spoilerAll living things are trapped in “The Cycle”, and no one likes it, they all want to die and be free of the burden of living. They called this “The Big Problem”. To try and find a solution to “The Big Problem”, people* built 3 AI that would constantly be running to try and compute a solution to The Big Problem. This requires a ton of energy, and an ocean’s worth of water to keep them cool. The AIs are generating so much heat that it evaporates oceans worth of water, resulting in periodic violent rainstorms (thus the name of the game). People moved to structures built above the clouds to be safe from the rain. One day, one of the AI finally solved The Big Problem, notified the other AIs that it was solved…and promptly died before sharing it. The remaining two AI (named “Looks to the Moon” and “Five Pebbles”) continue to iterate on solving the problem, but both have all but given up hope. You play as a Slugcat, a species specially evolved by the AI to squeeze through pipes and keep their systems clean. **I said “people”, but I don’t think it’s ever established what planet you’re on or what race of creatures built the AI.*There is a ton of detail I’m skipping…
…but when you start the game, you are merely trying to survive and explore a living ecology full of hostile creatures. The game doesn’t care if you understand any of the lore, it doesn’t care if you “finish” the game, it’s just there to be experienced.
Hah, I had thought, well it’s not quite reincarnation, because you don’t come back as something new, you come back as yourself with the same memories. But I’m just noticing that it does seem like “the Big Problem” is very similar to what [my rudimentary understanding of] the Buddhist quest for transcendence is.
Bestiary entries are vast, almost a book in game format, and most add to lot of worldbuilding even if not needed for the main plot itself.
Also bosses, sidequests, enviromental cues seldom aren't at least hinted by a few NPCs often dozens of hours before they're relevant.
Overall details are often explained when you look in the right corners of the game. Even some weird weather cycles seem to have some logic applied. And in a single case, it felt inspired by a real-world element, one even Mad Max 4 used a cut in the beginning.
And I wonder if the sky-gazing kid in one of the airships that says she saw something in the sky was referring to Deathgaze or the continent from Revenant Wings....
One detail that held to me the strongest is the characters' talking patterns. It feels like dialogues were written in another language and then converted to English. The strongest example I think was the lady that gives the Knight flowers for delivering, which also is added to, iirc, being at least implied she is one of the oldest creatures in Hallownest.
In Disco Elysium the game straight up called me out for apologising so much. It hit me so hard I stopped apologising as much irl. 10/10 game would be ashamed again.
I want to answer Xenogears because of all of its story and storytelling, but the worldbuilding itself is kinda standard, if not for the scope of it. You do end up learning about pretty much everything there is to learn - the world and its history, the characters and what moves them, the politics, the conflicts, the geography, the physics, the religions, the supernatural, the origins of mankind - not to mention a full class on philosophy. And then whatever question you still have left, there’s a book about it in addition to the game.
And you start with a classic amnesiac character in a small village.
yeah, PC here, i didn’t really much games before digital distribution came along, but i was enjoying every demo i got on a cd that came with magazines, now - over 20 years later i have nothing to play
You probably owned 5 games that you personally were actually interested in.
Until 2024 I was still subbed to Amazon Prime. Their Prime Gaming (Shipping and the Twitch Prime sub were the draw I would never pay for Prime Gaming) campaign throws a fuck ton of games at you constantly. A lot of good games too. Keys for GOG/EGS,/their own launcher/some shitty pixel hunting adventure games website.
I also redeem the EGS weekly free game(s) most weeks. I miss a few.
There’s 500 games in my Heroic Games Launcher list combined. I’ve played 2 of them.
Tough thing about being a kid. Lot of free time, no responsibilities, and no idea what you wanna do with it. In a sense anyway. When I was a kid yeah we had fewer choices. But I also had limited experience. Didn’t know what I might like or not.
I see my niece grow up with a similar attitude about movies. “I would not like that.” You can’t know that. So many games, you just don’t know which ones to play. You don’t have the criteria in mind to make an educated guess about what might be a good match for you.
The best part was: this was even in the installer! When setting up your sound card, there was a test button. If it worked, you heard “your sound card works perfectly”. But if you kept pressing it, eventually it would say “enjoying yourself?” And if you kept going after that, in an angry voice, “it doesn’t get any better than this!”
Ah old Blizzard, when even the installers had character.
Pillars of Eternity. I really appreciate that they must have had some Anthropology majors on the team, especially for II, because the worlds feel much more exotic than other RPGs. It shows up just how generic Medieval Fantasy most RPGs are.
The tropical Roparu (?) society with its caste system is particularly interesting. The interaction of the various factions is believable. And of course the pantheon is well though out.
The downside is that they can be clumsy about exposition of the world - especially in the first one, you get these enormous lore-dumps.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne