Dragonchasers
type: channel
description: Games, geekery and fun
date: 2026-06-08T01:12:07Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
generator agent: https://wordpress.org/
items: Eternal Strands Finished
items: Helping Bhagpuss Carry the NTE Torch!
items: More Neverness to Everness Musings
items: Mixtape
items: Neverness to Everness is Dissapointing Me
items: Backlogs (If You Care)
items: Coral Island Progress Report
items: March 2026
items: Preying to Git Gud
items: Prey That I Can Break Into This Lab

Eternal Strands Finished
type: item
creator: Nimgimli
date: 2026-06-07T16:51:54Z
subject: Gaming
subject: Eternal Strands
description: Yellow Brick Game’s Eternal Strands launched in January of 2025 and if I’m remembering correctly I started playing pretty much on Day 1. I finished it today, about 18 months later. That time-span says a lot. My final save was around 41 hours; it was a game that got pushed to the back burner over […] The post Eternal Strands Finished appeared first on Dragonchasers.
encoded: Yellow Brick Game’s Eternal Strands launched in January of 2025 and if I’m remembering correctly I started playing pretty much on Day 1. I finished it today, about 18 months later. That time-span says a lot. My final save was around 41 hours; it was a game that got pushed to the back burner over and over again, but also a game I didn’t want to abandon. Eternal Strands is a 3rd person action adventure set in a universe that feels very complete but that we only see a glimpse of in this game. My guess is that Yellow Brick planned this to be a world they set a few games in, though I’m not sure if ES was a commercial success or not. [Google says it was not.] It was on Game Pass on Day 1, which is how I played it, and apparently the income from Microsoft was needed to get the game finished, and it didn’t make enough to finance a sequel without support from a partner. Again, this is all based on a quick search so take it with a grain of salt. Combat in the game is divided into melee & bow physical fighting, and a magic system consisting of fire, ice and kinetic skills. It takes a bit of time to get comfortable switching around in battle but once you do it works well. Additionally enemies are broken down into normal (eg human-ish) sized enemies and giant beasts/automatons that you have to climb on to attack. I found fighting normal sized enemies was satisfying and fun throughout the game. The big guys you had to climb were more of a mixed bag. When that combat jelled it was pretty cool, but too often it felt just a little janky. Imagine you’re clinging to the arm of a giant who is flailing around trying to shake you off. It gets really hard to ‘read’ what is happening since “you” get occluded by the giant’s body or other appendages and the camera doesn’t (and probably can’t) whip around fast enough to keep you in view. If it could keep up, it’d probably make the player dizzy or motion sick. As a compromise you can see an outline of yourself through the body which helps but …

Helping Bhagpuss Carry the NTE Torch!
type: item
creator: Nimgimli
date: 2026-06-01T16:42:45Z
subject: Gaming
subject: NTE
description: In and around the blogosphere I only know of 3 people playing Neverness to Everness. Bhagpuss, Mailvaltar and me. Bhagpuss is a blogging machine but even machines need some support now and then (to be clear, I don’t think Bhagpuss is literally a machine. He hardly ever uses emphasis crutches, binary contrasts or dramatic fragmentation. […] The post Helping Bhagpuss Carry the NTE Torch! appeared first on Dragonchasers.
encoded: In and around the blogosphere I only know of 3 people playing Neverness to Everness. Bhagpuss, Mailvaltar and me. Bhagpuss is a blogging machine but even machines need some support now and then (to be clear, I don’t think Bhagpuss is literally a machine. He hardly ever uses emphasis crutches, binary contrasts or dramatic fragmentation. [I’m not 100% sure what these are but they are terms called out in a tool I was looking at called “Stop Slop” which is supposed to make AI writing seem more human.]) See if AI was writing this it would NOT start the post with irrelvant tangents. That’s how you know it is really me! Anyway, I was feeling a bit off this weekend so I stayed in and played videogames all day, and mostly that meant Neverness to Everness. The next big content drop happens this week and I kind of wanted to be caught up. There are like 3 or 4 tiers of quests. I’m pretty sure I’m caught up on the Main Questline unless the next step is gated behind a high hunter level. I did the big side quests, including one that incorporates the rhythm game that I find extemely difficult. Fortunately you only had to play it 4 times and the rest of the quest was mostly teleporting around and talking to folks. I met Akane and Aurelia, I think? The former is an adult who I liked. The latter appears child-like but she was in a band with Akane so I’m guessing she is older than she appears. Side note: In NTE certain people (including all the playable characters) have “Esper abilities” [we can call it magic] which have certain side-effects that skew towards growing animal parts (cat ears, tails, etc) and potentially long life. So a character might look like a child but be quite old. Sadly they generally still behave like children so tend to be shrill and hyper. Anywway Aurelia seems much calmer so I look forward to learning more about her, including why she doesn’t walk but instead rides around on a floating jellyfish! But most of this quest had me running around with Nanally and Han…

More Neverness to Everness Musings
type: item
creator: Nimgimli
date: 2026-05-22T18:52:09Z
subject: Pointless Ramblings
subject: NTE
description: I wrote a long screed (lately all I do is screeds…I’ve been blocked from SO many comment sections…probably) on a recent Neverness to Everness post at Inventory Full. I only stopped scribbling because I remembered I was in someone else’s comment section and maybe I shouldn’t post a COMPLETE wall ‘o text. I stopped but […] The post More Neverness to Everness Musings appeared first on Dragonchasers.
encoded: I wrote a long screed (lately all I do is screeds…I’ve been blocked from SO many comment sections…probably) on a recent Neverness to Everness post at Inventory Full. I only stopped scribbling because I remembered I was in someone else’s comment section and maybe I shouldn’t post a COMPLETE wall ‘o text. I stopped but now I’ve been carrying around these residual NTE thoughts and I need to get ’em out. I’m gonna go ultra-cheese and copy/paste my comment then go on from there. Here’s the comment: Old Comment * * * I still struggle! The UI on console was getting a lot better but this week’s patch seemed to bring back some older nuisance bugs. Hopefully they get smoothed out again. But what is with this mysterious texter that spams you every day? Hate that person! And Sakiri is a psychopath. I was doing a quest and was forced to take her along and we met this dude, one of a pair of twins, and she tried to get her monster to eat the poor guy. I’d happily throw Sakiri in a volcano. I DID get Hokori using the dice I’d been hoarding, so that was awesome. Love her. Love the main character, too. Most of the adults I really like (maybe not Adler) but all these kids… they’re all like fingernails on a chalkboard. I was doing the quest where you’re at an auction trying to buy an anomoly and the kids from the Courier Service were there. I finally get away from one set of kids and now I’m dealing with another (though they’re not as grating as the Eibon kids who’re just awful to everyone, including each other.) Edgar is slowly growing on me a little just because I feel bad for the poor kid; the girls just savage him constantly. <img decoding="async" width="1024" height="573" src="https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/mc_and_edgar-1024x573.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-10889" srcset="https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/mc_and_edgar-1024x573.jpg 1024w, https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/mc_and_edgar-300x168.jpg 300w, https://dragonchasers…

Mixtape
type: item
creator: Nimgimli
date: 2026-05-09T22:05:59Z
subject: Gaming
description: Mixtape is about 3 kids getting out of high school and facing the fact that life is going to now pull them in different directions. It takes place in the mid-90s. I myself graduated high school in 1979, but Mixtape still hit me hard with the nostalgia feels. I guess high school never really changed, […] The post Mixtape appeared first on Dragonchasers.
encoded: Mixtape is about 3 kids getting out of high school and facing the fact that life is going to now pull them in different directions. It takes place in the mid-90s. I myself graduated high school in 1979, but Mixtape still hit me hard with the nostalgia feels. I guess high school never really changed, at least not until cell phones were invented. These three were up to the same trouble I was back in the day. Skateboarding around town, getting high, trying to get booze, and hitting up secret parties, the location of which passed by word of mouth. The comparison I keep coming back to is American Graffitti. Same mix of laughs and melancholy for times lost. I absolutely ADORED Mixtape. The main character is Stacey Rockford, a girl whose superpower is finding the right song for any occasion. The soundtrack is a big part of Mixtape (probably not a surprise given the name) though I have to confess a lot of the music I’d not heard before even though it was from the 60s, 70s and 80s. Lots of b-sides and such. Stacey announces each song, breaking the 4th wall, as it starts to play. Her two friends are Van Slater, the tall skinny beanie wearing kid who says “cha!” for yes unironically. But he has a weirdly philsophical side. The third member of the party is Cassandra. Her dad is a cop and her parents are super strict, so when she got old enough to rebel, she deliberately sought out Rockford and Slater to hang out with them. I loved all three of these characters. Y’know when you consume a piece of media and you can kind of ‘map’ the characters onto real life people you’ve known? That was what happened with me and the Mixtape trio. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/stace_and_cas.jpg" alt="" width="1894" height="964" class="size-full wp-image-10876" srcset="https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/stace_and_cas.jpg 1894w, https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/stace_and_cas-300x153.jpg 300w, http…

Neverness to Everness is Dissapointing Me
type: item
creator: Nimgimli
date: 2026-05-04T20:15:45Z
subject: Gaming
subject: Neveness to Everness
subject: NTE
description: I had REALLY been looking forward to the launch of the new urban fantasy gacha game Neverness to Everness. It had been the game I was waiting for and I’d anticipated falling down, down, down an NTE rabbit hole until summertime or beyond. I’m sad to report that this hasn’t happened. I really really WANT […] The post Neverness to Everness is Dissapointing Me appeared first on Dragonchasers.
encoded: I had REALLY been looking forward to the launch of the new urban fantasy gacha game Neverness to Everness. It had been the game I was waiting for and I’d anticipated falling down, down, down an NTE rabbit hole until summertime or beyond. I’m sad to report that this hasn’t happened. I really really WANT to love the game the way Bhagpuss is loving it, but some things can’t be forced. My dissapointment can be sorted into two buckets. Bucket #1 is a lack of polish, at least on the Playstation 5 version. Mostly we’re talking Quality of Life things. There are a lot of places in the UI where you have to drill down a few levels to get to the task you want to work on, but then backing up takes you all the way out of the UI and you have to drill back down again to pick the next option on a list. Doesn’t sound like much but it just adds a certain amount of friction and frustration to getting things done. Then there are the voiced dialog segments where you can’t skip forward as quickly as I’d like to. For whatever reason when a character starts talking, but I’ve already read the text on the screen, hitting the “next” button doesn’t do anything immediately. Eventually it does, but I like to advance at the speed I’m reading and it is all much slower than this. Sometimes even after the character has finished their line, I STILL can’t proceed unless I wait for 10 seconds or so. More frustration. Lastly I’ve encountered some bugs that make certain quests uncompleteable, but maybe that’s just me being unlucky. I’m guessing all of the above will get cleared up as updates roll out and rough surfaces get smoothed down. The second bucket, though, I don’t have as much hope for. This is the content. I expected something like an anime-themed Grand Theft Auto that had my character and their friends going on adventures and getting into trouble. Instead I got what feels like a babysitting simulation. My character is a young adult; let’s say late teens-early 20s, based on appearance. But they’r…

Backlogs (If You Care)
type: item
creator: Nimgimli
date: 2026-05-03T16:04:31Z
subject: Gaming
description: A LOT of us have medium to huge gaming backlogs. Most of us are unconcerned with this. We like games, we buy games, but we have limited time to play games so the backlog builds. No big deal. I acknowledge that backlogs are a silly thing to stress over. And yet, at times I do […] The post Backlogs (If You Care) appeared first on Dragonchasers.
encoded: A LOT of us have medium to huge gaming backlogs. Most of us are unconcerned with this. We like games, we buy games, but we have limited time to play games so the backlog builds. No big deal. I acknowledge that backlogs are a silly thing to stress over. And yet, at times I do stress over them. If you don’t, just appreciate that your brain is more reasonable than mine is and take it as a win. Why do I stress? I’m not even sure. There’s a little bit of “I paid for this and it is wasteful not to then consume it” but honestly a lot of my backlog comes from bundles or super sales or even giveaways. The actual cost of most of my backlog is fairly low. I think it is more “What am I missing out on by not experiencing this game?” At the end of the day, WHY I stress about it isn’t the point of this post. The point is I learned a couple of interesting tips for combatting your backlog yesterday and I wanted to share. These come from a YouTube video that the algorithm fed me, but like most YouTube videos it is way longer than it needs to be. So here are the ideas that resonated with me. The author of the video first talks about the mental cost of making choices. We make choices all day long, particularly on work days. By the time you’re ready to play a game, your brain is just exhausted from making choices (so the argument goes) which is why you end up staring at your collection but never actually playing anything. So the first suggestion is to limit your choice. Pick 3 games in a variety of genres and ignore everything else. For digital games that author suggests finding some kind of physical token to represent the three games, and leave these in a basket by your gaming rig. Now when it is time to play, you still have to make a choice but choosing between 3 games is a lot easier than choosing between 300 games. Now that you’ve picked a game, put your phone away on the other side of the room, to limit distractions. Personally this didn’t really resonate with me as I don’t find my…

Coral Island Progress Report
type: item
creator: Nimgimli
date: 2026-04-16T15:32:27Z
subject: Gaming
subject: Coral Island
subject: farm sims
subject: life sims
description: I’ve been on quite the journey with my Coral Island playthrough and it has somehow become my main game recently. Early days was just your typical farming sim loop. You know the one. Clear land, prepare the land, plant the seeds, water the seeds, look up in bewilderment at the fact that evening was drawing […] The post Coral Island Progress Report appeared first on Dragonchasers.
encoded: I’ve been on quite the journey with my Coral Island playthrough and it has somehow become my main game recently. Early days was just your typical farming sim loop. You know the one. Clear land, prepare the land, plant the seeds, water the seeds, look up in bewilderment at the fact that evening was drawing near. Those early in-game days are always a little frantic as you race to get everything done before you run out of hours in the day, stamina, or both. Phase two was when cash started becoming the limiting factor. That’s when I got serious and set up a spreadsheet to try to track which crops and ‘artisan goods’ (aka crafted items) were most profitable. At the end of every in-game day I’d pop open my laptop and transcribe all the figures in. This was kind of fun and interesting…until it wasn’t. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/spreadsheet.jpg" alt="Screenshot of one of my Coral Island Spreadsheet tabs" width="1505" height="687" class="size-full wp-image-10849" srcset="https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/spreadsheet.jpg 1505w, https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/spreadsheet-300x137.jpg 300w, https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/spreadsheet-1024x467.jpg 1024w, https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/spreadsheet-768x351.jpg 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1505px) 100vw, 1505px" /> Sometimes I pretend I’m good at money management As is typical in these games, you get better at everything. You get new tools to automate chores (sprinklers to do your watering, feeders to keep the livestock fed, improvements to your tools so manual labor goes faster and eats less stamina). That gives you more time to explore, which is about when I learned there’s a second map and it’s all underwater. I spent a LOT of time cleaning the sea floor around Coral Island. This was honestly tedious but in a zen kind of way. There are also a series of mines that need to be expl…

March 2026
type: item
creator: Nimgimli
date: 2026-04-01T03:01:52Z
subject: Gaming
subject: TV & Movies
subject: Monthly Recaps
description: I hate it when the 1st falls in the middle of a busy week. Makes it hard to find time to do a proper recap, though once again I don’t have much to recap. Playing Coral Island — This is where I spent most of my time this month. After finishing My Time At Sandrock […] The post March 2026 appeared first on Dragonchasers.
encoded: I hate it when the 1st falls in the middle of a busy week. Makes it hard to find time to do a proper recap, though once again I don’t have much to recap. Playing <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/fish.jpg" alt="A screenshot from Coral Island showing the male main character talking to what appears to be an angler fish" width="1548" height="1022" class="size-full wp-image-10842" srcset="https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/fish.jpg 1548w, https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/fish-300x198.jpg 300w, https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/fish-1024x676.jpg 1024w, https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/fish-768x507.jpg 768w, https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/fish-1536x1014.jpg 1536w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1548px) 100vw, 1548px" /> This guy doesn’t look happy, but he did just give me a gift for freeing him from a cage Coral Island — This is where I spent most of my time this month. After finishing My Time At Sandrock I apparently wasn’t done with (mostly) cozy farming sims and I rolled right into CI. I’m in my first Winter now (which is a little boring to be honest) and at about 35 hours. It is even more “Stardew Valley”-ish than Sandrock was, though again it is ‘3d’ rather than sprite-based. The characters look older too, which I prefer. I mean there are kids, young folk, old folk. Married folk, single folk. There’s a lot of stuff to acquire and upgrade, and of course people to meet and befriend and possibly marry, bed and have kids with. [Personally I keep busy enough petting my chickens, sheep and cows every day… can’t imagine adding a kid into the mix!] Apparently there’s an update coming that lets kids grow up and I hope you can assign them chores once they do. Also, there’s a whole underwater section of the game which is kind of neat. Anyway, good game so far. On console movement can be a little fiddly when it comes time to in…

Preying to Git Gud
type: item
creator: Nimgimli
date: 2026-03-20T23:28:50Z
subject: Pointless Ramblings
subject: Arkane Studios
subject: horror
subject: Prey
subject: space
description: As I mentioned at the tail end of my last post, I’d been stuck in Prey trying to get into Dr Calvino’s Lab. I was determined not to look up a solution to this problem. Then, in a sign that the universe has a sense of humor, when I fired the game up just to […] The post Preying to Git Gud appeared first on Dragonchasers.
encoded: As I mentioned at the tail end of my last post, I’d been stuck in Prey trying to get into Dr Calvino’s Lab. I was determined not to look up a solution to this problem. Then, in a sign that the universe has a sense of humor, when I fired the game up just to take some screenshots, not really to play it, I found Dr. C’s keycard. I was excited to see what was in the lab but couldn’t REALLY play at that moment because it was during my work day. (Shhhh) Today I went back, explored his office and honestly, there wasn’t a lot there, other than access to some servers that needed to be rebooted. I did that and was told by the mysterious benefactor who’d been feeding me breadcrumbs that I had to get back to my office to finish watching a video. OK, easy enough except, nope. During my time in the lab a bunch more scary enemies had spawned. Meanwhile I was at 20% health with no medkits and hardly any ammo, though I had a few EMP Grenades. Those, at least, would work on the berserk robots I had to get past. Hit ’em with an EMP grenade then while they’re stunned bash them apart with my trusty wrench. Except even that didn’t go as planned because once when I was bashing a bad robot, it sparked and caused an explosion that killed me. Fortunately I’ve been obsessively Quick Saving. EVERYTHING in this game can kill me. I’ve died at least half a dozen times from getting too close to a sparking wire! It took a lot of tries but I snuck past the other enemies by climbing up into the rafters. These creatures haven’t learned to look up yet, I guess. I did have to bust my office window and climb in, but I finally saw the video that was so important for me to watch. Speaking of videos (this is NOT the video I had to watch): I snagged a video of Mimics being Mimics, but between the game being pretty dark to begin with, and HDR sticking its fingers in, it came out really dark. This version is brightened as much as ClipChamp will brighten things but my apologies as it is still really dark. [spoi…

Prey That I Can Break Into This Lab
type: item
creator: Nimgimli
date: 2026-03-19T19:37:06Z
subject: Gaming
subject: Arkane Studios
subject: horror
subject: Prey
subject: space
description: Always one to keep my finger on the pulse of gaming, I recently started playing 2017’s Prey [See? Now the ‘typo’ in the title makes sense, right?]. As opposed to 2006’s Prey, which as far as I can tell is completely unrelated to this game. I played a little bit of that one too, back […] The post Prey That I Can Break Into This Lab appeared first on Dragonchasers.
encoded: Always one to keep my finger on the pulse of gaming, I recently started playing 2017’s Prey [See? Now the ‘typo’ in the title makes sense, right?]. As opposed to 2006’s Prey, which as far as I can tell is completely unrelated to this game. I played a little bit of that one too, back in the day, but I don’t remember much about it other than it made me motion sick. In THIS Prey you are on a space station overrun with what I assume are aliens or maybe it is some life form that was created in a lab? Too soon to know for sure. But the ‘trash mob’ of the game is the Mimic. This is a little tentacled thing that can disguise itself as anything in the game. You’re walking past a chair and suddenly it turns into a critter that attacks. This has made me SO paranoid that sometimes I go into a room and just do a melee attack on EVERYTHING to be sure nothing is a Mimic. I’ll admit right away, I’m confused when I’m playing Prey. I’m sort of not sure what I’m supposed to be doing yet. I don’t really know who I am. I have some general goals that game has given me, but no real indication of what I should do first. There are also areas basically locked behind a skill system. You collect these geegaws that let you upgrade your skills. For example you find a broken door and it requires Repair 2 in order to fix it, but you only have Repair 1. So you make a mental note to come back here when you have managed to upgrade that skill. Let’s just say at this point I have a LOT of these mental notes. I’m assuming Prey is one of those games where you’ll be retracing your steps a lot. <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/skillcheck.jpg" alt="Screenshot showing a "Breach Failsafe" device that is broken" width="1869" height="1020" class="size-full wp-image-10813" srcset="https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/skillcheck.jpg 1869w, https://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/skillcheck-300x164.jpg 300w, https://dragonch…