Why I Quit: A Plague Tale: Requiem

Posted on by Nimgimli

I figured if I’m going to give myself the OK to quit games, I’ve gotta find a new way to squeeze blog posts out of them. So let’s lean into the quitter lifestyle and start a new series: “Why I Quit.” Well maybe it’ll be a series and maybe it’ll just be this one post because, y’know, it’s OK if I quit. 🙂 Anyway without further ado, here’s why I quit A Plague Tale: Requiem.

The first bad decision I made when it came to playing A Plague Tale: Requiem was…starting to play it. I had played A Plague Tale: Innocence back in 2021 and liked it, did not love it. Here’s a post I wrote about it and I see now that my memory is a bit askew as I even said in that post that by the end of the game I was no longer enjoying it so much.

There’s a new A Plague Tale game (Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy) out now, and this one centers around a different character and seems like it is more combat focused. I wanted to check it out but felt like I ‘should’ play Requiem first. So that was mistake #1: starting a game because I ‘should’ play it and not because I wanted to.

Requiem plays very similar to Innocence, or at least my memory of Innocence. Once again you mostly play as Amicia with annoying little brother Hugo tagging along. [Spoilers for both games incoming.] It turns out that young Hugo has some kind of connection to the plague and it basically follows him around. Wherever this pair goes in an attempt to find a cure for him, the swarms of rabid rats follow, consuming entire villages. And wherever the plague breaks out, soldiers quarantine people and kill anyone trying to get away. It’s all quite bleak and often gross. Many, MANY piles of corpses all over the place.

Once again we’re solving physical puzzles to get past the rat swarms (generally by manipulating light sources; the rats avoid light) and Amicia is using her sling to combat soldiers (and as a long range method of interacting with puzzle parts). This game leans much harder into alchemical weapons. Amicia can throw fire-starting shots, fire-dousing shots, tar-shots (which cause flames to become more intense) and so on. These shots are powered by ingredients she has to loot from crates and chests and then she can craft her special alchemical ammo on the fly.

A skeleton surrounded by a blood stain
This was a person a few minutes ago, until Amicia snuffed out the torch he was carrying and the rats fed on the poor bastard

I found the combat system to be really clunky. You hold a shoulder button (I was playing on Xbox) and then you push up/down on the D-Pad to pick your weapon (in addition to the sling you can throw things by hand, fill pots with alchemical fire or whatever, and eventually you get a crossbow) and left/right on the D-Pad to pick the type of shot you want to access. That doesn’t sound bad but in the heat of battle with an enemy charging at you I found it really easy to over-shoot the choice I wanted, leading to Amicia’s death. In fact most of Amicia’s deaths happened as I was in the process of trying to choose the right weapon and ammo combo to use against the enemy I was fighting.

I got fed up enough with the combat that I eventually turned the difficulty down to the “Story” setting. That helped to an extent.

The puzzle solving though… even though it has been 5 years since I played the first game it still all felt very ‘been there, done that’ with the puzzles, and some sections just required too much trial and error, with error equating to ‘game over, reload last checkpoint’.

Circling back to my initial point: I wasn’t playing to solve puzzles and fight soldiers. I was playing to finish the game so I could try the new one. That pretty much guaranteed I wasn’t going to have a good time. It’s one thing to try to plow through an action game as quickly as possible, but a game with stealth and puzzles and avoiding enemies just doesn’t suit a rushed playstyle, at least for me.

Combine that with my general distaste for little kids in games (I found Hugo insufferable) and it was kind of silly to even start this one. I DID want to get caught up on the narrative and I’ve heard the story gets pretty heart-wrenching towards the end, but there’s a Wiki: I can just catch up on the story that way. [I just did that and don’t feel like I missed much.] I was generally horrified that Amicia and her mum were willing to drag Hugo all over the place, spreading disease and being responsible for the deaths of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people. I thought we were the good guys?

This was also the first time in a LONG time that a game made me feel a little queasy. Something about the camera movement gave me a touch of motion sickness. Not enough to make me stop playing but it was one more straw.

I would be curious to try the game on PC with mouse and keyboard to see if the combat system feels a little more nimble that way. But for now at least, I’ve quit A Plague Tale: Requiem. I got to Chapter 6 of 17 and spent just shy of 10 hours playing and stopped really enjoying myself after just a couple hours. I stuck around partly because I’m stubborn and partly because I really did want to know where the story was going to lead. I thought maybe I could push through it but…naa. I was liking it less and less with every in-game encounter I had to solve

Also worth mentioning that this is a ME issue. The game has an 88% rating on Open Critic and a “Very Positive” rating on Steam with a bit over 8,000 reviews.

I sat on this draft for a couple of days and picked up the game once or twice to see if maybe it was a mood thing or something, but nope. Just not enjoying it. I DID start the new game (Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy) though. Only two chapters in but already liking it a LOT more. It’s a much more combat-focused game, but I guess that’s for another post.

Knowing when to quit

Posted on by Nimgimli

There are certain challenges in life that, in reflection, I have spent way too much time and energy on over the course of my life. Losing weight, for example. Literally my whole life I’ve fretted about getting in better shape. So far it hasn’t happened and at this point probably never will. I should accept that I’m always going to be a large person in terms of BMI, but as long as I am reasonably active and otherwise healthy I should just stop worrying about it.

Another example and the one I’m actually here to talk about is quitting games. Or not quitting them. Or fretting about whether I should quit them. For the LONGEST time I never finished any games and always felt some weird low-key guilt over that. Back in the day there was at least some logic behind that guilt. I’d spend $50 or $60 on a game and play it for 3 hours and drift away. That’s just wasting money and I’ve never been a rich person who can afford to ‘throw away’ money like that.

These days, though, games are SO cheap. Or they can be, if you are a bit patient. Steam sales, Humble Bundles, free games from the Epic store, Game Pass, PS Plus, Nintendo Online. I probably have over a thousand games, hundreds of which I’ve never played, most of which I got for next to nothing. I have not invested significant $$ in these games. The only currency in play here is time.

Anyway, at some point I decided I “should” finish more games. And I did start finishing more. But did that lead to gaming being a more enjoyable hobby? In retrospect, no. It just made gaming feel a little bit more like a chore. I want to play Game B, but I “have” to finish Game A first. And by the time I finish Game A, Game C and Game D, both ‘must-plays’ in my mind, have released. I just get further and further behind in my ‘want to play’ queue.

Last night the algorithm popped this video in front of my eyes:

For those who don’t want to watch, it’s about Sunk Cost Fallacy. TLDR: You’ve spent 50 hours in a game and you’re not finding it much fun but since you’ve already invested those 50 hours you feel like they’ll be ‘wasted’ if you don’t finish the game. But of course those hours are gone no matter what you do and pushing through the final 20 hours to finish is just ‘wasting’ more hours. That’s my bad summary but it’s a pretty interesting video, IMO.

Anyway I saw myself over and over again in this video. SO many times I’ve started a game, found it to be really interesting at first and then 10 or 20 or 40 hours in it all starts feeling like I’m doing the same thing over and over and just kind of going through the motions to get to the end so I can say I finished. SOMETIMES I want to get to the end jsut because the narrative has me hooked so I ‘push through’ to get that reward. That’s not the kind of situation I’m talking about.

I’m talking about a game I’m pushing to finish not because I really care about the story or anything, but simply because I feel like I ‘should’ finish or I want to finish just so I can say I finished. This situation is way more common for me (wouldn’t it be great if more games had narratives so compelling you’d want to finish just to see how they end?).

Yesterday I wrote a post about a handful of games I’ve been playing. I didn’t publish because I had to go and take screenshots for it. After watching the above video, I just deleted the post.

Why? Because I realized something about myself. Once I post about a game it becomes a Project that should be completed. It’s silly! No one cares! No one comes back to get a progress report on how it’s going in Kena: Bridge of Spirits. If I write a second or third post about it then maybe folks read it but if I never mention the game again… will anyone notice, and if they do will they care? Very doubtful.

But inside my brain? Posting about what I’m playing feels like I’m committing to it. Now if I don’t both finish the game AND write a post announcing that I’ve finished it, I have Failed in some way. I say again: it’s SILLY. Just not so sure how to turn that off. This is yet one more brain-tweak I’m working on. Of the three games I mentioned in the deleted post, all were initially enjoyable, but I’ve kind of lost interest in two of them already. I enjoyed my time with them right up to the point where I didn’t. What point is there in pressing forward if I’m not having fun!?

In terms of solving the problem, I just have to give myself permission to go back to being a “game grazer” and playing whatever the f I want to play whenever I sit down to play a game. If I play that game for 1 session or 1000 sessions doesn’t matter. What matters is whether I’m enjoying myself. As long as I don’t go back to spending $60 for a brand new game and then not playing it (because that IS wasting money I can’t afford to waste) then it doesn’t matter how long I play for.

I write all my posts but I sometimes ask ChatGPT to give me feedback before I publish in case I’m too close to the topic or maybe I’ve repeated myself or whatever. This time it said something that really resonated with me: “we've gotten extremely good at turning leisure into performance.” Sometimes AI can make mistakes, but I don’t think it did this time. All the ways we track and count and segment and reward ourselves for doing our leisure activities can start to become the reason for doing the activities when we probably should be doing leisure activities because we enjoy them.

In terms of blogging, it’s a bit more of a real problem. If I only post about games I’ve finished… I won’t have many posts! Two or three a year maybe? I have to get past the silly assumption that if I post about a game that I’m somehow committing to finishing it and that readers will think less of me if I don’t because again, intellectually I know no one cares a lick if I finish or not. Now it might be interesting to circle back and talk about why I lost interest. That actually might be illuminating. My post on why I stopped playing Hell Is Us might be a good example of what that would look like.

So my Action Item after writing this post is: stop treating game posts as progress reports. This is more an “inner voice” change than an actual content change. I need to remind myself that writing about a game is not committing to that game. And more generally to try to get back to treating leisure activities as leisure, not as “content fodder” and not as something that has to be ‘productive.’

Does anyone else struggle with this and if so, do you have coping mechanisms? Or is this just my brain striving to manufacture problems that don’t really exist — which I’m finally realizing is one of the ‘core’ issues I have in terms of mental well-being. There’s that bigger discussion to be had concerning how we maybe over-share things and gamify everything so we can assign values to everything we do… but I won’t get into that today (or ever, probably)!

[Top image is a screenshot of the first page of “My Library” from GeForce Now. In that service alone I have 550 games waiting to be played. That’s without factoring in PlayStation, Xbox Console and Switch games, or games in my Epic Gamestore library, or games in GOG or Steam that aren’t supported on GeForce Now. Point is, I don’t think I’ll run out of things to play any time soon!]

Week 3 of the ‘re-wiring my brain’ series

Posted on by Nimgimli

This was a tough week and I don’t feel like I made much progress. I did stay off social media, but not through any great show of willpower, but because of work. I didn’t have a moment free during the whole week.

I can’t go in details but we were pulling 12+ hour shifts Tuesday – Thursday this week, while at the same time our future at the company is very much up in the air; a 3rd party bought the company I work for as well as another company in the same marketspace, merging the two into one bigger company. They picked the CEO of the other company to run the new, combined company (good choice as our CEO wasn’t great). So now there are two web teams (as well as 2 IT teams, 2 HR teams, 2 everything teams) and these need to be combined into one, with the assumption (by me at least) that there’s going to be redundancies. Having Something Bad happen on our team this week was about the worst possible timing. So far it seems like most of the redundancies have been from our company, not the other one. Understandable, I guess, that the CEO prefers to keep people he’s been working with. But having this problem happen with our sites will not make him more apt to choose to keep us. So who knows what will happen. Anxiety fuel for sure, though.

Friday afternoon/evening Partpurple had a craft show. I was supposed to have the afternoon off to help her out but due to the Bad Things I had to negotiate with my manager to get a break to help Purple transport and unload her gear, then I came back home to finish working. When that was finally done I went back over to her show. She did OK as these things go and I actually sat at the bar (the craft show was held at a local microbrewery) and had a couple beers while chatting with folks. I have not sat at a bar in probably a decade at this point and I quite enjoyed it. By the time we got home we were pretty much spent and I’d logged 12K+ steps when my average is about 5K.

Saturday it was pouring rain in the morning. We decided that was a sign it was time for a rest day. I spent the morning doing the things I’ve been trying to give up: earning MS Rewards points. Haven’t been able to shake that habit yet. When we had a break in the rain we unloaded her car (we’d left most of her stuff in it Friday night since it was raining when we got home) and packed everything away until the next show. Saturday after lunch I jumped into the new story content for Neverness to Everness version 1.3. Spent a solid few hours getting through that. Maybe I’ll do a post on it. I also took rather a long nap which felt pretty well-deserved after the week I’d had.

Saturday evening we watched a bad movie on Netflix (The Last House… it was super stupid and not even in a very fun way) and soon after I was ready for more sleep. Kind of a non-day.

Sunday I got up and headed over to a ‘riverwalk’ park that I hadn’t visited yet. I saw an alligator. PartPurple and I have had a running joke where I swear alligators are mythical creatures because we’ve lived down here for, I dunno, 12 or 13 years and I’d never spotted one, only constant warning signs about them. Now I know they are real. 🙂

It was an OK walk. Not very long; I had to do two laps to get to 5K steps. And it’s kind of a serpentine path in what is actually a fairly small area so, overall it was mid, as the kids say. (Do the kids still say that?) Still searching for the best walking spot for when I want something other than to go around an asphalt loop.

Poor quality image of an alligator swimming in a river
Digital zoom plus intense sun-glare (my phone screen was totally washed out) = crappy image of my first ever gator spotting

After lunch I started writing this post, then played more Neverness To Everness. Sadly I think I might be done with NTE. This patch brought the story content I got through yesterday (and didn’t enjoy that much). Today I tried some of the other activites. Did all the personal-vehicle (can’t say Jet Ski cuz copyright) races which were super easy. I tried the volleyball but found it hard to get the hang of. I enjoy the world of NTE but these days it’s mostly grinding out boss fights and I honestly don’t find the combat that interesting. Anyway this isn’t an NTE review post.

I did sit down in a cozy corner away from screens and read a magazine of short stories for about an hour. I keep telling myself I’m going to read more then never get around to it. So that was one of the few wins of this week.

Then it back to the comforting electronic glow of screens. I saw what looked like an interesting video series on YouTube: Joanna Lumley, who to me is just Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, has a documentary series about traveling up the Nile. That sounded so odd to me, but it was almost an hour long (pretty sure it aired on BBC or something originally, back in 2010) which is generally way too long for a YouTube video. But I caught myself and decided to devote the time to watching it, and it was pretty good. As good as any other show like this anyway. There’s actually 4 episodes and I’ve book marked the others for watching some time in the future.

Now it’s Sunday evening, back to the Hellmouth tomorrow morning, but for the last couple hours of the weekend I’m going to go play a video game, I guess. Ideally just one, for a couple of hours. All in all I’m a bit disappointed in my progress, or lack thereof, this past week but I will give myself a bit of a pass due to the extenuating circumstances of work turning into such a sh*t show. Ideally I’d like to get to where I’m really sinking my teeth into SOMETHING that feels more substantial than just grazing on social media, video games and YouTube vids. I just don’t yet know what that something is going to be, let alone how to get myself to focus on it. Guess this all takes time.

Weekend 2 of “No Social Media” and an attention span upda

Posted on by Nimgimli

The title is a joke, get it? Like I don’t have the attention span to finish the last word. C’mon, it’s hilarious. No? No one!!? Sheesh, tough room.

So after a hell-week at work I slid into weekend 2 of my social media cleanse which has kind of morphed into an exploration of my 5-second attention span. Yeah I’ve been drinking deep from the YouTube Shelf-Help Firehose [I picked up that term, shelf-help, from a YouTuber whose name I can’t recall but I love it. He used it to refer to when we read all the books and watch all the videos about improving our life but then don’t actually change our behavior in any way.]

But I keep watching these videos, starting out skeptical then thinking to myself “Holy heck this really sounds like me!” I flit from thing to thing like a cranky old butterfly. I’m going to see if I can change that.

So Saturday PartPurple had another craft show. That kept me pretty busy and by the time we get home from those we’re fairly spent. No attention span worries there.

Sunday, though I was in the dark zone. Not really doing anything, irritable for no clear reason, kind of wanting to pick up my phone and doom scroll, and feeling alarmed by how much I missed social media.

I decided it was time to focus on one thing, which turned out to be Diablo IV. I played a bunch of it, finishing the campaign from the new expansion. More than a few times I felt tugs in my brain “Ok this is enough of this let’s go do something else.” But I stuck with it.

Here’s one of the traps I’m having to navigate carefully. There’s a fine line between “This isn’t fun and it’s dumb playing a game I’m not enjoying, let’s move on” and “This is fine and I want to finish it but I’ve been doing the same thing for 20 WHOLE MINUTES and I need more variety in my life!”

In this case I wasn’t LOVING the gameplay in Diablo IV but I did really want to finish the campaign so I stuck with it, finished, even wrote a blog post about it, and that all felt pretty satisfying.

I also watched a movie this weekend, on my own. Purple and I always watch a movie together on Saturday nights and honestly I sometimes dread it because the idea of sitting there watching something for two hours seems daunting. But I do it for, y’know, domestic bliss and all that (remember that the whole time we’re watching she is dinking around on her iPad). So that’s kind of a ‘forced attention span’ thing.

Choosing to watch a 2nd movie was…well, a choice. I was interrupted a couple times by real life, but in the end I did go back and finish it. Sounds trivial but my streaming service accounts are FULL of partially watched movies and partially watched TV show seasons. Even stuff I’m enjoying I just drift away from for some reason.

By late Sunday afternoon I was getting SUPER antsy but we had a break in the weather (heat and storms both) and I did a walk and that helped a ton. Got me out of the house, some fresh, extremely humid air, and of course desperately needed exercise. Image at the top of my post is of the angry clouds gathering strength for the next deluge. I got home just as it started raining again.

After dinner I finished a playthrough of Coffee Talk (weird game, I completely missed the actual gameplay) and then spent some time choosing my next game to try to focus on.

In the midst of all this I realized that it isn’t just social media crashing my attention span. It’s also all the ‘daily tasks’ I have in Todoist:

1) Play a Game Pass Game for 15 minutes
2) Play a PC Game for 15 minutes
3) Play an Xbox Game for 15 minutes
4) Make an AI image on Night Cafe to earn points
5) Do a lesson in Brilliant
6) Log into whatever Gacha game I have a monthly sub to in order to collect the daily goodies

The first 3 of those are to earn Microsoft Rewards points, and item 1 can be combined with either item 2 or 3. But these are not contributing to me rebuilding my attention span. I play with one eye on the clock and as soon as that 15 minutes clicks over I quit. I’m turning gaming into a chore I have to do in order to earn points that I can spend on games that I don’t want to play because I’ve turned gaming into a chore. LOL I feel like I need to give that up.

The AI image thing is just dumb. I have SO many credits on that service and I don’t even really like it that much. I can make better images using local AI models, or ChatGPT. And honestly in general the desire to create AI images just for the sake of making images has kind of lost its appeal. The novelty has worn off and I can’t actually USE them anywhere or y’all will come at me with torches and pitchforks and blocking me and my blog.

Brilliant still feels useful as long as I resist the urge to game it to stay on the leaderboards. It’s always tempting to start some really rudimentary course so I can just churn through lessons and shoot up the leaderboard, which is NOT the point. Learning and thinking is the point. Why is every damned thing gamified these days!?

And then there’s the gacha daily log-in thing. I only have one sub (Neverness to Everness) running and don’t think I’ll renew it.

So if I chop these 6 ‘daily chores’ to one, and that one which has some real value, I think that should help.

Circling back to the gaming: I farm Microsoft Rewards points to pay for Game Pass and I’m not sure I want Game Pass any more. All these subscription services are both a great deal but also kind of de-value games and cause choice paralysis and sometimes make me feel like a gaming Sisyphus as I low-key try to clear the backlog. My Playstation Plus expires in November and I don’t think I will renew that, but I have Game Pass pre-paid for the next few years and I almost wish I could cancel it. I really don’t need more MS Rewards Points and don’t need any more games for quite a while. Heck I’m not even sure what kinds of games I like at this point. But that’s another whole discussion – you’ve been warned.

So, that’s where I stand now. Feeling pretty OK about things in general. I did NOT get any significant reading in this weekend and that is still something I would like to improve on. I miss all those many years when I absolutely LOVED to read and I’m sad it is no longer part of my daily routine. But I want to reintroduce that organically, if that makes sense. I mean, adding “Read for 15 minutes every day” into my Todoist is exactly what I’m trying to get away from!

This all feels like progress to me. Perhaps more accurately, setting up for progress. Social Media is no longer the bogeyman under my attention span’s bed. Or at least not the only one. I’ve managed to put in place so many systems that seem almost deliberately designed to fracture my concentration. For now I’ll stay off social media, quit the Night Cafe thing, let the gacha subs expire. Those are pretty easy. The thing that feels hardest (but is the worst offender) is giving up the Microsoft Points habit, because that is actual value being left on the table. I’ve redeemed hundreds of dollars worth of Rewards Points over the years. But going back to only playing games because I want to be playing a game, and not to earn a few cents in points, feels like the right move and one that just might bring back the joy that gaming used to be a source of.

A Reminder for Future Me: Don’t Buy Diablo IV Expansions!

Posted on by Nimgimli

I don’t even remember why I bought the lastest expansion for Diablo IV. I know it wasn’t a thoughtful decision. Let me see if I can piece it together:

I’d just subscribed to GeForce Now and wanted to test it with something that has a ton going on on-screen at once. I “own” Diablo IV via Game Pass so I chose that. Started a new character, a Warlock, and went with the flow and made it a seasonal character. Started the campaign fresh since it’s been quite a while since I played. And I enjoyed it, as I always do when I first pick up a Diablo game. Smooshing hordes of baddies and hoovering up loot is fun for me.

Then I realized the Warlock was a ‘free trial’ of the character and you needed the Lord of Hate expansion to continue playing so I figured ‘What the heck’ and traded in some Microsoft Rewards points for $50 in Xbox Store credit and bought it on the Xbox.

That was a while ago. A month? Six weeks? Someting like that. Today I finished Lord of Hatred, finally.

This post is not a diss on Diablo IV. I know plenty of folks love it. It’s just another one of those “Good game, not for me” situations. Here’re my biggest reasons.

1) Although Xbox Game Pass gives us Diablo IV on both PC (via the Xbox app) and the console, expansion purchases do not extend between platforms. Since I’d purchased the expansion on Xbox, I could only play my Warlock on the Xbox, unless I wanted to re-buy the expansion on PC. This is strange since Microsoft tends to really push “Play Anywhere!” in its marketing. Buy a game, play it on Xbox, PC, or in the Cloud. That policy apparently doesn’t extend to Diablo IV expansions.

2) The game is terrible about saving quest progress, at least on the Xbox. Diablo IV is an always-online game and there is no manual safe option. Many, MANY times I lost quest progress because the game hadn’t saved inspite of a message literally saying “Quest Progress Saved” on the screen. To be clear when this happened I didn’t lose exp and gear I had earned in the quest I now had to replay. The game does fine at saving that. It’s just the progress through the campaign it kept losing. This is a big deal for me because I tend to play games in short sessions. Often 15-30 minutes. If you’re someone who sits down for long gaming sessions this probably isn’t going to be that big of an issue. And of course if you’re skipping the campaign it doesn’t matter at all.

But those are reasons enough for me to give any future expansions a pass. I also don’t really like the season pass characters since Diablo IV is far from my ‘main game’ and I don’t like the time pressure that comes with a set deadline before things reset.

The PC and a group of NPCs standing around talking about things I've redacted for fear of spoilers
I’d love a game that looks this good but that isn’t ‘live service’

I did enjoy the story well enough, that’s true. But for me the gameplay got stale pretty fast, too. The ‘build’ (if you can call it that) I used was basically “throw down a couple of DOTs then spam the fire button.”

What I SHOULD have done is push up the difficulty level (I was playing on Expert which is really low on the difficulty tiers) to challenge myself and make me have to futz with my build or figure out how to upgrade my gear. But I didn’t want to do anything to slow me down because…. seasonal character! I’ve got a deadline to make!

I feel like developing a build and rotation is where the real ‘skill’ fo Diablo IV is. But I’m not an expert.

And speaking of expertise. I am baffled by the various ways to improve gear. Slotting gems I get. Temporing I get. The rest, who knows. There’s little hints that come up during loading screens but the load times are so short on the Xbox that I never could read them before they vanished. For most of the game I just kept replacing gear with better gear, until I hit Gear Level 850. I guess there is higher level gear but I never figured out how to get it. So then it was getting better quality Level 850 gear. Once I had everything Legendary I just ignored gear and scrapped everything. In fact gear went from a source of fun to another gaming chore since I still picked everything up. I just scrapped it all at the Blacksmith whenever my inventory got full. Except these little charm things that you slot into the page of your character sheet. No idea what to do with extras of those so I just deleted the lower quality ones. And runes. WTF are Runes for? Never figured that out.

Before I completely give up on Diablo IV I might create a character on the Eternal Realm and see how it feels to play over there without the time pressure but… I also feel like I have a ton of games waiting to be played that I really WANT to play. Now that I finished the Lord of Hatred campaign I feel like I got my money’s worth out of the expansion and maybe it’s time to move on to another game.

A break from Social Media, and musing about attention spans.

Posted on by Nimgimli

I have a fraught relationship with social media (I suspect I am not alone in this). About 20% of the time social media is a source of joy, laughter and useful info. About 20% of the time it is a source of frustration, anger and irritation. The rest of the time it is kind of just there, sucking up the rapidly dwindling hours I have left in this incarnation.

My relationship with social media is also like a pendulum. Those percentages (which I obviously just made up) change over time, from being over in the “having fun” side and slowly swinging to the ‘this is toxic as hell’ and then back again. Sometimes when the pendulum is over on the toxic side, I just skip town. Often in a rage-quit kind of way.

Last week I decided to skip town again. My ‘usual hideout’ was feeling decidedly unfriendly again. Rather than rage quit, I stated that I was taking a 2-week break from social media. That felt a little more mature and a little more controlled, and past experience has shown that some time away tends to move the pendulum back towards the good side.

It would have been better if I’d written down when I made the post, but I didn’t, so I’m not sure when two weeks is up. Not for a while though. I’ll put a stake in the ground at August 24th.

The idea was to engineer more peace in my life. In addition to breaking from social media I removed a bunch of blogs from my RSS feed, culling things down to the handful of bloggers who I genuinely feel like I “know” in some way and who I generally get along with. Then I turned my attention to my phone. Removed social media apps (the temptation was too strong otherwise!) and more importantly turning off a bunch of notifications that I really didn’t need.

So how is it going?

Well last weekend was actually pretty nice. I read a lot (as in words printed on actual paper), walked a bunch and generally just enjoyed some R&R from the hub-bub of modern life. That said, while I was reading I did get that antsy feeling and wanted to check my phone. I resisted, since that is also part of the point of this exercise: trying to rebuild my attention span.

This week, work has been frantic [it’s Thursday afternoon and this is the first chance I’ve had to catch my breath] so I don’t know that I would’ve even had time for social media anyway, but I did notice how my brain is trying to get around the guardrails. I’ve been commenting on other peoples’ blogs a lot more than I usually do. I can’t quite decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Props to my brain for fooling itself, though.

But going back to the attention span thing… mine is in the toilet these days. I think a lot of people are in the same boat. PartPurple can NOT watch a TV show or a movie without having her iPad in her hands. She has some little paint-by-numbers app that she works on while she watches (listens, really) to whatever is on the TV. When I go out into the world SO many people I see are walking around staring at their phones, oblivious to what is happening around them. We’ve just conditioned ourselves to that constant dopamine drip of ‘something new’ hitting our feeds every few minutes.

This is a really jumbled post. I have so many thoughts that are tangentially related to each other. But since I’m on a break from social media and so have no way to promote it, I guess it doesn’t matter! 🙂

I have been griping about not having a very active imagination these days. Another part of getting off social media is seeing if that helps. If giving my brain idle time where it can just float along and process whatever is going on in there; if giving it that time will help me revitalize my imagination. I already do this to some extent. I’ve been walking a lot and when I do, my phone stays in my pocket. My mind wanders. I really think it helps. I go from “I don’t really feel like doing this” but as the steps go by that feeling fades and suddenly I’m thinking about something from two weeks ago or whatever. Sometimes finding solutions, other times just passively committing things to long-term memory (I hope).

But when I’m indoors I’m either sleeping or DOING SOMETHING and I still haven’t managed to deal with that, or even decided if I need to. But at least, for right now, the something that I’m doing isn’t doom-scrolling.

If all that comes from this is that I spend more time reading, I think that’ll be a win. I saw a YouTube video (YouTube being the one vice that I haven’t touched) where some young Gen-WhateverTheYoungestGenIs was talking about “How to get into reading.” and I thought that was the most ridiculous thing. At least I thought that until I sat down to read last weekend and even my old man brain found it slightly uncomfortable to ‘do nothing but read one thing’ for an hour. A few times I found that I was still reading but not really processing what I was reading. I had to catch myself, back up a page, and restart and kind of focus on focusing.

Gotta tell you, that didn’t feel great. It had me thinking of the days before ‘smart phones’ or even PCs when I’d lose a weekend in a fantastic book, or I’d be recreating some historical battle in a paper map & cardboard chit boardgame, or I’d be building a diorama of some World War 2 scene, incorporating the plastic tank model I’d just painted and weathered. Now all I do is stare at screens all day, every day. I’d like to change that, but I’m not ready to give up on gaming, and work obviously requires staring at a screen.

So my small goal is to spend more time reading print books and magazines, and then maybe, just maybe, finding an interest or hobby that doesn’t involve electronics. We’ll see how that goes. Past experience suggests it won’t go well, but I gotta at least try. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, or however that saying goes!

[Header Image Note: That’s a shot I took on my phone (the one I just said stays in my pocket) during a walk. The park I tend to walk in has a nice playground and this sprinkler area designed for kids to play in and boy do they ever have a blast in there. It really has nothing to do with the post.]

[Here’s where my mind is at: I published this post after proof-reading it several times and never noticed I hadn’t given it a title so who knows how it’ll show up out in the wild!]

Early Days in The Planet Crafter

Posted on by Nimgimli

The Planet Crafter is yet another survival-box game that happened to hit Xbox Game Pass just as my Solarpunk infatuation was starting to wane. (Solarpunk was a great game. I’d just done pretty much everything there was to do.) Crafting a whole planet, though? That sounded like a serious challenge so I took it for a spin.

This time out, you’ve crash-landed on a barren planet. First order of business? Oxygen. You have a suit that only holds a very small amount of oxygen. You dash out of your escape pod, harvest some minerals, then head back into the pod to craft things and replenish your O2. One of your first goals will probably be crafting better O2 tanks so you can travel further. You also have food and hydration meters; but what is there to eat or drink on a barren planet?

One of the trickiest bits in survival-box games is the survival part. If one goal is to survive then the fail state has to be not surviving. So what happens when you die? How do you making dying a fail state that penalizes the player enough that they want to avoid failing, but not so much that your average gamer gets frustrated and quits. These games tend to be about exploring and figuring things out and if the death penalty is too harsh then players aren’t going to want to take too many chances. In this regard Planet Crafters plays it pretty safe. When you die you drop some items in a nice neat storage chest, then you respawn in a base or your Pod (I THINK it respawns you in the last place that held oxygen but I’m not too sure) and run back out and pick the stuff up again.

Considering your limited range (at least in the early game) due to O2 concerns, your dropped stuff is never very far away. In fact maximum efficiency might come from just ignoring the food and water stuff completely and accepting that every so often you’ll respawn and have to collect your stuff. I don’t play this way because I’m a fan of the I word (immersion) and I tend to ‘roleplay’ in games like this, so I try my best not to die of starvation, asphyxiation, or dehydration.

I actually prefer an easier death penalty that I can make more difficult via self-imposed rules (even ones as simple as “Try your best to stay alive even if the death penalty is quite light”) than one that is unforgiving, so while I do think they erred on “too little” of a death penalty I MUCH prefer that to having a severe death penalty.

Red-tinged image of my 'starter base' showing a building, drill and windmill
This is pretty much what your first hours are going to look like. Red-tinged, kind of bleak

Honestly The Planet Crafter didn’t make a great first impresion on me. It was just SO bleak and exploration was tough due to the O2 limitations. What I did, and I assume most people do, is build a string of tiny bases that you can duck into to refill your oxygen tanks. You CAN also craft O2 Refill Tanks but those use resources, take up precious inventory space, and vanish when used. A 1×1 base gets created once and it always there when you need oxygen.

In fact after my first session I was ready to put the game aside, but fortunately for me Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob was also playing. I read one of his posts about the game and it finally hit me that we’re here to terraform and as we do, things look less bleak. The game did try to tell me this; the “getting started” goal is called Blue Skies or something like that.

You terraform the planet by building machines that add O2 to the atmosphere (via plants), add pressure to the atmosphere (by drilling into the crust… not sure how that would work in real life but it’s how it works here) and by heating the atmosphere (via heaters). All these require resources and power. Power comes from windmills and solar cells which of course also require resources. This is all fairly abstract but it works. As the planet’s terraform rating increases new tech automagically unlocks. Power seems to be universal; there are no cables and aparently no distance limits. If you put up a solar panel on one end of the map it seems to happily power stuff on the other end of the map, via magic. That sounds odd but within the context of the game it works fine. I think having to run power cables across this rather large map would be a headache.

I’m definitely enjoying the game now, but I’m still not sure it’ll be a long-term title for me. I’m playing solo, or course, and I feel like there’s a LOT to do for one person. Most of my time has been spent building bases to expand the area I can explore. And you do need to explore. While you can harvest a lot of materials from mineral deposits on the ground (deposits that get replenished via some pretty cool meteor impacts), some of what you need has to be scavenged from crashed space ships (food, for example. You can ‘craft’ water from ice, but for your first hours of playing the only source of food is scavenging packets of “space food” from chests and ships), and these tend to be relatively far flung. At my point in the game I don’t have a vehicle so there’s a LOT of running back and forth which is what generally causes me to end a session; knowing I have item X in a storage chest in the base I built next to the wrecked ship that is barely in view and that’ll take me a ton of running to get to. Yeah, that feels like a good time to take a break. 🙂

Mind you, I still haven’t finished the ‘intro’ section of the game called First Steps or something. But the sky above my base is lightening and starting to turn blue, which is pretty neat. Seems local though since if I push out into the wilderness the world turns bleak again. So we’ll see.

Over on Steam Planet Crafter has an Overwhelmingly Positive rating with over 36,000 reviews as I’m typing this. There’s also a demo available in case you want to check it out, but I hope the demo isn’t just the start of the game because that really does feel grim. Also I thought it was a new game since it just hit Game Pass/consoles but it looks like it released in April of 2024. Huh. “Recent Reviews” are still Overwhelmingly Positive, though!

Bouncing off Hell Is Us

Posted on by Nimgimli

Hell is Us hit Game Pass a little bit ago. It’s a game that I was curious about based on previews and teasers I’d caught during various not-E3 events. Figured I’d give it a go.

I didn’t make it far.

When Hell is Us starts you’re being interrogated by a fellow with the most enormous double chin you’ve ever seen. No idea who this is, but the gist of it seems to be that you’ve crossed a border illegaly and gotten caught. In this world two ethnicities (the Sabineans & the Palomists), are at war and there’s pretty intense hate between the two groups. Basically they seem intent on exterminating each other. Anyway the setup is that the actual gameplay is all a big flashback as you succumb to the truth serum and polygraph and start telling your tale to your interogator.

Actual gameplay is a 3rd person action/adventure game. You’re sneaking through a war-torn area that has the feel of World War I to it (trenches, bomb craters and the like). You have melee weapons and a drone, and rather than fighting people you’re fighting weird humanoid creatures that feel like something out of Silent Hill, maybe.

So far, so good. There’s a lot of puzzle solving mixed in with the combat, and lots of exploring to do

My drone distracts an enemy letting me get an easy backstab in
My drone distracts an enemy letting me get an easy backstab in

The first cracks appeared when I was learning to use the drone in combat. Your drone’s first trick is that it can distract enemies. If you’re faced with several baddies, the idea is you lock onto one, order the drone to distract it, then shift to a different enemy to fight. Sounds easy enough but I really struggled with getting the lock-on to work quickly and efficiently. A bit of Googling suggests this is a common complaint with the game. I eventually got things to where I could deal with this mechanic by increasing the sensitivity of the controls. Ideally we’ll see a patch for this but since the game launched last September I’m not sure how likely that is.

I was enjoying the gloomy aesthetics, the combat was OK once I got the hang of dealing with the lock-on requirement, and I was really intrigued by the story setup and genuinely wanted to learn more about this world. The puzzles I encountered weren’t overly hard, but they were hard enough to give a sense of satisfaction once you solved one.

Ultimately what ruined the game for me was one of the core tenets of the developers: no hand-holding. Hell is Us doen’t have a map. It doesn’t have quest markers. It doesn’t have a traditional quest journal. They want the player to feel really immersed in this world; this is an idea that I appreciate in theory. In practice it’s just not where my head is at these days. Some reviewers suggest taking notes while you play and my old-school gamer soul loves that. My current day lazy-ass gamer self can’t be bothered.

I realized the game probably wasn’t for me when I came back on the 2nd (IRL) day and already couldn’t remember which direction I’d been traveling in. I booted up and was standing in a trench on a battlefield and couldn’t recall, at all, which direction I should go. And this was after one day!! The way I tend to play several titles at once and jump from game to game often means I quickly forget details and need quest journals and game systems that nudge me in the right direction.

For the right audience, I think Hell is Us would be a hell of a game. It’s got Very Positive reviews on Steam and about an 80/100 on Open Critic. If I had a week’s vacation and wanted a game that I was going to focus exclusively on then I think I could give it a go and have a grand old time. But my old man brain and the fact that I get distracted by new games far too often make the old-school vibe too much of a challenge for me. A very much younger version of myself would have loved playing this game while drawing a map on graph paper and taking copious notes. Sadly, I’m just not that gamer anymore.

A High-Five for the Solarpunk Devteam

Posted on by Nimgimli

I mentioned over on Mastodon that I was coming to the end of my time with Solarpunk, not because I’m tired of the game but just because I’ve unlocked pretty much everything [I think] other than decorative items and I am not much of a decorator (sadly).

I never even really intended to play Solarpunk. My initial download (it’s on Gamepass) was a result of some jokes about how frequently we’re seeing “punk” added to the end of a word these days. Solarpunk was a lark at first, but then I really got into it.

It isn’t that the gameplay itself is all that unique, and there isn’t any kind of story. You gather, you craft simple items. You build workbenches and research stations and then you use the things you crafted to unlock new machines and new recipies for more advanced stuff. There’re some automation aspects, too. It’s all things we’ve done before, this time in a combat-free, and pretty much stress-free, environment.

Initially your power source will be burning things. Wood and leaves at first. Then wax bricks made from cloth (which comes from the cotton you’ve been farming) and wax (collected from beehives that you built… the bees show up automagically). Then you’ll unlock solar panels — unsurprising given the name. You’ll research batteries so you can store that juice for night time or rainy days. After that you get windmills and then giant wind turbines which hover well above your island, powering lots of stuff. I was a bit surprised that solar power became somewhat redundant! The wind is pretty constant, day or night.

One of the first automations you’ll unlock are drills. You put these on mineral resources that are scattered around the islands. Your first island has iron, a nearby one has copper and so on. The farthest flung islands have diamonds. Drills need power: you can set up a furnace that burns things, but using solar panels or windmills is going to be your ultimate goal.

Flying between the islands (which float in the sky) to gather the resources your drills have produced is initially fun, and just about the time it starts to feel a slight bit tedious you’ll unlock drones that will fly off and collect the ore for you. Of course these need power, too!

Solarpunk screenshot showing a first person view of coming in to a dock in the air ship
There’s one of my drones hard at work!

And here’s my first reason for giving the devs a high-five. The drones are physically modeled. You can watch them lift off and then head off towards their destination. I assumed, initially, that once they were out of sight they would despawn, and after some appropriate amount of time they would respawn laden with ore and a variable somewhere would decrement the amount of ore at the drill. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. When you’re out in the airship you can see your drones flying around, and they really are modeled for the entirety of the trip. I’m not sure exactly WHY I’m impressed by this, but I am.

And then there’s the weather. Your one true enemy in this game is storms. They’ll flatten your crops and they can even harm you if you get hit by lighting. The skies grow dark as can be and thick clouds roll in. One of my deaths came when I was trying to get back to my ‘home’ island at the height of a storm. It was so dark visibility was near zero. I was squinting at the screen and suddenly a mountain loomed out of the darkness and I flew dead on into it. Splat.

Before lightning strikes you’ll see electrical arcs forming on the ground, then BAM! The lighting and thunder is loud enough and abrupt enough to actually startle you.

Then as the storm starts to wind down, the clouds break up and you can fly in and out of them… the clouds are also physically modeled. Some are white fluffy things and others are dark and forboding.

The most distant islands are cold. When you are on those and it rains, instead of rain you get snow. OK actually it looks a little more like hail. But considering you’ll only be able to get to these islands near the end game, and that they’re far enough out you won’t probably make any more trips than neccesary for to them, that they added snow for this tiny slice of the gameplay was another thing that impressed me.

Solarpunk screenshot showing a storm in progress
I need to rig up a rain sensor so the sprinklers turn off during storms. Also low-key proud that I almost caught that lightning strike!

Oh also worth noting that sometimes it just rains, without the storming bit. The wind changes direction too which doesn’t have much of an impact on gameplay, but it does cause all your windmills and wind turbines to rotate accordingly.

There are just all these little details that they really didn’t need to put into the game, but these are also the tiny touches that, for me at least, made it pretty special. I hope there’s a Solarpunk 2, or an expansion or something. All these detailed systems they’ve created need to come back in other forms. I can’t wait to see what they do next.

The only place I felt like the game fell a little short is with the hunger/thirst system. It is super easy to keep these topped up, and yet there’s a whole cooking system where you can make better and better foods. It’s nice for immersion but I basically lived on watermelons for most of the game.

Oh, there’re also farm animals: chickens give eggs, sheep give sheep’s milk and pigs give…. truffles. Whew, I don’t have to turn Doodle, my pig friend, into bacon. These animals add add more infrastructure: they need shelters built as well as to be fed and watered (eventually you can automate this). Oh, and transport. You don’t want to have to fly from island to island just to give your animals food and water, so there’s a system to fly them between islands. But you have to research and build it!

The most amazing part of all this is that apparently Cyberwave, the development studio, is apparently a 2-person studio (though they used another team to do ports.. the game is on everything from Steam to Switch). Here’s a YouTube video about the team and the game:

Sometimes a game comes along and just grabs you. And sometimes you feel like it’s only you! On Steam Solarpunk has a very positive rating but only around 1,600 reviews, which seems low. It’s not an expensive game ($22.99 on Steam with no sale running) and my first playthrough is sitting at around 30 hours with maybe a couple more to go.

Wuthering Waves Gacha’d Me Back

Posted on by Nimgimli

Yeah that there is a tortured title.

Last month I caught up in Neverness to Everness but playing it had given me the gacha itch, leading me back to Wuthering Waves, which I played while I waited for NTE version 1.2 to drop. It was a pleasant enough interlude and I enjoyed refamiliarizing myself with the characters and gameplay.

Then NTE 1.2 dropped, and even though it added a whole game-within-a-game (999 Nights) it didn’t take too long to get through it all. I finished it on “Story Mode” and started a second playthrough, played that enough to get all the limited Event rewards and then I was ready to set that game mode aside for a bit. And the ‘real’ game didn’t have much new content, leaving me with not much to do other than grind bosses to level up characters I’m not really using. Oh and I already have the “battle pass” beyond level 50 which is where the interesting rewards end (battle pass levels 51-70 just give currency for every level).

Landscape image of a battlefield in Wuthering Waves
This is from a cut scene because most of my gaming session was cutscene after cutscene. Here, things weren’t going well

So again, it was back to Wuthering Waves. I am WAY behind on the story content of WW so I’m playing it as if it was a narrative game, not a gacha. I’m using my standard max-level team that I was using when I last played, and I’m focused on just the main story quests (which means often I’m using characters the quest provides anyway).

Playing this way, Wuthering Waves is barely a game. It’s more like a long and intricate anime series with some interactive sections. Wednesday night I started a new quest and played for about an hour. I was still locked into that quest when I had to quit for the night. Thursday when I logged in I was standing next to a portal that took me back to the same quest. I played for just shy of two hours, finally completing the quest. Let that sink in… almost 3 hours on a single quest, nearly all of which took place ‘outside’ of the game world. And most of that 3 hours — I’m going to guestimate at 2.5 hours of it — was basically passive watching. Clicking through dialog, running towards quest markers. Very little combat.

The strange part is: I was totally OK with this. The story was that good. The artwork is that good. The characters are that likable. It maybe helped that I was playing on PC in a dark room, on a wide screen monitor and with my govee lights projecting the colors on-screen across the wall behind my monitor. It was all very immersive!

This was the Rinascita quest (“Dawn Breaks on Dark Tides”) and it came out last October, so I have 9 months of content (I’m guessing that’s 3 or 4 updates) worth of content still to go. I’m psyched. Heck if I catch this up maybe I’ll go try to catch up in Genshin Impact next!

This is why I love these Genshin-like gacha games. They’re my new MMO, essentially. Big, open worlds with tons of things to do, everything from epic questlines to exploration and ‘hobby’ tasks like fishing. Combat of course. Characters to collect and improve on. You can play these games for a LONG time once they’re up and established. I love ’em!

Granted, it’d be nice if we could get a bigger variety of art styles. They’re all pretty heavily anime influenced. Fortunately I still am enjoying that style; I know some friends who are getting rather tired of it, though. But… Galbrena…

Portrait of Galbrena from Wuthering Waves
Not gonna lie, I became a little obsessed with Galbrena.

I’m sure this is also exactly what other folks don’t like about these games. “If I wanted to watch a TV show, I’d be watching a TV show” is a perfectly valid and justified complaint one might aim at them. Or at Wuthering Waves, anyway. I do think it takes storytelling to extremes that most other games don’t reach.

We still have a few weeks before NTE version 1.3 is expected, so we’ll see if that’s enough time for me to get caught up in Wuthering Waves. Of course I’ve also been giving Diablo IV another go. I finished the base campaign last night.. it was quite a gaming night, defeating both Lilith and Leviathan in the same evening!

Yeah, I don’t have any real point to make other than Wuthering Waves has a great story and just basically… I’m in the mood to express my love of video games. Oh, did I mention I’m still enjoying Solarpunk, too? 🙂

[Notes on AI used in this post: I used AI to remove some subtitling from the portrait of Galbrena]