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Friday Fun Thread for March 21, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Game subthread.

Review of Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader in the child comment here. (if putting it like this, let the mods remind me of not doing this)

The Pathologic 3 prologue is now available, but I don't know if I recommend it. The structure isn't linear temporally, and the imsim elements were a big part of the draw of the first two for me. You play as the bachelor, and like in the second game you do a lot of diagnosing people, but as the bachelor has a proper education diagnosing makes a lot more sense to me than as the haruspex (which I appreciated) but the gameplay loop is very similar. The new survival mechanics are... Odd. This time you have to manage the bachelor's mood, and maintain a balance between depression and mania, with differential actions tilting you one way or the other, and drugs maintaining the balance. So if you see a dead kid on the sid of the road you tilt towards depression and if you see people fighting you tilt towards mania, and you can take morphine to lower mania and amphetamines to lower depression. It works alright mostly, but I think it's bugged because the bachelor is perpetually one diagnosis mistake away from blowing his brains out. Also you have to assign your drugs to hotkeys to use them without going to the inventory but it doesn't indicate what's in your hotkeys, so I keep accidentally blowing my brains out when I forget which drug is where. It does make me want to play pathologic 2 again though, I wonder if there are any good mods for it?

I also played a neat little indie horror game called Rooten which I do recommend, it's an adventure game (with minor combat elements) that sees you dropped off in a forest near a small research camp whose researchers discovered a new fungus but now have all disappeared. There's none of what I'd call handholding, but you have an objective beyond 'explore' so I don't think it would be a good fit for @coffee_enjoyer's request. (Proteus is the only game I can think of like that, but unlike @problem_redditor I don't think it gets away with anything, for the past decade it's been my go to 'this is why you need at least some direction in video games' example.) However if you like games like yume nikki and strange telephone, Rooten might tickle your tights.

I really like the premise and I'm going to watch the game carefully if it ripens into something worthy of attention.