I beat Viewfinder, and it is a welcome addition to the type of 3D puzzle games I like to hang out in the most… reality-bending non-Euclidean puzzle games.
I appreciate the types of games like Superliminal, Maquette, Manifold Garden, or the Stanley Parable. I think it‘s possibly the medium’s greatest example of making something that could only be represented with games. When it‘s done right, the slight of hand can feel flattering to your sense of spacial reasoning or it can feel slightly unsettling and I think that’s a cool headspace to be in. What are some of your favorite games that play with perspective, recursion, optical illusions, etc?
Also – I think this might be the sort of game that Tim refers to on the podcast when he refers to indie games that get popularity based on a gif and then the devs spend 8 years trying to make a game worthy of the gif. I think it's probably a fair criticism, and even with a game like Viewfinder that I enjoyed, the game ends up exhausting the concept by trying to turn it into 3-4 hour experience with enough twists and content from every conceivable angle that it can add it to be too much of a good thing. I think this genre might lend itself better to proof of concepts on itch rather than complete game experiences.
It's also the opposite of what Tim described as Honest Geometry.
I'm curious if there are any games that “play it straight” for most of the runtime, and as things start going off the rails it starts playing faster and looser with its geometry and sense of space and perspective?
Antichamber was the game that introduced me to this type of geometry-bending. I remember it absolutely blew my mind the first time I turned around and found that I wasn‘t looking down the same hallway I’d just walked through. (I played about half an hour of Jedi: Fallen Order a few weeks ago (returned it because it was really boring) and was surprised to see that that sort of trick has made it to mainstream Sony Games.) I never ended up completing Antichamber because it felt so big and so confusing after a certain point, where I kept walking myself down the same dead ends, but it really impressed me while I was playing it. There is something ominous and awe-inspiring about these sorts of effects in a first-person environment.
This isn't exactly the same kind of thing but Catacombs of Solaris scratched a similar itch for me, but in a non-puzzle purely aesthetic experience. As the description says, “The goal of the game is to find your favourite room in the catacombs,” which I consider a noble goal.
@“wickedcestus”#p148421 Heck yeah, Antichamber was one of the first big ones. I need to check it out, I would imagine that these games mostly hold up pretty well over time. That's interesting about Jedi Fallen Order, I guess when ideas like that get out there anyone can just pick it up and do whatever they want with it.
I just downloaded Catacombs of Solaris - - and I love it! It really does thread the line between feeling like you're in a space and just being surrounded by abstraction. It doesn't take long before you start hallucinating ... I think I'm haunted by this creepy PacMan
Also shout out to Dark Souls II and its optical illusion of a world map with areas overlapping each other, on whom Hbomberguy did a really great video extolling their virtues (spoilers for DS2 therein).
@“Tradegood”#p148419 I’m curious if there are any games that “play it straight” for most of the runtime, and as things start going off the rails it starts playing faster and looser with its geometry and sense of space and perspective?
I don‘t like to share my own work here but I’m gonna link this game I made with some friends back in 2022……
@“connrrr”#p148439 Also shout out to Dark Souls II and its optical illusion of a world map with areas overlapping each other, on whom Hbomberguy did a really great video extolling their virtues (spoilers for DS2 therein).
People got real mad about DS2 not being 1:1, but thanks to markers you can see that Elden Ring's sweeping vistas are not quite accurate to the map and everything is closer than it seems.
Not sure if it quite fits, but a late Shin Megami Tensei 3 dungeon plays with perspective to fool the player in a neat way, with many corridors actually being dead ends.
@“bnn”#p148469 Not sure if it quite fits, but a late Shin Megami Tensei 3 dungeon plays with perspective to fool the player in a neat way
I think it should count. This kind of perspective trick was part of a series of similar intuition-bending experiments in the game (like the possibly more famous inverse prison), even if many of them would not count as "Non-Euclidean".
SMT3’s dungeon design was deliberate about trying to answer the question "how does a full 3D environment changes the way we can design a Megaten dungeon", with a craftmanship and seriousness that reminds me of earlier 3D pioneers like Super Mario 64 and Klonoa; an effort which was sadly quickly taken for granted in later Atlus games set in a similar 3D space.
Many of these Non-euclidean games “break” our logical perception with clever uses of teleportation, and an abuse of how graphics are effectively independent from a game’s logic. All very fun experiences but it’s basically the Super Mario 64’s staircase trick to the nth power.
Stuff like Baba is You, Echochrome, Fez or the metapuzzle from The Witness are a bit more interesting to me because they genuinely try to apply a different but constant logic a to 2D or 3D space. A good recent example of this kind of experiment in a visual space is Hyperbolica. The game itself is not that great, but it goes hardcore on the premise of “what if the natural order was parabolic”.
