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hannofcart

The next game that they made, Into the Breach, is also fantastic.

I think Subset Games are true game design greats. Really admire their work.

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They gave a great post-mortem at GDC one year:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s_I07Iq_2XM

What was great about it is they fully admit to wanting to give up at one point. They simply couldn’t make the game fun. They stuck with it and eventually made it a great game, but it was persistence that led to success.

Game designers with a lot of success get put on a pedestal and labelled “great”, but they fail as much as anyone, they just push through it. Or they throw their games away, case in point Edward McMillen and Meowgenics.

Into the Breach is a puzzle game that doesn’t look like a puzzle game. As someone who hates puzzles, it was a sad surprise.

I feel the same way exactly. I admire the craft but I don't want to spend time with it. Logic puzzles feel like work after a while. I like games I can play imperfectly.

It’s not a puzzle in one critical sense: there is no single set solution to each level. I would say it’s an abstract, discrete (both turn- and grid-based) strategy game.

I think it's described as a tactics game, to emphasize decisions at the micro level, as opposed to a strategy game which usually is larger in scope and encompasses things like base building and resource gathering.

Yeah that's fair enough! The strategy-part is pretty minimal (stuff like choosing/upgrading your pilots and mechs).

It's a tactics game with perfect information and deterministic actions, which transforms it into a puzzle game if you are inclined to treat it as one. The fact that some puzzles may be unsolvable is incidental (and usually avoidable, if you solve previous puzzles well).

For some people, the puzzle aspect is where the fun is. For others, it's a recipe for frustration.

You can say that because we don’t have an agreed definition of a puzzle game. For me it’s as much a puzzle as chess or go, which is to say it isn’t. For my definition having only 1 intended solution is what separates abstract strategy games from puzzles.

At least to me it feels a lot closer to Sedoku than Civilization.

Sure, it also feels closer to Sudoku than to Tennis. But I think it's closer to a "traditional roguelike" (like Jupiter Hell: https://store.steampowered.com/app/811320/Jupiter_Hell/ or Brogue: https://github.com/tmewett/BrogueCE) than to either.

I enjoyed it a lot. In the harder difficulties I sometimes would spend 15 minutes planning many moves in advance, and it felt rewarding when you crush the game by doing so.

But eventually I grew very tired of the mental effort required. After a long day using my brain, doing it for fun was just not doing it for me anymore.

It's similar to a lot of Japanese "tactics" games in that regard (eg, Valkyria Chronicles). Games which have a lot of elements which make them look pretty free-flowing, but the scenarios end up being rather strict puzzles.

I’ll say that Into the Breach was what I had hoped FTL would have been. But I don’t like rogue-likes and love puzzles. (I suppose logic puzzles were more like what work was instead of debugging AWS configurations…)

This is what I loved about it! Felt like a more fun version of a chess tactics trainer. But to each their own.

I thought I hated puzzles, it turns out that I hate poorly presented and slow puzzles and ended up loving ItB.

I enjoyed the game. However when coming back to it there is always a long relearning curve as I never remember what the mechs do. And then the muscle memory of how to plan/chain attacks takes a while to return... and when it does the fun begins!

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