Abzu (undersea exploration, relatively chill, but I never completed it)
@troyunrau Abzu isn’t an RPG, but I’d still second this recommendation, as it’s very chill to play, has zero combat, and has a lovely story to it. Would also recommend Spirit of the North for the same reason. No dialogue in either, though - the story is very much in the visuals, music, and atmosphere rather than words.
I thought you suggested it because of my username. Even better than you didn’t notice, and have now realised there’s another reason I should play Frog Detective. 🐸
I played the entirety of “Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion”, which was short, fun, and cute. I’m increasingly finding that I lack the stamina and mental headspace for large games, and I’m appreciating the little indie games a lot more. Something about the combination of cute food characters and running around committing petty crimes and ripping up documents just really appealed to me.
Yesterday I started “Earthlock”, which I got a couple of months ago in a giveaway. I’m liking it so far. Has a lot of “Final Fantasy games in the 1990s” vibes which is working for me. There’s more frogs than I expected, which is always a pleasant surprise.
I haven’t played it yet either (waiting for the price to come down, and I’m largely withholding judgement until I’ve played it myself), but my understanding is essentially it’s not a bad game, and if it had been launched 10 years ago, or from a much smaller studio, it wouldn’t have attracted so much criticism. But it’s using what is now a very old engine (and a notoriously buggy one, which I can confirm from having played other games with the same engine) which limited its potential. My feeling is it was a difficult decision either way: do you keep using the engine that the dev team has spent the last decade learning inside and out, or do you switch to something newer with more capabilities but then have the enormous challenge of retraining everyone? I don’t envy that choice.
I’m expecting to enjoy Starfield but not be wowed by it. But that’s fine, because I’m fine with playing games where I go “I enjoyed that” rather than “this changed my life”, and it’s also pretty rare for me to really dislike a game.
But… yeah, definitely sticking with my thinking that I totally understand the guy’s frustration with the way gamers so often think they know more than they do, but I don’t think his public response is very professional.
Yeah, I agree with you there. Sorry if the point wasn’t clear in my post. Like, I do legitimately understand where his frustration is coming from, because I don’t doubt for a minute that he and the rest of the team worked their asses off, and unfortunately there is a tendency for people who know nothing about game dev to think they’re experts in it (you know, the way there is for every subject.) But just because his emotional reaction to the criticism of Starfield is valid, the way he’s behaving is not okay.
And honestly, on our course we’ve had the “you’ve got to have a thick skin in this industry, because you will spend ages making something that your boss or the fans will tell you they don’t like, and you’ve just got to deal with it and fix it” talk three times already. Criticism is tough to hear, but unless what you did was so shit that it got you fired, you take the criticism and you do better next time. Seems like Emil Pagliarulo might have skipped those lessons?
I have mixed feelings here, because on one hand, I actually do see where this guy is coming from. I’m a game design student on a degree course structured around live client briefs and projects for contests (ie, the stuff we make has to work for people outside the university, not just ourselves), and as design lead for the first project of the course, I was fighting with a member of my own team about design decisions throughout the entire project. Dude with zero capacity for empathy spent a considerable amount of energy arguing about how it was a waste of time developing the relationship between the characters in what was explicitly supposed to be a character-driven story. The words “character-driven” were literally in the brief, and right up until the last day he was insisting it was a waste of time focusing on the characters. So I really, really feel the Starfield design lead’s frustration on the “stop arguing about shit you know nothing about” front.
On the other hand, I don’t feel it’s very professional to air this frustration in public. If people don’t like Starfield, then they don’t like it, and the design lead complaining about it on social media isn’t going to change that, nor does it paint Bethesda in a good light. It just makes him look a bit petty, I guess?
I guess it all comes down to whether the product meets expectations. Players are disappointed in Starfield, and even if they don’t know why design decisions were made, it doesn’t change the fact that the game hasn’t achieved what it was meant to achieve. People that spent a lot of money buying it have a right to feel annoyed, and being told “I’m right, you’re wrong” by the design lead isn’t helpful. And if the project does meet expectations, and it’s only a few assholes complaining, then nobody needs to say “I’m right, you’re wrong” because the end results speak for themselves. If Starfield had been a massive, widely-loved success, a few armchair devs saying “you should have done X, Y and Z instead” wouldn’t be taken seriously.
Not many. The obligatory 50% of all mobile games that I played for 5 minutes and went “I hate this”, obviously. But PC games? Hmmm. Probably “Lost Ember”, I guess. What really puzzles me about this is I played “Spirit of the North” and was utterly in love with it, to the point that it’s in my top 5, and “Lost Ember” is very similar in many respects. I ought to have loved it, and I cannot put my finger on what I didn’t like about it. I just didn’t like it.
For me, it’s a combination of “just jump in and wing it” and building on top of working knowledge from previous similar games. But I’m very much a “learning while doing” person, so if I tried to research how to play a game first, it’s not like the knowledge would sink in. I build up a working knowledge by jumping in and trying stuff out, and a lot of knowledge has at least some cross-compatibility between games of the same genre, even if the game mechanics are a bit different. As I play a lot of games with my partner, we’re often both learning a new game at the same time, and you’d be amazed how often we’ll have a conversation that can be summarised as “I’ve discovered how to do X. It’s like Y from game Z, except you do A instead of B.”
When the game allows for it, I always play on the easiest difficulty setting while I’m learning, as that makes the game more forgiving of mistakes. There’s no shame in playing on easy mode, even for serious gamers. :)
I also just realised: if Civ V works with touchscreen controls, then Civ Beyond Earth probably would as well, since it is essentially the same game but with a sci-fi setting. Same developer, same controls, almost identical gameplay mechanics.
I’ll need to double check them on my touchscreen laptop this evening, but 95% sure that both Dorfromantik and Townscaper work well with the touchscreen, and they’re also some of the calmest games in existence. I’ll also check Stardew Valley, which I haven’t played on my laptop, but the Android version is compatible with touchscreen so the Windows version may be too.
Townscaper. I find it so soothing to play because it has no expectations of me and no people. Just lots of lovely, inoffensive buildings that sometimes take unexpected forms. It’s been fun experimenting with different configurations to see if I can find any blocks I haven’t seen yet.
I’m also chipping away at my koi collection in Zen Koi. Another game that does not expect much of me and has no people in it. The Pro edition on Play Pass doesn’t have cooldowns or microtransactions either, so I can just swim around eating things and breeding new colours of fish.
Suffice to say, there’s a theme in the games I’m enjoying right now: “humans not welcome, just let me relax”.