Low-Energy Gaming

Real life’s been kicking me in the teeth lately-I’m adjusting to a new work role/schedule and of course there was the annoying end of Daylight Savings. So my MMO gaming (and writing, and overall mental attitude, and almost everything else) has suffered.

Oddly enough I’ve landed on Path of Exile as a mental tonic, a game which I had previously rejected as uninteresting all the way back in its nearly-perpetual beta. Now I see that it has one very compelling feature: You can play it one-handed.

That probably sounds weird, but if a game can be played with just the mouse, it’s perfect for my super low-energy playing moods. In Path of Exile, I can run around bashing things with a club and only occasionally reach for the keyboard to drink a potion. Meanwhile I can sip my coffee or munch on whatever junk food happens to be nearby, further enhancing my stupor.

PoE is a great game for what it is, although I find the loot kind of annoying. It seems that roughly 95% of it is trash and not even worth picking up, particularly since your inventory space is very limited. So far I haven’t felt any need to buy anything from the cash shop, so it’s a pretty good free-to-play model from what I can tell.

As for more traditional MMOs (sort of), the most complicated one I’ve managed lately is Trove. I figured out how to disable the recently-added “Rally” feature so that random strangers will stop appearing next to me out in the wild when I want to be left alone. (Hold down your Use button on the Rally statue at the beginning and it toggles the feature on and off. Super intuitive, right? Not.)