More backlog: Polygonal Fury

I've been meaning to write about Polygonal Fury from Armor Games for some time, and if I wait much longer it's going to be 2010. As is, it's already been months since I played the game and because I didn't jot down any notes at the time, I only have a vague recollection of why I thought this game was particularly blogworthy (apart from the fact that it was fun enough for me to finish). As a result I'll just use Polygonal Fury as an opportunity to poke at the game vs. simulation question due to the manner in which the player has somewhat peculiar limitations on how they exercise agency within the game space.

Polygonal Fury from Armor Games, Level: Insane 4

To take a step back, Dan Norton of Filament Games has a framework he's devised for discussing games and simulations which I had the pleasure of helping him refine a few years ago when he was my downstairs neighbor. The first assumption when working with this framework is that there is a simulation running underneath all games, digital or otherwise. To put it another way, something is being modeled and that underlying model creates the parameters for what you can do within a game. What makes a game a game is the positioning of the player in relation to that model.

Now to get to the core business of Dan's framework (which he really needs to blog about one of these days over in the Lightbox), games are games because players have roles and goals within them. No roles or goals, no game, just a simulation. I don't want to go into this too far here, except to say that Dan has noted that most games provide the player with significant roles and goals, although some tend to be light on either the role or goal side. He will often highlight SimCity as a role-light game and MSFS as a goal-light game (yes these things can be argued about, no this is not the place to do so).

Polygonal Fury falls clearly on the role-light side of things. The role of the player is generally unclear  despite some vague background narrative about a Polygonal Empire and reactors (I often wonder why people bother writing this sort of perfunctory narrative frame for games that are fun enough to stand up on their playability alone). It does, however, have clearly defined goals. In short, "Try to clear as many polygons as possible in each level." There's a three medal system layered on top of this, and achieving higher medals awards more points which allows for better upgrades, but I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

The main point I want to draw out here is that the player in Polygonal Fury has well defined goals which mesh in a somewhat unusual way with the actual game mechanics. You have three types of polygons that show up in various ratios on different levels: Circles, Squares, and Triangles. Circles blow up after a few seconds doing damage radially (AoE) to nearby polygons, squares shoot off in a random direction damaging polygons they collide with, and triangles will shoot a beam at another polygon at random. Effectively, this means that you have a fair amount of control over circles, more limited control over squares, and the least control over the triangles (except that you're guaranteed they will annihilate, or damage, at least one other polygon).

Apart from choosing which polygons to click while playing a given level, the only other control the player has in the game is allocating points to different upgrades. Each type of polygon can be upgraded granting it a more powerful effect, a more persistent or larger effect, or an increase in the number of "super" shapes of that type. The number of mouse clicks and damage per click can also be upgraded. I realize writing this that, as when describing a comic strip, the greater meaning is more or less stripped away through a recount of the artifact. That said, if you play the game you will likely find all of this very intuitive.

Coming back to my main point here (after having gotten sidetracked trying to gold medal one of the medium levels on a second play through), the positioning of the player in Polygonal Fury is very simulation like. Primarily, you manipulate point allocations to jigger the underlying model into behaving appropriately for the goals of the level you're playing. To a limited degree you can exercise agency in choosing which polygons you click on. However, with the wrong point distribution there's no way that you'll beat the harder levels in the game, while a mis-click can sometimes be more effective than clicking on the polygon you were aiming for since you never know where a triangle will shoot or which direction a square will fire in.

The bottom line: Polygonal Fury, play it. I'm not going to guarantee that you'll like it, but it's an interesting departure from the usual jumping, shooting, and collecting verbs that tend to dominate the gaming landscape.