Microblogging Journal through 1/29/2024

Dispatches from @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com:

Saturday 01/27

• 21:57 # Lies of P really annoys me but for some reason I keep playing it. I think just to have definitive proof that it’s not as good as Bloodborne all the way from the beginning to the end. On the plus side, I discovered that Power Toys accomplishes the task of remapping WASD to ESDF a little better than AutoHotKey, for games that don’t allow that, like, for example, Lies of P. (Weirdly you can remap all the keys except the movement keys.)

Sunday 01/28

• 09:57 # Yall crazy gamers convinced me to get Palworld again after I returned it the first time after 10 minutes. I kind of want to return it again. I really don’t get the appeal. I genuinely don’t understand how other gamers can continue to play a game that’s so dull in the first hour.

  • 09:59 # So far I’ve ignored all the instructions, didn’t talk to the first NPC, built a club, and mercilessly killed two Pals in cold blood. I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to do any of that. But I consider it a game development failing when games are so unintuitive that they have to give you a list of instructions to follow, like you’ve just arrived at a new job and need to complete an onboarding process.

  • 10:04 # Then I built a torch and a Palsphere in the middle of the night, captured a sheep, then tried to capture another sheep, but it didn’t work, and the sheep killed me in one shot.

• 11:06 # I tried Enshrouded. Guess what? You’re never going to guess what I think of this new early access survival game. Can you guess? Wait for it. It’s … not that great. It’s okay. It’s mediocre. As so many new games do these days, it plays like a game engine’s sample tutorial project. Thanks, democratization of game development. But I’ll say this, it’s slightly more interesting than Palworld in the first 25 minutes. But it’s certainly not better than ARK, The Forest, or 7 Days to Die. (Yeesh, I’m really jaded about new games. What is it even like to look forward to trying new games with an expectation that it might be good?)

• 16:15 # Hrm I think Lies of P has exceeded my threshold of silliness with this Black Rabbit boss “fight.” Just getting hammered over and over and over again from random directions with no chance to retaliate is definitely my idea of good fun. Boss fights where random chance is your best option for winning is really just great design, I think we can all agree without any controversy whatsoever. It’s great to see the new generation of game designers learning the right lessons from Souls games.