tartley.com (Posts about videogame)

Iron Lung

Jonathan Hartley — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 01:55:23 GMT

Game by David Szymanski, published 2022

Movie written, directed, and starring Mark "Markiplier" Fischbach, released 2026

New work meeting background just dropped!

Invited to view the movie at Pop's with Phil and Sarah, I crammed the game it was based on from start to finish the night before, with Zander watching disdainfully over my shoulder every step of the way. I gave SCP-354, which inspired the game, a wide berth.

Both are tense and engaging, but clearly only for a particular kind of viewer. The game itself has a very narrow focus, as befits a single-person indie production. This means you'll only really enjoy it if you're dorky enough to fixate on the mechanic of cross referencing your submarine's map co-ordinates sufficiently hard to orient your way around a whole system of underwater trenches. Every step of the way you negotiate your way past unseen but deadly canyon walls by dead reckoning alone, a tense enough exercise even without the proximity alarms. On top of that, strange noises and... other interuptions... when they drop, are technically relatively tame and limited, but in context, entwined in the co-ordinate grind, they are experienced as shocking and panic inducing.

Similarly, I enjoyed the movie, but I see reviews are all over the map. Clearly some don't have patience for its limited scope - 99% of the runtime takes place with one character in a single room. But I found it taut and thrilling. Some patches of unclear dialog softened the high-concepts thrown around, but for me it was always an experience of style and vibes anyway.

Tactical Breach Wizards

Jonathan Hartley — Mon, 26 May 2025 21:43:45 GMT

In this house, we use the metric system. Released in 2024 by Suspicious Developments.

I was toying with the idea of advancing the kiddo's videogaming curriculum into a turn-based tactics phase, maybe starting with the genius of 1994's UFO:Enemy Unknown, on which I spent endlessly fascinated evenings of my youth, or maybe one of the better of its numerous sequels and offshoots. Somehow I was distracted from that plan by multiple people enthusing about last year's Tactical Breach Wizards, and I'm so glad that I was.

It is such a lovely, synergistic blend of gameplay mechanics, setting, characters, story, plot-twists and whip-smart dialog, making substantial improvements on the traditional bombastic and yet intensely thoughtful turn-based formula.

First, it defuses the self-righteous seriousness of the genre's customary tone by replacing the gurning muscle-bound military types with a bunch of special-ops wizards. Still formidably competent, but now replete with pointy hats, hazardous runes, and bejeweled wands protruding from their assault rifle barrels. Further, while presenting a thrilling facade of enemies dispatched in a dizzying flurry of rapid-fire magic, the game explicitly disavows wanton killing. While one of our characters does sneer at the stance, your team is revealed early-on to use only nonlethal take-downs. This is soon followed up by a cut-scene which shows your team leaving a building after a mission, revealing the enemies you earlier dispatched out of eighth floor windows floating gently earthwards, each safely cocooned in a magical bubble.

Second, a fundamental mechanic bestows one of your characters with the gift of magical foresight, allowing you to see the outcome of planned actions before you actually commit to them. It's a slick narrative integration of a mechanic that serves multiple purposes. Preventing the anguish of losing a character due to dumb bad luck means the player is freed up to experiment more, trying audacious plans rather than playing it safe. Then, when it all goes wrong, you can rewind just a smidgeon, and try out nearby alternatives, until you have it all just right, bouncing generative combos back and forth between characters, unleashing staggering waves of action, discovering gleefully that a level you initially thought to be an impossible slog is actually completable in a single nimble turn. When combined with the inventive diversity of each character's specific talents, it simultaneously presents real challenges, while allowing the construction of surprising solutions that leave one feeling feeling incredibly clever and creative.

It's not often worthwhile dwelling on the characters in a videogame, but here they are the stars of the show. Distinctive, flawed and intensely likeable each in their own way, with personalities and back-stories that resonate so pleasingly with their in-game abilities. The writing is just top notch, with phenomenal dialog, giving the group as a whole a fresh, wholesome and real-talk vibe.

This is an all-time classic in my book, and has been fabulous to experience alongside the 13 year-old kiddo, as we've each run parallel games through to completion, ogling over each other's shoulders to get sneak previews of encounters we haven't seen yet.

The Black Parade: Level 04: Death's Dominion

Jonathan Hartley — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 02:33:01 GMT

So. Looking Glass's seminal 1998 PC game Thief: The Dark Project spawned an active and long-lived modding community, who created hundreds of fan-made extra levels, many of which are extremely artful and creative.

One group of particularly obsessed loons spent seven years crafting an extraordinary set of such levels, forming an entirely new single-player campaign for the game, named The Black Parade. This was released last year and I only just became aware of it. I'm four missions in, absolutely loving it, and completely lost in the catacombs beneath the pseudo-medieval city.

Hence, my lovingly hand-drawn map of mission 4, Death's Dominion:

spoilers

That Which Gave Chase

Jonathan Hartley — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 21:56:38 GMT

Released in 2023, played on Linux in 2024.

spoilers

Mush your dog sled across cruel Arctic wastelands, driven onwards by a brisk and intense companion, who hired you to take him back to some remote spot, where it becomes apparent he had some sort of revelation, or maybe a breakdown.

The low-res, dithered presentation conveys the harsh, blinding conditions, as you struggle to make out details through the relentless wind and ice. The days and nights of the journey blur into one another, leaving you only fragmentary, disjointed memories: sledding across the ice; arriving at crude wooden huts for the night; mounting the sled before dawn; collapsing into rough bunks; righting the sled while your companion curses you for a fool; silent moments alone.

Smash cuts amongst snowy wastes echo the discontinuities in Alan Moore's "Nemo: Heart of Ice", albeit this is a far more understated tale. The sense is of a protracted, exhausting time spent covering the distance, through punishing conditions, and it's surprisingly evocative.

The narrative leans into the disorientation, making nothing clear. Your companion becomes increasingly cryptic. He urges you onward, never pausing more than absolutely necessary. The deer behave increasingly strangely. Your companion regales you with sickening tales of the investigative mistreatment he subjected them to on his previous visit. By the time the strange mushrooms come into play it is very obvious that you are in a place to which you should never have come, very far from anywhere or anyone, with mounting dread, alone with with a madman. What happened the last time he took this route? What did he leave behind here? What awaits at your journey's end?

It's hard to know whether the difficulty of interpretation, or the non-literal aspects of your journey, are intended as the result of your character's mushroom-induced fever, or the pretensions of intrusively figurative allusions. Most likely, it seems to be both. The deliberate ambiguity runs deep.

Doesn't outstay its welcome, all done in an hour. But the memories remain.

Astroneer Resource Graph

Jonathan Hartley — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 15:01:51 GMT

Used the trusty Graphviz to whip up a diagram showing how to get each of the resources in Astroneer. Click the WEBP thumbnail below to get the full glorious SVG, then you can 'find in page' on it. (Diagram source)

Soma

Jonathan Hartley — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 18:51:16 GMT

by Frictional Games, published 2015

![Soma - protagonist](/files/2022/soma-protagonist.webp)

Soma is a creepy survival horror game, that leans deeply into the moral and existential quandaries arising from the deterministic principle that it's possible to scan one's brain and copy the structure into some other substrate, yielding a second conscious entity, which thinks it is you. So there are deep science-fiction issues in play here, about whether we think such a scheme could ever possibly work, and about the practical, personal, and societal ramifications of it.

Major spoilers ahead. It's seven years old at this point.

I loved the setup. A humdrum morning begins in your present-day Toronto apartment. A note on the fridge reminds you that today is the day of your medical appointment, a brain scan. Reaching the doctor's office by train, you find the experimental new type of brain scanner, run by some PhD in a cable-strewn side-office. Sit in the chair, don the helmet, wait for the scan to complete and- blink! Suddenly, you are elsewhere.

As the game progresses, it becomes obvious that the version of you that sat down in the seat did not experience this discontinuity. They completed the scan, removed the helmet, and continued their normal, everyday life.

You are not that copy. You open your eyes to a grim, decrepit cyberpunk future. Exploring, your only company is a menagerie of half-functional robots and drones, many of which are insane, and, in conversation, seem to be under the impression that they are human beings. It gradually becomes apparent that perceptual filters are in play, preventing them - and you - from noticing they are no longer human. At one point the ocean crashes in on you, and you drown for a little while, or at least think you are, but you still don't die. At that point you have to acknowledge the truth.

You have awoken to the year 2104, and the recorded brain scans of real humans are being used to animate drones. This is a scenario much like that told from a different perspective in the smashing short story Lena by qntm. Failing systems engaged fall-backs, resulting in your obsolete brain scan being yanked from storage to inhabit an advanced humanoid robot, in a facility deep under the ocean, some time after a comet strike has scoured all life from the planet's surface.

If that wasn't bad enough, one facilitating technology of this nightmarish scenario, a black goo that mimics and improves upon electrical and biological circuitry it comes into contact with, has run rampant, growing probing tendrils which are wrecking the facility. Among other effects, it has reanimated the corpses of the last few humans, who skulk around, not in a good way. As our protagonist asks, incredulously, "You mean they've been brought back to life?". Our reassuring AI companion replies "Yeah, let's call it that."

The game borrows the highly effective mechanics of Frictional's previous games, the Amnesia and Penumbra series, where the proximity of horrific, shambling enemies causes your character to experience debilitating symptoms, including, in this case, static-y visual distortions as your neural hardware suffers from some overload or interference. This applies even if you simply look at an enemy, an act which immediately draws their attention. So your only chance to survive encounters is to stay well out of sight, and actively avert your eyes so you can't even watch what's going on. Not being able to see exactly what your enemies are, or what they are up to, turns out to be fabulously scary and atmospheric. At one point it lead directly to my wife catching me staring intently at a blank, black screen for a prolonged period, with a peculiar expression on my face, as I hid in a dark cupboard waiting for the slithering sounds behind me to go away.

Spurring us through this environment are not just threats to our immediate survival, but also the adoption of a project, to launch into space a solar-powered simulation, hosting all the last remaining brain scans of the now-defunct human race, known as the 'ARK'. This will allow the on-board sims to live a prolonged period of idyllic virtual existence, preserving at least some echo of what humanity was. Since the conceit of the game is that our character is a living and conscious entity that feels real emotion, the sims on the ARK are all presumably the same, so this seems like a worthwhile endeavor.

We are guided, motivated, and assisted by "Catherine", a simulated personality running on our hand-held omni-tool, based on the brain recording of an AI researcher, whose project during her lifetime was the ARK. Plugging her in to a wall or console socket lets her interface with our surroundings, activating power supplies and manipulating machinery. She leads us through a series of undersea facilities, linked by trains, submersibles, and the occasional disorienting trudge across the murky ocean floor, stirred up by ferocious currents and landslides, populated by organic-mechanical hybrid horrors that glide by in the darkness. I found these some of the absolute best, most atmospheric "walking simulator" moments I've experienced in a game.

![The ocean floor, stirred up by currents and landslides](/files/2022/soma-murky.webp)
Is that another distant light up ahead? Good luck finding them while the currents pummel you, and hideous, deadly beasts loom out of the murk.

Along the way, we encounter a few unforgettable scenarios. We come across the failing storage system in which the last remaining copy of our own brain scan resides. I decide to flip some buttons which delete it, prompting my character to respond with something like "Let this be the last time I wake up in this godforsaken place."

At another point, we find ourselves trapped within a collapsing facility on the bottom of the ocean, with the gibbering undead hammering on the door from the next room. There is an airlock leading out into the ocean, but we would be crushed at this depth. There is no way out. Luckily, Catherine is able to guide us into assembling a more robust robot, one capable of withstanding the pressure - all we have to do is sit in the chair and activate the transfer into it. We already did this once, back in Toronto. Easy.

Except, after the transfer, we glance back across the lab at our original - the pictured chap with red LED eyes - who, we notice, is still breathing. Asking Catherine about it, she reminds us that the brain scan is not a destructive operation. He's still in there, chemically subdued for the moment, but he'll soon wake up again, wondering why the transfer didn't work. So we are left with the option of stomping out of the airlock to safety, leaving him behind to his nightmarish fate. Or flipping a switch to deactivate him before we go.

A lot of these narrative beats work better as a game than they perhaps might in a written story. They emphasize the player's complicity, your moral culpability, which is a mode that games, for all their faults, can do better than any other media. Plenty of the lesser moments along the way expose the player to decisions about unplugging some human simulation or other which declares itself to be "alive", but which is gating your progress in some way. Some of them are yourself. Some of these acts require manhandling weighty cables, which require large, insistent tugging with the mouse controls. It's not just a disembodied button press. One has to provide a determined, definitive, mechanical input to end a life. In context, the guilt feels real.

Later in the journey, we finally stumble across an honest-to-goodness real, live human being. She describes how the rest of the humans will be gathered in particular locations, while she stayed to protect the ARK. But, we tell her, we just passed through those locations, and there were no humans remaining there. We both know that the planet's surface is sterile. A beat passes before she announces "So I'm the last human being left alive." She's deathly sick, and without hope. By the end of your interactions she asks you to turn off her life-support before you leave, and stay with her for her last wheezing moments. So this is how humanity ends.

Carrying on, because what else is there to do? We finally we get the ARK loaded into the launch system that delivers it to orbit, upload our brain scans onto it just before it launches, and - we've done it! Success!

There was a moment, about five minutes before the end, when I realized what was going to happen here, even though my character had not. It was a real emotional blow. I envied and pitied him for his naive hope. For believing there was still a way out. For, of course, the ARK's launch changed nothing for us. Our simulations are aboard it, but we are still sitting here, in a broken robot corpse in a collapsing facility at the bottom of a haunted ocean on a dead planet. The dispatched copy will enjoy life on the ARK, but we - like the copy of ourselves we left behind earlier - are stuck here for good. Roll credits.

Infra

Jonathan Hartley — Sun, 07 Aug 2022 20:43:24 GMT

Released in 2016, played by me on Linux in 2022.

So much to love about this game. My enjoyment was perhaps stoked by my initial expectation that such a humdrum, non-mainstream game idea - of a civil engineer performing building inspections, documenting elements such as cracks and exposed rebar - must surely be a modest indie offering. But that expectation was vastly exceeded by the overwhelming generosity of the included content, providing level after level after level, all rich in geometry and atmosphere, navigable pathways surrounded by loads of non-essential scene setting, from broom cupboards to passing container ships, replete with specially coded set-pieces, and a story that expands in scope beyond all possible initial expectations.

It is filled with puzzles that are grounded in the atmospheric setting, having me clamber under cobweb-strewn desks with a flashlight, looking for tripped circuit breakers. The setting itself builds beautifully, starting with my inspection of bridges and decrepit sawmills as I wander along a small overgrown river path, but increasing in scope and severity as we continue downstream into town, culminating in varied and ambitious city facilities, from water treatment plants, abandoned sprawling secret WWI facilities, and various types of railway and power stations.

The puzzle difficulty is perfectly judged, demanding about the limit of effort I could bring to bear, and only on one or two occasions did I give up and find solutions online, leading overall to a tremendous sense of accomplishment.

The storyline exposes longstanding secretive corruption in the city, explaining both the pervasive neglect and sabotage that your inspections reveal, and it provides a variety of creative reasons why the buildings on your route are either long-abandoned, or else hastily evacuated moments before your arrival.

This gives you gloriously free reign over the facilities you pass through, opening up possibilities to perform ad-hoc repairs as you go. In particular, I particularly loved the way a successful navigation of levels like the water treatment plant requires the player to cross reference wall charts showing how the plant operates, with computer schematics showing the state of various machinery and valves, and overlay on top of that an understanding of a few signs and hand-written notes left behind by operators, to remind themselves about proper operating procedures, broken equipment, workarounds, and switches that were wired up backwards. And once you figure out this abstract understanding of what needs to be done, you have to map it all onto the actual 3D spatial layout of the massive hardware all around you, which often spans multiple buildings. Just delightful.

I should probably also mention the penultimate level, which is one of the most ambitious of many bold experiments that keep the levels diverse and surprising, by straying away from the core conceit. In this case that means navigating the locked-down hallways of an alternative, mushroom obsessed commune, squatting in a depressing tower block surrounded by trash. While this level is laudable for being the boldest of these experiments, and represents an important pillar of the narrative, an alternate society dropping out from the dysfunction induced in the city by the main story line. However, it didn't quite land for me, and I soon consulted an online walkthrough, without which I think I would have been trudging its grimy corridors for a long and dispiriting time. As it was, in contrast to the entire rest of the game, I was pleased to get it done as quickly as possible and move on without getting into its optional exploration and side-quests.

But other than that one level, I loved this game, and played it with a passion and obsession that burned fiercely for weeks.

Journey

Jonathan Hartley — Mon, 09 May 2022 11:22:20 GMT

Released on PlayStation 3 by thatgamecompany in 2012. Played on Windows 10 in 2022.

The slow-paced opening scenes, alternately trudging up and then surfing down sunbaked desert dunes, failed to sustain Zander's interest, so I ended up playing through its short runtime by myself.

In some ways it's an indictment of videogame culture that ten years later it still feels so fresh and radical to pair players up with another internet rando, while giving them no means to communicate or interact other than helping each other out, either leading by example, or exchanging wordless shouts. It seems like a pretty limited repertoire at first. I'm half tempted to just wander off ahead, alone, into the endless desert.

Then, you realize that standing close enough together recharges each other's magical flying scarves. Suddenly, it's enough. You cling to each other for dear life through the howling storms, double back to rescue each other from prowling beasts, and then fly exuberantly above the sunlit clouds, forever curving back to seek each other's life-giving sustenance.

I don't know who the two internet randos were, with whom I shared the first and second halves of my journey. But in those minutes together, we lived a lifetime's worth.

Subnautica: Below Zero

Jonathan Hartley — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 22:24:22 GMT

PC, published 2021.

spoilers, obviously. This is a map of an area in the game, revealing many of its secrets.

Subnautica, and its icy sequel, "Below Zero", have perhaps been my favorite games of the last few years. The majority of their run time takes place under the colorful waters of an alien ocean. It's been a joy to sit side-by-size with Zander for tense scuba cave dives, or piloting vehicles through vertiginous underwater cave systems, headlights straining through the murk to reveal wonders. It has inspired cake.

Part of the games take place on land though. I started drawing a map of Below Zero's Glacial Basin region just to keep track of where we'd been. To make sure we visited all the locations, found all the MacGuffins (I'm looking at you, pesky antidote), and experienced all that there was to experience.

But as those goals approached completion, I finished drawing it because it had become a therapeutic experience. Happily exploring away, mesmerised by the scenery, avoiding hostile wildlife, uncovering the ruins of ancient alien artifacts. Reckoning distances by eye, scribbling down what we found, updating and correcting the map as we went. Being lost in the experience. Simply a joy.

Reddit is encouraging me to tackle the tricky Actic Spires area, too. <Rubs hands>...

Manifold Garden

Jonathan Hartley — Tue, 05 Oct 2021 03:16:08 GMT

Windows, 2019

This was always going to turn my head, marrying a marvellous geometric engine to an austere, flat-shaded renderer. Bewildering portals, seamlessly disguised as humble doorways, are the simplest of its tricks. More pervasive, levels are wraparound along all three spatial dimensions, as can be seen by the disorienting arrays of geometry - the current level, infinitely repeated, offset or re-oriented - marching to the vanishing points, dwindling to infinity in all directions.

This is no mere trippy backdrop. Gravity can be trivially flipped to lie along any cardinal axis, and one will routinely step off, into a yawning, infinite abyss, to fall through the entire level, and beyond, through and amongst the infinite constellations of geometry, airsteering all the way, to land, unharmed, anywhere that's exposed to the direction you're falling from. It becomes a form of teleportation, used to get from A to B almost as frequently as simply walking around.

This non-Euclidean wrapping is baked deeply into the visuals, the engine, and the gameplay. But for all that technical mastery, the puzzles themselves aren't as deep and creative and varied as those in the ostensibly similar, but less technically accomplished, Antichamber.

Having said that, there's something entirely appropriate in this. The puzzles end up being as much rituals as a head-scratchers, holy spatial rites one performs to unleash the deeply evocative visuals towards the end of each level - a faceted and angular psychedelic, coupled with unnerving reformulations of reality straight out of Farbrausch's Debris. By the final level, this crescendos in scenes reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey, profound in both the intimacy of my commune with godhood, and in my continued inability to understand what I had achieved. Created a universe, probably? Yeah, probably.