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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • Games of about 10hs from before 2019?

    • King of Dragon Pass: Tribe management game/text adventure with illustrations. Felt it was interesting in both mechanics and vibes
    • Plants vs Zombies: Addictive comedy-themed tower defense
    • Alundra: PS1’s Zelda
    • Gris: Atmospheric 2D puzzle platformer
    • Celeste: Rewarding 2D platformer with nice music
    • The Lion’s Song: Graphic aventure light on gameplay and heavy on story and atmosphere. 4 chapters about early 20th century Austrian artists and scientists with themes like art, gender, identity, memory, society, etc.
    • Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You: You play as a government employee tasked with finding people deemed as terrorists by the gov by scouring their social networks. There’s different ways to play it
    • Papers, Please: Similar to above but as a border control agent
    • The Banner Saga: Tactical RPG bases on viking mythology
    • Rebuild: Gangs of Deadville: Management of a group/colony of customizable survivors in a zombie apocalypse. Web game

    These are more recent but they should require very low specs:

    • Roadwarden: Very well written and immersive text adventure with RPG elements. Low fantasy world, you’re assigned as a roadwarden by a far away nation to a dangerous and sparsely populated wildland.
    • Landnama: Viking tribes settling Iceland. Plays like a well designed board game in video game form. Real time with pause.
    • Citizen Sleeper: Incredible cyberpunk text-heavy adventure with RPG elements and a narrative focused on being humane in a not so humane world with a not quite humane body


  • 1) Hybrid visual novels (ie visual novels with some gameplay element, be it some basic adventure/exploration/mystery mechanics like the Ace Attorney series, RPG or Tactical RPG elements, management, deckbuilding or whatever) that have very good writing (think something like Roadwarden or Citizen Sleeper) and/or a loveable cast of characters (like Ace Attorney).

    2) Sci-fi and/or fantasy books that have good writing (by which I mean not that hollow, mass-produced, repetitive, overly simple YA-style prose —don’t want to offend YA lovers, I’m just tired of it). Bonus points if they have some elements of social criticism, and even more bonus points if they have very compelling worldbuilding and characters. I’m thinking of stuff like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness and Rocannon’s World, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life”, most of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories, Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, Dino Buzzati’s short story “The Seven Messengers”, Ursula Vernon’s webcomic Digger, Winston Rowntree’s webcomic Watching, Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, etc.

    3) Logical puzzle games that have the same quality of atmosphere and setting as Return of the Obra Dinn.

    4) Turn-based videogames (they can be RPGs, roguelites, management games, visual novels, text adventures or whatever else as long as it’s not action-focused, based on reflexes or time-sensitive without pause) that have very strong setting, atmosphere and writing (if they don’t have a traditional story, at least good writing in the occasional dialogue lines). Some preferred settings are:

    • Decadent worlds (like Darkest Dungeon, Dredge, Fallen London, Sunless Sea, Cultist Simulator, Book of Hours, The Shrouded Isle)

    • 18th to 20th century history/alternate history (like The Great Ace Attorney, The Lion’s Song, The Last Door, Amnesia: Rebirth, Return of the Obra Dinn)

    • Sci-fi in general —can be cyberpunk but not necessary— (like Citizen Sleeper, Tacoma, Soma, The Talos Principle, The Red Strings Club, Chrono Trigger, 2064: Read Only Memories, Subnautica, Stellaris)

    • Very current (as in 2020s or close) focused settings (like Unpacking, Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You, one night hot springs, missed messages., What Remains of Edith Finch)

    • Traditional and/or generic fantasy but well written (like Roadwarden, Wildermyth, Final Fantasy Tactics, Legend of Mana, The Banner Saga, Suikoden II, Terranigma, Grandia, Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, Alundra… many of these I played young so their writing might not be as good as I remember)

    • Other historical/alternate history settings previous to 18th century as long as they’re well written (like King of Dragon Pass, Landnama)

    But I’m also open to anything I’m not used to in videogames as long as it has those elements (strong writing, setting, atmosphere), like urban fantasy/new weird/fantastic realism type of stuff like Disco Elysium, whimsical settings a la Undertale/Deltarune or ambiguous mindscapes like in Celeste and Gris.

    5) Mechanically speaking, something that reaches the same heights as Slay the Spire. I don’t know what it is, I’ve played many other deckbuilding roguelites and/or roguelites with a tree-style map chasing that same high. And some were better than others (I guess shout-out to Monster Train, FTL, Pirates Outlaws, Griftlands, Roguebook, Iris and the Giant, Dicey Dungeons, Star Renegades). But none have absorbed me like it did despite it having uninteresting (to me) writing and visuals. Maybe it was just because it was my first with those ideas.

    6) I was exposed to a lot of anime/manga when I was a teen and even if I never feel like I want to watch/read most of them these years, I still have some lingering weakness for some of its tropes and aesthetics when applied to videogames. I’m talking about trainwreck-style games that are awful and strangely compelling at the same time, like Danganronpa and Zero Escape. Or, to speak of one that feels much higher quality while still having some puzzling choices, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. It’s hard to describe this vibe (maybe “anime aesthetics, very ambitious in some ways but messy and still beholden to certain clichés, occasionally managing to be deep but usually just coasting on pseudo-philosophical anime bullshit”) and I really never feel like actually playing these games but once a year or so when there comes a day I just don’t feel like doing anything I don’t mind laying in my bed watching full no-commentary gameplays of these kinds of games. So if you know of something similar to those I’d like to bookmark that for the future.







  • People here are just gonna tell you to leave (I have done so myself) but if you can’t for whatever reason something that can help is an extension like Blue Blocker which automatically blocks (or you can set it to mute) blue check marks as you encounter them. That way you don’t give them money for their horrible baits. While I was at Twitter waiting until the people I followed shared their new socials (sadly most went to BlueSky instead of Mastodon so I lost them anyway) I used Blue Blocker in that manner. You can set exceptions for certain accounts tho I didn’t, it mercilessly muted all checkmarks from my feed and revealed the bare Twitter behind. The result was somewhat like old Twitter at first but eventually it does get kinda slow as most of the valuable accounts become inactive. On the bright side that made leaving so much easier, so if you want to leave but need a motivator there’s one that might help you.







  • These are all hunches. I’ll add my own: he was initially just posturing about buying it but when he was forced to do it he was motivated by many things (his personal dislike of Twitter’s userbase -which was only partly leftist though it was a very vocal and hip even if sometimes unhinged and somewhat puritanical brand of leftism-, what he perceives happened to his daughter, the Saudi interests, his “I’m not owned! I’m not owned!” personality, etc.). Motivated to do what? Well initially it seems to me he wanted to transform it into more of a right-wing Elon cult (and he somewhat succeeded with the right-wing part). But the mass reaction was a destruction of his reputation. Before this he was usually clowned just by leftists but now it’s by a good chunk of the general public. My hunch is that he has started to like more and more the idea that he is “sabotaging Twitter from the inside” as revenge for the aforementioned reasons or just “for the lulz” (it seems he likes to think he does grave things for the lulz, maybe it’s desperation to fit in or cope). Wether this intentional sabotage is something that crossed his mind from the very start or something he picked up from his fans (“he… he can’t be taking these kinds of decisions, right guys? He’s a genius! He must be doing it all on purpose! He wants to tank Twitter”) it does sound like something that mends his ego a bit and also the only move that could maybe help restore his old PR image of brilliant player, real life Tony Stark.






  • It’s somewhat common for me to read in my dreams but I can barely see the text for a second (it is decipherable though): My perspective instantly shifts “inside” the book, or rather the story it’s telling becomes the new focus of my dream and I can visualize it just fine (sometimes I don’t even come back to the previous world, my dream is now about this new story). Same thing if i’m playing a game: for a second I see the frame of the monitor on the borders of my vision but quickly it disappears and all I see is the content of the screen. Sometimes it keeps looking like the game (like, Civ always looks like Civ) and others it becomes more flexible and cinematographic I guess, a new story that can go anywhere.