Revisiting Xenotilt

Thanks to my last post, multiple people recommended Xenotilt to me. I indeed purchased Xenotilt at launch and had already played 3.5 hours of it. But for whatever reason, I just could not get into it at the time.

I owe Xenotilt a huge apology. It is a better game than Demon’s Tilt. There’s just so much more: more flippers; more player agency; also, a lot more chaos; more adversaries and visual clutter on the table; more movement; more strategy.

Most important, there are many, many more pathways, more tracks around the table, particularly leading out of the lowest playfield. In video pinball games it can be frustrating to get ‘trapped’ in the bottom field, circling the drain; in Xenotilt, there is almost always a surprising avenue upward. (Pinball class mobility?) There’s seemingly more U.X. generosity, more flipper-collision forgiveness, as well. Which is good!, because the table’s attacks on the little ball are a lot more aggressive this time around.

There’s even more ‘monstrous feminine’! I love the theming of the original Demon’s Tilt, pitting the player against Lilith, who is sort of the voice of the ghost in the machine; in Xenotilt, the player’s ball is explicitly trapped inside the belly of the she-beast. Terrific. (Everything—everything—reminds me of the Jonathan Lethem novella This Shape We’re In.)

So why couldn’t I get into Xenotilt before now? I honestly have no idea. As best as I can figure, I was just already at full capacity. I could not have handled any “more.” In times like those, I guess, we look toward the comforting and familiar. Better the devil you know and all that.

Plus I think, in times of insecurity, we might have a tendency to gravitate toward things we are already good at, and I am not very good at Xenotilt. I don’t feel competent and in-control, which is an embarrassing reason to deny myself a more satisfying experience, but that’s exactly what I’d been doing.

Well! That phase has passed, so now I can enjoy Xenotilt as it is.

King’s Quest VIII may have been universally critically maligned, but it was the cat-hair mustache in Gabriel Knight III that bore the brunt of blame for the death of point-and-click adventure games. And I’ll admit I, personally, was always able to believe that’s when adventure games died, because that’s the exact puzzle I got stuck on in Gabriel Knight III, and internally I was like, whoa, maybe adventure games are dead for me. (Which is ridiculous, because Blade Runner and Grim Fandango came out around the same time, and those games were lit—but it’s true that Gabriel Knight III is probably the last Sierra game I ever received for Christmas.)

Unlike me, Dia Lacina was able to wrap her brain around the cat mustache puzzle—adding that she’s only sure she solved it because she distinctly remembers getting stuck on a later, entirely different puzzle. “[Y]ou can imagine my surprise,” she writes of recently replaying GK3, “when the cat mustache puzzle turned out to be one of the most fun and riotous moments I've had playing an adventure game.”

Read her retrospective of the game here:

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