It's no secret that Cassette Boy is inspired by the classics. It's a top-down adventure game in the vein of a retro Legend of Zelda, while your home base is a small town like in an older Pokémon game, complete with a mom who is constantly wishing you well. The game's blocky 3D graphics evoke Minecraft, and you save at campfires that reset the world, like a FromSoft game.
This year, Maltby, who was first hired by the Harper's editor emeritus Lewis H. Lapham, celebrates fifty years writing the magazine's monthly cryptic crossword. (To mark the occasion, I've included a cryptic clue below.) Maltby describes the puzzle as a "little universe on the back page," like a god estranged from his own intelligent design. It is "kind of lonely," he told me. But for his many loyal solvers, Maltby has always made this universe feel lively and large.
Then you have , a more straight-faced collection of digital escape rooms, but with a much bigger focus on involved puzzles and deep mystery. Both are excellent, but only one of them has a sequel just released. Escape Simulator 2 came out this week, offering even more elaborately themed rooms and even more complex challenges to solve. I spoke to developers Pine Studio to find out more about how to find the balance between emulating real-world rooms, and embracing the impossibilities afforded by video games.
For many triple-A video games, appealing to a wide audience often means ensuring players can see a game to its conclusion. That sometimes translates to sanding down combat, exploration, and puzzle-solving to make it approachable as possible. But this can sometimes veer into making games too guided for their own good. Hell is Us tosses all of these conventions out of the window. Goodbye quest logs, maps, and objective arrows telling you where to go. By trusting players to figure things out, Hell is Us' smart level and puzzle design shine to create compelling and rewarding discoveries, despite middling combat and uneven storytelling.
