This week on exp.
This was a really difficult one to write about, and while I really hesitate to bang on about how exp. needs your support to continue at this level, well, it does, so please consider supporting us on Patreon (preferrably), ko-fi, or pick up a zine or the book. Here, I chose to dig into a banned game with heavy themes that reflect the current moment of moral panic, but which I found… inconclusive. Would love to hear what others thought of it, or what I wrote about it.
Speaking of people getting in touch to say what they thought of a game, I’m still surprised by just how many people have popped up to say they love this one. I hadn’t heard of it before!
Wrote about this one all the way back in 2014 and was surprised to look Signal Studios up and discover that they’d quietly gone out of business in at some point in 2023, their last release a HD remaster of the original Toy Soldiers that no one liked. One of the only things I was able to dig up about the closure actually was a tweet from the official Toy Soldiers account: “TSHD was not handled well by the publisher or me—limited resource, tons of delayed/bad dev caused by idiotic public policy and other unexpected events—deals fell through—over time—resources gone—the rest is history.”
exp. Capsule Reviews
Mindset GO! (Magicave, 2025)
Spent some of the last few weeks playing this mobile and web puzzler, and as it’s been made by friend-of-exp Ste Curran I can’t in good conscience give it a “proper review” but I do want to recommend it anyway. In fact I’ll go ahead and explain that I’ve already recommended it to other people as an antidote to a few things–engaging with anything from the New York Times, a propaganda company with a games arm (or vice versa) or playing any of those fucking terrible games that show up when you use any mobile app with ads (more on that on a bit though.)
Mindset GO! is the kind of design where when you play it you think “wait, how have I never seen this before?” as it features an incredibly simple design: you’re just sorting shapes based on one or more feature that they have. If they’re a triangle, or yellow, that sort of thing. You put them into circles, which might intersect as a Venn diagram does–meaning you need to put yellow triangles there, but can put just yellow, or just triangles, elsewhere–and you don’t necessarily know what all the features required are.
This starts embarrassingly easy, but quickly gets… difficult. The Venn diagrams become more complex, and then suddenly you’re sorting (say) wee cat faces instead of big simple shapes. The thing I most appreciated about this game is that you can feel your brain expanding as you work out systems and techniques to beat harder and harder levels. Almost subconsciously you find yourself pre-sorting shapes, or able to keep two concepts in your mind at once that you couldn’t before. It’s deeply, deeply satisfying, and it’s all wrapped up in a terrifically thoughtful UI.
As highly as I recommend it, this is a free-to-play mobile game, and you therefore have to engage with that whole… thing. Meaning mobile ads rear their ugly head here if you don’t quickly stump up the no-ads tax, and if you’re determined to stick to free-to-play while you’re feeling the game out, every single part of this carefully curated puzzling experience is smashed to bits when what feels like out of nowhere you get an ugly, often broken slop advert for whatever the algorithm has decided you would like best (it’s certain I’m a woman in her mid-50s, obsessed with her dying plants but unable to get up from her chair to do any exercise.) This really means that you basically have to spend the $3.99 to enjoy this on mobile really before you get to the point where it gets its hooks into you. As a result, you may wish to play the web version at first, then make up an account to save your progress?
Weirdly, one of the main reasons to play this now is to play and enjoy the real thing before you start seeing its clones advertised in its own ad slots. Some weird AI voice saying how playing “Shape Sorter” will stop you getting Alzheimer's, or maybe an entire fucking streamed version of “Venn Diagram Royale” you have to play through where you have to shuffle a bunch of diamonds into a circle to stop a king being squashed by, I don’t know, a big Monty Python foot or something. Why the fuck are we supposed to be saving a fucking king anyway? If god chose him god can bloody well save him from rising sand or being dropped in some lava, the sponging prick.
Other Zines
"Due to POPULAR DEMAND I'm doing another print run of my Ridge Racer Type 4 fanzine."
"Catch up on missing issues, or jump in with some big savings. This promotion is applied at checkout and runs until the end of the month."
"For the first time in 35 years, COMPUTE!’s Gazette returns to serve the vibrant retro computing community. This premiere relaunch issue is packed with exclusive news, in-depth articles, community stories, and classic type-in programs that celebrate the golden age of computing."
"I'm launching a weekly newsletter that brings together all my writings, podcasts, videos, and creative endeavours in one place for your unmeasurable pleasure. If you like what I do, you must subscribe. Your life depends on it."
(Ok, that last one isn't a zine, but Justin Decloux is one of my favourite people and he does so much incredible stuff, you're going to want to keep up. I mean you already subscribe to this rubbish, don't you?)
And Finally…
This article, The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con is, I think, the most important, insightful thing you can read about the AI mania full stop. It's from a few years ago, but if anything more important to read and understand as AI tries to create a stranglehold over the mainstream. Share it with anyone who might be buying the hype but considers themselves rational. It gets to something really key about AI: it's not "just" a scam: it's an illusion that preys on our urge to fool ourselves.
Next week on exp.: A legend? No. The legend.