Gameplay Minimalism

I have found a couple of games featuring minimalist gameplay recently. It’s surprising how much addictive can they get.

Usually the games offer a lot of complexity and you get hooked up on that. Take some (real-time) strategy games and dissect them. You have to deal with a lot of stuff in order to properly play these games – building your bases, climbing the technology tree, gathering resources, training and managing units, knowing their strengths and weaknesses. This type of games is both addictive and exciting, but takes a lot of time to learn. I would call gameplay in these games broad, as opposed to deep.

Now switch your thinking from the Command & Conquer franchise to something more simplistic, like Harvest: Massive Encounter.

Harvest is very addictive. It took the essence of turtling from real-time stratregy games and built its entire gameplay around it. You don’t get to manage units. In fact, you don’t even get to train any units at all. You just build your defenses and see how long can you stay alive. The simplified goal of this game is just to stay alive, as opposed to complex goals that classic real-time strategy games have: protect resources, expand, conquer.

And who doesn’t remember the good old Desktop Tower Defense?

Check out these two games: One Button Bob, Robot Unicorn Attack. You use just a single mouse button to play the first one, and it’s pretty challenging. The control is modal – pressing a mouse button results in a different action in every level, and you’re given no initial explanation – you have to figure it out on your own. The other one just uses two keys to control your actions. I spent quite some time enjoying these games and I tip my hat at their creators.

No conclusions here. Draw your own!