The creative director on the Ori games got mad online, and then apologized more or less immediately. His profile pic is the currently the one Gabe drew of him in the strip. Now, the loop is complete.
I use the term Golden Age mostly as a euphemism. I think that to the extent a Golden Age comes about, it's not even observable in real time. Or it might be that we barrel a memory in nostalgia and the two inform each other. But I just spent twelve bucks on a fucking videogame again, another game situated at a bundle of genre leylines, and I keep getting way, way more than twelve bucks back.
Loop Hero is what you would get if you could run a lint roller over the wrinkles and trenches of the zeitgeist. The same developer put out Please, Don't Touch Anything many years back - I only mention it because that game was also really cool, and smart. But it wouldn't have presaged this.
I got fucking bewitched. I'm specifically culling my interest in the medium based on whether or not I can play a game with other people, I feel like it's good to, you know… hear them rustle and squeeze air through their lips and teeth, all that shit they do. Occasionally something like Monster Train breaks through. If there hadn't been a demo up in the Steam Game Festival it probably wouldn't have pierced my defenses.
I want the moment to happen in your own brain, so I don't really want to describe it too much. It's like an incredibly high person ransacked their cupboards and fridge and the result, inexplicably, was cuisine. It's got little bits of everything: Freemium mechanics without the model, Euro fuckin' tile laying horseshit, idle clicker vibes, looter gear chase, municipal construction (?!?), slathered in a pixel art reduction which they follow through on, masterfully, with the audio side. Demo! Demo now get. Demo get, then have.
Everybody was saying that Fight Club was interesting, so I put it on in the background. About ten minutes in I realized it wasn't that kind of movie. That movie is what you're doing. This thing reformatted my mind in about ten minutes, all smooth lanes, all going one direction, turned toward its purpose.
(CW)TB out.
