Evie's recent activity

  1. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Evie
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    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...

    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.

    4 votes

  2. Comment on Valencia and a Sledgehammer (MinnMax spotlight on a new game from Deconstructeam) in ~games

    Evie
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    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.

    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.

    2 votes

  3. Comment on Valencia and a Sledgehammer (MinnMax spotlight on a new game from Deconstructeam) in ~games

    Evie
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    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...

    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.

    1 vote

  5. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Evie
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    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...

    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.

    2 votes

  6. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Evie
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    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...

    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.

    2 votes

  7. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Evie
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    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...

    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.

    6 votes

  8. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Evie
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    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...

    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.

  9. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Evie
    Link Parent
    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...

    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!

    2 votes

  10. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Evie
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    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...

    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?

    5 votes

  11. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Evie
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    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...

    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 😏

    2 votes

  12. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Evie
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    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....

    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.

    9 votes

  13. Comment on Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others in ~science

    Evie
    Link Parent
    Anytime you see a university study about psychology, you can make a reasonably safe bet that the sample group was made up of psychology and cognitive science students, because in those majors you...

    Anytime you see a university study about psychology, you can make a reasonably safe bet that the sample group was made up of psychology and cognitive science students, because in those majors you are often required or incentivised to participate in studies. IDK about the other sciences.

    24 votes

  14. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Evie
    Link Parent
    Great suggestion! We really enjoyed playing the Portal 2 co-op together years back so that might be a fun road to go down

    Great suggestion! We really enjoyed playing the Portal 2 co-op together years back so that might be a fun road to go down

    1 vote

  15. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Evie
    Link Parent
    The time I spent with my brother was certainly worthwhile. I think what I mean is, I can spend time with my brother doing a lot of different things. In Terraria, my specific frustration is that...

    The time I spent with my brother was certainly worthwhile. I think what I mean is, I can spend time with my brother doing a lot of different things. In Terraria, my specific frustration is that what we did in game wasn't meaningful, it was the same as all the other times we'd played Terraria. Maybe it's less an indictment of the genre as a whole and more my burnout on these couple specific games, that I've spent so much of my life in: they cannot possibly make me feel anything anymore, I'm too used to them. Maybe we'd love Hytale or Vintage Story or what have you? IDK. I just know that playing Terraria made me genuinely miserable in about half of our play sessions, which is not a good ratio.

    2 votes

  16. Comment on What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them? in ~games

    Evie
    Link
    Can I be honest with you? This comment represents way more than a week's worth of gaming. I'm going to talk about five games today. Terraria, Dead Letter Department, Skin Deep, Reverse 1999, and...

    Can I be honest with you? This comment represents way more than a week's worth of gaming.
    I'm going to talk about five games today. Terraria, Dead Letter Department, Skin Deep, Reverse 1999, and Warhammer: Rogue Trader are what I've been playing for the last maybe three or four weeks. The reason they're all in one block is because of Rogue Trader, an enormous fucking boondoggle that took me so much time and energy to complete that I was taking breaks to play other games in between its five acts. Let's go one by one, shall we? Spoilers will be avoided where possible.

    Terraria: Bigger and Boulder My little brother and I have a thing we do every time they release a new Terraria update: we do a quick little playthrough and see the new content together in multiplayer. He's been going through a tough time, so I was happy to jump in and bang out a run with him. When you've beaten Terraria as often as we have, it goes from a sprawling nonsense of way too much content to an honestly fairly tight and economical experience — though still with a lot of grinding. But honestly, this playthrough radicalized me against Terraria and maybe against sandbox games in general. Sorry to the Minecraft server people, I love you, but I don't think I can do it anymore. I would talk about the new content in the new Terraria update that took the team at Re:Logic years to put in but honestly most of it is marginal. There's some QoL stuff that's nice, a few decent new weapons, two overpowered new mounts for mobility. A lot of the stuff we found I couldn't even remember whether it was new, or whether it was just content I'd passed over in previous playthroughs. The biggest addition for me was the implementation of a lot of new custom world generation parameters, which the game calls 'secret seeds' — my brother and I had a lot of fun on the "planetoids" seed, which replaces the world with a bunch of disconnected floating circles. You know, like planetoids. It made traversal more challenging especially in the early game but it made caving a lot easier, and meant we didn't have to worry about the spread of the world evil (a Terraria feature where certain tough biomes can grown and "infect" other biomes. That was all actually pretty transformative in the very early game, but it turns out that for most of your playthrough, especially when you get into hardmode, you're not really ever interacting with the terrain becaue you'd rather just teleport around with pylons and build your own quick boss arenas and farming spots in the sky or the cavern layer or wherever. And that's where my frustration arose, because honestly, isn't all this kind of meaningless? I mean, look, we had fun, we beat the bosses, you know, whatever. But I've done it all before, and even if my creative copper brick and glass and living wood build for our main base was *cosmetically* different from other Terraria builds I've made, even if I had a new whip to use, even if the world was made up of a bunch of balls, it was kind of the same *functionally,* and in terms of, like, the experience of playing it. It sounds fucking stupid to say "the problem with sandbox games is that they don't mean anything," but I guess that's kind of where I'm at. Looking back on the Terraria playthrough it just felt like a waste of time, and I'm not sure I want to do it ever again. Plus, you know, my brother can be convinced to try other co-op games. He's gotten into Gunfire Reborn, in fact.

    At this time, having finished the update, I started Rogue Trader. I knew intuitively that it was a 100 plus hour game — a three work week game — but you know, that never really registers until you're in it.

    Rogue Trader: Prologue and Act I Rogue Trader was developed by Owlcat games — makers of the Pathfinder CRPGs that everyone seems to love — and is a turn based computer RPG set in the world of Games Workshops's Warhammer 40k, a setting which probably hosts a tabletop wargame and I don't know some novels? and a lot of video games based on it as well. *My* only exposure to the setting was through testosterone-y ads for the Boltgun or Tactics games, and, more relevant to me personally, lesbian mechsploitation-adjacent smut — sorry, erotica — which, you know, your life will be better if you don't look into that stuff, and it tends to paint an incomplete picture of the world in favor of painting a thorough picture of a cast evil dyke OCs. I liked the idea of a space fantasy CRPG, as opposed to the sort of medieval high fantasy space that almost all of the genre heavy hitters play in, and Rogue Trader definitely makes a strong first impression, with its gothic arched ceilings and gilded skulls and Gregorian chants, announcing you as you create your character and are then informed that you're being considered to inherit the spaceship and title of the Rogue Trader Theodora Von Valancius, your distant relative. A Rogue Trader is, in a nutshell, the lab-grown perfect power fantasy self-insert, someone who is given special power by the God Emperor to break imperial law in order to do super space colonialism in the far reaches of the empire, and even, like, the super cops can't say no to you. So that's neat. Anyway pretty quickly Theodora dies and guess who inherits her title by default? that's right, me. Time to make my mark on history and probably form a harem, you know how CRPGs go. Okay, so this is my main narrative problem with CRPGs — most CRPGs anyway. They tend to act as though the "great man theory" is actually true. Almost always, you play as some incredibly powerful individual who can physically — and without great effort — steer the course of the world. I think it's frankly embarrassing to create a work of contemporary art where that's the case, where the player is given this kind of ultimate agency. But that's the escapist fantasy of the CRPG, right? In these games, unlike in reality, your choices matter. Rogue Trader really leans into this "great man" fantasy, and the world is absurd and over-the-top enough that it probably juuuust gets away with it. In Rogue Trader, the main choice you'll be making, again and again, is between the game's three moral positions of Dogmatic, Iconoclast, and Heretic. Dogmatic Rogue Traders love the God-Emperor, they're literally and explicitly xenophobic, they embody the Imperium's ethos of rigid hierarchy and violent suppression of the other, to the extent that Dogmatic choices often see you, like, glassing planets when you find one cultist on the surface. Iconoclasts, meanwhile, are normal people with old fashioned moral views like, "maybe we shouldn't kill everyone all the time," and "maybe the people worshipping God are, dare I say, almost as important as God himself," and even the daring "maybe when we colonize planets (you WILL be colonizing planets, of course) we should, like, be nice about it, and not extract TOO much." And heretics are the evil route who like love murdering people and chaos and stuff. The problem with the triangle morality system here is just that it's fairly rigid and often limited in terms of the kind of character it allows you to roleplay. Instead of picking the answer that aligned with the character I had imagined at character creation, I was mostly just picking the answer that felt "least wrong." This is true of most CRPGs without "Disco" in the tile, of course, but it bears mentioning here. Where Rogue Trader has a leg up on its peers is just that its options are way fucking funnier. Even though I was being boring and mostly picking Iconolast, it was always a treat to see dialogue options like "your appalling and flagrant disrespect for human life is admirable, and something I want to emulate!" I discovered pretty quickly that 40k as a setting, or at least Owlcat's depiction of it, is totally campy, and you either get to participate in that absurd pantomime as a Dogmatic or Heretic character, or play the straight man as an Iconoclast. The prologue of Rogue Trader basically just teaches you the mechanics, introduces one of the main antagonists, and gives you a minor decision, but it's good at introducing the world and setting the tone, and I was quickly invested on the story and world side, if not the mechanical side. That would come later. For now, it will suffice to say that Rogue Trader is really combat focused, and it doesn't really have any of the immersive sim elements of, say, a Baldur's Gate 3. Fighting and talking are your only real verbs; stealth, environmental interaction, exploration, these are either not present or are extremely minimal. In general the Owlcat production value is a lot lower than Larian's, probably just because BG3 is an unreasonable standard to hold any game to. But there's not a lot of voice acting here, except in the prologue; no facial animation; models are of lower quality. That's fine, honestly. I never put much stock in fidelity. Rogue Trader is a game in five acts. Act 1 sets the tone, and it really effectively deceives the player into thinking that the game is going to be better than it is. That came out harsher than I intended. What I mean is, in Act 1, Rogue Trader offers you a really constrained environment with a couple different highly reactive questlines that not only change according to how you do them, but according to the order in which you do them. With Lady Theodora killed, a mutiny barely averted, and your grip on power tenous, you have to stabilize a critical situation, and the urgency is reflected in the way the game responds to you dealing with quests quickly (i.e. early in the order) or slowly (i.e. late in the order). Of course, some quests are gonna be completed early in sequence, and some late, there's no way to have your cake and eat it. When you're inevitably praised by NPCs for getting to their planet in the nick of time, or when another group laments your late arrival on their space station, it makes the world feel alive: like it's progressing without you, and responding to your decisions. This only happens in Act 1 as far as I can tell but the fact that it *does* makes the game better at creating a false sense of urgency. When the game tells you in Act 2 that three of your colony worlds — Dargonus, Janus, and Kiava Gamma — are in peril, and if you don't hurry, they might be lost, you probably will assume that there will be consequences to the order you proritize them and how you tackle them. There aren't; that would probably break the budget. But an artificial sense of urgency is still psychologically effective. I would know, I play gacha games. As a self-contained introduction to Rogue Trader, then, Act 1 lies to you in terms of what it says about the game's overall structure. But when it comes to what it says about the game's combat and questing and moment to moment gameplay, it paints a largely accurate (if incomplete) picture. You want the short version? The combat is pretty good. Keystone combat encounters often feature gimmicks, objectives and terrain that lend them a degree of strategic depth. Later, this will get undercut by the progression system, which allows you to far too easily outscale enemies and kill bosses while they're still practically in the womb. But even so, despite having an embarassment of fights against trash mobs, just way too many encounters for a turn-based game, Rogue Trader's combat stays largely interesting, engaging and fun through most of its runtime — even if I did have to turn the difficulty up. The encounter design shines: whether it be with oddly laid out rooms, well-positioned enemies, or additional objectives beyond "kill everyone," there's almost always something to think about, even in the easy fights. On the story front, things are maybe less rosy. Though the writing and plot in Act 1 is competent and reasonably engaging, it largely lacks thematic depth. The game's tangle of side plots and questlines that do not initially appear to be connected is fun to unpick — but then, that only even existed because I bought the DLC, which adds frankly necessary game-length questlines to flesh out the city-scale lower decks of your ship and add new worlds and romance options. And the companion characters have interesting hooks and are decently reactive, but never quite feel wholly real, I think because the reactivity only exists during quests that are specifically relevant to them. You never get to interact with your companions "at rest." It's really the setting doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, but fortunately if you can let yourself immerse in the absurdity of the Warhammer universe, it's a fun place to inhabit. The reactivity of Act 1 is frankly incompatible with the hundreds of hours to follow, so once your condition is no longer critical, the whole system is effectively destroyed, so that the things you did there can't continue to have consequences throughout the rest of the game. It's a necessary evil, I suppose.

    I really want to talk about a game that felt more true to an experience I personally had than almost anything I've ever played. I'm talking about the horror typing game Dead Letter Depatrtment, a game about how much it sucks to work a data entry job, and probably other stuff too.

    Dead Letter Department Have you ever had a work of art hit too close to home? That was my experience with last year's Dead Letter Department, which I played several times through, in one sitting, trying to get the good ending. In this game, you get to process a lot of mail that didn't find its recipient. Make sense of the weird, blurred, smeared addresses on the envelope, send the letters on to their rightful homes. There's an AI system that's supposed to do it, but it doesn't get everything, so here you are, working night shifts at your prehistoric computer at a shitty warehouse in Arizona or Iowa or somewhere where the power keeps fucking going out, trying to fill in the blanks while your coworkers disappear one by one. Reader, my first job out of high school was going through a database of returned marketing mail sent back to the insurance company I worked for, and trying to figure out why it was returned, and then putting it all in a spreadsheet. Maybe the business had moved. I would have to go on Google maps and trawl South Dakota to find their new adress and put it in the spreadsheet. Maybe the pastor died and it closed. I'd have to delete the row from our database. Maybe the person who was addressing the envelopes fucked up a digit and it got sent to a wrong zipcode. I'd have to fix it, or, if I was feeling too miserable and tired and bleary to go looking for the mistake, write "no such business" in the notes field and hope no one spot checked me. So, okay, like, Dead Letters has a mechanic where the things the AI has you type in go from blurry addresses to like newspaper clippings on spontaneous combustion, or weird curses, or phrases like "I want to submit," you know, and then you go to hell, and things get pretty abstract. It's a horror game, you know? It tries to scare you, and it works; my typing speed went from 75 WMP at the start of my first, blind playthrough (helpfully displayed in the pause menu) to like 50, because my hands were shaking so badly and I was making so many mistakes at the end. But the core experience the game simulates — and very accurately, if a little bluntly, is that of losing your mind at an awful, tedious job. I think Dead Letter Department is great. It has incredible atmosphere, it has a neat, well telegraphed mechanical twist that you have to figure out to get most of the endings besides the default one where you get sold into hell slavery (you know, that's pretty Warhammer 40k if you think about it). It has this really well obfuscated and cryptic "curse" mechanic that really fucks with your head and, worse, your gameplay. But it also kind of hit too close to home. Left me really hollow, and unsettled, and uncomfortable. I thought trying to get more of the endings would defang it, as I understood the game better. It didn't; each one just made me feel a little more tired and a little more mad. I guess that's the mark of a good horror game, that it made me feel instead of making me think, but that fucking data entry job was the worst time of my life, and it might not have been the healthiest thing to go back to it. Even now, writing about it, I'm avoiding the specifics.
    Rogue Trader: Act II You might notice that I'm talking about every act of Rogue Trader like it's a separate game. To a suprising extent, that kind of is the case. Apart from acts 4 and 5, which are pretty linear and can be lumped together, each act of the game feels meaningfully distinct from the others not just narratively, but experientially and mechanically. That's part of why I was taking so many breaks throughout the game, despite being completely compelled by it, and eager to play more, for 90% of the runtime. Act II is Rogue Trader's biggest and best act; it's the one that I'll think of when I look back fondly on the game. It makes up maybe half of the game's total length, and introduces a key new mechanic: the colony management menu, where you can make light decisions about the worlds in your "protectorate" (i.e. evil empire). These worlds will include an opulent capital, a brutal prison-labor world, and a factory where heretical rot festers (more, besides); managing them will often offer you choices where every option is completely incompatible with your selected moral system, with no tangible impact on the world or your character besides the recources acquired. I'm not sure whether this disconnection is a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, not allowing my iconoclast character to do "ethical, cage-free, non-GMO colonialism" is probably the correct choice, just factually speaking, because there is no such thing, and especially not in this universe. On the other hand, it makes the whole system feel almost vestigial, more an occasional reward dispenser than anything else. It did slightly strengthen my connection with the world, which I suppose is enough. Here, with your ship restored, the Act II plot revolves around you warping across the Koronus Expanse, exploring, restablishing Theodora's uprooted power base, and generally running errands. The sheer amount of stuff you have to do feels appropriate, for a setting this large; it will eventually become a problem for the plot that everything in the story is so disconnected from everything else, but here, it feels like a strength. Exploring feels free-form and incredibly open; you're frequently presented with surprising new sidequests from within your voidship and without, whether it be a conspiracy that your enforces expose in a scene that pops up when you make a jump, or a mysterious pit showing up on your scan of the planet below that someone should probably investigate. I should emphasize that maybe the majority of the sidequests I encountered on my ship came from the two DLCs I bought, Void Shadows and Lex Imperialis. These quest chains never quite felt like chains; more like series of isolated quests that, miraculously, turned out to be connected in the end. They were also the best quests in the game, bar none, with the best writing and the best reactivity (maybe barring of Act I). The DLC quests even had coherent themes and motifs, which is far more than can be said for the main quest. Lex Imperialis in particular was a delight. It seems to have been inspired by Saturnalia and its tradition of role reversal, where for a day the servants would rule over their Roman masters. With one quest set on a feudal world, the DLC forces the all-powerful Rouge Trader into the shoes of a lowly servant; in another, it first forces her to pass capital judgement in an imperial court, then turns that same judgement on her in an attempted coup. It's the most vulnerable I ever felt playing the game, a welcome departure from the power fantasy to explore themes of what it actually *means* to hold this much power, how fragile it really is. Though it's never truly deep, it gave me something to chew on, which is more than can be said for most of the rest of the game. I'll give the game credit: there were a few bright spots in the writing. The Yrliet romance — a forbbiden relationship between an Aeldari (space elf) and human (space xenophobe) — was my favourite part of the game. It being an asexual relationship felt different from every other gaming romance questline I've been through, and Yrliet feels just alien enough for the relationship to feel both challenging, and plausible. Most of the romances and relationships are good, actually; companions don't tend to respond to most story beats — which feels like a huge oversight, given that they're unvoiced and so it wouldn't have been to onerous to write more dialogue for them — but the dedicated scenes you get with each character feel believable and engaging, and the characters do change in subtle ways in response to your actions and conversations in the main story. And Act III, which we'll get to, is genuinely good throughout. But Rogue Trader as a text lacks cohesion, it lacks a point, it lacks a main fucking plot in fact. In Act II, that isn't a problem. Act II is a CRPG open world, a huge space to explore with a ton of shit to find and do — none of it repetitive or boring, all of it bolstered by the fact that in a CRPG, talking is a main verb, and there are as many interesting conversations as there are interesting fights. Unfortunately, outside of the DLCs, self-contained conversations is most of what they are.

    Now, a few words about Skin Deep.

    Skin Deep I DNF'ed it. Wasn't for me.
    Rogue Trader: Act III Act III of Rogue Trader is the best written act. It sees you stripped of all your powers, your gear, your resources and capital, and sent to be a torture slave at the evil elf city. Hot. I knew about that city, Comorragh, where you eventually become a pit fighter, from the abovementioned lesbian smut. In Owlcat's interpretation of it, you feel naked and vulnerable, with a ton of stat-reducing traumas that you have to deal with; with your build ruined, with your companions gone. I played through the game as an AoE psyker DPS (a kind of magic wizard) so I wasn't as powerless as most players would have been, with my mind powers still intact, but still, your vulnerability is felt as you try to find allies both new and old, survive the city, and find a way out. It's a refreshing, mostly linear break from the Act II open-world power fantasy — and by being a more linear story, it's a lot cleaner than the incoherent plot of the rest of the game. You have a clear goal, you encounter obstacles to it in a more-or-less three act structure; getting out means making compromises you otherwise wouldn't, challenging your morality; as weak as you are, talking instead of fighting seems more appealing. The characters you meet are intersting, and contrast well with the human NPCs prevalent throughout the rest of the game. My only complaint is that the act isn't quite long enough. You find your companions pretty easily, all things considered, and get your overpowered gear back well before your escape — which is a shame, because it was around Act III that I was starting to realize that combat balance was a serious problem, and around Act III that I had to start cranking up the difficulty in a futile attempt to preserve any semblance of challenge. I wish Owlcat had comitted a little harder to breaking the power fantasy here: maybe put in a couple near-unwinnable fights, held you gear back from you for longer, make your traumas harder to cure. And the way the story ends — with the option to destroy Comorragh and genocide its (epistemologically evil) inhabitants feels both a little anticlimactic and a lot underdeveloped as a moral choice. I might be wrong, but your choice here has basically zero impact in the rest of the game, which just feels wrong. An aside: as I mentioned, the Yrliet romance was my favourite part of the game. Thoughout Act III she kept apologizing for betraying me, and other NPCs kept acting like I was insane for still working with her after "what she did." I was bewildered by this because I didn't remember any betrayal happening at all, to the point that I had to reload an old save just to check back to the end of Act II and find out what this betrayal was even supposed to be. And frankly, it was so minor that I was confused how anyone could even give a shit, but I checked the game's subreddit and some people wee pretty dogmatic about it. There are a few things like this in the story, where the assumed player reaction from the game just feels miles away from the reaction the text actually created in me.

    Okay, so. Reverse: 1999 might be my favourite game. Its monetization model is gacha; its genre is visual novel (with turn-based RPG essential oils spritzed over it). It's a deeply flawed text, one which is incredibly ambitious about the political and philosophical themes it wants to explore, about the artistic mileu it wants to belong to. Ocasionally, it reaches bewildering height of quality, telling some of my favourite stories in any medium, which haven't left my head in years; consistently, its art direction is surpassing beautiful and its characters are surpassing excellent. It updates with a new major story to mull over ever six weeks. This most recent patch was, in my interpretation, about the Holodomor.

    Reverse 1999: The Campaign's Tale Set on the steppes of the Don River Valley, "The Campaign's Tale" continues Reverse's main story, which has been about dealing with the end of the first world war, and the beginning of a new, esoteric, alternate-history war. Here, the story revolves around a racist who engineers a magical famine to kill the Cossacks living there, who he sees as subhuman, and around his former commander, an old, traitorous general, who has traveled back in time from the 1990s and claims to want to atone for the war crimes he once committed (in part) by stopping his rogue protege. Developed in China, Reverse: 1999 can broadly be described as a left-anarchist text. The historical events it's engaging with here — first, the displacement of the Cossacks by Russian Bolshevists who wanted to steal their land; second, the Holodomor, where many of the Don Cossacks (and other ethnic minorities in the USSR) were killed in an engineered famine; third, (and most tenuously) the modern Russian encorachment on, and invasion of, Ukraine, are sort of lumped together in its framework as atrocities, acts of genocide, perpetrated in the name of efficiency and expansion, but really fueled by base hatred and lust for power. But Reverse: 1999 is not primarily about macro-level historical commentary, or about depicting atrocities. Instead, "The Campaign's Tale"'s most striking commentary is about the leadup to, and the aftermath of, these acts, and specifically, the way they affect people: victims, tools, and perpetrators. The leadup: the game's main character, a teenage girl named Vertin, is leveraged and manipulated by war hawks in the increasingly fascistic government she works for to do their bidding — though the task is inocuous, even noble, they know, and she knows, that doing it for them will give them more power and apparent credibility. She's only even in this position because seven main story chapters ago — over two years ago, if we count by the real-world timeline of the chapters' release — she and her friends and allies carved out a place for themselves and other marginalized people (queer, neurodivergent, disabled, and magical) to exist safely within this authoritarian world order. A Campaign's Tale asks, "is it even possible to have systemic power at all, without being made complicit in war crimes?" In the aftermath: Igor, a general who has committed many atrocities himself, both actively and by passivity, in the course of his service, feels acutely the weight of his past actions, which didn't even achieve the utilitarian good he thought he was serving. He knows that redemption is impossible (even though, it should be noted, is crimes are much smaller in scale than the story's antagonists); his desire to atone is frustrated at every turn by his victims, who refuse to allow him forgiveness or sympathy; their desire for revenge, meanwhile, is frustrated by the political games Igor still plays in. What does it say that, in the end, he claims to be willing to face a legal and moral judgement that he knows he will not have to? What right, or responsibility, does he have to still command an army, to try to stop an obvious evil that he himself let fester? As a postmodern text, Reverse feels no obligation to answer that. It just leaves us to stew on the injustice and cruelty it depicts, the questions it poses. The evils Igor commited are done. They can't be changed, not even in this time travel narrative. So, what now? I left The Campaign's Tale feeling the sort of perverse delight you feel when a work of art depicts something awful in a really mature and thoughtful way. Though it wasn't a perfect story by any means, with some things I would have changed or cut, it tackles extremely difficult themes with skill, nuance, and a radical degree of compassion. Reverse 1999 might be my favourite game because this is what it's capable of; most games that aim for political are incapable of being this challenging, and of sticking in my head this ferociously. I never thought that I'd be so consistently looking forward to live service game updates because of their story.

    After that, going back to Rogue Trader felt a bit shit. Because, remember, last we left off, the game offered me an option to genocide the Drukari on Comorragh. I didn't, but either way, this decision would never have received even a tenth of the thought, effort, and care that went into Reverse's meditation on similar themes. An ending slide is all you get, friend. And sure, I hear you, "WH40K just isn't that kind of setting," "it's called grimdark for a reason!" Fair enough. At the time, though, the juxtaposition really damaged my experience of Rogue Trader's story. In Warhammer, genocide is camp. A Dogmatic character actually does them all the time, to help with digestion. In Rogue Trader, none of this is explored. The only thing that's really explored is the Koronus Expanse as a physical space. This is a game without, in my experience, much to say about anything.

    Rogue Trader Acts IV and V If you did as I did and completed all there was to do in Act II before moving on to Act III, these last few acts of the game are pretty linear. A few companion quests to tie up here and there, sure; one choice of what order to do two major quests, but even these feel streamlined compared to what came before. This is probably the right choice. The narrower structure does feel restrictive, but it keeps the game tight and well-paced all the way to the end. Shame none of it is actually that good, I guess. Throughout the game, you've been fighting off a cult, an alien attack, and a weird virus. You expect, at some point, to reach this point where everything comes together, where the story is revealed to be an ultra-cohesive masterpiece with a thundering finale. To a certain extent, this does happen, as in the end the sinister plot of the main villain is revealed, and you have to race against the clock to stop him. But on the other handd, you finish off the cult in an anticlimactic fight at the end of Act IV. You barely even see the aliens again after Act III. The final threat, from which the virus originiated, is revealed to be an out-of-nowhere SECOND alien civilization, with an out-of-nowhere imprisoned god that the villain wants to free (so that they can enslave them themself). Maybe these beats would have landed better if I had more familiarity with the setting, but on a narrative level, this all feels unsatisfying. The climax isn't climactic, it's just a workmanlike checklist of all the tenouosly connected threats you've been dealing with all game, there for you to cross out one one by one. It doesn't help that the mechanics collapse under their own weight at this point. Earlier I praised the combat, but gradually, little by little, the game's enjoyable progression and buildcrrafting system had been chipping away at its encounters, bit by bit, until there was nothing left. It's just to easy to come up with ridiculously broken builds in Rogue Trader, characters that pump out enough damage to end fights in one or two rounds by themselves (to say nothing of what you can achieve with a 6-man party), often before enemies can even act. I raised the combat difficulty, gradually, from Normal to Daring to Hard to Unfair and all that seemed to change was that enemies gained offensive capacity to rival mine. Fights would still end in a handful of turns, but now, enemies could end them in a handful of turns too, so I had to bring along one (1) defensive support. Revolutionary. I only ever lost one fight, out of like, hundreds, in all my time playing the game. Ship combat fares somewhat better: it's not as broken, fights still takes multiple rounds through the whole runtime of the game; your progression feels significant, but doesn't get to the point where it ruins encounters. But that does little to ameliorate a situation which is pretty dire: a story that feels badly constructed, a villain that feels like an asspull, a thematic tapestry that never existed in the first place. I'm a lot harsher on Baldur's Gate 3's story then most of its fans. But one thing you can't deny about that game is it has a central theme — abusive and coercive relationships: their formation and their aftermath — that it explores throroughly, through EVERY character and sidequest. The strength of the CRPG as a narrative genre, as a framework for storytelling, is that you get to take a position on that theme, in all its permutations, in a huge variety of scenarios; that, at some point, a situation is almost guaranteed to challenge your way, or your characters way, of thinking about the world. What, by contrast, is Rogue Trader about? Anyone who's played the game want to tell me? I have a hard time saying. For me, for the character I imagined, it was about the responsibility my character felt towards human life in a world that devalued it: a responsibility so strong that she even created a God to share her values and uphold her mission. That's an experience, an interpretation, that the game supports through the choices it offers. But not one that it challenged me on (except for one moment in the DLCs, incidentally). Not one that it endorsed or criticized or really even engaged with in its text. Rogue Trader is a build-your-own theme buffet, a game with nothing much to say besides, "hey, wasn't it fun to explore this universe? Didn't you enjoy getting to roleplay within it?" And yeah, Owlcat are right: it was fun, and I did enjoy it. Even though the game didn't make me think. Even if it rarely made me feel. Even if it had no falling action (my biggest pet peeve in gaming btw), proceeding directly from final boss to (pleasantly bleak) ending slides. Even if it ended in disapointment.

    When I look back on my month with Rogue Trader, I'll be looking back almost entirely favorably: on the exploration, the Romance, the openness, the fun and the camp. By sheer volume, this game is far more good than bad. But this month, I also played games that actually moved me: that made me feel miserable, and bad, and confused, and, in the end, changed in small ways. Rouge Trader, in extremis, was Terraria: Bigger and Boulder. I wanted it to be Reverse: 1999.
    Anyway. I do feel like I'm entering a very "modern CRPG" time in my life. Next week I'm meaning to play Esoteric Ebb; after that, maybe Larian's Divinity Original Sin 2, or the Owlcat pathfinder games, or Pillars of Eternity. We shall see! These games eat your life a little, but I always get at least something out of them.

    9 votes

  17. Comment on What is your favourite shark? in ~talk

    Evie
    Link
    The blacktip shark! Objectively it's kind of a median, unremarkable shark but when I was a kid they had a tank full of a bunch of adults and juveniles at my hometown zoo and I would just sit there...

    The blacktip shark! Objectively it's kind of a median, unremarkable shark but when I was a kid they had a tank full of a bunch of adults and juveniles at my hometown zoo and I would just sit there back to the moon jellyfish staring at them for hours until my family got finished with the lions or meerkats or seals and came to find me.
    It's cool how they can leap too, kinda like dolphins. I think they do it to get rid of parasites

    7 votes

  18. Comment on Megathread: April Fools' Day 2026 on the internet in ~talk

    Evie
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    With attacks on Omegas ramping up worldwide, it's more important than ever to have days like today where we take the time to acknowledge the incredible contributions Omegas have provided to...

    With attacks on Omegas ramping up worldwide, it's more important than ever to have days like today where we take the time to acknowledge the incredible contributions Omegas have provided to society: in politics, in science, in tech -- after all, many great Alphas couldn't have achieved their major world-changing breakthroughs without the support of their mates. And of course it's important to acknowledge how all Omegas, even unbonded ones, are precious, and should be treasured and protected.
    On a personal note I always feel warm and fuzzy when a big site like Ao3 -- one of the best sources for historical accounts -- takes time to mention the contributions of people like me.

    11 votes

  19. Comment on Trans Day of Visibility in ~lgbt

    Evie
    Link
    I know it's bad of me but I always roll my eyes a little at "trans day of visibility," since when did I ask for increased visibility? Wake me up when it's "transgender day of reparations from the...

    I know it's bad of me but I always roll my eyes a little at "trans day of visibility," since when did I ask for increased visibility? Wake me up when it's "transgender day of reparations from the government" lol.

    That said, I mean, I'm doing alright this year. Sometimes I have a day when I spiral but, I haven't been online at all these last several months so I genuinely cannot remember when I last encountered anti-trans hate. Yes, my government is pushing hard for it. Yes, there are a ton of transphobic bots and even real people online. But every human being I've met, even the cis ones, has been sweet and kind and normal about it. Even my goddamn mother has been making apologetic overtures through intermediaries. And I have the support of my new family, the lovely group of other trans women I live with, that just constantly lifts me up.

    Anyway Fae I get where you're coming from with the NB thing. I've been thinking lately that maybe my gender is dyke, that "womanhood" is of no real interest to me anymore, just closer to what I am than "manhood." Got years to feel out the details.

    It's been ages since I've felt either dysphoric or euphoric, I think. I still do have this kind of distant, unpleasant awareness of my body, my posture, my presentation out in public, but that might be more autism related than gender related. I guess nowadays I'm mostly just me. There's a scene in Disco Elysium where you can tell your partner, "Kim, I've decided to stop obsessing over my sexuality!" And, like, that but unironically is where I'm at.

    20 votes

  20. Comment on Tip to tip: Crossing China with no map in ~hobbies

    Evie
    Link
    Some of the conversations they have make me want to curl up into a ball and die, and I imagine it would be even worse if I spoke Mandarin. But I love this road trip stuff and some of the people...

    Some of the conversations they have make me want to curl up into a ball and die, and I imagine it would be even worse if I spoke Mandarin. But I love this road trip stuff and some of the people they met were so sweet... I'm always surprised by how much time people are willing to spend helping strangers out

    I imagine China will be much harder than Japan not just because it's way bigger, not just because their Chinese is way worse and they're seemingly awful at tonality, but also because there's far fewer English speakers there (according to Wikipedia, China is third last in the world in terms of the proportion of the population that speaks English; over a quarter of Japanese people speak English and there's lots of English signage even). Looks to be an entertaining trip!

    3 votes