I was playing Space Station 13 again today, and if you're a ghost in that game, you can choose to spawn as a non-crewmember somewhere in a predetermined location, like as a minion at an Evil Base, or a researcher waking up in an abandoned station, or, as I decided to go this round, a random poor sod stranded on Lavaland, the place where Miners go to dig up incredibly dangerous stuff and die horrible deaths very early into the round to the fire, the ash storms, the animals, the "Animals", the ANIMALS, or the simple lack of oxygen and thin atmosphere.
I really, really enjoyed the challenge of surviving on Lavaland with literally nothing but the bare minimum necessities required to grow some mushrooms and not asphixiate instantly. I would listen in on what was going on in the Station over a radio headset a Visitor kindly gifted to me, and no matter how chaotic it got, I was still here, pottering around, hoeing my mushroom patches, convincing certain weeds to grow so I could get my hands on wood, then using said wood to build nice wooden walls and furniture around my cave, then needing to steal an oxygen tank from the Station's mining outpost because a miner found my burrow by accident and the Burrow lost most of its air before the hole was patched up... I just loved every moment of it. The best bit was that you're given a guitar, and you can play actual music on it. Although I wasn't able to play it over the radio and start a pirate radio station on Lavaland due to the game not supporting that, I was able to spend most of my time there working to the tune of the Dwarf Fortress theme, or In The Pines.
I just got... joy, genuine joy, from just... existing, off in the corner, while the world did its own thing. Subsisting on what I had, and learning a lot more about the game in the process, about its crafting systems, about very obscure methods of making things without all the high-tech apparatus on the regular station, about how the game's farming mechanics work... It's an experience, a type of experience, that I always get buried in, whenever I engage with it. It's why I never finish games of Rimworld, because I'm secretly only in it for the period where I'm just playing as three subsistence farmers becoming better friends with one another and surviving a harsh world, as opposed to the late game of Rimworld, where you are running a huge sprawling settlement of as many as 1- people! I dunno, I guess it just loses a bit of the magic when the farming and basic survival aspects of a game disappear beneath power creep. I think I just explained exactly what my problems are with a significant number of games in just one or two sentences... maybe I should finally get around to playing Unreal World?
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Topic: [MILK] There were 12 eggs here what did you do with them? (Happy thread?!) (Read 14650845 times)