I played the Unhinged dating sim based on a TV show Too Hot to Handle and chronicled some of that here.
Into the Breach probably works pretty well on a phone
Desta is actually pretty interesting mechanically, although the writing is a little heavy handed. Probably worth playing for an hour or three until you’ve had your fill.
Finished Platform 8. I think it’s more effective as a horror game since you have to contend with the anomalies directly, but I miss the subtlety of The Exit 8. Platform 8 has hard resets/game overs if you screw up, and you’ll know when you do - there was a little something more to seeing the counter reset back to zero in The Exit 8, because it meant there was absolutely something there that you overlooked.
Anyway! Neat game. The “true ending” made me laugh.
I’ve started playing something called Tale of Immortal lately. It’s basically a Chinese immortal cultivation simulator with a randomly generated grid-based world and sort of twin stick bullet hell-ish combat. I think you basically have until the end of your lifespan to either complete the main quest or achieve the highest level of immortality.
It sort of feels like I need a degree in Taoist philosophy to fully understand what’s going on in this game. At the moment I think I have hit the last Qi Refining Bottleneck and need to find different elemental Qi to breakthrough to Qi Foundation. There’s a tonne of esoteric stats like Feng Shui (I think this is for discovering events and Qi Cultivation points on the world map) and ‘Finger’.
Sometimes random events trigger while travelling the map or at the end of month ‘World is evolving’ loading screen appears. Once I had a woman come to me asking for advice on her cultivation, but most of the options were untranslated so I just told her to use ‘Finger’ and she seemed happy with that.
During character creation you have to pick from a bunch of ‘Destinies’, but I had no idea what was good so I went with Business Wizard. Apparently my character is an annoying busybody who mostly likes gossiping about people and talking about how demons are much cooler than virtuous do-gooders, and as a result most people I meet seem to hate her.
I got involved in a sect tryout and lost in the first round, but because there were only 4 people who turned up I got accepted into the sect by default and everyone congratulated me on my impressive performance. Immediately after, some random woman I’d never seen asked to become my sworn sister so I accepted. I think they secretly hate each other though? Whenever I see her in person, her relationship level is 3 hearts, but on the relationship screen it’s 1.5 hatred icons. When she came up as a conversation topic my character was like “Hey do you know Pi Rongli? She’s a filthy SOB and you should keep away from her”.
The game sort of gives me Daggerfall vibes, I think both games rely pretty heavily on the player’s imagination lest they see beyond the facade through to the underlying spreadsheets. Also this game is pretty buggy, there’s at least one boss monster type that seems to softlock the game every time I kill it and it got stuck while saving one time which was a bit scary.
Enjoying it quite a bit for the time being though, interested to see where it goes.
I had my eye on that but have been dissuaded by the translation issues.
You may want to check out Amazing Cultivation Simulator later if you’d like to explore the cultivation theme more with something with a better translation. I believe that game is more like Dwarf Fortress.
Yeah, the translation is a bit iffy, particularly with truncated menu names. Took me a while to realise that ‘Men’ on the pre-combat screen wasn’t something to do with allies but just short for Main Menu
Amazing Cultivation Simulatior looks bonkers. I remember seeing a video showing how if your yin yang swings toward feminine, you will change gender, causing your phallus to drop off which can be picked up, sold and regenerated repeatedly, basically giving you an infinite source of income?
this is how the girlies got by before coding was invented
(Isles of Sea and Sky)
I’m at this point in the game right now. I just revisited every spot I have access to and every one seems to be blocked by one of those things that I need the right “key” to get through. I do know the location of one of those keys, and it’s possible that the puzzle in that location can be solved, but if it can I don’t know how and it’s kind of frustrating not being sure that I’m not just wasting my time trying to figure it out in my current state.
The room in question is the one with the green key, with those blocks that (it took me a while to notice) retain their positions when you undo a step. I’m guessing there’s a way to do it because nothing else I can see in the world looks possible at all.
I’ve played a lot of this game and while I do like it I think it’s pretty weak generally and it’s a problem the game functionally can’t overcome. Let me explain.
Xianxia is an extremely MMO-pilled genre in my reading, it’s basically all about power-levels and grinding and gamified social relationships, at least in the modern age (apparently in older media it’s more akin to like, wacky cartoon fantasy, which seems more fun). Parallel to isekai, basically. There’s tons of light novels / “webtoons” that follow this formula online that people I know into xianxia have recc’d me and I’ve skimmed and bounced off of.
Where wuxia - the genre’s direct forebear - is often about “lowly” characters like peasants and monks training to become strong and fighting for justice, xianxia is the inverse; you are destined by Heaven for greatness by virtue of your genetics and/or fate, and it’s just figuring out the right pills you need to swallow and people you need to suck up to in order to achieve this godly ambition. You’re still “fighting for justice”, but now instead of justice being protection of the weak, cleverness in the face of a powerful antagonist, or whatever, it’s maintaining the divinely-mandated social order. I find it… ideologically distasteful. Self-justification for selfishness, greed, and oppression in the name of eugenics and wealth. Gross.
For Tale of Immortal, this means that being “more powerful” than someone else literally just means you stomp them every single time in battle. There’s not really clever-type heroes in the genre, at least as a rule, because then that kills the power fantasy of "I trained and unlocked the immortal potential of my superior bloodline. The absolute widest gap you can fight someone is maybe from like Low to Mid in the same ascension tier, or Mid to High. God forbid someone an ascension tier above you decides to kick your ass, because you WILL lose and then the game will randomly decide if they kill you or not. Fun!
The social dynamics of the game are mostly about extremely powerful people who can kill you in one hit bullying the shit out of you. The mechanical dynamics are about roaming the map effortlessly wasting simplistic enemies with an extremely limited skill pool with dense, borderline meaningless diablo itemization. As wide as a lake and as deep as a wading pool is the way I would describe it. The moment you want to get deeper into some system or another - socializing with your peers, buildcrafting synergies - you realize that actually there’s not all that much to systems that evoke but don’t deliver depth.
The one aspect I do quite like though is the sects. Diving into them evolves the game into a sort of RTS/RPG hybrid where doing quests accomplishes objectives that power up your subordinates and that’s kinda neat. Still pretty shallow in reality, but at least it actively gives you things to do.
I’d classify it in my personal headspace as a “depression grinder” in the same vein but worse quality than Diablo or an open-world icon lawnmower game. It’s serviceable in that respect, but ultimately kinda bad.
does it have dual cultivation, the ultimate sign of what kind of story you are
Yes. And you can have kids.
Yeah, fair call on the game and cultivation stuff in general. I could sort of tell going in that it’s basically ‘Level Grinding - The Game’ with a fancy veneer.
The divine social order / eugenics stuff is pretty icky. I kind of find it funny though how generally in these stories, and in this game in particular, the cultivators are all basically petulant eternal teenagers getting into petty disputes. I think imagining this game like it’s ancient Chinese Melrose Place makes it more amusing, but with the limitations of the dialogue system it takes a fair amount of imagination for it to work.
I have had a similar experience trying to watch a few of these when Youtube recc’d them. They all seem to start the same way: lore dump and then immediately go into a long epic battle between two max level cultivators and never really slows down to get you up to speed. Jade Dynasty was the only one I really got into because it starts out with just some peasant children having a mock battle, so the characters were a bit more relatable.
Lol, it took me a while to notice you can only do that with the opposite sex, and then I was like “Oh no, what have I been doing with all these random guys approaching me out in the woods”.
And what are all those solitary cultivators doing?
I guess it also explains why it’s so hard to make a female character who doesn’t look like a massively stacked sex goddess.
the ttrpg weapons of the gods has a whole chapter about making lgbt cultivation work
(reset the “days since weapons of the gods was mentioned on sb” counter)
Quick Nine Sols update: This game is an instant classic. It’s grabbed me so hard; I’ve been playing it all weekend. So far it’s not doing anything revolutionary, but it’s much greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a particularly well-tuned 2D soulslike with an original and extremely compelling story and aesthetic. I don’t know how far in I am (I would guess like 35%?), but it’s already quite thematically rich. From what I can tell so far, it’s essentially about a guy who was a crucial member of the leadership of an ideologically committed vanguard party that took power and eventually became corrupted. He was betrayed by the party and is now coming back to set things right… violently. You spend the game traveling through various enormous clockwork systems that you slowly realize all connect together to commit some pretty nasty atrocities. Lots of philosophical stuff about whether or not science and technology is a neutral tool that can be wielded for good or ill, or whether certain types of progress are best sealed away.
The writing is great and all of the characters are interesting. You get yourself a little Majula where they all hang out and you can have fun little scenes with them. There’s a gross conspiracy theorist guy who eats any poison he can find as a hobby, and he becomes your drinking buddy. 10/10.
i like shadow dancer arcade version too. i think it’s just as good as shinobi 1987 personally. i dont really have a series ranking or anything tho. it’s a pretty good series all around… still hold a lot of affection for shinobi 2k2 too
I’m not very far in, but one thing I forgot to mention among my initial impressions was that I immediately wondered whether the story was doing some kind of Hard to Be a God thing, but with some power already exploiting the provincial inhabitants by creating a religion using technology that they see as divine.
I used to say shadow dancer was better cuz the art is by a woman and women are better at ninjas than guys but I don’t think on those terms anymore BUT I KINDA DO WITH NINJAS
(Isles of Sea and Sky)
Talk about missing the obvious. It was in fact this room that I needed to complete next and it wasn’t even that hard.
sometimes my brain goes “ah that makes sense” about something that doesnt because i dont think about it, i just kinda accept it as fact for a second before i realize i have no idea what im talking about.
this is why i read this and thought to myself “ah, now it makes sense why theres a dog in the game that turns into a puppy when it gets hurt, because a woman did the art for it”
In Isles of Sea and Sky I think I made about as much progress on the fourth main isle as I am gonna about now (if the pattern holds there is some item that will improve access here but while I’ve seen an item hidden behind an unusual lock and two or three jars I can’t make heads or tails as to what to do about them (and I have a bigger picture theory about the four main isles that I gotta take a bit of a wait and see with)) so I figured since that big door is now open I should go check it out.
I got one room in (I went to the left) and I literaly have no idea how to even approach it >_>
