I was stuck on it for ages and then I finally figured it out and wrote the whole script in a few days, it was bananas. Overall, I think this video is one of my best for a while, it’s a unique take on the “what makes a puzzle game good” idea and the response has been very positive. I also like the whole historical spin I gave it, I like throwing in some subject areas beyond videogames to liven things up and give people a broader education, it’s cool.

My only real gripe besides the view-count which is pitifully low is that I think I got quite negative towards some games in particular. I don’t like taking cheapshots generally and I think me dissing Superliminal and Maquette was justified but… maybe not entirely necessary. I cut out a LOT of complaining because I think that many of games I criticize on the channel are interesting and worth experiencing, even if it's their flaws that make them interesting.

Superliminal is a really interesting example of a game that’s overflowing with cool ideas but doesn’t quite stitch them together in a way that’s satisfying and Maquette is an example of a high budget for art and expensive voice actors actually dragging the rest of the product down. I dunno.

One thing I did want to talk about but didn’t quite get the chance is why the idea of perspective in a literal sense is something puzzles keep coming back to, both in the form of the ostomachion but also in videogames. Manifold Garden is probably the best example of that with its whole gimmick being that it takes place in recursive 4D space and getting your head around that is the main challenge. Maybe I’ll save it for another video, there’s something in the idea of physically impossible spaces that can only be represented virtually but that’s a topic for another time.

As for what’s coming next, I’m either going to do something on rhythm games or more likely, a look a the holy trinity of tank, damage dealer and support and why it seems to be everywhere - but who knows!

Anyway, I’ll see you then!