Dragonchasers

Outbound, Neverness to Everness, and Nintendo Switch

Posted on June 19, 2026 by Nimgimli

This is one of those ‘grab bag’ posts we do when we have a little to say about a few things.

First, progress in Neverness to Everness was going great but look at what happened!

I’ve also pushed the ‘battle pass’ thingie to level 50 which is where the interesting rewards end. After that every level just gives you some in-game currency, which is useful but not exciting.

There are, I’m sure, a few quests I’ve missed and I know I have some character micro-quests floating around, but in terms of narrative for now I’m tapped out on NTE. So I’ve just been fighting bosses to get materials to level up characters that I’m not using and basically biding my time waiting for the next content patch to drop.

Nintendo Switch 2

The other day after the “Summer Game Fest”-adjacent Nintendo Showcase, I bought myself a Switch 2. This was weird becuase I barely use my Switch 1, but we’d gotten PartPurple a Switch 2 back when Nintendo announced the price would be going up. When she games, she games on Switch so I’ll call it her main gaming platform; made sense to get her the upgrade in case, for example, a Switch 2 exclusive Animal Crossing ever comes out. Normally we’d wait for that to happen but with the price increase coming we took the plunge. Anyway I of course checked it out when she got hers and I was impressed. I didn’t realize how much bigger the screen was.

One of my issues with the original Switch is that I found it pretty hard to read text on the screen with my bad old eyes. I could of course play on the TV but there it had to compete with PS5 and Xbox Series X and it just couldn’t. It wasn’t powerful enough. The Switch 2 solves both of those issues. The screen is bigger and higher res and much more comfortable for me to read, and the device iself is light enough to be enjoyable to use in handheld mode. I mention the weight because I also have a Steam Deck which has a nice big screen but I find it to be a little too heavy and bulky to play for very long. The Switch 2 is 1080P on the device and does 4K on the TV. I don’t think it is as powerful as the other consoles, still, [honestly I may be wrong] but it is powerful enough to at least be a comparable experience.

Bottom line, I’m actually really happy with the Switch 2 and have been using it a lot. Right now I’m trying, for the 3rd or 4th time, to play Octopath Traveler. I’d originally purchased it on Switch but abandoned it because, well, see above re: my issues with the original Switch. Then the game hit Game Pass and/or PS Plus and I’d started it but bounced off it, or it left the services. I can’t remember. Finally I bought it on PC so I could play it on the Steam Deck but, again, see above re: issues with the Steam Deck.

So now I’m back to the Switch version only playing on Switch 2 which is a joy. I’m only maybe 10 hours in but that’s at least twice as much time as I’d spent on it in the past. I’m still doing the initial loop where you go around and meet all the characters and get them to join you. But after splashing out for the console itself and a few accessories, including the VERY nice Switch 2 Pro Controller, I didn’t really have the $$ to spend on Switch 2 games. But I’m adding stuff to my wish list!

Outbound

When the Outbound demo came out last winter I tried it and I LOVED it. I couldn’t wait to play this cozy game about rambling around the countryside in a camper and… just exploring.

But when the full game came out I found it was pretty meh. I was so puzzled by this that I kept playing it just to try to understand what changed. Maybe it was just that I’d changed. Here’s what I’ve identified so far and it’s kind of a laundry list of little things

I don’t remember my character having a voice. He does now and it isn’t good. It just feels super artificial and it bugs me. You can turn it off, mostly, and that helped.
The inventory system annoys me. You can carry 20 items. That’s fine. But when you go to 21 items my character starts groaning from the struggle and you’re told you’re carrying too much weight. What is silly is if you’re carrying 21 rocks, or 21 flower petals, you still groan from the exertion of it all. Don’t limit inventory by quantity but then call it weight because it just shatters the immersion, for me at least. I’m carrying a pack full of rocks, then I (literally) add a bottlecap to the pack and suddenly it’s too heavy!
The world is basically dead. You never see another person, at least I haven’t. Everyone has gone to some festival. Yet trash and stuff pops up all over. Where is it coming from?
Days go by really quickly, but nighttimes never end. Literally as far as I can tell. Night only ends when you go to sleep. I don’t know why the game counts the number of days you’ve been through but on the assumption there’s a reason, I do most of my stuff at night so as not to use up too many days. But nights are legit dark, too, so it’s a little frustrating stumbling around in the dark gathering things.
Then there are a lot of little friction points: you can’t scroll the map while you drive. You can look at it, but you can’t scroll it. You have to stop and get out of the vehicle first. When you deposit stuff into the ‘stash’ in your van, EVERYTHING goes in at once unless you ‘lock’ an item first. Annoying. At some point you get a dog. There are 4 dogs at a shelter you find, and you can pick 1. You then leave the other 3 to starve because no one is there to feed them. The game doesn’t say this, but it was how I felt. The dog is just a beast of burden; it doesn’t even ride in the RV with you but has to chase you around. Cruelty to animals! The dog can carry 10 items so it’s basically an inventory upgrade.

There’re a lot of survivalbox systems here: you gather materials to make tools to get better materials to make better tools. You can research upgrades and stuff. This all works OK but at least at lower levels it feels rather rote. You craft an Axe. Then you craft Axe 2. Then Axe 3. It’s no different then crafting a shabby axe, then a decent axe, then a good axe, but it just feels lazy. Gear tiers seem to gate you between zones. At least between the first and second zone. I haven’t been to the 3rd one yet.

Maybe it is just me. Outbound has decent reviews on Steam but only a 64% on Metacritic. It might be a better game for folks who love to decorate as you unlock a lot of blueprints for nicer tables and chairs and stuff, all of which are just cosmetic.

I dunno. It’s a pretty game and it is definitely very chill. Your RV crawls along at a very low speed and there’s no other traffic or anything so driving is relaxing, I guess? I guess maybe I just need more of a goal or something? Sorry, Outbound!

And that’s about it for what I’ve been playing lately. I hope we get more NTE content soon because that’s what I WANT to be playing; it’s just that constant grinding for materials isn’t enough to hold me in that game for very long each day.

50 Hours of Neverness to Everness

Posted on June 11, 2026June 13, 2026 by Nimgimli

My initial reaction to Neverness to Everness was fairly tepid but there was enough there to keep me playing. Since them my enjoyment has increased a lot and I’ve played every day since launch. Yesterday I noticed I was at 49 hours heading in, so it’ll be at 50 today if I didn’t get that far last night.

For once I’m staying caught up with the story in one of these Genshin-Likes which I think helps keep me engaged. I’m looking forward to the next update to see where the tale takes us. There are a LOT of quests in NTE but I focus on the main ones and do the little side ones when the mood takes me. I shouldn’t really call them “little” since some of them are fairly involved and interesting. Let’s say “Side Quests” instead. Less demeaning.

Like all these games, NTE has a battle-pass thingie and like all of them, the amount of exp you can earn in the battle pass each week is limited. So the early part of the week I spend pushing on that until I hit cap, then I just putter around. You can spend a LOT of time just puttering around in NTE. It’s fun (for me at least) just to cruise around the city to see what’s going on.

I’m still focused on one main team which is Zero (the ‘you’ character), Mint, Hathor and Hotori. Hotori was earned via the premium gacha system, though using currency that I earned via playing rather than via purchasing. Hotta (the developer) is pretty generous with the handouts when you’re new. We’ll see if that continues. I have also rolled a lot on the standard gacha and got Mint so many times her skills are fully unlocked. Again, all using currency I got just by playing.

I like Mint because she calls me Coco because she thinks I smell like cocoa (and I LOVE her voice actor). I like Hotori because she calls me Precious. (I guess I’m revealing how shallow I am, eh?) And I like Hathor because she’s a badass on a bike, though in truth she IS the weak link in my loadout. Zero and Mint are level 60 and the other two are level 50 until I farm the appropriate “Ascend” materials for them. I hope I have that right. 60 and 50. Or was it 50 and 40? They’re maxed for Hunter Level 40 anyway.

I’ve been semi-avoiding the “Industry” system which is one of the hooks here. I own all the Cafes and keep them stocked in order to generate income (and I always do my own shopping so as to get the choicest ingredients!), I own two apartments because I needed two to qualify to level up my Industry Level, and otherwise I’ve mostly ignored all these mini-games for now. Oh, I fish now and then, too. I WANT to get into all these things but time is not infinite and the other parts of the game have been keeping me busy!

I spend very little time around Taygedo, who was a bit part of why I wasn’t loving the game at first. I did uncover at some point that Taygedo is female. A female otter with a TV for a head who talks about eating sea urchins all the time, which implies she is a sea otter so why is she on land? [Update: According to the Internet, this was a translation error and Taygedo is in fact male.] And when your head is a TV how do you even eat? There’re still a LOT of kids in the game but they’re slowly, slowly growing on me, to the point where if I’m hanging out with one of them they don’t bug me that much. When two of them are with me and start their chatterbox routine then I start grinding my teeth again. Baby steps.

Haniel (I think, I mix up the names) standing next a cardboard cutout of her favorite manga character

In terms of bugs and controller UI inconsistences, the former seem to be mostly eradicated and they’re making progress on the latter. Also I suppose I’m just learning that different parts of the UI use different “Do it” buttons.

So yeah, Neverness to Everness has become a hit for me, like Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves before it. I guess I just love these big-world, always-changing games full of combat and quests and ‘getting more stuff’ and making lots of numbers go up. And as with GI and WW before it, I limit my spending to $15/month which is a number I’m comfortable with from all those years of MMO subs. I spend $5 on the “log in every day and collect currency” subscription, and another $10 for the “Premium” battle pass. Actually the latter lasts for longer than a month so it isn’t quite $15/month but I’m not going to bother to do the math. The important take-away is that these are optional and people can and frequently do play completely for free and don’t spend anything.

Bottom line? You should at least give it a try. What do you have to lose other than an hour or two of your time!

Cityscape shot showing our protagonist in the distance — Just an Appraisor out for an evening stroll

A Quick Dip into Tunic

Posted on June 10, 2026 by Nimgimli

Tunic is one of those indie games that I’ve always heard good things about, but that I also heard was quite difficult. Because of that I ignored it for a long time, but this week I decided to give it a shot (it’s on Xbox Game Pass so it was just sitting there, staring at me).

Here’s the elevator pitch. Tunic is a low-poly action-adventure starring a little fox who has to… do… something. It isn’t clear what your goal is. There is some souls-like DNA in the game; you can regain lost health by interacting with a shrine, but doing so respawns all the enemies except for bosses. You collect gold as you fight but if you die you drop it all. You can come back to your corpse to recover it. So that’s the combat challenge. There’s also a bit of rogue-like in there: you pick up items but the only way to figure out what they do is to use them and observe. There’s also a heavy puzzle element to the game. One of the things you collect are pages to the manual for the game which, over time, teach you how to play (presumably). There are also a lot of hidden passages; hidden in an honest way, like behind a stairwell or something. Not hidden in the sense of “There’s a door in front of you but it looks like a solid wall.” At least I didn’t encounter any of the later. Stuff is hidden via perspective instead (you can’t move the camera and you look at the game world from an isometric view).

Tunic pondering a gap in the road — Not a great example but see that ladder that isn’t immediately obvious if you’re running past this area. Those ‘stumps’ around it used to be trees that obscured it more until I hacked them down with my sword. There are better hidden pathways but… since you can’t see them I can’t show you an example!

Tunic seems really well made. It runs like a dream, combat feels fluid, and while the graphics are simple, they are also very pleasing.

But Tunic is not the game for me. It isn’t even the combat so much as the puzzles. I want a good map in games I play. I have a not-great sense of direction and while you do eventually find a 2d map, it isn’t super helpful. I also am not a fan of finding signs and even manual pages written in a language I don’t understand. These are NOT bad game design choices, they’re just not the kinds of things I personally enjoy.

The map for the game Tunic — Here’s the map that you eventually find in-game. Or at least part of the map.

What finally caused me to set it aside was the lack of understandable narrative. My sense is that if you play long enough and find enough of these manual pages you’ll learn why you are fighting all these baddies and what your goal is. But until you do, you’re just playing the game to play the game. At some point in my life I lost the joy in doing that. I need some kind of narrative hook to propel me forward. Fighting games, racing games, PVP shooters… all the genres of games that you play JUST to play and get better at…I’ve kind of lost interest in all of those. Maybe it’s because I’m old and acknowledge I’m never going to be really good at reflex-based games again.

So anyway, Tunic isn’t for me, but I do think it’s a really good game. On Steam it has almost 10K reviews with a “Very Positive” rating and it has an 85% rating on Open Critic. As I write this it is $30 on Steam which feels a little pricey for an indie that came out in 2022, but it’s been down at low as $15 in the past. And as mentioned it is on Game Pass, both PC and Xbox, and has been for a long time so it may be a permanent fixture there. It is also ‘play anywhere’ so you can use the same save file on PC and Xbox.

Eternal Strands Finished

Posted on June 7, 2026June 7, 2026 by Nimgimli

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 when various magic effects are shooting off it is really easy to lose track of what is happening.

In practice, for me anyway, this boiled down to the early game giants being fun battles, but later they got more and more frustrating rather than entertaining. In particular as they got better at plucking you off their bodies and squishing you like a bug, these fights got decidedly un-fun for me. The final boss was one of these fights that was SO annoying I finally knocked the difficulty down from Normal to Story Mode just to get past it. When the game was over there were still a bunch of side quests I could do but honestly by that time I’d had enough of Eternal Strands. That said, if there was a sequel I would probably play it.

The game world is set up as a series of pretty large levels and your protagonsit, Brynn, uses magical gates to teleport to these. Some are linked and you can zone between them but eventually these connections either ended or I stopped finding them. Every time you go out on an expedition time advances, though it was never clear why that mattered except a few quests had to be done at night (every day has 3 ‘excursion sessions’, two during daylight and one at night).

One of my gripes was that once you were out of camp you couldn’t change gear. That makes sense in a way; no one can carry several sets of armor and weapons with them, after all. But as a game, it was a little annoying to be in your “Fire Resistance, Cold Damage” loadout and run into an ice enemy, or vice versa. So I’d like to see that changed.

Which reminds me I should talk about the crafting system: it’s really interesting. As you roam around the world you collect materials both from fallen enemies and from breaking things (there are a LOT of breakables in the world, with a solid physics system behind them). You take these materials, and a blueprint, to your blacksmith. Each blueprint has several slots of materials to add and different materials change the stats of the final piece of gear. Stats are defense/damage (for armor/weapons respectively) but also things like fire or ice resistant and weight. Once you have a piece of gear you can level it up by adding more of the same materials to it, or you can ‘reforge’ it by swapping out materials.

I really enjoyed the crafting system and hope it returns if we ever get a sequel.

In terms of story…. it was fine I guess. The idea is that you and your group have entered into a giant ‘bubble’ that has formed around the area. The bubble contains the baddies who came through a rift and laid waste to the city/area the game takes place in. You’re there to explore and eventually to help put a stop to the enemies. If this sounds kind of vague it is because the story didn’t make a huge impression on me and I DID take 18 months to hear it all so I’m sure I’ve forgotten a lot of it.

My biggest issue with the story is that the group you travel with is so nice and so diverse and so… tension free, that it all felt kind of meh. It felt like a cast of characters designed to be as inclusive as possible with no chance of offending anyone, so there was just not a lot in the way of hooks. I guess I’d call them bland.

Anyway, I would recommend Eternal Strand for the combat and the crafting, but I don’t know that it was worth finishing. If, like me, you get to where the ‘giant’ battles stop being fun (and towards the end of the game you may have to do a decent amount of farming of them) then I’d just stop playing at that point. [I was earning a lot of “Rare” achievements towards the end so my guess is not a lot of players finished the game, at least on Xbox.] There’s no amazing story reveal at the end to make the frustration (if you get frustrated) worth the payoff. Right now it is $30US on Steam but it goes on sale (the lowest it’s been is $12), and that’s when I’d pick it up. It’s got good reviews on Steam, but not a lot of them. Kind of a shame that it didn’t get more attention, really. I’d love to see Yellow Brick Games make a sequel.

Helping Bhagpuss Carry the NTE Torch!

Posted on June 1, 2026June 1, 2026 by Nimgimli

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 Haniel, both of whom present as tweens or young teens. I have hardened myself to get to where I can put up with one or the other of these two, but together they really gave me a headache. So I was both glad to get the quest over, but from a big picture point of view I enjoyed it. I hope they fix this mini-game to make it a little easier because it could be pretty fun.

A red-haired young woman with spiral sunglasses. She holds a camera. — Just a random passerby….

After that was done I just started grinding, basically. My main team is at character level 40, with Mint pushed to 50. I unlocked a bunch of anomaly fights so that I can farm upgrade materials for characters, abilities and gear. I did a curious amount of fishing. I used up all my Character Pixels, consumed some recharge items and spent those, too.

There was a short-term event running where you got points for stopping crimes in progress. Those were pretty fun. Human enemies are nothing after you’ve been fighting anamolies all day. I wouldn’t mind more of these. Needing to stop a bunch of crime meant I spent a lot of time running around the city rather than teleporting, and that in itself was quite entertaining. The devs did a great job of making the world feel alive and I often stop to eavesdrop on conversations that are apparently only there for ‘color’.

Did a lot of climbing for magic crows that give you some kind of gee-gaw that you then take to a sexy witch who’ll take them and level up something that gives you rewards. I pay careful attention… notice the only detail I can recall is that Blackbird, the witch, is sexy (in that anime waifu sort of way). But this system is like the one in Genshin Impact where you collect gee-gaws to take to the shrines.

I still have a ton of ‘minor’ quests in my log, and I need to learn to play Mahjong as there’s a place called Little Sparrow where you can earn Fons (the in-game currency) by playing, but if they gave you any indication of HOW to play Mahjong, I totally missed it.

We’re past the first month of release and I’m playing enough that I renewed the daily login subscription thingie. I may or may not have spent 1,500,000 fons on an outfit for my character. In my defense I THOUGHT it was a bundle of several outfits but nope. It was a t-shirt and a pair of frayed denim short-shorts. Clothes are expensive in Hethereau! Anyway the daily stipend of Fons you get with the subscription will help re-fill the coffers as I’m now Fon-poor and can’t upgrade my Industry level. So buying that outfit was probably not a wise move, but I’ll recover. In some ways I LIKE having to actually earn materials for upgrades.

Yeah, this is a total ramble but I’ve been trying to stay off of social media so when I want to just chatter on about a game I guess I’ll be doing it here on the blog!

More Neverness to Everness Musings

Posted on May 22, 2026June 1, 2026 by Nimgimli

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.

Edgar is the one kid in the game that I don’t find too annoying

I’m trying to figure out how to unlock stuff I keep reading about, like racing, delivering, real estate. I just never get very far. Many days I don’t even get the award for fighting 5 enemies because I spend all my time on txting with this scammer who pings me every day.

I’m not giving up, though! Why? Because like you I LOVE the city. I love seeing a busker in a plaza and folks are watching and dancing and such… driving my little scooter around at 40 kph cause that’s as fast as it goes. I think I can run ALMOST that fast if I sprint.

I’ve completely forgotten how to fight since I do it so rarely; I’ll have to redo the tutorials if I ever start seeing combat frequently again.

I don’t know what kind of feedback Hotta is getting but I hope future content skews away from all the annoying kids. But maybe I’m just a curmudgeon and most people like them.

* * *

Hathor is one of the Sterry crew but I ‘pulled’ her early and I love her aesthetic.. tough gal biker angel or something

New Stuff

Since then I’ve pressed on. I realized I was completely ignoring the “Industry” icon on my in-game phone screen. I opened it up and was told to do a race. Went to do the race and someone politely pointed out that I didn’t own a car. I’d been to this point once before and my gamer brain assumed I would be tutorial-led to where I could obtain a car at some point. This time I just opened the map and found *gasp!* a car dealership. So I went and bought the cheapest car I could and did some races.

It was tough timing for NTE since I was doing this the same day Forza Horizon 6 (or is it 5?) came out, but in spite of that I found racing around the city to be pretty entertaining, and now I had the Industry bug. I’ve now bought a Cafe but am just learning how to run it.

I also started paying attention to Events and stumbled into some that were WAY too difficult for me, which I honestly appreciated because the game has been really easy up until now. I don’t want a Souls-like experience but I guess I at least want a reason to make my characters more powerful.

I’ve completed as much of the main story quest as I can for now; I have to raise my “Hunter Level” (which seems to basically be your account level) before I can continue. I didn’t mind this, though, since it somehow gave me the OK to just putz around and do whatever.

This has improved my enjoyment of the game quite a bit. I stay as far away from the annoying kids as I can while heading to different points of interest. Next up, fishing!

Also the mad texter that I mentioned in the comments has stopped for now, which I appreciated. I really wanted to Block that person.

Not to say there isn’t more work for Hotta to do. There’s still some UI oddities, I still have bugged quests I can’t finish (and as far as I can tell, I can’t abandon/restart them either) [Update: See comments: one of my bugged quests wasn’t bugged, it was just very unclear what needed doing] and haven’t been able to finish since the first week. Like the one involving Miss Patty:

NTE main character talking to "Miss Patty" at a playground — This quest having to do with Miss Patty has been broken for me since I first attemped it during the first week. I’m supposed to repair a stuffed animal but the game tells me it isn’t in need of repair even though it is clearly shredded, and the Internet has confirmed I’m supposed to fix it.

I guess in a lot of ways NTE just throws too much at me at once, considering often enough my play sessions are like 30 minutes a day. By the time I attend to everything that has the red exclamation point that indicates “something new to check!” I’m out of time. I’m guessing this will ease as I get farther in and I run out of new tutorials and such, plus just get into an efficient routine of all the daily tasks.

Anyway, since I have been warming to the game, and my first post about Neverness to Everness was pretty ‘meh’, I wanted to do an update. I paid for the $5 daily login ‘subscription’ (using $$ I earned by filling out random Google surveys) which has me logging in every day to collect the goodies, and that’s worked well to keep me semi-engaged and get me through.

Mixtape

Posted on May 9, 2026May 9, 2026 by Nimgimli

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.

Before I go too much farther I should warn you that Mixtape isn’t much of a game. I guess it’s more ‘visual novel’ than anything (I’m not sure I exactly know what a visual novel is). There are interactive sequences that you can zip through or hang out and enjoy, but there are no fail states or branches in the narrative. I finished in in under 4 hours. I didn’t mind because it told the whole story it has set out to tell, and didn’t pad things out.

So what you have is a 4 hour experience with great music, a great story, great voice acting, an interesting art style and honestly I can’t find a single nit to pick. Game of the Year for me, so far. 5 out of 5 stars. A masterpiece. I laughed, I cried, I cringed, I nodded along in agreement. I was completely, totally lost in this world. I have not been so impacted by a game or a movie or a book in a long, long time.

Will you like it? I’m not sure. I wonder how younger kids who grew up with cell phones and play dates will react to it, as it takes place in a very different time where sneaking out of the house was a thing and kids had secret hideouts they’d go to in order to party. We used to break into a local school to skateboard through the halls, just for the hell of it. These kids skateboard through a mall that is being built. We had that one place you could hang out in front of to get someone to buy us beer. These kids have the same kind of place. It all felt wonderfully familiar to me and got me thinking a lot of old friends, some of whom are no longer with us.

Anyway…yeah, I loved Mixtape. I JUST finished it and now I think I need to go sit with my thoughts about it.

There are some fantasy segments that may or may not be alluding to the fact that the kids are high. In this one they’re flying/tumbling instead of running

Mixtape is out on pretty much every platform for around $20. It’s also on Game Pass where it is a ‘Play Anywhere’ title. I played about half of it on PC and half on the Xbox. I recommend wearing headphones, and when you boot the game on PC you’re told it plays best with a controller.

Neverness to Everness is Dissapointing Me

Posted on May 4, 2026 by Nimgimli

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’re surrounded by children who behave like annoying shogun anime children. They tend to be tropes. The shy young boy who is really smart, the way over-excited young woman. The mysterious but child-like character that can’t stay awake and talks like she is an infant. Others who fixate on getting desserts constantly. They’re all pretty annoying.

But the worst… the absolute WORST, is this character Taygedo who is an otter with a tv for a head who says one thing over and over again but somehow everyone understands him, and he just… ugh, just thinking about him is irritating me, and he seems to be a main character, at least in the early game. He says something like “Togee-dogee” over and over again while being manic. That’s him at the top of this post. He needs to go away.

Now let me be very very clear… bucket #2 problems are very personal and highly subjective. You might find all these characters to be just delightful. A lot of people, I’m told, actually LIKE kids. Can you believe that? I don’t understand it but let people like the things they like, right? 🙂

It’s not all bad. I love the style of the game, and the music is pretty good. I like the main character just fine; I took the female MC and she is voiced really well and isn’t the least bit annoying. The city itself is fun to wander around in. It feels very ‘alive’ as you overhear conversations going on around you.

I’m not giving up. I’m hoping that as I get deeper into the story I’ll meet more adults and have to spend less time with Taygedo and the children. If you thought Paimon in Genshin Impact was annoying, let’s just say you ain’t seen anything yet!

Backlogs (If You Care)

Posted on May 3, 2026 by Nimgimli

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 phone all that distracting, but I get the idea. The idea is to agree with yourself that you’re going to focus on this game for a set amount of time. The author suggests 2 hours but that seems like a LOT of time to spend gaming every night. So you’ll have to pick a duration that works for you.

But here was the (in hindsight, obvious) suggestion that really resonated with me. In your basket with the game tokens (or actual games if your a physical media person) you keep a small notebook. When you’re done playing for the night, make a brief note on what you did and what your next planned task is. The idea is that the next time you play, you can refer to your notebook and refresh your memory and not spend the first 15 minutes of your session trying to remember where you were and what you were doing. This is the suggestion that I’m going to really embrace because even if I play the same game every day I can manage to forget what I was doing from one day to the next.

The one gap in this system is that it doesn’t account for “forever” games. The author of the video is a retro player and his games come from before the time of live service games.

I’m still trying to figure out how to decide when I am “done” with a live service game. In theory it might be “when I finish the MSQ” but I play so slowly that I rarely catch up; new content comes out faster than I can consume it. I don’t play competitive games but those would be even more of a challenge to quantify as being “completed.”

So this is still a work in progress, but I liked the idea of a physical representation of a couple of games, and a notebook to get you back into the fun ASAP when you pick the game up next time.

This might help until I manage to convince my brain that there’s not a thing wrong with having a backlog and there’s no reason to stress over it. These are games, brain, let me just have fun with them!

Coral Island Progress Report

Posted on April 16, 2026April 16, 2026 by Nimgimli

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.

Screenshot of one of my Coral Island Spreadsheet tabs — 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 explored. These had monsters in them, though so far the combat has been ridiculously easy. But you have to find a hole to go down to the next level, and that hole is randomly placed under a rock, which has to be busted up via pickaxe. You can only ‘save’ your progress every 5 levels (except for the final stretch which is 10 levels) so you need a lot of time and stamina to make sure you get to the next “elevator stop” in the mines. You might find the next shaft down on the first rock you break, or it might be under the LAST rock in a level, so you never know how long it’ll take. I generally did these on rainy days when I didn’t have to spend time/energy watering.

Eventually the money situation got better and now I’ve got what I think are the biggest sprinklers. Here’s the layout I’m in the process of putting together:

A screenshot from Coral Island showing the character standing in his farm — I have the sprinklers in the middle of these plots, with scarecrows between them, overlapping to provide full coverage. Hopefully this will work well when the next season begins.

My next investment is a dohickey that attaches to the sprinklers and automatically fertilizes, plants seeds and harvests crops. That should more or less automate the farm, though the animals and artisan goods will still require me doing things.

I was thinking I was hitting end game and then I got an invitation to start a second farm…. underwater! What!!!? I was warned not to start this until I had my land farm squared away, so I’ve yet to discover how involved this part of the game is.

In the meantime I’ve finally started socializing with the townsfolks. Generally this isn’t my favorite part of these games, but here it is pretty good. First, there are events where you are basically just an observer and the event happens between NPCs which makes the town feel more ‘real’ to me. I’m an NOT the sole focus of attention for everything that happens here. The “hangouts” are easy. In the “My Time At…” series hangouts required you to drag your friend/date all over the place and play minigames which for me got pretty tedious pretty quick. Here you ask someome to hang out, pick an activity from the map, and then it just happens in a little ‘montage’ of you and the NPC having fun and chatting. So it is simpler in gameplay terms, but more rich in ‘story’. Right in my wheelhouse.

I’m only in the Spring of Year 2 but I’m over 50 hours of playtime (the game starts in Spring). I manage about 2 in-game days per evening of gaming time, so I could be here for a while yet. But it is really hitting that sweet spot of pretty chill gameplay, characters that are reasonably interesting, and progression that so far has felt satisfying. I picked up Coral Island on a whim after finishing My Time At Sandrock just because it was offered via the PS+ subscription, but it’s been one of those very happy gaming accidents. It was a little slow and ‘same-y’ at the start but if you stick with it through the first season or so the unique aspects start to emerge. In my opinion, it was worth the wait (and even the same-y bits were as fun as they always are, to me, when starting these games. I take a weird joy in clearing fields and stuff). I’m liking it enough that I’ve put it on my Steam wishlist to snag on sale so I can replay it at some point on PC.