Textual Pornography

A year and a half ago, I threw together a game called The Sorcerer’s Detritus real quick like for a game jam in the Thinky Puzzle Games Discord. It’s a game where you control a magician’s hat that accidentally falls into the sewer, and you have to get back out. The original concept of the game was a ripoff of Toki Tori for the Game Boy Color, where every level you’d have a limited number of special actions based on magic tricks (like using a balloon to go higher, or sending a rabbit out to knock yourself forward across a gap), but that wasn’t super exciting to me and one action felt like it was potentially much more interesting than the others, so I made the game completely about that instead.

https://chz.itch.io/the-sorcerers-detritus

The game is one of the simplest I’ve released. Here’s a complete list of the mechanics, all of which are covered in the tutorial (except for one interaction between two mechanics which I forgot to include, but it seems everyone discovers it in level #2):

1. You can move left & right
2. There’s gravity
3. You can push one or more objects
4. Pushing a key into a lock opens it
5. There are thin, one-way platforms you can move upward through
6. If there’s space above you, you can create an object directly beneath you, pushing you up one space

That’s the whole game.

The level design is also insultingly simple, with a few levels only having a single obstacle. Like, here’s level #2:

That’s it. That’s the entire level. It looks like a joke.

People get stuck on this level for 20-30 minutes, because this game is somehow the most brutally difficult game I’ve ever made, by a wide margin. This catches everyone who plays it by surprise, because it feels incongruous that such simplistic mechanics and levels could possibly lead to complex situations, yet it does. Analyzing exactly how they do is a bit beyond the scope of this post, but the condensed version which may not make sense if you haven’t played the game is that because your ability to move objects upward is fairly constrained, ending up in a situation where there’s an object directly to the left of a key is highly problematic, so most of the trouble spots in levels are figuring out how to avoid that situation.

Since I made this game mainly for a Discord of puzzle nerds, and because it’s so difficult, I never really made any effort sharing it anywhere besides tweeting about it one time. (Not that I ever particularly share my games around anyway.) So it got a bunch of plays and funny reactions from the Discord server around when I released it, and then afterward it got maybe a couple of daily views from people searching for PuzzleScript games on itch.io. But…

So you probably don’t know this if you don’t have an itch.io creator account, but the user dashboard has analytics: you can view a daily graph of project views and a list of incoming referrers from the past 30 days. Occasionally I’ll get a notification on itch.io after getting a new follow or comment, and when I’m there sometimes I’ll just check the dashboard out of curiosity. And since I released The Sorcerer’s Detritus, I’d occasionally get a couple of hits from some weird referrer in the list, and when I looked into it, it’d inevitably be someone linking that game for some reason. For example, were you aware that Rate Your Music has forums? I wasn’t! But there was a thread about puzzle games, and someone had to link it because it’s one of the hardest games they’ve ever played.

Random links like this from reddit and whatnot continued intermittently until the start of this year, when things escalated. I got a bunch new followers in January, well not really a bunch in absolute terms but definitely compared to how many I normally get in any given time period (0), which seemingly corresponded with the game being included in this list of “the best puzzle games” that someone made. Which is a really bizarre inclusion to sit aside every other game in that list, but the guy said he just liked it a lot.

And then after noticing yesterday that I got a couple of new comments, I opened the dashboard and uhhhhhhhhhhhh saw this

Normally the y-axis of this graph is labeled in multiples of 10.

Apparently LilAggy, a speedrunner/challenge runner who’s played Sekiro at Games Done Quick events a few times, streamed my game. Twice! He introduced the game in his first stream by saying he was told it’s very difficult, so I guess someone showed it to him and challenged him to play it? It took him about three hours in the first stream to get through the first four levels (the majority of that being on level #4), and then he came back a couple of days later and got through the back half in an hour and a half. And now one of the top hits for the game is a video of that second stream calling it “The HARDEST puzzle game no one’s ever heard of.”

The game hasn’t exploded or anything. It’s still under 10,000 views total. It’s not getting a bunch of YouTube face let’s play videos (though there’s now a walkthrough video too lmfao). But to the extent that anything I’ve made can be described as “infamous,” I guess I have something now that’s infamous. Feels weird! It’s cool that my hastily put together li’l game that’s way harder than it feels like it has any right to be has somehow ended up having some bizarre charm for a bunch of folks though.

I don’t know if it’s going anywhere from here? Maybe this was just a random blip and the game will just sink back into obscurity where it belongs. I love it here in the dark, it’s cozy. Hate being perceived.

Also, if any part of this post made you play the game: sorry.