In real life, I run my mouth. Firing off terrible puns at sixty miles per hour, rambling through stories that go nowhere, enough phallic innuendo to shake a metaphorical banana at. In games, I am stricken by the need to be good. Not exactly completionist, but not exactly confrontational either. Risking a failure state in a video game might set me back sixty hours, or worse, make me die of games anxiety.
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But two recent indie releases have unintentionally broken me of virtual perfectionism. Cryptmaster is a rowdy, typing-based dungeon crawl. Meanwhile, Fay’s Factory charts a wry narrative journey in Disco Elysium’s wake, adding resource management and turn-based elemental combat. While vastly different in genre, both Cryptmaster and Fay’s Factory find ways to make failure more compelling than instant success.
Exasperated Narrator Teaches Typing
Cryptmaster dispels any notions of a rigid fail state through its’ ever-present narrator. You open chests, obtain moves from your party, and generally navigate this bizarre monochrome world through typing. Everyone involved knows that it’s a bit silly.
Through decades of fiercely competitive word games with my Nana, I have a keen sense of anagrams, letter combinations, and general word puzzle logic. Yet when it came to some of Cryptmaster’s riddles, I fully froze up. Every language faculty I had vanished into thin air when it was time to guess a wayward spirit’s identity.
Between my stage fright and the game’s real-time typing combat, I had a rough few sessions. But that changed after I desperately typed out “DAB.” It was a frantic guess, a last ditch attempt at unlocking another combat maneuver for a party member. “Dab?” the narrator asked me confusedly. “You want me to dab?” The delivery and circumstances of that moment broke me—I laughed and finally relaxed.
Unintentional or not, Cryptmaster made room for me, a typing doofus, and helped me let my guard down. Was it due to a goofy line read? Yes. But that’s pretty on-brand. Sometimes it takes a silly voice to remind me to go at my own pace.
Magic Meets Capitalism, Neither Wins
Fay’s Factory—currently in Early Access—cuts the tension by keeping you just as bewildered as your character. Although there is the option for an amnesiac background, playing someone smarter doesn’t necessarily give any advantage. I learned this lesson the hard way: after a disastrous first encounter as an amnesiac, I tried again with more politics knowledge. I save-scummed my way through one turn at a time, only for Fay’s opponent to trip and fall, botching the entire encounter all over again.
Fay, as it turns out, was pleased at this personally significant but diplomatically disastrous victory. Her sponsors? Decidedly less so. And me? I was a small cog in needlessly bureaucratic machine either way. Fay’s aspirations constantly mangled my—and anyone else’s—plans for her. Sharp character writing swerved away from any potential nihilism by unleashing Fay, a status-chasing chaos gremlin onto capitalism’s well-worn tracks. The game invited me to fuck around and find out.
Fay’s Factory deftly juggles political concerns with the dry humor of lofty ideals crashing headfirst into reality. At the end of the day, even your most hard-won, pro-worker efforts rest on your employment of a literal magic assembly line. The irony is not unnoticed. As author and activist Mariame Kaba says, “Let this radicalize you instead of lead you to despair.”
Despite My Games Anxiety, Done Is Better Than Perfect
The urge to stay current is overpowering in this industry. Games media capitalizes on mastering the new and the exciting while the scaffolding of the less recent and the past buckles under the weight. It’s easier to categorize experiences where a number goes up, and that means you did well. And yet games reach beyond that. There’s an ocean of games unconcerned with score, with success or failure. But still I fall into the classic trap: I need to clear this level, I need to raise my rank, I need to stay relevant in the now.
You absolutely do not have to hand it to Sheryl Sandberg, but she was on one when she popularized “Done is better than perfect.” Even this piece has been a multi-week struggle of translating ideas to paper. But Cryptmaster and Fay’s Factory have shaken me off that treadmill in small, significant ways. As I head off to the Summer Games Fest presentation tomorrow, I’ll try to do things in my own time, and in my own way.
