takunomi-blog/drafts/puzzle games.md

Want to talk about Capybara games and game Clash of Heroes and Grindstone.

So the process of _Tetris_ and _Street Fighter 2_ merging into _Puyo Puyo 2_, and how casual games develop from Tetris, and eventually _Bejeweled_ and _Candy Crush Saga_ and the likes appear.

RPG spins appear like _Puzzle Quest_ and Square-Enix's _Gyromancer_ (Nov. 2009), but it is Capybara's _Clash of Heroes_ (_CoH_) that continues to blow my mind. A project they worked on for multiple years as _Little Big Battle_, while they were doing licensed projects for pre-smartphone games. Eventually the most creative company in the universe, Ubisoft, made a deal with Capy to use the _Might and Magic_ license and setting for their puzzle game, and the game was released as _Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes_ (Dec. 2009).

Some ten years ago, Capy seemed to be a very vocal company. Their producer Nathan Vella, and often-director/designer Kris Piotrowsky would appear many places for talks and interviews. These last years though, Capy has disappeared more and more from the spotlight. They worked on _Below_ for a good many years, while the game industry changed. Smartphones aka _Stupid Devil Slates_ and their games, came to rule the public's attention (despite normal gaming not actually shrinking in user-bases).

In 2018, _Legends of Solgard_ was released. I played this quite intensely in the winter of 2019/2020. As has come to be expected from mobile developers in these days, it's a shameless clone of _CoH_ with a more more insidious loop to make people return and eventually throw money at the game. _LoS_ does away with the decent story and thoughtful balancing of _CoH_ and instead attempts to just create a far more accessible and digestible experience. It of course fails spectacularly because of the nerdy setting in nordic mythos. There's a reason why Farmville appeals to a hundred billion players. Normies just want farms and plants. Not faeries and weapons.

We all know how iPhone games went from being 5 bucks, to 1, to free, and becoming impressively dumber along the way. In 2019, Apple madea an attempt to remedy this situation by making a subscription service for quality. As usual, not actually because anyone that matters at Apple actually cares about video games, but whatever, a whole bunch of cool games suddenly appeared without any warning.

Among those, was a game from Capy, the recently oddly quiet game company. Supposedly the idea came about in the days of _CoH_, but much had changed since then, so instead of a surprisingly good storyline and a world to explore, _Grindstone_ took the effective parts of modern mobile games, and simply had a vertical map of a trash-ton of levels in succession.

There is something interesting seeing Capy create such a wonderful game as _CoH_, then ten years later it is bastardized, while Capy comes back with a thoughtful attempt at seeing if the progression that mobile game has done, could possibly be used for good, with _Grindstone_.

The irony is that I've had to abandon both _LoS_ and _Grindstone_. _LoS_ was just a stupid game, that emanated a disgust for me as human. _Grindstone_ on the hand, is such an elegant game that.... well it just goes on forever. It never asks me to pay money to unlock gems to buy upgrades, or expects me to return everyday to keep me locked in to the experience. It (unfortunately) just goes on forever.