Saturday Bits

Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

09:35 # I tried out Stray Gods, the Role-Playing Musical yesterday. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect: A passion project by some developers, artists, and famous voice actors who sing. Out of the ordinary for a game, and clearly a lot of love went into it, so I like it and recommend it. But on the flip side, the story didn’t really grab me right away (it’s got a teenaged angsty vibe so it’s skewed to a younger demographic), and the songs so far don’t have any memorable hooks. I kind of wish there was a way to just sit back and watch in these kinds of games, without having to stop and think of a narrative choice periodically, or a button to just pick a random choice. Stopping everything to make a decision is kind of immersion-breaking for me. #straygods

10:25 # Fighting a very strong urge to go to the store tomorrow morning instead of this morning, so I can play some games. I think I’m losing this battle. Surely I have enough food around the house I can scrounge up to survive a single day. (I do, which is the exact problem.) #nutrition

12:37 # Another Baldur’s Gate 3 fight on Tactician difficulty where two party members died while the other two ran away to live another day. The biggest advantage of the “run away” strategy (as opposed to the “reload” strategy) is that you don’t lose progress. I don’t like to waste my game-playing time replaying parts of a game I’ve already played, after reloading. The biggest disadvantage is there isn’t a lot of gold in this game and it costs a fair bit of money to get your companions resurrected. But I just realized it costs half as much to hire hirelings, so it’s probably more cost-effective to make a party of hirelings as cannon fodder and leave the story companions in camp. #baldursgate3

13:13 # So howlongtobeat says you can finish the main story of Baldur’s Gate 3 in about 35 hours. Steam says I’ve played 37 hours so far (which probably includes a few hours of idling on menus), and it feels like whatever main story there is has barely even started. #baldursgate3