Edge Guard Blake Beckett and Jordan Pruett

This week, we play Otteretto, a puzzle game about making palindromes from colored tiles. We swap strategies, agree that puzzle mode is best, and take a closer look at some of the game’s UI choices. Blake reminds us of a previous puzzle game we played for the podcast, and how a bug in the leaderboard fooled him into believing he had the world’s highest score.
 
Find the game here: https://csklimowski.itch.io/otteretto 
And follow the creator on Twitter: @csklimowski
 

It’s another Edge Guard Seminar special episode! This week, we take aim at the many Wordle clones that have taken the world by storm in recent months. We chat about what makes the original Wordle so popular, as well as what makes it so easy to clone. Then we discuss some of our favorites: a math Wordle, an adversarial Wordle, and more.
 
Links to games featured in this episode:
https://qntm.org/files/absurdle/absurdle.html
https://bigbag.itch.io/goblino
https://nerdlegame.com/
https://zaratustra.itch.io/dordle
https://www.lewdlegame.com/
https://quintessential.fun/
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/ 
https://qntm.org/files/absurdle/absurdle.html 

This week, we play Bloodborne PSX, a “demake” of the original game in the style of a Playstation 1 game! We talk about the game’s impressive fidelity to the PS1 era: everything from sound, to mechanics, to artificial loading screens. A discussion of the poison sewers prompts Blake tells us about Miyazaki’s love of poison swamps.
 
Find the game here: https://b0tster.itch.io/bbpsx 
And follow the creator on Twitter: @b0tster 

This week, we play Below the Ocean, an unusual take on the puzzle platformer genre that features an old-timey deep sea diver affixed to an oxygen tank. We talk about the game’s “watery” physics, and Jordan provides game therapy to Blake.
 
Find the game here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1663270/Below_The_Ocean/ 
And follow the creator on Twitter: @ishyrodriguez

This week, we play a series of Slovakian text adventure games from the late 80s, which were recently restored and translated as part of a cultural preservation project. The games are surprisingly fun, with a lot of charisma. We talk about their subversive sense of humor and how they manage to find interesting mechanics given their extreme technical limitations.
 
Find the games here: https://scd.sk/clanky/playable-english-localizations-of-slovak-digital-games-from-the-late-80s-period/ 

This week marks the debut of our new recurring segment: “From Jam to Gem,” an exploration of game jam games that later got a full release. For our first game, we play “Sacrifices Must Be Made,” a Ludum Dare 43 submission by Daniel Mullins that later became Inscryption. We compare the game to its predecessor and explore what the differences and similarities of the two versions tell us about the game’s development process.
 
Find the game here: https://dmullinsgames.itch.io/sacrifices-must-be-made 
And follow the creator on Twitter: @DMullinsGames