Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes - 20/20 hours

Eventually, I couldn't take it any more. I decided I needed a change of pace, so I decided to look through the workshop for mods.

That's where I found it . . .

THE CENTURION!

One hundred modules in one hundred minutes. A bomb so complex it required the installation of 100 other mods to go with it. I knew there was no chance I'd ever finish the thing, but I figured it would at least kill a lot of time.

And that it did. I decided I was not going to bother knocking myself out trying to get in under the wire. I would just take it easy, doing one exotic module at a time until my time ran out. I got as far as "the clock," which was the 16th one on the list. Not great, I'll admit, but some of those modules were downright complicated.

The worst one was "Cheap Checkout," where you had a list of groceries and you had to add up their prices (including multiplying by weight for certain products that were sold by the pound), apply a discount to groceries from a certain category (determined by the real-life day of the week) and then subtract the total from the displayed number to determine what amount you have to input to disarm the module.

Then there were other modules whose instructions were so unclear that I eventually had to look up tutorial videos just to figure out how to decipher the manual. Those modules could take me 10-20 minutes each. I actually wound up having to restart the bomb a couple of times, despite the 100 minute time limit.

I guess the temptation when designing a mod is to make it deep and weird enough to occupy a significant amount of the player's head space. It would seem like a real waste of effort to create something basic that could be finished in just a couple of seconds, and, of course, the space for iconic, easily described challenges is going to be very competitive. They probably work well enough on smaller bombs where they can shine as a centerpiece.

The modules I liked most, both modded and default, were the ones that felt like they could really be part of a bomb - cutting wires, flipping switches, monitoring the timer. There were times I wished that the game was about actually disarming fully simulated bombs, but then I remembered that doing so would be more or less the same as teaching the players how to build bombs themselves. Still, the modules that were basically just word puzzles often took me out of the experience. I guess it's just something I had to deal with.

Overall, I should not have played this game. I really enjoyed the multiplayer I played several months ago, but the memorization and streamlining I had to do over the last 20 hours has robbed the game of much of its mystique. I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to enjoy it again, and if I do, it certainly won't be in the same way.

Sigh. The things I do for love.