henke on 19/3/2025 at 11:37
(
https://knifedemon.itch.io/brush-burial-2) Brush Burial 2 Demo just dropped, and this is how you're
supposed to play it:
[video=youtube;M0wHJmSYGgo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0wHJmSYGgo[/video]
I tried the demo, I could not play it like that. Managed to kill like 1 or 2 guys before getting shot every time. It does feel more polished and accessible than its predecessor tho. Could be good if you really get into it.
Nameless Voice on 20/3/2025 at 00:03
Quote Posted by henke
And it's weird how there's no shops in the second half of the game, so you end up with a ton of money and nothing to spend it on, except the occasional protein-can vending machine.
You can take the tram / elevator back to HQ in a few places if you want, though there's not much point. There's really not much to buy in that shop anyway.
Aja on 9/4/2025 at 22:32
There was an interesting conversation brewing in the UFO50 thread about immersive sims, and I thought I should move it over here for posterity.
Quote Posted by Aja
Maybe it's sacrilege to say this on TTLG, but when it comes to imm sims, I think what I like best is that they usually give you lots of room to explore at your own pace. Strip away the exploration and atmosphere down to pure mechanics, and suddenly I'm not so interested.
Quote Posted by demagogue
Oh man, it's funny that me & henke had a little discussion about just this (what Aja is talking about), and I was already thinking about it when he mentioned Rail Heist. But that was for me playtesting a thing of his. Actually it wasn't on this directly, but indirectly in talking about just other details and mechanics of the game, but this kind of thing is what I was thinking.
I'm not going to talk about that at all, being behind closed doors and all, but it overlaps with what we're talking about with Rail Heist anyway & I can just give some general thoughts around the topic.
Also, the thing is while I'm on Aja's side on this, I also get what henke was/is thinking too.
I could probably write a long essay on this. I'll try a short version.
In my vision of imm-sim-ism, one of the core parts is that there are all of these open & unbiased or neutral systems that are just doing their thing that don't care about the player, but the player can game them to make progress. Part of that ethos is there's also a bigger world happening doing its thing that also doesn't care about the player. But the idea is that there's something that feels much bigger than the player, and the player is immersed in it.
For some things it's minimalist, like parts of the game that cater only to the player or game-as-such and/or are necessary for gameplay reasons, the big example being GUI elements (for Thief/Darkmod: the light gem, frob highlighting, inventory icons). The classic imm-sim ethos is that those are minimalist. You want just enough for them to do the job and be aesthetically elegant, but otherwise you want them out of the way of the rest of the world that's not supposed to be caring about the player being there.
But for the world itself, you want it rich with things you can interact with, e.g., in Thief/Darkmod: the way you game space and paths, narrow and broad paths, run and sneak, side & z-axis paths, shadow and light, different material sounds, the way tools change the safety/risk of space, etc.
So that's the way I think having a big world that invites open exploration with lots of systems you can game in open ways is important to the whole imm-sim ethos.
But again, I get henke's attraction to having a really sparse game world & systems that are whittled down to a few core mechanics that you can game, like the way Gilligan's Island can be this tiny metaphor or microcosm for all of society (a character is an entire social class, etc.), a very sparse game can be a microcosm of a bigger imm-sim. For that kind of game, it's great when they don't have any fat on them and capture their mechanic in a really tight but still open way. (I'm playing an old C64 game on my phone for breaks these days called Rags to Riches where you're a hobo trying to become a millionaire that's really pared down like this, & I love how much it does with such bare mechanics.) I don't think I'd call that style of game imm-sims for the same reasons I was talking about above that me & Aja are mentioning. But if someone did call them a kind of imm-sim, I think that's still fair, or not unfair. They're at least imm-sim adjacent.
I like both, but I'd just say that both have a different ethos & speak to a different mood you may have going into a game, whether you want your world and gameplay really rich with interaction and possibility or very pared down to very bare and tight mechanics.
Okay, maybe not such a short version. I tried. =L
I appreciate this perspective; it's not something I had quite thought of. Horizon, as an example, is a huge, beautiful open world, but I never really felt compelled to explore it, and it might be because it lacks that richness of interactivity. The environments are great for admiring and as arenas for combat, but there's no functional difference fighting in the desert or in the jungle. Breath of the Wild is better in that regard, perhaps because it gives you more ways to approach any scene -- from climbing to gliding to, in Tears of the Kingdom, zapping up through the floor -- and the world is more reactive, with falling trees, grass catching fire, et cetera. But clearly (and contrary to what I said above) my love of immersive sims is not only about exploration, otherwise these open-world games would make me feel the same way a good imm sim does.
I'd always rather explore a sprawling Thief level, and I think it does have something to do with what you're talking about. Thief levels are designed not only to be architecturally complex, but even within individual rooms the materials, sound propagation, and lighting lend a richness to the act of exploring that most open-world games lack ("lend a richness" has to be one of my top 10 phrases on TTLG).
And Thief in particular feels uniquely grounded. (Dishonored and Deathloop come close). The more you play Thief, the more consistent a sense you get of how your virtual body is physically situated within the world. Sound is reliably informative. Your tools have weight and consistency in their collision. It's almost always clear what you can and can't do, and the cumulative effect of all these design choices is, as you say, the feeling of a world that's bigger than the player.
I want to use this as an excuse to talk about Deadly Shadows, which I've recently replayed. Twenty hours in and I still have no idea where my feet ever are, and I get stuck constantly. Blackjacking is a weightless canned animation. In OG Thief I'd sometimes accidentally bang the blackjack on a torch or barrel and trigger an alert, a realistically clumsy mistake. In DS it's purely context-dependent (you can hit other things, but you never would because you wouldn't swing unless the preload animation triggered). Enemies don't seem to have as much of a sense of their environment besides their immediate surroundings, and they don't navigate it smoothly. The lighting is hard to read. Materials exist but are largely ignorable, and sound propagation is less consistent than the originals. It's also never clear how much sound you're actually making. And all that's before we even get to the level design, which is somehow both overly constrained and too mazelike.
I can understand why people liked it, because as a stealth game it's functional and even fun. But while it has all of the imm sim features on paper, none of them work well enough. They feel disconnected and inelegant, and as a result that sense of a greater world, that makes me want to regularly return to (and inhabit) the original games, never coalesces.
So to circle back from that tangent, yes, I think you're correct about what makes good immersive sims such a pleasure to explore, that the sense of place is bolstered by the complexity of the mechanics. While I might not gravitate toward imm sims that are stripped down to just those mechanics, stripping out the mechanics is maybe as detrimental to their appeal. It's such an interesting subject.
demagogue on 10/4/2025 at 01:25
Thanks for the thoughts.
The two quick data points I can add are...
1. Most of my thoughts on this come from working on Darkmod. I only worked on a few small things (the sound system & stealth score), but I grew to have a lot of opinions just giving comments on other people's work. But the point is that I really solidified my ideas about what makes a good imm-sim from that experience, everything I mentioned before. Also the idea that you shouldn't dictate to a game what it is. You start with a concept, and then you shut up and listen to the game telling you what it wants to be. And for me that defined the imm-sim ethos ... gamey things like GUI can & should be there when they must (when it's dumb to simulate directly), but if they're not necessary, there's no reason to throw them in; and even when you should, they should just do their job & get out of the way. But the world should immerse you in systems & living possibilities. Everything you just said.
But it's another thing to actually unpack that idea for lots of different systems, like a frob-highlight-locator-dot, whether we should make non-functional doors & windows look different from openable ones, whether the stealth score should count up from zero or down from something, whether "action music" when you're spotted or some event occurs is a good idea or not, etc., etc. It's interesting the arguments that have erupted by people's different interpretations even about the same values.
2. It's interesting you mention Breath of the Wild, since the other game in the back of my mind was Sable, which is a slightly-less-cartoonish BotW clone. What I liked about that is, even though most of the game is desolate deserts and wastelands, with the simple addition of a cool climbing mechanic, suddenly all of the megastructures in the desert came alive as living spaces you could engage with, and half of the game became about figuring out how to climb these increasingly challenging structures (and often you were rewarded with loot & lore for the effort), and exploration became a lot more fun because now you were actively looking around you for those challenges as you explored. If I ever make an open world game, that's gonna be a big inspiration for me.
heywood on 10/4/2025 at 13:48
Along the lines of what Aja said, interacting systems alone isn't enough to make an imm sim. For me, immersion comes from a combination of narrative, atmosphere, richness, and freedom. Take any of those elements away and I'm not so immersed and lose interest. For years, I kept trying to like open world games. They're often fun to explore for a while, but eventually they start feeling shallow, grindy, or too full of unimaginative pasta. My preference is for richness over size. Also, I don't get into sandbox sims and base builders because I need the gameplay to serve a narrative purpose. I like the interactive fiction of adventure games, but I'm bored by puzzles and want character development and multiple approaches to problem solving. It's fun mastering game mechanics, but I can't play pure sims and shooters for hours and hours anymore because I get bored of repetition and grind. My favorite imm sims blend elements of all the above. As I get older my taste in games seems to get narrower. It's kind of the opposite of music and food where I'm always looking to try something different.
Aja on 10/4/2025 at 18:44
Thief is my favourite game, period, but I don't think any other immersive sim would crack the top 10. So maybe I just like Thief.
Dema, should I get Sable? I've had it off and on my wishlist for years.
demagogue on 10/4/2025 at 19:26
If you liked Breath of the Wild then for sure, since it's the same kind of game.
You're exploring these vast open spaces for the equivalent of the temples and special areas, like massive set pieces, that have platforming-like puzzles.
Then on top of that the aesthetics are great & the story and lore are cool.
It's also a Bildungsroman, a coming of age story where you have to figure out who you are & make a choice by the end, which I liked.
BotW was cartoonish & arcadeish by comparison, which is fine; I just liked Sable playing it straighter.
Then it's sandbox on top of that, if you just want to go desert fishing or mountain climbing or secret hunting.
---
Y'all are preaching to the choir about Thief here of course, but what I liked about its formula is that it perfected the combination of great gameplay and storytelling. For one reason, because usually the story is going on around the player, and your main job is usually to stay out of its way, just ghost yourself around it and watch it play out, as opposed to any gameplay where you barge in to blow everything up and make the entire space & everybody there only about you being there, or it's just a walking sim where you're not engaging with the world at all, just only watching it play out as if you (the player behind the player character controlling it) aren't even there except to move from story node to story node.
I got so into that idea of the way Thief (& Darkmod) integrates gameplay & story plot that I wrote a whole (
https://wiki.thedarkmod.com/index.php?title=Story_and_Plot_Design) tutorial about it for mappers designing their FMs.
---
Edit: Oh I was also going to say that a big draw for me to imm-sims is definitely related to the way I get into sims generally, like pure driving sims like BeamNG.drive, especially after you can literally build your own car in the game Automation and then upload that car to drive in BeamNG.drive, then flight sims like DCS and IL2, and I guess the sandbox stuff like Minecraft with the mods (BuildCraft, the alchemy one, etc.), the Rogue-likes (Caves of Qud) & Elite-likes (my favorite being X4), and I think about Paradox games like political sims. (I want to see a political sim at a lower level though, like I was thinking of making a mod of Skyrim where you're getting support of a town & its people to become Jarl, and then king of the whole place, not just by script but you're really gaming simulated political & elite opinion.)
One part about it that I like is kind of hard to explain... Randy Smith once made a post about how devs can make their worlds so that players can perform rituals in them for their own sake. Like I remember playing Minecraft on June's server back in the day, when I was exploring I found a really spectacular high point very far from the spawnpoint, and it was suddenly really important for me to climb up there and build a little chapel and shrine up there. Things like that. And sims and imm-sims are the kind of games that let you do that. I think ghosting in Thief is something like that, not just that you beat the level, but you did it in this specific way that has meaning to you and your time in there.
But I can agree with the part in heywood's post that I still think it's important that imm-sims have stories attached to them, which is separate from pure sims or sandboxes. I love sims & sandboxes, but I like that imm-sims are different on that. You're also making progress with some narrative in them, so everything has a significance or meaning in terms of the story and progression through the plot, that perfect balance between open world but plot progression (not necessarily always linear), which you can tell from my tutorial.
I could write a lot more about it, but you get the idea.
Starker on 10/4/2025 at 23:13
When I think of open world games, Far Cry 2 still feels the most real to me. And it's mostly doing it with systems -- it's the fire spreading in unexpected ways, it's the diegetic map, it's the weapons breaking and forcing you to improvise, it's the healing that takes ages to complete, it's the reputation system affecting your interactions to a fairly minute detail, including not only how people talk to you in and out of combat, but even who will talk to you.
I think that lore, story, etc are hugely important for making a place feel real (it's a big part of what makes Morrowind work for me), so they matter for immersion in that sense, but without diegetic systems and systemic gameplay it doesn't quite work either.
Interestingly, I've heard some people say that Pacific Drive engenders a similar sense of place as Far Cry 2 for them, but I'm stretched too thin to check the game out any time soon.
PigLick on 11/4/2025 at 03:42
Aja, I definitely think you would enjoy Sable. The visuals are excellent in a very "arty" way, and it really feels like you aren't the main character. The beginning tutorial bit I found a little annoying, but once you get out into the world,it really clicked.
There is some narrative direction, but it's really about exploring around and finding stuff, also I'm not one for platforming, but the way the jumping puzzles are presented feels very organic.
henke on 30/5/2025 at 20:58
Fallen Aces is getting a level editor soon, get a loada this!
[video=youtube;9L33m41Xttc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L33m41Xttc[/video]
