Khrux

Subnautica is the perfect mesh of several things that work fantastically. It is a good survival game but with it’s upgrade and discovery based exploration limitations, it’s closer to a metroidvania than it is to Minecraft. The thing it does so well is sneak this past you, it’s a mystery driven metroidvania where the downtime is a resource gathering, based building game.

The closest game I can think of of that tried the same mystery metroidvania approach is The Forest, but this feels like one of the many many games from the post Minecraft and DayZ boom that has a certain scrappiness to it that somehow Subnautica absolutely sidesteps, and it’s all from just being a really well made game. The vibrant and often tranquil art style that lends itself to awe inspiring locations, and the level design and overall plot support eachother so well.

That said, I’m not in love with the amount of resources. A 4*8 gridded inventory puts me off a game from a worry of it to getting too grindy, and subnautica is a “I need to build another storeroom” kind of game. With a full survival game like Minecraft, which is endless and about exploration and progress alone, I know my storage will be unweildy and I can forgive it, but I’d have appreciated Subnautica finding a way to require less mindless resource hunting / busywork unless itnwas optional base cosmetics or the like.

My big three are Outer Wilds which at this point barely needs mentioning, Disco Elysium which seems to be getting more famous by the day, and Hollow Knight.

Outer wilds is an exploration game, and if the other comments haven’t been clear, that’s all I’m saying.

Disco Elysium is an unbelievably dense police procedural set in a unique setting, it can also be fantastic to explore without hearing much beforehand but unlike outer wilds, you don’t really need to beat yourself up for looking up the occasional piece of lore.

Hollow Knight is a souls-like metroidvania, so it’s ticking the Sekiro / Dark Souls box well.

I got about 90% through the game with only a rough understanding of the lore before ending up watching video essays about it and I was absolutely blown away. I don’t think the lore is overly difficult to find, and isn’t that complicated, but like FromSoft’s games, it’s not always delivered in a way that you naturally pick it up.

I play a lot of games with the “media literacy” part of my brain firmly switched off, because often games handhold you through the storytelling. With Disco Elysium, you know from the getgo that it’s a pay attention kind of game, but Hollow Knight, it sort of feels like a storyless flash game, and sometimes key lore is delivered in a beautiful set piece or creature design, so I only realised I should have been paying attention when it was too late to catch up.

I got no less enjoyment from it by catching up on the lore later though, these three games are absolutely my top three.

My final bonus suggestion is to bash out all the supergiant games in order, Bastion, Transistor, Pyre and Hades all hit the marks for me to sometimes just stop in awe and let myself get chills, although less tban the three above. I also think Pyre is one of the most overlooked games of all time.

The game is least forgiving in the first few days, after that, it really opens out into people remembering the choices you’ve made in the game. Even if you’ve still been making bad choices, it’s pretty fun from there.

Hey that’s exactly what my rent / wage split was in the UK last year. The only reason anything got better is that minimum wage went up while my rent hasn’t yet.

I honestly don’t think Lemmy will function well without a way for identical communities across different instances could subscribe to eachother, allowing a single feed of information. This would stop the instances splitting the userbase.

Early Reddit had a subreddit for everything, but most were dormant. However as soon as you posted on it, enough people had it on their front page that you’d get a response. I think Lemmy feels very similar to how Reddit did 10 years ago, except many of the dead communities are totally dead.

Yeah I don’t like Microsoft but like Office, I just run offline pirated version of their main programs. It’s like how I avoid Google for 70% of options but absolutely love Google Maps and Google Translate.

No.

This isn’t my standard instance but I do take a look at it sometimes. I’m definitely very far left leaning, I don’t have a label that clearly fits me but I’m probably close enough to anarcho-communism or syndicalism. I live in the UK so it’s pretty common for my views to fall further left of the USA.

I’m not particularly good at actually adhering to my own views, infact I don’t think I’ve ever done e anything substantial to bringing my ideals into reality. My dream would be for small federated housing / workers co-ops and unions to get a good handle in my area, and then have the stability to grow.

The crucial reason I’m not a tankie is that I actively oppose top down leadership structures, and I’m actually more against authoritarianism than I am against the right, but I feel that in my country, conservatism and authoritarianism are deeply linked, and a bottom up power structure would do more to actively oppose facism and power consolidation than a far left authoritarian regime.

In short, No. My principles may make me a commie, but I’m an anarchist first.

I just always give too much context to my stories, and quickly realise that I’m giving context for context for context and cant remember my point.

My closest friend is very similar here though, and we can have great long conversations that are 20 layers deep of tangents and forgetting our original points. We also sometimes yell ‘pin’ at eachother as a shorthand for ‘lets put a pin in this’ which basically means that at some point we’re trying to remember what we wanted to say at that point because it was fun.

Often when I try to copy other people’s facial expressions, I realise I have no control over my facial muscles if I try to move just the left or right side. It’s absolutely fine if I move both sides at once but I literally can’t even sense the muscle to move it when I try one side, but my friends can. I can wink though, but I used to do it very unnaturally.

It’s reasonably safe to Google, it’s about this letter where the FBI encourage Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide, using particularly abusive, dehumanising and degrading language. The content of the letter isn’t necessarily hard to read the if you want to read it, particularly as it didn’t work, but it’s still bad to know that this was an official government plot.

Oh man I didn’t actually know about this, it’s enormously fucked up and absolutely unsurprising.

There was the occasion dark environment on old mario kart games that ticked all these boxes and I never had an issue with.

Indie also covers an enormous financial area. People generally group games into AAA, Some nebulous middle ground games that are generally produced by the major studios but aren’t AAA and Indie.

There is a difference between indie games that sell millions of copies vs dozens and this lack of discrepancy makes this complex. I once pirated a game called infernium after seeing a friend play it on switch, then learnt that it’s an absolutely tiny game by a solo developer. I happened to adore the level design and lore of that game so much that I bought it on steam and then bought all of his other games too just to support him.

On the flipside, we refer to a game like Hades as indie. I love supergiant games and have purchased all their titles but I would have felt zero remorse at pirating Hades.

Maybe the only thing that I feel is sad in all of this is that the massive AAA games takes years to be cracked nowadays, which means only indie games are pirateable. I don’t like the unfair dichotomy this creates. There are probably a reasonable amount of people who pirate indie games and buy AAA games for this reason, and that’s bad for industry.

Bold of you to assume I’d ever remember this counting technique. Hell I’m shocked I remember counting my fingers for base 10…

Some people argue that it would be harder to count on your fingers but we could just surgically give everyone more?

There was an edgy but very fun indie game a few years ago (maybe 5-6?) where one player played as a parent running around and childproofing the house while the other played as the baby trying to kill themselves. The game was surprisingly fun, and weirdly putting the logic you’d heard your entire life to keep children safe to die was always quiet funny, from getting forks to plugs to filling the bath etc.

Taking inspiration to make a game in a psyche ward in a jail break / death is victory multiplayer game would probably make for a popular streaming game, although the topic is as horrible as the baby death game, perhaps worse because instead of being in the role of a silly unfortunate baby, you’d be in the role of somebody fully aware and acting with premeditation.

I think the compression has made the lighting feel unnaturally soft. It reminds me of shitty HDR or mid 2010s video game cutscene.

What do you mean? Genuine question, I’m loosely familiar with the the issues with Discord having it’s growing issues with data and advertising but I assumed Nitro was the worst element.

This is my favourite, it’s a little cheesy and fun, but it doesn’t have my biggest issue with the Reddit one which is for some reason acting like it’s a birthday party.

You gotta pretend it’s slipped out and you didn’t wanna make that noise. That’s the killer.