Alas, it has been a long time since I updated this blog. This is mainly because of doing a huge amount of development, bug fixing, and PR for our next game, Queen’s Wish 2: The Tormentor.

Elden Ring hasn’t helped much either.

I’ll get into writing again soon, but for now a few stray thoughts.

1. Elden Ring is Undeniable

Elden Ring is a huge success. It’s sold a bajillion copies. It got good reviews. (Meaningless!) Based on Steam achievement percentages, players are engaging with this game to an wild extent. (Not meaningless!) It’s big news.

I’ll write a big thing about it eventually, because how can you not?

A title like Elden Ring is very useful for people who care about video games because it’s a valuable reality check. Nobody has worse ideas about video game design than fussy video game designers (myself included), and people who write about games are generally free to say all kinds of nonsense without fear of contradiction.

A massive success like Elden Ring gives a reality check. It shows what people actually want and what actually works out in the wild.

Turns out, people want to be made to throw themselves off a cliff to enter the tutorial. Who knew?

I’ll say a lot more about this once I’ve finished the game. All I’ll say for now is that we have all been given a brief, blissful respite from “Sure, video games are an art and artists are free to express themselves however they want, but if your game doesn’t have an Easy difficulty setting you are a Bad Person!” discourse.

2. Inscryption is Terrific

There’s this indie game called Inscryption. It’s a roguelike deck builder, like Slay the Spire. At least, it starts like that, and then it becomes something totally wild. It won a bunch of awards recently.

I recommend it very highly. Go into it as blind as possible.

It is a truly individual work, clearly the the product of a strong artistic voice voice. Games like this are wher