This would have been a perfect submission for the 2022 game jam, Roll of the Dice.

@GMTK

8 ай бұрын

Definitely!

I think this does display the difference between "puzzle" and "problem" games pretty well. I much prefer problem games.

@Guts_Brando

8 ай бұрын

Like traditional Roguelikes in a way?

@SimuLord

8 ай бұрын

I feel the same way about "Tropico-likes" (Tropico, Prison Architect, Let's School), games where you build macro systems to solve the problems of individually-simulated NPCs. Small expediencies in the earlygame will inevitably become big problems in the lategame as the game's systems unfold, and planning and building for that is the fun in those games for me. Kind of like logistics games (the Factorio tree of the builder-sim genre) but with a specific "human" vibe to them.

@solsystem1342

8 ай бұрын

I like both. I adore baba is you, can of wormholes, the witness, etc But I also love roguelikes, opus magnum, and other open ended puzzle like things.

@PhotonBeast

8 ай бұрын

...that is a beautiful descriptor separation. I'm going to use that from now on.

@EnderBlood

8 ай бұрын

I would have loved it if TotK's shrines were designed more like problems than puzzles. Even though the mechanics allow for emergent gameplay, the way most shrines are designed means either you tackle it in a puzzle-solving way ("what did the designer want me to do"), or in a problem-solving way ("what is the best way to do this with my tools"), but the second way amounts to essentially skipping parts or even all of the puzzle that was designed. So either I skip the puzzles and it's not fun (for me), or I do the puzzles which means I have to restrain my thinking, which is frustrating.

Loved that you paired the game with an opposite game suggestion to show that you aren't saying one is absolutely better than the other

There should be more of such series among other KZreadrs because there are indie games out there that are 10/10 but no one knows them because creator couldn't pay for the marketing

@user-nd9qj7wd6r

8 ай бұрын

not the best english, but i agree :D

@paperspock

8 ай бұрын

To throw another game out there for you, I think it has gotten enough traction that you might have heard about it by now, but Pseudoregalia was an absolute blast of a game. It's like if Mario 64 were turned into a Metroidvania. Movement in the game feels so fun. The game also does a very good job at making it difficult but actually possible to go to places you feel like you aren't supposed to be able to reach just yet. At $6 it's a great value, too.

@WhiteKnuckleRide512

8 ай бұрын

A bunch of youtubers do stuff like this. Rasputen and snoman gaming come to mind

@corruption723

8 ай бұрын

@@paperspock Pseudoregalia is one of the best games I've played recently! I absolutely recommend as well, it's worth every penny.

@anthillplan2170

8 ай бұрын

@@WhiteKnuckleRide512 Thanks. I'll check them out. I like making new game mechanics games but suck at marketing

Mosa Lina reminds me of Spacechem and other Zachtronics games where there is no "intended" solution. And I think one thing that might hypothetically improve the experience is to borrow the idea of having user metrics. If I know "2,301 attempts at this level using the 3 items you were given, and 0 succeeded" that might tell me it's impossible. And when only 4 succeeded, I know it's possible but very hard, so I feel so much smarter when I beat it.

@kevin-bf4ww

8 ай бұрын

that's absolutely one thing that's missing the other is that the tools are way too dependent on an incredibly slippery high gravity punishing physics sim with a little more floatiness/slower timescale and wider rooms to make the gaps consistent to the tools/jump you'd have a little more time to react and be rewarded for thinking on the fly

I love Mosa Lina, such a fun game to mess around with. I've done so many funny and creative solutions to rooms to rooms. Every time a create some rube goldberg machine that actually works I feel like a genius, and every time I fail it always feels like I could have done something different. Such a cool game, so glad you're covering it!

I tried the demo of this before it came out, played it for 6 hours (normally I only give demos like, 20 minutes), bought it immediately on launch, and good grief, this game just never gets old to me. I love games with true emergent gameplay, and this is one of the best. Just the utterly wild things you can come up with. Every single tool without exception has many possible uses, there isnt anything that's like, oh it's only good in one situation. No, they're ALL useful frequently... but it's up to you to figure out how. Certain tools can seem pointless at first (fish for instance) but seriously, they're all useful, and THAT is impressive design to me. But also there's just the sheer convolutedness of the solutions you can do. It's a game that combines the solving of puzzles with precise platforming and careful timing and such. Sometimes you'll have a solution and then things go wrong but wait, if you quickly do THIS and THIS before you fall it JUST MIGHT WORK. Something that's nice is that if a situation in a level comes out too simple/easy... as will happen sometimes, you occasionally get a room where maybe a single tool is perfectly suited to it... those levels take up almost no time at all. So you get back to the loopy fun stuff very fast. And the next time you see that same level, you may find that this time, it aint so simple. And on the flip side, there's a lot of times when you get a situation that absolutely seems impossible based on your loadout (and there are times where it IS impossible) but then you have that "aha!" moment where you come up with some brilliant scheme. But of course, you might mess up the execution and fall into a pit. And really some things in it are just consistently fun to do. Once I realized that the tentacle thing could be controlled (aiming up or down causes all of the tentacles on screen to react) suddenly all sorts of bonkers ideas became possible. Like tentacle elevators, or attaching one to a fruit and then "walking" the fruit along the ground to punch a deadly turret off a cliff (which is the funniest one so far). Runs are short, too. I can jump into this one whenever I have like, a quick 20 minutes or something. Just amazing. My favorite game of the year so far, easily. And knowing that the developer has even more content coming just makes it even better. Heck, they already added like 20 more levels just out of nowhere and made changes to make the turrets work better while being in more levels (they work as an excellent obstacle).

I love this series so far. Chants of Sennarr was an amazing experience btw.

@laseede17

8 ай бұрын

Yeah I played Chants of Sennaar because of the recomendation and it was the best experience I had in a long time.

@alixnoble4042

8 ай бұрын

same! i just played it this weekend and it was incredible!

@RealRomplayer

8 ай бұрын

I played the demo last week and thought that opening the book where you had to match the hyroglyphs with pictures was a bit of a downside. It gave me the solution for a few words that I hadn't figured out yet. Is this something you experienced as well? Did someone try to play the game WITHOUT opening the book?

@user-qh2mk1es7j

8 ай бұрын

It was incredible and now I'm gonna play mosa lina no doubt

As someone who has previously tried making a puzzle game with randomness for GMTK 2022, I found that they really don't mix well together. Puzzle games work better when they have an intended solution, and doing a set of actions in the same order results in the same outcome. It's really cool seeing a game like _Mosa Lina_ that manages to solve that design problem!

I really enjoy these smaller recommendation videos, thanks Mark !

Great game, I’d be terrible at it.

This beautifully shows the difference in Mark’s conceptions of puzzles as a matter of discovering the solution vs problems as a matter of inventing a solution

I love these weekender recommendations. They are fantastic for people like me who are tried from having to spend 30+ hours to best a game, leading me to only play a handful of games per year

Stuffed Wombat is one the most creative game designers that I ever saw on the internet

Glad that Stuffed Wombat gets a spotlight. They make awesome stuff, I've been a fan of them for a while now!

Feel like I can benefit more from this series if they are being released on friday instead of monday, so I can actually use the weekend to play the games that's recommended

@rinofthemill

8 ай бұрын

Luckily for you, weekends come around Every week ;)

@Glitchmaster331

8 ай бұрын

or you could use that week to plan and prepare. Make sure you've got the extra little bit of money lying around, make sure you've actually got enough time that weekend, get the game and get it downloaded, have time to get you some snack from the store if you're that kinda gamer, etc.

@Thorcoal

8 ай бұрын

For sure, don’t see any problem in having it released on monday. If anything, it can give you something to look forward to.

Don't normally comment (hardly ever) but I just wanted to drop by and say this is some of my fav content on youtube (this series) and reminds me a little of what extra credits used to do for the "interesting games you haven't tried" and I highly encourage you to continue doing this series!

Noita is like this but you're a wizard & the wands you have give different spells in different combinations that you can change at a hub room.

On the one hand,I love the unique art style, but on the other, it is so dissimilar to what I’m used to that my brain has a hard time understanding that it’s actually a game

Weirdly, the open endedness and building reminds me a bit of The Incredible Machine, probably the first game I played that you had a real open ended creative solution to puzzle by using a toolbox.

Ahhhh, so glad you mentioned Cocoon, I just finished it and it's so amazing, one of the most beautiful games I've ever played, wish it was harder and longer but still a beautiful experience

@radical_dog

8 ай бұрын

For a harder game about recursion, may I recommend Recursed.

@Aldoistaken

8 ай бұрын

@@radical_dog Hey thanks a lot, that looks pretty fun!

Reminds me of Into the Breach which is also mostly a puzzles generator but you have more control over what tools to have.

Fantastic video. Loved the part about how diverse games can be and how two games on opposite sides of a spectrum can both offer compelling experiences.

I bet the speedrun scene for this game will be amazing.

This helped me to understand what I've been wondering for years. Why I really don't like playing some critically-acclaimed "open world" games like Spiderman and why I love other open world games like Tears of the Kingdom. I don't like just doing the thing that the game designers want me to do in the order they want me to do it. I want the freedom to really experiment, even if ultimately I hit the same touch points as other players.. And the amount of hand-holding in very strict story, one solution puzzle games has always gotten on my nerves. But this video made me realize that there are people who love solving carefully crafted puzzles as they were meant to be solved. And that's fine. That's just not really who I am.

@5:33 "there's no story or structure, so it can feel more like a weird experimental toy than a complete game" i don't think so, that expectation is a recent invention. traditionally, most games in history don't have a story (think of chess or tennis). plenty of well known video games also lack a story, such as the original pacman, or sim city. and to this day, tons of multiplayer games do not involve going through a story with the other players

I love the amount of variety in approach to problem-solving and puzzles that can only be done in games, and this video came at the perfect time as I've been playing through Void Stranger lately (made by System Erasure, who also made the excellent shoot'em'up ZeroRanger) I love creative problem solving more than traditional puzzles, but there's also something really special about a game that presents "only" traditional puzzles but has layers and layers of out-of-the-box thinking and discoverable revelations, ludonarrative harmony letting you also weave together an understanding of the lore and story as you proceed, and persevering through a difficult journey worth it because you came to those understandings almost entirely on your own. I know it's a lot to ask, especially since I feel Void Stranger and ZeroRanger's strongest moments are best experienced going in without knowing what to expect at all, but I hope by some chance more people get to play and/or watch videos on them. They have so much to discuss in game design, secrets, and story. But more on topic, Mosa Lina seems like a game made for people like me who just want to taste-test powers and experiment more in every genre of game possible. Thanks for giving it a spotlight!!

This game's soundtrack is more terrifying than any horror game I've ever played.

Mosa Lina seems like the perfect type of game for a level editor (which apparently is in beta), as well as a possible user created item/power type system

So glad you did a video on this game! I hope it gets more attention, I've been enjoying it a lot

I first heard about this game a few days ago, and immediately knew you would be talking about it! Great showcase, with a good message at the end.

Love this series. Definitely saving every video for when i have more time on my weekends

I'm impressed that the tools in Mosa Lina are so well balanced that you never feel like you got completely screwed by RNG.

Loving this new series! I thoroughly enjoyed Chants of Senaar, so ill check this out as well

I can see it being a tad frustrating to miss what you need, but the creativity it would allow sounds awesome.

The "world within worlds" aspect reminds me of a game that I've had trouble finding. It's a shmup where levels, powerups, and other things were themselves also levels that you could jump into in order to affect them; making powerups better, weakening enemies, etc. And of course, as those were entire levels with enemies and powerups, you could jump into those too...turtles all the way down.

@koveltskiis8391

8 ай бұрын

I think that game is called some variation of “beneath a starry filled sky”

man, it is realllyyy good seeing this game featured, that dev rocks!

This feels like a similar concept to the mobile game “Cinco Paus” that’s a top-down turn based rogue-like where you fight through randomized dungeons with random powers each play through. The extra twist is that you don’t know what the powers are until you use them, and even then the description is in Portuguese so most people can’t read it!

Love this series! Chats of Sennaar was great. Can’t wait to try these!

I played the demo during the Steam Next Fest and was obsessed, I'm excited to see a bigger creator spread the word about the game, it's so fun!

Picked up Chants of Sennarr after seeing Marks video and another channel stream it and loved every second of it, I can see GMTK making me spend a lot of money in future :D

@SimuLord

8 ай бұрын

The very best gaming channels are the ones most dangerous to one's wallet.

Good video, as always^^! That minimalism reminded me of another indie game called Alt254. You appear in a world as a pixel and you have to discover what each pixel is.

I knew you would love this game, I'm super glad you made a video about it :)

Gosh I enjoy your videos. Currently can’t Patreon you yet but really can’t wait until I can. Keep them coming, you’re becoming a lifeline.

Since your last video, Chants of sennaar has become one of my favorite video games ever, so I'm gonna follow this series closely

Mosa lina looks like my kinda fun lil time

Love this series! Currently enjoying Chants of Sennaar!

Thanks for these recommendation videos Mark, two games you’ve sold me 😊

I love this series! I'm having a blast with Chants Of Shenaar

I love this series so much, have played or about to play all 3 games mentionned in the videos so far

I freaking LOVE this series!!!

I love this series! You make such quality recommendations!

I like this series! I played the demo for Chants of Sennarr on your recommendation and really enjoyed it.

imma needa check out mona lina as someone who needed to set up some fold up cardboard holiday displays recently, but they had no instructions then had probably the most fun at work ive ever had figuring them out- seems very up my alley

This sort of reminds me of two Carl Chudyk's card games, Innovation and Impulse. Probably more so Innovation. One is a tableau builder, the other one kind of sort of 4X. Both shower you with incredibly random, and yet at the same time, fairly synergistic cards and it's up to you to figure out a way to use them - Impulse uses an atypical action queue that every player uses and lets you "stack" your own actions to plan in addition to that, while Innovation has absolutely game-shattering abilities on almost every card in the box, with no repeats, that let you shoot ahead with a little planning to avoid helping your opponents. Both are brain-melting, and yet, noone does card combos and emergent asymmetry like Chudyk.

This series should be called "Mark talks about a puzzle game" 😂

I got stuck on one level for a good 30-45 minutes. I ended up using frogs and freezing them in midair to make stable platforms while chaining butterflies together to move over a gap. If you're a stubborn player, you could be going at this game for a while.

this game is so good, thank you Mr. Toolkit for going over it

I can imagine a really interesting esports/speedrunning scene around this game or one similar that involves trying to get through with no restarts

@badmanjones179

8 ай бұрын

well you cant reasonably enforce "no restarts" for speedruns, but the speedruns for this game are pretty cool, current wr is almost sub minute (beat 8 levels and a boss level); i do love the idea of a competitive vs mode :] that would be ex citing

@stroads.

8 ай бұрын

@@badmanjones179 I'm curious if someone could run it like that though - where if you can't figure out how to do it with the tools you roll you have to start all the way over again? It would be the ultimate test of versatility. But yeah I haven't played the game so I dunno the intricacies

@pedrov.8087

8 ай бұрын

​@@badmanjones179there's only 8 levels?

@Pedropaulopoloni

8 ай бұрын

@@pedrov.8087 there's currently a pool of over 100 levels with more to come, but one single run is composed of 9 of those levels, and then after you beat 8 the last one transforms into a "boss level" which is to say it now has an additional mini-level attached to it.

@pedrov.8087

8 ай бұрын

@@Pedropaulopoloni oh i see, thanks. how do u see how many levels it has?

Amazing series, thanks to these I found out about Pseudoregalia and is now one of my favorite movement platformers!

Lovely game! Very well deserved recognition ❤🎉

Cocoon is one of the best, if not the best, narratif-puzzle game i have ever experienced.

Bought it before the video even ended! Love to support developers doing weird stuff and it looks super fun

I love these videos but please try to release on Thursday or Friday instead of Monday so I Can actually buy and play these over the weekend! :)

Just took a look at the reviews. there's a mad lad who played the game for 53 hours. since the 17th, that's about 7 or 8 hours a day!

@GMTK

8 ай бұрын

I mean it is pretty addictive :P

@nanardeurlambda

8 ай бұрын

@@GMTK I can easily believe that. still, they should pace themself!

@SimuLord

8 ай бұрын

Well, I mean some games _do_ have a funny habit of eating up all of Saturday and all of Sunday...you can get over 30 hours pretty easily without even realizing it.

"...finish in a weekend" - so why am I still playing it four months later?

This looks like exactly my type of game, gonna check it out!

This may explain why I like some puzzles and don't others. I like sudoku, nonograms or nurikabe. Playing these, I feel I’m not forced to come up with the exact steps of solving the puzzles devs prepared beforehand. I feel more freedom along the way to get the answer although the final answer is fixed. Many puzzles in video games make me think like “what do devs want me to do by these things” probably because there’s only one or few ways to solve each puzzle

how you can read my mind 0_0 i was thinking "what if detective game with luck" when watching your detective video

Nice, I will pick that up. It has that ‘take a break and see’

Ugh!! This makes me so mad that I didn't come up with this idea myself!! Kudos to the designer(s)!!

Immersive sims and Games with emergent gameplay are the exact type of game LLM powered NPCs will work great with.

Awesome vid. I feel like Weekender videos should debut on the weekend. Your fans can see this video on a Friday and spend that weekend playing through the game. Kind of dumb and cheesy but I think it would be apt.

I love it when I play a game befor it gets put on this chanel. Idk why, but I'm glad you recommend it :D

coccon reminds me of baba is you, with its subworlds and all that. ive always wanted to see another game like baba; the take it had on the puzzle genre was so incredibly intriguing.

Love to see Mosa Lina getting mentioned by big youtubers because it definitely deserves more attention

The speedrun for this game is gonna go so hard

The randomness factor looks like it would get too frustrating for me. Cocoon looks amazing, though.

Thanks for the recommendations! Great video

this game seems like it would be a blast to speedrun

I would love to hear your thoughts on Immersive Sim/Roguelike hybrids in a video. Lately, I've been really fascinated with Void Bastards, Weird West, and Prey:Mooncrash, which are all immersive sims that use degrees of randomness to force the player into creative new solutions instead of relying on old reliable tactics.

@pedrov.8087

8 ай бұрын

Which one is the best one

Excelent review!! And unique game haha.

Speed runs for this game must be so fun

Cocoon sounds like an expansion of that one Obduction puzzle but fleshed out into a whole game

love this series!

Such a cool series! Might just have to check this game out

The hardest problem with systemic games is avoiding optimal strategies, where players end up learning a handful of solutions to apply everywhere. A completely random toolbox is a really interesting take, and I'd like to see it applied to more toolbox-y games like rougelites. I really like this type of game but they don't feel liks puzzlegames to me. Here, I mostly think intuitively and single-step. In puzzlegames, I try to find abstractions and follow longer logic chains. Making complex plans in this type of game can be fun, but much of that fun is seeing the plan fall apart and improvising a new solution.

One thing I find cool about this is how simple yet scalable the game is. With 20 total mechanics and 3 possible each time, then each puzzle has 1140 different variations depending on the mechanics available.

I love this series!

Ive been very excited about this games release over the last couple if months. Stuffed Wombat majes some amazing games (he's the genius behind ord, gutwhale, qomp, and producer 2021). He's easily my favorite indie dev

@magroski

8 ай бұрын

Art style reminded me a lot of Baba is You. for a sec i thought they were both from the same dec

Awesome recommendation as always!

I think I’ll really like this series. I’m very much a fun of great but short games like Orbo’s odyssey, Detective grimoire or short hike. It’s nice to play a long game like BG3 or Elden ring, but sometimes all you need is some original little thing that you can finish in one sitting.

@solar9490

8 ай бұрын

Lunistice is also short and very good, I can't recommend this game enough

Wow, these puzzles are more clever than the entirety of Tears of the Kingdom

Thanks for the Chants of Sennaar video, it was great! I don't think this one is for me though, looking forward to the next one!

I'd love to have you take a look at Void Stranger, it does some amazing things in telling a story in a way that only a video game can. Not a game that can be finished in a weekend though.

Such a great content!

I am definitely in the camp of people who were turned off by TotK's building mechanics. But I don't think I would be turned off in the same way by this game. It's all about expectations. TotK felt like a departure for me from the pure world exploration experience of BotW. The sandbox mechanics took a much more front and center roll compared to the open world mechanics imo, and that was a turnoff for me. I don't really like sandboxes, I need a bit more structure. And it's not that TotK doesn't have good exploration or that you can't play the entire game without interacting with the sandbox bits, but they feel so core to the experience that I feel like I'm missing out or playing the game wrong by ignoring them, and am thus not particularly drawn to keep playing it like I was BotW. The vibe is off. Mosa Lina seems like the exact opposite. It's a puzzle game first. The levels are short and self contained. Your goals in each level are explicit and the options you have to achieve those goals are relatively constrained compared to the completely open sandbox of TotK. You only have a few tools at a time instead of having all of the pieces required to make a massive airship or battle mech at any moment. It forces you to consider what you can do with a few tools towards a specific goal instead of dumping you in a massive workshop with all the resources you could want and saying "do whatever you want".

@milescpw

8 ай бұрын

Also, building stuff in TotK always has some sort of cost, you're spending like ten minutes and a bunch of materials that took even more time to collect to build a machine that maybe kills the enemies the way you want, or maybe it'll just be a waste and sputter around on the floor. Or you could just use one of the standard weapons your inventory is full of and get it done in a tiny fraction of the time it took to build something. In Mosa Lina, your items are all you have, you're supposed to use them, and there's no long-term punishment for using them incorrectly. The game rewards you for getting creative and using all your items, rather than punishing you for it. If you tried something that doesn't work, oh well, you're now on the next puzzle with another set of items to use.

I bought Chants of Shennaar last time. It was great (so long as you don't mind "dying" a bunch of times in the second area). I might pick up Cocoon if/when it goes on sale.

Super great video!

I dig this indie videos a lot.