Hack 'n' Slash, Morphopolis, and Trine - Wrap-up

The hardest part of playing these three games is writing this post. Hack 'n' Slash, Morphopolis, and Trine all have puzzles as a fundamental part of their gameplay, but other than that they have nothing in common. Hack 'n' Slash is a bold experiment in what games can do that nonetheless falls short of reaching its full potential. Morphoplis is as much an art installation as a game (and I mean that as a compliment). Trine is the most traditional of the three, and probably not coincidentally the most well-executed.

Although, now that I think about, there is another thing they have in common - they are all short. Each one took less than 6 hours to beat. That feels significant to me. As you might have inferred from the blog's 20 hour play time benchmark, I come to games with a certain set of expectations, expectations formed in an era of gaming where "less is more" was not just nonviable, it was heresy. It was rare to be able to bring home a new SNES cartridge, and while the move to discs mitigated the costs somewhat, it wasn't until used games stores became common that games moved (for me) from a rare luxury to a regular form of entertainment.

Digital distribution, therefor, was a titanic shift. I was relatively late to the party, not buying my first downloadable game until 2012, and not fully embracing the practice until 2014. There's a part of me that still doesn't completely trust it, but it's mostly been silenced. It's too convenient to be able to shop from home, and prices are low enough that the risk is minimal. But more than just changing the way people like me buy games, it has also changed the way games are made. There's a whole new niche for games that would have been considered fatally flawed just 10 years ago.

By making a game shorter, or with minimal graphics, one could theoretically make it dramatically cheaper and faster to download (not to mention the benefits of being compatible with the widest range of the highly variable PC hardware). The third thing all three of these games have in common is that I paid less than 5 dollars for them. Hack 'n' Slash was $4.54, Trine was $1.68, and Morphopolis was an astonishing $0.24. I've had better deals, but only because we live in an upside down world where legendary games from a decade ago are given away as free promotional gifts and major franchises dramatically under-price their flagship games as a loss-leader for DLC.

I've lost track of what point I'm trying to make here. I guess it's that if someone said to me, "I have $6.46 to spend on video games, what should I buy?" I'd tell them "Fallout: New Vegas plus the DLC, and you'll have $1.47 to spare." But, if they came back and told me, "oh, I bought Hack 'n' Slash, Morphopolis, and Trine instead," I'd have no cause to criticize their choice.