LogFAQs > #932568318

#44





Years of release: 2012 (PC)
Beaten?: No, and I doubt I ever will

I really, REALLY wish the rest of my list was as interesting as this. Frankly, aside from a few oddball picks on this list, MOST of it I think encompasses pretty average tastes; it's a pretty standard list of Nintendo and popular indie titles released in the last ten years. But once in a while, I'll stumble across, and fall in love with, something really strange, and I wish I did it more often.

The Fool And His Money is probably the most obscure game on this list by a rather wide margin. A sequel to the Mac puzzle game from... I want to say 1987, The Fool's Errand (another obscure game I happen to have played and loved), TFAHM is perhaps the most difficult puzzle game I've ever played, and if you want to buy it, you won't find it on Steam or any other digital storefront - you need to go to Cliff Johnson's personal website and send him an email saying you want to buy it for like 30 bucks. I have no regrets about doing so - Cliff Johnson is exactly the sort of outsider game dev who I want to support. (I recommend signing up for his email list of terrible jokes and other weird stuff just for the experience of having done so.)

This game is extremely weird in a way I can't really describe to you. It's gaming outsider art at its finest; a game of nearly impossible word puzzles and mysterious Tarot card inspired challenges with an odd artstyle and even odder prose, all of which builds up to one big meta-puzzle that I have not yet solved. I don't think I ever will. Some of the puzzles in this game are barely solvable; others are absolute hell. I hope you really like word puzzles, like, a lot. I've gotten about 75% of the way through, and I haven't felt compelled to look up the answers or anything - I want to solve every puzzle on my own, if I can, because it feels rewarding to finally crack a puzzle I've spent over an hour on. If I don't solve every puzzle, and I never beat the game, I think I'm prepared to accept that. Not all games need to be beaten, especially not puzzle games. Perhaps I will come back to this one and solve some of the puzzles that have stumped me to this day. Perhaps I won't, and I will always have this personal little mountain left unclimbed to my dying day. Either way, it is mystifying and fascinating, to have my own personal puzzle hell taunting me. Damn you, Cliff Johnson.

I can't recommend it to everyone. I don't know if I can recommend it to anyone. But if there is one little weird corner of gaming history that I would like to introduce you to, in a bid to make my gaming taste seem WAY more interesting than it actually is, it's this. It's extremely creative and an impressive labor of love - he worked on this game for years and years, and it should have been a game of the 00's instead of a game of the 10's. Even among all of the retro aesthetics of this list this one feels like a really weird throwback, but I'm glad Cliff Johnson finished his insane magnum opus, and my life will never be the same for it.