I'm pretty sure I know their formula.
- 1 part childhood fancy - Klei has a game called Hot Lava, a platformer where you play as toys traversing a bedroom, a school and so on...Oh! And the goddamned floor is lava! I remember this shit! We all did this as kids and it was amazing! Observe the following rad as hell trailer to the right...
- 1 part socio and/or psychopath - Yeah...so...these are the guys who made Don't Starve and Oxygen Not Included. There's all kinds of brutality and consequence in these two properties. In Don't Starve...well, you can starve. You can also go insane via otherworldly horrors, including but not limited to: Pig Men, shadow born horrors and Elder Gods...of sorts. He might also be Satan, I wasn't entirely sure... Faust? Anyway. Then there's the whole suffocating thing in Oxygen Not Included, as well as your team flat nutting out and doing whatever their stress addled AI decides to do - wreck things, jump into space, eat a poison mushroom, you know how it is.
- Pure, uncut drugs - Okay, that's hoosafudge, but they've got their formula down to a sweet addictive science. They know their systems and they know how to snag you in for the long haul. And that might actually be the one thing I DON'T like about their games: I can't tear myself away from them without damn near a physical intervention! My current obsession is Oxygen Not Included, a god forsaken early access game that feels pretty darn complete, robust even! I don't do early access games, but that's a whole other article. The point I'm trying to make, is Klei laces each and every game with coke. Good. I'm glad we had this conversation.
Making a game isn't hard. Making it good is much tougher, but making me feel like a proper child again? That's an art. Klei is incredible for this more than anything in my eyes. And I'm going to use Oxygen is Not Included as my example.
This game screams the make-believe crazy-pants that I used to play with my friends, specifically the expand at your own peril expansion and the art style. Man. That art. And that sound! The design as a whole is somehow adorable and then...kind of disturbing. Your colonists - sorry, duplicants (which is brilliant, ps) - are hilariously adorable one minute, hard at work and all smiles, then pissing and stress vomiting until they die the next. Then there's the mush-bar, which is basically a sci-fi mud-pie(side note: sci-fi mud-pie is the name of my electro-country album). I made these damn things when I was but knee-high to a hair! I made them and then...well, I made my cousin eat them. She's fine.
My point was made above, but I'll threaten being further redundant. Klei understands and can implement a very crucial aspect of play that many devs don't execute as well: reminding us of the imagination most all of us used as kids. Their systems make proper use of your personal creativity and then give you fair consequences, not limitations, with your choices. They damn near make your imagination real.
Okay. It's late and I'm dead tired. Also, I'm going to go play more Oxygen. Sweet dreams.
Have the best day you've ever had.
Andrew
PS. I googled "electro-country" and the video below came up. I then realized I could have just posted the cotton-eyed joe music video. Eh. For the record I don't hate the song below. I don't like it either. Cool. Back to my game.
