Puzzle – Stately Play

Just when I thought I was out, Slay the Spire pulls me back in

January 20, 2020 David Neumann 10

PC/Mac/Linux, Xbox, PS4, Switch While I haven’t completely stopped playing Slay the Spire, I will admit my weekly numbers are down. In fact, other than plane-trip-long sessions on my Switch, Slay the Spire has been mostly ignored. Somehow, I had managed to slip free of the shackles that Slay the Spire’s relentlessly addictive gameplay had bound me in…until I logged into Steam yesterday. Sonofabitch, they added a new class. What the hell am I supposed to do now?

Review: Maze Machina

January 20, 2020 David Neumann 9

iOS, Android According to the wayback machine, it’s been over eight months since we’ve posted a review here at Stately Play. Despite this, I still try to convince myself that, somehow, we’re relevant [hahahahahahahahahahahaha -ed.]. It took our German friends at TiNYTOUCHTALES to put an end to our torpor. Last week the developers of such mobile classics as Card Crawl and Card Thief released their latest time waster and it’s a doozy. In fact, Maze Machina might be their best game yet.

Say cheese! Luca Redwood set to release Photographs this week

April 1, 2019 David Neumann 10

iOS, Android, PC Everyone loves games crafted from the mind of Luca Redwood and EightyEight Games. If you don’t, then you either haven’t played them or are a big ol’ doody-head. I mean, who couldn’t love You Must Build a Boat? There’s no option of building a boat, you MUST build it. Gold. Also, 1000000 which is a game I can never remember how many zeroes to add to it. Sure, they look like match-3 games, but delve into them and you’ll find they’re chock-full of deeper gameplay that belies their Bejeweled aesthetic. On Wednesday, we’ll get to see his latest foray into our collective gamespace when EightyEight Games releases Photographs, a game most definitely unlike the previous two.

Rev-ewe: Baba Is You

March 15, 2019 Tanner Hendrickson 1

PC/Mac/Linux, Switch There’s been a noticeable uptick in quality spatial puzzle games in the past five years. Games like Stephen’s Sausage Roll, Snakebird, Jelly no Puzzle, and A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build all take the classic Sokoban formula of moving/changing objects to their designated zones/states and put in their own little wrinkles, exploring the possibility spaces created by these tweaks to the formula. I like to call them “SokoButs”, as in “Sokobon, but…” because it’s fun to create microgenres and nobody has claimed this one yet. Feel free to use it, because I sure will. I attribute this recent boom at least partially to the release of PuzzleScript, a free toolset for designing SokoButs, in 2013. PuzzleScript streamlines the game design process via a simple markup for defining the rules that govern a SokoBut’s core systems. Baba Is You is a new SokoBut from Arvi Teikari, and its “but…” is huge: each puzzle’s rules are physical objects within the puzzle. By pushing around nouns, verbs, and adjectives, you rewrite the logic of the game in real time. Basically, it’s PuzzleScript: The Game. Baba Is You is an entirely new kind of logic puzzle, and it’s the best puzzle game I’ve played in a very long time.

Review: Legends of Andor: The King’s Secret

January 30, 2019 David Neumann 3

iOS Universal, Android At first glance, Legends of Andor may resemble other campaign-driven fantasy board games like Gloomhaven or Descent: Journeys in the Dark. There’s a fantasy map (you know it’s fantasy because there’s a castle and spooky caves), characters that fit the usual fantasy tropes, monsters, and even markets where you can buy your heroes better equipment. It may resemble those games, but Legends of Andor is nothing like those games. Not a bit. In fact, Legends of Andor isn’t a board game so much as a puzzle game wrapped in board game attire.

Twinfold mashes several well worn mechanisms into a unique new experience

December 7, 2018 David Neumann 13

iOS, Android, PC/Mac • So, all the voices in my head the last couple days have been talking about one thing, the new game from indie dev Kenny Sun, Twinfold. “Wait, what voices?” you’re probably asking. To that I say, Sandwiches! [we’re not sure when Dave fell and hit his head, but we’re all guessing it was somewhere around the age of 7 -ed.]

Tripflare & Torch: Bae Blades and Human Sacrifice

August 27, 2018 Tof Eklund 0

I shouldn’t have been such a hard case about the Black Death last time, I appear to have attracted the attentions of disease spirits and spent much of last weekend sick in bed. I beheld the Angel of Death and prepared to meet my end… but then it turned out that I was only re-watching Angels in America (the HBO miniseries). It’s really good, by the way – if you haven’t seen it, you really should.

Short Cut: Journal 29

April 24, 2018 David Neumann 2

Tabletop • I’ve been pondering whether or not to review Journal 29 from the moment I cracked its first truly difficult puzzle. You see, it’s not the usual fare here at Stately Play, and I wasn’t sure if our readers wanted to live the dread of English teachers everywhere, having to read a poorly written book report. Yes, a book report. You see, Journal 29 is an actual book made out of dead trees without a battery to recharge or screen to tap. It’s like the 80’s, with the exception that I’m not listening to Spandau Ballet [for the record, Dave is totally still listening to Spandau Ballet -ed.].

Michael Brough revisits Imbroglio, adds Phlogiston expansion

April 10, 2018 David Neumann 0

iOS Universal • I have kids in two different school systems, one in public high school and the others in a private elementary school. Although the schools are merely two blocks apart and many, many families in the area have children at both schools, we learned that they rarely manage to sync their schedules and, as such, their spring breaks never coincide. This led to the past two weeks when I was traveling and then home with children, both of which really cut into my writing time here at Stately Play. Today, the house is empty and I couldn’t be happier. Not only does that mean I can actually sit and write again, but it also means I’m back to not wearing pants. Freedom. None of this has anything to do with the topic of this post, however, which revolves around one of the true maestros of the App Store, Michael Brough. His dungeon-crawler/puzzler/roguelike Imbroglio has just expanded with Phlogiston.

Silicon Zeroes, Art, and Intellectual Property

March 28, 2018 Kelsey Rinella 7

Steam • In which the author addresses the greatest philosophical problems in gaming I tried to do a brief look at Silicon Zeroes, the easy chair of the programming game mini-genre, but, like Proust’s madeleine biscuit*, a single level touched off a bunch of related thoughts I needed to address. But SZ deserves at least a brief overview: if you’re familiar with Human Resource Machine or TIS-100P, you’ve seen the basic idea before: simple programming tasks are basically just puzzles, anyway, so folks have started turning them into puzzle games. SZ does so more comfortably than most, with an easily-grasped interface and helpful features like the ability to bundle a code segment into a reusable chunk. But it also includes the level in question: a problem in which you’re briefly denied access to one of the functions you’ve been using (subtraction), and have to build something to accomplish the same goal. Months later, I think I have an idea of how to understand the intellectual product which makes games distinct from other art forms, and which tracks my intuitions about intellectual property. Though you might have different intuitions, we’ll at least be able to disagree more specifically.