What Did We Play Yesterday?

I got stuck on the Soul Master boss in Hollow Knight, but instead of being a little piss baby I decided to explore the map and practice beating enemies. While revisiting the POIs I marked on my map I discovered this game is delightfully non-linear. I uncovered a lot of new areas (Howling Cliffs, Royal Waterways, Crystal Peak, Ancient Basin) and found a bunch of crests and upgrades. This is probably the most inefficient run ever, but the thrill of discovery is such I don't really care. I increasingly enjoy this game and all the creatures in it each time I play.

• I forgot to take a screenshot, but in a particularly tricky jump area I noticed the developers had included a partially-hidden ledge. This was very thoughtful, and I appreciate it.
• For some reason, I only recently realized I could exploit the game's save/quit feature to avoid backtracking in certain instances. Now I'm a lot more keen to venture out to tricky areas knowing I won't have to trek all the way back to save.
• I figured out you can spike bounce. I'm not sure when or if this is explained because I read about it online. So far, I have only needed it to save a grub.

Anyway, I leveled up my nail twice, assembled two more health masks, bought two more notches, got an assload of charms, diligently watched a how-to video, and finally beat Soul Master while almost embarrassingly over-leveled.

Follow your dreams, kids!

It's hard to explain why Vampire Survivors is so fun. It has casino engineering, that's definitely part of it.

Version 1.0 came out this month and it has every quality of life updated I wanted plus a bunch of extra things. I've got uhhh 30 hours in it, but only about half the cheevs because they kept adding stuff. I leave you with this top review:

and people still buy COD every year for $100 lmao

I've been reinstalling Switch games relegated to the archive and I decided to give Hollow Knight another try. This will be my third attempt. This is my first time playing this game on a TV screen with a pro controller and it improves the experience considerably. The game looks so good on a big screen.

Donut likes to watch me play, which forces me to reign in my Everything and project a false sense of chill. They have been chastised many times for losing their temper while playing a game, so it is imperative Renaldo Gade the OG controller thrower stay cool during these tribulations. Honestly, it's instructive for them to see an ostensibly "good" player repeatedly fail and have to take a break. That's just how it is sometimes.

The good news is I got farther than before! Things I found difficult my last playthrough were much easier this time. The environments are cool and I dig the characters, and when things are going well (when I have a map and I'm exploring a new area) it's a lot of fun. I lost a lot of geo before I found the banker because I got too ambitious exploring the Fungal Wastes. Now that I have a way to save geo that aspect, while annoying, doesn't bother me as much. Ultimately, the main sticking point is gonna be the backtracking. Save point benches are really spread out in this game and if you die at a boss you often have to travel a bit to try again.

According to HowLongToBeat this is a 30-40 hour game. 6 hours in (most recently discovered Soul Sanctum), I honestly cannot imagine playing this game 40 hours. If a game has a high difficulty level and strategic checkpoints I can sometimes power through it, but in this case I'm sure I'll get frustrated and put it away again. My inability to play through this game used to bug me but now I'm at peace. Here's why.

The difficulty largely hinges on tricky platforming (which I admittedly hate) and pattern memorization/telegraphing (which is fine), but the real issue is the backtracking. I view it as a design philosophy disagreement, which somehow makes it easier to accept. Backtracking can have purpose if it forces the player to practice beating a certain type of enemy, but generally speaking, we want to reward a player for progress and exploration by allowing them to unlock shortcuts so they can choose to grind/retread or not. Hollow Knight punishes failure and exasperates exploration/trial by design. I don't agree with it in principle, and not just because I'm terrible at platformers. YMMV, but do keep in mind I'm an Official Gameologist and therefore always right. 🙂

I asked my kid if they could have any nickname, what would it be. They said donut.

My meticulous, power-optimization philosophy is at odds with Donut's free-wheeling, expansionist capitalism.

I started a new classic game and began triaging Vaults and Infinite Furnaces for inventory management. This actually works very well! The moment resources that require conversion are harvested (e.g. ores) they are automatically crafted into ingots and sent to a vault.

One issue with Forager is the RNG can sometimes be a little wonky, it tends to run fat and lean. For instance, you might have 10 torchbugs spawn. If you don't collect those there's a chance you might go for several hours without seeing any, which could create an annoying softblock depending on where you are in the crafting tiers. Inventory space limitations are the only barrier to harvesting all the things, and the alternative to stashing rare items is to sell/donate them and then wait until whenever the hell the game decides to give you another one, which could be a long time.

Meanwhile, Donut expanded their empire so rapidly they soon ran into inventory management issues that dramatically slowed their ability to progress, as they were constantly having to sell things to open inventory slots. Donut doesn't multitask, so QOL upgrades like backpack expansion tend to fall to the wayside because a random dude asked for 50 flowers or whatever. The chaos of their gamestate gave me such low-key anxiety I invested a few hours to grind additional inventory slots and upgrade their tools. I'm not sure what that says about me and I frankly don't care to examine it, but it legit bothered me.

Donut appreciated the gesture, but we both lost interest in the game shortly thereafter. I think it's because the mid-late game is essentially for psychopaths, regardless of how well you organize and plan ahead. Elements that help pace the early game, like energy consumption, become a nuisance. As the map becomes more cluttered, the fiddly controls become more of a hassle. Tool upgrades don't keep pace with the increased difficulty of mining/crafting certain resources. And so on. Essentially, the difficulty of the game is increased by making things more annoying. You would have to be--frankly?--a special kind of insane to enjoy this gameplay. A significant subsection of gamers actually are insane so it works out but still.

Forager is a game you play until it stops being fun or scratching an itch, and it's not necessarily a game you complete. There are still a lot of things I haven't experienced, like the Void and bosses. So who knows. Maybe a few years from now I'll dive in again.

As my kid has grown older and more adept at using a controller, I have enjoyed watching games in my library get a second life. They recently got sucked into Forager and I got pulled back in as well. They are really into cosmetics thanks to games like Fall Guys and Riverbond, and I had to explain many games are not like that, but Forager does offer cosmetic rewards for achievements.

They don't really grok efficiency resource production, which is the cornerstone of the game. For example, they are currently obsessed with accruing money to buy land. I tried to help by demonstrating farming and cooking, but their current strategy is crafting bottles, filling them with rainbow, and selling for about 14g. It's interesting to watch them update their strategies as they play.

As for me, my old game got slightly borked after the big update, and on top of that end-game clickers are a hot, chaotic mess by nature. There's stuff flying everywhere (automatic loot collecting enabled), I've got a ton of factories producing god knows what, the auto-collection is so aggressive I have to work to empty an inventory slot long enough to add something new (this is actually a really annoying problem), and so on.

Auto-collection with cash-register dingy sfx can be really rewarding (see: Vampire Survivors) but the current state of my main game is too hectic to really enjoy. The update back in 2020 added a lot of new stuff, including nuclear power and bosses, and reset my stats in weird ways. Since I didn't encounter the new stuff organically I have no idea WTF to do with any of it.

I started a fresh classic game and put my considerable obsession with pixel organization to task. As winter approaches I often take solace in what I'm going to call "digital immersion." I used to call these "time wasting games" but that does a disservice to the necessary seasonal process of clearing RAM and rebooting my brain. Open sandbox crafting and farming games are good choices this time of year.