วีดีโอ

Sadly, I purchased Stardew Valley about 5 years ago (together with Celeste and Hollow Knight, 2 of my favorite games of all time) and never got to play it. However, I think that the constant rewarding system you mentioned is something that is similar to the engagement generated in Civilization games. In those games, it's hard to put them down because there's always a new technology about to be discovered, a long waited building, or Wonder about to be completed, or a big attack you've been preparing for many turns. Someone who's played both games could answer me if that feeling is the same.

I found you through a suggestion in the GMTK Digest for this month. Great channel & presentation. Looking forward to your other videos!

4:45 The face of Gus is such a focal point. His little smirk steals the show 😅

When you come back to this area in Rivulet's campaign Pebbles is in much worse shape and you can just barely hear an alternate version of Random Gods playing in the General Systems Bus. It's staticky with reeling fits of distortion, like gritting teeth and white knuckles trying not to cry out in pain. Listening to it after experiencing this scene is genuinely heartbreaking.

super high quality content, love it! I was here before he got big :)

One of the things with stardew is the way the days layout frontloads rewards. Most things update overnight - the only time you save - which means that after you save or when you first get on is when you get most of the shiny new rewards. I think stardew would be much less addictive if it was easy to pause the game in the mid morning slump where you are waiting for the miners guild to open to clear your inventory.

Fantastic video, thank you for sharing!

epic video my guy

Thank you dr.harvey!

thoughts about video games? yes please

Super interesting video, glad it was recommended to me. I've subscribed 😊

I love Alex Pine!!!

great vid, can't belive your channel hasn't blown up yet!

Man only at the end of the video did I realized the luck I had getting this video suggested. I myself had been reflecting about this as well. The thing is everytime I want to close the game a new day begins and I find myself with something to do and wanting to accomplish in order to get something that leaves me needing to do something more next. Dangerously addictive. Impecable writing and explanation just to mention some qualities from this essay. Keep up the good work. PS Sorry if this is bad written this isn't my native language and just commented to help with the interaction

Amazing, happy to see another video❤

your channel will blow up eventually man. your content is high quality and well-paced. just need the algorithm to notice you again and people will see everything else you've made

First

Wanna emphasise that the language we use to describe "addictive" games as something desirable is deeply flawed (I am guilty of this myself). While Stardew Valley is an absolutely lovely game, in general we should be careful to distinguish engagement from compulsion, and the line between the two - both in effect and in design patterns - can be very blurry indeed. By the way, I'm on the twitters x.com/Alex_Pinetree

Insane

Why do you sound like an android 💀 Also great video, this was definitely one of the most "wow" moments of my playthrough, so I'm glad that someone made an entire analysis video about it, thank you.

Upon further reflection, boh of my own experience of floating about inside the General System Bus and the game at large, I think I've found another layer on why this part feels so impactful. Random Gods doesn't even sound like music, not right away. It starts with electronic humming, this gargantuan machine simply making calculations and producing noise. Then you start noticing the melody emerge - whether or not it registers as Sundown right away is not necessarily important, just that the mind is finding the melodic qualities in the middle of this chaos. It feels like your mind is playing a trick on you, trying to find something greater in the surrounding area. It's the impersonal, sterile inhumanity of the machine performing its functions meeting the very human tendency of searching for, and finding, patterns in everything we experience. The frantic shifts of the sounds make it feel chaotic and confused, Sundown gives it a feeling of sadness and wistfulness, and deep electronic rumbling gives it an undercurrent of anger. Random Gods *is* Five Pebbles as a character, as much as the superstructure we traverse is Five Pebbles' body; it transmits the... Aura or feel of his character in the melody itself. Confused, sad, and angry. I was very impressed when I arrived at the Bus, as it helped communicate the sheer power of Five Pebbles as a computer, and in contrast made me feel so much more sad for Looks To The Moon, as we see her reduced to just her puppet and a handful of neuron flies. Then we see the scenery from atop The Wall and see that, not only is an iterator so immense they can have a city built on them, but there are so many other iterators away in the distance. Rain World is an amazing experience, and I am glad I decided to play it.

got damn the five pebbles theme still makes me goose bump all over

I cannot stress enough the important of CONTRAST in art. Contrast provides the ability to set your intended perspective in relation to another with ease, it draws the attention of the viewer effectively. Contrast can be used in many different things, like music, visuals, colors, gameplay.... like when you are suddenly tossed into the anti gravity environment in contrast to the natural environments you're used to. Learning how to traverse it is like playing a whole different game.

Gosh I could absolutely drown in the "Random Gods" soundtrack. Entering that room and having it on full blast for the first time- there will never be another moment like it. I'd give anything to relive that feeling again man, it was perfect.

I didn’t go through the bus, I took the wall. It’s a heck of a trek, but I had my worm from underhang and that made it easier than I think it was supposed to be. For once, I felt like I was actually getting past that lowest rung on the food chain. Get to the top and marvel as the sight of other massive superstructures in the distance, no more rain timer, it was something else. And then I take the roof, desolate (except one dang white lizard. Jerk.) and make my way down a pipe. No gravity. No gravity?? And lasers and lights and other entirely new look for everything! I’ve gone from a decaying civilization, slowly but surely overtaken by flora and fauna, to this? Where am I, what is this?? I go right, the only path that isn’t back where I came from, and find a pipe after bumbling and bumping around in the new zero-g environment, feeling like I’m all at the beginning again with barely an idea of how to move. And then it’s so loud, and there’s lightning and lights and dozens of pearls floating around a small figure, floating or held by an arm or something, and I have no idea what’s going on. Then it all shuts off when I fall, he makes some noise before grabbing and making me understand what he says, and explains everything without really meaning to. I didn’t know what a cycle was, really. I barely knew anything aside from how to scrape by at this point and now he’s telling me where the “end” is. Then, unceremoniously, I’m tossed back out where I came from before I can even try and go through the other pipe. When folks talk about Cthulhu and such, this is what I imagine it has to be like. A simple creature suddenly given a huge burden of knowledge, far beyond what they were ever expected to achieve, then tossed right back into its day to day struggle, unable to share that burden, unable to forget.

It is always a good day when your favourite tree man uploads! (Except when he uploads a video that spoils a game that you would want to play later so you can't watch the video until you complete the game but you never complete the game so you never get to watch the video.)

Ok hear me out though, oneshotting spikes is really funny.

blasphemous 2

Possible deadcells video soon?

6:26 A double jumo was originally intended However they just decided to cut it Also nice video Pretty great points

Great seeing you post again! Honestly liked the video.

Silksong: Understanding the patience.

i made like 90% of this essay last september/october, and then got super busy & burnt out. planning on releasing more essays very soon, and in fact i have a short & cozy stardew valley essay in the works - until then, you can find me on twitter.com/Alex_Pinetree

first and that my thumbnail :) and FACE REVEAL

the song random gods has always been really impactful just in the depth and discordance of it, but it wasnt until now that i realized it has the same motif as sundown and moondown. deeply emotional about it now. again.

I’ve listened to all the tracks with the opening melody and it’s very powerful, yet soothing. It perfectly captures the bittersweet and breathtaking feel Rain World has. It’s relaxing, but holds some amount of tension. It’s sad, but carries hope. It opens and it concludes. It does everything the game needs it to. It contrasts itself in its usage. It’s used for moon and pebbles, two characters who are so similar, and yet could not be more different. The opening of the game and the goals it presents are the polar opposite of those presented in the ending. Its used so well in every instance. When used in moon’s chamber, it makes you feel sad for her. You look at this creature and hear that melody and it just makes you sad. But compared to Pebbles, it brings out fear in a player, even if they can’t help but admire him. But it brings out the same sympathy for him especially if you really get into the lore. Pebbles and moon make me unreasonably sad if you can’t tell

I enjoyed the video. It's a shame it wasn't on my feed 2 years ago. Good luck with your channel, if you're still doing it.

I can say some reasons why it felt so powerful to me in steps: -The game is lonely. You are alone, everything familiar is dead or lost, and mechanisms seem to have mostly ceased. -You spend hours, dozens of hours traversing a harsh landscape with animals actively hunting you. -You come across, most likely, Moon, to show you that there is something bigger in this world you don't understand. -Lastly, before coming into the area, you likely encounter memory crypts, the leg, the underhang, etc... which are some of the most difficult parts of the entire game. Then when you enter this area it's dead silent, you know you're at the peak of the journey, you can feel you're approaching something big. It confuses you with all this anti-grav, power cells, neurons, weird little machines, etc...to double down on the "approaching something big" feeling. Of course, there's still a couple ways to die in here, but for the most part, it's empty. It immediately releases all the tension and allows the player to start to think about the game. So what happens when you enter that room with Five pebbles? You realize you've found what you're looking for. You have a goal, the world is not dead yet, you finally have the biggest piece of the puzzle that you've been missing. And the game sends you out of his chamber to ponder on it, with Random Gods playing to give that existential melancholy feeling. It's a good moment and it forces the player to THINK about what just happened.

Great video!

I think for me the second time entering Pebbles's interior was extra powerful. Realizing that all those little light flashes are some guy's thoughts is something else, it makes you feel small and insignificant in the best way possible. Paired with the music, it paints a beautifully melancholic picture.

I know that I am very late to this video but I just must say that this probably is the best or second best video about roguelike design that I have ever seen, definitely hope you make more stuff!

Best intro ever. Thanks.

One of my favroute moments in rainworld downpour is when you are playing as rivulett and you go into memory crypts, the first screen looking normal but then you see a rot cyst. It realy shocked me and it was super well done

there's no feeling quite like hearing "random gods" for the first time. also, a small trivia i really like. the downpour DLC adds another track tied to Moon called "random fate", which is a slower version of "sundown". it's grim, almost menacing, but very, very sad. and in the context of the game, the title of it just Hits. Pebbles, who randomly decided to play a god, being the reason of Moon's tragic fate.

I'm pretty good at predicting if channel blows up, did that with 15-20 channels. I'm telling you, keep making videos in this style, and you will get thousand of subscribers in a matter of few months.

Nice video, keep up the good work

I think the contrast of Random Gods and Moondown is even more emphasized with the Downpour DLC and Random Fate. Random Gods is an angry, loud, chaotic track, which is perfect for Pebbles, who's very frustrated and angry. So angry he distorts the theme to be almost unrecognizable Random Fate plays in Looks to the Moon's general systems bus as she's dying due to Pebbles. It still has that grandness and chaos of the original track but is much more calm. The Moondown motif is much slower, but still recognizable. Random Fate contains no anger like Random Gods, just sadness and pain to distort it. Moondown is the purest form of this theme, only distorted by loneliness, Moon by the time we hear this is too broken to be angry or sad anymore.

8:18 Oh, shut up! You don't get to decide what a "roguelike experience" is when you haven't actually experienced any real roguelikes. You casual losers fight for a definition of a genre you never even played!

I did a spit take at your quote about fighting fire with fire ending up with a bad noita run been there way too many times.

this is a very very good video that touches on views i wouldnt think to ever actually hear anyone voice