The Waking Knot (demo) on Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/app/2155130/The_Waking_Knot/)
My advance apologies to Stan and Bill.
More than ever this reflects on my own distance from games rather than being any judgement upon this game's creators.
when i played the waking knot, i felt like a stupid child being lead through my first math class. solving problems. one plus one equals two. three plus eight equals? yes that's right, carry the one, it's eleven! so good! only, cryptic, and while as a child i did not understand that math might someday be useful, here i think there are overtones of that desire for childhood's simplicity. you don't understand why this Higher Being is teaching and guiding you, so you follow along, having faith.
only, in this case, the Higher Being is a fictive creature. text on a screen. at the end of the day learning to play Yet Another Broughlike does not bring you to any truth, it drags you deeper into a hole. there i was, at the bottom of the hole, wondering.
i have had this experience enough. i did not like school very much.
being a child, now, i enjoyed being a child, to some extent, but i also was frustrated. i wanted to understand everything. i wanted things to make sense. imagine if i were to bring to life a wish fulfilment fantasy as a child: i would make a videogame. i would make a videogame out of rules. i would make a videogame that shows you, look, look, look at all these silly little pieces. aren't you interested in them? aren't you interested in how they work?
and then i would figure out how they all work and i would smile, i would smile and clap and make the little toy engine go and i would be pleased at having figured out a toy system not understanding that the value of a toy system is to help me understand a real system, and not the fuegorika of having learned something meaningless.
not that.
the waking knot is a videogame for broughlike fans at the bottom of a little hole. i believe that michael brough dug a tunnel for himself and maybe it caved in a little and that's fine, he was trying to get somewhere, the tunnel served its purpose, but in the wake he left a hole with a caved-in tunnel there and i don't know what people are doing there in that little hole.
i am sure that it brings a great deal of joy.