McMillen has made a card game before: Binding of Isaac: Four Souls was a hit, but it also had a level of challenge and complexity on par with card games like Magic: The Gathering. Tapeworm, on the other hand, was designed to be picked up and played intuitively, with deeper strategy emerging through interaction with other players, not necessarily a litany of rules and conditions. Tapeworm looks a lot like dominoes on the surface, but unlike dominoes, Tapeworm is not an objectively bad game. Players connect various segments of different colored worms to build out a tangled mass on the tabletop, but there are additional abilities, like cutting off a section or hatching new worms that make the game extra strategic and competitive.
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There is often a debate in video games about the merits of accessibility compared to the creative expression that some developers find in making their games extra challenging. Alongside the likes of Dark Souls, Edmund’s games are often brought up as examples of titles that use their difficulty to their advantage and make a point of being tough. As Edmund himself said when asked about the challenging nature of a game like Super Meat Boy, “It’s about perseverance.”
That perseverance is very much the point of games like Super Meat Boy and Binding of Isaac. The player is meant to try over and over again, which fits into the story or overall feel of the game to create an emotional response in the player.
The visuals of Tapeworm fit right into the morbid and adorable style that McMillen is so well known for, which caused a bit of concern for some of the game’s early critics. Edmund was told that if he designed the game to look like trains instead of worms it would do a lot better, but he expressed to us the desire to stick with the same themes that had inspired so much of his other work. When asked if those dark themes always translated into gameplay, he just had this to say:
It seems like most of the challenge in Tapeworm comes from the other players. Edmund stated that he wanted Tapeworm to focus very heavily on the social aspect of a card game, and the interactions that spring up naturally between players. With the ability to predict what other players have in their hand, force others to draw cards, and even lock them off from being able to play anything at all, Edmund described a very interesting dynamic between players who picked up the seemingly simple game and found deeper and deeper layers of strategy. “I wanted to make a game that people could sit down and instantly know what they were doing. And then as they play they discover more strategy….”
The Kickstarter campaign for Tapeworm is live now. Check it out here.
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