Old writing for The Patient Press
In 2022 and 2023, I wrote for two issues of a gaming zine created by an online community. The zine itself is called The Patient Press, which you can find over on this itch.io page, and the credit for the amazing layout and design of them goes to Pumkin.
I wanted to archive these as well as have my writing available on my own blog. Ultimately they're pretty short as we had a strict 500 word limit, but I think they're interesting little pieces!
The Ultimate Incarnation of Picross
Picross is fantastic. It’s simple and elegant, yet infinitely complex, and the picture you work to uncover is a built-in reward! Within this system, there’s some variability for quality, based on two factors: The user experience, and the puzzles themselves. While its user experience might have a bit of room for improvement, the swathe of user-created puzzles means nothing can compete with Nonograms.org. The only option then, to create a compelling commercial version of picross is to add some sort of twist. There’s many interesting options, but in my opinion, the best of these is Picross 3D for the Nintendo DS.
The ingenious twist is simply adding a dimension to the grid, and feels like a natural progression of the mechanics of picross. The game remains simple to understand for a newcomer, but adds a layer of complexity that immediately makes the gameplay interesting and fresh to those already familiar with picross. This provides picross veterans with completely new mechanics to learn, when most commercial picross games require you to do tutorials of mechanics you already understand, and only start becoming challenging right before they end. This isn’t the case with Picross 3D. Its levels start simple since everyone will be unfamiliar with its new mechanics, but the challenge quickly ramps up, culimating in final levels that are genuinely difficult, all while allowing players to play imperfectly if they get stuck, in exchange for a lower final score on the puzzles. So we can see that the puzzles themselves offer a uniquely new twist, and are satisfying and challenging throughout.
The other aspect of judging picross—quality of life—is similarly excellent, and provides an unexpected twist. The UI is minimalist and easily understood, yet colourful and charming in its simplicity, including fun little additions such as a showcase of all the puzzles you’ve completed in various similarly-themed collections with an apt background image. A part I’d really like to take note of, however, is the music. Each puzzle will play one of several background tracks, which are pretty fitting to the game. However, you can also select the music track yourself in the settings menu, and besides music, there’s the option to select one of several ambient tracks. These only appear in the game here, and allow you to listen to a running stream, birds chirping, wind rustling the trees, waves lapping the shore, and insects buzzing around. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this made Picross 3D genuinely meditative. The ambience helps your brain focus on the puzzle at hand, and completely removes any stress you might feel about the time pressure or making mistakes. I just love this feature. It allows me to sit down and just float away to a different plane where nothing exists but gentle nature, and picross. Overall, it’s such a fantastic little game that’s so genuinely worth your time if you enjoy picross. Give it a shot, and be transported like I was.
How JRPGs Suffer from Tradition
The classic style of turn-based JRPGs garners a lot of praise about their stories, their world, and to a lesser extent, their mechanics. The theoretical systems of combat can be very well-crafted, allowing for immense creativity and strategy, but rarely live up to the task. Often, the speed of the combat mechanics is more appreciated, as it means random encounters are over as fast as possible. Random battles are a mechanic whose main benefit in early JRPGs was to extend the length of a game that needed to be developed with extreme restrictions. Besides that, it gives players an unending supply of XP to level up as needed, and has the opportunity to provide a wealth of content if the combat mechanic is interesting enough. Here lies the issue, however. As it is an infinite, and relatively frequent, supply of combat encounters, it must be relatively simple. If each random battle is too complicated, it takes too long for players to work through it, and becomes an enormous timesink. And even if it is, the increase in levels means the more you engage with it, the easier and less challenging it becomes. As such, unless the player is severely underleveled and the mechanics are well-crafted, it results in an experience that is merely uninteresting at best, and a complete waste of time at worst.
This problem with traditional JRPGs has been side-stepped by changing the combat, such as in action RPGs or tactical RPGs. However there is potential for these systems, and I think the biggest solution is to massively decrease the amount of combat, allowing for each encounter to be longer, and more engaging. A frequent solution that’s posed is to decrease the encounter rate, but this is merely decreasing the severity of the issue, and so a better option would be to completely remove random battles. In this imaginary game, each combat encounter would be unique—similar to what boss battles would be like in a normal JRPG. However, these don’t have to be that grand, they can just be a simple, yet interesting and hand-crafted battle. This would result in a combat mechanic that actually produces consistently interesting gameplay, even if it is not as frequent. This does leave us with the question of experience and levels. If the encounters are set, how do you work to gain extra levels? We could utilize secondary mechanics, but the set encounters give us an opportunity to perfectly balance every instance of combat, possibly even going to the point of removing experience points and leveling altogether. Ultimately, it’s possible that JRPGs are better off without a core staple of the RPG formula.
Original Spreads
The original pages from issue 1 and 2 of the zine. Credit to Pumkin for design and layout.
