Primrose is a deep game, it's an homage to Go, Othello, the best of the Match-3s, and maybe to the burgeoning trend of threading user content creation into gameplay with seamless poise. Like most of Rohrer's work, you start out a bit unclear as to what to do, but through experimentation you stumble upon that moment of enlightenment where both the rules and the system's depth become clear. This time, Jason has traded his ambition of redefining our vista of the human condition for the ambition of making a system so deep that autistic savants will fecklessly try to sprint up the leader boards. It turns out to be a profitable trade.
The game involves surrounding blocks of one color with blocks of another color, and you can use corners and edges to corral this racial segregation. When surrounded, the central blocks disappear for points and the oppressor blocks are changed to the color of their former victims. Finally, you place blocks in pairs, the first block you can place in any free square, the second must be placed in the same row or column, so your moves are constrained.
Those three rules are it, and yet the geometric scoring scale that emerges from this (including chain reactions) makes it easy for a new player to score a few dozen points, and for a sick genius to score in the billions. The result is a sense of creating your own puzzle levels, each move you make sets up the terrain of your future moves. It's like Little Big Planet as a puzzle game, the design and play integrated even more seamlessly, so that you cannot play without designing. The flip-side to that is the transformation mechanic always introduces chaos. It's easy to set up chambers to clear massive swaths of blocks, but it's hard to predict three steps ahead how the transformations will warp your petty, rigid geometries into snake-like warps. Ultimately you end up filling the screen and running out of options, though clever players can clear the screen and keep going for what seems like a Valhalla of puzzle-dom.
The game does have a sort of pre-designed progression structure in that after so many moves, new blocks are introduced. Then after all seven types of blocks are introduced, the game starts throwing sets of a single block type, like thirty of them, that you must deploy without blocking yourself in. There's a leaderboard but in this version, no multiplayer. Let me know if you think this deserves a DSi port with turn-based multiplayer and the ability to read your opponent's face, because if enough people are into it, I can make it happen.
yeah man your rape jokes are
yeah man your rape jokes are so fucking transgressive way to stick it to the man you're blowing all of our minds WIDE OPEN so we can be prepared for the coming computer rapture you're like a goddamn poet all crafting booby traps out of words designed to catch us in our own preconceptions
YOU'RE AN AWFUL WRITER
GO HOME
The Apology
I was just talking to some South American girls about the threats women have to be wary of. I read a feminist critique of RapeLay and did a bit of research on the term "Rape Culture". Depending on your perspective, I may have taken a series of coincidences and ran with it too far. Men believing they have the eminent right to overrule women´s decision making about their bodies or any other aspect of their lives is something that needs to end, and my intention was never to promote that kind of cocky attitude. Yet, sexist jokes are just a low-grade expression of that attitude. It´s over, I´m moving on. If someone makes a game that addresses rape in a meaningful way, as DHSGiT! seriously attempted to do, then we´ll review it as we would any other game.
Primrose doesn´t have anything to do with rape, it´s a really deep abstract puzzler. However, just like you can skin Tetris into a torture game, or de-skin a rape game into a vector retracement exercise, you could skin this game to be about a variety of subjects. This was actually a theme of recent discussion amoung some of my collegues, I think it´s something we need to consider if we´re to design deeper systems that have meaningful reverberations.
As for your tone, I don´t believe in banning or disemvoweling, and I actually respect your criticisms as they are kind of funny because they´re kind of true. However one of my goals with this blog beyond exploring a greater depth of game criticism is to cultivate a comment culture that´s a step above other sites dealing with indie games. In that spirit, I´ll mature my writing style if you mature your mode of critique, deal?
Also, I´m aware that I sometimes write like a mongoose in a laboratory maze. When I reread my stuff sometimes, the syntax makes my frontol lobe want to throw up. I like the vertigo, but it could flow better. I´ll work on that too.
I will now proceed to drink hemlock. :P
Wow
You guys are pretty serious around here.
Why not play a computer game? Take your minds off things?
Cool
There is going to be a computer rapture? Cool. Warm up my tube, I'm getting my spinal sockets implanted.
Srsly
Srsly, this game is pretty awesome. I wish it came out 10 years ago for the GB color, as I would be reaching zen through it right now. As it stands, I'm the third best Primerose-r for the day (110 million, wootz) but I'm no where near the two billion of the best. I love how time isn't a factor, as it is in Tetris. All the challenge and fun comes straight from the puzzle mechanics.
EDIT: Bought it for my iPod Touch. Perfect thing to do while blazed and listening to some Iggy Pop.
Hmm.
This game constantly confounded my expectations. When I tried to play it well, it killed me. When I thought I was on the verge of dying, I survived for ages with a really basic strategy. But when I tried to apply that basic strategy to the entire game from the start, it eventually forced complexity upon me.
So there's definately depth here. But be warned... whenever I thought it might be fun, it would set out to prove me wrong about that, too.