LogFAQs > #932343851

#83





Years of release: 2015 (PC), then ports to every VR thing every year since
Beaten?: It's complicated

Can you play a game without ever picking up the controller or even seeing the screen? This is a fascinating question that Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes sets out to answer. For a while, this was the most interesting game that I'd ever played but never actually played.

This is a game where one person actually plays the game, looking at a bomb with a bunch of different indicators on it, but lacking the instructions on which wires to cut and buttons to press to defuse it; they have to call out what they see to either one person or a team of people who are not looking at the game screen, but have a pdf of game instructions in front of them, and they must relay the instructions back to the player to tell them what to do.

It's a pretty cool and kind of experimental concept. I played several hours of this one day with a couple of friends over Discord chat - I knew what the game was, but I never saw the game's screen or had any idea what the player was even doing. I was just sitting in front of a computer with a pdf open and that's it, listening to someone else ask me what's in the pdf and I try to relay it back as quickly as possible. It's funny how, even though I never actually had the game open or was even looking at it, I was 100% participating in the act of playing Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes. Despite having no idea what the game looked like or how it played.

Arguably, the pdf half of the game is actually the more intense portion - the bomb defuser just has to call out what they see, but the instructions-having people are the ones who have to quickly look it up, decipher the rules, do all the math and tell the bomb defuser what to do. The defuser kind of winds up a spectator, just hoping the people with the rules in front of them can figure out what they're supposed to do. Effective communication is really key though and figuring out how to convey all the important shit you're seeing on the bomb is a hard skill to master. There's a lot going on here and it's one hell of an entertaining team-building exercise.

I did actually finally get to play this game in the role of the defuser, and I played it on a VR headset - this game is great for VR, since having the goggles on is a really effective way to ensure the other people can't see what's going on, and being able to hold and rotate the bomb in your own hands is really nice. After two years of having no idea what the game even looked like, I finally found out, and it was kind of revelatory and exciting. Oh, so this is why the game is so confusing for the bomb defuser, I thought! It would have been fun to have this game on the list having never actually "played" it though.