exp. Is generally intended to be a video game website, but I like writing about film as well, so I think I can get away with celebrating my year in culture in general. Which I suppose makes it sound like I’m going to be sharing books and art shows I went to, but it’s just music and films and that, innit. I mean this is a video game website.
Single Of The Year: Hayley Williams – True Believer
Edge case here as this was, along with every other song on Hayley William’s Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, originally put online as a “single” but isn’t actually classed as a single on things like Wikipedia. But of course, such distinction is kind of meaningless these days. As I said on Bluesky, there are echoes of Chino Moreno’s ††† here, and I can’t help but loop it.
Album Of The Year: Deafheaven – Lonely People with Power
Probably wasn’t going to be anything else. I was shocked when I heard Deafhaven’s Infinite Granite, concerned they were making a full shift towards shoegaze the kind of which put me right off Alcest, but I’ll admit that album has grown on me. It almost makes me feel bad that I think of Lonely People With Power in that cliche fashion as “a return to form” but, well, it is.
“Evil Puddle argues … that community is very, very real, in both narrative and form.”
Interesting year for film. So many of the big award films this year were, frankly, absolute slogs, the worst kind of eating your greens. And here’s the bold Matt Farley embarrassing them with a shoestring budget and non-actors.
“War 2 is the realest fucking movie out there. And if you disagree? You’re a fucking idiot.”
Yes, Sinners is good–excellent, in fact–and probably what I’d go for if I was looking for the “mainstream pick.” But it’s still a pretender to the masala throne; better to go straight to the source. There was no bigger or better movie for me this year than War 2.
(Note: if this trailer autoplays with a terrible English dub, please click through and change it to Hindi. Please.)
TV Of The Year (Runner Up): The Rehearsal Season 2
I was a latecomer to Nathan Fielder, but I think he’s probably this century’s greatest artist (at least so far) and I already believed that before seeing the second season of The Rehearsal. I saw some complaints that the first season was him repeating himself (Nathan For You’s Smokers Allowed/Finding Francis) but I think that was uncharitable: Fielder has been able to drill down on his artistic process (thanks, unrealistically huge amounts of money from HBO) and create the kind of work that changes the way people see the world. Simultaneously, there are things in this that are so funny it’s actually painful. I am in awe.
TV Of The Year: Andor Season 2
It was a close run thing, but Tony Gilroy’s ability to take Star Wars, probably the world’s biggest “IP” and owned by the most overpowering and surely risk-adverse cultural force today (Disney) and turn it into a genuinely meaningful examination of what it means to live under fascism? A show that’s willing to say the word genocide? Much like Twin Peaks: The Return, this was a TV experience of the likes I don’t think I’ll ever experience again, one which will stay with me forever.
It’s March in 2026, the proper time for you to do your X of the year post, because people who do it in December are missing an entire month, the bell-ends. I mean the Oscars aren’t until the middle of March, so if anything I’m posting this early. Anyway, without further ado:
“I won’t lie–often when I’m playing these older games, I’m sort of just… working through them like a job. But Pro Wrestling? I just played it!”
I thought I’d start off with something simple to ease everyone in, but turns out this is a really hard one–the best game not from 2025 that I played that year–because it’s a year I played things including the original Metroid and The Legend Of Zelda. There are some games I really enjoyed writing about, like Zombi, but I think I have to go for Pro Wrestling here because I was so impressed at how it recreated the ebb and flow of a real wrestling match on the NES as early as 1986, and that it’s still so playable today.
“An extremely solid classic rooms and items, bread and butter text adventure. The best I’ve played since Meretsky’s own Planetfall, and arguably the best I’ve played full stop.”
Text adventures are an acquired taste and Infocom games are a pretty specific era, but I really have grown to love them. Unique amongst video games it really is like curling up with a lovely big book; I always imagine myself in a nice worn leather chair in a dark wood office, in front of an old IBM PC when I play them (I know I’m mixing my metaphors here.) Leather Goddesses Of Phobos is a superb Stephen Meretzky adventure, and while it’s no A Mind Forever Voyaging (a likely winner from a previous year) I just had such a great time with it and it has one of my favourite puzzles ever. An unchallenging pick, then, but what is my playing of all these retro games but looking for solace in an uncertain world, eh? Oh god… I might have unlocked something there.
The “Live Service? More Like Death Sentence” Award: Rematch (Sloclap)
2025 was an extension of 2024’s not just “maybe live service is not the answer” rumblings but also my own recognition that maybe live service just isn’t for me. This year I tried and put down Marvel Rivals in less than 20 minutes; I picked up and managed a few games of Helldivers 2 (even with friends) but then immediately forgot about it and the fact that it’s always updating doesn’t even remind me. But Rematch wins this award not just because it’s the one that was released this year because I thought it was genuinely great. It feels great to play–the amount of buttons is a little complex for someone like me who thinks Sensible Soccer is still the pinnacle, but it’s not ridiculous while compared to a modern FIFA (sorry, “EA Sports FC”). I thought it was going to lead to something like the period I had with Rocket League where I play it loads, almost to the exclusion of everything else, but I… didn’t. I stopped playing it after a couple of days simply because it was slow and annoying to get it booted up, through the menus and into a game, and the usual things–levelling up for cosmetics, and that–just wasn’t compelling to me at all. However, I’m beside myself imagining the universe where this is a single-player footy RPG. Oh well!
As this is picking up awards all over the shop, what harm another? I wrote at brutal length about Clair Obscur with the ultimate conclusion that it was fun, but flawed [“could have saved us a lot of time and just said only that”–Ed.] before I even knew it was just a rip off of La Horde du Contrevent. But I have to give my most major recommendation to watching French video essayist Ache’s lengthy deconstruction of the white European biases of the game. Is it too far to say there’s something sort of colonialist about a JRPG getting all these plaudits simply because it’s from the west?
“The difficulty of a work like Horses–if we accept my hypothesis that it exists in the spectrum of indigestible art–is that it is not a work about the horses, what happens to them, or Anselmo’s journey. It’s existence is, like Salò, a political act, to stand in opposition to the inauthentic, easily digestible product that floods our culture.”
I wrote thousands of words on the idea that Horses–by being banned by Steam and Epic–fit into the same spectrum of “indigestible art” as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom. I am unbelievably proud of this essay and I’m not entirely sure where all the awards are for it (I’m sure they’re in the post) but I’ll give myself one for it now. I can do that.
Game Of The Year (Runner Up): Evil Egg (Ivy Sly)
Yes, I admit: I haven’t written this one up. But only because I haven’t beaten the “proper” boss. I have beaten the alternative boss, and in most cases I’d just count that, but here’s the thing: I love Evil Egg so much that I don’t want to put it down and call it “finished.” I just want to keep playing it. Evil Egg is Robotron 2084 as a light Roguelike-like with a near-Jeff Minter level of visual noise and it absolutely rips. I really struggled with if this was my game of the year, but I’m becoming more conflicted over my feelings of games that feed my addictions, that take me to the “machine zone.” However, this game is fucking free. The only thing it costs you is your time, I’m still just trying to work out how comfortable I am with that. A few more goes, though, that should help me understand.
“It’s a rare video game that I say this could only exist as a video game’ but Many Nights A Whisper is one.”
I played this in August, and I knew it was simply not going to be matched. A game that respects your time (done in the length of a film) that is thoughtful, paced well, features an enjoyable central interaction, and builds towards an unforgettable moment that you could only do in a video game. You can read what I had to say about it, but just buy it.
Bonus: As I’ve actually never done a post like this before, here’s my previous “Games Of The Year” for the last two years, years in which I’ve been making a concerted effort to play more contemporary games than I have previously.
“What makes Hi Fi Rush genius, I think, is that it takes a type of game I am incapable of not button-mashing through and adds a rhythm action component that doesn’t expect but rather, uh… politely asks you to hit your combos on rhythm. And it works!”
Öoo is… perfection. I’m not sure I can phrase it any other way, actually. It’s not simply a textbook case of a game that’s doing exactly what it set out to do as well as it absolutely could, it’s doing something so clever–on a level that I didn’t think was possible–that I actually could not believe it was doing it. I actually think Öoo might be the gold standard for mechanic-first game design now. It’s that clever.
I mean the cleverness starts with the name, doesn’t it? It’s called Öoo, and you play a wee “bomb caterpillar” that looks exactly like the title. They must have felt like a god when they worked that one out. As the caterpillar–is it named Öoo? I’m not actually sure–you find yourself snaffled up by a big bird when you were innocently planning on snacking on an apple and have to escape by, well, getting as deep into the bird’s guts as possible so you can blow up their heart and then jump out of their mouth (I mean, I’d just have waited until they yawned or something, but you do you, Öoo. Yoo doo Öoo.)
You do this by navigating platforming challenges, but you can’t jump. Initially you can’t do much of anything, but you quickly unlock your first tail segment and then the trick is that you can drop it as a bomb and choose when it explodes–and when it does, it propels anything near it in the opposite direction the explosion hits it from. So you can, for example, drop it, stand on it, and then blow it up to propel yourself into the air to get you to a higher platform, or stand next to it to get you to blow you over a spike pit.
One amazing thing is that the game is able to do so much with that before it even introduces the second tail segment, thanks to the thoughtful implementation of other mechanics. The game immediately introduces a generous warp system where you can easily warp between any two warp points, and then begins to gate your progress with yellow frogs who require you deliver them flies to let you pass, along with a variety of other obstacles–the usual spikes, but also blocks that need to be blown up (which may reappear on a timer) buttons to press to open or close doors and… huh, you know what? That’s about it.
But here’s the most incredible thing about Öoo. They never give you more than the two exploding tail segments and they stop introducing new obstacles about half an hour into it, but the game is full of a sense of discovery I don’t think I’ve ever felt in the game before because (and I’m going to spoil the “trick” of the game here, so if you don’t want that spoiled, please stop reading and just play it):
You are never truly “gated” at all by the frogs. In each situation you’re stymied by one, you just need to know how to use your caterpillar’s already existing abilities to pass it right there and then. The section of the level you’ll go and play leads to a dead end that you just warp back from and it is entirely there to teach you the mechanic you need to perform.
I’m not sure if I can express how revelatory this is. It’s like in a movie when the hero learns they always had the power inside them and they just had to ~believe in themselves~ happening to you, repeatedly. I can’t say for sure if you’re going to have the reaction I did, but not only did I enjoy the game so much even when I understood the trick that I was happy to progress through the game in full–not stopping to try and figure out the “shortcuts”–and I definitely never knew how to do what was required to progress via frog gate until I’d done the whole thing anyway, because it was never as simple as knowing the mechanic; you needed to understand the mechanic fully.
It is wonderful. It’s made me look at Metroidvanias, roguelikes, even “git gud” games in almost a whole new light, imaging a world where rather than making the player jump through hoops for required unlocks or permanent warps or extreme mastery players were simply shown ways to use the mechanics in new ways through play.
I imagine this world, but I also find it hard to believe it’s possible, because I can think of every way it can go wrong immediately. And that’s why Öoo is such an incredible piece of game design. There’s a version of this game where the average player hits a gate, goes “oh, maybe if I do this” and then skips 10, 20% of the game, possibly backtracks to do it and discovers that there’s just a dead-end there and wonders “well what was the point of that.” You have to have incredible confidence to decide you can hide a solution that’s already accessible to a player from them until you want them to have it, and bloody hell does Nama Takahashi have it.
The only caveat I have here is that was my experience, and maybe you’re king shit problem solver, and you’ll grasp what do to immediately in every situation. You cut your teeth on kaizo and never thought “well, I’ll take that other easier path instead.” But I’d be surprised if that wasn’t a statistical irrelevance in terms of players of this game (maybe only slightly heightened by people who read things like this who learn the trick in advance.) The funny thing is how much trying to break Öoo would be to not just miss the point but to actually ruin the fun completely. That rather than learn a mechanic that allows you to unlock the doors as you go you hit your head against them until they bust open.
It would be pointless, too, because for the real heads there are loads of hidden extra hard sections to do found via hidden trophies that test your abilities as far as you can go if you really want to (in my case, not very far.)
Öoo is short–my completed playthough clocks in at 2.4 hours–but if it were to be any longer I think either cracks would start to show or new mechanics would have to be introduced, and the perfection would be sullied. But if you want to play a puzzle platformer, there is no better option. Probably at all.
Will I ever play it again? No. I am interested to see what Nama Takahashi does next, but good lord what an act to follow. I don’t think I could, but then I also couldn’t have come up with Öoo. It’s humbling.
Final Thought: If you’re going to play this or Elechead, Öoo wins; but if you think you’ll play both, I recommend playing Elechead first, as it has a rougher design but you can see the evolution towards Öoo in it (whereas playing it second will just feel like a step backwards.)
Developed/Published by: Playables / Panic Released: 31/07/2025 Completed: 03/02/2026 Completion: Crossed off every fly’s bucket list.
There’s a cliché about criticism, that the worst thing that you can have to review is something mediocre; the idea being that there’s nothing that much to say one way or another when something’s just fine. But actually, I sort of think that’s not entirely true–at least when it comes to games. Because think of the platonic ideal of the “7/10” game; a “mediocre” score under the prevailing wisdom of not using the entire scale, but often games with grand ambition they couldn’t quite match, or interesting ideas that didn’t entirely work.
Really, the worst thing you have to review is something that’s overall good… but unremarkable. Something you enjoyed… but couldn’t find anything special about. Something successful at what it set out to do… but what it’s set out to do is forgettable.
I think you can see where I’m going with this.
Time Flies comes from Playables, a production company with a focus on what they describe as “playful interactive projects” (and I do think this intentional distinction from games is important) and is published by Panic. Panic, of course, behind the Playdate, but also a surprisingly large slate of games in 2025 including Despelote, a game I consider interestingly boring (and one of their 2024 releases, Thank Goodness You’re Here!, was absolutely my game of that year.) In Time Flies, you play a fly who, in its short time on earth, has a “bucket list” to cross off, and so you fly about a side-scrolling black-and-white 2D world attempt to do all the things on the list (things like “get drunk” or “read a book”) before you die.
The trick is that the fly’s lifespan is the length of time you have per attempt, and that lifespan is based on the average lifespan in the country you are playing the game from, with years as seconds. So, for example, in Canada I got a whopping 81.6 seconds per attempt; in other countries it could be significantly less. I’ll talk about this aspect of the game in a moment–feel free to count it in seconds–but mechanically, at least, it simply means that you have a handful of seconds to do everything, and if you don’t do all the things in one life, you simply start again with another fly.
There are a few points of comparison here, play-wise, none of which quite fit. There’s Minit, of course, where you’ve got a minute to complete a quest (and which is also in a striking black and white) but as you keep your inventory, it’s more incremental. There’s actually Thank Goodness You’re Here, where you similarly interact with a world in a limited way to make funny things happen–though that’s more narratively driven. And then there’s the original Glider for Mac, which is probably the first thing old bastards like me will think of, and I think the most likely to be an actual source of inspiration; but that’s far more of an action game (although you do “collect clocks” in both games. Sort of.)
Really, even with the tension of having to do everything in a single life giving Time Flies the air of a “speedrun” game, it is much more a continuation of Playables “playful interactive projects.” Yes, the fly can die if you do something like stick it on some flypaper (come on man, have some sense) but the fly is in many ways just a cursor that you’re using to make funny things happen. So, for example, you push two statues together and they kiss. That’s amusing. Or you fly back and forth over some guitar strings and it makes some noise, counting as “learning an instrument”, and you can do it for as long as you like (longer than you need to, usually.)
“Hold on, there’s some buzzing on the recording. I’ll check the cables.”
This is… enjoyable! And it very much does not outstay its welcome. You get four levels with a selection of things to do, and just enough play in it that you have fun flying around, doing the things, then working out the racing line to do them in one life. It’s not boring, or too difficult, and moving the fly around feels good.
But it’s also the kind of thing that doesn’t stick with you at all. At the end of the game, all those memories flash by in the fly’s mind, all these things lost, like tears in rain, and… yeah. I did some silly stuff for a while and now it’s done.
Now, to be fair, not everything as to be dripping in meaning, but Frei did describe the game to Stephen Totilo as a game about “the finiteness of our existence and what to do with it, with the time we have.”
I think the use of real World Health Organization data for your lifespan is interesting–I like that it forces the majority of the assumed audience to, quickly, face up to the idea that by simply living in a Western country they get to experience more time to do more silly things. And it may simply be that, possibly, I’m just somewhat nihilist; I’ve lived long enough now to know how much I’ve already forgotten that felt so important to me at one point, so I’m not sure anything matters than the moment. It’s possible this could hit you in some way that is deeply profound.
But I had an enjoyable 70 minutes and that’s, you know… it. And it really puts the game in a weird position for me where I basically recommend it–it’s fun, funny and I liked it–but I still feel kind of indifferent.
Will I ever play it again? There’s only so much time on earth… I feel like something I played recently taught me that…
Final Thought: One thing to be said is that I really appreciate Totilo talking to the developers about it and focusing on the life expectancy angle; the team’s decision to include Palestine is meaningful, even if they are using out of date statistics and most players will never notice it.
Oof, haven’t done one of these for a month. Well, let’s get to it.
Hey, do you hate in-line advertising? We do too! We’re only ever going to do it here at the start of our newsletter posts because we want you to get these missives in your inbox a day early. Sorry!
Thirty Flights Of Loving continues my slow Blendo Games retrospective (see Gravity Bone, Flotilla) but I’m pleased to finally start doing something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, which is work through UFO 50 (similarly slowly). I’m always looking for reasons to make my subscription seem worth it, so these are going to be subscriber exclusive. Well, it is just $1, you know…
I supposed I also unlocked A Computer Christmas (Sierra, 1986), but I dunno if you want to be reading about Christmas at the end of January [only 326 shopping days left! etc.]
I’m speeding up my updating of the exp. Archive a bit because I’d like to catch up a bit faster–closer to a couple of archive posts a week, so I’ll probably not include them all here now, it’ll get unwieldy. Nice to see that my Attack of the Friday Monsters! post picked up a mild bit of traction over on Bluesky–there’s something quite ironic about the fact that in the article, from 2014, I complain about the inaccessibility of certain games, and now you can’t play Attack Of The Friday Monsters! officially either.
As much as you might not want to read about Christmas, do you want to be reading about Avatar: Fire And Ash at the end of January either? But we’re in the real January doldrums and to be honest I just couldn’t be arsed to go and see Marty Supreme just to keep up or whatever.
Couldn’t resist this based on the graphics, a short, simple platformer that initially appears to be about quick escape, but reveals itself to be a bit more of a puzzle if you’re willing to give it another go (I won’t spoil the trick–what have to do initially is simple enough, but the “a ha” moment is rewarding anyway. Although I suppose the trailer spoils it, so just… don’t watch that first then.) Does that thing I really don’t love where a lot of jumps are designed to be either just out of reach or just in reach (be more obvious/have more leeway, please) and the graphics don’t always make it clear what you can collide with, but this is a nice way to spend ten minutes or so.
“A fun new, 44-page, full-colour A5 music fanzine, featuring brand new interviews/features and lots of indie-pop silliness. #2 is dedicated to everybody’s favourite indie-pop band… Heavenly.”
“Before there was Battle Bots, there was the Critter Crunch. Read the story of the world’s first robot death match at the 1989 Denver MileHiCon. Trying out a different format—an online version of an 8-page zine.”
“Between the Scanlines is a fanzine launched in October 2023. Inspired by 90s anime and video game fanzines, we hope to capture their spirit and passion for video games and media history with our own. There are typically fourteen A5 pages in each issue.”
exp. was on Aftermath! Well, sort of. I talked to Luke Plunkett, as did a group of other writers and game developers, about not going to GDC this year because of [gestures at everything].
Next week on exp.: it’s hard to predict what’s in the cards…
Developed/Published by: Heather Flowers Released: 25/09/2025 Completed: 17/11/2025 Completion: Nine heads with an unlikely 40% chance and then the coin landed on its side. I’m taking it.
Q-UP (Everybody House Games, 2025)
Developed/Published by: Everybody House Games Released: 5/11/2025 Completed: 20/11/2025 Completion: Finished it with the Medic.
Oh, I didn’t think I’d do another one of these joint essays again so soon. However, with there being two games about flipping coins released within a couple of months of each it does feel like I’d just be repeating myself if I wrote two different articles, so here we are.
I did a jokey question on The Insert Credit Podcast about this: “Why is coin flipping so hot right now?” despite the fact that I feel like I know the answer: it’s our old friend simultaneous discovery. Yes, I may be an agnostic, but I also apparently believe that ideas float around in the sky and fall into multiple people’s heads at the same time. And it’s more people than actually act on it too, which explains how I invented nasal strips sometime in the late 80s as a child who suffered stuffiness far too often (should have made a bigger deal of it even though my prototype—sellotape and a broken toothpick—wasn’t that great.)
The more obvious answer, you’d think, would be Australian streamer/comedy man Tom Walker, who I best know for being on best TV show Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont Spelling Bee, but I first heard of for playing GTA IV with all the cars set to 9999% speed. However before that, at the very start of 2024, he did a coin flipping stream, where he attempted to flip a coin heads ten times in a row, but every time he flipped ten tails in a row, he’d add an extra heads (meaning he’d have to flip eleven, or twelve…) This took over eight hours, and while there might have been other coin flipping streams before or since (he actually does joke during the stream that it’s “Mr. Beast shit”) it’s the one that seemed to stick in people’s imagination. But, and it’s an important but, Unfair Flips and Q-UP are not really about the coin flips.
In Unfair Flips, you’re trying to flip a coin heads ten times in a row, but the game fucks with the odds in an explicitly video gamey way. The focus of Unfair Flips is probability, and a player’s ability to understand it.
In Q-UP, however, you’re not going for an unlikely number of heads in a row–you’re playing “best of three” flips against opponents. The focus of Q-UP is the idea that in a perfectly matched ranking system–where you’d always play an opponent with equal skill level to yourself–you’d have a 50% chance of winning, so you might as well just flip a coin and skip all that playing the game.
When I describe it like that, you’d think “alright, well, those are both really different concepts to explore, and both games explore them in really different ways. Why if they didn’t both feature coin flipping, there’d be no reason to pair them. In fact, maybe there isn’t!”
But underlying thing that both games are exploring is twofold. One: the ways in which people do or do not trust computers, and two: that game design was broken to combat that, and in doing so a precedent was set that has allowed bad actors to create not “fun games for us to play”, but “products that dole out enough reward on a regular enough schedule to keep us chained to them.”
[“Fucking Christ. Is this another article about how capitalism is to blame for everything?–Ed.] I promise it isn’t. Well, maybe a little.
Something that’s really stood out to me about Unfair Flips–or rather, the discourse around it, which I’m well aware I’m massively behind–is how often people said it was a game about “how bad gamers were at understanding probability.”
This is generally put down to “fake RNG [random number generation]” aka “bad luck protection” where if you fail on a 10% chance the next time it might be an 11% chance (or more!) while still telling you it’s a 10% chance to try and make sure you eventually get the endorphins you so richly deserve. My position is that, well, people who play games are not actually bad at understanding probability! The industry is invested in making them not actually engage with it!
Criticise me for supposition and anecdotal evidence here if you like, but people who play video games, “gamers” if you absolutely must, often play tabletop RPGs and board and card games, and something about those is that you cannot massage the odds progressively1. Anyone who has played anything from Candy Land up is aware of the experience of hitting one after one or hitting the exact roll required for the worst outcome despite long odds, and card game players are especially in tune with the uneven way your odds can play out: I played Netrunner competitively for years, and there’s not a player of that who doesn’t understand that if you put three copies of a card in your 44 card deck, and then riffle shuffle enough to get “perfect” randomness (seven shuffles, isn’t it?) you’ll still play far more games than you like where you’re not going to draw one of those cards in the first 15 draws and instead find them all clumped at the bottom.
Indeed, there are entire games where the reality of RNG is what makes them legendary. In Blood Bowl, a couple of bad rolls can destroy months if not years of work, and the game is almost entirely about trying to make sure you never do anything where you haven’t stacked the odds in your favour as much as possible, and you still have to expect it to go wrong. And people love it for the incredible highs and incredible lows.
Blood Bowl is a great example, though. In video game form the game uses “real” RNG, and yet there are many players who jump online to complain that the rolls are “rigged” in some way despite there being no evidence (their evidence, of course, generally relaying to them not hitting within some range of probability with what they think is some excessive amount of logged rolls.)
In a video game, we are not touching the dice; we are not shuffling the cards. We’re not touching anything real, so we don’t trust it. Every game we play with a computer is like visiting the casino, but the croupier is behind a curtain and he just yells out “no, sorry, you lost. Try again?” every time. We’re already seeing an illusion, so why should we trust anything about it? I’m struck by the comparison to the conclusion from that 4 hour Defunctland video a while back everyone was wild about (it is very good): visitors to theme parks get bored, and quickly, with fully computerised characters because they don’t feel real. That there’s this seeming paradoxical aspect that you prefer a Mickey where you know there’s a guy in a suit because it’s the knowledge that there’s a fourth wall that allows you to stand on the other side of it. You can trust the parameters of the experience and understand the limits the way you can’t with a robot.
So I really don’t believe people are naturally bad at understanding probabilities. And I do believe that “bad luck protection” was made with a genuine attempt to give the player an edge over the house not to fix the odds but repair trust. It’s a real “note under the note” fix, so elegant I’m sure even people implementing it don’t see what the real issue is.
The problem, of course, is that messing with odds in a way that players don’t understand presents an absolutely huge opportunity to fuck with a player’s brain chemistry to keep them playing. If you can take a player from “I don’t trust the machine’s odds” to “I am guaranteed to hit once every ten times because it says so” by repeatedly giving them slanted odds, it means you can give players the kind of shitey unfair odds that appear in gatcha games–1% chance or far worse –and they’ll keep playing or spending thinking they’re not really gambling at all.
This is where Unfair Flips steps in. Unfair Flips starts you with a 20% chance, makes explicit that this is the real odds, and things are so boiled down to one probability, and you flip the coin so many times that you actually cannot help but see the croupier behind the curtain is (for once) playing you straight. Tails. Tails. Tails. It’s doing it, alright. Tails. Tails. Tails. By jove, it’s doing it.
They then tie this to the exact kind of levelling system that is (if you allow the pun) the other side of the engagement coin: slowly doled out improvement that keeps you playing. Not just the hit of the “unlikely” wins, but the guaranteed hit, with enough time, of seeing a number go up.
There really isn’t anything more to Unfair Flips, but that’s what makes it brilliant. It’s a laser sight trained on the basest tricks that game designers play on us, and there’s nowhere to hide from it. You’re not competing to beat a system, you’re not even in a casino. You’re on a treadmill.
The only issue I have with Unfair Flips is in the end it overplays its hand [“Hang on, I thought you said we weren’t in a casino”–Ed.] by making the final flip actually only have a 10% chance of being heads with the others being gag endings. The game has already made its point about the ultimate meaninglessness of the treadmill, it does feel like a theft of something to not just play it out for real. I know it’s called Unfair Flips, but if you understand what some players might go through to get the final heads… I mean, you’ve made your point.
Q-UP is, at heart, an e-sports parody. In body, however, it is very much an escalation-focused incremental game2, designed, as it is, by a team that included Frank Lantz, designer of Universal Paperclips. I wasn’t super hot on Universal Paperclips–as is often the case, I think I was too harsh–but I agree that it does fall prey to the old “alright, I get the idea already!” issue that your, ahem, academic kind of games can have.
Q-UP masks this with an extravagance of mechanics. It’s kind of the joke. If a general player’s experience of an e-sport is that games boil down to a coin flip, then all of the other stuff you’re doing–your character, your loadout of items and abilities–all modify experience rather than outcomes. It’s (immediately) one of the most challenging things about Q-UP compared to the completely transparent nature of Unfair Flips–the game is all obfuscation, and poorly explains things in a way that I have to assume is also a joke (when I tried to play Marvel Rivals when it launched, it felt exactly as baffling) but doesn’t exactly lead to a smooth on-ramp.
We were coming to this metaphor, and I apologise, but these games are two sides of the same coin. Unfair Flips lays bare the trick; Q-UP makes the lie so huge, and so ridiculous, that you see right through it.
It does this by making the coin flips completely meaningless. It doesn’t matter if you trust the computer or not: the game isn’t about the matches, it’s about the metagame. I know this experience. I may have bounced off Marvel Rivals immediately, but I’ve played both Dead By Daylight and Marvel Snap for far longer than I imagined I would (and the latter, in an actively unhealthy way.) In Dead By Daylight the game became more about unlocking things than it was about actually playing it by the end (I think every player of any live service game knows the experience of realising you’re logging in to collect the free currency or daily unlocks for a game you don’t actually have any interest in playing.) In Marvel Snap, it was always about climbing that monthly ladder, and that game was almost as transparent as Q-UP: pretty much every competitive deck had a win/loss ratio that hovered around a coin flip, and climbing was just about putting in the time. Rather than making sure you unlock the right cards, in Q-UP you have to make the numbers bigger, but it’s the same thing: you spend time to climb the ladder. Time is the only real currency.
For what it’s worth: I think players understand this just as well as probability, and just like fake RNG, ranked ladder is the comforting lie that keeps us playing. God knows I played enough games of Marvel Snap aware that eventually the game would feed me a bot where I’d make up all my losses and then some.
The problem with Q-UP merging an incremental with ranked ladder, even if it’s in service of a critique, it does the exact thing that it’s critiquing! Q-UP actually is just the treadmill for, like, eight hours, and it doesn’t really matter if the game is going “ha ha, this is stupid, right?” if you’re locked into the loop. And you can, very easily, get locked into the loop. If you gel with the systems, Q-UP pops as those numbers get ever higher. Q-UP is the kind of game where I don’t think I had a great time playing it–you really are just watching a coin flip and numbers go up–but I couldn’t stop thanks to the next unlocks or the ranking system that forms the game’s core critique.
Q-UP’s problem, ultimately, might be the same as Universal Paperclips–the fact that once the player gets it… what then? In his essay, “Qing-UP in the Age of Tilt” Q-UP’s designer James Lantz discusses a lot of the things I’ve discussed in this essay, but he also makes a point of saying this:
“Q-UP wasn’t built as a commentary on the state of the world. First and foremost, the game is designed to be funny, engaging and addictive.” [My emphasis.]
This is quite apparent in that as much as the gag of Q-UP is laced through every aspect of it, the game is also extremely carefully designed. The live service-style game screens might be ironic, but they present deep and complicated systems that reward you for engaging with them. There are multiple characters with wildly different skill trees and the entire thing builds towards what is meant to be an actually competitive postgame where you’ve built your engine up incrementally with a squad to the point where you’re just making absurd numbers.
I’ll be honest–it was overcomplicated in a way that was beyond my willingness to engage beyond “I get the joke.” I reached a point where I had to look up character builds to understand what I was doing, and… I still didn’t. The character’s skills are placed in a huge matrix that has a trigger order based on placement, if they trigger from heads or tails (and so on) and it’s about two steps beyond rewarding for me, though I know it would be catnip for many. I got to the end with a build that made sense to me, but it was missing triggers left and right, and I really had no way of working out how I would fix it.
Alright, you make sense of this if you’re so clever.
Q-UP also has a story (of sorts) to keep you going. It’s jammed away in the game’s email system and it’s… I guess it’s there, but it added so little to the experience I was a bit surprised they bothered. I suppose it’s supposed to be funny, but when the entire experience is sort of a joke, it’s gilding the lily and as with Baby Steps, it just didn’t click with me.
If Unfair Flips is a dagger [“Hang on, I thought you said it was a laser sight”–Ed.] then Q-UP is some sort of a… blunderbuss. It’s still hitting the target, but it’s done it via overwhelming scattershot, and the collateral damage is, in my opinion, too much to bear.
So what’s my conclusion? Unfair Flips and Q-UP are both very, very good at what they’ve chosen to do–one minimalist, one maximalist. They ask the audience to take the reality of the dark patterns of game development on the chin, and I hope–and believe–that both leave players with a lasting insight of things that they probably understood, but had never deeply considered. But if Unfair Flips wants you to learn your lesson, Q-UP seems to want you to keep engaging anyway.
Will I ever play them again? I was done with Unfair Flips so hilariously quickly, I did fancy playing it again. But I learned the lesson! With Q-UP, I really just am not interested in learning any of the other characters. The design is good, but there’s the same emptiness at its heart.
Final Thought: That Q-UP wants you to keep engaging with the systems it critiques is understandable with further context from Lantz’s essay; he makes a point of saying that neither fake RNG or Ranked Ladder are “evil.” It’s getting into something really thorny to discuss the ethics of game design, but let’s here take some shorthand and say that it’s what you do with game design that matters. Frankly, the standpoint this essay comes from is that the design patterns of Unfair Flips and Q-UP are used elsewhere to eat up people’s money, time, and ultimately their happiness, because they exist within the context of late-stage capitalism, and [“Oh for Christ’s sake. I’m cutting this essay off now”–Ed.]
A tabletop DM with hidden rolls can, will, often does massage wins and losses, but that’s not really the point here. ↩︎
I notice people don’t make a point of this distinction, generally. Unfair Flips is an incremental game, but it’s not focused on getting comically huge numbers. I think there’s a meaningful difference there that should be given a genre marker for clarity. I’m partial to “exponential incremental” but I got cold feet about the specificity of exponential… ↩︎
I do not think the original Avatar is good, but I’ll be the first to admit that Way of Water had me both hootin’ and hollerin’ as I watched genocidal whiteys get murked, and I remember thinking “oh man, I enjoyed that enough I’d watch it again.”
[Monkey’s paw curls]
Did that mean I wanted to watch the exact same film again, but as a sequel? Because I did not.
Now, before you start quibbling here–there’s the fire Na’vi, multiple(!) whale councils, a fuckton more Spider, the climax which is whales vs. whalers again features more, bigger whales and even some squid too–I think I assumed that this film was going to, you know, not just feature the Sullys mostly hanging around and swimming in the same location of the previous movie. That there’d be some contrived reason for them to end up at a volcano, or among the fire Na’vi, and the film would be a feast of fire and particle effects the way Way of Water was for water physics.
No. In fact, the film does a hilarious thing where the Sullys have their contrived reason to leave the water Na’vi (“Unlike the audience, we don’t want Spider to die!”) and so they leave, get into complications on the way to their original settlement (literally due to the Fire Na’vi!) but within about twenty minutes they’re back with the water Na’vi.
What the hell?
The film does, briefly, go to a volcano so the OG antagonist Quaritch can enjoy a Far Cry 3 cutscene with the leader of the Fire Na’vi Varang, but we never learn anything meaningful about the Fire Na’vi or their motivations, they don’t do anything exciting (one guy Witness Me’s himself, so I thought that might be a thing, but he’s the only one that ever does it, so maybe he was just depressed or something) and Varang has them all move to the evil human settlement so she can be close to her boyfriend? I mean she basically tradwifes herself into irrelevance?
Fire And Ash is just so deeply unrewarding. Look, I’m not exactly hung up on the lore here or anything but the fact that the movie does absolutely nothing to move the overarching story forward feels like… a mistake. If you’re really reaching I guess there are some underwhelming revelations about Kiri and a glimpse of a big white rotating head (???) but I don’t get a sense of where that takes anything. And don’t get me wrong, I could watch whitey get killed in a variety of ways for hours, but it’s mostly the same stuff you’ve seen before, and the one death you’re waiting for–the evil whaling captain–is… nothing. You can’t have him get torn in half or something? At least if you do that he could come back with spider legs (come on, all together now [chanting] Spider legs! Spider legs! Spider legs!)
Speaking of Spiders… what was the deal here? James Cameron made a bet with George Lucas that he could make a human Jar Jar? I’m being unnecessary cruel to Jack Champion (it isn’t his fault) but it’s so weird to make your film about indigenous revolt that’s already about a white saviour end with every Na’vi in I guess all of history crowding round the one white guy that’s cool with them to say “congratulations!” like it’s Evangelion.
I’ve seen a few people say that they like this more than Way of Water, which… I mean, fine, I’d like to agree, but there’s even less narrative drive here. And even if Varang is hot or whatever (where are the thicc Na’vi tho? Am I right, fellas?) the fire dancing and ululation is wildly cringe no matter how desperately we’re all trying to pretend the allegory here has any distance at all.
If you’re “only” going to make five of these, and you’re 71, I don’t think you can piss an entire film and several years away on doing the same thing twice even if it’s still making bank in China and kept a lot of people in New Zealand employed.
*Sigh*
It’s weird that not only do I want these films to be good, I think they should be. “We should brutally kill the people who are making our planet uninhabitable. Like really fucking fuck them up. Real Drive elevator hours” is just the kind of message I can believe in, I guess, even with all this baggage.
Ah well, maybe next time. At least it still looked completely fucking stupid in high frame rate!
A dispatch a little earlier than has become usual, but it’s the last newsletter of the year and feels like I should get it in before Christmas happens and we end up in that weird no-man’s land between it and the New Year.
Hey, do you hate in-line advertising? We do too! We’re only ever going to do it here at the start of our newsletter posts because we want you to get these missives in your inbox a day early. Sorry!
Going with A Computer Christmas as my last pre-Christmas new article is going for a kind of sophisticated, adult Christmas shindig vibe; Christmas Crackers is more that last day at primary school when you’re allowed to bring in any toys you like and the teacher lets you play games on the computer. Of course, if they’d booted up Christmas Crackers you might prefer to wait your turn to see if you could get a game of Crossbows and Catapults with the older kid that brought it in, because it looks amazing (you won’t, and you never will, so you’ll just have to imagine how amazing it is… hang on, they made a new version in 2024??? Finally I can stop imagini… oh it’s $90.)
If you follow me on Bluesky you’re probably sick of me posting about my Horses essay, but I’m just so dang proud of it/it just took a long time ok? Better for me to make a bigger point of drawing the first map for Jingle Bells that exists online, an experience more enjoyable and festive than close reading Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, let me tell you.
A subscriber exclusive in the archive as well! It’s nice to be able to offer a few of these at certain times in the year to say thanks to those who support my writing.
Definitely didn’t originally plan on writing this up as extensively as I did, but sometimes inspiration just takes you. Wish it had for Wright and company.
Yes, I’ve been playing Christmas games chronologically (more or less) but when I saw this pop up in my feed I felt I had to play it, as I love unique customs!!! And Mari Lywd is… a pretty unique custom.
Mari Lwyd’s Pantri Panic was made by Rhys Wynne for the Pico-8 Advent Calendar Jam 2025 (of which there are a huge selection of Christmassy games to play, but this is the one I played.) As admitted by Wynne, it’s a version of the Blokus/Tetris mash-up game design where you place shapes on a grid until they can’t fit, but rather than be a series of grid-filling puzzles, each time you make a line it disappears, opening up space so you can hopefully keep going.
I’ll be honest—I don’t entirely gel with this game design; I find it slightly uneasy to be playing Tetris on four sides with a wider range of block shapes. And it’s a shame Mari Lywd is just window dressing (there’s probably an interesting idea in a game where you have to keep thinking up new songs to stop a horse skull getting into your house, but I think that’s somewhat out of scope here.)
That said, this is a pleasant diversion, and another great example of the pick-up-and-play Pico-8 puzzler. It particularly gains serious points for including a different Christmas song (Nadolig Llawen i chi gyd) rather than Jingle Bells again.
Festive Vibes Ranking: HIGH (if you’re Welsh) MEDIUM (if you’re not)
Darren Hupke has always been very kind about exp. and he’s been a shockingly prolific zinester, putting out quality zines on a monthly basis, but he’s sensibly decided to slow a little to provide more coverage in a less logistically challenging fashion with a new quarterly zine. You can back the new Kickstarter now.
(And if you missed the 2025 zines, you can pre-order the annual now too!)
JP Coovert takes you through how to print up an A5/half-letter zine at home in a quick little video, so you’ve got no excuse. He’s talking about TTRPG zines—I’ve often wondered how zine oldheads feel about how much “zine” has become synonymous with self-published TTRPGs in some circles—but it works for any kind of zine you’d like to make.
(If you don’t want to watch a video, or use a computer to make your zine, check out this neat guide from Julia Gfrörer.)
“There but for the grace of god, go I” goes the saying, and as someone also struggling with unemployment in the games industry (and who expects to see games industry people in need like this a lot more) I want to share Andrew Elmore’s fundraiser to help support him as he tries to keep him and his family going after being laid off by Bungie in 2023. It hurts to read and recognise in myself the words “there is so much—SO MUCH—work that I can do!! But nobody wants any of it anymore, I guess!?” It’s tough out there, but maybe we can get through it if we help each other when we’re able.
And Finally…
I shared No Games For Genocidelast Dispatch in the And Finally… spot (which is actually supposed to be something funny/nice, but never mind) but I’d like to highlight People Make Games’ superb video on the movement. For what it’s worth: I’ve signed the pledge and exp. won’t be covering Xbox-published games. Please consider signing too.
Next week on exp.: I spend the week eating chocolate and watching the old films that they always put on the telly (maybe this is the year I finally watch The Railway Children.) When I return: Quentin Tarantino’s favourite arcade game.
Something I’ll say for The Running Man: usually it’s annoying and pointless when a movie gets remade, but considering the original had almost no relation to Stephen King(“Richard Bachman”)’s novel, I can understand why someone might want to make a more faithful adaptation than the Schwarzenegger vehicle from 1987.
I can understand it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, and especially not in 2025. Even if The Running Man is completely new to you, in the last decades we’ve had so many variations on the concept, a few of which were legitimate cultural phenomena (The Hunger Games and especially Squid Game.) At this point, The Running Man wasn’t posed to ride the wave but paddle in its trough, and there’s no surprise that it hasn’t been able to keep its head above water.
It’d be nice, then, to say that it’s a great adaptation, has a unique spin, or is even that it’s just really fun and a great time at the movies. It would be nice to say that! But the Running Man offers no reason for its existence beyond the endemic lack of imagination in the executive class, who will dust off any old IP in the hope that it connects with the demographic the research claimed it would. I have a tremendous fondness for Edgar Wright, and I think it’s for that reason that this bummed me out so bad even after being burned by Baby Driver and Last Night in Soho.
The Running Man’s issue is that it seems to have absolutely no consistent vision, like no one really tried to think what the world of the film is and what it represents, and no willingness to hold a comprehensible political position either. It’s a strange alternate reality where they’ve got drones and self-driving cars and streetlamps smell you but runners still have to… record things to tape and post them in, for the most popular TV show ever that must be incredibly boring to watch (seriously, what do they fill the time with each night? The tedious procedural work of the hunters?) Any attempt at this being a “Verhoeven-like satire” is smashed to pieces because you can’t satirise consumerism with products like “Fun Twinks” while also having product placement all over the film. It’s unbelievably grim to imagine a director who once walked away from Marvel over creative differences giving a thumbs up after shooting the umpteenth take of a Liquid Death commercial he was going to put directly in his film. Eurgh!!!
Everything is just so flat. Glen Powell might play the world’s angriest man, able to withstand a taser out of sheer rage (wish they’d done more with that) but they don’t seem to be able to find anything to do with that, and even cut my favourite humanising factor–that he’s one of the rare people who still likes to read books–so they can jam in more of a reality TV parody that makes no sense because it just looks exactly like normal reality TV and doesn’t seem to have any jokes. His first escape is on the money, but they can’t seem to build on it, and in fact, there’s really not much action at all (concerningly, this lines up quite well with Baby Driver, which similarly runs out of steam.) Michael Cera has a bit of fun (and you know what, I liked the subversion of expectations) but Powell doesn’t even do anything in that scene and the big climax is… a small explosion on a bridge. Thrilling.
The nadir has to be the ending. I think everyone accepts that no studio is going to shoot the ending as written, and to be honest, I’m surprised that Powell’s Ben Richards still holds a woman hostage (it feels very retro, though they speedrun getting her onside so no one has to feel icky for very long.) But the decision to do what they do is so wrong-headed and unsatisfying I almost can’t believe it. This is a movie that has three (three!) separate “you thought this happened but it didn’t” fake-outs, and to end on one is such a complete collapse of the contract between audience and filmmaker you should be able to get a refund, especially because the film tries to have its cake and eat it by offering the expected payback in the coda. The lack of politics really comes to bite the film in the arse. They shed almost all of the climate change stuff from the book, and the main antagonist, despite a game performance from Josh Brolin, has none of the bite of even one of the random people they found on the street to play the billionaire spectators in Squid Game. The film also seems to forget Colman Domingo is playing a baddie, because he escapes thanks to… his contract negotiation? Was something cut earlier in the film that would have had us emotionally invest in his character?
This movie even largely fails on the “it’s nice to look at Glasgow” scale, because while I popped when I saw the back of the Savoy Centre or whatever, most of this film is slathered in so much digital smear that it might as well have been shot in the Volume. I don’t mean to bang on about haptic cinema again but Christ we really need films to look real again.
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