The Stack

Blue Prince has a lot of repeated iconography. The holly leaf with three berries, the crescent moon with a circular hole in it. The shapes that are symbols of the various nations. But the most mysterious of its symbols is the spiral. There are four handwritten notes you can find (only three of which I’ve seen in-game) that all bear a picture that incorporates a spiral, together with a short phrase — “Denoted in verse”, “Investor needed”, “Does it never end?” — all of them anagrams of each other. No one knows why. It’s one of the game’s great unsolved mysteries.

The most concrete thing we know about it is that the “Does it ever end?” note depicts the “Spiral of Stars”, a large constellation visible from the house’s Observatory. On every day that you visit the Observatory, you can see a collection of constellations and click on them to trigger special effects for the day, like giving you an extra key or reducing the prices in shops or making dead ends come up more frequently, the effect being described in text next to the constellation when you select it. The Spiral of Stars has effects that evolve: every time you trigger it, another word is added to the text, and any completed phrases take effect immediately. It’s one of those incremental progress deals that I was describing, that give the player one more reason to keep coming back day after day, and it keeps adding to the text for far longer than you’d expect, making “Does it never end?” appropriate.

But of course it does end eventually, after adding 100 words, to match the 100 stars in the constellaiton. And at that point it’s basically used up. For most of its lifespan, the Spiral of Stars is the most beneficial constellations there is — the first several effects give you loads of resources that help you on your run. But the last several prevent you from obtaining more of those resources that day, making it only useful at the end of a run, and the very last effect to be added simply ends the run immediately, making the Spiral of Stars useless forevermore.

It could be warning to players about taking their obsessions too far. In fact, it almost certainly is. Let me tell you about the game’s second ending. This is going to get really spoilery.

So, one of the first things you learn about popular children’s author Marion Marigold, most likely before you learn that she’s your mother, is that she wrote a book called The Red Prince, about a prince who’s obsessed with the color red and won’t look at any other colors. She claimed in public that it was simply inspired by her son’s (that is, the player character’s) unreasonable fondness for the color red, but the authorities thought it was secretly subversive: every nation in this fictional world is associated with a color, and red is the color of Fenn Aries, the nation where the game takes place. And so she was forced to change the ending, in which the prince finally looks at the sky and decides he likes blue better, as it might be taken as a political statement. The published version instead goes meta, talking obliquely at first about the prince’s favorite book and concluding that the prince is the reader and the book is The Red Prince.

(Side note: This isn’t just a matter of fictional small nations ostensibly located in Europe, like Latveria or Freedonia. We can find maps and even globes in the house, and they show landmasses that are not those of our Earth. It’s quite strange to discover, when the game is fairly advanced, that it’s set on another planet, especially when you know that this alien world shares our calendar and even celebrates Christmas.)

Was The Red Prince actually meant as a political statement? Sort of. The ending cutscene, in which Mary reads the original text over a montage, suggests that she wrote it as a gentle warning to her son to not be seduced by Fenn Aries propaganda. She wanted him to be able to see past it, in part because she knew the family’s big secret: royal blood, from the kings that Fenn Aries deposed.

Much has been made of the “layers” of Animal Well, with each layer being associated with collecting all of a particular thing, and the first two layers triggering a credits sequence when they’re completed. Blue Prince doesn’t separate its layers quite so cleanly, but I think we can usefully describe layers in a way that isn’t greatly dependent on the details of the game. Layer 1 is simply completing the game’s initial goal, and in these games, is basically achievable by a reasonably on-the-ball player who’s enjoying the gameplay enough to keep at it long enough. Layer 2 has its own goals, and is where most players will need a few hints, but is still mostly approachable solo. Layer 3 is a community effort: people are expected to solve it by sharing information and theories, so the clues are allowed to be too obscure for most people. Layer 4 is where there’s no reasonably expectation that it will ever be solved.

The focus of Blue Prince second layer is acquiring the components of a ritual. And not just any ritual: a coronation. Simon takes his place on the lost throne of Orindia Aries, and in doing so unlocks the way to the second ending. And there’s some pretty great fusion of puzzle with tile-plpacing game here, as you figure out how to get everything you need together in the house under some pretty severe constraints. (There are multiple viable approaches to this.) But it’s a little peculiar, because it’s not a real coronation. You can’t just declare yourself king all by yourself in an empty house without anyone knowing about it and expect anything to actually change in the world outside. And I feel like the second ending is basically an acknowledgement of this.

What it all leads to is this: In a small secret room under the house, you find three boxes in different colors, a familiar sight from a logic puzzle found in the Parlor, where you have to figure out which box contains a prize. This time, though, it’s not a logic puzzle. It’s a choice. The blue box — the color of your coronation — is labeled “This is the end of this journey.” The black box — the color of the old kings — says “There is no end to this journey.” And the white box says nothing about journeys and is irrelevant to this discussion.

And the boxes more or less give what they promise. If you open the blue box, you find a manuscript for a book called The Blue Prince, which is basically The Red Prince turned backward and made even more meta: where the published version of The Red Prince talks about “the red book we just read”, The Blue Prince talks about “the blue game we just played”. If The Red Prince was written to gently chide Simon for his Fenn Aries patriotic sentiments and warn him off of going too far down that path, The Blue Prince is there to similarly warn the player off of becoming too obsessed with the game.

The black box, now, the one that says “There is no end to this journey.” The black box is empty. But on the inside of the lid, the wood grain forms a spiral.

I think the message is pretty clear. When you find Room 46 and roll the credits, you have a clear opportunity to declare that you’re satisfied and stop playing, but the fact is, you’re probably not satisfied at that point. There’s way too many things you still want to investigate at that point. But The Blue Prince basically says “No, really, you can stop now.” It doesn’t give you a video cutscene like the first ending did, but it does conspicuously give you the words “The End” on the last page. And if you don’t listen? You’re on the spiral.

And, as with the Spiral of Stars, the earlier parts of the spiral have good stuff on them! I’ve seen people say that Layer 3, the part with the Atelier, is the best part of the game. Alas, after deciding I was done, I spoiled myself about that part too much to get any big “Aha!” moments out of it. But I’ve also seen people on the game’s Discord who are deep into the end of the spiral, grasping at straws to read meaning into the tiniest of incidental details. And I’m sure that they’ll continue to occasionally find actual secrets for some time — there are still some conspicuous clues in the game that no one knows how to interpret. But they’re definitely falling prey to what Mary tried to warn them about. Part of the genius of Blue Prince is the way that it uses the tile-placing game to slow down the player, making discoveries partially reliant on chance, using partial reinforcement to make the game more compelling, even addictive. This is also what makes it dangerous.

Games that are trying to be edgy sometimes make the exasperating decision to clearly push the player into doing things and then scold them afterwards for doing what it seemed like it wanted. Blue Prince could be accused of treading into that territory here, but I think it’s skirting the edges of it. It helps a lot that it’s done in Mary’s voice.

Heavy plot spoilers for Blue Prince ahead. But be aware that I still haven’t finished the later post-game parts and everything I say about the story should be taken with a grain of salt.

It must be said: The whole idea of a will with strange conditions attached to it, especially conditions in the form of a challenge, is pretty paternalistic, even patriarchal. It’s a way for an elder male figure — it always seems to be an uncle, which is to say, someone who isn’t even your real father — to exert control over you even in death, to demand that you prove yourself to him and make youself worthy in his eyes, because that’s what matters, the approval of old dead dudes. If, as in Blue Prince, it comes with encouraging words along the lines of “I already know you can pass this challenge”, that somehow feels even worse.

So it comes as a welcome surprise that the story of Blue Prince actually mainly foregrounds the relationship between the player character and his mother. Mother-son relationships are seriously underexplored territory for games.

Like everything about this game, it’s disguised at first. You’ll most likely find references to the mysterious disappearance of beloved children’s author Marion Marigold long before you have any idea who she is or how her story relates to yours. But as you learn more, it becomes apparent that (A) “Marion Marigold” is the pen name of Mary Epsen, the mother of Simon Jones, the player character; (B) she was under investigation by a tyrranical and censorious regime that thought it saw seditious messages in her picture books; (C) her disappearance was deliberate and meticulously planned, a way to get out of the reach of the authorities; and (D) she was heavily involved in planning and implementing the challenge you’re going through. It’s not primarily about Great-Uncle Herbert testing your worthiness. It’s about Mary doing what she can to convey the truth about what happened to her, and about the deeper family secrets, without alerting the rest of the world. Because she cares about you and wants the best for you, and under the circumstances that meant removing herself from your life, to minimize your exposure to the risks her presence brings, but it also meant making you aware of who you really are. The cutscene you get on reaching Room 46 has her reading one of her stories to Simon, and the voice acting absolutely cements the idea that this is fundamentally a story about maternal love.

But then I kept investigating. One of the remaining seemingly-unrelated plot threads from earlier was a report about the theft of the Ruby Crown, a symbol of the tyrannical regime’s authority, from a museum. In Room 46, you find the same crown, its rubies removed and replaced with sapphires. How did that wind up there? After some time, I found Mary’s hideout in an abandoned railway station, where she and her accomplices planned the heist. Guns of various sorts lay scattered around. Mary wasn’t simply an unfairly persecuted innocent. She was a rebel, an insurgent, and some notes left behind in her rebel lair make her mindset clear. Whether she was a rebel before she became a target, or whether being targetted led her to rebellion, I’m still not entirely clear on. (Possibly I could resolve this by comparing some dates on newspaper clippings.) But it led me to re-evaluate everything I knew about her. She risked her life and liberty for what, the idea “That crown doesn’t belong in a museum, it belongs on the head of my son”? Is that a good thing to want? I get that the current government is a bad one, but “The reason things are bad is that we’ve got the wrong absolute monarch” isn’t a message I trust. There’s a history book you can find, heavily censored by the authorities. When you later get a look at the uncensored version, it turns out to be nakedly propagandistic in a way that didn’t inspire any confidence in the regime’s opponents.

So, the story as I’ve experienced is one of maternal comfort, which is then complicated by doubt, like in Steven Universe. But it occurs to me that this is only because of the order in which I discovered things. There’s no reason why a player couldn’t reach the hideout before Room 46, and I assume there are plenty of players who have done so. Those players had a story in which what they learn about Mary’s darker side is later tempered by reassurance that she did it all for love of her son. This is a very different story than the one I got!

My usual assumption is that when interactive works make it possible to vary the order of fixed plot elements, it prevents those elements from forming a meaningful narrative arc, turning it into a sort of unstructured mass of plot-stuff. There are often good reasons to allow variation anyway, based on player agency, but that just means it’s a compromise between authorial control and player control, between what makes for effective narrative and what makes for effective interactivity. But this makes me doubt that idea a little. The order of discovery here makes for meaningfully different stories, but I can’t say they’re weaker for it.

The very first time I heard about Blue Prince, it was from a social media post by Andrew Plotkin, in which he stated that he didn’t feel the need to write a blog post about it because everyone else was doing that. It’s basically this year’s Animal Well — and not just in the sense that it’s this year’s popular indie game, but in the sense that it’s got multiple layers of mystery to solve even after you’ve technically won. It makes me wonder if every hit puzzle game from now on is going to be like this. The canonical joke among the fans is that when the credits roll, that’s when the game begins. Reaching that point took me four days of real time, and 52 days of in-game time, which I understand to be well above average, but the RNG wouldn’t give me a break — in most runs before that, I’d either be able to reach an entrance to the Antechamber, or have the means to open it, but not both at once. But taking so long meant that I had already made significant progress on the post-game content that’s dominated my attention for the last couple of weeks.

But I get ahead of myself. Let’s cover the basics: Blue Prince is fundamentally a puzzle-based first-person adventure game, but it’s sort of embedded or intertwined with a tile-placing board game along the same lines as Betrayal at House on the Hill or the D&D Adventure System games. The premise is a classical freak will: your deceased great-uncle has bequeathed you his manor, but only if you can meet the challenge of finding its secret 46th room, a challenge made more challenging by the way tha the manor’s layout changes from day to day. Whenver you open a door, you get a choice of three rooms, drawn at random from a pool, that can be on the other side. When you’ve either filled up the grid or (more likely in the early stages) run out of doors to open or keys to open them with, you can call it a day and reset the estate. Most of the adventure-game puzzles rely on drawing specific rooms, or specific combinations of rooms, or specific rooms in combination with specific randomly-placed objects.

On the face of it, this sounds like a recipe for disaster. Don’t you get frustrated and annoyed waiting for the combinations necessary for progress to randomly come up? And yes, you do, somewhat. And there certainly exist people for whom this is enough to make them lose interest in the game completely and then make lengthy posts complaining about it on the Steam message boards. For me, it produced the opposite effect. Not being able to try out my ideas immediately makes me all the more eager to keep playing until I can. But why? That’s the interesting part.

I think part of it is that it gives you multiple aavenues of progress. I’ve noted this before about RPGs and adventure/RPG hybrids: when you’re stuck, you can always grind for XP. Blue Prince doesn’t have XP, but it does have other incrementally accumulating attributes that help to make you feel like you’re making progress even when you don’t accomplish your main goals. For example, raising your allowance, which is the amount of money you’re given at the start of each day to spend on special items. Eventually you get to the point where your allowance is large enough for any expense and you don’t need to increase it any more, but by that point you’ve probably discovered another incremental goal to take its place.

Moreover, though, the very fact that you can go through multiple runs without an opportunity to try out your intended solutions to puzzles means puzzles tend to stay alive longer than they would in a conventional adventure game. At any given moment, you have several back-burner goals that you’re ready to pounce on the moment the game deigns to give you the necessary resources. You’re probably thinking “Sure, until the end, when you start running out of goals”. But it maintains this state for a remarkably long time, just by unfolding its mysteries gradually and revealing new meaning in what you’ve already seen.

But I think the really crucial thing is that the tile-placing game is engaging. Picking rooms on the basis of their contents and constraints requires enough thought and attention that it could easily be made a decent game of its own, without the rest of the story and puzzles embedded in it. As a result, most of the time you spend playing this game isn’t actually spent thinking about the adventure puzzles. Minigames in adventures feel annoying when they feel like interruptions, disrupting the game that you were absorbed in playing. Here, it’s kind of the reverse: the adventure is embedded in the minigame.

Still, things do wind down eventually, and I’m well past the point of diminishing returns. As in Animal Well, you have to decide when you’re done. I’m not quite done — there’s still a thing or two I want to do before closing it for good — but I’m getting there.

So, yeah, I’ve dropped into a months-long silence once again. There is a reason for this: I have been making a game. An indie puzzle game, but one that I intend to fill out to the point where I can in good conscience ask people to give me money for it. I’ll have more to say about it later, when it’s closer to complete, but the title is Runecaster and the elevator pitch is “DROD with spellcasting”.

I’m well aware that this is not likely to be a profitable endeavor — the average indie game, to a very strong first approximation, sells zero copies. But I’ve committed to spending a year developing it anyway, because (A) I can afford to, and (B) it beats looking for work in the current job market. Moreover, this is a game that I’ve been thinking of making for many years — decades, even. The initial inspiration came not from DROD, but from an obscure 90s action-RPG called Four Crystals of Trazere (or simply Legend in its European release). Four Crystals had this magic system where you constructed spells from runes, each of which had a specific and deterministic effect, forming a sort of miniature programming language. There were a handful of points in the game where it made puzzles out of this, like a sealed chamber that can only be opened by a lever inside the chamber, so that you have to figure out a way to press the lever with magic. But it wasn’t the game’s focus, and I always felt like the idea could be taken a lot farther.

Over the years, I’ve made a few previous attempts at implementing my ideas — once in Unity, once in Javascript — but this current attempt, using Godot, is the first time I’ve gotten far enough to think I’m going to finish it. And I’ve contemplated repurposing this blog as a dev diary. But the unfortunate fact is: Blogging and working on this game seem to tax exactly the same mental resources. On any given day, I am capable of working on the game, or blogging, but not both. And development has taken priority. I’m going to try to establish a schedule of game development on weekdays, blogging on weekends. We’ll see how that goes.

But in all honesty, although this has been the thing occupying my attention for most of the last few months, it hasn’t been the thing occupying my attention for the last two weeks. Something else took me over pretty thoroughly, and is only just now letting up somewhat. I’ll describe that in my next post.

Speaking of titles that I played obsessively for a time, 2024 also saw the release of a new Creeper World game! But it occurs to me that I never posted about Creeper World IV here, so let’s talk a little about that first. Creeper World IV was the franchise’s foray into 3D, and it was fine. If you’re a fan of Creeper World, and you’ve wondered what it would be like with 3D models, it’s worth a look. But it’s nothing to write home about, especially after Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal, which is, to my mind, still the ultimate and definitive Creeper World experience. Being 3D adds the possibility of a first-person mode, and, while this wasn’t used in any of the campaign mission, it’s telling that basically all of the top-rated player-made levels use it. It’s like the fanbase decided it was more fun to use the engine to play a different game.

Now, the new one: Creeper World Ixe. (Or, according to some of the title graphics, Ixe Creeper World. “Ixe” is the name of an alien race in the game’s backstory, which I will not be describing any more than that.) This game abandons the 3D and in fact brings us back to the vertical 2D view that we haven’t seen since Creeper World 2, based on cave systems that constrain and pressurize your fluid enemy. But the game isn’t just Creeper World 2 brought up to modern standards. It’s Creeper World 2 hybridized with Noita.

This might seem strange. The Creeper World games are real-time strategy games in a sci-fi milieu, and Noita is a fantasy Roguelike. But they both have a lot to do with simulating fluids, and the main thing Ixe gets from Noita is its pixel-level simulation. CW2, in contrast, was fundamentally tile-based. The world was a grid where everything you could build occupied one square and the Creeper was essentially a cellular automaton. The pixelation of Ixe is notably coarse, but not tile-level coarse.

And the pixelation doesn’t just affect fluids. As in Particle Fleet by the same developers, your own ships take damage by having pixels eaten away. This isn’t the only thing it takes from Particle Fleet, either: some levels feature a similar particulate enemy, and, as in PF, the number of ships of any type you can have at a time is limited, making for smaller-scale battles. The very fact that I refer to your units as “ships” is a symptom of how Particle-Fleet-ish it is; Creeper World is usually about land battles. But the pixel-level simulation is stronger and weirder here: when you move your ships, they move by physically breaking apart into the pixels they were built from, which form a sort of snake-like chain, slithering its way around walls to reach its destination and reform.

But back to the fluids. In addition to Creeper and Anti-Creeper, there are several other fluids found in the environment, as well as substances with “sand physics”, pixels that form heaps when they fall. And some of them are useful: oil, sulfur, pixellium, etc. These can be sucked up and combined into other useful substances, like explosives or acid. And, as in Noita, you combine them by throwing them into a pit together. This is the single thing that makes me certain that Noita was a direct influence, rather than just something that hit on similar ideas independently. The system of alchemy here isn’t nearly as complex as Noita‘s, but I’ve seen player-made levels that extend it with secret combinations and new substances.

In the campaign’s final level, it makes a final turn towards Noita by stopping being a RTS and instead becoming a 2D metroidvania, with a single player character running around a complex, shooting at Creeper, picking up keycards, and mixing chemicals in vats. I feel like this might be a reaction to all the first-person levels made for CW4, a way to get ahead of the inevitable genre shift among the fans, to make it planned and deliberate. But I haven’t seen any player-made levels like it yet.

I’ll say it again: Creeper World 3 is the definitive Creeper World. This game isn’t even trying to be the Next Big Development of the series. It’s the quirky offshoot of the series, an experiment in what else you can do with the basic idea. And I kind of love it for that.

When I started this blog, I posted about every game I played. That hasn’t been the case for a long time, and some games that have eaten large portions of my life have gone completely unremarked on. I did make a solitary post about Train Valley 2 a few years back, but this does not even begin to cover my experiences with it.

To recap a little: In contrast to the original Train Valley, which is a scramble to meet unpredictable demands (a bit like Mini Metro, but with completely different mechanics), Train Valley 2 is about making a plan and then executing that plan. It’s essentially a crafting game, where the crafting is mediated by trains: a city might need, say, dozen Copper Ingots, which are made at that factory over there out of Copper Ore and Coal, each of which is produced at a mine somewhere else on the map using Workers. (Workers are, like everything else, a consumable resource.) You have multiple demands to meet within a time limit ¹That is, there isn’t a time limit per se. You can exceed the par time and still meet all your other goals. But only if you’re willing to settle for fewer than five stars., and thus have to prioritize, sending your trains where they’re most needed.

I think I found this structure most appealing at times when I felt blocked in other areas of my life. If I can’t make progress in my real plans, at least I can make a plan and execute it in Train Valley. The fact that it really does involve making a plan is important, I think. So many modern games tell you outright what you need to do at every moment, but TV2 just delivers a bunch of requirements and constraints and lets you figure out what needs to be done. The result is something that I found extremely compelling, to a perhaps unhealthy degree, downloading and playing user-made levels well past the point of enjoyment. I’ve uninstalled it several times, but then they’d come out with a new DLC pack²One of the DLC packs adds back the random passenger trains from the original Train Valley, letting people mix together the two play styles in a single level. My reaction to this is usually annoyance and a desire to get through the random stuff as quickly as possible so it stops interfering with the execution of my plans. and I’d begin the cycle anew.

Last year, an ad on the TV2 main menu announced the release of a third Train Valley game, Train Valley World. Despite a title containing a word suggestive of MMOs, this game turns out to still be essentially about levels playable by a single player. It does add multiplayer modes, but this is of not much use to me, as I don’t know anyone else interested in these games. It changes up the presentation and feel once more, basically going for something more like Civilization VI: levels are larger still than TV2, the graphics are finer and typically viewed at a greater distance, and, as in Civ, the cities all have names this time, these names being the names of real cities, even though the geography they’re placed in is nothing like reality. The tracks follow the same tile system as always, but the larger scale makes this fade in relevance. Instead of placing a route by dragging over every tile you want it to go through, you usually just click on a series of waypoints.

But the largest change to the feel of the thing is in how you give orders to trains. In the previous games, you send trains on single missions. You’d select a source of freight and a destination to bring it to, and a train would do that once, and then it would be done. If you wanted to send four trainloads of lumber to a sawmill, you’d give that order four times, perhaps using all of your trains in a convoy to send it all the lumber it will ever need at once. In TVW, you program a route into a train, potentially including multiple stops where it drops off one freight and picks up another, and then that train repeats that route until given new orders. Or attempts to, anyway; sometimes it can’t, like if a source of freight is empty, or a destination is full and can’t take any more. The overall gameplay, then, becomes less dominated by goals. It still has goals similar to TV2, with cities having specific demands, but you reach those goals by creating stable, balanced systems than can keep running indefinitely without your attention.

And for whatever reason, I find this a great deal less compelling than the get-it-done-and-then-stop approach of TV2. Perhaps it’s because it suggests endless labor, even if I’m not the one performing that labor. I’ve played through the TVW campaign, but I don’t feel drawn back to it. I’m hoping this breaks my Train Valley habit for good.

Not much progress to report today. I’m still trying to become sufficiently proficient with the flightstick to tackle the highest level I’ve reached without it. I still maintain that it will be a benefit to me once I’ve mastered it, but right now, it’s a learning curve. It strikes me that the game’s ideal player is one who’s already over this hurdle, just as, say, Animal Well is built on the assumption that you’ve already mastered basic platforming skills. It’s a game for people who have graduated from the likes of Wing Commander and are seeking something more involving, more complex.

I’ve been replaying from the beginning, on Easy, and in the process I’ve seen some Sinistars that I had previously passed over by destroying the gate. For what it’s worth, I don’t consider replaying from the beginning to be all that much of a setback; this is a game that’s positively designed to be replayed from the beginning. But being worse at the controls means that I kill fewer worker drones, which makes it less likely that I’ll destroy the gate before the Sinistar shows up. And some of them are real toughies, ones that I have no idea how to even begin to approach. There’s one that’s surrounded by a flickering green spherical force field, and sometimes it projects force fields at you, sending you hurtling away as speeds sufficient to destroy you if you collide with anything. Even in Easy mode, I don’t know how to survive that encounter long enough to do the kind of experimentation needed to figure out how to so much as scratch its paint.

I’d gladly read a walkthrough for some of these guys, but there doesn’t seem to be one online, even at old mainstays like GameFAQs that host hits going back to the dawn age. It just never had a sufficiently large fanbase to produce one. I guess that’s what happens when your target audience is the intersection of “nostalgic for 80s coin-op games” and “proficient with a flightstick”.

How long has it been? More than a week? It’s been a busy time, largely due to the latest Puzzle Boat, my first. Maybe I should post about that. But I’m not going to do that today, because I’ve just resumed playing Sinistar Unleashed.

The main bit of news here is that I went and did what I said I might, taking advantage of the holiday sales to get myself an actual flight stick — specifically, a Thrustmaster T. Flight HOTAS X. My understanding is that this is exactly the same as the Thrustmaster T. Flight HOTAS One, except that the One can be plugged into an Xbox and the X can be plugged into a Playstation. Since I have no intention of using it with anything other than a PC, I don’t much care about the difference. It’s a cheap-end-of-midrange device, and comes with a detachable throttle lever, which seems important for this game.

Having now experienced it in Sinistar Unleashed, I am absolutely sure that this is the intended experience. All those extra options like perpendicular movement and rolling left and right, which I had evicted from my gamepad to free up button space, are available trivially. At the same time, it’s going to take a while to get used to this, because it’s way more responsive to small movements than I’m used to, including involuntary small movements. I keep rolling without meaning to, just because I’ve never used a controller that actually cared about torsion on the stick before. I’m reminded of a bit in Wing Commander where you’re given an experimental prototype fighter to try out. In the debriefing, the player character says “It handled like a dream”, while I wanted to say “It turns way too fast. I had basically no control over what I was doing and kept overshooting my targets.”

The other big downside is that I pretty much have to use it while sitting at a desk. My home computer setup is like this: I live in a four-room apartment. Bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and living room. The living room is the only reasonable place to put a computer, so my office space is a desk on one side of it. My PC is connected both to a pair of normal PC monitors on that desk, and to a projector positioned opposite a couch. It is from this couch that I watch movies and play those games that benefit from being projected onto a large screen.

(Some years back, Valve started selling devices with the sole purpose of enabling “couch gaming” while keeping your PC in a different room than your TV. This always bemused me: why would people be willing to pay money for this when they could just put their PC and TV in the same room? But then, I just bought a fancy joystick for the specific purpose of playing a 25-year-old game that cost me less than the joystick, so who am I to talk?)

Sinistar Unleashed is definitely in the category of “games that benefit from being projected onto a large screen”. You want to fill as much of your vision as possible with that starscape, helping the illusion that you’re physically there, gliding and swooping around. And as long as I was playing it from a wireless dual-stick controller, entirely designed around couch gaming, that is how I played it. But I can’t have that and the proper controls at the same time. I gladly choose the controls, but I know I’m losing something as a result.

As in the original arcade game, most levels in Sinistar Unleashed start off with a number of stationary turrets scattered about. When you’re in range, they turn slowly to face you and then fire in barrages, a long cone of fire randomly packed with bullets every few seconds. Seeing that many bullets at once is scary, but I’ve found that the best way to deal with it is to face the turret head on. You present a smaller profile that way, thus getting hit by fewer bullets, and although you’ll still get hit multiple times, you can easily kill the turret before it kills you. If, that is, you actually want to kill it — enemies can be damaged by friendly fire, and sometimes the easiest way to get attackers off your tail is to head into a turret and let it shoot it them down for you.

(Can you be damaged by friendly fire too? I assume so, but it’s hard to be sure, because of the lack of friendlies. There’s a Special Item that you can use to place turrets of your own, but their bullets are fewer and more precise than the enemy’s. You’d have to try pretty hard to get hit by them.)

Past level 16, however, there’s a new sort of turret that I haven’t figured out how to best deal with yet: the laser turret. Instead of a barrage of bullets, it fires a continuous beam. It can take a few seconds to home in on your position, but once it’s locked on, it follows you unerringly until it pauses to recharge. Facing into this gets you killed. You have to move perpendicular to the beam to avoid it, and that means you’re not facing the beam and can’t shoot at it with your primary weapon. Some of the secondary weapons, such as homing missiles, don’t need to be aimed, and could be useful here, but as I’ve said before, I’m inclined to save those for emergencies.

I may need to finally master the clutch. This is something that’s occasionally mentioned in the helpful hints that appear at the end of the game: “Take advantage of the clutch, it’s a very powerful tool” or words to that effect. But I hadn’t used it and frankly didn’t even know what it did. I think there was a button assigned to it on the controller by default, but it was one of the less easily-discoverable ones, like pressing the right joystick or something. Again, this game wasn’t really designed for a gamepad. The manual is written under the assumption that you’re using some kind of flight-simulator stick — in describing how to roll left and right, it says to twist your joystick — and what’s more, that you’re using it in conjunction with a keyboard — in describing the clutch, it says to use the space bar. I’ve rebound it to the left shoulder button, which was previously shields, a special item that I only occasionally have.

What the clutch does is this: it allows you to pivot without changing the direction you’re moving, like in Space War and Asteroids. This would clearly be useful against laser turrets: you could take off laterally, then clutch and turn and fire at the turret while still moving laterally. It also seems like it would be useful against ordinary warrior ships: they like to chase you and fire at you from behind, and with the clutch, I could just fire back at my pursuers.

But this is all predicated on actually getting good at using the clutch, which will take some practice. And it occurs to me as I write this that strafing could also be an affective approach to laser turrets. But I’ve unbound strafing from my gamepad. I just don’t have enough buttons for this game!

Maybe I should actually get myself a flight stick. I’m not a big flight sim fan, but this isn’t the only game on the Stack designed around them.

I’ve been backtracking a bit. Whether it’s through improved flying skills, or greater knowledge of effective tactics, or just having access to all the Special Items now, I’ve managed to pass level 4 on Normal difficulty, with the result that I can start Normal games at level 5 from now on. I’ve also tried restarting from the very beginning on Easy. There are advantages to this: by the time you reach the later levels, you’ve got an inventory full of weapons and items that you wouldn’t have if you started there. Also, you gain an extra life every time you clear a level, but this is only a net advantage if you’re not dying more than once per level. There’s definitely a pivot point around level 10 where my lives stop going up and start going down.

In both Easy and Normal, though, I still wonder: Am I missing out? It really seems like the most effective way to beat a level is to not face the Sinistar at all, but rather, keep the gate from ever being completed. This means spending enough time on each level to run out the clock, and devoting a substantial portion of that time to hunting worker drones instead of fighting the things hunting you. Surviving this is nontrivial. But at least it’s a skill that transfers easily from one level to the next. In contrast, each Sinistar is different, and not just in appearance. There are definitely Sinistars that are only hurt by bombs that hit them in specific vulnerable spots — the resemblance to shellfish of various sorts is kind of a hint about this. I think I’ve even seen one whose shell only opens to reveal the vulnerable spot some of the time, possibly in response to player actions. And you have to figure this stuff out while in extreme danger — especially difficult because most of the time, if there’s a Sinistar around, I’m running away from it, which means it’s behind me where I can’t see it. It’s markedly different from the original arcade game, where you could just spam the bomb button while fleeing and the bombs would home in on where they needed to go.

The point is, battling all these various Sinistars is a significant part of the design of the game, and it’s one that I’ve been avoiding where possible. There are Sinistars that I’ve passed by without ever seeing them, and others that I’ve seen but have no idea how to defeat. Maybe I should do a pass where I just leave the worker drones alone, let them complete the gates and figure out how to fight the Sinistars from the easiest onwards. Maybe I’ll be better trained to defeat the Sinistars past level 12, when they show up because I couldn’t delay gate completion enough, if I know how to defeat all the other ones up to that point.