Khrux

Subnautica is the perfect mesh of several things that work fantastically. It is a good survival game but with it’s upgrade and discovery based exploration limitations, it’s closer to a metroidvania than it is to Minecraft. The thing it does so well is sneak this past you, it’s a mystery driven metroidvania where the downtime is a resource gathering, based building game.

The closest game I can think of of that tried the same mystery metroidvania approach is The Forest, but this feels like one of the many many games from the post Minecraft and DayZ boom that has a certain scrappiness to it that somehow Subnautica absolutely sidesteps, and it’s all from just being a really well made game. The vibrant and often tranquil art style that lends itself to awe inspiring locations, and the level design and overall plot support eachother so well.

That said, I’m not in love with the amount of resources. A 4*8 gridded inventory puts me off a game from a worry of it to getting too grindy, and subnautica is a “I need to build another storeroom” kind of game. With a full survival game like Minecraft, which is endless and about exploration and progress alone, I know my storage will be unweildy and I can forgive it, but I’d have appreciated Subnautica finding a way to require less mindless resource hunting / busywork unless itnwas optional base cosmetics or the like.

My big three are Outer Wilds which at this point barely needs mentioning, Disco Elysium which seems to be getting more famous by the day, and Hollow Knight.

Outer wilds is an exploration game, and if the other comments haven’t been clear, that’s all I’m saying.

Disco Elysium is an unbelievably dense police procedural set in a unique setting, it can also be fantastic to explore without hearing much beforehand but unlike outer wilds, you don’t really need to beat yourself up for looking up the occasional piece of lore.

Hollow Knight is a souls-like metroidvania, so it’s ticking the Sekiro / Dark Souls box well.

I got about 90% through the game with only a rough understanding of the lore before ending up watching video essays about it and I was absolutely blown away. I don’t think the lore is overly difficult to find, and isn’t that complicated, but like FromSoft’s games, it’s not always delivered in a way that you naturally pick it up.

I play a lot of games with the “media literacy” part of my brain firmly switched off, because often games handhold you through the storytelling. With Disco Elysium, you know from the getgo that it’s a pay attention kind of game, but Hollow Knight, it sort of feels like a storyless flash game, and sometimes key lore is delivered in a beautiful set piece or creature design, so I only realised I should have been paying attention when it was too late to catch up.

I got no less enjoyment from it by catching up on the lore later though, these three games are absolutely my top three.

My final bonus suggestion is to bash out all the supergiant games in order, Bastion, Transistor, Pyre and Hades all hit the marks for me to sometimes just stop in awe and let myself get chills, although less tban the three above. I also think Pyre is one of the most overlooked games of all time.

The game is least forgiving in the first few days, after that, it really opens out into people remembering the choices you’ve made in the game. Even if you’ve still been making bad choices, it’s pretty fun from there.

Hey that’s exactly what my rent / wage split was in the UK last year. The only reason anything got better is that minimum wage went up while my rent hasn’t yet.

Maybe I’m going mad but I don’t think I’ve ever found dental floss slippery? I’ve got a feeling I wind it round my fingers but I’m not sure, even so I don’t think it seems too slippery to hold.

I honestly don’t think Lemmy will function well without a way for identical communities across different instances could subscribe to eachother, allowing a single feed of information. This would stop the instances splitting the userbase.

Early Reddit had a subreddit for everything, but most were dormant. However as soon as you posted on it, enough people had it on their front page that you’d get a response. I think Lemmy feels very similar to how Reddit did 10 years ago, except many of the dead communities are totally dead.

I once read a pretty good write up somewhere on Reddit with proof that they were getting reasonably large financial support from the daughter of an oil baron, and it’s unclear if she supports the left or right.

On the other hand, a friend of a friend was arrested at a just stop oil rally in Manchester, UK a few months back, and I know him well enough to absolutely believe he thought he was doing what was best for the world, although I’m unsure if he’d deface anything.

Studded leather, 20 Dex and Int, then something like haste is definitely possible.

Yeah I don’t like Microsoft but like Office, I just run offline pirated version of their main programs. It’s like how I avoid Google for 70% of options but absolutely love Google Maps and Google Translate.

One enormously clear thing at release was that a lot of content and mechanics were half ready. I recon there was a lot of work towards immersive audio before the initial release that’s only finished now.

Also companies that spend years fixing their broken games often receive a lot of praise for their diligence, maybe getting more commendation than if they’d just released a working game.

I definitely doubt the average comic author is pro billionaire. I think having an absurdly rich protagonist is just interesting for plot, not just does it easily justify the funding, but it easily generates a lot of plot hooks.

Growing up, I absolutely loved Peter Parker as just being the average broke kid, but I was never excited by the plot that generated that was largely school drama or conversations in small apartments.

On the other hand, there are plenty of cool things that Bruce Wayne gets to do. Sometimes he blends in with high society functions and you get an almost James Bond style investigation and sometimes you capture that Dracula style recluse skulking in his enormous manor, and both of those are very evocative even before you consider how it funds his heroics.

If I had a button that when pressed would kill the richest person in the world, I’d press it until I physically couldn’t any more. Hopefully the remaining millionaires would have the sense to see what’s happening and spread their wealth more evenly amongst people, and every now and again, I’d press the button a few more times just to keep things from reverting.

Killing a billionaire does nothing but presenting the idea that being among the richest people would result in some regular, omnipotent death would do a lot.

No.

This isn’t my standard instance but I do take a look at it sometimes. I’m definitely very far left leaning, I don’t have a label that clearly fits me but I’m probably close enough to anarcho-communism or syndicalism. I live in the UK so it’s pretty common for my views to fall further left of the USA.

I’m not particularly good at actually adhering to my own views, infact I don’t think I’ve ever done e anything substantial to bringing my ideals into reality. My dream would be for small federated housing / workers co-ops and unions to get a good handle in my area, and then have the stability to grow.

The crucial reason I’m not a tankie is that I actively oppose top down leadership structures, and I’m actually more against authoritarianism than I am against the right, but I feel that in my country, conservatism and authoritarianism are deeply linked, and a bottom up power structure would do more to actively oppose facism and power consolidation than a far left authoritarian regime.

In short, No. My principles may make me a commie, but I’m an anarchist first.

I just always give too much context to my stories, and quickly realise that I’m giving context for context for context and cant remember my point.

My closest friend is very similar here though, and we can have great long conversations that are 20 layers deep of tangents and forgetting our original points. We also sometimes yell ‘pin’ at eachother as a shorthand for ‘lets put a pin in this’ which basically means that at some point we’re trying to remember what we wanted to say at that point because it was fun.

Often when I try to copy other people’s facial expressions, I realise I have no control over my facial muscles if I try to move just the left or right side. It’s absolutely fine if I move both sides at once but I literally can’t even sense the muscle to move it when I try one side, but my friends can. I can wink though, but I used to do it very unnaturally.

Honestly I feel it was way more exciting in concept than execution anyway. Hell, I think it would make a fantastic TTRPG setting, since it’s strongest in premise and has strong ludo-narrative cohesion falling between a narrative game and a wargame.

It’s reasonably safe to Google, it’s about this letter where the FBI encourage Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide, using particularly abusive, dehumanising and degrading language. The content of the letter isn’t necessarily hard to read the if you want to read it, particularly as it didn’t work, but it’s still bad to know that this was an official government plot.

A well roleplayed Marut is great. As a CR 25 construct, it’s going to be enforcing a universal law, such as attempting to stop a world ending threat.

It’s primary aim is normally to planeshift it’s quarry to court, rather than kill them, and may even prefer not to kill those who come between that goal.

Here’s The Monsters Know What They’re Doing’s blog post on them. It really telegraphs how helpless a targeted creature is to them.

Oh man I didn’t actually know about this, it’s enormously fucked up and absolutely unsurprising.

There was the occasion dark environment on old mario kart games that ticked all these boxes and I never had an issue with.