Ixion - and on and on and on

"I don’t mean to be cramping your style
Just come home to me once in a while" 

Clare Fader & The Vaudevillains - Catch of the Day

 

 

It's Surviving Mars - IIINN SPAAAA- wait, wait, uhh... is Mars already in space? It is a planet but not this planet so spacey relative to us but rocks but gravity but atmosphere* but... actually never mind:

It's Frostpunk - IIINN SPAAAAAACE!!!

Not a very helpful error message without a "because" now is it?

Ixion does little to hide its strict Settlers-inspired village simulator genealogy. But where the similar Endzone is straightforwardly inspired by the trend's originator, Banished, Ixion skews more toward the mechanization / exploration themes of Surviving Mars and especially Frostpunk. Most all your resources, in fact, come from outside your city's buildable area, said city being a space station that can teleport between stars -

(Hey, I've been inside this art installation before... Milwaukee Art Museum, about ten years back?)

 

- via a suspiciously gate-like device on its patootie. 

Chevron six locked!

Ah, see, dere's yer problem, Mac, y'only put six chevrons on dis doodad. Ev'rybody knows ya need seven! (But, important plot point, you can engage them ALL AT ONCE!) And you better believe you'll need every chevron, because Kharak Is Burning!

Or maybe we're just re-enacting the intro from Thundarr

Anyway, though a bit derivative beyond the usual genre conventions - 

- Ixion does capture the melancholic atmosphere lacking in more cynically exploitative copycats of the Banished/Frostpunk lineage, thanks not least to Bulwark's secret weapon Guillaume David (how often do you see a game's composer get third billing?) While he takes a bow here and there echoing his lauded work on Mechanicus, the score here is lighter yet still mechanical and expansive, more... "spacey" to once again beautifully suit its spacefaring setting.

 

Sadly, it's gradually downhill from there. Ixion's core measure of player progress, building up your space station and filling it with crew, exploits the appeal of a mobile base of operations to its fullest in finest Homeworld fashion, yielding a true feeling of accomplishment with every new increase in electrical output or new sector. Like Surviving Mars, the visuals follow a futuristic, polished aesthetic, and quite aptly if not outstandingly. The writing is weaker, filled with stock SF episodes, bland heroics and a cheesy, easily hateable villain that won't pose any moral quandaries for its audience.

 

When you get down to gameplay, a fundamentally solid exploration, resource gathering and expansion system is constantly marred by misconceived straining to keep that routine fresh and temporize. First off, the spaceships you send out from your station to gather resources are deliberately dumbed down (dumber than a Roomba but a bit smarter than a Tesla autopilot) to force you to micromanage. They will not avoid hazards despite these being clearly marked, unless you manually deny individual destinations. And hey: quick quiz. You've got a map full of scattered resources. You tell your worker bees to prioritize all equally. Would it make sense for them to gather the closest ones first? Obviously not, since they have secret priorities of their own and will run across the map to fetch one scrap of nothing instead of clearing your immediate area.

 

The hazards you encounter on three of the campaign's five maps provoke just as much gratuitous frustration, since you only discover their individual properties when a ship blows up or your station eats hull damage. Calling this "exploration" ignores the basic idea of investigating the unknown and not simply flattening your nose against invisible walls. Individual science ship events skew similarly toward random nonsense. And don't ask me why you can't click-to-zoom to a particular ship.

 

Inside the station, things are less drastically but more routinely frustrating. Ixion could have been subtitled "a pull-my-finger city sim" since turning on a storage unit somehow blows up an apartment block or mushroom farm across town. Dipping below your available workers and electrical output can cause accidents. Great. Except they made a classical conditioning nightmare out of it, hitting you with a rolled up newspaper. You are not cited a risk assessment so you can make informed decisions. The moment you accept a risk, the game punishes you for doing things it doesn't like. Instant boom. I could have lived with truly random "accidents" but:

Ixion rather maintains a ceaseless and unpredictable stream of gratuitous punishments throughout. No matter how good your gameplay random shit just blows up, injuring and killing your workers** and though you can mitigate this by playing safe, individual buildings' accidents nonsensically scale in severity with the total number of passengers and the campaign chapter reached. Combine this with idiosyncratic resource transport automation and a bug causing said automation to stop functioning (especially for food!) until you reload a save, and you're left with a system not encouraging you to grit your teeth and adventure bravely onward in the face of adversity, but save-scum the shit out of each mission every few minutes.

 

Otherwise, the game could've been great. Resource acquisition and the tech tree are well balanced, prompting you to shift priorities as you open up more of your city map, and the mix of plucky industry and cozy domesticity indoors contrasts beautifully with the inimical lonely infinity without your hull. But when I first fired up Ixion I thought I'd be finishing up my summary by saying "Frostpunk has some serious competition" and... no, it doesn't. Not even close. It has an awkwardly charming but weakly written, amateurish imitator relying entirely too much on artificial constraints on player input and "wouldn't it be cool if" ideas that could've greatly benefited from another few cycles of tester feedback.

***

 

Now we must return to my observation that both Ixion and Endzone share a suspicious number of novel similarities. With both coming out a year-and-a-half apart ('21-'22) I doubt one had time to copy directly from the other. More likely these were just ideas tossed around at conventions, and as means to keep the city sim routine fresh, they're a mixed bag:

- Buildings of irregular sizes, making it impossible to fill your town's grid. Almost everything has a different x-by-y footprint of grid squares, meaning they not only cannot fill the same spaces, but cannot even be reliably added up to the same sums. A quaint space-filling challenge at first, but ultimately not very rewarding. Dead space is dead space. It does not add to the game experience. At least Endzone lets you fill a few squares with decorations.

- Flipping the old resource scarcity precept. It's not the vespene gas that limits you but the ore, needed for constant maintenance. Interesting. Can feel a bit grindy but pre-empts much of the mid-game complacency plaguing strategy genres in general. An expanded interpretation of Frostpunk's coal, I suppose.

- Overdrawing on your workforce kills you. Partly, fighting to stay above a threshold of constant resource depletion penalizes overexpansion, though Ixion goes further to actively punish you for even taking a single step in that direction. Goes in hand with:

- Random death. Workers are weirdly brittle in both cases. This may be an attempt to make you care more about their well-being than Banished's bleakness or Frostpunk's grimness, but mostly it's just annoying, and comes across as underserved punishment of the player. Goes in hand with:

- Socially conscious. Not so much in terms of cozying to racial or other "minorities" but touting egalitarian societies where well-being is actively valued. Neither game's writers were up the the task of conveying such ideas/ideals cogently though, so it mostly results in bland, facetious niceties at odds with your supposedly harsh survival setting.

- Quest system as crutches. In Endzone giving you free resources, in Ixion mostly opportunities to raise crew morale. Slow worker and resource transport reactivity though tends to doom such recovery efforts. Also, a reactive quest system is a bit demoralizing when compared to the basic precept of a quest as a grandiose goal, a fundamentally proactive challenge, boldly going and so forth.

- Economy unmanageable except by maintaining massive stockpiles of everything. Largely an artifact of poor resource transport automation combined with worker brittleness. No brinksmanship permitted, no gambles, tends to sap some of the excitement Banished added to the city sim formula, where you could run decades or generations on a clothing or tool shortage and still recover.

- Decreased tangibility. Surviving Mars or Dawn of Man made a huge show of keeping resources as a physical presence on the map. You could track unit by unit of rock or food as it's dug up at its worksite, in its worker's pockets, added to its storage facility, in the claws of a delivery drone and finally at its consumer. Endzone and Ixion's larger population sizes and rapid resource churn negate this and lose not only the satisfaction of knowing where each egg is in the basket, but some of the accountability necessary to troubleshoot production chains.

 

Overall, it's weird that something like Medieval Dynasty cleaves to the Banished village simulator formula more successfully by simply transposing it to first-person perspective than these two did by trying to build it up. Maybe it also explains Frostpunk 2's decision to return to RCI district management a la Sim City instead, and village simulators will transition to first person from now on.

 

_____________________________________________

 

* I so wanted to write that as "but gas" ... heehee, butt gas

** Note to self: have got to go back and try playing Suspended: A Cryogenic Nightmare again. 

Endzone: A Predictable Part

"Where did you mess up your fur?
And I don't like your braggartish purr
Your cool cat lazy
Is driving me crazy
And your sweet talk is so amateur"

 

Clare Fader & The Vaudevillains - Catch of the Day

 

 

After the end of the world, 's crap!

 

Before getting back to RPGs I wanted to try some of Frostpunk 2's competition to scratch the city sim itch. But as both my choices proved eerily similar in everything except superficial aesthetic, I may as well finish a full campaign of each and talk about them one after the other. First up we have Endzone: A World Apart.

Welcome to Nyctimus, ca. boom-and-a-half.

Quick, find me a woodcutter's hut. What? Come on, it's so obvious, it's right in front of you! ... somewhere. Among the rest of the junkpile. Though it puts a fair bit of effort into detail work on its various structures, Endzone's first impression is of nonsensical clutter. Maybe intentional to suit its Mad Max aesthetic, but forgetting visuals should also enable the player to identify production facilities and storages at a glance. It's not a unique problem (Dawn of Man had it to a lesser extent) but I've rarely been struck by it quite so forcefully, right from the start and never improving.

 

It similarly lacks flair in other respects, never actively terrible yet never showing any particular competence. I muted its one generic bot-extruded music track after half an hour, and for their sake I hope they didn't pay anyone for voiceovers sounding more wooden than a bot. Not that the flavor texts themselves inspire much thespian passion, sounding more like stage directions (be amazed that people used to eat in fast food restaurants) than anything a post-apocalyptic explorer might say. You can imagine how inspired their political messaging sounds:

I feel insulted to agree with your inanity

The interface tracks the same awkward fumbling, as while you're given access to an overtly comprehensive system of stats on resource trends, it contains almost no relevant information (what's my projected wood production and consumption and how is it distributed, how much housing do I have and need) and resources overlap for critical services and construction, leading to a lot of inexplicably stalled production chains.

In practical terms Endzone is a quite straightforward Banished clone, with some added inspiration from the likes of Frostpunk or Surviving Mars in adding an exploration system to the formula. Even there it fumbles, as conflating the exploration and city map results in impractically long distances for your workers, and when struck by any shortage, your recovery efforts will be nigh-meaningless because your peasants will die en route before delivering the food/water/medicine you need. Farmers starve to death, herbalists die from infections, water carriers of thirst. Endzone's distinguishing conceit is basing most of your economy on a single basic resource called "scrap" which is then turned into construction of four secondary resources. But reminiscent of Tropico 4, resource production and consumption rarely track any rational pattern, creating situations in which the same food output which supported 200 settlers with surplus creates starvation among 150, and the main secondary four constantly over/undershoot their marks.

 

Likely to help with those weird fluctuations you're handed a quest system as crutch. Whenever you fall short of a resource, you're "spontaneously" hit with a related production demand and receive a bonus of same upon completion. Except the quest will often demand you build exactly one more of the relevant production building than you already have, when the real issue is almost always that you lack the workers to fill even your existing capacity. Even their spare tire's flat.

Some other quirks include requiring explorers to have badges for exploration, which they gain (you guessed it) by exploration, thus forcing you to clear the map in a single generation. Map creation doesn't let you pick your starting location, prompting a lot of re-randomizing to get a decent spot near a lake. This being a post-apocalyptic game, global warming is apparently in effect because winter gets replaced with droughts as resource scarcity challenge. But lumping loss of water, herbs and most food sources into a single disaster turns it into an off button for half your economy, basically a "skip a turn" card and I've already voiced my distaste for such mechanics in single-player.

However, Endzone suffers not so much from individual flaws as from mediocrity, an overwhelming feel of inept imitation, a by-the-numbers assemblage of modern city sim elements with none of Banished or Dawn of Man's honest charm to compensate for its lacks. I guess there could be worse village simulators around, but I know with a certainty there are more inspired ones.

 

Next time, a suspiciously similar exercise in mediocrity: Ixion!

Medieval Dynasty

"Gdzie telewizji nie ma, radia nie ma, zasięgu brak"

Cool Kids of Death - A Moze Tak

 

I've been in the mood to try out several titles built around old-timey village life themes and thought Medieval Dynasty would serve, along with The Guild, as a quaint but ultimately negative point of reference, an easily dismissed amateurish attempt at something better. After all, the market's littered with dime-a-dozen asset flips. But damned if it hasn't insisted on earning my appreciation. Don't expect too expansive an array of content. Mostly it does a few basics very well. If you wanted an FPS Banished, it's worth a look.

Best daub 'em wattles afore win'r, a-yawp

If you've played such games before, the core elements are straightforward enough: pick up basic resources, make some tools, gather better stuff, build, get wood for sheep, keep advancing through the tech tree, form babby, keep building up your settlement. Classic stuff. But its resource and time management mechanics are uncommonly fine-tuned and its various elements' progression flows more smoothly into each other than you normally see.

 

Setting out in The Oxbow map I sought a spot not too far from NPC villages (foreseeing frequent trade runs) and knew I'd need water/fish but also wanted someplace with a nice view, and settled just west of Piastovia - by dumb luck, almost on top of one of the map's few caves. This has yielded me quite a bit more cash than I'd otherwise have gotten early on (bronze hammers and sickles is how humble Werwolfe pays the bourgeoisie's onerous bills) with the only inconveniently spaced resource being clay. Thus, as I round out my third year I've hit a pretty good balance.

I can finally devote some time and geld to more frivolous exploration and decoration, but until now it's been a scramble to get a working community up and running. From doing everything yourself at the start you gradually begin delegating more and more to the villagers you recruit. Build them a house and then you find you have to feed them, recruit a hunter and you realize everyone needs water, plant some fields then scramble to make tools fer da hoein' an' fertilizin'. I almost started losing villagers recently because I ran out of buckets of all things. I was never stuck, never overwhelmed yet never at a loss for more options going forward. In between all of that you need to find time to run fetch quests for reputation to raise your population limit and make a bit of spare cash to buy recipes.

 

Oh, and mind the wolves.

 

The other half of the game is a first-person-slasher array of kill and fetch quests, slightly more interesting than usual due to the solid resource / inventory / travel time interplay making you plan out your trips. Unfortunately the FPS combat is both twitchy and sluggish somehow, with lightning-fast enemies aggroing on you from behind brush and lauching themselves at you in pinball maneuvers. Combined with poor pathing, massive damage/health ratios and nearly absent attack animations or hit confirmation, combat ends up feeling both annoying and unsatisfying. Suddenly there's something at your feet and your health bar dissappears. (Though I did luck out again. First bandit I killed was a crossbowman out in the open so I could rush him with my stone axe. Then his crossbow got me a kill on a mook with a helm and iron sword, which has gotten me through the next couple of years in style.)

 

Aside from the combat, the interface has some odd quirks. The radial menu for building/crafting is pretty good, but I don't see any point to keeping the clock running while it's open, since you'll frequently find yourself opening it to check costs. And on the downright weird side, in order to even load a game, you're forced to cycle through two extra confirmation screens, including one asking whether you want to play your game in single or multiplayer... every... single... time! Why? I've gone over this repeatedly: the early-2000s dream that multiplayer competitiveness will maintain your single-player game's popularity and sales has long ended, largely because we've all noticed the world's full of subhuman garbage. And if the only point of pretending to have a multiplayer mode is so Epic Games can mine my data, fuck'em! At least keep the multiplayer button from being too intrusive.

 

Aside from all that, the skill trees are also mostly just there to exist, and though you can customize a fair bit (I switched from 3-day seasons to 4, then later to 5) that doesn't extend to mob and resource respawn rates, which default to nigh-instantaneous for animals and daily or seasonal for even the more valuable stuff like metal ores, which respawn faster than trees! But in one aspect in particular, despite its otherwise unexpectedly solid effort, Render Cube nonetheless shows its amateurish side: writing.

Can you not at least slap an "OOC" in front of such lines?

Only a couple of dialogues so far have been written in-character. The rest read like forum troll banter or some middle-schoolers reveling in making "a game" not bothering with consistency or immersion and "going meta" for a cheap feeling of superiority. Pity, because otherwise the world itself is or could've been one of the best village life sims around, and despite some fumbling due attention was paid to quality-of-life mechanics often absent from such games, like auto-using stored resources from a nearby shed without making endless twenty-pace trips back and forth from your construction site.

 

Medieval Dynasty could've been great, but even with its flaws it's still pretty decent.

Paws for Shelter

Fear me, for I am bane unto all bird and frog-folk! Mew!

 

Aside: I find it hilarious that after 25yrs of 3D games, we still can't decide which mouse direction is "up" for any given 1st-person/3rd-person camera control. I'm not inverted, you're inverted, shut up!

 

Anyway, the first Shelter came as a very welcome surprise back when everything was solely about having the biggest, baddest graphics requirements and fastest-paced action, with its wistful atmosphere, heart-wrenching immersion in the mundane struggle for survival and apt use of construction paper visuals. The sequel unfortunately got caught up in the "everything must be Skyrim" endless open world craze, and couldn't quite fulfill its ambitions. Paws is a standalone mission pack mixing elements of the two, and succeeds... decently, closer to the first, though its $20 price tag may depend on whether you feel like contributing to the arts. If you're looking for three hours of bittersweet fuzzy frolicking through lush meadows and don't mind sneaking past angry geese, go for it.

 

Everyone leaves eventually. Care.

My main gripe would be that it plays up platform-jumping more than the others, and the controls and collision detection can be slightly obtuse. It's also on the easier side, with some early levels literally completable by holding down the forward key. Nevertheless there's fun to be had bowling your siblings over and snatching at butterflies and looking for detours. If only they'd stuck to those natural elements. I still hate the immersion-breaking scrapbooking.
 

The original succeeded so well because our mythology roots in primal, instinctive anxieties. Nature itself is survival horror, and the ogres and fairies of our children's tales stand-ins for reality's harsh lessons. But trying to force that storybook feel with symbol-filled skies and magic star guides tends to kill it. The emotional impact is also less poignant than the badger's Jack London grade tooth and claw. Ah, well. That last longing gaze across the swelling gulf still hit home I suppose.

"Keeping time time time in a sort of runic rhyme"

"Will you, won't you want me to make you?
I'm coming down fast, but don't let me break you
Tell me, tell me, tell me the answer"

 

The Beatles - Helter Skelter

 

 

Fear tha space wolf, fer he gots apsides on the brain, Mundust in's nostrils an' a non-relativistic clock in's belleh, AaawooOOOO!!

 

On a completely unrelated topic I decided to catch up on my Wadjet Eye backlog with Technobabylon. Barely started before groaning at a tired old gimmick:

I've played enough adventure games to parse "a few hours" as "until the next scene featuring this backdrop" but every time I see a character reference an actual timespan I can't help recalling my thirteen year old self wondering "wait, so can I just leave the game running overnight to get another item?" No. No, young werwolfe, you cannot. Time is not time. Time is scene transitions. Also, don't let that old CRT monitor overheat, even if it does have a snazzy star field screensaver. And ffs wipe down your mouse and keyboard with rubbing alcohol once in a while!

Anyway, just to state this rant's thesis clearly like your high school teacher told you to do:

game designers, be consistent on whether time does or does not matter. When is time time?

 

Granted, in many or even most genres the question doesn't apply. FPS/RTS tend to be solidly real-time by the minute and second and millisecond and dick-measure their actions-per-minute, while turn-based strategy sticks to its turns whether we're talking cards or chess or Civilization. cRPGs though, for emphasizing immersiveness through everything from armor frills to pettable pets to the slant of light on a winter afternoon, routinely end up tripping over themselves when conveying critical or non-critical timeframes. Especially after Morrowind raised the bar on portraying a living, breathing world.

Games dumbed down from better formulae for mass appeal frequently feature the passage of time as shallowly as everything else.

Vampire: the Masquerade - Redemption, despite emphatically warning you vamps don't tan, featured a grand total of what, one(?) mission where you sidestepped some windows? Otherwise nights never ended. At least Bloodlines was a bit more honest about everything happening at night and just flatly ignored the issue.*

Greedfall would occasionally tell you to wait for night. So you did exactly that. Hit the "wait for night" button at your hideout, and that's all there is to it. They didn't even bother with an in-game clock.

Mechwarrior 5, as I already complained, has a timeline you just fast-forward until the next event.

Such one-to-one relationships are meant for imbeciles incapable of holding more than one thought in their heads at a time.

Time as mechanic needs many more factors feeding into it, with some of the best examples being suvival-themed games where bonuses rapidly decay, monsters patrol or everything revolves around day/night cycles. I may have trashed Don't Starve for forcing mindless restarts (and stand by that) but I did enjoy it making you fear the dark and stock up on protective light. Frostpunk and its meal/hunt larder management and outpost deliveries, Miasmata's pitch-black nights making you depend on your paltry lighter, Banished, Dawn of Man or Northgard staving off winter starvation, such adventures greatly benefit from their cycles.

My favorites let you set the cycle.

Mount&Blade made a name for itself as a hack'n'slash physics simulation, but as that market filled up became more noteworthy for its tactical or managerial sides. Even when your army is standing still during a siege it's doing many things at once. It takes time to build siege engines, time to knock down walls, time for other bands to trickle in as reinforcements, during which both attackers and defenders are eating into their supply of food, wounds are healing, morale drops, etc. Though I was disappointed at Bannerlord dropping food spoilage as a management concern, on the flip-side it enlarged the map allowing for longer and more diverse trade runs, buying low and selling high from desert to tundra and shore to steppe as territories shift ownership around you. Caravan management in fact makes an excellent premise for a game based on scheduling.

 

Vagrus: the Riven Realms is turn-based, with your actions per in-game day limited by action points as you shift goods across the desolate postmagipocalyptic landscape, but there's quite a bit of fine-tuning involved in keeping your comitatus' mood above threshold while occasionally driving them to exhaustion rushing to the next town by day's end, buying as little food as possible (to leave more room for saleable goods) while avoiding starvation, chopping the odd horse up for burgers, weighing the amount of food passengers might eat versus how quickly you can cash them in at their destinations, foraging chances along your route, food prices at your future stops, and so on and on. What a bother, and what a joy to be bothered!

But here we're already getting into some issues. While Vagrus's design remains consistent for basic managerial mechanics, its questing side is a bit hit-or-miss in that regard. Most quests have no limits. Some give you fairly clear deadlines but might drop them on you unexpectedly (Finndurarth) while others just get huffy if you passed some limit you were never informed of (the Ashkulites with the stolen corpse) and still others blatantly lie (wind shamans tell you to wait a week but according to forums it's just a couple of days) and for a more manageable but frequent nuisance the companion attitude minigame places cooldown timers on gifts but doesn't auto-track when you gave the last one.

 

Those copying The Elder Scrolls' formula tend to be both best and worst at this. KCD for instance puts a great deal of detail into NPCs' daily routines, whether it's Father Godwin preferring to eat breakfast outside before he takes a bit of time to mend his fence

or, since the 1400s are a benighted superstitious times, pausing for prayer by those great

 and small

or managing to fill your 24hrs despite most characters being uninteractable at night

 

I arrived at a camp in the woods some hours too early to question the locals about bandits. I could "wait until morning" but since this is a better game I instead filled my time with a bit of honest robbery (lots of low-level sound sleepers with no guards around) then read a book until they woke up. You can also fill that supposed dead time at night with travel or poaching or alchemy or bounty-hunting. Quests involving hunting/poaching for instance tend to be some of the most challenging/frustrating as you must both luck out finding game and get the meat back before it spoils - during daytime! Night has its own activities, making it feel - imagine this - different from day!

 

Unfortunately once again many quests don't warn you they'll be timed or don't tell you the timer, or don't tell you they'll keep you involved for some period of time. One of the most important pieces of information: you can put off the main quest indefinitely at the step requiring you to meet Lordy FuckFace for a hunting trip, even if it says in the "morning" while other times "morning" does indeed mean next morning, like Johanka getting pissy if you don't escort her to preach in the woods.

When is time time?

Your guess is as good as mine.

And those are hardly the only examples

Pathfinder: Kingmaker's barony management became rather infamous for blindsiding you with timed events you couldn't schedule properly.

That piece of crap GameDec had its third act "action" timer, where little indicated what counts or does not count as an action.

In Tides of Numenera it was crumbling houses and serial killings.

In BG3 Lae'Zel rushes you to meet her people in Act 1 but it doesn't seem to care when you do it. But later, merely talking to the newspaper owner automatically kicks off a timed quest. The prison break round timer doesn't care how fast you reach the boats, because you're expected to just abandon the prison breakers and rush out the door. Some events are set off by the number of rests you take... but moving between maps also counts as a full rest. Does that eat into my timers? Does it eat into my food supply? Best head for the wiki and forums, 'cause nothing actually tells you when time is really time.

Even the original Fallout rather infamously had to drop its campaign time limit for running against the game's main charm of exploring all the settlements.

 

In fact, while adventure games or city sims will occasionally run into this issue, you can look at most any cRPG over the past thirty years and find players infuriated by being forced to reload old saves upon discovering they've been on some invisible timer or weren't informed they'd be setting off a timer just by walking into a room. And that's all it does: force reloads, unless you know the campaign beforehand.

 

It's always been a running gag that what sounds urgent in video games (like the world about to explode) moves only at the speed of the plot, so take your time. Introducing more deadlines can be generously interpreted as an attempt to cure that lassitude or the well-worn cRPG pattern of sweeping all side-quests in order of challenge rating between main quest steps. I'm especially fond of "per day" or "per rest" advancement mechanics and encouraged such when discussing daily rests and inns/taverns. Yes, as long as you properly notify me what I'm getting into. Being surprised with a timed quest when I have ten others on my plate doesn't make me reschedule the ten to prioritize that one. It just makes me reload to avoid the starter pistol. Discovering that exactly two of my fifteen "do it by tomorrow" quests actually fail if not done by tomorrow... when it's already tomorrow... tests neither my priorities nor my time management skills, but only my willingness to cheat and read about every quest before talking to NPCs. If you're gonna do it, do it right. Gratuitously forced wiki binging OR DIE is not a feature I've ever been interested in buying. It's a bug.

 

I'm sorry, I must've lost track of time and got sidetracked... what was I talking about?

Oh, right, Kerbal Space Program!

Do you notice how in that first screenshot I have alarms set up for when my launches hit critical points, and precise to-the-second estimates for my vessels' orbital positions and target intercepts?

Why is that so hard for cRPGs to do?

When is time time?

Either your game's timed or it's not. If yes, notify me when a task is indefinite. If not, notify me of any exceptions before I undertake them and track the timer through the interface. But I should not have to play a constant guessing game over whether the pill you labelled "morning after" actually works the morning after!

And, yes, yes, I hear you scream that interface record-keeping breaks that devil-may-care adventuring spirit of immersion, sure, sure. But you know what else breaks immersion? Gratuitous reloads so companies can pad their "hours played" marketing fad.

_____________________________________________________

 

* I wonder whether Bloodlines 2 will... no, I will not seek hype, I will not seek hype...

Crossroads of Flesh

"Is that squire on the fire?"

"Mercy no, sir, look closer, you'll notice it's grocer"

"Looks thicker, more like vicar"

"No, it has to be grocer - it's green"

 

A Little Priest (Sweeney Todd)

 

(or, alternately, try The Cathedral of Flesh's theme; Redemption, for all its flaws, featured some of the most inspired game music ever recorded)

 

 

I speculated at one point on how a fantasy RPG inkeeper game should play, and marked a few random titles I found on that theme. Two of those, Travellers Rest and Fortune's Tavern, look like RPGMaker fare, and I'd rather not pay good money for freakin' chibis. Tavern Keeper might've vaporized? I eventually caved in and gave Crossroads Inn a try just to see the concept in execution. It's not very executive.

 

Not pictured: lists upon lists of redundant recipes.

Opting for campaign mode first, I quit two minutes into the opening cinematic when the narration headed for some manner of painfully trite chosen one / secret orphaned prince setup. Why? When for once you're working with a theme so apt to show a commoner's rise to greatness in the absence of cosmic favor... WHY?!? why why cling to the same perfunctory star-crossrailroaded specialness as 95% of fantasy fiction?!

Anyway, swapping to the more freeform game mode, I was immediately struck by how unfinished Crossroads Inn looks even four years and a couple of DLCs after release, and even by the standards of my generally low-budget RPG/Strategy collection.

why one box but not the other...?

If you've played games with a managerial side you'll be familiar with the resource stockpiling/recombination paired with Sims-inspired customer/employee mood management, but here both sides appear truncated from their design aspirations, with features like employee mood/loyalty or resource decay stripped of their effects to save balancing. I eventually quit due to the time-honored algorithmic foible of pathfinding (and the unrestricted drag-drop tool you're given to move NPCs should tell you just how often they get stuck) but the depths of Crossroads Inn's amateurishness show in rando' crap like lack of feedback on whether your orders are queued, neglecting to word-wrap a text box, or autosave never replacing old saves, accumulating hundreds of daily files.

To compensate for all these lacks, its developers leaned hard on expanding your trade network on the overland map. At some point they seem to have decided to give up on actual gameplay and just copypasta the nearest cookbook, making you gradually unlock dozens, scores and hundreds of recipes for which to stockpile more and more redundant ingredients. Ditto for furniture. While some such breadth in a core feature is expected (see Dwarf Fortress' livestock) even the fifteen types of customers don't justify the sheer repetition of yet another omelette and yet another soup. Even the developers themselves obviously had no idea what to do with them all. "It's a chair, don't know what more to tell you" sounds cute the first time. Not so much the fiftieth.

 

Sinking all their work-hours into a heavily scripted campaign instead of addressing basic functionality makes Crossroads Inn overpriced even at 80% off.

But enough about its failures, let's segue to what was never attempted. Despite a smatter of fantasy gimmicks like griffin eggs and alchemy, the game's creators opted for more of a vaguely Dumas-flavored inn of intrigue, never quite meshing with the managerial simulation precept and casting the choice of setting in doubt. In my original post linked at the start I'd said "Fantasy tavern management shouldn't be about cheerfully serving drinks. Your struggle to stay in business should center on your innkeeper's role as middle-man to the forces out to destroy the world, a conniving tool and accessory, a racketeer, a money-launderer, an accomplice, an enabler to the universe's gutterspawn and all the grandstanding, self-righteous loose cannons who stand in soi-disant opposition to "evil" forces." And while I stand by playing up the destructive nature of adventurers and fantasy inns' role as drama magnets, there might be a useful link here to my declaration that I wanna be a Tzimisce.

Why not pair the fleshcrafting of a villainous lair with a greater context for acquiring more flesh to craft? Fantasy races tend to be carnivorous anyway, and if a poor wing-sore griffin on above the road would pay good money for a haunch of hobbit... and hobbit-hide makes such lovely upholstery... well, who are you to deny it in here? In that context, the inn itself would be... bait.

 

Crossroads Inn's obsession with gathering recipes from the three corners of the world got me thinking I'm also gathering connoisseurs from said corners, and it's a damn shame to let that culinary variety go to waste. By all means advertise horse steaks to lure in all those Dothraki nomads, to lure in those independently wealthy dragons with a taste for Dothraki. And what giant doesn't love a good Jack'n'beans? Maybe stock up on honeydew for a fairy brunch, and some fairy popsicles for the orc table's dessert tray? Why not? You'll keep players' attention more readily by serving cousins than cuisine.

And who better to put the... leftovers... to good use than a tzimisce inkeeper, faultlessly polite and mannered and always on the lookout for more art supplies? As the inn prospers aboveground, so does its hidden counterpart below, sinew by sclera.

Look, not to get too lycanthropic here, but parental watchdog groups are gonna keep bitching about video games' corrupting influence anyway. Give 'em something to cry about. Beats counting the pixelated mugs of lager any day.

Mechwarrior 5 (vs. Battletech)

"Let's go driving and toolin' around
We could always get lost in the crowd"

 

Garbage - Get Busy with the Fizzy

 

 

Feelin' a hankerin' fer SciFi before I return to medieval themed games, I bethought meself to get mechanical and warlike. Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries was one of my earliest PC games, probably the first to truly enthrall me. I also played the previous Mech2 thanks to an acquaintance, loved Mech Commander for its own particular charm, but Mechwarrior 3 gave me pause, its development restricted in favor of graphics and destructible environments, to the detriment of campaign length and general variety/complexity. Given the Mechwarrior series was also one of the last names in vehicular simulation to garner interest outside its niche audience, I can't entirely condemn the gamble on visual immersion... but it failed. When Mech4 stirred only mildly improved user chatter, I simply didn't bother. Given the series stalling out with Mechwarrior Online apparently I wasn't the only one.

So when Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries' price finally dropped to almost reasonable levels I decided it might be a hoot to chronicle a campaign comparing it to its recent adaptational competitor, Harebrained's Battletech, step by step like a role-playing story, admitting my bias toward turn-based strategy over first-person shooting. That idea went out the window a few missions into MW5. A few artlessly randomized, repetitive  missions.

 

I'd assumed Piranha BytesGames would have marketed to stand out from Harebrained Schemes' Battletech, stake out their own interpretation of the source material. Instead, even the opening cinematic re-hashes the same dead(-ish) mentor boilerplate except longer, simpler, louder, flashier. Immediately after that you're thrown into a fully mobile human mode as a genre novelty.  Eh, thinks I, guess I liked sniping windshields on foot well enough in Battlezone 2, so I might like it here too. But I HATE being forced to play a premade character, even if it is just a last name. The crew, much like the dead mentor setup, looks hilariously copy-pasted from Battletech, immediately throwing in your face a female officer (Ryana/Sumire) and a middle-eastern mechanic (Murad/Fahad) whose... Britstraliohannesburgian(?) accents double as your introduction to Mech5's nauseatingly cheesy voicing. Forget Battletech's more subdued, self-controlled action hero one-liners, mildly believable for people who risk their lives on a daily basis. Mech5 seems obsessed with playing up the setting's MILITARY SciFi, which obviously means talking like dem super-cool soldier types on da teevee. So instead of personalized callsigns, everyone's "lieutenant" this-and-that, and instead of "heads up, commander, you've got incoming" you get lines like "recon has just reported additional bogies, heading along a trajectory that intersects with your position" yadda-yadda, jabber-jabber. CLEAR COMMS! Plus, the moment they said the word "smoke" they telegraphed the most likely engame villains. And the music... is actually not too bad, even if more generic than MW2Mercs' instantly evocative, techno-punk personality.

 

So much for atmosphere.

What about gameplay?

Follows suit. At least load times are quick enough to match modern standards, outshining Battletech's worst feature by a mile, with detailed environments and no FPS drops... though it comes at the cost of spiking my Geforce 2060's temperature to 80C. But the interactivity which makes a game a game is dumbed down to suit the idiot-friendly presentation, and I can illustrate that in three screenshots.

 

You pick up random goodie crates as you stomp around each map, in the worst tradition of D&D treasure chests, or more aptly Sonic the Hedgehog stomping ring boxes.

Turrets randomly pop up out of the ground, one-shottable along with tanks and helicopters constantly streaming in. Even enemy mechs lack fog of war pings. Your missions largely resolve to skeet shooting / whack-a-mole, except:

You're also forced to occasionally shoot up enemy bases, with absurd numbers of damage sponge buildings needing piecemeal demolition. Found a gas pipe to blow up, speeding the process by a few percent? Count yourself lucky, because otherwise even trying to shoot the bottom floor out from under a skyscraper will only result in it sitting pretty on its technically "destroyed" supports until you arduously laser every damn floor to death individually.

Luckily you get nearly infinite ammo. Machine guns, as an example, go from 200rounds per ton in MW2 (yes, fine, too low) to a ridiculous 5200rounds in MW5. In fifteen hours of gameplay I think I ran out of ammo for exactly ONE weapon.

If there are any status effects like water cooling or volcanic planet ambient heat (sandstorms supposedly do weaken lasers at least) they're not actively displayed on your HUD.

No numeric values for armor/internals.

C-Bills flow like lube on a porn set. I accrue more spare cash by the time I start killing Centurions than in Battletech running full 400-ton teams.

Even your timeline can only be fast-forwarded to the next official event instead of giving you day-by-day control like Battletech's.

That "human mode" I thought might expand upon Battlezone 2's showing? Completely unused so far except for walking between your two interactable NPCs. If you want to switch mechs you just instantly teleport from cockpit to cockpit, without even a trace of in-universe justification.

Overall the message is as clear as an Atlas stomping on your face: this is an FPS and therefore tailored to the tastes of brainless twitch-gamer trash. Don't think. Don't plan ahead, don't ask for information, don't worry about resource management. Just point and click like a good little drooling cretin.

 

Sad. I'd missed stomping around in bipedal war machines, but... this? The series never moved past MW3. Battletech, despite its glaring flaws, added to the MW/MechCommander formula. MW5Mercs is still stuck in the '90s. Wanna know how weak it is?

 

I re-re-re-uninstalled Battletech today in temporary disgust. A mission ended with an enemy dropship landing in an unadvertised spot, basically as a cinematic send-off. Except it landed on a Zeus with 3 PPCs and an LRM15, MY FAVORITE TOY, telefragging it and the pilot both. No warning, no justification, no saving throw. Just a bolt of divine lightning like a teenage dungeon master's tantrum, randomly costing me millions. One of the most idiotic possible ways to screw the player over, utterly unjustifiable!

 

Yet still, by next year when I've cooled off, I can see myself reinstalling Battletech for a few more missions... but MW5? Fuck it. I can get better turreted vehicular combat by swiveling my lance in Bannerlord.

Action Relaxation

"I took that from you

The life that's born to die"

Chiasm - Embryonic

 

Stardew Valley I believe was the first game I saw routinely described as "relaxing" and though it never enticed me to buy, from its reputation it does seem to have addressed the growing demand in the mid-2010s for more freeform playing styles after a decade of WoW-inspired "kill ten rats" dragging you into quest after quest after rat-race after rat-race. Hey, I certainly like genres with a managerial side and I've got nothing against farming sims per se, having enjoyed SimFarm back in its day. But seeing "relaxing" crop up as an official tag on GoG just seems to be missing the point of this entire industry. There's a difference between freeform and no form.

Pleeeaase don't get me wrong, I utterly loathe the obssession with "action" games paced for meth-addicted ADD kiddies. I'm a big proponent of turn-based genres, which includes admitting that "real-time" strategy or role-playing were unnecessary gimmicks we too eagerly swallowed in the mid '90s simply 'cus that thar newfangled post-486 hardware could take it. I'm especially irked by designers strong-arming you into twitch-based gameplay in otherwise unrelated genres. The problem dates back at least as far as Oregon Trail's game hunting and rafting minigames.

The gunfights in Gemini Rue for instance added nothing but annoyance to an otherwise atmospheric and captivating 2D cyberpunk adventure.

I've been trying Hellslave recently, not a bad little loot-farming turn-based dungeon crawler, and can't help but roll my eyes at its trap minigame making you panic-click three random spots for a temporary XP bonus. At least it can be turned off and tends to only rear its head once a dungeon.

My distaste for "quick-time events" in The Wolf Among Us ran far deeper given their pervasive and intrusive nature.

I've run across one of the most glaring examples in Anomaly Defenders, a tower defense spin-off of 11-bit's Anomaly tower offense spin-off of the tower defense spin-off of RTS.

To spice up the whole recursive mess (in addition to making you panic-heal your towers) 11-bit severely limits one of your two resource pools and forces you to actively harvest it from dead mobs by clicking on the glowing orbs they leave behind. Wait. Pecking breadcrumbs relates to my strategic foresight in organizing a layered and thorough defense... how?

But there's gotta be a middle ground here. We shouldn't be trying to "spice up" genres which would be better served by increasing their core concept's complexity just by forcing players to SPAM CLICKS SPAM IT SPAM IT SPAMIT SPAMITSPAMIT! Neither should we be making a virtue out of dullness and passivity in themselves. You'll generally see the "relaxing" tag appended to the usual suspects like ULTIMATE FISHING SIMULATOR - now with EXTREEEEME lure bobbing! OMG totes badbass! But the few titles I've played falling under this new category make me wonder what anyone even means by relaxation.

 

Banished of all things gets slapped with the relaxing label, a game which diverged from old-school city simulators precisely for imposing scarcity, loss conditions and general stress on a genre which had more or less always presumed guaranteed forward momentum. Furthermore Banished's success in this kicked off a whole spate of survival city builders defined largely by anti-relaxation. So what the hell do you even mean by that tag? Soundtrack NOT by Mastodon?

 

If having a moment's breather qualifies as relaxation, nearly everything qualifies. I've posted endless screenshots here of my characters relaxing, watching the sunset from an awning, taking in scenic vistas, meditating on their past travails, plus watching my spaceship break atmosphere or gently nudging my empire's stats while it grows or tracking my citizens' progress through my neighbourhoods. Any designers worth their salt will leave you little opportunities to admire their handiwork. It's good business. But if you're seriously buying an interactive product for its pause button, there are other media more apt to let you lay back and passively absorb. Movies spring to mind. Enough with the damn walking simulators and idle games! A game, no matter how slow-paced, should still be judged partly for its ability to keep you engaged, considering strategies, plot and clues, moral quandaries, your resource stores, exploration paths, process flow in general.

Thought-effacing hypoactivity should be no more a selling point than thought-effacing twitch-based hyperactivity.

Being mentally absent is not a virtue!

Pacing Mars

"The trap that holds you down
The safety of your net
Creates a yearning to regress"

 

Chiasm - Delay

 

 

I'm finally ready to uninstall Surviving Mars. GoG claims I've spent 359h,45m playing this good game which could have been a great game. Of course, this being a city simulator, at least 4/5ths of that is AFK time, cooking dinner or playing Dwarf Fortress or Darkest Dungeon or clicking through unemployment pop-ups in Stellaris while my Martians monetize more technologies and plant more trees.

 

Welcome to Nyctimus, 356 sols (days / years) after its founding, viewed from its initial landing site now known as Lycanthrope Loch. Technically, the atmosphere has been breathable for at least fifty sols, but I kept the domes up because, well, I decided I like domes. So there.

(they look like shiny boobies... heheheh...)

Therein lies the problem. I feel no particular incentive to open up the domes. Terraforming adds a much-needed end-game stage, it's true, but its interplay with the rest of your colony-building is shallow at best, and also brings to the forefront one of the myriad small problems I cited back when Surviving Mars first released:

Pacing.

Surviving Mars is an object lesson in poor pacing.

Remember this?

A rover caught in a dust devil.

At the game's launch, this was one of your nightmare scenarios. Not just drones but rovers required both electricity and cleaning. Your colony's early stages amounted to teleoperating without a net, struggling to maintain a functional mechanical work force long enough to establish the various life support functions for human settlement. Having one of your rovers dusted into malfunction halfway across the map meant deliberately shifting your priorities to a power / repair expedition, all the while hoping you weren't throwing good machinery after bad.

These mechanics could certainly drag out past their plot relevance until they became pure drudgery. Once your priorities shifted to human settlers, rover maintenance rapidly grew onerous. But, instead of being shortened, this first colonization stage via teleoperation was removed altogether. Rovers are now self-cleaning, you're handed more powerful wind turbines for power, right from the start, and instead of consciously weighing your oxygen / water / power needs you can just plop down a self-sufficient habitation dome and immediately start your colony.

 

At the other end of the story, every run-through of Surviving Mars featured a randomly-generated "mystery" or long-term challenge, usually alien contact or some kind of political event requiring massive resource investment. Unfortunately these trigger a bit too early (usually before you fill your second dome) and did more to break up the rising action of colony building than to provide a satisfying boss encounter. By the time you finish a "mystery" you'll still be faced with half a campaign's worth of reiterating shiny boobies all over the landscape.

 

Terraforming would seem to fill that end-game void, but in practice it's merely a separate minigame. I decided to quit when I discovered that vegetation stops spreading at 40% completion, with the remaining 60% being doled out by the game itself at its own convenience as "special projects" artificially inflating the campaign's timescale. So where two years ago I'd run a colony about 50-100 sols after a mystery ended before losing interest, terraforming merely doubled that timespan while eliminating the last remaining challenges like disasters (cold snaps, dust storms, meteor showers) which might have spiced things up. I finished building space stations for Gene Roddenberry's imaginary counterpart in sol 123. This is basically what would happen if Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star thirty minutes into the movie then spent another hour farming moisture for your entertainment.

To reiterate:

Vanilla Surviving Mars suffered from a slightly overextended micromanagement first act and a rushed final act leaving you building redundant domes to fill your time.

The new and improved version of Surviving Mars deprives you of the first act altogether, stretching the dome building routine in both directions by demanding you stick around to wait for "seeding" special project availability... all the while failing to address and even worsening its premature expostulation problem.

The sad part is that, as I said two and a half years ago, there is a lot to like about Surviving Mars. The resource management and infrastructure maintenance are as good as any other city simulator, and the exploration and disaster angles add both proactive and reactive incentives. It banks well enough on its retro-futuristic, hopeful vision of exploration, plays smoothly with intuitive controls, offers a variety of side projects into which you can sink resources. But, aside from my smaller quibbles about writing quality and whatnot, it lacks an overall vision for proportional escalation. And, instead of realizing the problem, its developers have only further flattened their plot diagram after release.

RimWorld

Hark ye to the tale of Captain Kaleun

A former cadet on a three-hour-tour

A doughty old hottie of much-guarded poon

Faceplanted on <planetname> one fateful moon

 

 

She found herself whistling Robinson's tune

With a hermit called Alistair who hated to rassle

And a doting wife Fletcher who thought fights a hassle

So they all nearly died to a guinea pig hustler.

Kaleun then recruited some muscle to aid her

By beating them senseless and shooting their brethren

But the idiots died to wolves, goons or weather

Leaving more work to their glorious captain.

She quarried and sculpted, brought home the bacon

She hammered their steel into helmets and guns

She scienced technologies odd and arcane

But with each caravan her strength lastly waned

An arm lost to robots. Leg? - rabid bisons

Confined her to researching better prosthetics

Which Fletcher attached with stiff analgesics

In time for their captain to hold off the formics

Yet giddy with victory, the grizzled corsair

Tarried too long outside of their lair

Not sensing the fallout that dusted her lungs

Scanning and mining for wealth uncompared

Her sanity waning, her faculties faltering

She wanders forgetting, negotiates slurring

Yet the slayer of bandits and beasts beyond counting

Clings to her shotgun and stares down contenders:

"If you try to replace me, I'll buckshot your nethers!"

 

---------------------------------------------------------------------

 

If Northgard reminded me of Lords of the Realm, RimWorld reminds me of The Oregon Trail. Slightly off target, as RimWorld's closest relative is obviously Dwarf Fortress: digging, seasonal changes, room designations, animal breeding, materials of varying value, finished goods of varying quality, happiness metrics by the Stepford, more ways to die than you can shake a scythe at, etc. with the major caveat of a lack of three-dimensionality. It compensates for that lack by letting you mount expeditions outside your starter zone, which only partly accounts for my Oregon Trail comparison.

 

You start your adventure with only three colonists instead of seven and expansion is much slower, with ideal colony size seeming to peak around ten, one-twentieth the size of a dwarf tribe. They don't breed and while you can occasionally buy a slave or rescue a crashlanded survivor, you'll do most of your recruiting by capturing prisoners from the frequent raids sent against you and feeding them until Stockholm syndrome takes root. This can lead to some amusing situations down the line:

 

I built a monument to me kicking your ass. Best buds?

In fact it's lucky that scenario doesn't register as an official insult, because RimWorld encourages an almost Sims-level micromanagement of your colonists' moods. With so few workers, having even one drop into a depressive funk can prevent finishing a project on time, and lashing out against each other can quickly steamroll into crippling your colony's production until they're barely feeding themselves. The situation is even more grim for your original three, with any relevant gap in their skillsets rapidly becoming obvious. I wasn't joking when I said Kaleun's colony, with the other two incapable of combat, was almost wiped out by a single guinea pig. I have to reiterate my observation vis-a-vis Into the Breach: small numbers and randomness do not mix. If one of your first three dies you may find yourself lynchpin-deprived and might as well quit.

 

Of course, once you hit your stride, get some fields planted, climate-control your compound, set up barricades and traps, tame some livestock, you're much less susceptible to individual events. They may eat their weight in meat, but I've found a phalanx of mountain lions to be every bit as effective as the phrase "phalanx of mountain lions" suggests. Then, every time like clockwork, the events get tougher. Here's where we have to address RimWorld's official main selling point, the "storyteller" AI, really just a way of saying the algorithm spawning new objectives, hazards or enemies for you adjusts to your colony's success. A.k.a. level-scaling for a base-building game, a.k.a. treadmills, a.k.a. leveling sideways.

 

No matter the usefulness of such mechanics in keeping the action flowing, I still bristle at having an algorithm arbitrarily decide at exactly which time I should be punished for my success. In RimWorld it comes across as contrived as being notified that some occupant of my Oregon Trail wagon has spontaneously contracted and just as spontaneously succumbed to dysentery. Randomness is bad enough without edging into preordained calamity of a random nature. I'm getting a bit sick of killer robots raining down from the sky whenever I hit eight or nine colonists. I'm supposed to be playing the game, not vice versa; I'm supposed to be the one driving the action, not merely providing fodder for an algorithm to run my life. Though I don't play tabletop games, RimWorld's "storyteller" AI feels like playing with a G.M. who arbitrarily spawns a lich to attack you because you've looted your thousandth gold piece. Less storytelling and more like a jealous toddler throwing a tantrum.

I could cite other minor gripes, mostly having to do with colonists' skewed priorities, like running around hauling rocks with a gaping chest wound or going to sleep in a freezer because their last task happened to be storing food. However, I'm wary of unduly bashing RimWorld simply because it fundamentally grinds against my lycanthropic, hermit-past-the-edge-of-town mentality. To me, city simulators are about grand works, not citizens and the "Sims" precept of insinuating oneself into the private lives of others and manipulating their thoughts has always been inherently... creepy. I can certainly enjoy the propensity of simulators to fabricate personal or social dramas (exhibits A, B and C). I've been well amused by the antics of Captain Kaleun, the man-hating, half-senile, brilliant researcher, crafter and sniper, as well as the dashing young power couple (animal tamer / planter) who ruled my previous attempt at a colony... but building a base should still be about objects, not people, grand works and not the filthy workers.

RimWorld sticks laudably to its space western theme, and it truly does excel at weaving personal NPC narratives, but its main effect on me is rekindling my desire to fire up another Dwarf Fortress world and build my legendary monuments on the hundred-fold corpses of disposable nobodies.

 

____________________________________________________

* Apparently I've reached that Grandpa Simpson age where everything reminds me of an interesting story. (Actually, it's not so much interesting as it is long.)