Most of us know about the uncommon features of the human body that not everyone can perform, like wiggling your ears, shaking your eyes sideways really fast, or whistling extremely loudly. There are even the rare ones that almost everyone experiences, like an eye twitching, or the lightheadedness occurring when standing up too fast. The conscious versus the autonomous features.
The latter has been particularly interesting to me in my life as a human being. I have noticed quite a few bizarre phenomenons repeating themselves that I’m quite sure is not just me being wired differently, yet I have barely read or heard anyone else talking about them. So I decided to start listing the ones I know about so far, while also trying to research them on the internet.
Zooming fatigue
I’m sure a better expression could be invented for this. The effect occurs in the exact center of my vision, typically after having exerted myself. I’ll see a transparent zooming tunnel, and it’s most clear to see against the blue sky or even the tarmac. It looks a little like the zooming tunnel you see when space ships are traveling at hyperspeed in Star Wars, although completely colorless.
Back when I was working as a postman, having finished a route and ready to go home, I used to see a strong version of this phenomenon while waiting for the bus. That was many decades ago, but I can still see it today if I have been busy outdoors. I’ve almost never seen it indoors. Maybe the sunlight is required for the effect to be clear? I’m not sure if that makes sense.
Let’s start by getting the obvious explanations out of the way first. No, it’s not floaters. It’s also not the Alice in Wonderland syndrome nor is it the Blue field entoptic phenomenon. It’s difficult finding anything about this on the internet at all. I did find this thread on Reddit that sounds like the same thing, although my version was never purple. As mentioned before, it’s completely colorless to me.
I’ve always been fascinated about the topic of consciousness. Especially because, even to this day, nobody has the first concrete clue what it truly is. All we know is that it feels like one point of view, like being placed in a driver’s seat. Is it a small and tangible part of the brain that calls the conscious shots? Or is it the result of multiple collaborating brain cells, emerging it like hydrogen and oxygen combines into water?
We don’t know.
But I have been thinking about the consequences of having a consciousness, and how evolution has built life around it. And I believe there are some interesting conclusions to derive here.
I’ve decided to retroactively make this an entry in the Short Sessions series. I like the title a lot and it keeps things simpler. The series is no longer just about abandoned games, but also shorter games in general.
This is a series about the shorter PC games I’ve completed or abandoned recently.
Developer: Hello Games | Released: 2021 | Genre: Puzzle, Third Person
I’m going back to the game notes format for this one, only with a few tweaks. There is a short paragraph with my opinion, and the game notes are called musings instead. Also, there won’t be a rating in the bottom.
An isometric puzzle game where I had to revive fellow embers turned to statues. Touching one brought me to a secluded puzzle. When solved, the ember woke up and joined other embers at a campfire.
I was impressed how open world it was – previous campfires remained available – and the unique tasks I found on my way. However, the difficulty of the puzzles were inconsistent. Most puzzles were so easy, they could be solved by small kids – then once in a while, a surprisingly hardcore puzzle occurred. Because of how these felt like aberrations, it made me worried about what challenges I might face next.
Spoiler: Musings
Just reaching the ember statues could be a challenge in itself, blocked by puzzles or unique encounters with multi-step tasks. There was a big frog wanting food, a fisherman that could repair a butterfly net for me, luring a pig with a fruit so it could eat a carnivorous plant, raising platforms with treadmills, bringing orchid seeds to a cook, burning bushes with fire, connecting paths on a map, and much more.
At one point I acquired a lanthorn, which was a horn I could blow to invoke specific objects for moving them around like telekinesis, only while they were still touching the ground. I could move small islands I was standing on, or flipping blocks for closing gaps for me to walk past.
Everyone I met and exchanged dialog with, all notes I found in chests, even narrating while solving quests, was almost all voiced by just one girl. The voice acting itself was fine, but I was often wondering if the game would have been more enjoyable without all that chattering.
The camera was often static or on rails, instead of the usual behind-the-character. I always prefer the latter. In my opinion it is far superior to the former, which often introduce corners that are hard to see.
I tried to reach the chests for the challenges themselves, not for the contents of the chests. Each chest just had a humdrum note that didn’t really feel like a nice reward. I think the most apt description is meh.
Most puzzles were really easy, except for the odd ones out that were quite the opposite.
By far the worst was the puzzle where I had to walk on plates depicting frogs and turtles. There was some sort of order to figure out, but it never made any sense to me. I just kept brute forcing it until I got it right. Unfortunately, this meant falling to my death many times.
The one with two flip blocks and two block buttons also had me stumped for the longest time. There was something about it that just didn’t feel intuitive.
I also think the snake puzzles, dragging strings of blocks through pathways, were quite difficult. I really had to experiment a lot to get those right.
My conclusion to these surprisingly difficult puzzles is that it made the game feel uncomfortable to me. I was always wary of the next hardcore puzzle to appear in the ocean of kids puzzles. I really think the developers should have balanced this differently. Easy puzzles in the beginning, then steadily getting more difficult towards the end. You know – the way most games usually work.
A different kind were the pipe rotating puzzles. It was the usual trope. Grab a straight pipe piece, a corner piece, or a tee piece. Place where needed and rotate to continue the flow of energy. These puzzles could be complicated but didn’t feel difficult in the same way. It was just a little bit of fiddling and replacing. They should have made more puzzles like that instead of the painful lanthorn puzzles.
I always smiled at the way my ember sometimes got slowed down by a spider’s web for a second or two, after which it snapped and the normal run speed was back. Such a cute little detail.
I wasn’t too fond of how the boat was controlled using mouse and keyboard. It felt like the controls for the arrow icon was upside down. Later, I found it easier to just click a spot somewhere in front of the boat.
LOL at the green duck boat that builder robot made for me. Totally ugly – I liked it!
Developer: Kojima Productions | Released: 2022 | Genre: 3PS, Adventure
This game was essentially Hideo Kojima discovering walking simulators and then saying:
Let’s make an AAA game out of that!
The human characters models and their facial animations were out of this world in this game. Probably the best I have seen so far. The pimples, the eye colors, the perfect lip sync. Really amazing work.
If anything, the camera was often too close to their faces.
Being late to the party as always, I actually didn’t want to play this for the longest time. It looked like it could be frustrating. While it was certainly not devoid of enemies and boss fights, it had enough interesting treks across Icelandic landscapes to warrant me spending some time with it.
Another reason I liked the game was how refreshingly different it was. In a world dominated by hackneyed tropes such as fantasy games with sword-wielding warriors and wizards with fireballs, first person shooters with reloading guns and bullet sponge enemies, and point-and-click adventures with object-combining inventories and dialog choices, this AAA game dared to try something entirely different.
A package delivery simulator. A more apt definition than walking simulator.
8/10Developer: Cosmonaut Studios | Released: 2022 | Genre: Adventure, First Person
In this first person adventure game, I was an observing rubber suit guy manipulating time in a house with two floors, trying to save the lives of six young adults after a fire in a fuse box.
Using a tool held in my right hand, I could start an event somewhere in the house. It typically lasted a few minutes and showed some of the young adults talking together as ghostly figures that I could walk around. A bit like in Tacoma, but with much clearer character models – and I couldn’t fast forward an event.
The events themselves had a separate overview screen that scrolled far to the right. It was overwhelming at first, with hundreds of dots available on a timeline. Some dots could be selected immediately, and after watching it was no longer a question mark. Most events were solely observing some dialog, but sometimes I was given a opportunity to alter time by making a person change their mind and react differently.
This had a butterfly effect and could change what events were available after that point.
7/10Developer: Clifftop Games | Released: 2019 | Genre: Adventure, Point & Click
I’m changing my mind about canning the balanced reviews. I actually missed doing them. So I’m not going to rule them out after all. I’ll return to them again for a while to ascertain the format.
A solid retro adventure game much in the same vein as Technobabylon and Primordia. I was in a control of a female cop trying to solve a few murders in a small city located on a raised disc.
The developers called it a sci-fi nordic noir.
As the blonde protagonist, Vera Englund – still moaning the loss of her boyfriend – the game immediately started with her arriving at the first murder scene. There were just two screens to navigate here until I had reached a milestone. Then most of the city was available to me.
Apart from the classic point-and-click features with an inventory that can combine objects, there was a triangle for steering towards one of three paths depending on what dialog options where chosen along the way. Since I only played the game once, it didn’t feel like this affected the gameplay all that much.
My guess is it probably did affect what augmentations I was given.
Augmentations? Sure. This was a pretty cool feature and most unexpected to find in this type of game. It felt like it was inspired by Deus Ex. I had a few to begin with, and more were added during the game.
I found this anthill the other day while I was on vacation. There was one ant barely alive on it. When I blew on it, it moved 1 mm and then stopped. The temperature was probably around 5°C.
