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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1363 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 27, 2026

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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Video game thread

What are you playing this week?

I'm 14 hours into MENACE. It's still fun, though it's even more apparent how unfinished the game is. I won't say I regret that they released it so early into early access, because I've enjoyed it a lot. It's a very solid start and I look forward to the final release.

I bring two vehicles to every mission. One of my three pilots, Rewa, has by far the least professional and most embarrassing voice performance, so she's the backup for whenever one of the other pilots gets the Weary status. One of my vehicles uses the heavy machine gun, and the other uses the autolaser, in order to deal with enemy vehicles/walkers. I prefer fighting the pirates. Some of the 'rogue army' and alien operations have been somewhat difficult due to all their armor, even tho I'm only on Normal difficulty.

It was a couple weeks ago but I tried out Pathologic 3 and I am... not a fan. The Pathologic series is known for being brutal and unforgiving, trying to cure a plague and slowly losing as you have to make hard decisions with limited resources. Very much not my thing. But someone left a review of Pathologic 3 that was like "it's a time loop! The developers saw all the people saving and loading and saving and loading and trying to optimize their runs on the previous games, and decided to bake that into the mechanics."

And that sounded like fun to me. I really like time loop stories where the character is up against overwhelming odds but manages to win anyway by exploiting the ability to try over and over again and learn and cheat using future knowledge. Even if the game is super hard, I can tinker and optimize stuff and fix any of my mistakes by rewinding.

What the review failed to mention is that even though the plot revolves around a time loop, the mechanics are still based around finite resources and brutal hard mechanics. Every consumable you use to restore your statuses permanently reduces the effectiveness of future uses of that type of consumable. Every time you rewind it consumes a non-renewable resource. It's not a true time loop, because even if the plot allows you to redo decisions and change the consequences of your choices, your vital resources don't respawn and you can only do it a finite number of times. Every time you mess up in an encounter and die it forcibly rewinds to the last time you saved, which uses up the time resource. And if you do it too many times and run out of the resource the game deletes your save and you have to start the entire game over again. This is more harsh than a normal game that lets you save and load at will, not less.

This didn't even happen to me. As soon as I discovered that the time rewinding used up resources I googled to see if it was renewable, saw that it was not, and stopped playing. I do not play games that threaten me with permadeath. Not unless it's a roguelite where each character only exists for like an hour (and even then I usually only play if there's meta-progression that persists). If there's a realistic chance of me having to reset or backtrack more than 5 hours of gameplay and have to do it all over again, I'm just not going to play in the first place. It's bad game design, it's not fun. The Pathologic people are trying to be hardcore and brutal and catering to a masochistic audience that likes that sort of thing. You're allowed to have a niche. And I knew that about the first two games which is why I never played them. I'm just kind of annoyed that this one was presented differently and then wasn't.

The Pathologic series always struck me as games it's far more enjoyable to watch others suffer play through instead of trying them myself. Mandalore Gaming has excellent reviews for the first 2, but I'll be damned if I'm going to play them.

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