hell yeah

there are dozens of us! dozens!!

I love running into people who get what I'm trying to talk about with the differences between like Joghurt and Domingo in design discussions, for example, like it's too hard to explain without seeming like a lunatic

YESSS

it's amazing to me it took until unicorn overlord for another game even remotely like it to come out

and it mostly does this by establishing very simple rules that allow for very straightforward gaps that the player can kind of intrude into and extend those rules to very weird places.

y'know, void stranger is a pretty good example of this from a genre that is decidedly not detective fiction. you've got to figure things out for yourself and whenever you stumble into something new it's usually pretty revelatory for what else you should be trying.

absolutely. extending it to an ongoing investigation, you can then use the context of a scene to focus your search - I think it almost justifies the presence of red herring clues to reward your attentiveness to the data presented all on its own

the division had maybe my favorite example of psychometry in media to date, even though it's apparently just extrapolating surveillance data to recreate a scene. being able to move through the event in space and hear moments was very cool and gripping.

for what I mean in the latter case - the game Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective is an awful lot of hunting for related data points and it's extremely true in the CD-ROM version but I felt like the smartest tween in the world when I figured a case out.

maybe a hybrid approach, like how arpgs or crpgs have a hold-to-highlight key combined with a prevalence of objects of interest and then subsequent procedures to take actual items of interest and extract data from them?

yeah, this is also something I really enjoyed about forbidden west - you have to actually explore in focus mode to spot clues and some you need to come really close to.

I think about the ability to pick up absolutely everything in LA Noire often - it's silly, sure, but it felt great to be right.

just make sure she toasts the Sichuan peppercorns first! trying to grind them fresh is a fool's errand.

lao gan ma?

they're both so right tbh

corey the cats cradle one

🧑‍🍳🤌

just had a thought. I played a ton of beyond zork and fiddled with its color modes a lot but I don't think it included a green on black one. wonder why.

y'know, yeah

the ittiest beans

lmao