Lith's Diary - April

Dear Diary,
I hope you've had a good month! Looking back, mine has been pretty good. I've been getting lots of work done, but also getting lots of good playtime in, and on top of that I've been getting a little better about my social life. Mostly by pure luck? It's a little embarrassing to talk about, but suffice it to say, this month has left me feeling pretty good. I almost feel bad talking about it, like... I worry that maybe you haven't been doing so well, and I don't want to be a jerk and brag or something, you know? If you have been having a hard time, then please accept my warm, cuddly good wishes that things will go better for you from here in every way! I want us to be happy together.

Humm, what to talk about. It's true I've been dipping into a lot of different games this month! Trying to find just the right thing to scratch the itch while I wait for Satisfactory to update. They said the next big patch would be at the end of April, but nope! Got delayed, and now I'm pouting because it's only a great game, instead of an even better game, for another week. Let's see...

I tried Islanders! It's this very chill, minimalistic sorta city building game, but it's almost closer to a puzzle game or tetris, just that you're filling in the space you have with all these randomly shaped buildings, trying to pack them together tightly to maximize the bonuses they all get from each other. It's a pretty nice way to relax and lose an hour or two, my only complaint is that I got a little too caught up in trying to get every building juuuust right instead of just plonking them all down so I can move on to the next map. Pixel perfect stuff like that can be fidgety, but I guess if it was just grid based or something, that might take a lot out of the gameplay.

Fluffy Horde was a weird one. Deal with hordes of killer bunnies on this big side-scrolling map, trying to strategize your way through silly puzzles full of weird memes and references. It definitely has a strange, somewhat ironic sense of humor that caught me off guard a couple times. Lots of struggling to get things done before the bunnies multiply out of control, moving your armies and critical units around, sacrificing people to gain the few seconds you need. Morbid and goofy. But... the gameplay just got kinda frustrating for me after a while, and the humor wasn't enough to carry it for me. Got an hour or two out of it I think.

I was looking for tower defense games and finally tried Steampunk Tower 2. It's... not really the same, but it's not bad? Sort of a weird, hot-swapping thing in a similar vein, with the gameplay centered around controlling a single huge tower with various gun emplacements you can move around to deal with waves of enemies approaching, then returning to base to handle upgrades and such and go back out for more. The localization was really rough on it though, some key concepts felt like they weren't quite named right, and they have a fair amount of "banter" and character chatter between missions that just kinda... fell flat when everyone sounds so odd. It's times I see games like this, that look so nice and have decent gameplay, I kinda wanna just go out there and offer services as a "person that can write clearly in English" or something. I dunno. Still, it was fairly fun, and I got maybe five hours out of it, might go back for more.

And... Windward! I tried this a bit a long time ago, I was excited because it's one of those games that's all "you can fight, but also you can do trading and stuff!" So I like to just get really deep into the trading and mostly ignore the combat. But... when I got back into it? It kinda just turned into "you need to fight a million guys to get the right to do any trading that's worthwhile." It's sort of a semi-multiplayer brawler setup where you control a ship on the rivers of a randomly generated medieval earth, capturing territories from pirates, supporting the settlements there, and expanding your faction's reach. Maybe it would've gone faster with multiple players, but I was really hoping to make the single player experience work, and it was just... frustrating. The map generator had a lot of problems too, sometimes it made sections so tight the NPCs couldn't even path through, cutting off half the map from them. I remember being fairly happy with the game, but coming back to it now, it just seemed disappointing...?

Winds of Trade (I was going for this when I noticed Windward right next to it) has been a bit better so far. It's one of the few games around that really seems to embrace the idea of trading as the primary mechanic, though there's still a fair amount of combat available. You start with one ship, but can expand to control many different ships, sending them from city to city trading resources to profit and help the cities develop their industries. You can set up automated routes, track prices across the whole map, it has a lot of pretty nice features that make it a strong contender in my book.

Which makes it that much more annoying when there are all these little things that are off... They're still developing it, and I think it's better than when I last tried it, but I'm hoping they'll still bring some more fixes in. Information being readily available, but only in awkward, inconvenient ways... The economy feeling "malnourished," but you can't really focus on building it from the ground up when you're in a race against competitors and you'd just be helping them while slowing yourself down... And a weirdly frustrating thing. The name generator is just ridiculous? Like, almost every town has some really long, awkward name that's just a mish-mash of syllables and almost completely impossible to remember. Every time you get a mission, it says something like "we need resources from here to there," and you have to go scroll around the map till you find one name, then the other, and hope you remember that for later. If I could get one mod for the game, it would be one to change the name generation, either to something super generic or at least something memorable. "Pick up soldiers in Butts and transport them to New New New New York" is much more memorable than "Kalnarakchat needs supplies from Yelniferignat."

I feel really petty grumbling about that, but seriously, after three hours working with a map I still have to put way too much mental work just into figuring out what the heck they're talking about when they name a town, or a country. I want to like the game! It's very similar to some older games I enjoyed, but with some burdensome bits stripped out and some helpful/interesting bits added in. It just... needs a lot of the corners sanded off so it's not such a pain for the player to get to the meat of the gameplay, I think.

Well. I ended up grumbling a lot about all these games, but I did have fun trying them all out! Maybe I'm just being tough on them because they're not Satisfactory. After how intense last month was, I'm looking for the next amazing game I can just dive in to, but a lot of games aren't amazing... just good, and full of interesting ideas, and still worth playing.

That's an important part of tempering your expectations with anything, I think. Sometimes you might find something really amazing, and it can skew your whole idea of what's possible, and suddenly make other things seem so drab in comparison. Or, you might even just imagine great things, and be unable to settle for normal, realistic things. Just because they're "normal" doesn't mean they're not good. That can apply to video games, or hobbies, or jobs, or people, or even... having a nice patch in your life recently. Maybe this coming month, things won't come together quite as well, but there's still gonna be good to celebrate in it. It's healthy to embrace the good, and deal with the bad, even when you feel like there's not enough of one and too much of the other.

All of us deserve that chance, right? To be good, even if we're flawed. Same with all these games out here people have poured their hearts into. It's good to engage with things and understand how to improve on them, but also to be happy for what is already there. We can only hope others extend the same kindness.

I know you've given me a lot of chances, Diary. I've had a lot of... problems... and flaws. But you've kept putting up with me, and... I really appreciate that. If I can say so, you haven't always been perfect yourself, but you've done a lot of good, especially for me, and I want you to know that... you're important to me. I'm happy you're here, and I'm grateful that you've chosen to be a part of my life, and of my strange journey. Thank you, Diary. Together, despite all the... strangeness, I know we can pull through.

Thank you.
-Lith