Sometimes you can see an OC one (1) time and intuit without further evidence that the most popular post on the artist’s blog is definitely a drawing of this character with the viewpoint positioned roughly at belt-buckle level looking up at their smirking face.
Sometimes you can see an OC one (1) time and intuit without further evidence that the most popular post on the artist’s blog is definitely a drawing of this character with the viewpoint positioned roughly at belt-buckle level looking up at their smirking face.
Sometimes you can see an OC one (1) time and intuit without further evidence that the most popular post on the artist’s blog is definitely a drawing of this character with the viewpoint positioned roughly at belt-buckle level looking up at their smirking face.
I think the fact that a video game criticising its own audience is perceived as bizarre and outside normal boundaries points to the fundamental immaturity of video games as a medium. (n.b.: "immature" in the sense of "undeveloped", not "childish".) It would rightly be regarded as absurd to be having this conversation about literally any other artistic medium.
Well, video games are also uniquely participatory as a genre (there are participatory works in other genres, sure), but I imagine that adds to the uncanniness.
All engagement with art is participatory.
Maybe I could've chosen better words here, but if you claim to not understand what could be meant by "uniquely participatory" when we're discussing Deltarune of all things, I'd be inclined to call you willfully obtuse. I'm addressing the feeling here, not the nature of it.
I don't disagree that video games have affordances for artist-audience interaction which other mediums (typically) do not. I just don't see the use of creating a special carve-out for those affordances – it's a difference of degree, not a difference of kind. All art has ways of engaging for which the artist has prepared a response, and ways of engaging for which the artist has not. The nature of video games allows some ways of engaging which would normally go in the second category to go in the first category instead, but there's nothing ground-breaking in this; the same can be said of all mediums.
(I mean, hell, even if we restrict our consideration to works which engage with their audience specifically on the level of how the work is physically interacted with, The Monster at the End of This Book escalates from Grover begging the reader not to turn the page, to attempting to physically prevent the pages from being turned, and this is a children's book from 1971. "You are responsible for what happens to me in this book because you chose to physically keep turning the pages" is a piece of metatextual fuckery even a first-grader is expected to be able to grasp!)
I mean... is The Monster at the End of This Book not bizarre and outside normal boundaries? I realise it's played for laughs, but it's only able to be funny because of how clearly bizarre it is.
No, it isn't. There are whole genres of children's lit that do similar metatextual stuff, much of it dating back roughly as far – a lot of Edward Packard's Choose Your Own Adventure novels, to cite an example that springs readily to mind. Like, to bring this back around to my point about the immaturity of video games as a medium, I need to emphasise that the kind of metatexual horseshit that's being treated as revolutionary in video games is in literature regarded as so entry level that it's largely relegated to books for primary-school children.
I think the fact that a video game criticising its own audience is perceived as bizarre and outside normal boundaries points to the fundamental immaturity of video games as a medium. (n.b.: "immature" in the sense of "undeveloped", not "childish".) It would rightly be regarded as absurd to be having this conversation about literally any other artistic medium.
Well, video games are also uniquely participatory as a genre (there are participatory works in other genres, sure), but I imagine that adds to the uncanniness.
All engagement with art is participatory.
Maybe I could've chosen better words here, but if you claim to not understand what could be meant by "uniquely participatory" when we're discussing Deltarune of all things, I'd be inclined to call you willfully obtuse. I'm addressing the feeling here, not the nature of it.
I don't disagree that video games have affordances for artist-audience interaction which other mediums (typically) do not. I just don't see the use of creating a special carve-out for those affordances – it's a difference of degree, not a difference of kind. All art has ways of engaging for which the artist has prepared a response, and ways of engaging for which the artist has not. The nature of video games allows some ways of engaging which would normally go in the second category to go in the first category instead, but there's nothing ground-breaking in this; the same can be said of all mediums.
(I mean, hell, even if we restrict our consideration to works which engage with their audience specifically on the level of how the work is physically interacted with, The Monster at the End of This Book escalates from Grover begging the reader not to turn the page, to attempting to physically prevent the pages from being turned, and this is a children's book from 1971. "You are responsible for what happens to me in this book because you chose to physically keep turning the pages" is a piece of metatextual fuckery even a first-grader is expected to be able to grasp!)
I think the fact that a video game criticising its own audience is perceived as bizarre and outside normal boundaries points to the fundamental immaturity of video games as a medium. (n.b.: "immature" in the sense of "undeveloped", not "childish".) It would rightly be regarded as absurd to be having this conversation about literally any other artistic medium.
Well, video games are also uniquely participatory as a genre (there are participatory works in other genres, sure), but I imagine that adds to the uncanniness.
All engagement with art is participatory.
Maybe I could've chosen better words here, but if you claim to not understand what could be meant by "uniquely participatory" when we're discussing Deltarune of all things, I'd be inclined to call you willfully obtuse. I'm addressing the feeling here, not the nature of it.
I don't disagree that video games have affordances for artist-audience interaction which other mediums (typically) do not. I just don't see the use of creating a special carve-out for those affordances – it's a difference of degree, not a difference of kind. All art has ways of engaging for which the artist has prepared a response, and ways of engaging for which the artist has not. The nature of video games allows some ways of engaging which would normally go in the second category to go in the first category instead, but there's nothing ground-breaking in this; the same can be said of all mediums.
I think the fact that a video game criticising its own audience is perceived as bizarre and outside normal boundaries points to the fundamental immaturity of video games as a medium. (n.b.: "immature" in the sense of "undeveloped", not "childish".) It would rightly be regarded as absurd to be having this conversation about literally any other artistic medium.
Well, video games are also uniquely participatory as a genre (there are participatory works in other genres, sure), but I imagine that adds to the uncanniness.
I think the fact that a video game criticising its own audience is perceived as bizarre and outside normal boundaries points to the fundamental immaturity of video games as a medium. (n.b.: "immature" in the sense of "undeveloped", not "childish".) It would rightly be regarded as absurd to be having this conversation about literally any other artistic medium.
The biggest difference between Undertale and Deltarune is that Undertale adheres to the forms of children’s adventure fantasy (in which most adults are well-meaning but misguided and can potentially become useful allies), while Deltarune adheres to the forms of YA fantasy (in which adults are contractually obligated to be actively malicious, unable or unwilling to acknowledge the existence of the problem, or temperamentally unsuited to provide meaningful aid), and this explains basically everything about why your favourite returning Undertale character is Like That in Deltarune.
(“Well what about Gerson” that’s the corollary to the above-cited rule of YA fantasy: adult characters who don’t fit one of those three moulds – malicious, useless, or in denial – are allowed to save the day exactly once, then immediately get killed off or otherwise permanently removed from play. Dude isn’t coming back!)
The biggest difference between Undertale and Deltarune is that Undertale adheres to the forms of children’s adventure fantasy (in which most adults are well-meaning but misguided and can potentially become useful allies), while Deltarune adheres to the forms of YA fantasy (in which adults are contractually obligated to be actively malicious, unable or unwilling to acknowledge the existence of the problem, or temperamentally unsuited to provide meaningful aid), and this explains basically everything about why your favourite returning Undertale character is Like That in Deltarune.
You’d think “Soulslike miniboss whose equipment drops have paragraphs and paragraphs of attached lore making them out to be a big hairy deal in the setting’s recent history, yet literally nobody else has ever heard of this guy” would be a parody thing, and yet.
Everyone’s heard of the equipment, but this guy just ended up with it Somehow and no-one’s sure how.
Like, yeah, Starbreaker was forged of pure grief and then used by the last king to seal away the dragon god etc etc, but that was a while ago, and there was a succession conflict a few generations later, and then a revolution, and then the slow decay into crapsack brown dark souls world, and people just kind of lost track of it, and now Bob has it for some reason.
That isn’t even satire, that’s literally just this guy.
Or, in non-video game terms (for those of us who haven’t played Soulslike games) - “How did the hell did Orcrist and Glamdring (and, I guess, Sting) end up in a damned troll’s cave in Eriador…?!”
Nah, “infamous magical doohickey turns up in the lair of a random nameless monster encounter” is a separate and only tangentially related trope.
Phoenotopia: Awakening is an odd duck; it's basically the product of the developer trying to imagine an alternative history where Zelda II rather than Castlevania II had ended up being the second major codifier of the metroidvania genre. You're not going to run into too many other games like it for that reason.
However, citing Nicklas Nygren's body of work definitely helps to narrow down what aboutPhoenotopia most appeals to you, so taking that angle we can range a bit further afield.
If you're extremely into cryptic secret-hunting you might give Animal Well a look; in the interest of full disclosure, I'm personally not a big fan because a lot of its secrets are gated by poor visibility, which is a design pattern I dislike, but that's a me thing. Otherwise it's excellent.
Conversely, if you're more about routing and don't mind a bit of mandatory speedrunning, you might have a look at Treasures of the Aegean. It's a time-loop game where progress does not persist between runs; all progression is purely knowledge-gated, which gives it something in common with the Knytt series.
Ranging a bit further afield, if Yume Nikki style brainfuckery is a flavour of secret-hunting you enjoy, but you'd prefer to have it in sidescrolling platformer form, Dreaming Sarah (and its decade-later sequel, Awakening Sarah) might be your speed. This one's a bit of a long shot, but the first game at least is cheap!
If you're willing to go full retro, Alwa's Awakening might be the ticket. Like Phoenotopia: Awakening, it takes strong inspirations from Zelda II, albeit with more conventional world design. (Contemporary gamers may find the NES-style platforming annoyingly unforgiving, but if that wasn't a dealbreaker for Phoenotopia I don't expect it to be one here!)
Shifting gears from metroidvania-esque titles to pure puzzle platformers, Leap Year might scratch your itch. It initially appears to be a frustration platformer whose gimmick is that you take falling damage from your own default jump height; it quickly evolves into something else with some fascinating and very well-tutorialised knowledge gating.
If any of those grab you, let me know and I can see what else I've got in my library along those lines.
(Also, I know for an absolute fact that some joker in the notes is going to ignore 90% of your stated criteria and just plug Rain World. On the off-chance that you're not already familiar with it, take that rec with a grain of salt; basically the only point of intersection with what you've asked for is that it's "exploration-based", and the particular type of exploration it features is very different from what you're describing.)
Twenty years ago a friend of mine who was giving me a ride home from class got cut off by another car in the university parking lot, and loudly exclaimed "fuckbutter!". They later claimed to have had no recollection of ever having heard the word before, and had no idea why they said it; it's been part of my vocabulary ever since.
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