Rules are fake

Games are a pre-text, not a pretext, but a proto-text which exists at a stage prior to text not unfinished like an experimental prototype but unfinished like a code prototype, like a precursor. It is as the object it is, finished. But it exists to be used in the creation of the finished text. Games are the food you eat to have the energy to run the marathon. Bananas are premarathonic; but where food has a great deal of impact on your ability to run a marathon, games have an enormous amount of control over the finished text you create incited by them. This incitement, and this control, is games. Congratulations, you are a machine which is used by memes symbiotically, and sometimes parasitically, to move into their next stage of life, which is typically where they engage in sexual reproduction for the purposes of varying the gene pool. Ideas are fucking in your head, right now! Can't wait till they spore.

Rules are False

This is presumptive and reductive, I'm certain counter examples exist but I'll say it for the universe is infinite and my time is infinite differently (derogatory), there are no games for which the rules are true. When we engage in game, we take the rules, and we accept them as if they were true to guide our experience; but that acceptance is contingent and voluntary, further it is adapted via our understanding of the text so we are unlikely to be accepting the literal rules of the text, but a precursor meme that we have constructed from the text.

Holocure makes me more critical of Vampire Survivors

To me, Holocure is definitively better than Vampire Survivors, because they aren't in the same genre anymore and ultimately I don't think I like Vampire Survivor's genre. Vampire Survivors is a game where you move around, and you make decisions about moving around, picking up and advancing weapons, items, as you go. Holocure is that but also you have 2 active abilities, Support & Special, and some weapons have attack direction so it's basically a twin stick shooter. This is what makes it Nanaca to me.

Nanaca Crash actually has an absurd amount of nearly impossible to make use of player agency, which moves play into a weird space of fighting to be the player. Vampire Survivor is barely not an idle game, and all of the play space exists in figuring out meta in order to make entertaining decisions in configuring your nearly autonomous character. VS also suffers from a memetic hazard I'm infected with, most videogames can be described as a combination lock. You enter the correct inputs and it gives you the thing.

This is a really frustrating thing in my brain and it's why I don't like puzzles in game design. There are a few basic movement patterns that conditionally synergize with builds in VS and once you identify them with their use you just do that and not doing that is wrong. You do the most right thing you can until it's done, until you have progressed the unlock tree and the meta to the point where it is mathematically possible to achieve your goals and/or the game's goals. In VS this is unlock all the stuff, reveal all the combinatorics, and kill death. Which you do by operating the D-pad to achieve motion patterns and positionality subgoals, selecting from sets of 3 or 4 things periodically along the way.

A lot of the time optimal play in VS is you take the guy you're working on to the library or the tower, depending on if you intend to have primarily vertical or horizontal attack patterns, and the linear nature of the map constrains the enemies to simplify your agency space. In the tower there are trap manholes, don't step on them, or do if you want but it's not relevant so don't want, and there's rooms where big storms of bone serpents spawn, these move too fast and densely to be engaged with agently so just dodge or leave. The library doesn't have that.

One of the big points of inanimate agency in VS is that many maps have weapons and items scattered around that you can go pick up. You can receive weapons and items from levelups until you have the maximum number, which I can't even pull to mind because it's just fact, you don't count them they're just there. You can pick up more than that, but the synthesis of this is you must not pick up anything until you have received the maximum from levelups, or you simply get less. In the same, you can pick up a thing you already have, but that doesn't give you a new thing, it just upgrades and you will get the upgrades, so you must not receive anything from levelup that you could pick up later. Thus, the strategy is to plan for having things you can pick up later, and survive until it is appropriate to pick them up. The simple example being the Library always has the spellbook that lets you evolve the Wand. So you get the Wand, and you do not get the spellbook, until you have filled out all your items so that when you get the spellbook you have more items than you would have otherwise. Which is good.

This gets enhanced with joint evolutions, such as the guns, or the birds, or the whips. The important mechanical addition here is that you have multiple weapons evolving into a single weapon, and usually retaining the essential function of both. So when you evolve the two guns into one set of four guns, you get to get another weapon. Which is good.

This is the essential gameplay of Vampire Survivors. Understand how your weapons interact with the space, and how they tetris together, so that you can get more stuff, because having more stuff makes things go better for you. Now just don't fuck it up.

Yesterday I unlocked a new map in Holocure which is a vertical strip of land between two bodies of water. Positioned in the water are pirate ships. When you move vertically across the plane of a pirate ship, they shoot a big cannonball at you and you die (you only 90% die and then you get killed by the mobs). This map is really aggro, with quite a lot of mobs spawning, they do a lot of damage quickly, and there's a lot of obstructions breaking up the space, I don't think I've broken 5 minutes yet. Part of that is there's an upgrade system, part of that is that the weapon/item synergies are a lot more complicated, part of that is I don't use my special as much as I should. I also think that this map does a pretty great job of punishing girls who aren't suitable for it, which in turn rewards concept mastery of the different play styles and how to augment them with builds. If you just fall into movement patterns, you're going to get crushed by a cannonball.

Did I mention you can't see the pirate ships most of the time? There's an area you need to stay in, or cross between with intention, at least until you get your speed up a lot. It's tight and you must keep your exits open or you're going to get killed.

To be clear this is still a combination lock, but now the definitions of the conditions can't be laid out simply, and the margins on failure are a lot tighter.

Like driving a car, the goals are to get to your destination, not die, not kill anyone, not allow your vehicle to touch any pedestrians, and do so efficiently, which is a combination lock scenario, but moment to moment that doesn't describe what you're doing. 

Playbook: Scholar of the Hollow Sky

Everyone looks up into the night sky and sees the stars that gleam with a scent of color, the milky streaks that paint paths, the ephemeral lines of shooting stars, and the longer lasting trails of comets. You looked, and looked, at every star, every speck, every stroke of heavens, sketched, cataloged, plotted.

When you finish looking at all of the everything, what remains is the tremendous nothing. They say the abyss stares back but you stared long and it welcomed you home to the place you have always been. Inside the between

The space between the world and the moon, between the stars, between the hills, between the houses, between the walls, between our hands, our blood, our souls is of a kind. It is all the hollow that holds us and sings us to sleep with the echoes of the cosmos -- the noise of endless stars, the noise of birds between the heavens and the earth, between birth and death -- as we drift aside to sleep.

It beckons, come here, come to where you are, come and see all the everything, and all the nothing between. Come to the cracks, the gaps, the paths forgotten by space itself, to the other places, the older places, the new trails between here and other heres.

    "Where are you scholar?"

    "I am in between." 

Playbook: The Nameful One

Like most, you were born with a name, but in the calling darkness there came an offer, and with it a new name. Bestowed upon you by the great fallen, your service to them was rewarded, in coin, in crown, in the friendship of powerful people, and in a reputation. Your bargain fulfilled the calling darkness found you again, another patron, another task, another name. The years strain knowing and you have proven yourself by many names. Some are known but in knowing the name is yours one knows as well that the name rings hollow. Holding no power over you. With so many names in hand, what even does it mean for one to be your own?

Under Strange Moons 03/10/22

It's dark here, an unkind darkness, under the ice. Red lights line the walkways, radiophosphor indicators, but for now the power is out, the tunnels are dark, only rote familiarity to guide. Help is coming, it is best to wait, but the main shaft door was open when everything went out. First order of business is to close in this cold, so the worse cold stays out. Uncountable time traversing the red dotted walkways, the dim glow of stars casts down the shaft. Not lit, but light. On approach though, a glow descends. The moon is crossing over the shaft. It's thin crescent offering far more light.

Under Strange Moons 02/03/22

The trees give way down the hill to a creek, falling down to the river. Their shadows fall, today, well clear of the water, which sparkles in the starlight. Rocks litter the waters, in some places seeming to deflect them. Slides from the slope above. Some, as this one, suited almost willfully to being sat upon, with one's feet in the water, cool from the ground, unlike the air. The trees drape a curtain, creating a hallway through nature itself. An undergrowth of mysteria hidden from the creek, the rocks, by inches and seconds. A wall between the exposed and the vulnerable.

Under Strange Moons 01/30/22

Behind the factory, a small dark parking lot in the dead of night. The winter sky is scattered clouds, dim stars peek through, hazen by the city light. This is a moment amid the work, a step aside from obligations knowing the return step comes in stride. In the days and minutes this place is mine, the shadows and snow mounds, I know the cracks in the asphalt, the vines in the chain link fence. There is no seat, but many perches to lean.

A Game of Asphalt Among Ashes

Asphalt Among Ashes is a game by Andrea Duarte

 https://kipplekipp.itch.io/asphalt-among-ashes

What follows is some play:

The vehicle is a road train, a squared off double wide, built to barely fit under any bridges in the area, when there were bridges in the area. The cabin is high and it's windows wrap around. The body is in good shape, only from careful repairs. Whether an inch of original sheathing remains, is a negative not to pursue disproving. The outside is kept a slightly iridescent blue, the inside show's it's patchwork nature. The glass is harder to maintain, nothing the like has been made in almost as long and spares ran out soon after. It has been replaced with layering of mesh painted black. Fine grid on the outside, larger and more robust grid on the inside. Appearing from a distance as a reasonable facsimile of the original windscreen. The airflow helps to make up for the long dead AC unit.