Not just any everyday game! There's probably a better term than “manual-focused games” but my brain refuses to come up with anything, so I'm sticking with this title
A friend gifted me the game Shenzhen I/O, a game that make you design and program circuits with an extensive physical manual. After a few hours of playing it, and a good self-esteem boost from it, this game made me realise how interesting the concept of having to engage with media outside a game's window is.
It does not necessarily have to be physical, as cool and tactile as that feels. Like Final Fantasy 11, which I also recently found out to be really fun because of external information seeking stuff. The game is slow-paced, because you spend most of the time scouring wikis from the early 2000s and old forum threads for information on monsters. Or you go in the game's “linkshells”, asking veteran players to find out how to navigate the world as if you're a real adventurer asking for directions. It gives off a special feeling, pulling you outside the game but somehow increasing immersion at the same time.
Please share some more games that explore this specific concept in fun ways! I really want to find more stuff like this, and hopefully introduce this concept of slow-paced brain usage games to more people.
this game has an in game manual that you build overtime, and it's kinda the main gimmick of the game. I don't want to say much more about it because it's really good for a first play through.
Since @Aria mentioned Keep Talking and No One Explodes I'll talk about the concept of "feelies" in games.
Many PC games in the 80's and 90's, as a form of copy protection sometimes and as little lore bonuses in others, would come with extra things in the box. On the copy protection side, one of the most famous being The Secret of Monkey Island's Dial a Pirate Wheel[1]. How it worked was that when you started the game, it would show you a picture of a pirate that correlates to one on the disk and you have to answer what year that pirate was hung in which city; dial the face in, find the city, type in the year, and boom you're playing the game. Failure to do this would kick you back to your OS and you'd have to try again. Something more fun, easier, and harder to replicate than the typical "What's the 7th word of the 3rd paragraph of the 26th page of the instructions?" type of copy protection also common at the time.
Sierra On-Line games were also notorious for this: Police Quest: In Persuit of the Death Angel came with an abridged police manual which had information needed to get full points in the game. The Colonel's Bequest came with a full map for the game's mansion with fingerprints only revealed using a red tinted magnified glass that served as copy protection.
Of course, let's not forget the most famous feelie of them all. Startropics' letter, something so integral to the game that even the Wii Virtual Console release had to replicate it digitally.
Of course, there plenty of others, but I'll leave it at that
Some of the other games by Zachtronics have this same aspect to their gameplay. I love Shenzhen I/O, good one of theirs! The two other ones I know of are TIS-100 (much simpler UI, but very parallelized programming) and EXAPUNKS (Much more similar to Shenzhen I/O, with an added bonus of the print material also being an "infozine" with little tidbits to add to the vibes & lore of the game).
oh, come to think of it i think ni no kuni wrath of the white witch as an ingame manual as well. I've never actually played it myself so i cant give too many details though
This game is entirely incomprehensible without the included 123 page manual, and not much better with it. I have it, but I don't even know how to interact with the game in any meaningful way since I haven't gone through the PDF it came with. I'll post some screenshots of the manual later if I remember to do so
It seems like a genuinely interesting project but good lord is it esoteric.
I am currently out so don't have much time to post, but uncle chops rocketshop. Decent sized manual. Basically keep talking and nobody explodes but single player and you're a spaceship mechanic
This game looks beautifully weird, love it! I think it'd kind of give me nightmares, though.
Omg I didn't know that Tunic had a gimmick like that, I've seen it a few times but never really took the time to look into it. I think I'll play it this summer.
I had a look, yeah, a manual-focused roguelite… I'll give it a try next time I have that strange roguelike mood that sometimes takes me.
I should also look into the other Zachtronics games like Karyotype mentioned, I think I actually already own TIS-100, so that one's next on my list!
there's a particular subgenre of puzzle games i'm interested in where the "puzzle" comes from trying to understand and translate a conlang from context clues etc.
oftentimes these games will have a little dictionary you can fill in with your own definitions or guesses, functioning as some sort of manual?
here are a few examples, but i'm sure there are many more out there.
if you're interested in the concept, chants of sennar has a demo you can try out too!
i'd certainly consider games like dwarf fortress to be "manual-focused", a lot of the fun comes from tackling the learning curve and digging through wikis and forums to figure out how everything works (and then how to actually do what you need to). feels very fulfilling to finally be able to set up something as simple as a well without flooding your whole fort lol
Ooooo wow I completely forgot that I was learning that game! Maybe a Dwarf Fortress stories thread would be a good idea if enough of us are into that? Could lead to some fun stories :3
