When Your Friends Start Getting Good At A Game You Usually Let Them Win At

a backpack for chubs.

Illustrator Turns People’s Deepest And Darkest Fears Into Comics

Honestly the mere fact that some people refer to Daddy Long Legs as “harvestmen” is creepier than 90% of all deliberately created horror but like the worst part is that the alternative is calling them Daddy Long Legs

Palpatine’s Journey

baby meeting cat for the first time

With all this talk about how Super Mario Odyssey’s mechanics are great, but its world designs are cliché, I’ve gotta wonder: what’s left? Like, how do you design themed platformer worlds without falling into cliché if you’re not allowed to have:

a world set in a forest, in a desert, at the beach, amid the clouds or on the Moon;

a world themed after fire, ice, water, castles, food, flowers or ghosts;

a world characterised by ancient ruins, modern cities, or giant machines

… and so forth? The game goes so far as to have you fight a damn Dark Souls boss at one point, and even that’s been described as predictable tonal break.

I think we’re reaching a point where we’re going to have to stop expecting novelty for novelty’s sake in open-world platformer design, simply because nearly every reasonable world theme has already been done by someone, somewhere.