These days, I feel like a lot of people determine that they're either into narrative-centric games or mechanics-centric games, and don't do much in the way of cross-pollination, even when the games themselves do so. I'm sure we all know at least one person who takes inexplicable pride in the fact that they skip all the cutscenes in games, for example.
Me, I've always been a "why not both?" kind of person. There are times when I'm in the mood for a game to tell me a good story, times when I'm in the mood to engage with some interesting mechanics — and times when I find a blend of the two to be most rewarding.
Actually, there are times where I feel like I'm enjoying mechanics-centric games a lot more now than I have done in the past — to such a degree that I've found myself wondering more than once if I actually prefer them. This was particularly fresh in my mind while I was feasting on Super Mario Galaxy while we were on holiday.
Then a game like Nighthawks comes along, and I'm reminded of how involving and immersive a game that places its narrative front and centre can really be. How it can feel like you're really inhabiting a world with a cast of characters, truly sharing your experiences with them.
The gameplay in Nighthawks isn't especially complex, but it is enough to distinguish itself from both visual novels and adventure games. I'll have a lot more to say about this when I write about the game in full once I've beaten it. I'm not sure how far off that is now, but I've been playing for 30 hours and things are definitely building to something. But suffice it to say for now that I am thoroughly enraptured by this dark little world and the colourful cast of misfits that populate it.
I think the simple answer is that I just like a wide variety of gaming experiences, both mechanics- and narrative-centric. I attribute this to growing up in an age where mechanics-centric was the norm and narrative-centric was relatively unusual to see, and then having several of my defining gaming experiences be with narrative-centric games, including Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Final Fantasy VII. This state of affairs helped me see the benefit of all types of games.
Well, no. There are some games, like grand strategy affairs, that I still find largely indecipherable. But I guess one has to draw a line somewhere. As it stands, I don't think I'm ever going to be short of things to play!
For all the terrible things happening in the games industry, it is still a great time to be into games. And there are a bunch of things out in the imminent future that I'm very much looking forward to getting stuck into. After Nighthawks, of course…
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One of my favourite things in video games is when a game takes a very small, pretty mundane environment and renders it in a ridiculous level of detail. I'm not generally a "graphics person", but if you give me a game in which I can poke around a tiny, convincingly rendered house in extreme levels of detail I will be very happy indeed. Consequently, I am very excited to check out Silent Hill Townfall when it arrives.
I actually don't know very much about Silent Hill Townfall. I don't even really know how it plays. After not loving how Silent Hill f turned out — or more accurately, how it played — I haven't really been following the new one, but I have seen a few screenshots floating across my feed here and there. And I am finding myself oddly excited by them: specifically, by the fact that the game unfolds in a lovingly recreated depiction of working-class Britain (well, Scotland, but much of the characteristic visual identity is similar) and allows you to… well, poke around in tiny, convincingly rendered houses in extreme levels of detail.
I'm all for this. The idea of Silent Hill being more of an amorphous concept than an actual, physical place is a solid move for the series, I think; for all my grumbling at Silent Hill f's gameplay, its vibes and depiction of 1960s rural Japan was fantastic. The way the setting reflects the protagonist's mental state has always been an important part of the series, and setting it in places other than small-town America allows a lot more scope for this aspect of the storytelling.
I'm not even all that bothered about the inevitable "Otherworld" stuff that will almost certainly be part of Townfall. I don't need spooky scary monsters jumping out of closets at me. I just want a cool little world to wander around.
My attitude towards this sort of interactive experience goes some distance to explaining why, back on its original release, I enjoyed Gone Home so much. There are still people who get absolutely frothing mad about that game, but I was never one of them. For me, it perfectly captured the almost exact same feelings that I felt when I first returned to the place that had once been my home after my first wife left me. You might think that's not exactly something I'd care to be reminded of, but at the point I played Gone Home there was enough distance between that happening and me being able to look back on it and appreciate a piece of work that understood those feelings.
A similar thing for Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, a mostly forgotten PS4 game in which you walk very slowly through an English village and weird things happen with no real explanation or resolution. While I very much understand some people bouncing off that one in particular, I was thoroughly enamoured with just existing in that world.
I think all this goes back even further to Build engine games like Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior and Blood, which at least made an effort to depict convincing, realistic environments and feature interactive elements you could fiddle around with. Of course, the tech was too limited to be able to create environments with the level of detail we expect from our big-budget entertainment today, but there was something oddly… real-feeling about these virtual locales that I never quite got from games that took a more fantastic or sci-fi approach.
So yeah. I'm mostly excited about Silent Hill Townfall to wander into houses that look a bit like where my Nan used to live. And I don't have a problem with that at all. If the game turns out to be good, so much the better. But I'm going to enjoy just exploring that world, I think.
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I forgot to write something on here yesterday! In my defence, I wrote nearly 4,000 words on Ys VIIIover on MoeGamer so I think you can probably cut me a bit of slack. I'm still going to take this post to "catch up" though.
I really enjoyed Ys VIII overall. It still feels a bit odd to play an Ys game that is 50+ hours long, but the game didn't drag at any point. It consistently sends you to new and interesting locales, and the story develops in some thoroughly intriguing directions as you progress. I successfully got the "true" ending, which isn't all that difficult to get (you just need more than 198 reputation points, which are easily acquired through just normal gameplay) and everything wrapped up in a most satisfying manner.
After writing my piece on Ys, I went back to the excellent Nighthawks, which is a spectacularly good game. As you might expect, I will be writing a more substantial piece on this once I've finished it, but suffice to say for now that if you have enjoyed any of the relatively recent crop of what I like to call "storytelling RPGs" (Disco Elysium, Esoteric Ebb), then you will definitely get a kick out of Nighthawks.
I think one of the things that always impresses me the most about a good quality game like this is how it can truly create a sense of a world without having an actual 3D space you can freely wander around. For me, the primarily text-based world of Nighthawks is considerably more compelling than a fully 3D modelled but ultimately bland and personality-free "open world", particularly because of the colourful characters that inhabit that world. It's funny, because this is exactly what the capital-A "Adventure" snobs were talking about in the early days of the medium; if you have a suitably compatible brain, the imagery conjured up by your mind from reading text will always be more vivid than anything even a powerful video card can render. (Of course, the fact that Nighthawks has beautiful art and excellent voice acting also helps a lot.)
Once I've finished Nighthawks, I'm going to play Silent Hill Townfall, which looks like it's going to be thoroughly interesting. I'm oddly excited to play a game with such accurate-looking renditions of a British (well, Scottish) town, and I'm intrigued to see how the game differentiates itself from other Silent Hill games. I didn't love Silent Hill f, although I didn't hate it either; from what I understand, Silent Hill Townfall is quite a different beast anyway, so I'm excited to explore it.
After that, I think it's going to have to be Ace Combat 8. I love Ace Combat, and this new one has been getting excellent reviews. I'm happy about that. The series deserves to do well, and it's nice to have a game like this on modern hardware. I mean, the PS2 Ace Combat games still look surprisingly great, but it's even better to have something in full HD-o-vision.
There we go, all caught up. Now watch me forget to write something later today.
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The deluge of amazing games coming out in the latter half of this year has started. I've already noted that I've been playing the excellent Nighthawks from Wadjet Eye Games, and that is very much occupying my immediate attention, but also on my radar for the immediate-ish future are Silent Hill Townfall and Ace Combat 8, both of which seem to be going down well with reviewers so far.
I also still need to finish Ys VIII, which I set aside while I started Nighthawks, but I think I'm going to devote tomorrow to. I was enjoying it a lot, and I think I'm getting near the end, so I would like to finish it properly. Ys VIII is not a recent release, though. It came out ten years ago and has had two sequels since then, both of which I would like to play at some point.
Not only that, but I've been having a steady stream of stuff I preordered months ago finally coming around — just this week I've had Chained Echoes and Trails in the Sky Second Chapter come in, Little Goody Two-Shoes is on the way and I'm sure there are others to look forward to.
Situations like we've got here are why I'm not immediately worried for the crash that the top end of the industry appears to be careening towards. I have enough unplayed (or "want to replay") games on my shelves to last me for many, many years at this point, so if there comes a day where, for one reason or another, I just can't buy any new games? I think I'm probably going to be fine.
It will be a sad day when it's no longer possible to buy boxed copies of games, of course — and I'm sure once Sony successfully pushes for this with their abandonment of discs in 2027, at the very least Microsoft will follow — but I'm well-stocked in my little bunker for such an eventuality. Only question is: will I actually be able to finish all these RPGs before I die? I reckon I can… assuming the world itself lasts that long, of course.
My wife often takes the piss out of me for the number of games I have that are still shrinkwrapped, but I've always bought stuff with this sort of eventuality in mind. I mean, I was hoping it would never actually come to a day where physical media would no longer be a thing — and I guess it still might not, as much can change even in the space of a year — but I've basically been investing in the future enjoyment of my hobby, and in the meantime, I've been wanting to just support the games that I would like to see more of. As frustrating as it is to know that "Day One" sales count for almost more than anything for a lot of developers and publishers, it is, unfortunately, a fact. And while I'm in a position where I'm comfortable enough to be able to support the stuff I like, I'm happy to do so — even if I don't get around to actually playing the games in question until, at times, a year or two (or ten) later.
Anyway, I'm not buying anything else until payday next week. But I will probably be picking up Silent Hill Townfall and Ace Combat 8. I do genuinely want to beat Ys VIII though! Really! I want to write about it and everything!
For this evening, though, Nighthawks is calling, so if you need me, I'll be stalking in the shadows of Cradlebridge.
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Yesterday's post was out of frustration, so it's only fair that I make today's post one of genuine enthusiasm. Today marks the release of Nighthawks, a new game from The Curiosity Engine and Wadjet Eye Games, and I think you should buy it because it is good. Positive enough for you?
I should probably add at this point that I have not yet played the full version of Nighthawks — it is presently sitting on my PC ready to be started for the first time. But I did play a demo several months back (EDIT: nearly a year ago!) that looked like it would be pretty representative of the full experience, and I came away from that demo thinking "cor blimey, that game was a bit of all right and no mistake, onto the wishlist it goes". I have no reason to believe that things have taken a devastatingly shit turn between that time and now, particularly because Nighthawks has been in development for so long.
Eight years, to be exact; the project began its public-facing life on Kickstarter in 2018. I must confess I only became aware of it a little more recently — I think the aforementioned demo was the first time I'd really stumbled across it in any meaningful way — but like I say, that initial contact was enough for me to get thoroughly interested in the project and want to pick it up immediately on release day. Well, release day is here, and I have made good on my promise: I have bought it, and intend to spend the evening playing it, even though I haven't quite yet finished Ys VIII as I hoped I would have by this point. But no matter. I'm sure I can find a way of juggling these two games without agonising over the decision of which to play each evening. I'm good at that.
(beat)
Anyway, some of you may still be wondering what the fuck this Nighthawks thing actually is. Well, it's a vampire RPG, based around a similar concept to White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade franchise, only in this instance there is no Masquerade; the existence of vampires is no longer a secret. Still, the fact that you play a vampire, with all the interesting powers that comes with both your new undeath and your overall background, is a common factor — and with the disappointment that Bloodlines 2 apparently ended up being, there is definitely scope for a good vampire RPG in 2026.
Don't come into this expecting something along the lines of Bloodlines, though; this is primarily a text and dialogue-based game rather than a game where you have a little vampire man that runs around a city, bites people and occasionally indulges in some of the worst first- and/or third-person action ever committed to a gold master. That means it's a very character-centric game, with interactions between your character and the various inhabitants of the city playing a crucial role in how things unfold. To put it another way, its overall approach has a fair amount in common with games like Disco Elysium and Esoteric Ebb, where you are effectively working with the game, which acts as a virtual "game master", to build your story.
The game is written by Richard Cobbett of PC Gamer fame, whose other work actually on games includes titles such as Beyond a Steel Sky and Sunless Sea/Skies. It also features art by Ben Chandler, who has worked on some excellent adventure games in the last few years, and Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games has acted as producer. There are also some excellent voice actors in the game, including, among others, the inimitable Sally Beaumont (of Old Skiesfame) in a "minor but memorable" role, apparently.
As I say, I'm yet to jump into the full game and see how things have turned out, as well as establish factors like how long the game is, but the demo version from a while back made me very excited about this game indeed. As such, I'm really looking forward to sinking my fangs into it after dinner, and I'm sure I'll have much more to say about it in the near future.
Right now, though, it's 7.30pm, I've had dinner, I've emptied and reloaded the dishwasher: it's time. The lights are down low. It's time to enter the nocturnal world of Nighthawks. Maybe you should, too.
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It feels like pretty much every day for the last few months we've seen a story that claims some game or other has been translated for the first time ever, or ported to PC for the first time ever… and I feel like a good nine times out of every ten of these projects that show up, the project ends up being vibecoded slop.
I'm afraid I don't give any credence to the theory that AI development tools "democratise" development of stuff like this. The biggest problem — besides the fact that AI models are all built on stolen data, of course… and the environmental impacts — is, without a doubt, the fact that people using them end up shitting out something that they have absolutely no understanding of. Thus, when a problem arises — and you can bet a problem will arise with something shat out by AI — they have no idea how to fix it.
"Well, just hand it over to someone who knows what they're doing!" you might say. And to that I say, any developer worth their salt will not accept such a project. No-one wants to debug the spaghetti code shat out by a plagiarism robot. Not only will that be a lot of work, much of which wouldn't have needed to happen if the project had been done properly in the first place, but the person fixing the job will end up with their reputation tarnished purely by virtue of having worked on an AI project.
Unfair? Perhaps. But at this point, people have to know that using generative AI is going to attract backlash. People fucking hate it! People would rather not have a thing than have a thing that was pumped out using generative AI tools! And any short-lived kudos you might attain for being the "first" person to do something (except you didn't actually do the thing yourself) will, in short order, absolutely torpedo your reputation. At this point, with all the high-profile cases there have been of backlash against projects that involve generative AI, you would have to be either wilfully ignorant or just outright sticking your fingers in your ears to be unaware of the resistance to all this.
And the thing that sucks is that, for me and numerous others like me, the torrent of vibecoded slop projects has completely destroyed any interest or excitement we might have had for things that should be interesting and exciting. The decomp/recomp scene should be fascinating, and the non-vibecoded examples of these games put out amazing results that can potentially breathe new life into all manner of different games. But I've seen so many announcements that conclude with "…and this was made with Claude" that I'm afraid I just don't give a shit any more. I just do not care. I do not have the time, energy or inclination to sort through everything just to find the few things that have been made with genuine human knowledge and craft. And so I just can't be arsed to keep up with any of this sort of project any more, be they fan translations or decomp/recomp efforts. It's enough of a pain having to resist generative AI bullshit in full-price commercial titles already.
I know pushback against generative AI is repetitive and tedious and annoying, but, frankly, the signs are very much apparent that we haven't been pushing back hard enough. We need to get to a point where even thinking about using generative AI for something like this makes these dorks flush their own heads down the toilet. I'm sick of it. And, if you're reading this, you probably are too.
Still, with any luck the bubble will burst soon, and all of this garbage will go the way of NFTs. I cannot wait. Cannot wait.
Advance notice to any AI boosters already composing an indignant comment: I think I have made my stance on this abundantly clear at this point. If you come in here with any of the usual garbage about "just a tool" and "what about the motor car" or "Amazon Web Services" or "Luddites", you will be banished to the pit of I Never Have To Hear From You Ever Again. You have been warned. Go cry to your precious Claude about it. And it will not care, because it can't. You are going to die alone. And you deserve it.
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Remember how yesterday I said a group of friends and I were going to play Big Walk"this afternoon"? Yeah, well, we started in the afternoon, my time… and concluded twelve fucking hours later. I have never, ever had a multiplayer session so long that the batteries in my headset went flat. Until now! (It's also been a very long time since I pulled an all-nighter on a video game, but those are usually solo.)
There are some mild Big Walk spoilers ahead. I will not be sharing complete puzzle solutions, but I may talk a bit about the thought process involved in some of them. You have been warned.
I don't think any of us expected the session to go on for so long, since we were in Big Walk's "postgame". We had partly (and correctly) assumed that the postgame would just involve going around and cleaning up any puzzles we didn't complete as part of the process you go through to "beat" the main game, but we were also aware that we'd discovered a place where there were fifteen empty slots for the "Kong" figurines that are your rewards for completing the various puzzles, and thus there was probably still a fair amount of work to do. We didn't know what the end result of doing said work would be, though.
We should have known, really; in our process of beating the main game, there weren't fifteen puzzles left over. And sure enough, once you get into the postgame, a selection of "purple Kong" puzzles unlock in a part of the map that was previously inaccessible. These mostly take the form of challenges similar to puzzles found elsewhere in the game, but made significantly more difficult and/or time-consuming somehow.
That said, there were also two puzzles from our "main game" leftovers which had left us reasonably stumped, so we had intended to come back to them. Both of those proved to be extremely time-consuming, too, so in retrospect it's no surprise that solving fifteen puzzles in total took twelve hours. We did make up for it with one of the other main game leftover puzzles taking us less than two minutes, though, because our team are now Big Walk pros, apparently.
Some of the most interesting challenges we encountered involved having to split up the party in various ways. One puzzle tasked us with looking through telescopes to find a series of four pedestals, and once there was at least one person at each pedestal, we then had to find a way to synchronise our button presses. Another challenged us to find a specific sound somewhere on the island. Another still involved locating things that we had used in various other puzzles and taking them to another location. In each of these situations, the challenge was communicating over a long distance: the game does have walkie-talkie items, but given you are limited in what you can carry — you can hold one thing in your hands, one on a belt loop (once you've found one) and one on a backpack (likewise), but you cannot access the belt or backpack items yourself — it's not always practical for everyone to carry one of these. And besides, you have to find them first anyway!
We found a way in each instance, though. And it wasn't just the long-distance puzzles that gave us these communication challenges, either. One of the "purple Kong" puzzles required us to figure out how to communicate complex information between two different rooms, when one room could use an intercom but the other could only respond by turning a light on or off. Another tasked us with communicating auditory information between rooms with a completely soundproof barrier between them. Another still tested the limits of how precisely we could verbally communicate visual information.
The one we left for last was a harder version of an earlier "golf" puzzle involving an extremely heavy ball that we had solved earlier in the game. The initial, main game implementation of this puzzle was fairly easy to solve, but the postgame variant involved getting the ball over a significantly longer distance, which required some creative thinking and teamwork. Among the many talents and skills that Big Walk tests, patience is one of the most significant of all of them. In this modern, attention-deficit world, I suspect there will be at least some groups who find the patience and endurance challenges to be some of the most taxing.
Still, the "true" ending was worth it, and I was grateful we didn't have to go through the immensely difficult "finale" of the main game again. That finale was a great experience, but having to do it again after twelve hours would have probably killed me.
One thing I really appreciated about Big Walk as a whole is that it's just an excellently designed game. It's a game which understands that when you're tasking people with confronting some significant, cooperative challenges together, it pays to have a clear, distinct visual language that everyone can learn to understand quickly and easily. Subtly, and without explicitly telling the player at any point, it introduces you to various concepts as you progress through the game — many of which are in the "starter area" — and coming to recognise those different elements of the game and what they mean is a key part of learning to play Big Walk effectively. Communicating your understanding of those elements to the rest of your group is important, too; if you know something but the others don't, it won't help the group as a whole if you keep it to yourself!
Anyway, we successfully completed all of the game — with the only thing (I think) we didn't find in our playthrough being the "shiny paint station". It was very much worth it, and if you have at least one good friend to play it with, I highly encourage you to do so — and to take the time to play it from start to finish. It takes a while, but it's very much a worthwhile activity to spend a few sessions on together. I certainly won't be forgetting our experiences in a hurry.
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One of the things I was originally thinking about doing with MoeGamer was doing more regular "updates" on what I've been playing recently. I still haven't actually done that — at least partly because I haven't determined a good way to do it; perhaps a weekly "What I've Been Playing" column? — so for now, today, I am going to provide that update in the form of a blog post here. Strap yourself in!
I've had several games on the go recently. My Final Fantasy XI playthrough stalled when Oliver went missing and I haven't picked it up again since that; I've got to a point in that game where it feels quite demanding to play in terms of attention span and patience, and I haven't quite felt up to that yet. That's not a criticism — I think one of the best things about Final Fantasy XI is its depth and complexity — but I do very much have to be in the mood for it. I also have the issue that I finished the bit of the game that I was most interested in playing — the Chains of Promathia expansion — and thus I'm early in Treasures of Aht Urhgan and it hasn't quite "hooked" me in the same way just yet.
I have, however, started a few other games. Probably the "main" one of these I'm playing at the moment is Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, which I've been meaning to have a look at for pretty much the last ten years. I did start it one evening when we had some friends over, we all got a little tipsy and one of them wanted to see an RPG, but I set it aside after that because I was already playing some other things. This time around, I started over (again) and have been thoroughly enraptured by it; it's an excellent game, with speedy combat and progression, a real, genuine sense of adventure, and a compelling story. It's very long for an Ys game — I'm 40 hours in and only just getting hints that we might be getting towards an ending, but my map exploration rate is only about 75% — but I think it works. "What Ys is" has changed a great deal over the years, and it seems that this one is (quite rightly) regarded as one of the best of the "modern Ys" titles.
I've also been playing Suikoden as part of the HD Remaster collection, and I've been mostly enjoying that. It's another game that I feel like I have to be in the right mood for, although this is less to do with its complexity and more to do with its relatively sedate pace of proceedings. I need to get back to it and finish it, because I was enjoying it a lot (aside from the army battles, which suck) and I would like to see how it ends. I also believe it's quite short, and I'm a good way through it, so it would be nice to cross it off the list sooner rather than later. Perhaps I'll play some of that today.
The next "big game" I have on my radar to play is Wadjet Eye Games' Nighthawks, a text-based RPG which is heavily inspired by (but not licensed from) the White Wolf Vampire: The Masquerade setting — with some notable differences, such as "no Masquerade". I played the demo of this a while back and it looks like being something incredibly special. Beautiful art, excellent voice acting, a well-crafted script with memorable characters — I'm looking forward to giving it a good amount of attention, and almost certainly writing something about it once I've spent some time with it.
I was hoping to get both Ys VIII and Suikoden finished before Nighthawks came out, but I don't think that's going to happen, given that Nighthawks is out early next week. I should be able to polish off at least one of them, though; at the rate I'm going, I think Ys VIII is likely to be down for the count first, but we'll see.
On the non-narrative game front, I have been playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 after really enjoying (and completing) the first one while we were away on holiday. I've also been playing Kirby and the Forgotten Land, which is a game I like a lot, but for some reason find it difficult to focus on for long periods of time.
I think part of the issue with Kirby is that each level has a bunch of optional objectives to complete, and it doesn't reveal them until you've either already done them, made progress on one that has multiple steps, or just completed the level without achieving them. In the latter case, it only reveals one of the optional objectives at a time, so if you have absolutely no idea what they are, it takes up to four playthroughs of a single level to get all the Stuff. This feels a bit like padding, but the game as a whole is so charming (and the levels so relatively quick to play through) that I should probably just get over myself and get on with it. I've actually been doing just that at lunchtimes this week.
Finally, this afternoon a group of friends and I will be playing some Big Walk, which we've been working our way through at the weekends. We finished it a few weeks back, but we're going back in to try and clean up some of the puzzles we didn't complete prior to heading for the ending. It's been a really good time; I was worried that it would be another Blue Prince kind of situation, where a bunch of critics lost their shit over how "good" it supposedly was, but I'd end up hating it, but no; I've been really enjoying it.
Anyway, that's where I am. I think some Ys for a few hours, then Big Walk later. Then tomorrow I'll do some video recording. Sounds like a plan to me!
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In the early days of home computer and video gaming, there was an enormous amount of excitement over what many publications referred to as capital-A Adventures. It wasn't uncommon to see computer mags in particular devote entire issues to Adventures, and a lot of them had a monthly column in which the writer (who often went by a pseudonym for some reason) would talk about recently released adventures, offer tips and advice to readers who had written in, and sometimes provide full solutions for particularly tricky games.
One recurring feature of this Adventure coverage back in the early '80s was a marked disdain for graphics. To the devoted Adventurer, the most vivid, spectacular images of all are those which are conjured up by one's own mind when reading some well-crafted prose, and thus no form of computer graphics would ever be able to match up to the possibilities afforded by one's own imagination.
There was a certain amount of pretentiousness here, yes, but they also had something of a point at the time; the graphical capabilities of home computers at the time were relatively limited, at least until the 16-bit micros became more well-established, and thus in many cases the graphics in illustrated adventures were somewhat… primitive, to say the least. In cases where they weren't, you ran into another problem: memory and storage space. Since 8-bit micros had anywhere between 8 and 128 kilobytes of RAM on offer, there was a hard limit on how much game data you could include in a game — and "data" in this case covered both descriptive text and graphics.
On systems with widespread disk drive adoption, such as the Atari 8-bit and C64, this issue was at least partly sidestepped by publishing Adventures on floppy disk, with the relevant data being loaded into memory from the disk only when needed — something it was only possible to do with the random access of a disk, since cassettes could only load data in a linear fashion (and took a long time to do it anyway). You still ran into hard caps, though: a disk could only hold so much.
It became pretty widely agreed among Adventure enthusiasts that straight-up text-only Adventures were always going to be the superior option, because you could fit a lot more text than graphics into either memory or the available space on a floppy disk, and the sort of person playing an Adventure was likely to be someone who enjoys reading anyway. So leave the fancy graphics for the arcade game fans and keep giving those Adventure fans that delicious plain text!
It didn't last, of course. As graphics technology got better, computers had more memory and storage solutions had greater capacity, we got to a point where it was possible to have well-written Adventures that also had excellent illustrations. Some of the earliest to see success in this regard were the titles from Magnetic Scrolls, such as The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves and Jinxter. These still placed most of the emphasis on the text, but the illustrations (which could be turned off) supported the story.
Then we started to get more in the way of "graphic adventures", beginning with Sierra's "3-D Animated Adventure Games" such as the King's Quest series, which initially gave you direct control of an on-screen character while keeping interaction via a text parser. From there, we ended up with the entirely mouse-driven point-and-click adventure, as popularised by titles such as Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island. At that point, the purely text-based Adventure appeared to have been completely left by the wayside in favour of a more visual form of interactive entertainment. In many respects, this made these games a lot more accessible to those who perhaps weren't comfortable attempting to communicate with a computer by typing verb-noun phrases, but for those who still enjoyed to read, things were never quite the same again.
Today, of course, there's the never-ending push for photorealism that has been taken to its natural, absurd extreme with technologies like Nvidia's AI slop bimbofication filter, sorry, DLSS5, and some people are, quite understandably, starting to feel fatigued with how a lot of games feel like they look very similar to one another. What happened to using our imaginations as the ultimate graphics chipset?
Well, good news: the good old text-based Adventure never died! In fact, it quietly flourished as the years went on, with an enthusiast community continuing to make use of this venerable but undeniably effective means of enjoying an interactive story — and even creating their own original Adventures that would have gone down extremely well with the Adventure enthusiasts of the early 1980s. Meanwhile, the similar-but-different visual novel genre has enjoyed gradual but steady growth over a similar period, making its way from niche-interest curiosity to something quite commonly seen today. People, it turns out, still like to read.
Every so often, I get a hankering to explore some text-based games. What I have referred to in the preceding paragraphs as Adventures tend to be described as "Interactive Fiction" these days. If you're being particularly pedantic, there is a difference between "Interactive Fiction" and "Text Adventure" — the former emphasises an unfolding text-based story, while the latter has greater focus on exploration and puzzle-solving — but "IF" tends to be used as a shorthand for all text-based, parser-driven games these days, and it also encompasses games that use multiple-choice or hypertext interfaces, such as those made with the popular Twine tool.
Thankfully, there are plenty of places to explore Interactive Fiction. A good place to have a look is the annual IFComp, or Interactive Fiction Competition. Right now, you can download and play a whole host of games that cover probably every piece of subject matter you might be able to think of. And you (yes, you!) can judge them, too. I bet you'd like that. You love judging things, don't you. Well, go on then! Go judge something! I think I know what I'm doing tomorrow!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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I've been playing video games for as long as I can remember existing. I grew up playing games on the Atari 8-bit and ST home computers, and since then, I have followed along with the explosive growth and technological advancement of the medium every step of the way. And yet today, in 2026, I feel like I'm being specifically pushed away in so many ways.
There are lots of contributing factors to this, but the things that come immediately mind today both relate to Final Fantasy VII Revelation, the upcoming third and final part of the Final Fantasy Remake project. We have a release date for it at last — April 8, 2027 — but two things came to light today which pissed me right off: firstly, the fact that not one, but two pieces of DLC and an "expansion pass" have been announced for it more than half a year before the game has been released, and secondly, the physical editions on all platforms will require you to download the bulk of the game rather than installing it from disc, thereby making said physical editions almost completely worthless.
On the first point: you have spent three games telling this story which once took one 40-hour game to tell. Just include everything in this fucking final part.
Those who have embraced an "all-digital" future will doubtless not be bothered by the second point, but I am someone who has cultivated a collection of over a thousand physical releases across a variety of platforms, and a big part of the reason I have done that is as a sort of investment in my future entertainment: for the next significant number of years, I will be able to enjoy a whole variety of different video game experiences on a bunch of different consoles. And with this looking like it may well be the last generation of consoles I have any interest in whatsoever, thanks to Sony's plans to give up physical media and the adoption of the odious "Game-Key Cards" on Switch 2, it feels increasingly important to have all that stuff ready to play.
Now, for a lot of the stuff I've bought, I can just put it in a console and play it. It's one of the big reasons why I've bought a lot of limited-print stuff — I know a lot of people don't like those companies for various reasons, but one thoroughly admirable thing that pretty much all of them have committed to is only putting out a physical version when a game is finished. That means you buy it, you put it in, you play it. No downloading updates; no DLC (there have been a few exceptions to this, but for the most part anything that was once DLC is included in these physical versions) and no requirement to be connected to the Internet. You know, like physical media always was prior to everything we own being perpetually connected to the Internet, and gradually, slowly but surely, getting increasingly fucked-up over time?
This news for Final Fantasy VII Revelation fucks with this, though. I have copies of Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth that I can install from disc and play right now, even if my Internet connection isn't working — or, in the years to come, if Sony were to decide to just switch off the servers that were delivering downloadable game files to people. Were I to buy a physical copy of Revelation, though, I would not be able to do that, because the whole game isn't on the damned disc. So what happens if, in 20 or 30 years, assuming I'm still around and capable of playing video games at that point, I decide I want to replay the entire Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy? I just… can't play the last bit if the servers are no longer online?
And you might think that's an extreme scenario, but there are games I have on my shelf that are 30+ years old that I am still pulling down and playing. And I will continue to play an original copy by choice if it is available. So it's entirely possible that multiple decades from now, I will want to play something that was released in the 2020s.
Of course, it's also possible that in the future, storage costs will continue to plummet, and it will be practical to have some form of storage device loaded up with a huge library of PS5 and Switch 2 games, just like I have a chunky SSD full of everything from Atari 2600 up to PlayStation and Saturn games hooked up to my MiSTer. At that point, physical copies may well have ceased to matter.
Couple all this with Sony's eagerness to fight the apparently mistaken assumption that we are "buying" games when we click the "buy" button in their "store", and it doesn't give one a lot of hope for the long-term preservation of what is still, at its core, an incredibly exciting creative, artistic medium.
At this rate, we're going to have everything up to about PlayStation 2 preserved perfectly, but after that things are going to start getting a lot more patchy. No pun intended, given the additional considerations that post-launch updates bring to the table.
I dunno. Maybe I shouldn't bother thinking about this stuff. It's entirely possible that by the time any of my concerns actually start to matter, I'll be long dead. I just don't like seeing something that I have cared deeply about for my whole life continually make itself worse and worse and worse, all in the name of the "perpetual growth" rot economy and the pursuit of never-ending, continually unsatisfied greed. I don't want to feel that future generations simply won't be able to enjoy gaming the way I've enjoyed it for the last 40+ years. And it's hard to flip the switch to the "I don't care, just enjoy it now" setting, after so long of actually caring!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.
