Remember Oblivion’s wheel system for grinding NPC disposition? You probably do, since a very popular remastered version of that game came out a single year ago. But if not then, well, you Skyrim kids don’t know what you’re missing. Where the most recent Elder Scrolls (the one that’s 15 years old), only let you affect your relationship with NPCs by completing quests and joining factions, Oblivion would let you affect everyone’s opinion of you granularly, via a wheel-based minigame you could drop into mid-conversation.
Was it good? No. Was it intuitive? No. But was it representative of the actual experience of building up a rapport with other human beings? Again, no. No wonder then that it has become an object of cathexis for a certain generation of videogame players who found themselves developmentally T-boned by Oblivion’s jelly-clockwork world at precisely the right age. We miss it, we yearn for it, and some of us have brought it back—for the second time.
Voting is currently ongoing to pick the winner (who will get, uh, nothing tangible—”DO IT FOR THE LOVE OF THE WHEEL,” beseech the jam’s organisers), but the submissions are all playable now. Heck, you can fire up 27 of them in your browser, just as the flash games of olde.
I’ve mucked about with some of the submissions and, yep, many of these are utterly inscrutable, which is only proper. My personal favourite so far is probably A Contrario, which puts you in the clogs of a vapourwave artists’ mannequin whose combat system is a wheel-ised selection of seasons, but I’m not willing to call it my winner just yet. I still need to check out Wheelfox 64 and The Wolf Of Wheel Street.
The jam’s voting period ends in about five days, but the games will still be playable afterwards. See you next year for Wheeljam 3: Gettin’ The Grease*.
*I just made this up. Please do not put Wheeljam 3 in your calendars just yet.
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