A while back I wishlisted this game on Steam called Palia. It kind of feels like, Stardew Valley but 3D with MMO elements. There isn’t any combat though. It’s commonly referred to as being a chill and cozy game. This actually came off as kind of appealing in the same way Sky:CotL is appealing. It’s recently been released and I have jumped in to check it out.
The story starts out, with your character, a human, mysteriously appearing in this shrine where you meet the first of several locals in the area. You can tell they are not humans because they are all purple-skinned. Though they all kind of just, look like purple humans. After a bit of talk, it was time to head down to the town to meet more locals and get set up.
It feels a little weird from a plot standpoint. They seem to both consider you, as a human, unique, but also seem to acknowledge that humans keep popping up in this world. Like the plot is at odds with its online world nature.
Anyway, after getting set up with with a basic little plot of land in a little mountain Crater area, it was time to start my life in Palia. It almost feels like they don’t really trust me but hey, I am contained in case they decide I am not useful anymore I guess. The people also provided some starter elements for some of the basics of the gameplay loop. A basic axe for chopping trees, a basic pickaxe for mining, some plots of soil to grow plants in, a simple tent and crafting table.
Like I said, it’s kind of like Stardew Valley. You get land to build on and upgrade, and you work with a variety of townspeople to do little quests.
The starter tent is the most annoying bit here, I am not sure if it’s intentional, but you can’t place crafting equipment in the tent. Which feels like from an aesthetics level, would be the ideal place for it.
The tent didn’t last for long though, after a few quests I gained a house! Or at least, the foundation for a house. Which also lead to needing to work with some more advanced crafting like turning wood into planks and ore into bricks. After collecting the appropriate materials, and waiting 8 hours, I ended up with my first house, which is a little small and boring. But over time it will be soon spruced up a bit I hope.
Anyway, let’s take a little trip down what I’ve been playing since uh… (checks notes) … wow, January. I’m definitely going to forget some things.
Horizon: Zero Dawn
I started this one a while back, then in traditional fashion, got distracted and stopped playing it. I don’t really know why, it’s quite a lot of fun. I got just out of the initial starting zone and to the point where the plot started actually moving along and just sort of, got overwhelmed, I suppose. I often try not to fast travel too much in these sorts of games, because I find you discover more by traveling, and it’s just, more immersive. But sometimes it’s useful. In this game, fast travel is a consumable item, which means I just, never do it.
Yeah, probably a bad mindset.
Notable on this game, i was playing on a controller, which is unusual for me in anything 3D, especially on the PC.
Fortnite
It’s worth mentioning, I am sure I probably played some Fortnite, though, I’m not positive, considering I mostly just idled for XP last season. I have not really bothered with the current greek season. I’m not big on any of the Pass Skins and I’m just, kind of burned out.
Instead of playing real games though, instead, I went back to…
Overwatch
Because I apparently hate myself and can’t game without playing tedious grindy games I hate. Also, there was a sweet Ramen Noodle Bastion skin in this season’s pass. I ended up unlocking it instantly because I had several rounds of “free battlepass tiers” from Amazon Prime stacked up and I used Bing Rewards points to get the pass. I have been playing a lot of, and enjoying Mystery Heroes. Anything else, not so much.
I’ve also really enjoyed the goofy April Fool’s mode “Totally Balanced Overwatch.”
I am not sure if I’ll keep going much longer. It’s getting a bit dull and regular Quickplay is annoying. Also annoying is the locked heroes from seasons I missed, though I guess they are changing that next season and just giving everyone all heroes. I didn’t get to play as Tiny Mauga in the april Fool’s mode, because I don’t have Mauga unlocked.
Lame.
Sky: Children of the Light
I’ve been coasting out the last of the Season of the Nine Colored Deer. I’ve rather enjoyed this season. Next season adds player housing, which sounds like it could be quite fun, but I’m not sure yet. I’ll probably keep going and get the pass, since I have new ways to get currency and hearts. I still feel incredibly candle poor though.
A new year, a new time to try to build new habits. Hah ha ha, yeah right… probably. Anyway, I picked up a slew of new-ish games over the holidays in various sales, and I look forward to forgetting that I wanted to play them over the next few months. Off the top of my head, I picked up, yet to really play, Spider-man Miles Morales, Alan Wake 2 and Alan Wake Remastered, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Horizon Zero Dawn. Plus some cheapies in bundles or randomly, A bunch of Oddworld Games, Need for Speed Payback, Tron 2.0, Karateka. This doesn’t even include the whack of free games from Epic, though of those I only really care about Saints Row, Deathloop, and Guardians of the Galaxy.
I might be a bit slow getting going on these though as I’m doing some work-related training in the evenings 3 nights a week for most of January.
Spider-Man Remastered
I bought this one back at the start of December. I’ve since finished it. I started on some of the DLC, but I’m not really sure I’ll bother doing much more. I really enjoyed the gameplay in this one, but the combat is kind of super repetitious. It’s just the same 3 or 4 enemies in groups but in different outfits depending on the stage of the story.
The game itself is fun, the story is decent, I made the stupid assumption about the end boss not being in the game because, unlike all the other big villains, there wasn’t an explicit achievement. It did a pretty good job of weaving together several unrelated subplots all into one larger narrative. Swinging and running around the city is fun, but it starts to feel a bit slow after a while.
Spider-Man Miles Morales
If I am going to do more of the same Spider-Man, I may as well mix it up, which is why I’ve started on the “Not number 2 but still a sequel” game of Spider-Man Miles Morales. Miles shows up in the first game, and you play as him a few times, as not Spider-man. There is a subplot that sets up Miles gaining his powers and then this game lets you play as him. It’s the same map with a few changes, and the same basic combat with a few new additions, but it’s basically more of the same. I’ve only done one major mission and the game says I am 22% done with the main story, so I guess it’s pretty short compared to the first.
The first isn’t that long either really, it just has a ton of optional mini-missions you can do scattered across the map.
Deathloop
I decided to give Deathloop a quick try, it was a freebie from the holidays. In the 10-15 minutes I played, it kept losing the controls. Repeatedly. I don’t know if it’s something I was doing or if it’s just THAT buggy, but the experience was pretty awful.
Hogwarts Legacy
I played a bit of Hogwarts Legacy again. I really enjoy this game, but it’s taking up space on my drive, and I want to uninstall it, but I need to play up to the last achievement with a Ravenclaw character. It’s really odd just how tedious replaying this is. I am not real sure why it’s like that, but even skipping the cut scenes and rushing, I just don’t want to keep going. I think it took me like 2 hours to do this as Gryphondor and Hufflepuff, but somehow this last run is just so annoying. But I don’t want to reinstall it, I want to finish this and be done.
Fortnite
The game I am not playing, but making progress on. I’m super burnt out on Fortnite, but because I had a screw sub from the last season, I got this season pass. Most of the skins are pretty meh, but it has Solid Snake or will have Solid Snake. A lot of people are going crazy for Peter Griffin, but I don’t care about that at all.
I also have not written about the new Rhythm game or Race game, because both are pretty lame. LEGO is, ok, I’ve gotten a bit better hang of it, but it’s still pretty tedious. The new modes are great for leveling up though. I’ve never leveled so fast in a season ever. In Fortnite LEGO and Fortnite Festival Jam stage, you can load it, and walk away and gain about 5-6 levels a day, for EACH mode. I’m already something like level 165, but I’ve stopped for now until Snake drops. Also, occasionally I kind of need to drop in to catch up on the Weekly quests for those item drops.
It’s like back in Team Fortress 2, when you could idle for hats.
All I wan to add is the pricing on the cosmetics, especially for the new modes, is fucking bonkers nuts. You can buy a Lambo in Fortnite and play their mediocre Mark Kart clone, or for the same price you could buy Forza Horizon 4 (on sale), and get infinite Lambos and a real racing experience on a large, open-world map. The music tracks are like 3x the price of buying the track itself in MP3, and the game mode needs some tweaks to make it playable (lanes should be different colors).
Sky: Children of the Light
I’ve shifted into a weird phase with Sky. It’s brought on by the Steam version being available. I’ve now shifted to alts and mechanical farming mode. I’ve got like 5 or 6 total accounts now, one being my main account. I spend a short bit each day, generally in the morning when I would have been eating breakfast (which I am not at the moment, but that’s for a BI post later), where I’ll log into each account, send my main a Heart, and farm out 3-4 candles, to replace the candles I’ve spent on the heart. Two of these accounts have a pile of reserve candles now because the season ended, so if I am feeling time crunched, I’ll just eat into those.
Hearts are one of several in-game currencies. The only way to get them is to be sent one from a friend, at the cost of 3 candles, once per day, or to gather bits of light sent from friends, which I think takes like 60 bits. Getting these normally, is a pain, even with a lot of friends, because half the time, they don’t send you anything even when you send it to them, because who wants to spend their candles on strangers? You can only get like 20-25 candles per day, and Candles are the main currency.
Anyway, I did some rough math, to complete just the main tree, none of the Traveling Spirits trees, I need like 1000+ hearts. Even with 4-5 accounts feeding me hearts daily, that’s 200 days. You start throwing in events and Traveling Sprits, it’s easily a year of farming.
I will probably give up before I get there, but it’s a little nuts. Granted, the bulk of this is the handful of Ultimate Capes, which tend to run 100-200 Hearts each.
I may look into automating the candle and heart farming with some automation tools later, so it just sort of, happens. It would be pretty easy to use some sort of input macro tools to log in, run to a handful of regular candle sources, and send the Hearts.
Part of this exercise in creating accounts also meant running through the game some to unlock areas. Twice now, I’ve done a no cape run, once as a test, and once recorded, which can be viewed in it’s entirety below.
Another day, another time I remeber I was going to post more often about gaming habits. Maybe one day I will start posting about Toy habits too. for now, I’ll stick to games. Let’s look at the pseudo staples.
Fortnite
Oh Fortnite, how I love to hate thee. The whole of the OG Season has come and gone since my last post, which is kind of sad, I didn’t realize it had been that long. Granted, it was a shortened season. I went back to my “trying to wind down” strategy on the Battle Pass, If I finished it before the season ended, I would buy in, since you get more V-bucks back than it costs. And I did manage to make it to level 50 something. Weirdly, after the end of the season, I was awarded the last two bonus styles that I had not earned. So that was cool, I guess. The Mix-up skins really didn’t interest me beyond sort of the customizable one.
The season itself was interesting, but it kind of sucks that the already mostly non-existent lore of Fortnite has basically just, completely vanished. There was some sort of build-up in Chapter 4 about a time machine, then suddenly we are back on a modified “OG” map. Except it was like, Ch1 S5 or something, so not even the original original map. I have no nostalgia like many folks for this early map, but the map was ok-ish. Kind of too much wide open spaces for my liking. Plus I like a lot of the newer mechanics and gimmicks.
But now things have moved on to Chapter 5, and I’m kind of torn, because, the pass skins seem kind of neat, but I am just kind of, tired of playing again. Plus they have added three new modes, each with their own ball of FOMO and grind. The game doesn’t respect my time, so I have no interest in playing it anymore. I’ll probably try to write up some thoughts on the new modes, so far I have just done the LEGO mode. They are all kind of neat, but I’m just, not really feeling it.
Sky: Children of the Light
The best part of the PC version is that it’s much easier to manage a few alts to get hearts. Hearts are a PAIN to get, and you can’t even buy them if you wanted to. Plus there was a “Double Hearts” event for Heart gifts, so I managed to buy several of the heart currency items. Which was cool, for a bit. Then the Fireworks event going on gave out a budget version of the Heart currency Fireworks staff. And a traveling spirit came along, offering a much nicer black-colored cape, versus the Heart currency black cape. So in the end it was a bit fruitless, but at least I am bit closer to completing the trees.
Otherwise, it’s just been the normal stuff, though the new Aviary home area seems like it could be pretty nice. It is much larger and more robust for features as a central hub than the old bare-bones island.
Spider-man
Black Friday week, Fanatical was doing their “Better than Steam Sales” sales, plus coupons and such. I bought a couple of games, though so far I have only been playing through Spider-Man Remastered. I’m maybe, 60-70% through the main game. I have not done any of the DLC but I can’t imagine the DLC is that complex. It’s been a lot of fun, though combat is starting to get a bit repetitive. Traveling around the city is a little repetitive as well, though at least I can fast-travel if needed.
The Taskmaster Drone missions are “kind of bull shit”. But that’s just recent frustrations talking. I may have to look into getting the Miles Morales game around the holidays if there is another blowout sale moment again.
Professor Layton and the Curious Village
Speaking of Black Friday deals, Google was doing $!/month for 6 months or something on the Play Pass thing. I’ve been considering subscribing to it anyway at regular price, so this is a good way to test it out. The Layton ports were all part of that deal, so I have been playing through the first one again. It’s kind of nice that I don’t really remember the puzzles, so they are, for the most part, fresh and new. The port seems to work pretty well, though considering it was on the touch-screen-based Nintendo DS, that makes sense that it would work.
Fortnite is launching several new game modes with the advent of Chapter 5. The impression I’ve gotten is that these are supposed to be more or less permanent fixtures like Battle Royale and Save the World. The first of which to drop was LEGO Fortnite. This one kind of feels like the largest one because it includes LEGO Mini figure versions of many many skins and completely new gameplay in large worlds. Not all of the skins have LEGO versions, but they seem to plan to add them all over time. If you already own a particular skin, then you get the LEGO version of that skin, usable in the LEGO mode.
LEGO Fortnite isn’t just “Battle Royale with LEGO skins”. I’ve seen it described as being “Minecraft but it’s LEGO”. From what I’ve played, it seems more like a LEGO version of the popular Viking survival game Valheim. Honestly, aside from the occasional sound effects, nothing much about it even feels like Fortnite at all, which is kind of weird. Even the landscaping and trees, which use a non-LEGO style don’t really feel like Fortnite exactly. I would really love to know some of the juicy business details behind whatever made this happen because it really feels like LEGO could have just made a stand-alone game. I get why EPIC wanted this added, they are trying to make Fortnite into their Metaverse play, and much more than just “Battle Royale”.
So, I know there are quite a few of these “survival sandbox” sort of games, but most of my experience is with Minecraft and Valheim, so those are what I have to compare things to here. Like Minecraft, you can create a world that is either creative or survival. Like Minecraft, in Creative you get access to all the parts and just get to build as free as you want, in Survival, you have to forage for everything. The survival part feels a lot more like Valheim. The resources are much more limited than Minecraft, and it’s more about actual foraging than digging up every block on the map. Which is why it feels like Valheim, with its central village base that you explore out of, and it’s more realistic gathering methods.
Everything centers around upgrading your village, which lets you gather more and more villagers, which are just NPC LEGO versions of popular Fortnite characters. The whole gimmick is a little hazy. To get a villager to stay, they seem to require you give them a bed, which is simple enough, but also that your village be a certain level. They will show up and gather around your central square statue until you officially recruit them. Even when not recruited, they pretty much just act like every other NPC though, defending the village and hanging around the area not doing much.
You can give them jobs to gather resources, but that doesn’t seem to actually DO anything from what I can tell. I have no idea where the resources go, if anywhere, and when you “ask about their job”, they just answer that they just started and have not done anything yet. However, when you assign it, they say they will be done in one day cycle.
It’s also clear and not clear how to upgrade your base. There are clear-cut needs, like a certain number of stones or wood, but also a vague, “Improve your village”. Which I think it related to how much you have built within the little circle area around the central post.
Like many of these games, there is a day/night cycle. Mobs are not limited to only nighttime, but there are MORE mobs at night. And this kind of brings up my first gripe with this game mode. You are REDICULOUSLY WEAK. There does seem to be a way to craft more health, I have yet to unlock a way to craft armor or better weapons, if there even is one. You have three health hearts, which can tick away in quarter increments, but for things like Wolves, they hit very hard for almost half your health, and for the skeletons at night, it’s easy to rapidly become overwhelmed, as they move much faster than you do. The balance here just feels, way off.
The skeletons also have a pretty huge aggro range, which means they will start swarming your village regularly. Thankfully, they don’t seem to really damage anything and the NPCs seem to be indestructible so they can kill the skeletons easily. Also, when you die, you will just respawn in your village, so you can quickly recover your lost loot. I have tried spreading campfires all over to light the area, but it doesn’t seem to really help. Also, campfires seem to be the only real way to make light. You can toss down torches, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to place them like in Minecraft. I crafted some candles around but they don’t really seem to DO anything.
Since we are on Campfires, it’s probably worth mentioning the weird temperature mechanic of the game. I’m sure there is a way to become too hot, but when it rains, you can become cold, which is bad. The game tells you this, it’s basically, “Get to shelter.” Standing next to a campfire does not work. You would think it would, but it does not keep you warm in the rain. It also does not heal you like in Fortnite BR either, it just provides light. You also can’t build or interact with anything in the rain. This all is a bit annoying because the best solution is to build a giant roof over your entire village, which feels a bit, not very village-like.
Between the coldness and the mobs being overpowered, you will often spend many nights just standing around waiting. Which is boring. In theory, you could use that time crafting things, but the game is very resource-stingy. You could build, but that also requires resources. And going out to the dark edges of the village to build, means probably aggroing in 10 skeletons.
The lack of resources also really adds to the tediousness of it all. I mean, sure, the idea is to get you out into the world, but then you run into another issue. Inventory management is absolutely atrocious. Your 24-slot backpack fills very quickly with things of dubious usefulness. Ok, sure, you can just dump stuff. Maybe you want to keep things, well, there are chests for this. Small chests with 8 slots in them. So you’re probably going to need a room full of chests. Chests themselves are kind of costly to build though, since resources are hard to get, making chests can feel costly. Also working against you, tools break very quickly, so you will be burning resources making fresh axes and picks and swords.
But it’s a survival game, those are more just complaints about the game having gameplay, so I can accept them. But managing all of this is even worse. items don’t automatically group and stack, for example. They stack to stacks of 30 or so. Say your chest has 4 of an item, you “deposit all” on a stack of 5. It now takes up two slots. You can manually stack them, but the entire point of quick keyboard shortcuts here is not to have to hassle with manual sorting. That 5 stack should drop into that 4 stack and make a 9 pile on its own. This feels nitpicky, but when you constantly have to do it, it gets old, very fast.
Exploring itself doesn’t feel very rewarding either. The main driver is gathering wood or rock, which is a constant need. But sometimes there are special encounters. you might find a ruined building or a small pack of bandits, or these little glowing butterflies that lead you to a chest. The rewards are almost never good though. Often just berries you can find anywhere.
I should probably mention the game servers/worlds themselves. Like most of these games, the map is procedurally generated. I have not explored out to the edges, but they may be infinite, I am not sure on that one yet. You can invite other players to join you as well, which is a popular aspect of these sorts of games. According to the game, you can hand out keys to a limited number of people to allow them to play without your presence, otherwise, the world ends when you leave. There also isn’t any additional cost to running a world/server, which is a bit surprising considering Minecraft has things like Realms that you can pay for, and even running a game outside of that means a host of some kind and a cost. Then again, they also host all of those creative mode maps as well. “Free Hosting” is kind of Fortnite’s gimmick I guess.
I feel like a lot of my complaints are about how this survival game expects me to survive. And to some extent they are, but the real underlying complaint is balance. The game world is all cutesy and LEGO, but also it’s hard and restrictive on what it gives you. The harsh survival part of these games is supposed to be at the higher-end areas, or when you explore out deep into the world, not, literally while you are in your own home base.
The game just sort of, feels at odds with itself. It’s stingy on resources to encourage exploring, but the enemies are very tough so you never feel confident enough to go on a long trip anywhere. There are bonuses and special chests around, but they never give worthwhile loot. I mentioned Valheim, this is all part of why I could never really get into Valheim, it all just felt so egregiously annoying for the sake of annoyingness.
