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Video game thread.
I played through Aethus this week. Its a top down survival / mining / exploring / puzzle game. The ambiance of the environments was great. I eventually turned down the difficulty settings for everything cuz it felt a bit like a slog on standard difficulty. The Scottish accents were ok sometimes, but every time I heard "no" pronounced something like "no-er" I winced. The story itself was very anti-corporate. Which I knew going in from the reviews, but it was still a little heavy handed with it all. At this point an anti-corporate screed in a video game just feels as generic as you can get.
Still playing Starship Troopers: Extermination on occassion with the 1stmi (a light military sim group). They are fun to play with. I recently competed what they call a "harbinger run" which involves leading a 16 person group from the field (rather than staying with the squad at base). Its a fun balancing mix of shooting the bugs around you but also needing to maintain situational awareness of the entire battlefield.
Dropped the factorio playthrough. Didn't have enough takers, and I messed something up in map settings that would have required cheating to fix, or flushing approximately 10-15 hours of early game play down the drain to start again. Both options didn't make me feel good so I stopped.
I just started playing Lobotomy Corporation, which I dismissed back when it came out thinking it looked pretty amateur and the English translation was awful. But after seeing them come out with their third game and ongoing popularity I decided to give it a try. I'm not yet sure if it's for me. It is complicated, unintuitive, and punishing in a volatile way. Which I get is all intentional, but it might be slightly too harsh for my taste.
For those who don't know, it's an employee management type thing (Oxygen not included seems like the closest game I can think of at the moment, but I suspect there are better comparisons.) in a SCP-inspired facility. Spooky abnormalities exist and you contain them and learn about them and exploit them for electricity that your company sells. Your people have different skills which influence both their combat abilities and their proficiency at certain tasks. Each abnormality has different preferences and task-affinities, as well as different shenanigans it inflicts when you mess up and make it angry (or just randomly when timing events anger them).
The game is kind of sort of roguelite, in that you can restart your campaign, or rewind to an earlier checkpoint several levels ago, and keep some of your unlocks and upgrades. And then new random stuff happens. But at least so far it's been very stingy with the upgrades. And also although your employees die permanently and buying new ones is expensive, you can reset a level at any time with no cost other than your real-life sanity after you've tried to fight the same opponent 5 times and it's not quite clear what's going wrong, or you're almost done with a day but then suddenly all your best people spontaneously die and it's not quite clear why.
I want to like the game more than I do. I want to like difficult games more than I do. This is a similar issue I ran into with Pathologic 3. I want to bash my head against a really hard challenge and then gradually work it down until I can overcome it, and I prefer when this happens simultaneously via real skill and in-game upgrades. I like JRPGs where I can progress up until things get too hard and then go grind a couple of levels to adjust it back down. I like Rogue Legacy where when you run into tough enemies and die you get to unlock stuff and then come back stronger for another try. I don't prefer the Dark Souls experience where you bash your head into a boss 20 times in a row until you finally overcome it and then move onto the next boss to bash into 20 times. Which so far is the majority of what this game has been. Sometimes I just get lucky and nothing bad happens (since I'm still early game), but sometimes something bad happens and since I haven't yet spoiled all the game's secrets and am trying to discover them organically, it usually kills my people and then I restart the day and try something else next time.
Not sure if I'll stick with it or not. I think I need to restart my run and give myself more of a headstart on snowballing now that I have some vague idea of what I'm doing.
I went through a similar arc. Ended up just reading this LP.
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