I just… it takes so much more out of me to play a game than it does to read. It’s not purely restorative, it’s like baseline for my effortfulness at best.
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Could not be more opposite for me. Reading is so much more deliberate and involved than playing a game; a book consequently has a much higher barrier to overcome for me to invest myself in it.
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I have a cold so I’m finishing Numenara and Rhin came back as a grownup and the writing was still v. obnoxious but I said “sure be in my party” so I would maybe have an excuse to poke @Felix and her Special Abilities Only For Her are twee alliterative garbage and after we walked around for a while and I did everything through chats she went “whelp! I have a sense you don’t need me anymore!” and gave a final cutesie lip-bite and stepped back through a portal WHOOSH
Erritis is ok.
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spoilers
yeah they really spoiled an ok game with this garbage companion huh 
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Yeah, like a game like this seems to generally take 2 or so hours to finish while a book takes me… much longer.
booksdonequick.zone/donate/
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most of these walking sims would be short stories or even flash fics at most, if they were stories, but the things that made Edith Finch work for me was in how it used the video game medium (which is not immediately apparent) and not the actual text (which I thought was shoddy/mediocre in a way that suggested it would appear in McSweeney’s were it sold as a story)
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yo if you ever watched a bad indie film and thought it would be better if you had to click stuff to progress the story, THE BUNKER is for you
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Now that it’s been around a year since I played it, the thing I remember enjoying about Edith Finch was its setting. Most folks who speak positively about it online like to talk up its vignettes, particularly the cannery, but I can admit my reaction to pretty much every vignette was “oh that’s neat I guess”. I liked just trying to make sense of the house, to reconcile its absurdities with the otherwise realistic layout and structure. It was impossible for me not compare it to Gone Home, starting as it did in such a similar way—and the house has that same plausibly lived-in feel, at least initially. That wears off starting when you encounter your first caulked door, and it’s pretty much gone by the half-way point, but while it lasted, I had a good time.
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I think nowadays I’ll pretty much always prefer a story in videogame format as opposed to books. I can relax playing videogames but reading and even watching movies/shows takes more out of me so that I can’t relax as much
I would never have guessed that I would apparently be totally alone in this here. Having to make player input in a game that’s not mechanically satisfying or challenging is increasingly something I don’t want to do at any point during a regular workweek, it’s why I only even tried last guardian over the holidays
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Every time I play Tetris Effect, I intend to look up what a “T-Spin” is afterwards. But then I forget. I finally remembered today, and it turns out that it’s something that looks like it shouldn’t even be possible (at least when done most effectively).
I have another favorite theme now–the one with the fire and ice spheres crashing in the background. I always win or lose right about the time that the music picks up, though (depending on the mode).
As someone who was once in the exact same position, thank you for actually finding and playing this game
NO idea why it made such an impression on me at the time
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You probably don’t care about this but there are cases where you don’t want mechanically interesting controls, like with porn games. You basically want as neutral as possible, so you can, well, jerk off in peace. That’s why visual novel style porn games in Ren’Py are so abundant. You just click on stuff. There are also a lot of RPGMaker porn games that make you use the arrow keys to move around and I find that annoying but I guess a lot of people don’t mind or else they wouldn’t get made and played. I guess this extends to other genres of games as well for people.
Personally I sometimes play XCOM 2 because I want to play something deep with just the mouse and chill out. Sometimes I don’t want to commit to wasd + mouse or Dualshocking
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a strategy game will still engage my optimization brain to a significant degree, if I’m playing it totally absentmindedly it feels like empty time
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I don’t think I’m enjoying Prey.
It’s weird because I’m usually 100% about this kind of game, but it’s constantly stressing me out and making itself inaccessible in ways that are supposed to challenge me but I just find unenjoyable.
Fallout 4 is having the same effect on me too.
Am I just done with AAA games or something?
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I came to believe that most people who should have enjoyed Prey but didn’t bounced off it due to the enemies, particularly the basic mimic – they found it too frustrating to spin around trying to deal with it.
I wished it was scarier; only the Psi-labs really goes into that tone and it eventually dissipates, but otherwise think it’s the best in the genre, easily, since the first Deus Ex.
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I didn’t like either of those and I still love big budget games
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*raises hand