Today I checked out Little Kitty, Big City, where you’re a kitty that fell down from their home in a high-up apartment and need to climb back up to get home. It’s not quite that easy, of course, you need to do some tasks and run around and do some platforming to get what you need to climb back up.
The main quest is pretty straightforward, but there are of course a million little things to distract a little kitty. Hats and shinies to collect, fellow animals to help out, humans to pester, and nooks and crannies to explore for secrets, most of which are completely optional, but it’s still pretty fun to just run around and Do Stuff. A lot of it is definitely Very Cat, like finding spots to nap in or boxes to sit in.
Overall it’s pretty short and not very difficult, but it’s fun and extremely cute, and a decent way to kill an afternoon.
Okay, calling it a ‘game’ is a bit of a stretch, but I’d gotten back into doing Duolingo lessons for French, and they do have a fair bit of ‘gamification’ via daily ‘quests’, monthly challenge goals, different leagues to rank up in, and a streak counter to keep track of how many days in a row you practice.
What do you gain from any of it? Well…not much, really. The main benefit of the streak is showing it off, as other people in the league can see roughly how long your streak is when they look at the rankings. They then also made it so that maintaining a long streak gives you some extra streak ‘protection’ tokens that let you skip a day and still maintain the streak, which in hindsight is really just a self-perpetuating benefit, keep the streak going so you can keep the streak going…
It’s surprisingly effective though, and it’s nice to have a daily reminder to get your exercises in to maintain the habit, so I kept a streak going for quite a while. Eventually though, as I had less free time, I didn’t want to do the full units, but as a creature of habit I still wanted to keep the streak. So, I started doing the bare minimum, just one quick practice lesson since it only takes a few minutes per day and is still enough to maintain the streak. But, that then became the new habit, and for a couple years now I’ve just been doing one simple practice lesson per day just to keep the streak going, even though it’s been the same lessons repeated over and over. And, y’know, I’ve intended to return to doing the full units, any day now, so I gotta keep that streak going for when that happens…
But, I’m now just going to let my streak expire. And stop with Duolingo entirely, really. Their pivot to “AI-first” just smacks too much of disrespect for their own workers, the work they do, and the quality of linguistics work, so I’m done with them. Maybe I’ll pick up some other service, but honestly, I’m probably not going to find the time.
Today I finally gave Mouthwashing a try, a game about a disaster happening on board a cargo freighter spaceship and how the handful of crew members are dealing with that (badly!) and what led up to that, in non-linear jumping between different points in time.
It’s very much a horror game, as the things that are happening are, um, not great, and the specifics of the plot are probably best left unspoiled. It does a great job of setting up an extremely unsettling atmosphere and delivering the story in that. The one thing I found odd was that towards the end it starts getting very abstract and…metaphorical?…when it had previously been fairly grounded, and I’m not sure I ‘got’ those parts. Still, highly recommended overall.
Next up on the block is Nubby’s Number Factory, which had been getting some buzz among people I know and is a bit of a ‘meme game’ with its deliberate lo-fi and absurdist presentation.
It’s again a drop-balls-onto-pegs game but with the goal of hitting a target score this time, with pegs whose scores increase between rounds based on how far past the target you hit, and you can buy or earn items that have various effects on the game.
it me fr
The challenge then is to try and get items and buffs that will increase your score faster than the target score increases. Your choices here really do matter, since some items work together better than others, so you can strategize, but there’s still a lot of randomness here since you may get offered options that just don’t work well. Where you aim the ball does matter since the first peg you pop often affects a bunch of active buffs or items, but it’s difficult to predict how it will bounce and can often just go straight down the board.
That randomness is ultimately why I think I’m kind of lukewarm on this game. I did eventually ‘break the game’ (quite literally, as shown below) by gathering a good set of items and perks, which were deliberately chosen, but it took a lot of failed runs that really had no chance, as well.
The kazoo was the key to victory. Really.
And, having hit that high mark, I think I’m done with the game. There are various different ‘boss’ modes and challenges that apply variant rules and restrictions, but eh, I’m good. At its cheap price, it was still a decent way to waste an evening.
Continuing on with checking out recently bought games, I gave PegIdle a try, to fill that void left now that I’m not leaving Idle Champions constantly running.
The concept is fairly simple: it’s Peggle, except that once you start upgrading balls, they drop automatically, so you can just leave it running and have it gather gold and points in the background, occasionally dropping in to upgrade stuff and maybe shoot some balls manually. There are a bunch of different ball types, which have to be unlocked with increasing amounts of gold, and they often have different properties (more or less bounciness, splitting apart, etc.), and can be upgraded to give more gold on hitting a gold peg or drop more frequently. There are different types of pegs, some of which grant gold or ‘prestige points’ or temporary buffs, and buckets at the bottom that grant you gold if you land in them.
The tension here seems to be based around how to optimally gain gold. Higher tiers of balls grant way more gold when they hit a gold peg, so it would seem like you would want to focus on using the higher tier balls as much as possible, even disabling the lower tier balls once the difference in gold earned is too great, to prevent them from bringing down your earnings. But, it doesn’t take long before you realize that the real goal is prestige points, because they’re what let you buy permanent upgrades whenever you decide to do a prestige reset and start over, and those upgrades make a huge difference. So really, you want to gain as many prestige points as quickly as possible, by clearing boards as quickly as possible, and to do that you want as many balls active as you can possibly get, even if they’re low-earning ones. Gold only really matters in getting to the point where you can flood the screen with balls and clear stages in only a few seconds, which doesn’t really take that long.
Too Many Balls (🎵 Too Many Balls 🎵)
So, there’s not really as much strategy to it as it first seemed. The other slight disappointment is that it’s not really Peggle, as it lacks that joy of pulling off that really sick high-scoring shot yourself. It’s really more pachinko than Peggle. It probably won’t last too long either; after a couple days I already have a good chunk of the prestige upgrades, and the rest of them don’t really change the formula too much, just increasing the numbers more, so I may not even bother finishing the upgrades. But, you know, that’s fine too, I don’t need another game that’s going to demand my attention Forever. It has its flaws, but it’s cheap and I got some decent fun out of it for those couple of days.
Update: After playing a few more days, I managed to buy all the upgrades and get all the challenges and achievements. Things do shift a bit towards the end of the game since once you have all of the upgrades, the emphasis is now on earning as much gold as possible, and it actually becomes advantageous to take manual control of the drops for a while and focus on the high-scoring balls, if you want to be quick about it.
It felt like I’d just barely finished the previous expedition in No Man’s Sky, but before I knew it, there’s a new patch and a new expedition to go along with it. This time, rather than scramble to get it done at the last minute after almost forgetting about it, as usual, I spent a good chunk of this weekend going through it right away.
This expedition was focused on finding fossils and assembling them into display skeletons. I’m not sure about the scientific veracity of these skeletons considering it lets you mix-and-match whatever pieces you find… Overall the expedition was fairly chill though, with only some light combat required against some guardians of the fossil beds. As usual, I did a bunch of faffing about and completed a scattering of the objectives while prepping, and then blitzed through the remaining ones fairly quickly.
A few objectives were a bit annoying, though: the ‘bonefish’ you had to fish up had unclear requirements and took quite a few casts, and the objectives for finding fossils and excavating dirt felt like their targets were a bit excessive. Doing the rest of the objectives only took those to about halfway to their goals, so a bunch of time at the end was spent just grinding the remainder of those out as busywork.
Making some more progress through the list of games I’ve bought but not played, I spent some time in Atlyss, a lo-fi action RPG where you play as one of various critter races.
I am but a wee creature.
It’s fairly straightforward, clear out monsters from areas, go on quests to collect stuff, delve into semi-random dungeons, level up and get new gear and skills, etc. What’s distinct is that moving around is pretty fun, with a double jump and dash abilities that everyone gets, and you’re going to be doing a lot of that because the pace of combat is fast. Especially in dungeons, where most rooms lock you in until you defeat multiple waves of multiple enemies, and they’re instantly chasing and right on top of you so you’re constantly moving and trying to make space so that you can tell what’s even going on and when you should block and attack.
It might even be a bit too fast-paced for me, as I’m constantly dying in these dungeons and I feel a bit stuck on a current boss, but there’s only a minor penalty for dying at least (having to run back and the current wave of enemies will be healed). Still, it’s pretty cute and it’s still in early access, so I’ll have to revisit it again later to see what’s new.
Yesterday I finished off the Titan expedition in No Man’s Sky. It didn’t really take too long, this was one of the expeditions where you can knock out a bunch of the goals just in the course of regular play, and then it’s a quick sprint to clean up the rest of them and rush through the checkpoints. The main new experiences in this expedition were going really-deep-sea diving, and learning that gas giants kinda suck. I would recommend building your base somewhere that isn’t a constant raging storm…
I only intended to do the expedition, but after finishing it and converting back to a regular game, I wound up playing my regular save for quite a bit longer than expected. I restarted recently, so I’m still pretty early game, and haven’t found somewhere good to set up a base or claimed a freighter yet, and am mainly just running around doing the Artemis quest. But I did find a trade terminal that was selling drop pod locations, so I bought 30 of those and just ran around claiming drop pod upgrades for a while. The stuff I brought back from the expedition had left me short on inventory space, but after getting all those upgrades, I’ve got space to spare in my suit, at least. Now if only it was as easy to get ship inventory upgrades…
I need to start clearing out some of the stuff I bought in the big Steam Xmas sale, so today I played Clickolding. It’s more of an ‘interactive experience’ than a game, where a strange man in a hotel room insists on watching you click a tally counter, occasionally interrupting to dictate how you should click it, other tasks you should do in the room, or to reveal little bits of his personal history and needs, and…yeah, it’s an allegory for sex work. It’s creepy and uncomfortable and goes some unexpected places (it gets a bit metatextual too, though that seems like more of a bonus), but it’s worth experiencing.
I also got around to starting the newest Titan expedition in No Man’s Sky. This one’s mainly about experiencing the new features added in the new world generation, like the gas giant in the system you start out in. I still haven’t left that first system yet because I got hung up on trying to complete the fauna scanning on several moons, but got stymied by rare underwater creatures that I just could not get to show up. It doesn’t help that the gas giant moons tend to have very shallow water, making it harder to get underwater creatures to show up at all.
Steam keeps track of how much time you spend playing a game, and by far the largest one on my list is, uh…
I’ve been ‘playing’ it for a few years now, but Idle Champions is an ‘idle’ game, so very little of that is actual, hands-on playing of it. Most of that occurs early on when you’re just starting out, where the basic gameplay is to select an adventure, set up some party members in a formation, and then keep buying upgrades for them and tweaking things a bit (swapping members in and out, moving them around, clicking ‘ultimate’ attacks) when things start getting more difficult. It actually requires a fair bit of your attention at this point, managing all of this. Eventually you get some ‘familiars’ which can automate tasks for you, such as levelling up party members and clicking on the playfield, and ‘modron cores’ which can automate setting up a formation and restarting the adventure when you hit a certain point. With enough of these combined, the game then basically plays itself automatically, just continually running an adventure over and over again with no intervention required.
But, you might ask, why would you even do so? Well, there is Stuff to earn… Your party’s strength is affected by a lot of things, including the ‘item level’ of the equipment they wear. The item level is raised by either using blacksmithing contracts, which come from chests, or finding duplicate pieces of gear, also from chests. Chests can be bought with ‘gems’, and gems are earned by defeating bosses, which you do by…running an adventure over and over again. Hence, with the familiars and modron cores you can just set it up and let it run in the background and just check in on it every once in a while to buy stuff.
But, there’s other stuff to keep track of as well. A big source of your party’s strength will also come from legendary items, which requires earning dragon scales, which requires you to interrupt your gem farming and run a special adventure once a day for a week for each batch of scales. New heroes get added on a roughly monthly basis, and you have to run a bunch of adventures to unlock them and get them geared up. Special events occur every once in a while which require you to log in once per day for a week to open a special chest, or keep the game running to passively earn some new temporary currency. There is now a daily login to earn a new ‘platinum’ currency which can be used to buy some stuff that would normally require real currency.
All of this kind of begs the obvious question of ‘why’ though, and that’s where the FOMO starts to kick in in subtly interconnected ways. Why would you want to unlock a new hero? Well, new heroes are sometimes essential for the new ‘meta’ to make for a stronger party that can beat the more difficult adventures. Why would you want to log in daily to unlock a special chest? Well, sometimes you can get valuable things like a Potion of Polish from them, and you have to do so at least four times to get the Bonus reward, and you wouldn’t want to miss out on that, right? Why would you want to passively gather a new currency? Well, it’s the easiest way to get pigment buffs which raise your party’s strength significantly… They’ve done a great job of giving you a whole bunch of reasons to log in and play the game regularly, in order to help you…become better at continuing to play the game. There is no final goal to it all, as they’re regularly adding new campaigns and adventures, so you still feel this constant need to prepare.
The problem is that this starts to nibble away more and more bits of your time. You can leave it running in the background 99% of the time, but it still takes a non-zero amount of time to do that dragon scale run, to spend the currencies and buy the upgrades, to unlock that hero, to do the daily chest claim, etc., and if I spend a half hour each day doing these maintenance tasks, that’s a half hour less time for other games or tasks. The interconnectedness makes it difficult to limit your interaction, too. Oh, maybe I’ll just fire it up once a month to get the new hero. Except that I’m going to need chests to equip the hero, so I could just leave it running to farm gems for the chests. But if it’s running anyway, I may as well check the daily login… And before long it’s back to being a time suck again.
So, ultimately, I think saying goodbye to Idle Champions means quitting cold turkey. It wasn’t really a waste of time, but I think for me it’s the only practical way to get off this FOMO ride.
