Filament-ary, My Dear Watson

Over the past week I've been playing a game that came out on Friday called Filament, and while I don't usually talk about my gaming hobby that much here on my blog, I have to write a glowing review of this game. It's a puzzle game with a very simple premise: you play a spacefaring traveler who comes upon a spaceship whose crew has disappeared, except for a disembodied voice over the radio from the pilot who's trapped in the cockpit. You wander about the rest of the ship and find “anchors,” where you control a little robot who can spool out an infinite amount of cable after itself in little puzzle rooms. They're explained as you “decrypting” the ship's logs to figure out what happened, and to progress you have to use the robots to wind cable around pegs in such a way that you've touched every one at least once in order to progress. However, you can never cross the cable you've already laid down, and those two simple rules combine to make a wide variety of puzzles from easy to brain-breakingly difficult.

The art style is also perfectly matched to my likes, very stylized and clean.

It's a very simple premise, but there are all kinds of additional obstacles added in various puzzles: sometimes literal obstacles, which block your path and force you think more outside the box, sometime more interesting puzzle conditions, like needing to have wrapped some pegs before being able to wrap others, having multiple robots (with multiple cables) in one room, or needing to run the cable over pads on the floor as well. The whole thing has strong connections to the mathematical fields of topology and graph theory; I often find myself, while stumped by a fiendishly difficult puzzle, thinking: “Surely there much be some theorem in topology to help me winnow out the impossible options here and narrow it down to the correct sequence of wraps to make to finish this level!”

Here I am in the library, trying to decipher what looks like a binary code on these servers.

Make no mistake, these puzzles get hard, and I am absolutely loving the experience. The story you unlock bit by bit is very engrossing, and keeps me coming back to throw myself at particularly difficult puzzles over and over again in hopes of finding out more about what happened. (I haven't finished the game yet, actually, so please no spoilers! I normally don't care about them but I find myself caring very much with this game for some reason—perhaps because the scraps of knowledge are so precious for having been so hard-won.) Here's a shot of a puzzle I've been stuck on for probably at least 20 minutes now:

This puzzle variety also requires you to run the cable through the four “light screens” you can see here.

I can't neglect to mention the music, which makes a soft, quiet, meditative background to your brain sparking and shorting out. It's very soothing, and loops so well that I could listen to it for hours. (And have!) I bought the “Marmalade Edition” which came with the soundtrack, and am looking forward to listening to it the next time I paint. (It's named after a particular character in the game, who all have color-themed nicknames assigned.)

The game is set up so that you can wander around at will and try any of the available puzzles, which helps negate the feeling of being stuck and unable to progress which is all-too-easy for puzzle games to fall into. If I'm having trouble with a particular type of puzzle, I can go and try a bunch of other different types instead. Sometimes I'll come back to a puzzle a day or two later and find the solution suddenly coming to mind. In fact…

After firing up the game to get this screenshot, I figured it out in about five minutes!

All in all, I can highly recommend Filament if you want to give your brain a real workout. And not just the puzzles; there are also secrets scattered liberally throughout the spaceship, in ways that make them incredibly satisfying to find. I once picked up a tray of seedlings in the botany lab, and discovered a secret code encoded in the way the plants' leaves were pointing at each other. I found another in the contents of a vending machine, and another as a binary pattern hidden in sets of four lights being on and off. There's a lot going on in this game under the surface, but the pleasant background music and engaging story make me want to keep coming back for another round of being thoroughly, utterly stumped.

Forget Princess, I Want to Be an Astrophysicist

Back in January I showed off the picture below of a Christmas present from my mother. I've finally finished painting it, and it came out quite well if I do say so myself. Here's the original canvas:

And here's the finished version:

I really, really like how this came out. There's a few minor blemishes—mostly invisible in the photo—where I over-painted the boundaries and need touch them up when I get access to the Midnight Blue I used for the background again, but on the whole this gives me joy every time I see it. You might notice that the stars are all colored as if their sizes correspond to their relative masses, with the smallest being reddish, then orange, yellow, etc. I had to get creative with some of the colors since I finished it at home in quarantine without my full range of pigments, but I think it looks good. I decided that what looked like a ringed planet with a star coming out of it was actually a black hole with accretion disk devouring a star, and since I happened to have my Black 2.0 at home I was able to make it work. I'm glad to finally be able to show this off, it's been an interesting exercise in constraints painting it. While I've gone for very simple, solid shading much of the time I've also gone for more subtle and realistic shading in places, but I've stayed within the lines everywhere without adding anything. (I thought about stretching the accretion disk into photon rings around the black hole, but decided to stick to the lines.) Anyway, I now have this hanging behind me at my computer desk at home to continually remind me of my vocational aspirations. A hui hou!

Happy Easter 2020!

Happy belated Easter, everyone. I hope you're all keeping snug and secure wherever you are this Easter season.  I've been meaning to get around to posting something since the end of March and just haven't gotten around to it until now, but only because working from home is still working and leaves me too tired most evenings to feel like composing a piece of writing. I'm doing fine other than that, and I'm currently enjoying the (very) long Easter holiday weekend we get at Swinburne—Friday through Tuesday. (As usual, it takes about three days for me to start feeling creative again after a work week.) I've got several ideas for posts that are pretty much ready to go, including a few painting projects, so look forward to those in the near future.

And if you're feeling cooped up inside and isolated this year, just remember that our Lord was too the first Easter—but now we can have hope that such things end. Eventually. A hui hou!