The End of Gameplay. It's a good game. Or games I think. Sort of inhabits a space in my brain that the now-deleted "Rules Elide" essay does for TTRPGs where I don't really. agree with it fully but I do think it's a really useful tool/lens for a game maker to have anyway? Like having a thorough understanding of a variety of philosophies of making art does inherently make you better at making art I think.

I never played Starseed Pilgrim. I don't want to misrepresent Droqen's message but from what I've read in the various texts surrounding The End of Gameplay I think they kind of regret making it? Or maybe not regret but it's a game which they think in hindsight is a negative game somehow, in that its use of a game loop and near complete absence of deliberate level design makes it a kind of "time waster" which doesn't benefit its players at all. From my understanding "Kill Gameplay" is something like a broader take on the idea that all these mobile games that exploit dopamine loopholes in our brain to waste our time and money are evil. Applying that not just to the most egregious examples but to a much larger class of game design, anything formulaic or algorithmic, which puts the player interacting with a system rather than as closely as possible with the artist who made the game. And I don't think I (or you) need to fully buy into that in order to benefit from killing gameplay from time to time, just having the ability to borrow that perspective for a bit is invaluable.

The poetry is good if you like poetry, the platforming is good if you like 2d platforming (I like both of those). I've long been fascinated with the out-of-bounds areas in game levels and so I'm always delighted when a game plays a lot with that in its level design. Umm I feel like I have more to say and I'm forgetting but I've run out so there that's my review.