Spoilers AHEAD!
I’ve found taking notes can increase the enjoyment of a game. And it turns out there are others who are also game note-takers. Mateusz Skutnik‘s new/old game Daymare Town recently came out, and if you aren’t familiar with his work, he is an artist and game developer who has created a number of point-and-click adventures. His work has timeless appeal and even 20 years later people are still playing these old Flash games!
If you plan on playing this game: Do Not Read This Post until you have! Stop Now!
I have never played the original Daymare Town and so i was very excited to play this recreation of the original game. And with all of Mateusz’ games, I need to take notes. But as I sat down and opened up my notebook, I realized how lame text-based notes are in Mateusz’ world. His use of cryptic symbols and oddly shaped objects would usually mean I write in a text file something like ‘need thing with two dots to open the floating circle doohicky’.
So I thought, what if i ‘zhuzhed up’ the notes and drew them instead? Maybe that’ll be better?
Turned out that it is much better than just writing things down.
I think the main benefit for me was that it slowed down the game play and allowed me to more thoroughly enjoy the experience. Instead of rushing through getting thing X to unlock Y, I would doodle these items to keep track of where I got the item. It also helped me to track and remember the details more, so that I would focus on areas that I hadn’t explored. When I got completely stuck, I would just look at the notes and kind of ‘meditate’.
Below you can see that I have a few puzzles in a line: these were things I just couldn’t figure out in Chapter 3. This chapter was BY FAR the hardest for me. The biggest blocker was that I had to give a sleeping pill to the head guard in order to get the passes and continue to the last part of the chapter.
Frequently I would take notes of things that just didn’t matter. That’s one of the interesting things about Mateusz’ games: there is a lot of random things that feel like they might matter but ultimately don’t. I was obsessed with getting 5 cogs on the pegs only to find out that…they didn’t do anything? Well technically they give you an achievement but I was expecting something more important.
So I still don’t know what to do with Garbage Guy, Cyclops Fireplace, and Hooks From Nowhere below. You can see I was definitely feeling some things when writing these notes tho.
I’ve gotten to 59% achievements and we’ll see how far I go (i’m not much of a completionist). But again, another high recommendation for this latest new/old installment. It works great on Linux, fyi.
I think i’ll likely continue to ‘game doodle’ moving forward. Perhaps I’ll post more here in the future. Stay tuned.