When I wrote my little reminiscences of Leisure Suit Larry last week, I thought back on a game that to me wasn’t so much about a loser hunting for ass, but about illuminating how depressing is that particular occupation.

LSL was particularly opaque, too, and frustrating — this let it have fun at the expense of adult players, but had the side-effect of making the concept of “adult” seem particularly curious-making and mysterious to my young mind. I thought I could solve the gap between my child’s mind and the world of adults if I only mastered the game’s terse vocabulary, made sense of its crude imagery.

If you haven’t yet heard, also partially-inspired by old Macintosh shareware, I made my new “game”, THE SEX CHAMBER, to try to recapture some of that confounding opacity, the feeling that something deeper and out of reach was always lurking beneath a system that was either unwinnable or broken somehow.

The biggest hint I can give about the game is that it’s not broken at all — or rather, it feels broken when it ought, and you can get through it by being systematic.

Recent years’ evolution in game design suggests clarity is the most important thing you can give the player — actionable feedback, a logical understanding of the impact of your behaviors. And it’s not that I disagree, but I very much enjoy well-made games (not like mine, games that actually feel good) where there’s a salting of calculated randomness, and the intentional obscurity of information.

“Randomness you can make an informed decision about,” says Klei’s James Lantz, talking to me in this new interview I did about Incognita, the upcoming procedural strategy game where information is the most precious resource. Neat insights into their process of hewing the game from a vision, too.

Last week I also interviewed Ben Cousins of DeNA about The Drowning, and the intriguing idea to put “core content” on iPad while using the short-session action mechanics of a game like Bejeweled Blitz. Cousins has, as usual, lots of fiery insights on the decline of the console market and the disruption on mobile for indies and big guys alike.