What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

Citizen Sleeper this week. It's one of those text-heavy games which delivers a lot of (science fiction) story and uses click-based and inventory-based gameplay mechanics for progression. It reminded me a bit of I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, minus the card game (which I kind of liked!) and the disrespectful notion that a player is supposed to replay through the same game a dozen times even though most of the scenes would be the exact same.

That's not to say CS doesn't get a little grindy, also. Every cycle (turn/day) you roll a bunch of d6 (fewer the more injured you are), and depending on their (random) outcome there are things you can or can't do, since actions require dice and dice rolls determine how successful an action is likely to be (negative outcomes can yield injury and failure). The gameplay allows for strategy; you can allocate your dice into different things in such a way that maximizes the usefulness of what you rolled, and upgrade yourself to make yourself more compatible with one or more specific types of challenges.

The challenges are all very samey, though. Everything is based on delay clocks (you have have to wait!) or doing the same thing over and over in order to fill up a meter. The meters gate story progression, and accomplishing drives (quests) yields upgrade points. That's it. That's the cycle. There's a hacking system whose existence the developers seem to have forgotten about one third of the way in; hacking still happens in the (included) expansions, but it uses the same repetition meters as everything else. Weird!

The science fiction concepts in the game are pretty good. For a game that lives and dies by its story, though, there sure is a ridiculous amount of missing commas in the text. Like, come on. I'm aware I complained about the written dialogue in Tinykin last week and I'm feeling a bit curmudgeonly doing it twice in a row; the writing in both games is actually fine, but please, proofread your five million pages of dialogue if reading it is part of your main value proposition!

The romance options and self-edification you get in IWATEC are nowhere to be found; this future is definitely much more gloomy and sad. Instead of optimistic space hippies and adorable promiscuous teens, you get space corporations treating people as property and forcing them into indentured servitude in rapidly decaying space colonies. There are some good people, but for the most part, despite being interesting, the characters are angry, stressed out and uncooperative.

Both games want you to gather funghi though!

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Brotato

First things first: this the only game I've played (that I'm aware of) that was made in Godot (which is awesome).

Second things second: oh my god this game is addictive.

It has been years (maybe over a decade?), since I got sucked into a game and decided to forego sleep and instead play it into the wee hours of the morning. This past weekend though, Brotato got its hooks into me, and I kept telling myself "only one more run" as the clock made its way past midnight and up through the single digit hours.

Initially I almost bounced off the game. I'd seen it compared to Vampire Survivors and many people treat Brotato as the pinnacle of the genre. At the time I started playing it, I didn't quite get what it was going for. It's got the same auto-attack, collect drops gameplay as VS, but the builds in the game are way more about stat management, random items, and managing tradeoffs. My first few runs I didn't really understand all of the game elements and it didn't feel that good to play.

Now that I get it though, it's gripping.

The item tradeoffs remind me of Binding of Isaac, while the character building reminds me a bit of Diablo. Brotato takes the essence of both of those, works them into a combined batter, and pours them into a Vampire Survivors mold. The result is the best tasting gaming cake I've had in a while.

Unlike VS, runs are done in waves. You've got 20 waves total, and each wave you collect materials that drop from the field and gain XP. In between waves, there's a shop with random weapon and item drops that you can buy, and you can pay for rerolls. Your character can have 6 different weapons and has 15 different stats (e.g. damage, speed, crit chance, armor, etc.). The different weapons rely on different stats, and the different items do lots of different things to different stats, as well as sometimes changing how your character works. A given run involves you trying to build towards the stats and weapons you want, all while hoping the RNG gods are favorable to you (which you can directly influence through your luck stat).

A big part of the game is the variety of characters you have access to. Each one has a starting stat block that nudges you in a specific direction with your build. Some of them are obvious, while some of them are slightly more puzzling as you try to figure out what a winning strategy for them might be.

I've found it very hard not to get attached to builds. Because there's more depth and robust options for how you build your character, I find myself buying into my character's progression and getting heartbroken when my build dies in, say, wave 19. I haven't felt that way about any other VS-like game, because their builds tend to be more simple and straightforward.

The game is perfect on the Steam Deck, and it's seriously addictive. Like, to the point that I feel compelled to warn some people about it. I can look ahead in my life and already see the large number of hours I'm going to lose to this, and I don't want to be responsible for that for anyone else.

When I'm not playing Brotato, I'm thinking about how I would rather be playing Brotato.

I never liked this idea that "WoW starts at level cap", and the Classic WoW Hardcore Challenge made me see the game in an entirely new light.

At face value, the idea of playing WoW with permadeath, no trading, and many other severe limitations sounds like an exercise in masochism. To a certain extent, it is. WoW is not Diablo, and the amount of time dedicated to a character is measured in hundreds of hours. You can play an entire game from start to finish in the time it takes to level a Vanilla character to 20 (of 60).

It only takes a few seconds of distraction to lose a character, which can be enraging and traumatic. It's a big price to pay, but, for those that love the game, it's well worth it.

The world of Hardcore WoW is as lethal as it is alive. I'm not rushing to the endgame, I'm rather fully engaged, totally present every step of the way, and learning a lot about the inherent value of every item, skill, or profession. Going around with my rogue I'm always considering the surrounding enemies, making tactical moment-by-moment decisions. Gold is a real constraint, as I can't accept anything from other players (WoW players and be very generous, and I often see myself with a bunch of bags and a few hundred golds before level 10). Now I must decide where to spend my resources, carefully designing my character's journey.

Hardcore can be tragic and demanding, and only time will tell if I'll be able to sustain the effort. It took me days to level a character to 10, with many deaths and restarts. It was grueling but so much fun!

Another aspect of Hardcore (in the unofficial hardcore server) is socialization. The guilds are huge and chat is always active both globally and in-guild. It feels like a real community. I even ended up creating a storyline for my character that grew from a joke in guild chat, people really liked it and in the end, a player showed up near me and we did a bunch of "scenes", acting out the story of my character (I created, deleted and recreated a character with the same name over and over until she got so pissed off of being killed by the same mobs that she vowed to kill every one of them. A simple joke/idea, but it was really fun!).

A consequence of playing Hardcore is that you're never relaxed, so I also played a bit with a regular character on another server. I'm not strictly following the Hardcore rules, but I decided to not accept gold from other players, I won't use the auction house, nor will employ leveling guide addons. But, even without permadeath, I am naturally seeking a more paced and strategic style. It is slower, but so much more fun!