Category: Gaming

Daily Logins are the Fun Killers

Posted on by Nimgimli

It’s time for another round of pointless self reflection, and you get to play along at home! First, let’s establish the pattern:

I’ll start playing a new (to me) live service game for some reason. Maybe it’s all the rage, or maybe it’s on Game Pass or something. At first I’m just kind of poking at it. No plan, no optimization, no spreadsheets open on the second monitor, just running around seeing what happens and thinking, “Huh. This is actually pretty good.” I’m having fun. I’m not committed to anything. I’m not trying to be efficient. I’m just playing.

So I play for a day or three, and at some point I get a pop-up telling me I earned a Daily Login Reward or I advanced the Battle Pass.

Now, I didn’t ask for a Battle Pass. I was just over here having fun playing. But fine, free stuff is free stuff. I should at least see what I can earn, right? And next thing I know I’m not just playing the game, I’m studying the reward track like I’m planning retirement contributions. If I do this and that and the other thing I’ll have enough points to unlock the next freebie and keep my streak alive.

How I turn every live service game into a chore

It’s subtle. I don’t even notice it happening. I’m still having fun. But now I have a plan. Dare I say, a schedule. A checklist. I log in every day and first thing I do is finish my dailies, push the Battle Pass forward, collect the daily rewards. This is fine; I’m in that honeymoon period and I was going to play anyway.

The absolute worst version of this, though, is when I’m already logging in every day anyway and I decide that since I’m clearly committed, it makes perfect sense to spend money on the Premium Battle Pass. Or one of those daily login reward subscriptions where they basically give you a little allowance as long as you show up and punch the clock. The latter are so low effort: you literally log in and you get your rewards. You’ve paid for 30 days. The catch is, if you miss a day, you miss that day’s rewards. So you best log in EVERY DAY.

And once I’ve spent actual dollars, that’s it. I’m no longer just playing a game. I HAVE to log in now. I paid for this. I would be irresponsible not to extract maximum value from my purchase.

And that’s when the fun quietly starts packing its bags.

Story? I’ll worry about that later

The thing is, nothing dramatic happens. There isn’t some big moment where I slam the keyboard and declare the game ruined. It’s much quieter than that. I just start noticing that I’m logging in even on nights when I don’t really feel like it. Not because I’m excited to see what happens next, but because there’s a checklist waiting for me.

“Just knock out the dailies real quick.”

That’s the phrase. The phrase of doom.

I tell myself it’ll only take ten minutes. Fifteen, tops. I’ll grab the login reward, clear whatever daily tasks are being repeated today, maybe collect some currency that resets at midnight, and then I can decide if I actually want to play.

Except by the time I’ve done all that, it hasn’t been 15 minutes, it’s been 30-45 because somewhere, something went a little bit amiss. And when the checklist is finished, so am I. I’ve harvested the crops, killed the required number of enemies, cleared the little red exclamation points on various sub-menus and options, and now the idea of “real” play feels like overtime.

Now presumably, since I am a very narrative focused gamer, part of what drew me to this game in the first place is the storyline. But now I’m never touching the storyline. I’m just doing the daily tasks, the time-limited tasks, all the things I ‘should’ do so that I don’t miss out. And the game has become another chore to do every day. Almost a job. I’m logging in to collect virtual currency, NOT to have fun, not to enjoy an interesting story. And as more and more content rolls out I fall farther and farther behind and now I don’t even engage with the community for fear of spoilers since I’m back in the starter zone collecting 10 flowers every day and killing that same boss every night.

Just another obligation

The worst part is that none of what I’m asked to do is hard. It’s not even really unpleasant. It just feels… obligatory. Boring, even. Like taking out the trash. You don’t hate taking out the trash. You just don’t feel a surge of joy about it either. You do it because it needs to be done.

Somewhere in there the game quietly stops being the thing I choose and starts being the thing I maintain.

That’s the beginning of the end. Actually, not true. By this point we’re like mid-way through the end. I’m starting to resent the game more than anything. It’s 10 pm and I want to play the game I WANT to play but instead I’m logging into the live service albatross to check that off my list.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

Now here’s the part where I pretend I’m surprised by any of this.

Because this is not new behavior. This is a pattern. I have done this before. I will do this again. If there were a Battle Pass for learning from my mistakes, I would absolutely grind it out and still not unlock the lesson.

I always act like this time will be different. This time I’ll just enjoy the game. This time I won’t care about the streak. This time I won’t let the daily reset timer dictate my evening plans like some tiny digital landlord. This time, dammit, I will JUST focus on the story and leave that other stuff for “endgame” once I’ve unlocked all the zones and defeated the big bad at the end of the tale.

And yet.

There’s something in my brain that just hates missing out on stuff. If the game offers me a reward for logging in seven days in a row, well now I have GOT to get that reward because I’m sure it’ll change the game completely for me. [Spoiler: It never does.]

And then there’s the money part. Once I’ve paid for the Premium Battle Pass I’m REALLY committed. I start calculating value per day. If I miss a login, I’ve wasted fifty cents. If I don’t finish the season track, I’ve basically set fire to five dollars. This is how my brain works, and I wish I were exaggerating.

The game didn’t do that to me. I did that to me. I could simply… not. I could skip a day. The sun would still rise. My characters would still be there. The digital crops would not file a complaint. Yes, I’d lose out on 50 cents worth of digital currency but so what? It’s 50 cents. It should’t matter.

And yet I log in.

What I SHOULD be doing

When I think about the games I’ve loved the most, the ones that stuck with me long after I stopped playing them, none of them are tied to a streak. I don’t remember what day I logged in. I don’t remember what tier of the Battle Pass I hit. I remember wandering. I remember the story. I remember the characters. I remember rushing through boring bits and really meandering through parts I loved.

I remember deciding to go left instead of right just because the light looked interesting over there. I remember getting distracted halfway through a quest because something shiny caught my eye. I remember staying up too late not because something was about to expire at midnight, but because I wanted to see what was over the next hill.

That’s my happy place in games. The roaming. The poking around. The completely inefficient use of time. I AM the worlds slowest gamer and for good reason. If HowLongToBeat says it’ll take 50 hours to complete a game, I’m going to take 100 hours. I just HATE rushing.

When I’m wandering, I’m not optimizing. I’m not thinking about value extraction or daily caps or whether I’ve “maximized rewards.” I’m just in the space. If I don’t log in tomorrow, nothing breaks. The world doesn’t reset on me. It just waits. Maybe I take a bite of story. Maybe I don’t. Maybe I go see if I can get over that mountain. Or what happens if I swim too far out to sea. Will I die from slaughterfish or will I just get teleported back to land. Let’s find out!

That’s probably why life sims and slower games have been pulling me in lately. There’s no clock ticking in the background saying, “Better hurry up, this offer ends soon.” I can roam around, talk to whoever I feel like talking to, maybe dazzle someone with fireworks and go in for the hug, and call it a night. [Sorry, day dreaming about my Sandrock wife Amirah… she’s so attentive!]

And maybe that’s the real difference. Wandering is open-ended. It doesn’t demand anything from me. It doesn’t care if I show up every single day. It doesn’t punish me for having other things to do. It just exists, waiting for when I feel like stepping back into it.

Daily logins, on the other hand, always feel like they’re tapping their watch.

And I’m starting to think that as soon as a game starts tapping its watch at me, I should probably take that as a cue to wander off somewhere else.

January 2026

Posted on by Nimgimli

Holy smokes, how is January over already? This month has flown by!

I’m posting this one a day early because we’re about to get hit with a whopper of a storm (they say the area could see more snow than it’s seen in 30 years, but for here that means 8-9 inches, not 3 feet) with high winds and bitter cold, so in case we lose power or Internet, figured I’d hit Publish on the recap.

Playing

I’ve been playing a bunch of stuff a little bit, in a kind of slow-motion cleanup of my hard drive. I made a list of every game I have installed and have been going through them deciding which can be shelved and uninstalled and which to keep around (my SSDs are getting full, mostly thanks to a ton of AI models sucking up space). I won’t list them all, though. Here’re the games I have been playing more seriously:

My Time At Sandrock is still a daily stop in my gaming travels. I’m somewhere around 90 hours in and just based on how much stuff I have upgraded to the highest levels possible, I think I must be getting close to the end of the story, but we’ll see. I certainly am not rushing through it. It tends to be the last thing I play at night which means lots of roaming around exploring and goofing off. I’m also struggling to focus on a spouse. I was dating one character when I said the wrong thing to another character and BOTH of them got mad at me. Now I’ve been putting the moves on Amirah. See the picture at the top of this post. I dazzled her with fireworks then went in for the hug. What a player I am! Anyway I’m having fun and I’ve really been drawn, lately, to this kind of ‘life sim’ game that ISN’T all about combat. I have a couple more waiting in the wings for this one to be finished.

Ball X Pit continues to also be a daily thing. I log in, tweak my village and play a round. They just added more content although one of the new characters they added literally plays the game for you, so that’s dull as dirt. Like for real you can start the level and go have lunch and come back in 15 minutes to see how you did. I guess I’ll call this one done when I’ve unlocked everything; there’s really no story here or any kind of “The End” situation that I can detect.

I spent a little bit of time in Wasteland 3 before deciding the tone wasn’t for me. See more about that here.

And I finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and you can read about that here.

Eternal Strands is probably the game to replace Expedition 33 on my “let’s actually finish a game” list. This is an action rpg from Yellow Brick Games that feels like it borrows from several sub-genres in a good way. There’s fighting regular monsters, fighting really big monsters that you can climb on, and crafting weapons and gear from both monster parts as well as plants and minerals you find during your journey. There’s a LOT of destructible stuff in the game. It feels like everything that was “placed” in a level is destructible, which is oddly fun. Finally combat is a mix of melee, bows and magic, with various elemental magics impacting the world. Fires spread, ice freezes baddies in place (and puts out fires) and so on. More when I’ve played more!

Screenshot for Eternal Strands showing protagonist Brynn facing a much larger enemy
Big enemies like this Ark of the Stricken Earth have to be climbed in order to harvest their magical energy.

Watching

Stranger Things S5 — I hadn’t been super excited about another season of Stranger Things after such a long break, and I went into it skeptical. But by the end I was on-board and while the ending seemed really long, it was also pretty interesting. It’s not often you get a glimpse of the life of your shows’ heros after all the excitement is finally over.

Sanctuary: A Witch’s Tale — I did NOT want to watch another witch show, but PartPurple really wanted to watch so we did. And I found myself enjoying it; it’s really more of a mystery with some magic sprinkled in than it is a classic witch tale. It’d been a while since I watched a mystery series so in that way it was a nice change of pace and a very pleasant surprise. I’m glad we watched. That said, I found most of the characters pretty unlikable and just last night we started Season 2 and my immediate reaction was “these characters haven’t learned a thing and are making the same mistakes they made last season” and I’m considering asking Purple to watch this second season on her own. But I guess I should give it a chance so the mystery aspect can kick in.

Fallout — We re-watched S1 (I think that was my 4th time watching, but just the 2nd for PartPurple) and we’re now enjoying S2 with the last ep just a few days out. Love this show to bits!

Defiance — This was our lunchtime re-watch, and we just finished it. Seasons 1 & 2 are on Prime Video but Season 3 is on Peacock, and we were invested enough that we subscribed to Peacock to finish the re-watch. Jamie Murray as Stahma Tarr carries so much of this show. She is so ethereal and sexy and evil and conniving in it. I’d also forgotten what an ass Nolan can be… sheesh dude, take it down a notch. I do think Seasons 1 & 2 are much stronger than S3, but we’ve enjoyed them all. If you don’t want to sign up for Peacock but have Amazon Prime, watching the first 2 seasons still works.

Reading

Still reading old sci fi and fantasy magazines and that’ll probably hold true for a long time to come!

So that’s a wrap on January. It was a pretty good month for me. The trauma of the move is fading into the rear-view mirror, the new apartment is SLOWLY coming together but generally feels comfortable and much nicer than the old place. I’ve been slowly exploring the immediate area, though I still haven’t found my way to the beaches. Gotta fix that. Work has been OK, health has been OK… so yeah, it was a nice month for me despite the wider world slowly (?) falling apart.

 

Finally Finished Expedition 33

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m going to make this pretty short since Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been talked about so much since release, what with being a hit at launch, then winning awards, then having awards retracted, then news about the studio resisting the pressure to expand so they can get their next game out more quickly… suffice to say that the game is a critical and popular success.

I started playing at launch (April 24, 2025) and finished yesterday, Jamuary 24, 2026. And this wasn’t my typical ‘start over half a dozen times’ playthrough. The Save Game I finished on was the same one I started in April. My playtime was a little under 43 hours. I’d leave the game for weeks at a time before remembering it and circling back.

I liked it enough to finish it (mostly because the story, which somehow never got spoiled for me, had me very curious) but why the long breaks?

Basically I found Expedition 33 hard to get back into after ANY kind of break. When I’d play a good long session I would love the game, but if I left it for even 2 or 3 days getting back into it was difficult for me. It all comes down to the combat. Combat is turn-based with player-reaction coming in the form of dodging or parrying enemy attacks. By tapping a button at just the right time you can dodge or parry an enemy’s attack, mitigating damage and ideally leading to a counter attack. When you’re playing consistently and learn the enemies’ devious patterns (they tend to try to fake you out, but each enemy type has a few varieties of attack that play out the same way every time) and get good at parrying, especially, it is a lot of fun and combat becomes substantially easier.

But for me, at least (remember: I am old as dirt), even a couple days away and I’d have to re-learn all these defense patterns and I would SUCK for the first half hour or so. And, another quirk of mine is I often play games in very short sessions…like 30 minutes or so.

A screenshot showing the combat interface
Combat screen from fairly early in the game

While it took 8 calendar months to finish, I’d guess the bulk of my progress came in 3 or 4 spurts where I really focused on the game for a couple days. I guess this is all a long-winded way of saying that this is a game best enjoyed all at once. My advice is that if you haven’t played yet, when you do pick a time when there aren’t other games plucking at your attention and just focus entirely on this one until you’ve finished. To me this feels like the best way to enjoy Expedition 33. Oh and if you have both an Xbox and a gaming PC, don’t play this on both platforms at the same time. The dodge/parry timing is just different enough between the two platforms that it’ll really throw you off.

My only other issue with is is the lack of a map. That’s a personal peeve. I really like having a map, ideally with ‘fog of war’ so you do have to travel all the pathways to discover them, but after that you have a map. Presumably one of your party members is on cartography duty!

Everything else about the game: the story, the characters, the artwork and the music, was amazing. The characters in particular were some of the most beautiful I’ve seen in a game in a long time.

I have no idea if the devs will be coming back to this IP, but if they do I will surely play the next game in the series. My only request to them is to give us a difficulty slider specifically for the timing of the block/parry. I could have put the game on Story mode which I guess makes the timing more generous, but I didn’t want the enemies to hit less hard or have fewer hit points. I just wanted to be able to effectively dodge and parry even after a break from playing.

A Taste of Wasteland 3

Posted on by Nimgimli

Back in my younger days, before I gravitated to consoles, I was a huge fan of tactical strategy and wargames. Recently I’ve been spending a bit more time on the PC and wanted to see if this genre still scratched the itch for me (yes there are tactical strategy games on consoles but I’ve never found using a controller for these to be very comfortable, nor is reading a bunch of stats from across the room). Wasteland 3 in a CRPG with tactical turn-based combat and it’s on Game Pass so it seemed like an obvious choice.

Actually it was a choice I made a few times, bouncing off very early most times. But this time… THIS time would be different. And it was. I put about 9 hours in. Enough to do ten or so quests and to level up characters and gear, and to engage in a good amount of combat.

I found that I do still enjoy tactical combat. Y’know, figuring out how many things you can do on one turn’s worth of action points. Moving and finding cover. Healing your squaddies. Tossing grenades and accidentally blowing up your own guys. All of that was fun and I enjoyed building the characters as well. This guy will be the doctor and I’ll load him up with health and recovery skills. That one is the spy, give him a sniper rifle AND lock picking skills. Things like that.

So combat and character development, thumbs up.

The RPG aspects though, felt a little dull. Click to move, then scroll the screen, then click to move further, then turn the view so you can see down that side street, then click to move down that street. BORING. There’s a Map screen… why not just let me click on that and have my crew travel back and forth across town on their own? I might need to learn some patience.

The dialog with NPCs and such was pretty good in that there are a lot of choices and apparently these choices have long-term ramifications though honestly I didn’t play long enough to experience that myself.

In the end though, the aspect that convinced me to put this one aside was the tone. Yeah its post-apocalyptic and we know how “edgy” that can get, but this felt like post-apocalypse via the imagination of a 14 year old boy who is caught up in the grip of puberty. It’s really weird by design, and dirtier than it needs to be, and not dirty in a good way if you like your media to be a bit spicy. It just feels crass to me. For example, check out the helmet on this character. At this point I didn’t yet have enough helmets for everyone so I had to use what I could get but c’mon…

A character wearing a helmet that has sex toys as 'horns'
When I was younger I may have found this hilarious.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, just like I never thought there was anything wrong with the dildo club in Saints Row. I just personally think it’s dumb, and I dunno… I like to find cool armor in games, not armor I’d be embarassed to wear. This is just an example but you get the idea of the tone of the whole game. It can’t decide if it is a soft r-rated slapstick comedy, or a grim-dark story about how after civilization falls, there are no good guys left in the world. It tries to be both, in the way Fallout is both, but for whatever reason, for me personally, it just didn’t work.

I’m NOT saying it’s a bad game; in fact there’s a lot I like about it. It’s just not the game I’m in the mood for right now, so keeping with my new gaming outlook, rather than trying to force myself to keep playing I’m going to set it aside. I MIGHT come back to it some day but there are SO many games out there waiting to be played… life feels too short to play games that you think are “OK”. (At 9 hours in I still have 50+ to go from what I’ve read and that’s a lot of time to dedicate to something you’re not whole-heartedly enjoying!)

For what it’s worth, the Steam community has given this one a “Mostly Positive” rating with over 190K reviews, and it’s currently 70% off ($11.99 USD) and Open Critic gives it a ‘Top Critic Average’ of 86%, but keep in mind those reviews came out in 2021. Point is though, if it sounds fun, don’t let me dissuade you because my issues with it are personal and very subjective.

December 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

OMG I just realized tomorrow is the end of the month and I haven’t even create the ‘stub’ of a recap post (I’m writing this on Tuesday). My usual system is to create a recap post early in the month and just jot down notes in it because I WILL forget what I’ve done. I didn’t do that this month and indeed, I have forgotten what I’ve done.

The truth really is that I haven’t done much ‘fun’ stuff due to the move I’ve been talking about. We are STILL in the midst of this and painful, expensive lessons were learned about how much work it is, and how much time it takes, to move. Particularly if you’re a senior citizen and work a desk job so your stamina is shit. We spent money on movers to move the big furniture and planned to move the smaller stuff ourselves, but after many wasted days (and wasted gas) we threw in the towel and hired the movers to come AGAIN. And still there was more to do, like take down things we’d mounted on the walls, take down curtains… stuff like that. Then the cleaning started and eventually we threw in that towel, too, and hired a cleaning crew (this is gross and embarassing to admit but we’d had furniture that hadn’t been moved in a decade and it appears mice had been living under/behind said furniture, and what a mess they made). On New Year’s Day I’m making 1 last ‘haul’ trip. Friday PartPurple goes up to basically let the cleaning crew in. And next week we go back to turn in the keys and do a walk-through and then, finally….FINALLY…. we’ll be done. And I’ll be broke.

Anyway between shuttling back and forth between apartments, packing, unpacking, recycling runs, and organizing, not a lot of fun stuff got done this month. But here is what did:

Playing

My Time At Sandrock has been my ‘main game’ and I’ve been slowly chipping away at it. Realizing that — unlike in many titles in this genre — Sandrock lets you save pretty much any time has been a blessing and a curse. Blessing because, duh, it’s convenient, but a curse because now it can sometimes take me 2-3 play sessions to get through a single day. I keep forgetting what I was working on and so forth. Because of this I think I’m way over-level for the part of the main story I’m in, though I’m not sure I mind that all that much. Still really enjoying this one and looking forward to the next game in the series, Evershine, where the character models are a big more adult. It feels a little creepy running around looking like a 14 year old boy and trying to woo the (based on appearances) older women in the town!

My yard, with the stable to the right, my garden in center and a row of machines in the background

Winter Burrow was finally finished. Here’s the post on that.

I still play a session of Ball X Pit every day to keep the Microsoft Rewards streak going on console. To earn the points you have to play a game on console and a run takes just about exactly 15 minutes (assuming you don’t fail) so this works out perfectly and it’s the kind of game where you can really easily jump in, play and jump out without having to remember what you are supposed to be doing, or anything along those lines. Plus, it’s fun as heck!

Last is Relic Hunters Legend, which I just spoke about the other day.

Watching

The Mayfair Witches, S2 — This was a ‘her’ pick. She loves Anne Rice and that whole milieu. We’ve recently watched Interview With The Vampire, Talamasca, and now this. I like them, but not enough that I’d probably watch them if PartPurple wasn’t really into them. It’s all urban fantasy about witches and vamps and stuff.

Stranger Things, S5 — We just started season 5 and are only a couple of episodes in. I loved this show when it was new but honestly I like it less with every season. I think. It’s been SO long between seasons I can’t be certain.

Defiance — We always do re-watches for lunchtime TV viewing since we, and particularly me, can’t focus as much as we usually do. I’m always listening for pings from work while we watch. Anyway Defiance recently hit Amazon Prime so we’re doing a re-watch and loving it.

Reading

A Christmas Carol — For the most part, we just skipped Christmas this year. We did put up a tree, and I read A Christmas Carol, as I do every year. It’s a tradition!

Old sci-fi/fantasy magazines. In the back of a closet I found a stack of old magazines. Sci-Fi Age, Realms of Fantasy, the Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy, etc etc. They have dates from the 1990s on them! I’ve been having quite a good time reading this old stuff, particularly sci-fi that takes place in the near future (as of 1995 or whatever) which is often the VERY near future as of 2025. It’s fun to see what the authors got right, and what they got wrong. Also ‘interesting’ is the artwork that comes with many of the fantasy stories. There’s almost always an attractive woman in an alluring outfit. The era of the chainmail bikini, amiright?

So that’s December, and that’s 2025 done and dusted. 2026 is gonna suck (in world scale) but I’m hoping it’ll be less bad in personal terms. Losing our dog Lola was really painful, and frankly really expensive, and this move is driving us deeper into debt. Hoping in ’26 I can climb most of the way out of that hole. And we’re starting the year in a new apartment, and in a new area full of places to explore and things to do. So while the world burns, I’m hoping that we in our specific household have a better year.

And I hope that you in your specific household have a better year, too!

Early Thoughts on Relic Hunters Legends

Posted on by Nimgimli

Here’s another of those games I never would’ve tried if it hadn’t been on Game Pass. But it was and I needed one more Game Pass game to collect my Microsoft Rewards for having played eight different Game Pass titles in a given month, so I gave it a shot.

This isn’t a review since I didn’t play it enough, but the beauty of being a blogger rather than a professional reviewer is that you can just throw in the towel whenever you want. And after 5 hours of Relic Hunters Legends, I think I’ve had enough. It isn’t a bad game, but it isn’t a great game either, and there are plenty of great games out there waiting to be played.

RHL is a looter-shooter that seems like it was maybe made for kids? Your character is a kid, the art-style makes me think of Nickolodeon or The Cartoon Network (if either of those are still around) and the combat is pretty basic. It’s essentially a twin stick shooter played from an overhead perspective. Enemies are anthropomorphic animals, primarly ducks and turtles in the early game.

Big dude on the left is an NPC, white haired little guy on the right is me

At the start of the game you answer some questions like it is 1985 and you’re playing Ultima IV. At the end of this you get assigned a Planet, which I guess is a class. Eventually you can unlock the other classes but until you do, you have the joy of getting lots of loot your class can’t use. That’s always fun. At least you can break useless gear down for components, which are then used to upgrade gear you CAN use. Upgrading gear (whether through drops of new stuff or improving what you have) is the main way of getting stronger. There’s a level system but it just seems to be there to gate gear and not to make you inherently more powerfull.

My assumption is that they really want you to play this with friends, and I played it solo, so keep that in mind. What’s odd is that in the tutorial mission you are joined with some NPC companions, but once you get into the main game you don’t have access to them. I think adding bots to play along side of would’ve made the game more interesting. But anyway as is typical for this kind of game, it’s probably more entertaining when you’re on comms with your friends and you’re laughing at how that one guy keeps running off the edge of the world or whatever. The tutorial mission with NPC pals was frenetic and kind of fun.

Playing solo I tended to charge ahead, then fall back to let my skill cooldowns expire, which was effective but dull. The two mission types I experienced were skirmish (kill your way through a couple of short levels, then take on a boss) and ‘escort the payload’ (where you have to hang out near a vehicle and it moves forward, unless enemies are near it). The skirmish mission was easy until I got to the boss, and it wiped the floor with me. I thought I was going to have to grind the mission over and over until I realized I could respawn and the damage to the boss wouldn’t reset. So I just chewed away at him, dying probably a dozen times before he finally went down. On a second run, after having gotten some better loot from finishing the mission once, I had to respawn three times.

The Escort mission was arguably more interesting but since the payload only moves when you’re near it, you could still fall back and wait for things like your heal skill to cooldown so you could fix yourself up. It didn’t appear that the payload took any damage so I’m not sure if you can even fail these missions. I beat that one the first try.

The Ducans (duck-mans?) are messing with my payload!

The art style and the lack of fail-states is what makes me think the game was intended for kids.

When you’re not doing missions there a hub-world to run around in. This felt like another situation where it might be more interesting if you were running around in it with friends but as a solo player I just found running back and forth to be a little tedious.

I don’t have much BAD to say about Relic Hunters Legends; it’s fine. It just doesn’t really sparkle in any way. It’s currently on sale on Steam for $7.00 USD and might be worth a purchase at that price (there’s also a demo) but at the regular price of $20 it just needs more of a hook to be worth it.

Winter Burrow Finished

Posted on by Nimgimli

Winter Burrow is a pretty short game (12 hours for my playthrough) but it still took me something like 6 weeks to finish it, what with everything going on in my life right now.

That’s only relevant because I think stretching things out over such a long time took away from my experience with the game. I really enjoyed it at first, but over time I was less and less enthusiastic about it. The gaps in play sessions had a lot to do with this. At launch there was no map. It’s not a huge game so that wasn’t too much of a problem until I stepped away for a week and came back and had to re-explore everything to remember what was where.

Shortly before the holiday the devs released a patch that adds a map and that’s when I started focusing on the title again. I like maps.

Oh, sort of getting ahead of myself. If you’re unaware, Winter Burrow is a (self-proclaimed) cozy survival game where you play as a mouse. It has a really cute art style and that’s a big part of the burst of fun right out of the gate. If you played it over a few evenings that cute glow-up will probably last the entire experience, but as with anything familiarity breeds apathy and after a while I needed more than cute.

The actual gameplay isn’t far removed from most survival games. You gather, you craft, you fight baddies. You have to eat to stave off starvation, and you have to stay warm. Staying warm is enough of a challenge that I’d argue against the ‘cozy’ label. Cozy aesthetics? Absolutely. Cozy gameplay? Not so much. Being chased by a giant spider while you’re losing health from freezing isn’t my idea of cozy! Not that the game is hard; the cold mechanic just makes things a little tedious as you constantly have to cut short expeditions to return to someplace warm. This gets particularly tedious when, like me, you’ve been away from the game long enough that you can no longer remember where X is, even though you know you’ve been there before.

You have a home that needs repairs and such, but you don’t build any structures from scratch. You can build better tools, warmer clothes, and there are a LOT of recipes for furniture that is used purely as decoration. I’m not big into decorating so that whole aspect was more or less lost on me. If you’re someone that loves to spruce up housing in your games you’ll probably love this aspect.

Crafting is limited to Woodworking, Knitting, Cooking and some very lite (and generally not needed) farming.

There are a handful of NPCs you’ll meet and run errands for. Most of these quests are pretty simple “go find X” or “go craft Y”. They’re enough to nudge the story along, though. And all the NPCs are different small animals that nontheless appear huge to a tiny mouse.

My overall rating after finishing is that it was fine. I liked it, didn’t love it. But again, part of that is on me for playing so infrequently. The only truly ‘bad’ thing about the game, for me, was the ending which is really abrupt and is basically just “The End, Thanks For Playing” without any kind of summary or epilogue or something to just help you reflect back on your journey.

Other things I didn’t like were much more subjective. The cold mechanic just felt like busy work (you can eventually craft campfire kits and kindling to alleviate this aspect if you’re willing to put in the time to gather materials to craft them), inventory is crazy limited, and I often had trouble differentiating interactive objects with decorations. This rock I can hit with a pick and get resources, but that rock is just part of the scenery. That kind of thing. Not a huge deal, though.

I played on Game Pass, but Winter Burrow is currently 20% off on Steam ($16.99 USD), and there’s a demo available. I’d say this is an OK price but the full price of $20 feels a little high to me, though maybe I’m just cheap. The developers did add some Solstice content in the same patch where they added the map (the image at the top of the post is of the Solstice Tree that you can craft post-game, thanks to this new content). If they keep on adding bits to it (for free) it’ll make the price more palatable.

November 2025

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Been crazy here this month, and next month will be just as crazy. I really thought that spreading out this move over a couple months would make it easier and in a lot of ways it does, but it means instead of one absolutely crazy moving-week we’re experiencing weeks and weeks of moderate craziness. But things are coming along and we’re pretty excited about the new place. We’ve made two trips there so far. The first was brutal, the second much easier which was interesting because I think my body is actually just growing stronger that quickly. Or more flexible anyway. Whatever the reason, hauling boxes of books up and down stairs didn’t take nearly as much out of me during the second trip.

Somehow I’m still sneaking in a fair amount of gaming, but I’m going to rip through all this pretty quick cuz…. boxes need to be packed!

Playing

Wuthering Waves: Shelved for now. I did a couple of months of the subscription thing (where you get premium currency every day) and the paid version of the battle pass thingie. Made good use of both of those but, as is VERY typical for me, they also made the game feel a bit like a chore. When I started playing a swore to myself I’d just play for the main story line but alas, that was dropped in favor of logging in every day and doing all the things that give you battle pass progress and stuff. I did get in something like 150 hours before burnout hit though so… not a bad run.

My Time At Sandrock: I started this a year or so ago right after finishing My Time At Portia but soon realized I needed a break between two titles that are so similar. Glad I did because I am HOOKED on Sandrock now. If you’ve never played a “My Time At…” game they’re a lot like a Harvest Moon or Stardew valley, except in 3D and they take place in a post-apocalyptic world. But a pretty, mostly friendly, post-apocalyptic world. The tension is between two factions, one that shuns technology since it ruined the old world, and one that wants to rediscover technology to make the current situation better. You kind of straddle that line and mostly spend your time harvesting, building, farming, mining, fighting and trying to befriend the natives. It’s pretty casual and stress-free in site of all that stuff you have to juggle. One setting that I can’t remember if Portia had is the option to slow down time so each day goes by more slowly. I turned that down so I could just putter around without a lot of time management stress.

Ball X Pit: I wrote a post about this… still playing!

Winter Burrow: Wrote a post about this too. Also still playing. This one has turned out to be a bit harder than I thought it was going to be due to the lack of a map and the ‘cold’ mechanic that means you have to be careful of how far you wander from home. Also your inventory is pretty small. It’s cute as heck but that doesn’t mean it’s super easy, as it turns out. Or maybe I’m doing something wrong which is always possible.

Octopath Traveler: Picked this up on sale and I’m playing it on the Steam Deck in the evenings when we’re at the new place. Very early days and everyone interested in this game is familiar with it, so just sticking a flag in the sand to say I’m playing.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage: This game follows Bassim who was in AC Valhalla and I did NOT like him in that game so I had no plans to play Mirage. But then it hit Game Pass so I figured “What the heck.” I’ve barely gotten started on it, though.

That’s too many games to be juggling, isn’t it? Sandrock is by far the title I spent the most time on this month.

Watching

Nobody Wants This S2: This is the Kristen Bell sitcom about her dating a rabbi and all the trouble that causes because she is not Jewish. Loved S1, loved S2. Can’t wait for a Season 3 which I assume is coming.

Talamasca: This is set in Anne Rice’s vampire mythos. It was a PartPurple pick. The Talamasca is a shadow organization that keeps tabs on supernatural goings-on and in this show a new recruit is sent in to spy on an ancient vampire. It was actually pretty good, but I’ll never admit that to Purple.

The Witcher S4: I didn’t really miss Henry Cavill so much, though PartPurple did. We’re in the part of the story where a lot of the emphasis is on Ciri anyway. I enjoyed it but it is VERY similar to what I remember reading in the books. Almost too much so since I know what was going to happen next every step of the way.

Tales from Woodcreek: This is a D&D Campaign hosted by Deborah Ann Woll on YouTube. This is the 2nd time we’ve watched one of her campaigns (the other being Relics and Rarities, also on YouTube) and we really enjoy them for a few reasons. First, each episode is a manageable length: about an hour. Second, she brings in guest players, often ones who’ve never played D&D before, and generally her guests are actors. It’s fun watching the regulars help the newbies and being actors, the newbies tend to really get into their characters. Third, her campaigns tend to be really interactive with props and such. In this one she actually leads the party to new physical locations to set the scenes and such. Now I do not play D&D so I can’t speak to how authentic this all is, but it’s really fun to watch.

Reading

The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories — A collection of Isaac Asimov’s short stories, mostly written in the 1970s. Lots of robots. Lots of concerns about AI that seem pretty similar to the concerns we have today, for reals.

microserfs (Douglas Coupland) — A novel in the form of a journal. The narrator is a 20-something Microsoft employee and super-nerd, living in the 1990s when working 100 hour weeks was considered slacking. He and his colleagues decided to leave and start a company making a Lego-like videogame called Oop. (Oop, as described, seems a little bit like Roblox, though the game isn’t the focus of the story.) I really enjoyed this though it is hard to quantify why. In the end there isn’t much story there; it’d be like, well, reading the journal of any mostly ordinary person. I lived through this era so there was a lot of nostalgia for me. The team going to visit 3DO HQ, or going to CES and seeing the Ninteno VirtuaBoy. I was at that CES so, y’know, maybe brushed shoulders with these ficticious characters. It came out in 1995 but looks like it was re-issued at some point [Amazon link]. If you enjoy ‘nerd culture’ you might enjoy it. [I found this while purging to move and intead of sending it to the donation bin I held onto it to read.]

Old science fiction and fantasy magazines: I found a cache of these in the back of a closet. Most of them are from the 1990’s which means I’ve lugged them through 3 or 4 moves. Now I’m finally reading them and they’re pretty fun since in a lot of cases their “future” is our present and boy did they get a lot wrong (and some stuff right).

It’s strange to be reading physical magazines again! Remember “Continued on page 104…” WHAT? Why do I have to jump around you crazy editors!

OK, back to moving and by the time the December recap rolls around we should be (more or less) settled in our new dig! Happy Holidays!

Winter Burrow Early First Look

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Earlier this week Winter Burrow hit Game Pass and launched on Steam the same day. I’d seen previews and it was so darned cute I had to try it right away.

So far at least, it’s been a fairly typical survivalbox game, only this time you’re a mouse so everything is on a tiny scale. You’ve returned to your childhood home to find it in a state of disrepair; first order of business is to fix things up! You need to go collect twigs and pebbles to make tools and effect repairs. Then you need to use the tools to harvest better materials to make better tools in order to fix more things. It’s a familiar loop that we’ve all done many times and by now you probably know whether or not you enjoy this kind of game.

Aside from the cuteness, it’s the winter setting that makes the game a little different from most survivalboxes. In addition to gauges for health, hunger and stamina, you have a cold meter that is always dropping when you’re outside. You can knit (SO ADORABLE, your little mouse self sitting there knitting) warmer clothes to mitigate this, and there’s a day/night cycle as well. Colder at night of course.

A tiny mouse in his burrow knitting warm clothes
Knitting some warmer clothes by the fire

It’s billed as a cozy game but the cold mechanic kind of invalidates that designation to me, because you do frequently have to run home to warm up or you’ll start taking damage, and as far as I can tell there’s no map, so you can get lost and freeze. In the name of epic journalism I stayed outside in the cold until my health hit zero. When that happens you ‘pass out’ and somehow ‘stumble home’ to the burrow [aka you respawn at home], but you drop any items other than tools that you were carrying. You can go back to the spot of your misfortune and re-collect what you’ve dropped, though, so it isn’t a harsh penalty.

A tiny mouse outside the door to his burrow. The screen is feezing up!
The colder you get, the more the frost encroaches on your window into the game world. Better get inside!

In addition to gathering/crafting there’s some farming elements as well.

There’s also combat and hunting. So far I’ve attacked passive beetles to get meat that I can roast, and once been attacked by a different kind of beetle that was aggro. There’s also a setting in the options to toggle spiders on or off for folks with arachnophobia so expect some 8-legged enemies at some point.

I’ve only played for a couple of hours but wanted to share my very early thoughts, particularly for Aywren who was curious about the game.

So far I’m really enjoying it but have to stress the cuteness is the real hook here. Being a little mouse wearing snowshows and a yak beanie is just so adorable and did I mention the knitting?!

I’ll circle back once I get further in, but the initial TLDR is, not super original in the gameplay, but the aesthetics are keeping me engaged for now.

Two tiny mice having a chat
You’re not completely alone in the world!

Ball X Pit – Weird and Addicting

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I was really late to the Vampire Survivors party. By the time I discovered it, it was old news. If you haven’t played it, it’s a top down APRG where your character auto-shoots. All you do is steer around. You level up quickly and as you do you get a choice of power-ups to choose from and in so doing put together a build for that run. When you die, you hit a store to buy upgrades to make you stronger, then you try again. It doesn’t sound like much, but the sheer number of enemies on screen, each of which drops a bit of exp when they die, make it like a constant dopamine drip.

Anyway, now we have Ball X Pit which is scratching the same kind of itch. This time the gameplay feels like the love-child of Vampire Survivors and Breakout. The main gameplay has you in a tall narrow corridor with enemies marching down the screen from the top while you fire balls at them to destroy them. Both enemies and you have a health pool and generally one hit from a ball isn’t enough to destroy a baddie. If the bad guys reach the bottom of the screen they smack you for a chunk of your health, and some fire arrows or other projectiles at you as them make their way down the screen.

Meanwhile the balls you fire bounce around like they do in Breakout, the major difference being that you can aim them fairly precisely, and if you want you can hold them and then fire. There’s also an “auto-fire” mode that makes it a lot more Vampire Survivor-ish and it is how I usually play. But just like in Breakout if you can sneak a ball to the back of the enemies it will careen around and hit a ton of bad guys, doing a lot of damage.

I feel like a video will be a better explainer than I ever will be:

There are different kinds of Balls. Hero balls, and baby balls. Baby balls are weaker little projectiles that you don’t really control. Hero Balls come in a number of flavors. Fire balls cause enemies to burn for a bit (doing DoT). Earthquake balls cause area damage. Vampire balls heal you when they kill an enemy. And so on. You can hold 4 types of Hero Balls at once, and 4 passive powerups that offer bonuses like faster movement or enhanced damage when you hit an enemy from behind.

As in VS, every enemy leaves a gem which gives you experience. You have a variety of stats (Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity) and when you level up one or more of those get bumped up a point or two, and you get to pick a ball or a passive to add to your quiver or level up. Every so often (haven’t figured out what triggers these) you’ll get a little glowy thing spawning. When you pick one of those up you get some boon. Sometimes it’s random level ups for your existing skills, and sometimes it’s the chance to combine Balls into something new. So maybe you fuse a Fire ball with a Vampire ball and you get, well, a Fire X Vampire ball that both burns and returns health, and when these two fuse you now have an open slot to add something new.

Anyway eventually you die or beat the boss which ends a level. Then you go to your village. Here you can spend your rewards to buy farms and buildings and so on. Farms (wheat, forest, stone) just give more resources to buy more buildings. Houses (which you need to find a blueprint for in the ball-busting part of the game) unlock new characters, and combat buildings (eg Barracks) make your characters start the next run stronger.

But even in your village the ball motif continues. Once you place your farms and buildings and such, you have to aim and fire your characters at them in order to collect, and these characters bounce off things like your balls do. To build a building you have to hit it x times (5 maybe? I never counted). To harvest a farm  you have to fire a worker over it. And so on. Once you’ve built and harvested, it’s back to the pit for another run.

Here is what that looks like:

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Runs take about 15 minutes once you get a little ways into the game and have leveled up a bit (very early you might die much more quickly). This makes it a great game to drop into when you don’t have a lot of time but just want a gaming fix.

Anyway, I’m finding this one really addictive.  It’s available on Steam (Steamdeck Verified), Xbox and Playstation and it’s $15 everywhere. There’s a demo on Steam as well, and it has an overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam with over 6,000 reviews.