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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2043 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 12, 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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Games.

Almost finished Blood West. Shooter with soulslike characteristics, with decently sized map open to exploration per chapter, emphasis on stealth and looting, very retro feel. The setting is cool and well executed - wild west under a curse, roamed near exclusively by various monstrosities. Narration is minimal but compelling (intro features a native american blaming the white man for the curse, but that angle never comes up again), voice acting surprisingly nice. Quests amount to pointing you in the general direction of the next thing to find, but any order works, so you can explore freely.

The oppressive atmosphere is a highlight, both aesthetics and gameplay. Enemies are fast and hit damn hard, combat is bursty - you either get those headshots in (supposedly 5x damage, but not stated in-game afaik; feels like 5x) as you methodically clear an area, or you're in a desperate fight for survival. Highly satisfying gunplay, great feedback on the shotguns. A lot of weapons/consumables to pick up, inventory tetris abound unless you can resist the temptation to hoard.

Only minor complaints. Could use some "elite" enemies scattered around. Some balance issues. Too few artifact slots to permit more elaborate builds, and one slot is all but reserved for the pocket watch that stops time when you open inventory.

Random hallucinated connection: the "barn + house + tiny field + ghouls + nothing around" locations could well be lifted directly from Western Plaguelands.

Highly recommended. Put the first points into +experience perk. You can toss rocks on X, took me half the game to realize.

Sounds like my cup of tea, wishlisted.

Last night I gave Prey from 2017 a try, playing it for a few hours. It wasn't bad, but I agree with some people who argued it's so beholden to its immediate influences (System Shock 2 and BioShock) that it maybe doesn't really have much of an identity of its own. I like immersive sims, but the very fact of their relative open-endedness sometimes makes me feel a bit overwhelmed: I feel anxious that I'm playing them "wrong" unless I meticulously search every single drawer and container.

I like immersive sims

I don't like that someone decided to call them "immersive sims". What does it simulate? Why is it immersive? I know it's "just a name", but MSFS with VR is a much more immersive sim. Why can't people call them "simulationist action RPGs" or just "shocklikes"?

Immersive sims simulate a virtual environment with a high degree of systems-oriented internal consistency, and unlike most games which do this (e.g. SimCity) they attempt to immerse the player in this simulated world by having them control a specific individual therein (typically from a first-person perspective), as opposed to having them observe the virtual environment from a God's-eye-view.

In general I vastly prefer genre tags which offer some kind of description of the game's mechanics: genre tags of the form "games that are like X" are useless because they presume familiarity with X, which is an intrinsically more insular naming convention than just describing how the game plays. Does anyone seriously think "Doom clone" is preferable to "first-person shooter", particularly when most FPSs have so little in common with the original Doom? I'd love if someone could come up with a better name than "roguelike" — I'd hazard a guess that the majority of people who use the term are unaware the term is a reference to a specific game, never mind having played it.

In the case of Prey, however, I'll grant that, based on the two or three hours I spent playing it, "shocklike" is a perfectly accurate description.

“Procedural dungeon crawler.” Maybe squeeze in the word “permadeath” if you’re worried about people confusing it with procgen-as-compression like Elite.

I don’t think -like and -lite merit different terms. If adding a jump button or RPG stats doesn’t keep a game from being an FPS, adding metaprogression still leaves you with a PDC.

-Like and -lite marks the difference between audiences who want to complete the game eventually through piling on upgrades and those who want to play a game they might never complete.

That doesn’t seem right. FTL barely has metaprogression at all, and it’s a definitive roguelite.

Besides, why should expectation of completion deserve a separate genre? “FPS” doesn’t even distinguish between single-player campaigns and uncompletable multiplayer lobbies.

"Permadeath highly-variable X" and "permadeath highly-variable X with metaprogression" for roguelites respectively? Not sure how to make it not be a mouthful when "roguelike" is already a pretty specific modifier genre.

Is Minecraft survival mode an immersive sim, then? High degree of systems-oriented internal consistency? There's nothing but systems there. Immersing the player in this simulated world by having them control a specific individual therein? Absolutely.

As they have explicit win-states, I consider immersive sims a genre of video games, whereas sandboxes like Minecraft are more akin to software toys, per Will Wright's distinction.

I'd also dispute whether a game whose environment is wholly procedurally generated can be classed as an immersive sim, as the genre typically involves the simulation of a specific space rather than the simulation of a kind of space. System Shock 2 takes place on the Von Braun and the Rickenbacker, not on a generic spaceship whose constituent spaces can be arranged in any arbitrary order.

I would argue that No Man's Sky is an immersive sim (if not a very realistic one) and not a software toy, and conversely that Star Citizen is a software toy (no end game and progression exists almost entirely on player-defined axis) and an immersive sim (it has a defined world with specific spaces where they player exists entirely within a single avatar facing a systems-coherent simulation, makes you feel paranoid that you're missing out on lore/material if you don't search every corner).

I'm honestly not sure where I'd put Space Engineers there.

Minecraft has had an "explicit win state" since year 2011.

Yeah, but even at that point (and definitely since 2016) the win state has been just another toy to play with. The area with the end boss is literally called "The End", but after the final victory text the game doesn't actually end, or even restart from scratch in a "New Game +" sort of mode; all persistent world and character changes remain. As of 2016, "winning" spawns a portal that makes it easier to reach new areas that are practically inaccessible otherwise, with monsters and treasures that don't exist elsewhere in the game. To make it easier to reach more of those new areas it's recommended that you re-summon the end boss and defeat it again to spawn more portals; wiki says you can get up to 20 of them.

At least in vanilla, you're usually better served by exploring the outer islands directly instead of refighting the dragon -- a lot of the intent for multiple summonings is to handle multiplayer servers. That said, yeah, there's a lot of players that literally never do it, and another number that consider it where the game starts (since Elytra and Shulker boxes, both post-Ender Dragon, are incredibly useful for creative builders).

Modded can change that pretty aggressively, and it's common to lock 'end-game' or specialized crafting material specifically around the End Dragon's death (either as a direct drop, like old Tinker's Construct end dragon scales, or indirectly like Quark's Biotite). But then again modded will also have other end states, some just checkboxes (GTNH's final Stargate is literally useless by the time you can make it), and some more serious (completing Blightfall's last quest involves purifying the entire pregen map; you can still explore, but it's an entirely different style of play from what you were doing before).

Can this win state be reached from survival mode?

Yes, and it rolls the credits and everything.

Yes.

The player can "beat the game" in Survival mode by defeating the ender dragon in the End.

Prey from 2017

I had it in my backlog for a while, but I am a little shocked it's that old. Time flies.

I feel anxious that I'm playing them "wrong" unless I meticulously search every single drawer and container.

Tell me about it. It's embarrassing, I can't be assed to grab pencil & paper and go after the proper secrets in these games, but will obsessively, tediously loot every nook, and will get nervous about accidentally progressing. And it's rare that these games push you to use everything you find (can't expect everyone to play that way).

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