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Friday Fun Thread for March 22, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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For people interested in indie games with weird physics: 4d golf just came out. I've played it for a bit over an hour now and I'm really enjoying it. From seeing footage in devlogs which the dev posted before on his youtube channel, I was kind of skeptical as to how well it would work. However, despite still not feeling like I completely understand what's going on all the time with 4d space, surprisingly I got a bit of an intuition for it pretty quickly. Only in one very long course in an extra challenge level did I end up getting completely disoriented and having no clue where I was and where I should go.

It's by the same dev as Hyperbolica, an adventure game in non-Euclidean space (mostly hyperbolic space). I enjoyed Hyperbolica as well, but that felt more like a boring adventure game with a fun gimmick which I happened to like a lot. I just had fun walking around in a hyperbolic world and some simple mini games and puzzles became fun because they required you navigating through hyperbolic (and in one case spherical) space. However 4d golf actually feels like a fun game. Obviously mini-golf isn't a revolutionary idea, but because we only have the fun bit where you have to navigate through 4d space without it being dressed up as a mediocre adventure game, it feels less gimmicky to me.

If you are interested in how a first person game in a 4d world works, or in non-Euclidean worlds for that matter, the dev has a bunch of devlogs on his youtube channel trying to explain the concepts behind it and explaining some of the issues in developing the game.

For people interested in indie games

Everyone's playing Balatro.

Wait, how does hyperbolica compare to HyperRogue? I wasn’t driven to get very far through the latter, but hey, it’s a cool concept.

I’ll have to try golf.

I think Hyperbolica does a much better job at getting you to experience hyperbolic space, because you actually walk around 1st person in a Hyperbolic world, whereas HyperRogue uses a top down perspective and tessellation to represent hyperbolic space.

One big difference is also that HyperRogue is much more challenging. I've never really played other roguelikes, but I think they are supposed to be very challenging and HyperRogue sure was for me, which also meant I did not get very far. Hyperbolica being a pretty straightforward simple adventure game almost feels like the opposite, where it was pretty short and easy and for me it almost felt more like a showcase for the concept of a 3d first person hyperbolic game, than a fully fleshed out game in its own right. That was not a problem for me by the way, because I think the concept is so cool that I am more than happy to pay some money for a good showcase of a hyperbolic world in which I can walk around 1st person, but it's good to have realistic expectations going into it. For reference, looking at my steam library, I have 3,5 hours in Hyperbolica and completed the game, whereas I have 11 hours in HyperRogue and I feel like I achieved almost nothing in it.

In some sense HyperRogue is probably a much better game, at least if you are into roguelikes. As an experience of hyperbolic space however, I much prefer Hyperbolica.