The Binding of Miss Magi

Gaming isn’t that accessible. A lot of times, I play a game and immediately know what’s going on and how stuff works. Attacking, moving, kiting, strafing, and all of that sounds logical to me because of experience but then I mention “accessibility” in my reviews and talk about subtitles, key remapping, graphics options, etc. but I never really talk about beginner-friendliness.

The reason why I mention this is because I can’t really talk about beginner-friendliness because I’m not a beginner. Even if I start a game from a new save file and no nothing about the game I still know how other games work and I end up winging it more or less. I get a grasp of things quickly… Meanwhile, Ms Magi hasn’t played that many games apart from maybe Mario Kart and some Wii Games as well as Animal Crossing: New Horizon, which she recently picked up and started playing on her Switch. So, I made her play Portal a while ago and she wasn’t really able to figure things out because moving while also moving the camera are quite hard for someone who hasn’t really played games that require that. I planned on making a post on that but forgot to take notes and… Razbuten made a bunch of videos on that, on YouTube, where he documents how “the lady he lives with” handles new games.

Either way, today I made her play The Binding of Isaac… She failed in the first room that had combat in it. It was interesting to see. I think the main issue is that Isaac may be a great game but it’s incredibly hard. She often wouldn’t realise that she can hold the shoot button or that she could shoot while moving and stuff like an enemy spawning flies would also not be that logical to her, which is why she died quite quickly. And I found this interesting because I haven’t had the chance of experiencing an all-new Isaac because I played the Flash-Version and Rebirth and Afterbirth and Afterbirth+ and now I started playing Repentance and while I was never really good at it, I enjoyed it and had a lot of fun with it so far… and the appeal of a very hard game that resets all your progress once you died sounds cool to me but Ms Magi still doesn’t get the appeal of it or it’s just not her cup of tea.

It’s gonna be interesting to let her play games like Hades or Forager in the future. I’d like to see how she’d deal with stuff like Yoku’s or Ori or maybe even Skul. It would be cool to see her play a bunch of different games and I may want to document it all. I personally can’t play Outer Wilds really because I know everything about it already. If I were to forget everything, I’d love to play it again but until then my first playthrough of the story ruined the game for me because a game that is all about Mystery and Exploration doesn’t work all that much anymore if you already know all of it. Hence, it’d be phenomenal to see her play it for the first time and to see her react to it and to her find out about all of it. It’d be amazing to see how she’d fare in the game or what she’d think about it.

Today, she found Isaac cute at first when I showed her the cutscenes and stuff but she found it quite disturbing once she realised that you’Re shooting tears. Yup. It may not be apparent really, especially since I didn’t tell her anything about it but she quickly realised when she saw me play a run that “tears up” means that your tears are stronger and hence, those orbs you shoot? They are tears! And then there’s all the poop piles and spiders and all of that stuff… Or me shooting a razorblade through my eyes as Isaac…

A game she spotted in my library though that looked interesting for her is Turnip Boy commits Tax Evasion, a cute little Adventure game that I’ll review soon once I get the chance to do so. Would be lovely to have her play that, too, or to have her check out A Short Hike or Ape Out or anything else that is Indie and that doesn’t require too much camera movement, etc.

Either way, I just figured I should talk about this for a little bit and I may write some posts on Ms Magi playing games and stuff. I’m having fun seeing her experience all of this stuff that I really love and adore… and even if I’m not the biggest Animal Crossing person, I enjoy letting her show me around her island and stuff. It’s super cool how much she loves it and how terraforming works in that game and stuff. :D

Hope you enjoyed this post! Would be interesting to have Ms Magi on-stream eventually but I’d have to make an avatar for her, too, in that case. Oh well…

Cheers!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!