Hemingway had some excellent advice for where to break off for the day when you’re working on a long piece of writing. Maybe it works for more than just writing. I think Hemingway used the analogy of drilling or mining – of course he did.
Anyway, the advice goes like this: if you’re breaking for the day, don’t break just before you have to write something difficult. Break before you have to write something easy. The easiness of what you have to write will bring you back in the next day and let you get properly on your way.
This is great advice. I use it myself! And it’s unsurprising, I guess, that I’ve been thinking about it while playing Metroid Dread over the last few days. Metroidvanias are wonderful games – they offer you complex worlds to explore, and they make sure that the ways you explore them are constantly evolving as you collect new gadgets and also, crucially, as you come to understand things more. The best Metroidvanias always leave you with a few possibilities to think about at any moment – a few possibilities scattered across the emerging map. A great element of the tension of these games, for me at least, comes from this feeling:
We Played Metroid Dread and It Really Is Terrifying – New Metroid Dread Nintendo Switch Gameplay Watch on YouTube
But there’s a problem with all this. For me at least. Metroidvanias are quite intense games to play – they require your total attention. Inevitably, I need to play them over the course of a few months, with breaks now and then. But those danging threads! Those scattered things that I told myself to remember! What then? Put something like Hollow Knight down for a week and it’s very tricky to pick up again, because what you have to remember is not just how the dash works, but all of those interesting potential leads you were carrying in your mind, all of them flung across a complex landscape. Picking up Hollow Knight after a month away would be like trying to restart a half-finished doodle, an artform that these types of games often resemble. You know, a single unbroken line taken on an extravagant journey.