This part has driven me nuts, there’s no real information in game other than looking at scrolling damage numbers to figure out how the math works. Opted to write a single post on this, rather than in another.

Every item has an info screen that resembles the screenshot above. The key pieces:

1. The type of item, and rarity. The type impacts how it’s used, rarity impacts other stats (higher is better).
2. The attack/defense is only relevant to the level. All level 1 weapons have 100 ATK. For such a big piece of the visual, it’s actually meaningless.
3. This is the actual damage you will deal, and it’s relative to other items at the same level. A level 1 musket will deal more damage than a level 1 pistol.
4. The level of the item. This is the stat that is the least understood but actually the most important.
5. The icon is the main stat of the item that boosts damage (Perception in this image) and the letter (A for this one) scaling of stats to raise damage. It takes about a dozen perception points for an A weapon to equate to 1 item level. The scaling improves as you improve the rarity of an item (rare, epic, legendary).
   • More explicitly here, if you have a B or C scaling item, you are better off putting your stats into stamina/vitality than any other option.
6. The extra effects of an items. You get 1 for a rare item (blue) and 2 for an epic item (purple).

Right, with that, what actually matters? Enemy level vs. Item level. That’s about it.

It’s nearly 15% difference per level delta, which scales in logarithmically. 1 level is 15%, 2 levels is 25%, 3 levels is 32% and so on, with diminishing impacts.

If you have level 3 gear and you are fighting level 5 enemies, you’ll be down nearly 25% across all stats. You will absolutely feel this when you enter a new zone, as you’ll generally be 5 levels lower than enemies. The Alpha Wolf that 1 shots you the first time you meet them, will at most take off half if you are evenly matched.

How does this apply to item groups:

• Armor: The average level of all your gear is your defence level. 5 pieces of gear, it gets expensive. You will need a lot of flax (cloth) and hides (leather).
• Weapon: The level of the individual weapon, even if you are dual wielding a pistol.
• Ship: The level of the item itself. This applies to cannons, keels, and boarding gear.

How should you prioritize? The sort of good news is that item upgrades are somewhat exclusive per type. Level 1 to 5 you can get the items in the wild. 5+ you need to buy material with piastre, which is primarily had from ship battles with pirates and selling loot. I would recommend upgrading your weapon first, and then equally upgrading your armor (e.g. get them all to 5 before making a level 6 item). For ships, this depends on your variant and gear but for the most part should be balanced between canons and keels – dying on a ship is so much worse than dying on land. Boarding gear is only needed for boarding, and in 99% of cases outside of specific quests, you’re better off sinking the ship instead.

Quick notes on rarity (or called ascension in-game). Armor should not be upgraded to epic or beyond. Weapons, that depends on the added effect, and in most cases this is worthwhile. Ship items, you should upgrade anything other than Perfectly Ordered (+aim speed, wth?) or Tempered Cannons (+20% dmg if hitting the rear of a ship).

The first island is normally good enough to get all items to level 5. You will want to find an island in the 2nd zone that has an iron mine near the coast and set a Bell teleport nearby. That will give you iron, hardwood, flax and more hides with minimal trekking.

To me, this is more of a tutorial type of thing combined with an updated UI, so that players understand how these mechanics work with each other. There are bit too many variables and no real indication as to how they actually work in-game currently, which is normal for EA.

Hopefully this helps folks understand why the are getting absolutely wasted by higher level enemies. Upgrade to the max level and the game gets a whole lot smoother.

I did try the demo a few months ago, enjoyed it. The current EA release has more in it, but for sure it’s early access!

Baseline first: If you’ve played Valheim or Enshrouded, you have a decent idea what to expect here. Punch trees, build tools, mine rocks, build better tools, and die against ever increasingly difficult enemies. Oh, and you will build a hut of dirt, then eventually of diamonds. Windrose doesn’t change much in this model, yet there are enough tweaks to add some flavor.

• Food adds buffs, but that’s about it. You don’t need to eat/drink to stave off death. Food buffs leave when you die. There are some rather substantive buffs from food, so worth considering farming early.
• Combat is generally melee focused as ammo is very hard to acquire for a long time, and reloading takes forever. You can block and dodge. Enemies have stun bars. You can’t really block, but parry, and if you miss the timing you either take damage or are stunned. Fights against multiple enemies are very, very difficult.
  • Armor seems to have no real purpose that I’ve found. Set bonuses on rare items are cool, but the armor itself isn’t useful.
  • Weapons have types with different advantages. Enemies have resistances. Find one that fits your style.
  • Armor + Weapons have quality levels with benefits (and sets), which are mostly pointless now. Or at least, I see no difference.
  • You will die in 1 or 2 hits for a very long time. There are no real penalties to death, you keep all your armor and need to trek to collect other items. You will die a lot. Not a little. A lot.
    • It is possible to create a spawn point that is too close to enemies so that when you spawn, you are effectively ‘camped’ by the NPCs. Takes about 10 deaths or so before your spawn point is reverted.
• Crafting is pretty much as expected here, no big surprises. Build a roof, put in stations. Oh wait, the amazing part is that you craft from storage from the start. AMAZING!
• There’s slightly too much variety in inventory vs. size. In particular for items you can trade later that do nothing but take up space.
• There are side quests + discoveries to make. This is where 99% of your character growth comes from – do them.
• There are character levels which are acquired by doing ‘stuff’. They give you stat points to distribute and eventually talents, which are just stat more stat boosts.
• The crummy boat you get at the start is crummy. The quest to get the next ship is arduous, effectively closing the tutorial. You do not want to die on another island, that trek is very long.
  • Spoiler-ish I guess here. One particular step of this larger ship quest has you enter a mini-base with 8 enemies. You will die. And die. And die. Build 2 revive points, a decent distance from each other in case things go really wrong.
• Related, the world is quite large and moving across it takes a lot of time. You do NOT want to die while on the boat, so prioritize upgrades there.
• You can fast travel, which is essential. Need to create a Bell, which comes from copper, so it’s relatively early stuff.
  • More specifically. 2 Bells allow to travel between them. A single Bell station means anywhere on the map, when in a boat, you can teleport to that Bell. This is a really cool system!

Overall, the mechanics here are solid enough and either maintain or improve on the existing model. While I will always have a soft spot for Valheim (it’s pure and raw and glorious), Enshrouded is my current gold standard for this type of game. It’s still quite EA mind you, with a significant need for balancing – in particular at the front end. But really… there is no game that let’s you be a pirate in such a free form state. This is more or less what I had expected as a base option from Skull & Bones. And here we are.

Point of interest here, from demo to here, the dev team has performed a significant balance pass. I’ve yet to reach the second biome, but feedback to date says that is as unbalanced as the demo was. This not only validates why EA exists, but also shows that the devs are extremely responsive to feedback. Impressive.

Windrose is less a technical achievement than a statement. A team of 60 can launch something like this and Ubisoft instead spends 10 years and nearly a billion dollars to build a live service game that nobody wants to play. Are survival games economically sound? Not with the AAA payrolls they aren’t. Valheim has a team of 8, and I would actually argue is a better game in nearly all aspects. I know we’re at the edge of AI-slop-fest game development, and we’re sitting pretty. Let’s enjoy it.

Which, you know, is the whole point I guess.

Anthem is gone now, but that post series really focused on how bad of a job that game did in this regard. Or perhaps, how utterly complicated the entire thing can be. The design challenge here is multi-faceted, with some core principles.

• The itemization journey must last a long time to keep engagement up.
  • You don’t want players being fully kitted in a single session.
• Itemization should be constructed in a way that players can understand it
  • Meaningless stats are confusing
• Itemization must have incremental benefits that players can feel
  • +1 stat boosts are not meaningful and dis-engage players
• Methods to acquire items must be varied
  • The D2 runs of a single boss room for 40 hours are long-gone
• Itemization progression should have safety nets
  • Pure randomness is not good. Weighted drops (e.g. wizards don’t get bows) and enchanting (re-rolling stats) are good examples.
• Itemization must complement a player build
  • Generic stats are fine, but stats that are more tailored to a build give variety. +fire damage is better than +intelligence if you’re a fire wizard

This whole mess gets complicated quickly when you realize that some principles actively constrain others. If you add a few stats, players can quickly figure it out, but it also shortens the journey. Add too many stats and there’s no real sense of progression as you spend more time in the inventory than in the game.

Safety Nets + Player Empowerment

This is the relatively recent development in ARPGs, and it’s a relatively fascinating one at that. Other games did it first, but Diablo 3 really did a job here when it came to bloodshard gambling. The principle is somewhat straightforward.

• Players do content, collect items and currency for safety net.
• Currency is used to rapidly pull the 1-armed bandit loot machine to acquire more items

Diablo 3’s also implemented stat re-rolls, where you could select 1 particular stat and attempt to get another one. Re-rolling cold resistance for + hit points, for example. These re-rolls cost more and more resources, and the pool of available stats had different weights (+hit points is much more common that +all resists). This safety net meant that rather than look for ‘god rolls’, you could get something that was close and tweak it to be closer to top tier. Math is a big deal here, so let’s look at that.

Let’s say you have an item that can roll 4 different types of stats, of which the list has 25 possible items. For simplicity, let’s say they are all even odds to acquire. The math to get the ‘perfect’ set is 25x24x23x22 or 1 in 303,600. If you can re-roll one of those stats, the odds drop to 1 in 13,800. That’s a ridiculous amount of difference.

It’s important to note that safety nets + player empowerment actively work against a long journey for itemization, as it accelerates the time to get good gear. Balance is quite tricky.

Weighted Rolls & Spans

This was my largest gripe with Anthem, and at the core is due to the lack of understanding of player engagement. There’s a limit to how often a person will gamble without reward, and this is offset by the perception of progress.

Let’s say you’re a wizard and you run a dungeon 20 times. All the gear that drops is either outright for another class (bows and swords), or has stats that don’t help you (strength). So not only were you ‘unlucky’ in not getting good stats, you effectively were playing the wrong class all along. Engagement tanks here.

Alternatively, let’s say you do get a drop of an item that you can use. You have an rare version, with +100 to a core stat. A legendary item has dropped (yay!) and you look at the stats and it gives +80 to the core stat. As a player, you question your sanity that a less common item is somehow worse than your common one.

Weighted rolls ensure that on average, an item that drops is useful to you in some sense. Items that drop are both things you can use but also have stat rolls that benefit your class. It is VERY obvious when games don’t do this. This may seem an obvious thing today, but it most certainly was not even 5 years ago

Spans limit the high and low portions of a given stat roll for an item class so that on average, the more rare and item, the better the stats. This means that when you see a shiny sparkly item, it will nearly always be better than a more common alternative. This is just basic design, when Anthem messed this up it was a simple matter of poor design choices with too little time.

Diablo 4 vs PoE 2

In terms of itemization, there’s some parts here that are similar. PoE 1 and Diablo 3 are more like stepping stones and not really too much of the conversation here, Diablo 4 and PoE 2 are the next iteration.

Diablo 4 took what was there before and adding more knobs for players to tweak in order to get the right item combos. There’s a ton of safety nets, multiple valid paths to acquire items, re-rolls, tempering, gems, and a pile of options to tweak gear to fit a build. I’d actually say there’s too much here as 4 options to tweak an item is 4 ways to mess it up. The good (and impressive) news is that all the systems intersect with each other and are generally well balanced. Clearly a lot of experience and thought here.

PoE2, there are issues. There are some safety nets, but relatively few here. As an archer, you will find an abundance of melee weapons you will never use. The stat rolls are generally in line with expectations. You can’t re-roll gear in any meaningful sense as you can in D4, but there are some tweaks possible. The core issue is the way stats on items are distributed and then how those stats impact actual gameplay. The physical damage on your weapon is scaled across every other skill you have, making it the ultimate stat for character power, absolutely dwarfing everything else. Secondly, some stats are so important that even though they have no real value offensively, they are the only way to actually survive (temporary HP for instance). The good news here is that gems are no longer socketed into gear, which is a major positive output.

The net result here is that D4 has little friction in itemization and a feeling of continual progress, while PoE2 has significant friction causing fits and spurts of progress. Either you’re god-mode, or you need to dedicate time to farm new gear to get to the next challenge. Conversely, this means that D4 has you reaching the ‘end’ much faster than in PoE2. I’d guess you reach the end of the D4 journey before you’d even complete the entire PoE2 campaign. This generally means PoE2’s journey is more complex and fulfilling and much more painful to restart when a season starts.

I had spent some time lately in Grim Dawn, scratching the ARPG itch. The final DLC is coming sometime in 2026, which will close off a rather impressive longevity. I won’t go into why Grim Dawn is a good game, ample stuff on that elsewhere (buy it!). What I will get into is the ARPG genre in general.

There are really 3 ‘main’ streams here.

• Titan Quest & variants. These are single player games and almost all of them play the same way. Grim Dawn, to me, is the best one in this stream with Torchlight 2 a close second. Lots of flexibility, some have an end-game, most are relatively well balanced, and most have mods. Steam is full of these.
• Diablo & variants. These are designed for online play. Consider D3, D4, Last Epoch and a few eastern variants. Generally accessible gameplay, end game for years, and league/ladder play. These are very accessible games with a wide appeal. Not much thinking required.
• Path of Exile. Seriously, this is its own stream and are hyper complex and crunchy. PoE1 has a ton to offer and dozens of systems to understand. PoE2 is in early access and streamlines a lot of PoE1. These games are very difficult, extremely dependent on understanding builds + stats, and have their own trading market which is almost mandatory.

I have given Path of Exile 2 a quick run through, after a couple hundred hours in PoE1. PoE1 is an amazing game, but it is not accessible and the ‘end game’ portion has a stupidly complicated trade market due to the way gems work. PoE2 is in early access and sands down a lot of the edges.

In terms of major changes:

• No death penalty! Hard to overstate how this changes the approach to combat.
• Gems are now character based instead of bound to items. Adds a TON of flexibility to items.
• Boss variety is dramatically increased, with much more AE / dodging required.
• Due to the item flexibility, there is a much higher requirement to be at a given item level and proper stat allocation. Item passives can transform your gameplay.
• Your weapon and its stats are life. 90% of your power is here, and getting the ‘right rolls’ matters the entire leveling journey. This is very obvious by the end of act 2.
• Defensive characters (e.g. melee) are extremely underpowered due to the way scaling works, especially for HP. Getting 1 shot is normal, which is not exactly fun. I can’t really think of any ARPG game where the issue is this flagrant.
• The trade market is very weird and feels like the mid 2000s. It’s better than PoE1 (which was chat spam) but it’s super wonky.
• Most fights are 1v5, instead of massive hordes. You still need to rely on AE damage, but not to the scale that existed in PoE1.
• The art is more grounded (and awesome looking!) while combat feels crunchy. It’s close to Monster Hunter here in terms of combat feedback.

Saying PoE2 is more accessible is true from a certain perspective, but it is absolutely not accessible when compared to any other game other than PoE1. It is not meant for pick up and play, it is meant for die-hard ARPG fans that want to invest dozens of hours of thoughtful gameplay. If you want to just ‘Brrrrrrr’ your way through and seem loot rain from the sky, pick literally any other game.

The main challenge here is that PoE2 feels more like a PoE1 expansion than an actual new game. The barrier for entry is way too high, which means the target audience is PoE1 players. The last 20 years of gaming has shown that particular model doesn’t work. This is why we don’t have World of Warcraft 2.

The question then boils down to, is this worth the current price of admission (~$30)? At this point in time, if you haven’t already bought it, you’re unlikely to be the target audience. Yes, even in early access. Pretty much any Titan Quest variant is going to give you more bang for your buck. If you do have it and haven’t played in a while, I’d recommend waiting a few weeks until the next major patch (0.5) which is still TBD.

I have played a dozen or more games of the genre of ‘you are a creature, you eat to get bigger, in order to eat bigger things’. Maneater is what happens when you expand on that idea and try to make an sort-of-RPG from it. Mileage varies. On sale for like $10, including the DLC.

High level, all of these games suffer from the same type of issues. You start off extremely defensive as you’re very weak, with nearly every corner a type of death. You eventually reach a point where the environment has no real challenges and it snowballs into a sort of ‘god mode’ game. The best games here add new mechanics to add challenge, the less good games add hit point walls.

The core of the game has 2 main streams of effort. First is a bunch of map markers that ask you to attack a landmark, chew some meat things, or open a tunnel. It’s rather free form and simple enough, back to basics from 20 years ago. There are some tunnels that connect locations, so you’re generally rewarded for exploration.

The second stream is the RPG element, where you have mini-quests, mini-bosses, levels, equipment, and stats. Make the numbers go up! This is different than most games, and uses Chris Parnell’s as a sarcastic narrator. There’s a really tough balance with comedy, and if you like Chris Parnell’s sarcasm, then this will work for you. If not, well, not. In my case, I enjoy it.

The combat portion is relatively straightforward. Attack and dodge. In most games, combat takes place on a relatively linear plane. Here, it’s more like Xwing, with full 3D movement, including breaching the water to attack surface dwellers. There are camera issues, and nuances to the lunge attacks on the surface that generate a significant amount of frustration. The ‘target lock’ feature is wonky. The game is relatively easy, the hardest boss battle will remain the controls.

The story itself is over the top without being campy. Thankfully it’s only about a dozen or so hours. Which gets me to the final point.

There’s a soft spot here in terms of price and value. Gone are the days where any game can justify an $80 price tag and truly reach mass appeal, without some extra bits involved. Live Service games sort of work here (though honestly, Roblox + Fortnite absolutely dominate that market). What’s left is this middle ground of games in the $10-$20 range that need to find the right balance of quality and content. Something like Tower Wizard at $5 and taking 6hrs to complete is a good deal. Seance at Blake Manor too. Maneater at $10 is a solid pick. I think there may be some area here to explore further…

Importantly, the Steam Deck is the go-to for nearly every FF game, even the remakes. FF16 is the only one where it doesn’t work as well as it could, more on that later.

To me, the games all seem to fit into eras. Each with a starter entry, and then a capstone. There’s some experimentation within, but you really feel the difference between eras.

Old School

FF1 through FF6 fit here, all of them pixels with turn-based battles. FF1 (the OG, not the remake) has a tone of quirks but works well. Each game along added some new bits to it, some worked (ATB), some didn’t (usage-based skills). FF6 just is at another level though, and frankly set a bar that could not be met, but had to be avoided.

Early 3D Era

FF7 to FFX. FF7 was a crazy experiment, moving to 3D gameplay, limit breaks, and a wild amount of FMV. One-Winged Angel is tattooed in my memory. FFX took all the fun along that path and condensed it to a near-perfect experience, as much as FF6 did before. It’s still my favorite FF game, with near perfect pacing.

The MMO Era

FF11 to FF14. Bookended by actual MMOs, the main concept here is that you are a leader and lose control of the party. FF12 has a sort of hybrid system here, and was more side-content than main content (frankly needing a wiki/guide to see it all) and FF13 was, well I dunno what is was. Divisive for one, auto-played for most in another. For a 40hr game, only about 5 of it is decent.

The Open World Era

FF15 and FF16. Personally, I think FF15 is the worst of all the mainline games released. The story never worked, the gameplay either. Felt like it needed more time in the cooker. FF16 is a very strange game, and aside from the setting, you can’t really see any FF at all here. It’s an action game with no RPG elements, less than God of War. What it does poorly, it leans into (side quest and exposition). What it does exceptionally well (20 minute kaiju battles), it paces out so that they are meaningful. It may also be the easiest of all the FF games as a result.

Remasters + Remakes + Expansions

You should play the remasters of the pixel games (except FF6) as they are better than the OG. FF7 remakes is a nostalgia cake, so your mileage may vary. FFX-2 is a buggy mess that offers very little. But you get it for free with FFX. FFXIII’s 2 extra games are not good and should be avoided.

Forward Looking

It’s no secret that Square Enix’s main source of income is FF14. The good news is that FF16 is a ‘good’ game, not great, and a nice cleanser after the FF15 launch. FF16 is not a Final Fantasy game though, at least not according to 30 years of games. Expedition 33 is more FF! It’s a curious thing to look forward and see where the games do go. I certainly expect large spectacle with crazy boss fights. Some throughline about some monopoly (religion/kingdom/company) being bad and you playing a knight of some kind. I don’t see the game going back to turn-based, though a hybrid option is a possibility. And quite unlikely that we see team-based RPG elements return, though honestly, that would make me quite giddy.

Perhaps, just perhaps, FF is best looked at as an event in the past we can look upon with nostalgia and not try to replicate but simply inspire. FFX is 24 years old now (!!!) Maybe it should just be respected for what it was.

….

Nah. There’s money to be made!! (Oh, that would be quite meta…)

May you live in interesting times. Indeed

I think we’ve all had enough of the “world news” to fill our socks for a couple years. I am certainly trying to avoid the insanity as much as possible, with so-so results. For sure I am desensitized to more than I should, which doesn’t really speak too well of me I suppose. I’ve opted instead to just try to live with as much kindness as I can, and give where I can. I would like to think that speaks better of me.

Physically, this has been a tough year. Work stress has been off the charts, and my lower back seems to continually trigger with sciatica. I wake up with a 4/10 of pain, and it fluctuates throughout the day. Treatment does help, but it feels more like tolerance than progress. I need to be more active – a piece I’ll focus on in the new year.

Mentally, well the lack of posts here I think speaks enough about that. Rough year. And I am damn sure that January is going to be the worst month on record.

Games

A decent amount here actually, mostly in the order played.

• Indiana Jones and the Golden Circle. Way better than I had expected, and certainly better than the last 2 films. I really like the exploration here.
• Pacific Drive. I’ve had this for a while but the latest patches add way more replayability and less punishment to the game. The mechanics are better than average and the story is excellent.
• Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. This is a puzzle game that had great reviews. It’s obtuse, has poor controls, and reminds me of puzzlers from the early 90s. Meh.
• Monster Hunter Wilds. 50 hours here. I enjoyed it.
• Core Keeper. A sort of exploration/survival game with some minor automation. 85 hours here, and absolutely rocks on a Steam Deck.
• Blue Prince. I played up until room 46 and lost all interest. I love puzzle. I love roguelites. I very much dislike their combination here. Having to re-do simple puzzles 40 times is dumb. Looking at you dartboard!
• Outworld Station. A factory builder in space, without belts. I enjoyed the first part of it, up until the 4th zone. Then some serious balance issues popped up. Multiple patches since then though. Interesting mechanics here.
• Clair Obscur. If you haven’t played this, well, I fell sorry for you. There’s a very good reason it swept so many awards.
• Avowed. To me, this is what an open world RPG should feel and play. This would have been my GotY if not for Clair Obscur.
• Warhammer Space Marines 2. I got it really cheap and finished it in a sitting. I’ve followed 40k for a long time and while the setting is interesting, Space Marines are clearly fascists. The story just doubles down on it. Mechanically it’s a solid game, but the through-line is tough to swallow.
• The Crust. A game that tries to mix factory building with exploration (a la Frostpunk). It’s in open beta and is worth the ticket price.
• Two Point Museum. It’s ok.
• The Alters. Hard to describe this game. Exploration, automation, story driven wheel of near-death? It’s a weird game, with failure states you only realize later on. I need to replay this.
• Tales of the Shire. I am disappoint. Unless you get this on a massive sale, pretty much any other cozy game is better. There is so much promise here, but it revolves into 90% fetch quests.
• Strange Antiquities. Puzzle games that focus on inference are a fave of mine, and combined with an occult storyline, this game kicks. Amazing.
• Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Ghost of Tsushima did is better in all regards. The minimap is again full of pointless activities, long-tail grinding for materials, and cut&paste environments. I do like the differing playstyles, but the game is rinse & repeat from the moment you unlock the 2nd character. It looks pretty.
• Hades 2. It improves on Hades in every regard and has amazing replay value. #3 for me for the year.
• BALL x PIT. Breaker + roguelite = amazing. For the price, you’ll get more than your dollar’s worth. Also works great on Steam Deck.
• Rise of the Golden Idol. The story is great. The puzzles increase in difficulty, exponentially so in the DLC. Lots of inference required here, and the characters show up multiple times. Excellent game(s).
• Strange Jigsaws. Remember the Flash era of puzzle games? This is right up there. Very weird. Only $5. I liked it.
• The Seance of Blake Manor. A mix of Blue Prince and Golden Idol. You’re sent to solve a mystery, learn about 20+ characters, discover the nooks of a manor, and experience some neat hallucinations. It’s just the right type of haunting. With a very minor exception, all the puzzles can be solved with ample time. Very solid pick.
• Absolum. Beat em up roguelite. Where BALLxPIT allows you to grind your way to victory, Aboslum requires you to gitgud in order to succeed. My only gripe here is that some enemies cannot be stunned, and at random points you get multiple ones show up making it an exercise in frustration. I consider it a sleeper hit, very very good game.

I think the list is less interesting about what’s on it than what’s not on it. I didn’t play Silksong (I will though!) and didn’t give Death Stranding 2 a shot (yet to play the first). I didn’t get a Switch 2 so nothing there. And zero multiplayer games.

Oh, and aside from Indiana Jones, MH Wilds and AC Shadows, none of the games would be considered AAA. I think that speaks volumes about where the industry is headed.

And there’s still some time left to pick up some more games before the year ends.

My brain works in interesting ways. I tend to gravitate towards correlation and inference quite naturally, which doesn’t always work out. It makes the world this giant spiderweb of interconnected pieces, where pulling on one tiny bit can have effects at seemingly completely randoms spots. Things like climate change impacting well water, which impacts purification, which impacts hockey rinks, which impacts hockey teams being able to play, which means more travel, which means more traffic and more planning, which means a tighter schedule, which means improved meal plans, which means… it can be paralyzing at times. The whole thing is this giant puzzle that’s always moving.

Then you have mystery boxes, which require you to just accept that things go in and things go out, but without causality. Using the connected pieces above, it would be more like going from dry well water straight to scheduling with no real reasons between. I struggle tremendously with letting go of my desire to understand and mystery boxes absolutely fascinate me in their complete breakdown of logic. Put in a chicken, get a thunderstorm. Put in another chicken, get soup. Like what the heck? Under most circumstances the magical box is simply a quick method to gloss over details. In the poorer versions, like say a science fiction serial, mystery boxes become writers crutches. Star Trek’s holodeck is absolutely notorious for this.

Games

Return of the Obra Dinn and Strange Antiquities are good examples of puzzles with inference. You are given contextual clues (e.g. this item turns blue when next to a flame, or this person’s bunkmate was taller) and from that, you need to extrapolate answers. Given the amount of questions present, there’s a validation exercise for each guess, and more clues are discovered as you go. There’s a quiet joy when you make a stretch guess and it opens up a new area to discover. The development challenge is difficult, as you need to create breadcrumbs to a conclusion you’ve already come to. You can’t give the answer, and you can’t give super obtuse clues that conflict with others. The sanity check alone is massive, and frankly harder and harder to do as more and more people know the answer.

I like factory production games because they act as mystery boxes when fully formed. If you do it right, you put in a few items and out pop rocket ships. Often, these games focus on logistic puzzles so that you can optimize the box – logistics mostly about moving things from one place to another.

Factorio vanilla, DSP, and many others in the genre focus on belts/trains to move things around. Foundry’s recent-ish patch for space trading implemented a giant mystery box that negates 90% of the logistics issues.

Factorio Space Age broke this model, or rather evolved from it. The start planet still has logistics issues but by the time you leave, quite a few of them are negated through fleets of robots. Robots have amazing throughput options and absolutely remove a pile of spaghetti design for logistics.

Cerys

Cerys is a mod for Space Age that puts you on a planet that’s a mix of Fulgora (materials generally come from recycling material) and Aquilo (the planet is frozen and needs to be melted in a very linear fashion). I’ve completed the game a few times now, so I’m quite aware of the tools and their applications. A recycling plant is not hard to build, but building logistics between ‘islands’ of thawed areas, or fixed production plants across the planet is challenge for sure. Bots are not an option until the puzzle box is solved.

The good part is that with a set of knowledge coming in, most of these challenges can be sorted out. The less good part is that there are 2 new core mechanics introduced that do not make any sense on the surface – both relating to particles. How you can control, defend, deflect these particles is fundamental to the larger planet puzzle. I was able to infer to a degree how one of these mechanics worked, but it’s also quite RNG based and hard to validate. The second mechanic absolutely eluded me and had zero in-game context that I could find. I still honestly have no idea how you’re supposed to figure it out. That said, once the solution was present it wasn’t terribly difficult to work my way around it.

I’ve yet to complete the planet, and I don’t see any particular benefit long-term to maintaining a presence (aside perhaps Holmium productivity boosts). I also don’t really see how anyone could appreciate this particular puzzle box without first having spent time on Aquilo in a previous playthrough. I figure I have a few sessions to go to close out this mod and then try a new one.

This time of year is usually quite busy, with the return to school and hockey season going into full swing. By the end of the month, I’ll have a grand total of 1 day where I wasn’t in a rink. Thankfully I enjoy it! Still, it takes up a huge chunk of time. The neat side effect is that I’m quite a bit more physically active as a result, which is great for my health. It’s not super for my back mind you, that physio needs to continue so that I can get more than 4 hours of sleep a night…

I did miss out on the launch of Silksong, which depends on your perspective of ‘miss’. After years of waiting, a few weeks or months more doesn’t really change much in terms of expectations. In fact, it’s a larger benefit since some stability/balance patches are going to be deployed before I press the buy button. It’s on the list, and again the Steam Deck provides the near-perfect tool to play games I really enjoy.

Given the extremely sporadic game time, I’ve opted to get super nostalgic. I can remember the Christmas where I received Hero’s Quest (now called Quest for Glory). I’ve owned the anthology from GoG for a long time now, and the improvements to DOSBox are quite noticeable. Not to mention the slew of game patches provided since to address a wide range of bugs.

QFG1 takes only a few hours to get through, and I know I took weeks to get through it all as a kid. It is pure nostalgia. There’s a VGA option for point and click, though I honestly enjoy the very limited text parser option from Sierra.

QFG2 only offers EGA on GOG, but you can find a free VGA version through AGDi. In this one, the VGA version is quite a bit better, if only for the really painful map option present. It is quite a bit more linear than the first one, but it offers a much more interesting playground of things to do. You can see the devs were reaching here and got most of it done.

QFG3 is VGA, point and click, and relatively simple. This model was retro-actively applied to QFG1+2. I wrote my own mouse driver in order to play this game! It is substantially shorter / simpler than prior games and has quite a few bugs in it. The final area is amazing mind you, and quite a bit different than the content that precedes.

QFG4 is a big departure. Everything is voice acted and more cartoony. The combat model here is quite poor, but is entirely offset by the amazing writing. I played this on release but encountered soooooo many bugs I had to shelve it for years. While it has my favorite storyline by miles, the game is a challenge to get through.

QFG5 is, well, it’s a cap on the series. It’s 3D before 3D was a thing. It addressed dozens of plot points from the prior game. It had a ton of interesting lore bits, puzzles, and challenges. I bought it really close to release and played the heck out of it. It was an amazing capstone of 5 games across 9 years. That dev cycle is insane to write out for an RPG series.

It isn’t a stretch to say that the modern RPG has a ton owed to this series. Multiple character types, different solutions to puzzles, stats that go up with use, cross-game saves, dialogue trees, 3D characters…. Do you think games like Mass Effect would be around without this foundation?

Nostalgia is a heck of a thing and really speaks of a golden age of game design where bold ideas were common, whether they stuck or not. Glad GoG has so much to pick from.