The Stack

And now for some unfinished business. Last year, I was in the middle of a game when the IF Comp started up. Unlike this year, I abandoned it in order to play the comp games. So, it’s been over a year since I looked at this game — enough time that I feel like I have to replay the beginning in order to get back into it. This is of course one of the ways that the Stack maintains its size. This time, however, I am unabashedly playing at a lower difficulty, adopting the same attitude as I did towards Etherlords towards the end. And the content is familiar enough that I’m most of the way through map 2 already.

That familiarity. It hit me like an ocean wave to the face when I started the game up after a year’s pause. If learning a game makes circuits in the brain, those circuits go dormant when you stop playing. But, being dormant rather than dead, they perk up again at the right stimulus and merrily go through their paces, grateful for the attention. There’s a real pleasure there that you don’t get from just playing the latest games steadily until you get tired of them.