It’s not always about the game, or what you want, or whether it’s a good use of money. Sometimes Christmas is just about giving the thing that your kid wants most and then experiencing it with them.

So there are no regrets, exactly, when I knew full-well exactly what I was walking into.

Bluey: The Videogame is an undercooked sampling of fun moments from the show. You can play “keepy uppy” with a balloon or “the floor is lava,” and you can play as any of the main characters in the Heeler family, and put certain costumes on them and go to a few of the places that they go.

And that’s about it! It reminds me, not so much of licensed console videogames, but of the commercial games that would sometimes come stuffed in a cereal box or as an addition to something else — more like a promotional aside — and not quite sensible as a fully priced object.

So my daughter got what she asked for. A Bluey game that does some of the things she’s wanted a Bluey game for. But it only took a couple hours to really see it all and most of the way wasn’t a very good time.

It’s not like back in my day, back in the ‘80s…

My niece sat across from me and kept saying the same thing: so it’s not scary but that’s why it’s scary right? I think that’s the negotiation made with children here, that they will get a preparable scary moment and the game will be about the preparation for either that moment coming or how to avoid it.

I do not love this as a horror design because doing well ought to not reduce the horror — see the new Resident Evil designs which scale to how you play them and what amount of supplies and abilities you have — if you oversucceed in those games, the difficulty measures and responds to that, that’s game design. I’d like to think the horror is the reward of playing a horror game, not the avoidance of it.

All that said, it’s a perfect format for the streaming breakthrough it experienced — in that there are broken moments of time designated to sitting and waiting, lots of dead air for a streamer to fill in.

I wrote about interviewing Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Chuck E Cheese, and my perception of the games through studying lore and playing the first game on The Twin Geeks — you can find that here:
https://thetwingeeks.com/2023/11/07/five-nights-at-freddys-what-we-make-for-others-is-no-longer-ours/

Game-wise, I surprisingly find there’s even less here than with the movie, which I can better understand as entry horror that does something I like (practical effects) vs a game wherein the horror devices are based upon limiting inputs and engagements.

That is always a central design in horror, to strip away mechanics until the absence of them are what creates a central tension. I just don’t find it that interesting to play here and understand very fully why it’s a game to be watched. It’s better that way.

Space is a loading screen in Starfield, a very Bethesda first-person adventure about exploring the surfaces of so many stars. You are one of many versions of You, who travel these stars, in a long and paralleled timeline of space travelers and the game puts You right into that situation — it’s very funny but it takes like five minutes from being Some Space Miner until You become The Most Important Person in the Universe.

It has a lot to do with Obvlivion and Skyrim structure-wise and if you enjoy both of these games, you will enjoy this one, too, because it is deterministically, always going to be a Bethesda game, no matter it’s outsized ambitions, which you begin to understand as actually quite practical when you get into the rhythms of the game.

The rhythms of the game, for better or worse, go like this: you move between planets and loading screens, land somewhere and progress the story, side story, or resource gather, then go to another planet and do something else with that story or those resources. Eventually, you will unlock all the right tools so that the game opens up mechanically and the full expression is more clear, but that may be a dozen hours or more in, depending on which thing you are doing, and where you spend your upgrade points after doing it.

The thing is that once you do reach this point, although the game is standard Bethesda fare until then, the new things it’s doing do begin to open up. First you play something like what you have played, and then eventually, the game comes into its own — Starfield becomes Starfield here.

The developers have put so much in the game. You will not see everything. No chance. They have designed enough to keep someone here for a long time. The long game just isn’t that interesting.

Where the game peaks is late into the story and in the faction missions — here you have already come to define the new mechanics, have unlocked enough to have agency over your own story, and probably have a sufficient build and character attributes that do what you want them to do.

At its best, it’s a fairly advanced model of what Bethesda games have always done. If you do not like those games, do not bother. If you do, you’ll find the same things to like here.

There are some great times in Starfield. Moments of awe when you land on planets and just look around at what modern games can do. It’s astounding-looking and richly aesthetic. There are limitations, in that way that certain RPGs only give back what you put into them. If you put in the effort, Starfield inevitably does reward the player with a space in the stars that is all their own.