RE: What are you all playing right now?
January 22, 2022 at 3:13 pm
(This post was last modified: January 22, 2022 at 4:16 pm by emjay.)
(January 22, 2022 at 1:11 pm)Angrboda Wrote: ...
I don't get games that one might describe as pastoral, just a loop of repeated, moderately pleasurable activities. I do however love my sims, though. Train sims, truck sims, farming sim. There's just something about them that I can't put my finger on.
I guess for me the lure of games like Stardew Valley, is that you're constantly building a persistent legacy of sorts... your farm, your business... just that sense of slowly and incrementally working towards multiple long and short term goals concurrently. Like I don't know, you're growing your crops but you've also saved up enough to buy a tree sapling, for which the expected return on investment is a much longer term goal... 28 days or whatever to grow the tree, but after that it will give you one fruit per day when it's in season, without needing any maintenance like watering as you do for other crops or whatever... it'll take a while to pay for itself, but you weigh up whether you want to make that investment, and just enjoy working towards it, day by day. Stardew Valley was the first game like this I'd played, and it was so addictive that I found it really hard to disengage even when I wasn't playing, sad as that is; even in my downtime I'd find myself daydreaming about this or another goal in the game, and, as they accumulated, I'd just have to boot up the game, just to get them out of my system, in case I forgot them. So yeah, no other game has had that sort of effect on me.
As for those sorts of sims, I've never really played any... unless you count something like Elite Dangerous or something... a kind of space sim. I think I might one day give the farming sim you've mentioned on steam a go, maybe after this current binge of Astroneer, but I can only usually handle one game at a time ;-). If that's your type of game though, I did come across one game you might find interesting... it's a sailing sim, on Steam, called Sailwind, currently £15.49. I saw a youtube video of it and though it was only in early access (don't know if it still is... probably), it just looked really interesting from the sim point of view. The guy that was playing the game in the video clearly knew about sailing outside of the context of the game, from the way he was speaking, so was using a lot of technical language I'd never even heard of, not being a sailor, but it was clearly all really well represented in the game. So yeah, although I think it would be too complicated for me, if that's your thing, this looks like a really good and immersive sailing sim... it was certainly immersive to watch the guy playing it on youtube... I could have watched it for hours. As far as the early access goes, it's looks like they've concentrated most on the sim part, at the expense of the locations/quests etc in the game, but if the part of this sort of game that you're interested in is strictly the sim part, as in in this case, sailing the boat, taking every minute detail into account like the direction, speed, and presence or absence of wind, the weather etc, which sails are up and down and how far up or down etc, ...if that's what you're interested in, this looks great