This Week I Played...
Mar. 9th, 2025 05:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
windjammI played a bunch of games this week, so! May as well document them!
Needy Streamer Overload
This was a game on sale for $6 for a steam Visual Novel event and the ideas were just interesting enough to catch my eye. Namely, you play as a streamer's partner/manager, 'suggesting' (but really commanding) different actions which raise or lower 3 different meters (stress, affection (towards you), and mental 'darkness'). Activities take time but will reward you with 'stream ideas' like conspiracy theory stream, gaming stream, 'sexy' stream. These streams will raise followers and stress and during these streams you, as the chat moderator, can pick messages to delete and donation-highlighted messages to pick for your streamer/partner to respond to after the stream.
It was a really interesting series of things to mechanize and it ended up squarely in a toxic relationship environment with about sixteen different endings. I didn't enjoy playing it so much as reading through the endings and seeing what kinds of things the game was interested in saying.
As someone who's streamed and modded a lot with various relationships to those streamers and who has heard more than enough stories of mod-streamer relationships going awry, this was a fascinating look into someone else's perspective on the office.
I can't really recommend it, but it was interesting!
Emily is Away <3
Also from the VN sale, this one was a single dollar and the premise sounded interesting enough to check it out. You play in 2008 solely through a facebook interface. In theory not much is different from a visual novel; you have options to pick in a dialogue with various characters. However, the trappings do give it a sort of a Web/Social Media Horror movie style interface, which I am a sucker for. Ultimately there isn't much horror here save for the hormonal naivete of teens, but I was pretty sold from go.
What I didn't anticipate, however, was how well the developers would capture the conceit and vibe of being on 2008 Facebook. Compared to places like AOL Instant Messenger, MySpace, Tumblr, or eventually even Twitter, there was an amount of dressing up I was familiar with. After all, it's a place where families ended up going, somewhere with whole-ass government names (chilling to think of now). You start with a nigh on, "Hello, my name is..." and have to warm up to people to devolve into the actual internet dialects particular to the time (emoticons, extra letters for emphasis).
All of this really led to my immersion and a sense of placeness. I didn't feel like I WAS my character (though, as I almost always regret, I did name my character after me, so sometimes when people said my name I got jumpscared). But the experience of her and her high school friends did feel genuine, complete with a lack of experience navigating complicated social spaces, which I can now navigate via my Adult Brain, but it was fascinating and tragic being in there once again.
It was definitely a fun experience and I do recommend it if any of that sounds fun.
One Lonely Outpost
Honestly I don't have a ton to say about this one. It's a sci-fi stardew, which is interesting to me conceptually, but the inventory management was both unintuitive and clunky, which led to me tapping out before long.
Can't recommend.
Star Trucker
I finally got around to trying this and at first it seemed really interesting. A mix of the driving sims I enjoy like American Truck Simulator while simultaneously giving me a space ship game I'm always yearning for. At the end of the day, though, I haven't found the drive (ha) to return. They abridge space travel quite a bit by having jump gates between stations, but because of that everything does feel rather samey. "Long-hauls" mean 9 jumps instead of 1-3, which is basically like driving to a freeway, driving down the off ramp, driving to another on ramp, driving off of another off ramp, never experiencing the middle part which, to me, is the 'stuff' of road trips.
It's especially egregious because there's so much potential to repair a ship. There are mechanics built around exchanging batteries, managing power, even doing space walks to repair leaks in the hull. However, if you're always 5 minutes from a gas station, the fear of breaking down is far less exciting.
I may come back to it and have a road to damascus moment but until then.
Can't recommend.
Monster Hunter Wilds
Ultimately I've been really enjoying Monster Hunter Wilds. I'm, as they say, an old head when it comes to this series. I've been playing since Freedom Unite on the PSP and at least touching every entry if not completing it.
This new one is beautiful. I've heard of performance issues, but I haven't encountered any and so can't speak to that. Instead, I am a little put off by the pacing of it. I've put maybe 7 hours into the game so far and it does feel like most of that is cutscenes. Even if it isn't true, every stage surrounding a hunt feels really inundated with them. For the most part they're just 'fine' but there are aspects I like including some of the characters, so I do want to see them (even if just to have references for drawing them later).
I've seen other old heads complain that it's too easy and there are things that make it easier for sure, but personally I've fallen out of love with the 30+ minute hunts while grinding for items. Did it extend the game quite a bit? Sure but so too did all the rough systems that went into trying to get kids to eat through their quarters in arcades and I'm not looking to defend those. Mostly, I think the hunts are fun and I think the custcenes help to make them quite cinematic, a thing Monster Hunter has struggled with for as long as I've been playing. Most of the drama has come from emergent gameplay, one last faint for the team and someone throws a really precise bomb that interrupts the charging monster absolutely about to gore your friend into nullifying the last 30 minutes of your lives.
Instead, every monster they introduce gets some kind of pomp and circumstance and there's a lot more world building on the hunter's side to consider. (At least for me; I realize there could have been a lot of lore in the prior games but I simply couldn't be bothered to read through a novel of text prior to a hunt.)
Recommend if hunting the big monsters sounds fun
Conclusion
That about wraps it up for me! See you next time I have a lot to talk about.
Oh and last week I played Bloom and Rage and it was incredible. I have a lot to say, generally, though, and I'm still stewing on it. Recommend if you like character focused stories about weird girls in a summer-movie style environment.
Needy Streamer Overload
This was a game on sale for $6 for a steam Visual Novel event and the ideas were just interesting enough to catch my eye. Namely, you play as a streamer's partner/manager, 'suggesting' (but really commanding) different actions which raise or lower 3 different meters (stress, affection (towards you), and mental 'darkness'). Activities take time but will reward you with 'stream ideas' like conspiracy theory stream, gaming stream, 'sexy' stream. These streams will raise followers and stress and during these streams you, as the chat moderator, can pick messages to delete and donation-highlighted messages to pick for your streamer/partner to respond to after the stream.
It was a really interesting series of things to mechanize and it ended up squarely in a toxic relationship environment with about sixteen different endings. I didn't enjoy playing it so much as reading through the endings and seeing what kinds of things the game was interested in saying.
As someone who's streamed and modded a lot with various relationships to those streamers and who has heard more than enough stories of mod-streamer relationships going awry, this was a fascinating look into someone else's perspective on the office.
I can't really recommend it, but it was interesting!
Emily is Away <3
Also from the VN sale, this one was a single dollar and the premise sounded interesting enough to check it out. You play in 2008 solely through a facebook interface. In theory not much is different from a visual novel; you have options to pick in a dialogue with various characters. However, the trappings do give it a sort of a Web/Social Media Horror movie style interface, which I am a sucker for. Ultimately there isn't much horror here save for the hormonal naivete of teens, but I was pretty sold from go.
What I didn't anticipate, however, was how well the developers would capture the conceit and vibe of being on 2008 Facebook. Compared to places like AOL Instant Messenger, MySpace, Tumblr, or eventually even Twitter, there was an amount of dressing up I was familiar with. After all, it's a place where families ended up going, somewhere with whole-ass government names (chilling to think of now). You start with a nigh on, "Hello, my name is..." and have to warm up to people to devolve into the actual internet dialects particular to the time (emoticons, extra letters for emphasis).
All of this really led to my immersion and a sense of placeness. I didn't feel like I WAS my character (though, as I almost always regret, I did name my character after me, so sometimes when people said my name I got jumpscared). But the experience of her and her high school friends did feel genuine, complete with a lack of experience navigating complicated social spaces, which I can now navigate via my Adult Brain, but it was fascinating and tragic being in there once again.
It was definitely a fun experience and I do recommend it if any of that sounds fun.
One Lonely Outpost
Honestly I don't have a ton to say about this one. It's a sci-fi stardew, which is interesting to me conceptually, but the inventory management was both unintuitive and clunky, which led to me tapping out before long.
Can't recommend.
Star Trucker
I finally got around to trying this and at first it seemed really interesting. A mix of the driving sims I enjoy like American Truck Simulator while simultaneously giving me a space ship game I'm always yearning for. At the end of the day, though, I haven't found the drive (ha) to return. They abridge space travel quite a bit by having jump gates between stations, but because of that everything does feel rather samey. "Long-hauls" mean 9 jumps instead of 1-3, which is basically like driving to a freeway, driving down the off ramp, driving to another on ramp, driving off of another off ramp, never experiencing the middle part which, to me, is the 'stuff' of road trips.
It's especially egregious because there's so much potential to repair a ship. There are mechanics built around exchanging batteries, managing power, even doing space walks to repair leaks in the hull. However, if you're always 5 minutes from a gas station, the fear of breaking down is far less exciting.
I may come back to it and have a road to damascus moment but until then.
Can't recommend.
Monster Hunter Wilds
Ultimately I've been really enjoying Monster Hunter Wilds. I'm, as they say, an old head when it comes to this series. I've been playing since Freedom Unite on the PSP and at least touching every entry if not completing it.
This new one is beautiful. I've heard of performance issues, but I haven't encountered any and so can't speak to that. Instead, I am a little put off by the pacing of it. I've put maybe 7 hours into the game so far and it does feel like most of that is cutscenes. Even if it isn't true, every stage surrounding a hunt feels really inundated with them. For the most part they're just 'fine' but there are aspects I like including some of the characters, so I do want to see them (even if just to have references for drawing them later).
I've seen other old heads complain that it's too easy and there are things that make it easier for sure, but personally I've fallen out of love with the 30+ minute hunts while grinding for items. Did it extend the game quite a bit? Sure but so too did all the rough systems that went into trying to get kids to eat through their quarters in arcades and I'm not looking to defend those. Mostly, I think the hunts are fun and I think the custcenes help to make them quite cinematic, a thing Monster Hunter has struggled with for as long as I've been playing. Most of the drama has come from emergent gameplay, one last faint for the team and someone throws a really precise bomb that interrupts the charging monster absolutely about to gore your friend into nullifying the last 30 minutes of your lives.
Instead, every monster they introduce gets some kind of pomp and circumstance and there's a lot more world building on the hunter's side to consider. (At least for me; I realize there could have been a lot of lore in the prior games but I simply couldn't be bothered to read through a novel of text prior to a hunt.)
Recommend if hunting the big monsters sounds fun
Conclusion
That about wraps it up for me! See you next time I have a lot to talk about.
Oh and last week I played Bloom and Rage and it was incredible. I have a lot to say, generally, though, and I'm still stewing on it. Recommend if you like character focused stories about weird girls in a summer-movie style environment.
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