Sunday, May 13, 2018

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes - 2/20 hours

This is going to be a tough one. It's only been two hours, but it feels more like ten. It's not so much that the game is dull - the modules that make up the bombs are simple puzzles that are mainly notable for how tetchily they're described, but it's not nearly as monotonous as Secret of the Magic Crystals - it's more that the game is broken down into 3-5 minute segments. That means that I am going to have to disarm almost 400 bombs. And there's no way to escape how overwhelming that is.

It doesn't help that solo playing Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes isn't very fun. It's not a complete drag. When you've got just a couple of seconds left on the clock and you snip the last wire you need to disarm the bomb in the nick of time, that's a satisfying feeling. But mostly it's just reading instructions from a sheet of paper and then following those instructions as calmly and efficiently as possible. I suppose a video game that encourages you to keep your cool and not panic under a strict time constraint has some value, but I'm already a pretty mellow guy, so it's mostly just going through the motions for me.

This hasn't yet proved the disaster I predicted before I started playing, but let's give it time. I can feel something building inside me the more I play it, but I can't yet say whether it's resentment or resignation. Either way, there's no chance of me getting out of this completely unscathed.

If only there were some sort of metaphor that described my situation of sitting in suspense waiting for calamity to inevitably strike . . .

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