ibb & obb - 5/20 hours

I got another chance to play with my friend, and that was pretty great. If I could keep up this pace, finishing ibb & obb would be no trouble at all. Unfortunately, it looks like I'm on my own from here on out, at least if I want to finish it by the end of the week.

The biggest obstacle is that this game is mentally fatiguing. In a good way, but fatiguing nonetheless. I think it's because it combines obscure puzzles with precision platforming and just never lets up. Each level attempts to one up the previous levels, introducing ever more convoluted ways of manipulating gravity and bouncing on each others' heads.

It's immensely satisfying when you get past a new obstacle, but the game stretches muscles that you don't often have to use in real life. So every step of the game is a demanding mental exercise. It wears you out fast.

And that doesn't even take into account the actual platforming itself. The places where you have to land are pretty narrow, and you often have only a split-second window in which to land on them. It's fine when I'm well-rested, but after your third or fourth level of the day, my reactions start to slow and I start to get sloppy. There were a couple of times where my friend and I found a secret level, figured out how to solve it, but had to give up because we couldn't execute the complex maneuvers involved.

My conclusion is that once the sluggishness starts to set in, I just have to put down the controller and get some rest. I'm not sure how this is going to play out with my solo attempts. There's an added complication in the fact that I'm neither expected nor encouraged to be able to control both characters simultaneously, so I'm going to fail in execution even when I'm fresh and alert. That's just going to exacerbate my fatigue. I may have to learn to just lean into it, do 15 hours in one night and just let my brain melt out my ears.

Then again, I always say I'm going to do that, but only follow through maybe one time in five. I've got three and a half weeks until my deadline so I'm not too worried about overdoing it, though I did kind of hope that I have some time to see what this blog would be like if I were responsible and only bought games I intended to play immediately.

Things are getting kind of suspenseful here.