﻿I don’t care how fancy a new game’s graphics are,
or how many guns its… guns have.
What I want to know is: do I need to take out a little notebook and jot down some names?
Draw a rudimentary map? Connect some… dots?
What I really want to know is: should I be taking notes?
I know I’m not alone in this. I’ve found plenty of people asking across internet forums for
‘note-taking games’ or ‘notebook games’
or ‘journaling games’... there are a lot of boring names for this.
But the games! They’re not boring! These are games that breach their digital
confines, filling up the pages of our notebooks with strange hieroglyphics and the cat scratches
of a mind enthralled... by a mystery. These physical relics may come from
playthroughs of modern games, but they harken back to an earlier era
of gaming when the game’s manual was a critical part of the product.
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, when memory on game cartridges and floppy discs was limited, it didn’t
make sense for developers to take up precious space with instructions and diagrams.
So a game’s manual typically included control layouts, lore,
and hints not found in the game itself. Check out this “menu” for Rootbeer Tapper,
or the kickass winged snake art for Vanguard, which looked like this…
[peepeepewpew laser sounds]
One of the most famous and gorgeous examples is the Legend of Zelda manual. It’s full of
colorful art, enemy and item descriptions, and helpful early game maps. Seven pages alone are
dedicated to setting up the story! Other manuals went even further.
Some contained the solutions to puzzles that acted like a sort of proto-DRM. Startropics included a
letter written by your in-game Uncle that you dipped in water to reveal a hidden code.
Thanks, Uncle! But a common feature of a lot
of these manuals, usually in the back, was some blank pages for the player to take notes.
- PlannedObsolesence: I guess it’s for you, the player, to write things down if you wanted.
- Clayton: This was an era before guides were ubiquitous:
figuring out puzzles or mapping out a game world was up to you.
And using a pen and paper made decrypting a game’s mysteries much easier.
These days, it’s not hard to find blogs, forum posts and Pinterest boards filled with
images of people’s hand drawn maps or puzzle solutions for games like Myst or Zelda.
These became precious keepsakes for people, a testament to their journey through the game
and a relic of their adventure. It’s hard to know if this was the
intention of the developers at the time: game graphics were rudimentary, so puzzles
and environmental clues were more obtuse, which made note-taking much more of a necessity.
As technology progressed, game manuals became less and less of a memory saver,
shrinking down in size and detail.
Today, digital sales have made them all but obsolete. And the note-taking games
that made them such a treasure faded along with them, into a distant, sentimental memory.
[Fez soundtrack: melodic and gentle but fast-paced synth music]
It was nostalgia for this era of gaming
that partly inspired Phil Fish’s 2012 puzzle platformer Fez.
The throwback graphics and gameplay evoked that feeling of exploring a
world teeming with unexplained secrets and cryptic puzzles, aided by one of the
best video game soundtracks ever.
[Glorious, relaxing synth tones]
The player’s ability to switch dimensions was the
perfect mechanic for hiding (and uncovering) clues.
Quite literally, you could never see the full picture of a level all at once.
They were packed with hidden areas, wild power ups, and even an in-world alphabet.
Like so many other games of a bygone era, this type of puzzle sleuthing was
made much easier and more compelling if you kept a notebook of your work,
a method directly inspired by Phil Fish’s experience playing the Myst follow-up Riven.
And these are some satisfying puzzles to solve, the kind where you feel lost in the dark,
grasping at straws right up until the moment your brain is slammed so hard by an epiphany that you
practically fall out of a chair. When I played Fez, I used my notebook
to keep track of glyphs and hidden messages I uncovered, along with my ongoing attempt
to translate the game’s language. Keeping a notebook became so associated
with the game that a fantastic Tumblr blog was created just to show them off.
It illustrates what made Fez so special: it wasn’t just riffing on a visual or even
auditory nostalgia, but a tactile one. A throwback not just to the games we used to play,
but how we played them. It’s how Fez was designed,
and it required drawing on another aspect of these kinds of retro games: complexity.
As Patrick Stafford wrote in Unwinnable magazine, “Complexity is handling
many different factors all at once – a juggling act of thought and skill.”
2005’s God of War was difficult, but it’s not complex: you move through the world and defeat
baddies. That’s kind of all there is to it. But in Fez, you had to constantly be on the
lookout for clues, while also juggling multiple interconnected series of puzzles, on top of trying
to solve the level’s platforming challenge. And before you could even begin to understand
most of the game’s secrets, you had to decrypt an entire alphabet.
And you had to be really dedicated to solving these things, because the clues
could be spread across multiple levels and the game didn’t signpost them at all.
Which was another big change that occurred alongside the decline of
game manuals in the early aughts. As the Playstation and Xbox dominated
the market, developers and publishers wanted to reach wider audiences.
So they’ve relied on things like huge, on screen button prompts, super detailed quest logs,
and literal bread crumb trails to lower the complexity and thus, the barrier of entry.
I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing: not every game needs to be complex.
And it’s not like notetaking games completely disappeared.
Rather, notetaking was mostly relegated to murder mystery games,
like those based on Sherlock Holmes, Nancy Drew, and the works of Agatha Christie.
They literally made a million of these. And no shit, Sherlock!
This is a literary and cinematic genre that’s loved by millions of people, so its games haven’t
always followed the larger gaming trends. But unlike mystery books and movies,
where the plot must ultimately reveal the solution, mystery games give you the chance
to be the detective, with a notebook full of all your little clues.
That’s exactly how I felt as I puzzled through Her Story.
This Full Motion Video game, released in 2015, gives you the chance to play the detective
as you watch clips from a police database and try to unravel a murder mystery.
The real actors bit isn’t the only throwback here:
The game is also a lot easier and more immersive with a notepad at your side.
It’s not at all the same reason you’re taking notes in a game like Fez: unraveling Her Story’s
mystery is the entire experience. But like Fez, Her Story journal-pilled
a lot of people, us included. And I think it’s partly because of
the way the game’s note-taking perfectly complements the amateur sleuth the player
is essentially roleplaying. And that’s why I think so many of
today’s best note-taking games are murder mysteries… or murder mystery adjacent.
But a lot of people view note-taking as, essentially, homework. So game developers
have figured out ways to preserve the essence of note-taking while making it optional.
[twanging banjo music]
Outer Wilds is a space mystery
about a dead alien civilization; an intergalactic who-dunnit, if you will.
As you dig deeper into the enigma of their disappearance, you encounter physics-defying
puzzles, hidden shortcuts, and uncover long lost journals spread across multiple planets.
It’s a level of complexity that would beg for detailed note-taking,
if it weren’t for the clever way the game helps players keep track of clues — not in a list,
but in a web of connections. With just a glance, you can see what
threads still need pulling, while easily reviewing what you’ve gleaned so far.
You can also take a break from one branch of the mystery and hit up an
entirely different line of questioning. It stays true to the messiness of a notebook,
while keeping everything well organized, like a conspiracy tack board made by Marie Kondo.
[spiraling violin riff]
The Return of the Obra Dinn’s setting
is quite different from Outer Wilds: instead of playing as an interplanetary
archaeologist, you're a maritime insurance agent conducting an audit.
But I promise almost everyone was murdered! You unravel the fate of each unfortunate soul
onboard the vessel by piecing together if, but more likely how, they died.
You aren’t told if you’re right until you get a trifecta of correctly identified victims,
which means sometimes making a wild ass guess is the correct path forward.
Since you’re solving this question for every person on the Obra Dinn, it ends up being an
overwhelming amount of information at first, but it can all be easily tracked using
the game’s built-in journal. Filling in its blank pages is a core
feature of the game… along with a magical pocket watch that lets you see how a person died.
That part’s also cool.
[plucking mysterious tune - synthy but old]
You can see another take on the idea
of a “fill in the blank” style mystery in The Case of the Golden Idol.
As players collect clues from its strangely charming murder scenes,
they accumulate words in a bank at the bottom of the screen, which are then used to fill in
a short summary of what happened. These words and names are also used to
complete some smaller puzzles that ultimately make solving the central who-dun-it easier.
This built-in clue tracking freed me of the need to write down every little thing,
so instead I could fill my notepad with charts and tables and even literal math equations that I
needed to solve in order to close the case. …
Okay, so it is kinda like homework.
These are games that put logic and deduction front and center, but they're not the only way developers
have paid tribute to the mysterious vibe of gaming’s earliest years.
In fact, Tunic does something even more unique.
This isometric adventure game walks a similar path to Fez,
riffing on the nostalgic experience of exploring a world with little context or direction.
It also has a killer soundtrack.
[glistening, ethereal synths and piano]
But what makes Tunic special is that it takes the idea of a game manual
and makes it part of the experience, tossing the player a new page as a reward for their progress.
The pages are mostly written in a fictional language and require some intuition and lateral thinking to parse.
And much like Fez,
even deeper puzzles are hidden inside both the game and the manual.
Bringing it all full circle, the in-game manual also has notes scribbled in the back,
left behind by another “player”.
I took some crucial notes while I played Tunic, but
nowhere near as many as my coworker Nicole Carpenter did.
She kept a journal of the game and filled it with drawings and diagrams, which
you can see in her review on Polygon.com
- Nicole: And I also collaborated with my partner on it.
So he did some of the drawings and I did some of the drawings and that was really fun.
- Clayton: Nicole, like me, is an avid game note-taker.
- Nicole: So I'm always looking for a reason to use a notebook
because I'm one of those people who like, I'll buy a new notebook and it will save my life.
[Clayton laughing]
You can also see how many notebooks I have back there!
- Clayton (off-screen): Oh yeah.
-Clayton (voiceover): I shared my Fez notes with Nicole and
she showed me some of the journals she’s created over the years.
- Nicole: This is the Hitman — this is one page from the Hitman one.
- Clayton (voiceover): I wanted to talk to her about a game that takes note-taking
even further than all these other games:
because it makes keeping a game journal the entire game.
In fact, it’s part of it’s own little genre called —
-Nicole: “Keepsake Games”
- Clayton (off-screen): Ohh, I like that.
- Nicole: — which are games where like, the game itself is creating a journal.
So for the game Field Guide To Memory —
- Clayton: — a game where you play as a cryptozoologist doing actual fieldwork!
- Nicole: — it has prompts that you get sent every day.
Like, it wants you to write a letter to like, another scientist…
So like, you write the letter over here.
And then sometimes it's like,
go out into nature and collect some leaves or something.
And uh, then journal about the leaves, or like, draw the leaves,
and then write down what the species name is,
and do some more research at your computer. And like, that's all part of the game.
- Clayton: This niche genre is called “Keepsake Gaming” because at the end of the experience
what you have left is a physical keepsake of your journey. Which is also the case with
so many of the note-taking games I love.
I can always play Fez again, but this little notebook
brings back the memories of that first bewildering playthrough,
from the moment I started teasing out the game’s deeper mysteries
to the revelation I experienced finally translating that damned alphabet.
Which is funny, because one thing in common with all of these games
is that I wish I could forget I ever played them
if only so I could experience playing them again.
You should give it a try! I promise, keeping a gaming notebook
doesn’t sound as much like homework as it might appear.
And I also expect your assignment on my desk Monday morning at 9:00 am sharp!
Don’t act surprised, it was in the syllabus.
[dreamy synth music builds]
Thanks for watching my video! If you’d like to get started journaling your own games, well,
now you can do it with this exquisite Polygon branded notebook.
It’s full of paper.
That’s right.
Paper.
[dreamy synth flows on]