Disk Cleanup
Welcome to Disk Cleanup, our regular weekend feature delving into the PCs of PC gaming luminaries. Come back every weekend to read a new interview, digging into the important questions, like “How tidy is your desktop?” and “What game will you never uninstall?”
Alasdair Beckett-King first encountered games through playing Dizzy on a ZX Spectrum bought by his parents. “We got a second-hand Spectrum with a black and white monitor. I don’t even know if kids know that was a thing. So I played Dizzy in black and white. It’s a hard enough game in colour!”
When he eventually got his hands on a PC, Beckett-King was drawn to adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island and Full Throttle. It’s a passion he’s maintained all his life, through film school into his initial career as a game developer, creating games like Nelly Cootalot and the Fowl Fleet, and Unforeseen Incidents.
Alasdair Beckett-King
Alasdair Beckett-King is an award-winning British stand-up comic, YouTube sketch creator, actor, writer, podcaster and adventure game designer. He’s got a lot going on. You can watch him on Mock the Week, or catch his new show King of Crumbs during his UK tour.
Gaming has also played a role in Beckett-King’s rise to prominence as a comedian, a regular subject of his meticulous YouTube sketches like ‘Every Guy In a Video Game’. Lately, he has also appeared on panel shows like Mock the Week and 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, and has just completed the first leg of his UK comedy tour King of Crumbs, which has been extended for an Autumn run. “I’m going with the line ‘tour extended due to moderate demand'”, he says. “I considered ‘overwhelmingly moderate’ demand, but that seemed too self-deprecating even for me.”
Beckett-King took a break from sending up gaming’s quirks to show me around the verb-strewn puzzle-box of his PC, where a trail of clues led through an off-brand Bethesda world to a forgotten detective gaming classic.
What game are you currently playing?
I am currently playing—I think it’s called Tainted Grail colon Fall of Avalon. I am not enthusiastic about either half of the title. I am enjoying it. I’m only a short way into it, I think. I can’t really tell with indie games whether I’m nearly finished or whether I’ve just started.
Before I played it, obviously the general grimdark imagery around it looks very dark & Souls-y. I’m not really into that sort of thing, and I was a bit worried it was going to be very intense and combat-based. Good news: it’s not. The combat is very basic so far.
People say ‘It’s indie Skyrim’. And I’m playing it and it’s not. It’s indie Oblivion. It’s much sillier and more fun than Skyrim in my view. Of the Elder Scrolls that I’ve played, I like Skyrim the least and Morrowind the most. And it doesn’t have Morrowind’s weirdness, but it does have Oblivion’s. I’m just very pleased to discover that every single side-quest is full of character and silly.
Morrowind was the first RPG I ever played. I was a point-and-click player and I didn’t realise that RPGs had stories. And I was like: “Morrowind is the best point and click adventure game I’ve ever played!”
I played Dread Delusion recently. I’m always trying to find something that captures the ambition of Morrowind, without perhaps the hostility to the player. The first time I loaded it up, I walked straight into a little pond in Seyda Neen and was then killed by a fish. Two seconds into the game, dead.
What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?
The previous game I played was the remaster of Broken Sword. I’ve been meaning to play it for ages. I would have played Broken Sword dozens of times, and I thought ‘I’ll fly through this’. I recently replayed the remastered Myst and Riven, and I finished Myst in about 12 minutes, because if you know what to do in Myst it isn’t difficult.
The great thing about Broken Sword is I completely forgot how to do all the puzzles.
Alasdair Beckett-King
The great thing about Broken Sword is I completely forgot how to do all the puzzles. With the exception of the notorious goat puzzle, I didn’t remember any of the solutions. So I was there with my 12-year-old self sitting like an angel on my shoulder going, “Yeah, I can’t remember”.
But what’s great about Broken Sword is the atmosphere and character writing that really draws you through. George is just an every-man, but he’s written with a wit and a personality that makes him pleasant to spend time with, which is not a guaranteed feature of point-and-click adventure games. A lot of them went “Do people like American Psycho? We should make the main guy like that, the most insane and annoying man possible.” Even George is capable of a little bit of snark in Broken Sword.
It stands up very well. I think the remaster is very well done. But it also makes you realise how much of the enjoyment of it comes from things like the music cues and the story progression, the subtle things that adventure games in the ’90s knew, that indie adventure games since haven’t had the budget to do. Like “Let’s have a little beautiful bespoke animation for reading this newspaper”, or “For this story point, we’ll bring in a new piece of music” … those sorts of things really add to the sense that you’re playing a Tintin or Indiana Jones-like adventure.
What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?
I’m a terrible uninstaller. I do it all the time, so even though I’ve played loads of really old vintage games, it’s probably Cluedo [or Clue, if you’re American] from 1997, which was originally on laserdisc. And then it was cut in half. They took half the game out and released it as a CD-ROM game on like six CDs.
It’s not the boardgame. It’s the TV show of Cluedo, where some terrific character actors play all the characters in Cluedo and you solve the mystery. I’m a huge fan of detective games, and it’s a very good detective game.
Most games with a detective in them are games where you play a character who is a detective. But then there’s a subset of games where you actually solve something, like deduction games like Obra Dinn and The Case of the Golden Idol, and I love that. I’m very excited by the fact that those games have started to exist.
But Cluedo is a proper detective game where you pick up clues and then you say who you think did the murder, and if you get it right, you get it right. I’m a sucker for FMV, and it’s got proper good actors on film, and then digitised into the lowest resolution you could ever imagine. But it’s great, even through all the crinkly sound and the horrible scanlines, watching people going around dropping clues and then working out who did it, that is a good time. I think it’s a massively, undeservedly forgotten and underrated game.
What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?
It would be The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, at 266 hours, which I think means I’ve played it three times. I really do think it’s a very good game. And the next one down is The Witcher, which is also a very good game.
I always play a game on normal mode. I’m not interested in beating the game and it being intensely difficult. But The Witcher 3 is one where—I must’ve read it somewhere that you should play The Witcher 3 on hard mode. So when I replayed it, I did, and it’s really interesting the way it changed the game and made it better.
Because in general, hard mode just means you die more easily and they die more slowly. In The Witcher, it forced me to become more of a Witcher, and go ‘OK, now I have to look into the codex and see what this monster is and find out what its weaknesses are, and then I have to prepare for that by getting certain [equipment] … and forcing me to do that, what I would have regarded as tedious work, actually makes you more invested in the character of Geralt.
What game will you never, ever uninstall?
Well, if I uninstall Silksong, does that mean I’m admitting I’m never going to finish it?
I think that’s it … I played it for longer than Hollow Knight, which I also kind of think I’ve finished. But it’s interesting, I played [Silksong] up to the point where I thought I’d finished it, and now everything is corrupted and there’s a whole third act. I’m in the coral tower and I am stuck on a series of gauntlets.
I love that the lore exists, and I don’t need to find out anything about it because I don’t care about lore.
Alasdair Beckett-King
I should say, I really like metroidvanias. I love these games, they’re brilliant. I’m not a fan of boss fights. I’ve never enjoyed a boss fight in my life. I’ve no interest in repetition in general. I don’t mind repeating myself, as I have several times during this interview, but once I’ve done something, I don’t want to do it again.
But I love the exploration. I love meeting characters. I love that the lore exists, and I don’t need to find out anything about it because I don’t care about lore. What I mean is it creates a world with a lot of texture and full of interesting spaces, and hints at things that might be. But I don’t need to find out what those things are. I love all of that about Silksong, but I hate gauntlets, and I cannot beat the guys in the coral tower.
What’s a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn’t live without?
Watch On
Well, I don’t want to sound too much of a legend, but it’s probably Blender 3D. Or just Blender. I’m so old I call it Blender 3D, because that’s what the website used to be, because someone who made, presumably, blenders that you use in your kitchen, used to have the website.
I’ve been using it since I was a film student in the early 2000s to do visual effects for my student films. And I use it when I do animated bits from the YouTube sketches that I do. I use it to do 2D animation. The 2D animation that’s appeared in it over the last few years is surprisingly user-friendly. However, I have spent 25 years learning how to use Blender, the famously unfriendly piece of software.
It normally takes me two or three days [to make a video]. Most of a day to shoot the video, if I’m in the video, and a day or so, depending on what ludicrously, needlessly complicated thing I do, to add to the video. Because it doesn’t make them funnier. All my comedian friends just film themselves standing in front of a wall and go viral, whereas I spend days meticulously constructing something.
But I don’t regret that, because the only way I could make myself make these things is by trying to come up with an angle that will make it interesting to do so. “OK, now I’m going to try and spoof this genre, or this aesthetic, or imitate this animation style” just because that is the thing that will make it interesting to do.
How tidy is your desktop screen?
I don’t like to think about it. I never click on the many thousands of icons that are there. Sometimes it gets so full that they start piling on top of each other, because they reach the other wall and start coming back. I’m terribly disorganised.
Almost every folder I have contains another folder called ‘New Folder’ that I’ve made by accident. Sometimes there’s ‘New Folder 2’ and I have seen ‘New Folder 3’. They’re not doing anything. They’re not doing any harm to anyone. So, it’s a real mess.
