Pen and paper games
A niche genre.
They might involve hurried arithmetic, amateurish maps, doodled floorplans, scatter-brained lists.
Sometimes you gotta use a pencil.
Here are the 9 best games to play with a notepad.
Tunic
There is a joyful way to summon nostalgia and there is a cynical way.
Tunic does it the nice way.
If you’re like me, your note-taking instinct will kick in.
Maybe even take a stab at translate a few of the game’s mysterious hieroglyphs.
You think this is unnecessary?
Try leaving Tunic unplayed for a week and coming back to it.
Even the profound sense of being lost is period accurate.
“Window,” you write, trying to understand basic facts.
you scratch down, confused and curious in equal measure.
“Hair,” you scribble, with a terrifying realisation, underlining it twice.
“HAIR,” you write again at the top of the page.
“IT’S ALL ABOUT HAIR.”
You push yourself back in your swivel seat.
You pick up the pen one final time.
“HAIR STORY.”
All the same, there is something satisfying about discovering and recording these things for yourself.
Humans love to catalogue things.
It’s why Argos exists.
Crusader Kings 3
I keep a “to do” list inCrusader Kings 3as well.
“Don’t die,” it says.
“Evaporate the English into nothing,” it says.
“Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.”
Calm down, me.
Look, here are some strange symbols.
And some more, but these ones look… different?
Oh ho, look at your little eyes glimmer.
I think someone wants a Bic and an A4 sheet stolen from the printer paper tray.
Any Zachtronics game
What is logic?
How do clocks work?
Why do computers beep?
These are ancient mysteries, and have never been resolved.
You mostly muddle through the wire-plugging and instruction-programming without the use of extensive notes.
But every so often a puzzle comes up that requires a plan.
A bubble diagram biro’d onto a napkin.
A flow chart scratched onto the back of some nearby cardboard.
Zachlikes don’t make you sit down with a notepad from the first moment.
They ease you into the logic of their mechanisms.
You don’t do that?
Okay, I admit it, I have the memory of a teabag membrane.
Just click options and stroll on through.
But you’d be missing out on some fine word nerdery.
The bunch of squiggles that means “river” comes out as something like “wet-thing-moves-high”.
And that river doesn’t “flow” but it “do-move-water”.
To fear is to “death-know” and to love is to “life-hold”.
“Just doodling,” they added, to the silent ticker tape of one million likes.
All the above persons are alt accounts of mine, and I wish to set the record straight.
But one of these was no surprise.
It’s…Spec Ops: The Line.
Because I say so.
