What Did We Play Yesterday?

I made the mistake of starting a new game in Stardew Valley.

It has something to do with the time of year. I got sucked into it around this time last year, too. It's bad. For the past few days I've been fishing instead of doing my actual day job. When I get fired I'll let you know if it was worth it.

Concerned Ape recently released version 1.2, which includes 5 new types of farmland (aaaah river farm), a couple of romances, and some other stuff. I really respect that he's still working on the game. He could have just WELP IM DONE after the 1.0 bugfixes, especially since he spent the last five years working on it. But he has a vision. God bless him.

What I really wanted my last game was the greenhouse, but the amount of stuff you have to collect for the Pantry Collection is kinda ridiculous. Previously I was going about it by growing/raising all the stuff myself and after 4 seasons I was halfway there.

I'm not a fan of the livestock situation. It's very expensive to get started and it would take a long time to break even on sale profits. If you have enough head/fowl it is impossible to harvest enough hay to overwinter, which means you lose a season of production.

Fortunately, the traveling cart provides a random chance to buy most of the items in the game. $600-1,000+ is a lot for an egg, but buying the three you need is less than buying a deluxe coop ($4k + $10k) and chickens ($800 x 2) and a duck ($4k) to lay em. The cart comes into town 8 times a season, so I guess the question is how many seasons it takes to collect all the stuff I need.

There is one farm building that is cost-effective. A silo costs 100 to build. The cheapest you can buy the 10 hay for the Fodder Bundle is 500. (Edit: I forgot it takes 5 copper bars to build a silo. It's cheaper to buy the hay.) I swore I wasn't going to mess with fowl again, but today I began to miss little Mulder and Scully, and their duck friend Skinner, so.... gotta get on that silo, I guess.

I am still not interested in socializing, making and keeping friends is about as much of a pain in the ass as it is in real life. (In the past, I've complained about NPCs and romances being too player-centric, now I have a game where NPCs have their own lives and you have to actually socialize with them and give them presents and I can't be bothered.)

Hyper Light Drifter is a mashup of Zelda and Fez. It takes place in a violent and mysterious world, walking a tightrope between good wholesome challenge and FUUck (a couple of the cheevs are straight-up trolling). It's one of those fine wine-type games. Once you open the bottle and let it breathe a bit it opens up.

The pixel art style makes the visceral landscape much more palatable. The Drifter routinely passes through sites of massacre, bodies floating in water, and victims strung up for torture. If the graphics were in a more realistic style I probably would have found it too disturbing to play.

All in-game dialogue and text is in a cipher and the few characters who talk to the Drifter speak pictorally, leaving the player to intuit much about the world. It works, though, and really adds to the game's sense of mystery. There is no in-game key, but players cracked the code using shop signs as a starting point.

While HLD is challenging, part of the fun is getting better. There is a learning curve to discovering secrets and hidden items as well. When I returned to several areas I was surprised by how many things I missed the first pass. A few areas are pretty damn cheap, but this is largely confined to optional challenge areas. Three of the four dungeons can be completed in any order, so if you get stuck you can wander off for a bit.

There are a million things to collect: modules, monoliths, outfits, weapons, gearbits. The modules are the only thing marked on the in-game map, so it's up to the player to keep track of the rest. The game does not explain what the outfits do, I had to get that on the wiki.

My main problem is there is so much stuff to collect that figuring out how to find that one module you missed is a chore, even with this helpful Hyper Light Drifter Interactive Map. I'm only missing two modules, two monoliths, and a handful of keys, but trying to figure out specifically which ones I missed and how to backtrack to find them is so tedious I would almost rather start a new game with a planned route.

I'm honestly not sure how (or why) people are "beating" it in 7.5 hours, my current PT is 17.5. I haven't beaten the last boss yet.

I recommend it if you're interested in a creepy Zelda clone that (probably) makes some of your hair fall out.