Games You Should Only Play Once

manifold Garden is a beautiful game it's a video game developed by William Shear over the course of 5 years and released in 2019 for the PS4 William was formerly known for his massive balloon structures reportedly having a fascination with scale in his work but eventually wanted to move on to a new medium finding most materials too expensive for what he wanted to do he found one place where he could explore near Infinite Space almost entirely for free video games manifold Garden is a puzzle game that works in non- ukian space and every individual room is endless having Solutions often require wrapping through endless copies of the same area and yet somehow connecting these rooms with simple seamless hallways 2 years after its original release in 2021 it was ported to PC and it blew me away while I had always seen games as art this game felt like an art piece that you could play at the time I was a very small Channel still trying to figure out what kind of content I even wanted to make after years of experimenting and only recently discovered the genre of video essays and so with with a lot of unrefined passion and a lot of unearned confidence I decided to delve into this world and come out the other side manold Garden is a beautiful game is the title of a YouTube video I made now nearly 3 years ago it didn't go viral or anything it's sitting nowadays at around 25,000 views but it is the single most important video that I have ever made video games are far from the first medium to be constantly re-experienced anyone that has loved a good book or show or movie knows that one or two or 50 they found themselves coming back to time and time again they vary in how easy or tedious they are to go through and games are no different while also being very very different the question of why do we replay video games to me has a slightly different answer than the rest and also slightly different effects for doing so now you don't need me to tell you this but the main difference between games and everything else is that you interact with the world of the video games you play what this means is that when it comes to replaying a game versus re-watching a show there's theoretically much more that you can get out of it while other forms of media are experienced mostly in align even if the structure of it is nonlinear your route through a game is just one line through something necessarily bigger than your first experience ever could be your playthrough doesn't exist on a roller coaster even for very linear games it's one sliver of a larger dimension of possible experiences this isn't just limited to where you go physically but in the abstract sense as well difficulty settings for example change the entire way you view and interact with your environment being able to get away with more or less and often needing to learn more about the game and how it works to beat its harder challenges secrets every video game from actual physical locations to silly modes or hidden messages glitches and exploits can entirely uproot the game's design letting you fly across a map or skip through areas entirely this hypothetical zone of experience is larger in every sense than any other form of media really could be however the degree to which you can Replay Games in a meaningful way how long it takes to map out the whole world of this experiential space varies from very small to overwhelmingly large I've spoken a few times now on this channel about the idea of forever games a concept getting being increasingly more common as time has gone on it's a game that at its ideal functions a lot like a sport you're given a set of rules of common means to participate in it and that set of rules in place alone is fun and interesting enough to be played theoretically forever one of the decenter examples is rocket League maybe the most sportsy for every game with its playable area literally and metaphorically taking place in the confines of an arena you and either 012 or three of your friends face off against an equal number of opponents in 5-minute matches of car soccer you're given boost pads that literally Arena which both give you extra speed and acceleration as well as the ability to fly with enough practice and skill this and just a few more nuances in the rules as all rocket league is and has been at its core since release and yet it has been continually played to this day the natural extension of this sort of thing brings us to Esports professional competitions between the very best players at any one particular game in the past including a game as an esport at big events for games would only last a few years at most since competitive games used to be released almost entirely in ongoing entries evolving with each one and having the former abandoned nowadays though it seems like games aiming to be orts want to be like actual Sports a permanent fixture in the system however companies keep finding out just how hard that is when we think of globally recognized and played competitions the list is very very small the amount of sports that were made and never popularized or died out or mutated into something else and had its original version abandon is uncountable but when it comes to real life Sports no one person owns the right to its existence even though there those federations that are given legitimacy and do logistical work to create leagues if they all suddenly toppled over tomorrow the game could still be played and new federations would spring up quickly football exists by itself however these video game Sports these forever games are trapped in the digital world and as such have many different complications when a company releases a game like this they own the game and the universe and means by which to play it they take years and millions of dollars to make so where other sports could be proposed and fail without ISS isue these game Publishers existences rely on the success of these games regardless of how much it should naturally survive without intervention it takes money to keep the servers up not just giving infrastructure to the pro players but to every single person playing the game potentially millions of people and so when the vast majority of them start to die out as they naturally do these games need to start implementing life support constant balance patches regular content updates custom game modes new characters launching every 3 months that completely uproot The Meta every time their solution is to keep trying to expand the space that the game takes up and to shift the things already inside of it the longer that someone spends exploring a game for the first time sifting through its new content the longer you delay the rot it's like muscle confusion but for gamers you can never get used to something if it never stays the same and yet even with these measures in place the vast majority of these games still slowly die out even rocket League after several years of success started to feel the train slowing down and didn't want to see if it would stabilize or if it was just too late for the game and so after being bought out by Epic the game went free to play a classic move nowadays even before then there was new game modes and experimentation but afterwards this became a constant thing microtransactions existed in the game since it's launched like most other of these forever games but it has only gotten more and more Insidious as time has gone on and all of this this constant shuffling and shifting and endless addition is done to fight exactly one thing the irreversible change that comes with endless re experience the time around A Game's release is normally the most fun the game ever gets nobody knows what's good and what works so ideas are shooting out from every direction for what the game is and could be wild and unrealistic strategies have a good chance of working New Tricks get discovered constantly and the spectacle of what people are able to do makes the community rapid to discover everything the game has to offer and then they discover everything the game has to offer and this is where the problems start once the scope of the game is found its limits fully charted and mapped the search for more has to be directed inward as players improve the differences between winning and losing go from large swings and daring plays to smaller nuances in game mechanics and small tactical decisions execution meeting more and more as time goes on suddenly despite the game being large in scope the functional playable area of what you can get away with starts to constrict all while the enjoyment for winning with each and every cycle of the gameplay Loop gets lesser and lesser this whole wide world of interaction all of the possibilities the game has to offer gets smaller over time and as the functional playable space begins to shrink a few weeks to months after release two things happen either the game finds a state of stability or it dies very very slowly and it honestly feels the longer the gaming industry goes on that whether it lives or dies basically boils down to luck developers before a game releases cannot possibly account for the exhaustive depth that millions of players exploring a game does to its DNA or how the culture around it develops you can only account for so much the most recent example I've seen is what the game hell divers to too the game has only been out a bit longer than a month now and it already seems like the honeymoon phase of the game is starting to come to an end it released to a swath of positivity and hype with video essays trying to answer the Deep analytical question of why is game fun and still at this point most players are having a ridiculous amount of fun with the game it is a super fun game and yet without a doubt the rot has already begun if you Suter on over to Hell divers Twitter or steam discussions or their subreddit you will find landmines among the terrain we need to set the standard for 8 plus missions if they are using anything but the right breaker gun kick if they have worthless strategems that are weak kick if they don't have either rail gun or nade launcher kick not using a shield kick we need to set a standard for high ranking pug play you can have your silly builds or weak guns on your own or friend's time but if you're not using these things you are trolling and should be kicked this isn't much helped by the whole mini industry on YouTube of metag guides people who jump in as soon as physically possible to tell anyone and everyone what the best weapons and strategies and ideas and it items and vehicles and setups are for every single competitive game in existence it's becoming more and more common these days to not just start to constrict the functional play area but to do so intentionally once discussion on the game turns more and more meta focuses on the best stuff and on overarching changes like balance patches and advocating for some things to be nerfed or buffed the rot has almost certainly begun now this isn't the case with all games there are games that have fully survived this phase and come out the other side seemingly Immortal but they are few and far between as for the games that don't Sur survive that phase they do delay their death by a good few years with consistent content releases but it's nearly impossible to keep up with how insatiable a Gaming Community can be for many of these games too they don't start with the intention to become this everchanging mass for anywhere from months to years they might Remain the exact same as they were at launch with bug fixes and new Cosmetics sold in the store what that starts to do over time is cement the core of this game in the minds of the fan base even if there's calls for more to be added a large part of the players will always favor the original version of the game and so once the developers do go into life-saving measures all the rapid change inevitably causes cracks right down the lines of these communities seeing the backlash these Studios might try to both hold on to the core and continue to add and change but only end up making both sides unhappy changing too much for the original fans and not changing enough to keep the newer ones interested so the type of games that survive are either the ones that get lucky and eventually find stability keeping a core audience that grows and the ones that absolutely refuse to have a core fortnite without a doubt is a brilliant video game I hate its design I find it empty and entirely soulless but the one thing I cannot deny is that if someone likes fortnite they will never run out of things to do fortnite exceeded in the way that many other forever games failed which is the willingness to completely change the DNA of your game for the sake of entertainment there is some vague semblance of aord of fortnite's game design and it is held on to its primary game mode this entire time but fortnite as a formula can be utterly uprooted and trade at any moment so long as it means the train can keep moving in this way I actually respect the game a lot many games try to do both stick to its core and adapt to the wins of a dopamine star fan base but fortnite utterly sacrificed its Integrity straight out the game these days it's less of a video game and more of a video games it becomes whatever the community wants to the utter damnation of anyone who enjoys stability I'm weirdly happy that it exists I guess the way fortnite avoids being explored and then restricted is by never being the same video game on any given day however this replayability rot is not at all exclusive to Forever games put simply our minds have a tendency to absorb whatever World we're in we call this immersion and it's not just something that happens with 3D realistic Graphics story based games any game from 3D to 2D to top down absorbs us into it serving as a little world we're exploring through with our adaptable Minds it seems like we can treat any world as if it was our own for a while and so what happens if we could reset our world as many times as we wished or to put it more broadly what would happen if there was no consequence to any of our actions this idea has been explored many different times and under different contexts but the thing it concludes is never very optimistic undertale the most video essay prone game of all time touches on this through the main villain flowy undertale is a video game about video games turning the traditional RPG game structure into defin parts of the game's canonical universe and that includes the ability to save and reset seemingly given to one person or thing at any given time before you arrived to the underground that thing was flowy a flower injected with determination a thing that apparently determines this power and as we near closer and closer to the end of the game flow's motivation becomes clear above anything and everything he wants to die or at least he no longer wants to exist in this universe with the power to save and quit Floy was essentially given Godlike abilities and used it to save everyone but then he just woke up at the start of his existence at the end of it he slowly went through the game over and over using his lack of consequences to solve everyone's problems get to know everything to explore every dialogue tree to kill everyone to burn everything and with every Loop his world became less and less real everything was determined and as such there was no more life to it as weird as it sounds the more we play a game the more of a game it becomes the less our minds can treat it as a world as something unique and emergent and magical platforms become assets jumps a matter of acceleration and base speed and hitbox collision attacks measured in frames weighed in quality by start and end lag defined combos known Roots exploits repeatable ways to reliably break the limits of this world in front of you no place that's real is so easy to Define so mappable so figured out code is code and some of these characters to their horror come to know that fact in undertale we have the privilege of not actually living in that Universe flowey does not none of these characters do and yet still to us once we've drained the life out of these worlds explored every angle absorbed every fact it's nearly impossible to get that enjoyment back we all have those games we returned to in Cycles games we played an exhaustive amount for months or years coming back to not to play the game so much as to relive Memories reignite the neurons that first absorbed this world now deeply strengthened by the pure exhaustive knowledge you have of it however it never lasts very long you peruse the game like a museum of the past and then leave waiting for when you can do it all again my greatest Fascination in all of this are single-use video games ones that for one reason or another are best experienced only once and have essentially zero value for any following playthroughs there's a few different reasons as to why a game might be best experienced once but the most straightforward examples to me are puzzle games to be clear I'm not talking about puzzle plus some other genre just straightforward puzzles to play through puzzle games are part of a genre I like to call knowledge-based video games games where the primary thing limiting you from from progressing is a lack of knowledge and where the way you progress is by gaining it the only thing stopping you from immediately solving a puzzle is not knowing how to do it so if you've already learned how to solve every single puzzle in the game you have no real reason to play it now many game developers aren't stupid so they've been finding ways around this for years Molina is a randomly generated puzzle game you're given a random set of powers and a random set of levels and told to try and find a solution it's not even always possible to do or taking inhuman Precision in a relatively imprecise game but this uncertainty adds some special feeling to the act of actually solving a level set instead of conquering a Rubik's Cube you conquered a jungle some unfair Untamed Beast adjusting in their own way many purely puzzle games have decided to commit almost entirely towards enthusiasts making their Puzzles Either absurdly difficult are so open that any number of esoteric options could be the solution even having new Solutions on future playthroughs in terms of simplistic puzzles shitty mobile games have taken over the industry with the simple solution to making so many puzzles that nobody in their right mind could ever finish them making more and more continuously and forever and yet still there are those games that are consumer grade not extensively long and irreversibly changed in our minds once finished not even forgetting over time truly changes much I returned recently to Portal 1 for a quick playthrough and even though it had been years since the last playthrough and I remembered essentially nothing the problem solving came from trying to recall Solutions instead of figuring them out remembering what worked instead of figuring out how it worked taking these bits of ideas the general concepts of how the game works I've built for my first playthrough even just the knowledge that I beaten this game before and know I can do it again changed the chemistry of how I played portal it was me exploring Chambers and reliving past memories not really playing a puzzle game however with the proliferation that came with the internet age with the widespread growth of consumer grade tools and exchange of information on game development the power was given to small teams or even single people to create any games they wished one undercurrent in the topic of replayability in games is the idea of being cost effective if it costs $10 and you get 30 hours of gameplay out of it or $60 for potentially hundreds or a game that could be played forever entirely for free with microtransactions that offer is being made with the Assumption of video games as a commodity however more and more these days there are people that just make video games to make them most of these games from the perspective of a consumer and even a player kind of suck but some are simply made to be one single short whole experience game Jam games are the most ubiquitous example of this developers are given a theme or idea and a time limit and need to produce one entire game before the time runs out as a format these developers understand the role their singular game is a sort of sampling of an idea people exploring a game Jam will dip their toes into any game that catches their interest but really no further than that each game is simply one of many and it's designed with that in mind there are many games too that serve as small additions to the universes of actual commercial releases by the developers themselves one of the most recent examples is Celeste 64 a game relas released to iio entirely for free by MADD makes games the developers of Celeste which turns all the mechanics of the original game into a short 3D experience surprisingly well the % speedrun for this game is 15 seconds long with the 100% category amounting to a bit under 8 minutes compared to the monolithic challenges and expansive content of the original this game was meant as a fun little getaway a celebration for the 6th anniversary of Celeste landfall the studio behind totally accurate battle simulator has some of the most iconic examples of gag games starting from 2016 onwards every year on April 1st they release some sort of experience to the general public sometimes a game sometimes something else their first gag Game was super truck a mix between their own game cluster truck and super hot having time only move when you move in the game getting more ambitious the next year they released totally accurate battle Zombie later a Zombie Survival game with no specific objectives having you travel around the world attempting to find artifacts and otherwise explore this game in particular is near and dear to my heart and I've considered making a video on it to Doc it as the game is no longer available to purchase through Steam however its contents are pretty meager and it's something I only go back to for its very specific Vibe the next year 2018 came totally accurate Battlegrounds a game they originally made in 2 weeks as a parody of the Battle Royale Trend until they realized that battle Royals are in fact profitable and started genuinely working to make the game a real thing it's a rare and appreciated thing to see these powerful tools and engines and styles forged by specific companies used in things made purely for fun and not necessarily designed to be a thing of monetary value another in the genre of single-use games and maybe the most iconic are video games designed exclusively to be an experience while most games are a big space that you take one of many routes through with every new playthrough experiential games are more like a hallway storytelling and video games are often at odds with each other for the simple reason that the players us humans don't really have stakes in this world there's no point for us to abide by social conventions or act cautiously or not just steal everything and murder every single NPC games need to occasionally limit the players's freedom in order for the story to happen but the more the game tries to tell a deeply affecting Story the less Freedom the player tends to have in that way the player and the character they're controlling serve as the two idealistic ends of video games as a product the player represents the freedom and entertainment that video games provide being this amazingly stimulating toy that's interactive in a way that most other media simply isn't on the other the character is a being that actually exists in this world a world with real stakes and depth and meaning to them the more that were're made to act like the character to be put in their shoes in terms of power and ability the more that these worlds can tailor an affecting experience most games do an awkward compromise between these two ends having gameplay sections and then breaking them up with cutscenes allowing the important parts of the story to play out without us being able to actually affect them in that way they're able to control the pacing and tone of the story without sacrificing the player's freedom however it also serves to deemphasize the importance of the story itself one of the most common complaints in games is when cutscenes are unskipable when the story is made irrefutably important because as much as we may like these stories our playthroughs will always have some subtle differences the cutcenes never change what these experiential games do however is put the story at the Forefront of everything the game is structured entirely around the story allowing player freedom in the abstract sense of us being the one that actually does the actions instead of Simply watching them it lets us interface with the world in a way unlike any other media but makes the game much harder to ever replay it lacks both the convenience of a movie or show and the entertainment value of a more video gamey video game however replayability isn't really the point the term walking simulator has been used ringly for years now describing games that are basically just stories you walk around in but these often become some of the most emotionally impacting games of all time firewatch is a game I've already spoken about in another video but it's notable just how much more the game impacts you because of the fact that you interact with it the game starts with a tale of Henry and his wife Julia someone he meets in lives a Charmed Life with until she develops early onset dementia after being unable to take care of her and having either her family or home lookout for her for the rest of her life you see an ad in the paper for a job as a fire lookout and with nothing left with everything you ever Lov disappearing you take it firewatch as a story is about escapism shash National Park is the only place we as the player get to see in the story and it serves as an Escapist fantasy for Henry himself the plot of the game is largely conspiratorial Define through routine a normaly being broken up by moments of deep suspicion and Intrigue the story does eventually speed up but the first part of the game is the most interesting to me by far for a large portion of it the gaml is just the life of a lookout inspecting various locations and talking to Delila another Lookout that's been there longer than you have the game does its best to give the feeling of actually being in some idyllic National Park including in the ways you navigate it firewatch doesn't hold your hand with way points or other UI to direct you to the next narrative location arguably the gameplay Loop of Fire watch is navigation coming to know your little section of shon with each new task Delila sets you out to do we come to learn about its history the Lookouts before you little tidbits about each and every named location to an extent the forest is given just as much character as Henry or Delila and with every new day you come to know more not just about our two main characters but the forest itself and the Mysteries it contains most narratives and other mediums use the idea of dramatic irony the gap between the viewers understanding and the characters even some video games do this using what we know and what the main character doesn't to build tension however in most other mediums were're given the privilege as viewers of different perspectives on different characters in video games we most often are simply the eyes and limbs of the main character and so other than recognizing some suspicious Behavior at the beginning sooner than Henry were're taking along almost the exact same ride from the very first strange instance Delila seemingly talking about you to another fire lookout our understanding and suspicions are Guided by Henry's and Delilah's perspectives and not the allseeing eye of the plot we are taken revelation after Revelation through a roller coaster ride of discoveries being a part of it ourselves instead of as an outside Observer finding some partying girls you found near the beginning of the game seemingly missing finding auds of you and Delilah's conversations breaking into a government site that seems to be tracking you you get the ax to break in you find a way for St you sneak out only to find the campsite on fire you and Henry are in the same position stuck in this Mass expanse of intrigue and danger as our fabric of reality becomes unstable so too does the forest both Henry and Delila are convinced that someone something is after them something seemingly much greater than themselves around onethird into the game's play time were introduced to a forest fire in the middle of the night I'm going to call it in they'll send in a hot shot crew for some suppression but I bet we'll be stuck with her for the rest of the summer this Fire Sticks along for the rest of the entire game happening before all of the biggest craziest twists and continuing to grow with each passing day measures are made to suppress it to delay it but it never quite goes away and only continues to grow and grow through the final days of the game just like your paranoia just like Henry's former life just like in Julia's mind this fire is all consuming firewatch the game is burning to the ground we come to realize that this paranoia this Grand conspiracy was nothing more than the past Lookout at your Loc location a war veteran with PTSD trying to cover up his son's accidental death through all of this paranoia we've inflicted on ourselves that Henry has inflicted on himself what we've been left with is an Escapist world that's corrupted we were given the life of this Forest only for it to be burned all away and the impact of the story comes largely through the fact that we are the ones living in it just like Henry through exploring its depths wandering around on your own charting it out and learning its roots its Cliffs its locations shason becomes real to you it's a place with character with history stretching back much further than you and Henry have even been alive every moment of your Charmed Life with Julia was a moment shared by this expanse of trees and rocks and water and life the ground changed with every footstep made human science built in place to only to be stolen and built again memories made and words exchanged and life and death all mixing into Cycles nothing besides reality itself could feel more real than a world like this no media could cast such an explorable chartable Place viewable from every angle filled with man-made roots and ecosystems all burning burning to the ground as you leave or if you want choosing to stay behind shason was a game in some way to both Henry and us a place separate from The Real World isolated in our minds but brought to an absolute reality right in front of our eyes an entire mini Universe burning away in front of us there is no real reason to replay firewatch to wind the world's clock back and play it again would be to make this experience less real to cheapen it at its core you could find some more secrets find out what each dialogue answer gives but nothing would be gained firewatch at its base price on Steam is $20 its runtime is not very long it will not stimulate you for hundreds of hours and yet it will stick with you for tens of thousands to me it has been far more memorable than nearly any game I have ever played in the search for infinite enjoyment we miss one very basic principle that more is not all if a game gives you one single route to travel through it can bring you through twisting unfamiliar hallways to a place that you will never soon forget manifold Garden is both a puzzle game and an experience the gameplay Loop if you could call it such a thing is changing gravity and moving cubes around in order to solve puzzles and move to the next room you're surrounded at all times by infinite copies of The Islander moving around on and lack the ability to jump forcing you to fall through Infinite Space in order to navigate your way through the rushing sound of wind while falling in most games is a sign of impending death accidentally running off a cliff or going too far out of bounds but this is a place that simultaneously has no bounds and is still Limited in scope you could fall for a million years and be only 5 seconds from the nearest piece of land it is impossible to die in man Garden there are no hazards no risk not even significant trouble with solving the puzzles themselves the entire game from head to toe is obsessed with the idea of being seamless there exists no UI to crowd the screen in as few instructions as possible every room teaches you something new just by how presently obvious what you need to do is the game at no point becomes incredibly complex despite Solutions occasionally needing some creative problem solving no hurdle is too great to stop the experience entirely making the puzzles more of a means to stimulate than being the actual primary draw to the game the game consists of seven different chapters all with the nebulous goal of completing this Cube Garden on each plane of gravity in one more chapter after you manage to do so outside of the moments just after completing each section the game lacks any loading screen whatsoever it is possible to walk the entire game from front to back in one continuous route well nearly every game's world is broken up through video gamey elements reminders that this isn't a real world manifold Garden tries its best to remove that mental barrier and yet simultaneously this game constantly reminds you that this is a world that is intentionally designed the level design itself is as unnatural as possible existing through these brutalist concrete angular structures with the only splashes of color existing through blocks and buttons gears are shown in far off distances and operating the vague Machinery powering everything but no answers are given as to who really made this world the Final Chapter after you finish the garden ends in a strange way to build the garden up until this point you need to get these objects called God cubees that you would plant growing the tree and the rest of the courtyard with it on each plane of gravity but in the Final Chapter despite the garden being finished you get one more seed to plant this time it sprouts an entire Endless City flocks of birds in a rainbow Hue coloring the landscape but most importantly one more thing Sprouts alongside the city a way out hitting one final button you open the door to see something you haven't seen anywhere else in the game a vast expanse of absolutely nothing thing turning back shows an endless wall the bounds of this infinitely enclosed space where you're moving to now is an entirely different kind of infinity the goal of your character in this game was to reach the end of it both physically and literally but for one purpose and one purpose only to finally cease to exist you're able to peer into the nothingness as long as you'd like explore the entire game again if you want but there's only one thing left to do the game is over you jump what you're met with eventually is in all consuming blackness and then [Music] [Applause] Dimensions melting in with each other structures forming and unform changing directions floating through this collapsing Universe around you you're overtaken by light and eventually escape this dimensional bubble entirely viewing it from the outside it slowly sheds its Dimensions away from infinite to many to four to three to two to one and finally slipping into non-existence entirely the first time I saw this ending I was completely and utterly mesmerized the second time this ending is absolutely emotionally impactful but like most games that impact is the result of a building tension in Stakes that is finally delivered at the very end of a story replaying games in most cases still delivers a solid emotional punch since our brains don't remember literally everything but manifold Garden is a bit different see when your job is to give a comprehensive of analysis of a game like this to turn it into a product yourself you need to replay it many many times however when I dove into the world of manifold Garden a second and third and fourth and fifth time I was surprised to find basically nothing the game as you might expect has no voiceover or text or anything to give a story but there's some sparing context given to the game one source of context comes to us through the soundtrack and specifically its song names rather than pertaining to the game itself and whatever Aesthetics it may have nearly every song has to do with the idea of Creation in multiple different contexts indras net and estria refer to religious ideas or beings Bloom Ray marching and refraction refer to Concepts in 3D modeling and video games ideas like Petra cor sky and water and the AR Borum give imagery of nature the creation of our own world and our own Universe some songs refer to other works like House of leaves a mind-bending book series using nonukan space and tonos things actually used in the game but notably also literal building blocks means to to create structures of all different kinds with every recurring playthrough I had of the game inspecting everything I could for ideas it only became clearer to me how intentionally Barren manifold Garden is everything felt simultaneously designed to suck you in but also to give you nothing to dig into even the gears these monolithic indications of something more immediately become nothing but flimsy assets the moment they were re-examined it feels less like a reminder that something in this world created the game just a reminder that something created this game there there is no main character in manifold Garden they have no motivation no way to express themselves and so the only logical idea is that the main character is simply you you're given eyes and a means to explore this world however while you're given free Reigns to go wherever you wish you have no real Freedom given to you nothing in this game entertains or stimulates you other than progression and it makes clear what the reward for winning is for beating manifold Garden you've been given the reward of no longer existing in this universe the achievement you get for beating the game is named Transcendence despite the world itself collapsing in front of you that leaves the question of what exactly we're transcending to and to me the answer is fairly obvious we're transcending from this limited Barren world back into ours the satisfaction of the game comes with exploring everything it has to offer and then actually being allowed to leave to transcend back into our own complicated consequential universe and yet Williams seemed to understand that the the game itself wouldn't settle right for some people there is more in the game specifically one more route but it feels separated from what the game actually has to say throughout your first playthrough you might notice in several locations a door that you have no ability to access you might think that you'll wrap back around to it later but you just keep going forward through a linear game experience all the way until the end of the game entirely if you feel unsatisfied with the first playthrough you might go back into the game and start to scrub through each and every level until you find something almost immediately you find a mysterious dark threshold and in the Next Room you find a door locked by a cube seemingly entirely absent from the room as you keep going you find more and more hidden rooms and rots ones that take you to different chapters of the game entirely and so a question starts to form in your mind can you get to the end of the game without growing a single side of the Garden in contrast to the fairly smooth experience of the game proper this route requires annoyingly dense logistical planning scouring every little tiny piece of every single area of of the game dizzyingly complicated game-wide problem solving all to get to the end of the game in a slightly different way this route seemingly was made intentionally unfairly difficult I can admit that even I gave up after 3 or 4 hours of being lost and found out that I had missed several Secret locations necessary to figuring it out meaning I had basically not even completed step one and further unlike the smooth experience of the base game this one has solutions that are arguably clunky rather than steady progression you zip from one place to the next seemingly with no log to it some solutions have you boringly go in and out of one room to get a cube over and over again it feels weirdly punishing instead of rewarding expressed entirely through the game design itself that transcended achievement is not the only one to give us some context both PC and PS4 shares the exact same list of achievements with the same names except for one additional one on the PC achievement names are interesting most of the time because they tend to reflect the tone and style of whatever game they're for from funny to Serious to absurd but manifold Gardens achievements are very literal some are run-of-the-mill like thinking with portals for solving a portal puzzle a reference to another game but most of them are things like orange complete for completing the orange level color change change the color of a cube non- ukian fluid Mechanics for directing water through a portal discover Hydro energy for using water to power a cog plant a seed for growing a tree each of these achievements in fact almost every achievement in the game is gained just by going through the main route you must do all of these things just to get to the end of the game achievements in games tend to either be a mark of progression or a challenge to go out of your way for but that latter category is almost entirely non-existent except of course the achievement for beating the game through the secret route and its name in contrast to the tone of the rest is the game is not enough what made this entire route seem so out of place for me appears to be intentional it is some arbitrary bit of gameplay inserted for people who want more out of this experience that actively rejects the idea of more even further in the steam release one more achievement was added one forgetting all the other achievements with the name what does it all mean it felt like the game was mocking me or rather serving as a meta representation of the idea of analyzing a game in its Universe with every new recursion every new Journey Through the game and every time I left with essentially nothing new it was a reinforcement of the game's themes a demonstration of the limits of these universes we create of the flimsy nature of what we call depth inside of them it removes that barrier between character and player places you exactly in the position of a character in a universe stripped of plot or any idea of Aesthetics while still immersing you there is no illusion given no world that is eventually dissected everything is laid out bare in the very first playthrough you are the main character and the creator of this world is William Shear this is an art piece that is both its own world and exists in ours and by the nature of it it's a representation of these manyi universes in their entirety boiling its message down sifting through the details leaving it a desert in your mind a place where your only purpose is to make progress in a place where your reward is no longer existing inside of it it's a world made Barren before we can turn it that way I had analyzed many things before made videos about shows and games I had already squeezed the life from in my mind some way to translate the passion I used to have but this was the very first game I made a conscious decision to do it to for the sake of a YouTube video and the very first thing that happened with that decision was a mirror being reflected on my decision to do so it was both funny as and a cautious lesson for the future nowadays I know that when I choose to analyze a video game I'm in some way sacrificing it I'm sucking the life from it turning it into a corpse I can properly dissect and then showcase I'm giving words to The Ghost of my former passion translating my old feelings into words in the present immersing the viewer in a world I can no longer access I take all those ideas and feelings and collapse them tailor them down to something something roughly 15 to 30 minutes long something nice and digestible I'm taking the massive pool of ideas and theories the abstract space constructing my entire understanding of these games full of potential lines and possibilities and turning them into one script one set of words and ideas when I cover a game I used to obsess over I'm choosing to make a burial site player unknowns Battlegrounds Five Nights at Freddy's Super Mario Galaxy firewatch Halo Reach monuments to my past to my former self thousands of memories and feelings and ideas compressed into a headstone I revisit these games to understand why I loved them to learn and to share it with others and then to finally leave them behind I feel a sense of grief when I cover anything I hold dear because I know that my feelings will no longer be mine once it's finally done they're yours now it's nice in spirit to make so many more people than me passionate about something I love but I'm not you and you are not me in place of my feelings I have a video a statue that attempts to translate my passion to anyone but myself this statue has 25,000 views I got the game's custom font from the Creator interviewed its composer and talked about its themes for about 19 minutes it's not very good and that is what's left of my passion manifold Garden is a beautiful game I hope that you will agree I hope you enjoyed the video if you did enjoy the video and want to see more from me in the future I suggest subscribing if you want to support me even more than that I have a patreon it only pays out when I actually release a video and there are monthly limits to ensure that you don't overspend if you only wanted to pay out once each month you can do that you get a roll on my Discord server can run ad block on all my videos without any shame and most importantly see your name at the end of my videos speaking of which the higher tier donors also get their name shouted out and so I'll do that now special shout outs to my higher tier donors Jared CH wall de morville zimor Arin atlin Brody lson dankle voley Edmond dong grinkle stinkle MF boy beagle bestest Patron Brian Jackson Connor fake milk Florian hay Wheelock Wheelock Jacob Faulk Joselyn Maiden batter no joke Peter Healey ribbon Aster Ro Ramen Robin Michael Becker I got his name right first try this time Rudy shering Rudy shering Sola fart Ted H Thomas Scott Tim the cringe and unde Rexy VT oh and U what's your bench judge I I have noodle arms I do basically nothing but leg exercises that all being said thank you for watching and have a fantastic day

Channel: The Cursed Judge

Views: 553,178

Keywords: the cursed judge, games you can never play again, games with satisfying endings, firewatch, manifold garden, william chyr, fortnite, mosa lina, mona lisa, helldivers 2, video essay

Id: tUwQLhixKdk

Length: 42min 36sec (2556 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2024