Evie's recent activity
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Comment on I tried Erewhon’s new $15,000-a-year VIP membership for a month in ~food
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Comment on What are your gaming idiosyncracies? in ~games
Evie Link ParentSo real... Few things are more entertaining to me than online microdrama about balance patches in live service games I'll never play. Even if there's no drama involved it's still fun to read...So real... Few things are more entertaining to me than online microdrama about balance patches in live service games I'll never play. Even if there's no drama involved it's still fun to read through good update notes where the devs go the extra mile to explain all the changes
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
Evie LinkThis week I played last year's narrative RPG Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. I wrote up the original Citizen Sleeper last year in November and though I was quite positive on that game it took...This week I played last year's narrative RPG Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. I wrote up the original Citizen Sleeper last year in November and though I was quite positive on that game it took me a bit to get around to its sequel. Ultimately I'm glad I did — in many respects, Starward Vector represents a significant imrpovement on and evolution of its predecessor.
I'll try to keep things mostly spoiler-free below.
Citizen Sleeper: Starward Vector
In the family of the CRPG, a game genre that, in the nineties, aimed to emulate the old school tabletop roleplaying games for computers, two distinct branches have developed in recent years. An oversimplification: CRPGs can either be narrative games or adventure games. The former, a subgenre largely stemming from Planescape: Torment and Disco Elysium, features games that eschew combat in order to focus on a fairly linear story, while developed political and philosophical themes. Meanwhile the latter — a subgenre with a much more filled-out history, spanning from 1998's Baldur's Gate to 2023's Baldur's Gate 3 (and many, many more besides) often focuses on traditional adventure stories, where the focus is more on exploring, fighting, and expressing power over the world through the decisions you make to shape the story and your character. I've been really only playing CRPGs lately and when you do you really notice just how fundamentally different these two subgenres are, how different a narrative game like Esoteric Ebb is from an adventure game like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Principally, the narrative games are often extremely light on gameplay, and can even feel a bit like a chore; can even evoke feelings of "I wish this were a novel," as I often felt while, say, playing Disco Elysium and changing my clothes in the middle of a tense scene to get a better chance of passing a skill check.
The heavily Disco-inspired game Citizen Sleeper fit solidly into the "narrative" camp. That game was an episodic story set on a space station, with every episode sort of running in parallel, where you, an escaped robot slave, found a new community for yourself. But as its sequel, Starward Vector, evolves the formula, it becomes on the one hand considerably more linear, less choice-y — but also more gameplay-driven, more focused on telling its story through its systems like the adventure CRPGs do.
In both Citizen Sleeper games, the story progresses in "cycles." At the start of each cycle, or day, you roll a pool of five six-sided dice, and you have to find things to use those dice on throughout the day. You roll a six? You might want to use it to progress an important main story quest. Roll a two or a one? Spend it on something less important, like a gig, because your chance of failure will be higher. This "dice pool" system was honestly not very well implemented in the first game. The reason for this was that there was a whole separate game system, the hacking system, that used low dice rolls like keys in locks, so when you got "unlucky" and rolled all ones and twos for a day, you would just progress the hacking segments, whereas when you got lucky, and rolled high numbers, you would just do regular tasks. This effectively meant that you were never choosing where to spend dice: what tasks you must succeed on, what tasks were okay to risk failing. Starward Vector largely does away with this system, and in general, dials up the difficulty and pressure significantly.
Last year, I described Citizen Sleeper as a game about gig work, where every day you would work four or five different shifts for four or five different employers: whoever had work for you that day. Starward Vector by contrast is more a game about contract work; in it, you'll start jobs that take three to five days, and with your crew, fly out to those jobs and work with single-minded intensity on them till they're done. The pressure on these jobs is high: numerous game systems like stress and dice damage are designed to make failures cascade into more failures, so low rolls can be devastating, but tight timers mean that often you'll have to risk a bad result to get the job done in time. The general feeling with a lot of these jobs is that when you succeed, you succeed by the skin of your teeth, and when you fail — as I did in three jobs throughout the game — it was always due to a mistake on your part. When you fail a plot-critical job, the game will always ensure you have a way to fail forwards and progress the narrative anyway, but he mechanical effects of the failure — broken dice removed from your pool, high resource costs, or even a permanent glitch on death — will stick with you for a long time.
In addition to adding, in essence, difficulty and gameplay and time pressure, Starward Vector evolves on its predecessor in terms of how it structures its narrative. Citizen Sleeper the First takes place on one space station: the Eye — where a slate of largely disconnected episodes unfold in parallel. It largely lacks a main plot; though there is some connective tissue, my experience with the game was that it was more about exploring the Eye, and the people who live there. By making repeated decisions to stay on the Eye at the end of every questline, by how expansive and lived-in it becomes, the place begins to feel like a home for your character, which is, I would argue, the game's emotional core. Starward Vector takes place instead across a large asteroid belt on maybe a dozen different outposts, which you fly between in your ship the Rig, and of course none of these places are as well-developed as the Eye. Though the narrative remains episodic, it's a bit more linear and directed, with more connective tissue and a mostly set order in which you'll visit each station (though you can explore and do sidequests). Structurally, this allows for a better paced experience, with stronger core themes. But it also means that there's less of a feeling of agency in the narrative, and it's much harder to get invested in the world or the characters.
A lot of Citizen Sleeper 2's characters are carry-overs from the first game, albeit with slight redesigns, a few years on. Unfortunately, I recognized almost none of the characters — apart from the three refugee captains from the first game's ending DLC, who were all better fleshed out there than any of the base game's characters. Despite strong designs and visual identities, this general lack of recognizability speaks to the fact that Citizen Sleeper's characters were not particularly memorable, but I fear this is going to be even more true for its sequel. So many of these characters are just unbelievably flimsy, with their entire screen presence amounting to three five minute scenes in a ten hour game — barely enough to amount to an arc, in most cases; often, if they do change, it feels abrupt, clumsy, and forced.
This is a direct consequence of Citizen Sleeper's writing style, I think. It's tight and punchy, very plot-focused and fairly fast paced. On its own this isn't a flaw but it doesn't leave a lot of room for moments to sit with the characters, hear what they have to say, and watch them evolve. Starward Vector's intended fix for this problem is that the incidental dialogue characters have on jobs will help flesh them out, but that dialogue, too, feels wasted, because what characters I take to a job is determined not by what characters I want to hear from, but what skills I literally need to be able to succeed, and what they say is mostly static and work-oriented anyway. That plus a lack of strong character-specific dialogue voices means that characters are usually made up of no more than a gimmick, a strong portrait, and a clumsy arc, and the only characters that get well developed are the sleeper you inhabit, and, to a lesser extent, your friend Serafin who, unlike the other companion characters is always with you on almost every job and story mission, and has full episodes dedicated to fleshing him out.
An episode usually consists of entering a new station, maybe one where a timer is ticking to apply some pressure. You'll spend a couple cycles exploring the station by spending dice, meet some characters, and eventually, do one or two jobs for them, during which the plot will unfold. At the end of the episode, you might be given a bit of technology you need, or a lead on how to deal with the game's antagonsist, Laine. These episodes have a very nice flow both internally and from one to the next; the game is more-ish and hard to put down, just like Citizen Sleeper. But unlike its predecessor, Starward Vector's gameplay variety: alternating between relaxed station exploration and dialogue, and tense, skin-of-your-teeth jobs, contributes a strong feeling of pressure, momentum and variety that was sorely needed. Experienetally, it reminds me of one of the CRPGs I've been writing about these past few months, the adventure CRPG Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Kingmaker has similar ticking clocks, similar resource management loops, and a similar two-way split between its relaxed kingdom management segments and it tense, more story and combat-driven episodes as you fight to stabilize your kingdom in the Stolen Lands. Of course, Kingmaker is longer, more esoteric, and less polished, but the similarities here are not just structural, but thematic. Both games, fundamentally, are about bodily autonomy and sexual violence.
In Starward Vector, much like in the first game, you play as an escaped robot slave. In this one, though, you're not escaping a corporation. You're escaping a man, Laine, who lured you into working with him with promises of helping free you from your corporate masters, before, eventually, severely traumatizing you, taking control of your body, and severely damaging your memory. Waking up in tatters at the start of the game, you escape Laine's space station and spend the game trying to put yourself back together and heal. Throughout that experience, you meet characters who see you explicitly as an object, or who refer to you as a slave, as an 'it'; you meet other sleepers who have had similar experiences, and humans who don't understand, but will try to support you anyway. I can't talk about the ultimate message of this game without spoiling the ending — and I won't, because the game is very much worth playing — but by the end I was in tears, feeling a bit hopeless and a bit mixed up inside.
I think a good, spoiler-free way to put it is that Citizen Sleeper and Kingmaker explore similar themes from opposite directions. In Kingmaker, you make your burgeoning kingdom a home for outcasts, victims, and survivors, and support them as they fight their battles against the past; the game is about gaining stability, about healing, about proving to the world and your companions that you are a worthy leader — even, if you choose to — unto the point of redeeming that game's main villain, herself a victim of gendered violence and a millenia-long curse. But in Starward Vector, you play as the victim yourself, and the game isn't about gaining stability or healing; it's about coming to terms with your brokenness, with what you can hold onto and what, despite your best efforts, you can't. This story feels less exploratory, more specific; the type of painful, hard-to-swallow thing that a narrative RPG can do, and a rollicking adventure about growing a kingdom can't. But Starward Vector also surpasses it narrative CRPG peers, by using its mechanics, its dice, to reinforce that story about damage and brokenness and the long-lingering impacts of trauma. Even with its weak characters and occasionally clumsy writing, in its subgenre, it's my favourite experience since Disco Elysium, and an easy game to recommend.
I also played Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous a second time, and have started a third playthrough, even. The game is so reactive, it's very very hard to put down. Every time I make a major choice, I think, "I can't wait to do another playthrough to see what it would look like if I chose X instead."
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Comment on Signet City | Reveal trailer in ~games
Evie LinkOh wow, perfect timing, I just finished playing Citizen Sleeper 2 the other day (and I loved it, even more than the first game). Looks like an interesting premise. Making left-wing art about...Oh wow, perfect timing, I just finished playing Citizen Sleeper 2 the other day (and I loved it, even more than the first game). Looks like an interesting premise. Making left-wing art about mushrooms seems to be very fashionable at the moment for some reason
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Comment on Control Resonant | Story/release date reveal trailer – 24th September 2026 in ~games
Evie LinkI feel like this date is probably gonna have to move if Remedy don't want to get stomped on by Silent Hill Townfall and to a lesser extent Wolverine -- hell back in 2023 they moved Alan Wake 2...I feel like this date is probably gonna have to move if Remedy don't want to get stomped on by Silent Hill Townfall and to a lesser extent Wolverine -- hell back in 2023 they moved Alan Wake 2 back a week to avoid splash damage from Spider Man 2 so maybe Insomniac is perpetually haunting Remedy.
Anyway corpo talk aside I'm so unbelievably excited for this game. I feel like this trailer is alright but the "Paranatural Manhattan" trailer they showed at SGF was just gorgeous, this hugely confident flex of the game's art direction, with great music to boot
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Comment on What are people's experiences with using Kagi? in ~tech
Evie Link ParentKagi has more features for sure but in the six months I was using it I found I just didn't get enough use out of them to justify the subscription over DDG.Kagi has more features for sure but in the six months I was using it I found I just didn't get enough use out of them to justify the subscription over DDG.
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Comment on The 100 best novels of all time published in English in ~books
Evie (edited )LinkI never know how to feel about these lists. You know I think the methodology here is decent but it also leads to an obvious skew away from genre or really anything niche(I mean, the Left Hand of...I never know how to feel about these lists. You know I think the methodology here is decent but it also leads to an obvious skew away from genre or really anything niche(I mean, the Left Hand of Darkness was seminal, but is that really the ONLY sci-fi representation here? Unless I missed something), towards the classics, and sometimes towards very high placements of books that I would personally characterize as more "impressive" than "good" (Ulysses, The Man Without Qualities). Speaking of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, I always find it slightly stupid to put works in translation on lists like these. It says English in the title, right? Why is the Quixote there? Why Pedro Páramo and One Hundred Years of Solitude and Invisible Cities -- brilliant books no doubt, that are among my personal favorites, but are also works in translation where, somewhat notoriously, their ambiguity and poeticisms often fail to come across in English?
I guess lists like these are best as jumping off points for discussion, but I tend to prefer more personal lists anyway because by attempting to be definitive these come out kinda anonymous.
Anyway I do agree with a lot of these picks in full: Catch 22, Wuthering Heights, the Nabokov stuff (if I'm right in remembering that Nabokov wrote in English and then his family translated it into Russian). All holds up marvelously. I do wonder what more recent novels will be making lists like this in fifty years when they're "eligible." Chain Gang All Stars, maybe. House of Leaves? I mostly read dyke-y genre stuff these days so I'm not hugely tapped in.
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Comment on Tildes Survey #5: Pineapple on pizza? (Results) in ~talk
Evie Link ParentExactly, my go-to pizza order is pineapple, jalapeno, and red onion. It's basically just a salsa fresca on a pizza lolExactly, my go-to pizza order is pineapple, jalapeno, and red onion. It's basically just a salsa fresca on a pizza lol
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
Evie (edited )LinkAfter I wrote the bulky section below on Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, I couldn't sleep, so I played Selkie Harbor and Deconstructeam's short game Many Nights a Whisper. I'm adding this...After I wrote the bulky section below on Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, I couldn't sleep, so I played Selkie Harbor and Deconstructeam's short game Many Nights a Whisper. I'm adding this addendum up top just to tell you to play this game right now. It's an hour long tops, it's like three bucks on Steam but if you don't want to spend the money DM me and I will literally buy it for you. As long as I don't get like more than 10 people asking haha.
Like the CRPGs I've written so much about lately — like all Deconstructeam games — it's a narrative experience about making choices that will challenge you. In it, you're chosen to perform a ritual where you have shoot a fireball into a chalice from a great distance. You'll only have one chance to do it, to make everyone's wishes come true if you succeed. So the game is about practicing for that shot. Where the choices — God, the choices — where they come into play is for you to find out when you play the game like I asked you to. But the game, for being so short, is incredibly impactful. Left me shaking with adrenaline and catharsis after the ritual was complete. Might stick with me forever? If you're not a fan of these short narrative experiences Many Nights probably won't win you over but otherwise, please play it, and then when you do, please tell me what you thought about it!
So. Anyway. Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. It might be too early to say, but I think this is my new favorite fantasy/adventure CRPG (which I say only to exclude Disco Elysium, which is very hard to compare). This is developer Owlcat's second game, and the followup to Pathfinder: Kingmaker: another CRPG devoted to adapting a preexisting Parhfinder TTRPG adventure path into game form.
I've written a lot about Owlcat over the past — how long now, over a month? And I've been playing their games for about two months. My journey through the developer's output started with their most recent game: Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader, and I'm honestly really glad it did. I was lukewarm-to-positive about that game, but I think if I had played it after the Pathfinder CRPGs, I would have hated it, because in every aspect except production value, it is a step down.
Maybe that step down was inevitable, though. Kingmaker was an eclectic game, 90% friction by volume, really less a power fantasy than a barely-holding-onto-power fantasy. For that reason, and because of its genuinely excellent character writing and great plot writing (at least in the CRPG space, a genre where the huge amount of reactvity makes it hard to create a strong main plot) I loved Kingmaker. In a lot of ways, Wrath as its sequel feels like a play for a larger audience. A lot of the rough mechanical edges have been sanded down, especially in the management portion of the game; the story is much more of a true power fantasy now, maybe more than any other game I've played. The production values have gotten much higher — you can rotate the camera! there are more than three overworld tilesets! But even so, WotR surpasses its predecessor, because in terms of reactivity, in terms of character work, in terms of the way the game encourages you to actually roleplay a character, the game simply feels unbeatable.
The biggest selling point of the game is the Mythic Path system — both narratively and mechanically. It's an additional progression system, one where you unlock "classes" by completing quests or making certain choices, and "level up" by progressing the story or finishing path-exclusive quests. Each mythic path, once selected, is locked in: you'll get maybe one, maybe two chances to switch at story moments, but otherwise once selected your path is your path, and as you play through the story, it governs who your character is becoming. You can become a gold dragon, a demon, an angel, a lich; a spirit of freedom, a cell in the body of God. This fundamentally alters how you play — by granting new abilities, yes, but also by giving you new choices and huge new branching outcomes to select; also, by building an arc, a narrative, into your character whether you want it or not.
My character, Iphia, was conceptualized as a dhampir, a self-hating undead who saw monsters (like herself) as degenerate and wanted them purged and destroyed. It made sense for her to lead a crusade against demons, to close a wound in the world; she quickly earned the approval of the queen, and the fear and respect of her soldiers. So it was only natural for her to select the mythic path of Aeon, to become a being dedicated to upholding the law of the universe, and eradicating wrongness from the fabric of the world. But even as she pursued this path, the game presented me with obstacles to challenge her belief and values. First, with the companion character Aerushalae, another monster trying to overcome her fundamental nature and do good (who I stumbled into romancing), who it would be "lawful" and "aeonic" to kill; later, with a journey to the Abyss, where her increasingly overriding Aeonic nature drove Iphia to uphold the laws of what is basically super-hell, and punish those who did good, or showed mercy, or lived by a code (since that broke the laws of the Abyss, where everyone is "supposed to" be evil). This all forced my character to really reevaluate what she believed, why she cared so much about the law, and who she was turning into, and, at a key story moment, decide not to follow the path of the Aeon, but to choose another path instead. And I think what impressed me most about WotR was how easily and regularly it did this: confronting my character's beliefs, constantly forcing her to choose, to make decisions, about how she felt about things, what she was thinking, where she was heading. Wrath is the most reactive CRPG I've ever played, but more than that, it encourages and enables roleplaying more than any other game: constantly presenting decisions, big and small, that shape not only the plot, but the character you're playing.
Back when I was writing about Rogue Trader I didn't really love the companion system. Nowadays I'm much more positive on it; I think my problem in RT was just that I honestly didn't understand it. Companions are constantly watching you, any time they're with you. Especially when you're playing their quests, or at major story moments, but at other times to, companions will react to your decisions, actions and offhanded comments in subtle, internal ways, as multiple internal gauges shift. (Other important characters, including the villain, have these too). Their perception of you will change; they might change, in ways that ultimately affect their personalities, the way their quests unfold, and how their stories end. It's subtle and incredibly naturalistic, and it makes the Owlcat companions feel more like people than in other CRPGs I've played. I'm tempted here to compare Wrath to Baldur's Gate 3, where by comparison the companions feel better integrated into the main story, and have more budget funneled into them, but they are all also hot 20-somethings with similar trauma who will fall for you at the drop of a hat. By contrast, Wrath's companions are much more diverse in terms of race, appearance, age, body type, sexuality and availability. Even morality and personality; many of WotR's companions grated at first, but I eventually developed a grudging respect or even affection for some of them. Not all; I don't think my player character could ever find it in her heart to like Woljif.
I need a pallette cleanser first, but I'm already planning my second WotR playthrough. My choices as a lawful neutral Aeon often lead to me missing a lot of content — and even killing two companions, who it would be impossible to justify letting live from a roleplay perspective — so I'm really interested to see what a more true-to-me chaotic good playthrough would look like, and what new content might be waiting. Maybe I can dive more into the combat and buildcrafting side of the game, too, which I mostly avoided this time around by playing on a lower diffculty and letting most of my companions auto level. There are two optional dungeons I'm dreading playing again, Blackwater and The Enigma, but for the most part, despite being very, very long, Wrath of the Righteous is a total joy to play.
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Comment on Valencia and a Sledgehammer (MinnMax spotlight on a new game from Deconstructeam) in ~games
Evie Link ParentThe game and its environments are inspired by memories from the developers' time growing up in Spain, which they talk about in the video, but the setting itself is a fictional small town.The game and its environments are inspired by memories from the developers' time growing up in Spain, which they talk about in the video, but the setting itself is a fictional small town.
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Comment on Valencia and a Sledgehammer (MinnMax spotlight on a new game from Deconstructeam) in ~games
Evie LinkFor a long time the Valencian independent studio Deconstructeam has been one of my favorite game developers. Games like The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, Many Nights a Whisper, and Essays on Empathy...For a long time the Valencian independent studio Deconstructeam has been one of my favorite game developers. Games like The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, Many Nights a Whisper, and Essays on Empathy challenge the player with tricky decisions and empower them to create their own art within the game. Their new game, Virtue and a Sledgehammer, co-developed with Selkie Harbor, departs from their usual melancholy, narrative driven pixelart style by implementing 3D environments, destruction mechanics, and a sledgehammer.
I really enjoyed this deep dive on the game from MinnMax's Ben Hansen and Jacob Geller, who travelled to Valencia to see local landmarks and get insight into the game's small, sustainable team and their process from modelling to sound design to animation. It's a really cozy and insightful video.
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Valencia and a Sledgehammer (MinnMax spotlight on a new game from Deconstructeam)
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
Evie Link ParentArgus is one of my favorite characters in Reverse. I read her as the writers going "what if toxic masculinity was a woman?" Her character story, "The Red Wall," is about exploring her mental space...Argus is one of my favorite characters in Reverse. I read her as the writers going "what if toxic masculinity was a woman?" Her character story, "The Red Wall," is about exploring her mental space after the events of Route 77 and it's an unsettling personal favorite.
Expedition 33 has one of the strongest openings of any game ever. I don't love the whole game quite as much as most people, but my jaw was on the floor through the whole prologue. And it's super fun to find all the remnants of previous expeditions while exploring and work out their little stories.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
Evie Link ParentSpring Unending is completely unrelated to the main plot -- not all side events are, but you'll be fine doing this one! In general, while the event is running, it's recommended to use as much of...Spring Unending is completely unrelated to the main plot -- not all side events are, but you'll be fine doing this one!
In general, while the event is running, it's recommended to use as much of your energy as you can spare farming the event boss so you can buy out the event shop for its high level materials, exclusive items, etc. Spending energy there is more efficient than anywhere else.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
Evie LinkI have two games to write about this week. I'll try to keep it short (at least by my standards) — not because I regret the interminable rambles I sometimes go on in these threads, but because both...I have two games to write about this week. I'll try to keep it short (at least by my standards) — not because I regret the interminable rambles I sometimes go on in these threads, but because both games are kind of too much in my head to neatly summarize.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker
Pathfinder: Kingmaker is the second CRPG I've played from Owlcat Games. It was their debut project, a Kickstarted COVID-era adaptation of an official module for the Pathfinder TTRPG (an open-source-y D&D derivative from the nineties). A few weeks back I wrote about their most recent game, Rogue Trader, which I generally quite liked but had some quibbles with, and playing Kingmaker was a revelation, because it was everything I wanted from Rogue Trader, and it also made me realize why some of its best elements would get streamlined away in subsequent games from the studio.
It will suffice to say that, unlike Rogue Trader, huge amounts of Kingmaker's systems are designed around creating a sense of friction between the player and the game; of making their actions feel committal and deliberate. The game is divided into an exploratory, open-world-ish RPG campaign and a crunchy, challenging kingdom management simulator; by and large, you won't so much be doing both of these at once as you will be alternating between them, going from long, challenging main quest adventures to months' worth kingdom crisis resolution on the map screen, all under the weight of an ever-present ticking clock. You're playing a baroness, building your small barony into a poweful and influential kingdom, but even so the game never makes you feel powerful or secure in your position. Constant crises undermine your authority, challenging both your power base and your philosophy. And all of this ties into a sprawling but well-crafted plot about displacement, curses, the cruelties of the powerful, and violence against women.
A real standout here are the characters in your party, which are, I believe, almost entirely original to Owlcat's take on the Kingmaker story (in a tabletop campaign, they would be replaced by player characters). Owlcat do a decent job at tying them into the main story where they can, but where their character writing really shines is in incidental moments: in camp conversations that don't involve you, in the advice they give on dilemmas facing you kingdom, in main quests where they interject at a moment where you don't expect them to. Although only one of your twelve companions — maybe two, tops — feels truly integral to the game's main plot, they're all extremely believable as people, with key links to the game's themes, and arcs that generally felt extremely natural. At one point in the game I noticed that a character who I had hated at his introduction had suddenly become one of my favourites, both because I understood him better, and because our journey had humbled and changed him. And I didn't even notice as it was happening.
Kingmaker takes place over the span of I think three or four years, so the passage of time allows characters and plot to really go places without anything feeling rushed or crammed. If anything, the game runs into the opposite problem, especially at the end, where it's just too big, and you're kind of eager for it to be over (this not helped by the penultimate dungeon, which decides to be an ultimate combat test and increases both the quantity and difficulty of enemies in a way that grinds the pacing to a dead stop).
It was a case of extreme serendipity perhaps, but the character I built and roleplayed for my Kingmaker playthrough played a pretty big role in my enjoyment of the game. A lot of its plot involved the fae, including one whose whole aesthetic is "big burning ball;" I conceived my character as a whimsical, chaotic figure, who was burning up inside, which manifested in the form of intense fire powers. A lot of the game is about explicit or implicit sexual violence (at least in my reading); I named my character Io. You know, how you roleplay the character you create has a substantial impact on your enjoyment of a CRPG story, and Kingmaker never really asks you to consider the character's backstory, but more than most games I've played I felt that the game really responded to and enabled my roleplaying choices within the story thanks to its alignment system — which often provides 5-9 options at major decision points, instead of the 2-3 you often see in other RPGs. And since the character I conceived of happened to align naturally with the game's themes, it really felt like I was in conversation with the game when it came to the choices I made, even or especially when they led to tragic outcomes that forced my character to re-evelauate herself. The ending I got, pursuing an ultimately doomed romance with one of the game's antagonists, felt suitably tragic and complex (though I hear if I had just done one or two things slightly differently, I could have gotten the "true" ending, which probably would have been less bleak).
In some respects, the game really feels like a freshman effort. The pacing is rough, especially near the end; though I liked the kingdom management system, it was pretty controversial; I haven't even talked about the combat or buildcrafting, which was pretty confusing, assuming a level of familiarity with Pathfinder's systems that I did not have. There's a ton of asset reuse, and the camera is fixed and can't be rotated, which severely limits environment design. All that said though, Kingmaker might be my favourite experience I've had with a fantasy RPG. Part of that is just the character I played, who felt really important to me by the end; part of that is the game's themes, its story, its sense of mystery and precarity, all of which are genuinely really well done. In part because of all the friction (some the result of elegant systemic design; some, of jank) It's just a super rewarding experience, with a lot of bold design choices that maybe don't quite work out all the time, but never fail to contribute to a wholly unique gameplay experience.
Reverse 1999: Spring Unending
If Kingmaker is too big to really talk about, Reverse 1999's newest story update, Spring Unending, is too dense. It feels like an extremely concentrated distillation of all the game's themes about marginalization, power and politics into a frankly delightful Wuxia story set in the distant past. In it, Yao — personified plants and animals who will only live for a few months or years — desperately search for longevity; they bump up against an immortal Daoist who tries to help them but is simply incapable of understanding their experience of the world, a city-state that is hell-bent on blaming them for all its problems, and a cabal of influential figures who leverage this climate of bigotry and hostility to push the Yao towards radicalism.
Meanwhile, in the nineties, another Yao, doomed to die before spring, uncovers this ancient story on the burgeoning internet, on forums, in internet cafes, her path crossing with some of the immortal figures from that ancient history as the events of the past threaten to repeat themself.
On the one hand, you've almost certainly read or played a story that's a lot like this before. On the other, Reverse's take on the quest for longevity is quite simply a clinic on storytelling and structure: thematically dense; rich with believable characters whose arcs intertwine and overlap and mirror each other in delicious ways; an elegant mechanism of setup and payoff that is never shocking but still manages to delight in its specifics. There are so many threads I could pull at, could weave into a workable analysis, that it's a bit overwhelming.
Here's just one. The story is titled "Spring Unending." Both of our main perspective characters, past and present, are herbacious Yao: embodied reeds who "won't even survive a full cycle of seasons." Implicitly, then, the story suggests a question: "what good is an unending spring, if you won't even survive the winter?" And this is deftly explored: for example, our immortal deuteragonist, Paper Heron, urges the Yao not to hurt themselves in their pursuit of longevity; to instead follow the Way, and let the world wash over them and not trouble them. But how can the Yao acheive this kind of peace when they're told it might take years, and they're faced with a ticking clock counting down on their lives? It's an excellent depiction of the transperency phenomenon, the way that the privileged, however well-meaning, are often literally incapable of understanding the experiences of the marginalized. And it's not a surprise when this friction of worldview eventually plays into the conflict in a way that feels both tragic and inevitable.
It feels like Spring Unending has a dozen or a hundred threads like that. To explore them all, I would have to turn into a spider. And since that's beyond my powers, I'll just say that I'm not sure that this story will stick with me — it didn't move me, really — but it feels genuinely masterful in a way that you almost never see in gaming.
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Evie Link ParentYeah I'm playing Pathfinder Kingmaker right now, which is a game with both Turn Based and RTWP, and I generally strongly prefer the turn based mode, but it has to be said that the game's pacing is...Yeah I'm playing Pathfinder Kingmaker right now, which is a game with both Turn Based and RTWP, and I generally strongly prefer the turn based mode, but it has to be said that the game's pacing is designed for RTWP where fights are much faster. So there are just a ton of trash fights. Thankfully there it's easy to switch so I just turn TB on for bosses and big fights and such. I think I remember hearing that when they added TB to Pillars 2 last year they made it a per-playthrough thing which if true kind of sounds like it would be a slog.
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
Evie Link ParentDikke is free for every new player; she's a healer who does decent damage so she's a good starter character to give out. Not sure it has anything to do with the AI thing. Chapter 7, wow! So you're...Dikke is free for every new player; she's a healer who does decent damage so she's a good starter character to give out. Not sure it has anything to do with the AI thing.
Chapter 7, wow! So you're almost done with the first major arc. That's a really beloved part of the game and for good reason, really feels like a culmination.
I'd enjoy hearing your thoughts as you continue playing! Oh, uh, if you haven't checked out the past events in the Reflections tab yet, a lot of players will recommend you play a few of them before/during arc 2. A few of the side events released at the time were designed to contribute to the main plot so while it's not essential you MIGHT want to consider playing "Floor It! To the Golden City" and "Route 77: The Haunted Highway" (which is really great in its own right) before chapter 8 and "Last Evenings on Earth" before chapter 9.
Several hundred people is pretty normal for these modern gachas. Genshin Impact I believe has a team size of over 1000. Reverse is a much simpler game of course but you kind of do need that many people to keep the six week content schedule up. Bluepoch also does a lot of its localization in house which does make things more complicated. You can kind of feel the "too many cooks" effect in parts of Reverse sometimes, but in most chapters it's still pretty damn cohesive.
From the parts you've played so far my favorite character is definitely Marcus, I started playing waaaay back when Chapter 6 was originally released and I've "mained" her pretty consistently since then. Really great performance from her actress Kari Wong. Also between chapters 6 and 7 the event "Farewell Rayashki" released and I think the pairing in that one is absolutely delightful, though I shouldn't say too much!
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Evie Link ParentOMG I love Reverse: 1999. I wrote a bit about it last week and on a few other occasions too, though some of that might be a spoiler. It has been confirmed that the developers used AI to generate...OMG I love Reverse: 1999. I wrote a bit about it last week and on a few other occasions too, though some of that might be a spoiler.
It has been confirmed that the developers used AI to generate one background image in the Dikke anecdote, which I believe lead to drama when the game released in China, and then the developers vowed not to use it again. FWIW, I generally think that when the game is bad, it's bad in human ways. The bad translation in the early chapters strikes me as very human -- AI would probably do a better job, honestly; the language used is very consistent, but sentences are structured torturously, in a way that feels very "ESL" to me. Visually, the game had a very distinct and strong art direction that I don't think AI can achieve. And though Bluepoch is a small first time developer, the team is currently comprised of several hundred people, many of them former devs on the popular gacha Punishing Gray Raven which of course had a similar content schedule.
How far into the main story are you so far? Do you have any favorite characters/pairings?
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Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games
Evie Link ParentI really loved UNBEATABLE's story mode (do I remember right from last week that you weren't impressed?) but I was, and still am, hooked on the arcade mode. IDK if it's doing anything special, it's...I really loved UNBEATABLE's story mode (do I remember right from last week that you weren't impressed?) but I was, and still am, hooked on the arcade mode. IDK if it's doing anything special, it's my first rhythm game, but I'm very proud of getting to eight stars.
I honestly don't fully understand the star rating system works. I think it's, like, combining the difficulty value of the 25 songs where you have the highest scores? I would also sometimes lose points for completing a song on a lower difficulty but I don't know why. Might even be a bug. Also, several of the arcade folio challenges have been broken since the game released with no fix in sight. UNBEATABLE is kind of a broken game, but that's probably part of why I love it.
What's your favorite track in arcade? Mine is probably Drastic Hammer, which I was able to FC on unbeatable difficulty btw 😏
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Evie LinkOh, Esoteric Ebb. I was so sure I hated you. If you follow games discourse you know that Disco Elysium is seen by many (present company included) as one of the best written games of all time....Oh, Esoteric Ebb. I was so sure I hated you.
If you follow games discourse you know that Disco Elysium is seen by many (present company included) as one of the best written games of all time. Disco is — was — truly special, a complex, thoughtful CRPG with beautiful prose, an incredibly compelling central character, a vivid and evocative setting, and extremely strong political themes.
Esoteric Ebb has the cunning idea to, insamuch as possible, simply copy everything from Disco Elysium. At least, that's the impression it gives. The way its skills have distinct personalities and talk to you depending on how much you level up? Ripped straight from Disco, without alteration. Its dialogue and roll system? Again, Disco, down to the presentation. Even its premise: a mystery, an inept boyfailure cop sent to investigate it, a small locale with different political factions to play off of, and a major political conflict brewing -- all sort of tenuously, suspiciously entangled… It's Disco Elysium all the way down: down to specific narrative beats, down to overt referential jokes, down to an acknowledgement in the credits, down to specific characters literally sharing the exact same political views as the Disco Elysium characters they were obviously "inspired" by.
This never quite stops feeling shameless, and hacky, and maybe even unethical, but it's at its worst during its opening hours. Esoteric Ebb does ultimately differntiate itself, mostly by adding new things to what Disco had: a fantasy setting, dungeoneering, combat, electoralism. All very welcome additions, with unique flair. And ultimately, Ebb's voice is quite distinct from Disco's in a way that I grew to appreciate. But in the early hours of the game, the ways in which Ebb differentiates itself from Disco mostly feel like ways that it's slightly worse.
I don't really want to dwell on the game's problems, honestly. Sure, Esoteric Ebb's setting seems a little "generic fanasy" at first. It's not as beautifully written. It feels more "online" in its political ideology. But it will suffice to say that ultimately the game actually does make something of itself, does grow to feel different enough that by the end I really loved it, and in a much different way than I loved Disco.
A lot of it just comes down to the tone. Esoteric Ebb feels more like the actual experience of playing a TTRPG than any other game I've yet encountered. Frequently, the game's writer/creator (and your Dungeon Master), Christoffer Bodegård, will break the fourth wall to talk to you directly, about the game, about your progress through it, about your decisions. There are frequently jokes based on modern (tumblr-ish) memes or twitterspeak in dialogue that makes it feel like you're a modern person, roleplaying a character (instead of embodying the character himself). There's just a lot of wacky stuff you can do in the game whose inclusion feels like pure, D&D-fan id, like drawing from the Deck of Many Things to get absurd, economy-breaking windfalls or awful, impending dooms; making a warlock contract with an eldritch patron; casting speak-with-dead on every skeleton, even the ones with whom you don't share a language. And really, if you've played D&D, you've probably met a DM who heavily rips off their favourite books and games and mvoies for their campaigns. It makes the borderline plagarism Ebb does feel, I don't know, like a cozy, intentional part of the experience, a curation of a certain "vibe."
Ebb uses a modified version of the D&D 5e ruleset, which I believe they're allowed to do because the base D&D rules are licensed under Creative Commons or something. As much as the game is built around the talking and the exploring and the investigating, D&D kind of requries combat and dungeoneering, and Esoteric Ebb's unique take on this — which mostly occurs through the dialogue menu — feels very similar to "theatre of the mind" games I've played (a style of D&D campaign that eschews maps and tactical combat in favor of a fuzzy, imaginative way of resolving battles). It's genuinely an excellent system, and wholly unique in the CRPG landscape. This and the wide variety of things to find made it a delight to descend into the Undercity whenever my investigation called for it.
That investigation, into an exploded tea shop on the eve of your city's first ever election (in contrast to Disco Elysium's hanged man on the eve of a class war), does take you everywhere you need to go, but it often feels almost incidental to the game's plot, which is about untangling a whole nest of conspiracies and plots — and that plot itself, though it eventually does conclude in a way that's satisfying and emotionally affecting, often feels incidental to the compelling experience of walking around, talking to people, and occasionally casting Grease on an assasin here or there. It's standard CRPG fare, about par for the genre in terms of depth and substance. There's a lot of worldbuilding here that feels just genuinely irrelevant. Maybe you'll explore more of the world in the heavily-teased sequel, and I'm sure Bodegård is (justifiably) proud of the actually-pretty-unique fantasy setting he's created, but for a game that's generally really tight and economical, there's a bit too much fluff in the setting.
As I said, Ebb's whole political framework revolves around an election. Conversations are always framed in terms of "which party are you voting for?" Is it the angelic neocolonial liberals pulling strings and inserting candidates from overseas, the dwarven communists, or the homegrown human nationalists? Or do you vote for yourself, or for a party that will never win, or are you kind of checked out of this whole politics thing? I will say here that, playing as an Azgalist (communist) I felt like I was kind of having the 'intended' experience, and the DM never really challenged me about my beliefs, to the point where I got the sense that he was just probably a commie himself. Disco, despite being a far left game, is much more sharply critical of its own ideology, which makes playing a leftist as a leftist still a somewhat challenging and uncomfortable experience. And sure, Ebb is generally cozier as an experience, but I somehow doubt that a player playing as a fascist had such a pleasant time.
The game's relationship with democracy is interesting. In its setting, "elections" are a genuinely new idea, and the weight it lends them, lends the act of voting (despite the fact that, as in real life, your vote will change almost literally nothing, and you have virtually no influence over the outcome of the election) actually made me tear up a bit. The game climaxes in an epic battle and a high-stakes converation with a shoemaker, but it ends on the act of dropping your ballot in the box. After all the effort I put into keeping hold of my voter card, after all the schemes I'd uncovered to subvert the election (that you can only expose, not stop), it felt like a hugely impactful moment. I don't know, I'm not explaining it too well. Esoteric Ebb actually manages to communicate, at least on an emotional what a big thing it is to be able to vote, how much it should matter to you. I found that to be quite striking.
Anyway, I'm not sure whether the fact that Esoteric Ebb is in constant conversation with Disco Elyisum — that it would be complete malpractice to write about it without mentioning Disco — is a strength or a weakness. Compared to Disco, Ebb isn't quite at the same level, can't quite keep up, is sometimes painfully derivative. But that it can hold the covnersation at all, that it can bring its own new ideas to the table, that it is, in its own right, an enjoyable and well-differentiated experience, is commendable.
I'd especially reccomend Esoteric Ebb to anyone who hasn't played many CRPGs. It's short, accesible, and very well paced, with a lot of gameplay variety and a ton of interesting characters to meet and talk to. And it's a great onboarder to the genre, containing simple and easy-to-learn takes on both the turn based combat and the dialogue systems that are core to the CRPG experience. If you've already played the genre greats, it might be a bit of a tougher sell, but it still does bring some genuinely new ideas to the table, and if nothing else, it will do a great job at reminding you of one of the best games ever made.
I've already started Pathfinder: Kingmaker, though it might take me a few more weeks to complete. I'm really impressed with it so far, and I can't wait to talk about it more.
I would struggle to spend that much on groceries, I think. Our food budget works out to about 10k per year, in one of the most expensive cities in the world, shopping for three, often at the nice grocery stores. That's a lot of smoothies to close the gap! Ironically it would make more sense to me if Erewhon prices were as absurd as they're often portrayed.