Yes, I Got Some Stuff Wrong

From Chaos begat Ouranos, the sky that breathed across the water, and Gaea, the water flowing beneath the sky. For an epoch, this is all that was. “Hey, baby,” said Ouranos.

Gaea was quiet.

“How you doing, girl?”

Gaea tried to flow nonchalantly, but there wasn’t a moon yet, and it was kind of hard without a tide. “What do you want, Ouranos?”

“Jus’ wanna get to know you, baby. Let’s talk.”

“What’s there to talk about? It’s not anything happens around here.”

“So let’s make something happen, girl.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah, girl, I’m ready.”

“I mean, really? That’s your line?”

“What’s the problem, girl? You don’t like what you see?”

“What, the infinite horizon? The pale blue? They’re nice, sure, but-”

“Then what’s wrong, girl? Let’s mix up a storm.”

“Do remember the beginning of the epoch? Both of us begat by Chaos? We’re practically siblings. And frankly, you’re coming off like an asshole.”

“Hey, girl, I’m sorry, okay? No big. Let’s just hang out for a while, forget about this little thing, yeah?”

“Okay, fine.”

The wind blew over the water for a while.

“Am I wrong, or does having me on top of you make you wet?”

A Message from the River

A beautiful woman walks out of the river. Her hair is a rich mud-brown, her eyes a river-water blue. She is naked as the day she was born, a meaningless phrase because this was the day she was born. She walks until she finds civilization: a fisherman’s cabin by the water, fisherman included. Approaching him, she asks, “Please help me. The river has made me to bring a message to humanity. Will you help?”

Finding his voice, the fisherman says, “Ah, sure, I’ll help if I can, miss. What can I do?” He puts down his pole.

“The river has been misused and is on the verge of catastrophe. She has sent many messages without change, so she has sent me. I need your help to tell the world.”

He clears his throat. “I’ll do what I can.” He leads her to a van parked by the cabin. “Let’s see about getting you some clothes, then we can tell folks about your message.”

“Thank you,” she says, accepting his hand up into the back of the van. “Your wisdom will save our world.” He closes the back of the van. He locks it.

“They never get any smarter,” he mutters.

Unbound: The Binding of Isaac

The Binding of Isaac is thematic as all hell and a solid game, and I don't want to play it. If forced to squeeze it into a genre, I'd call it an unforgiving Rogue-like shooter, which I didn't really know was a thing before playing this game. It's right up my alley, and I still don't want to play it. The opening story is that of a child who has been abused by his mother because she is suffering delusions of commands from God. The game begins as she hears a final command to kill her son and goes to do so, and only the discovery of a trapdoor to the basement in his room allows the son to escape. The entire thing feels like the self-protective hallucination of a boy about to die, and it's rather depressing. Not to mention the elements that fill the hallucination-slash-gameplay that suggest just how terrible the boy's life has been.

Gameplay is good. The difficulty curve is moderate but surmountable. The knowledge curve is far steeper, with a broad range of powerups that often aren't clear about what they do for you. Part of this is the legacy of the Rogue-like, items that you have to test and experiment with to figure out what they do. Part of it is just obfuscation.

I might be able to ascend this knowledge curve with another handful of hours of play, but I don't want to. The game just doesn't suck me in enough to make that time commitment worthwhile.

The Binding of Isaac is available for $4.99 on Steam, or at the Humble Bundle storefront for $7.99 (bundled with an expansion).

History Lesson

"...Planters invented peanuts, and Exxon-Mobil discovered oil." "Very good, Jeremy," said Mr. Alword, "you may sit down." He turned to the rest of the class. "Now, if you will all turn to page," his laser pointer struck the day's assignment on the whiteboard, "three hundred twenty-three in your history texts, we can resume yesterday's lesson."

Kim often had questions during their history lessons, but she usually kept them to herself. This time, she raised her hand. Mr. Alword gestured for her to speak. "If inventing or discovering something means you get the profit from it, why does Don get full marks for copying my homework? He didn't write it." The other students murmured, and she could feel Don staring at her.

Mr. Alword didn't smile. "Do you have any proof that Don is copying your work?"

She shook her head. "Then perhaps you should spend more time deciphering a way to increase your profit from your own work, rather than what someone else may or may not be doing with it. In exchange for that interruption, why don't you begin our reading. Second paragraph, please."

Kim sighed and looked at her book. "When George Washington first discovered the American continent..."

Principal Winter

She wore a narrow-cut dark suit, a thin slash of white shirt showing in the front. Her face was as sharp. She leaned forward as though she might strike either person sitting across from her: two children. The nameplate on her desk read "Principal Winter." "You," she pointed at the left child. "Speak."

"Well," it said, and Winter wondered how people discerned larval males and females. "Some of us were playing pirates, and Sammy said he was pirate king, and we had to give him our pirate loot or he'd take it."

"No," said Sammy, "I—"

"Silence," said Winter. "Proceed," she said to the first child.

"Um, I said no, and he pushed me. I pushed back, and Mr. Beecham grabbed us for fighting."

"Fine," said Winter. She looked at Sammy.

"We were just playing, and I didn't hurt Jenny, and that's how pirates work."

"Enough." The children stopped. "You," she pointed at Sammy, "have an overabundance of spirit. I am confiscating your soul for the rest of the school week." She plucked something from just over his head. Sammy's eyes dulled and his posture slumped. "You," she pointed at the other. "Continue defending yourself. Dismissed."

Sammy walked out, unprotesting.

Euclid Who?: HyperRogue

You are lost in a non-Euclidean space, constructed of tessellating patterns of shapes that recede into the distance in a way that simply doesn't make any sense. There are treasures here, from ice diamonds to rubies to spice, scattered through a double-handful of impossibly-constructed worlds. There are also monsters who can kill you with a touch, if you don't get them first. The more treasure you collect, the more monsters seek you out, but you need lots of treasure to find an Orb of Yendor before the monsters overwhelm you. Good luck. HyperRogue is a brilliant, dead-simple game that is not quite a Rogue-like and not quite anything else. Please keep in mind, when I say dead-simple, I mean that the art is cheap and the music... well, the music is quite nice, if not complex. In contrast, modeling a non-Euclidean space on my computer... I have no idea how simple that is.

You move through up to ten different worlds (plus one crossroads between them) that procedurally generate as you go, each with unique properties: In the ice world, your body heat will melt the walls; in the living cavern, walls move; in the running world, the ground falls away behind you. Enemies have unique properties as well. Though many have an AI that only charges you, the desert's indestructible sandworm moves once every two turns, and the jungle's murderous vines grow outward from a root one vine at a time, rotating around the center.

That's not all. Because one attack kills anything (with some exceptions), including you, the game plays on a checkmate principle: you can't make move anywhere a monster would kill you, and if you are being threatened, you must eliminate or escape that threat. And if there's no way out, you're dead. Checkmate.

A friend suggested that makes it a puzzle game, but it doesn't feel like a puzzle, it feels like you're running around a bizarre world trying not to die.

There's a lot of creativity in the variation of rules for the different worlds and and different monsters. That creativity is what takes a simple game with a non-Euclidean gimmick and makes it a smart game that's kept me playing for almost two hours, trying to find the key to unlock one of the Orbs of Yendor that I can find in Hell.

If you manage it, please tell me what's inside.

HyperRogue is available for $0.99 on Steam, or to play for free on the web.

For a Good Cause

"Please, I need them back." I had her right where I wanted her, and to highlight that I dangled one of the pouches in front of her. Her face went chalk white and her eyes nearly bugged out of her face. She knew the pouches were sealed and in no danger of opening, but she wasn't used to playing this close to the edge.

I tossed it to her, and she nearly passed out right there. "That one's free. You know my price for the rest."

"Please! This isn't just my professional reputation, this is, is... it could release a global plague!"

"Then it should be an easy decision," I said. I held out a pen. "Need my back to sign on?"

She glared, but she signed the papers. When she smacked them into my hand, she said, "Are you happy?" in a voice that could scrape paint.

"Almost." I gestured for her to open her car, then I pulled out a carrier. "Hey there, buddy," I said. Li'l Ben's meow gave me my first smile in days. It almost brought me to tears.

So I thanked her for the divorce and told her where to find the other pouches.