Lith's Diary - June (Patreon)

Dear Diary,
Okay, this month I'm just gonna be a total nerd, alright? I mean like, more than usual. I was already thinking I'd tell you about a couple games I've played, then I skimmed last month's diary and remembered I said I'd talk about another game, and also I saw this anime that was pretty charming. So uh! I think I'm doing a better job of enjoying my free time. I mentioned that last time too. I think I'm getting a little better about getting my work done in healthy amounts, but still working on it some.

So last time I mentioned Prey. I've finished it since then, which is itself a big endorsement. I tend to try a lot of different games, but lose interest partway through, and Prey ended up being pretty long the way I played it. Like I mentioned, I like to play in sort of a meticulous way, combing areas for all the resources I can possibly get before moving on, and Prey is all about that. Even moreso than Alien: Isolation, it strikes a strong balance of putting Stuff in the environment for you to go through, and actually making it feel worthwhile to pick it all up.

Bethesda has gone through a pretty clear progression in that regard, I think. First you got 3 and New Vegas (well, not first, but I could never quite get into the earlier games for the long haul) with the simple system of: pick up everything you see, cart it to town, and sell it. I think most gamers have known that feeling, struggling to carry just a little more junk so you can go sell it all, or even starting to sort your junk into "worthless" and "slightly less worthless" so you can leave behind the frying pans in favor of silver plates or whatever and get slightly more money per pound. It was a hassle! It bogged down the gameplay like you wouldn't believe, but it was still kinda addictive.

Then in Skyrim, it was more of the same, but also crafting was turning into a thing. Pick up not just valuable loot, but useful raw materials like leather and metal, so you could make your own equipment. More varied and interesting, but I still found myself doing the math on the 5lb sword that was worth 70g vs. the 3lb helmet that was worth 50g or whatever. Then in Fallout 4, they went for something at once refreshingly rewarding and mind-numbingly boring: literally everything was worth collecting, in theory. In the spirit of a desperate salvager in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, virtually anything you picked up could be broken down into useful materials, then cobbled together into equipment or some kind of furniture or structure to help with building your own settlements. In a way, it was an inspiring idea: you single-handedly scour the countryside for raw materials going unused and turn them into safe homes for the people. Made you much more of a visible hero of the people, rather than just a morally ambiguous monster slayer, or even "that guy that keeps stealing all our stuff but sometimes kills the bad guys too." It was a great way to make you feel the struggle of the apocalypse and really make you invested in the world rather than just kind of wandering through, cleaning an area out then never caring about that half of the map again.

But it was absolutely mind-numbing! You couldn't even leave the obviously worthless junk behind, every empty bottle and filthy trash can lid was potentially useful. It meant if you were a total packrat like me you know you're always doing it for a reason, but at the same time, there's nothing to push you away from wasting days on picking up trash except the fact that you gradually come to resent your own colonies for forcing this on you! I was so immensely bored with it, and so disinterested in manually building yet another settlement when they only became liabilities over time, that I simply lost all interest in playing.

Oh man, this was supposed to just be the first game. So the point is, Prey brings you to "gather up everything you find" again, but now it's the future, and literally any matter that you can cram into this tiny box can be disassembled into one of four kinds of elemental material, then used to build anything! You don't have to build any dumb buildings for other people-- instead, you can take a spare wrench and a wad of plastic and break them down, then make bullets out of them, somehow. The vast majority of items you use, including your sole source of upgrades and progression, are constructed from stuff you find. That, combined with the machines for "selling" your piles of junk being strewn around the map where you're actually going rather than off in some town far away, makes for a much more satisfying overall cycle. You don't just feel rewarded for collecting junk, but if you find there's something you need, then you start actively trying to hunt for a particular kind of junk so you can build more of it. It lets you fill out your inventory according to your playstyle and makes the item collection a much more important part of your gameplay than most any other.

Of course, there are tons of games in the Minecraft vein that play heavily with "collect stuff from your environment to craft things," and by their standard this would be way too simple. I guess you could say it's approaching that proposition from the opposite end of the "crafting spectrum." You don't want too much crafting stuff in a game like Prey, and I might argue that Bethesda is kinda waaay too into collecting stuff as a mechanic as it is, as all these games have proven, but I can appreciate the advances they've made in matching the mechanic to the feel of the game and its story, and making the environment engaging as a part of the gameplay even when your main focus should be on shooting the bad guys.

Also, the stealth is pretty well-done overall and they do a great job making it feel flexible and like you have tons of different ways of approaching any problem.

Aaaah I was supposed to talk about like three other things but I already wrote so much! Instead of spreading my nerding out over several subjects and being a big nerd in general, I nerded out intensively on a single subject and got into its history and progression for some reason?? It just felt like something I'd wanted to kinda put together "out loud" for a while now, I guess. Hrmmm.

Well! Monster Slayers is a rogue-like deckbuilding game that's super fun if you play the right class and has so much potential that some of their design choices really frustrate me! Slime Rancher is a really cute farming-ish game with a great gameplay cycle between messing around on your ranch and going out to explore, but it gets super boring if you run out of things to explore! Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid is a recent anime that, despite having pretty shallow characters overall, comes off super charming and manages a strange blend of fanservice and emotional gratification that left me just kinda feeling good about life! Maaaaaybe next month I'll go into some more detail if I don't manage to get a life or do something more interesting by then!

I guess most people don't really review games in their diary. But I mean, it's not like I'm really analyzing all the pros and cons and coming to a conclusion about whether you should play the game. I just find it really interesting to engage with a game both as a form of entertainment and trying to understand why they made it the way they did, and maybe how it could have been done better. It's a big, complicated field, making a form of entertainment that's supposed to be super interactive and responsive to your choices out of the box, and we're all still learning a lot about what can be done, and what works well and how, and all of that. Video games have only been around a few decades, and they were still only barely tapping into what could be done with movies when they were that old. We still have so much to learn! The seeds of wonderful things can be found in all these cool little indie games, and they hint at the amazing games we might get to play someday!

That's an important thing to remember, I think. There are still amazing things coming, things we can't even imagine right now. Twenty years ago, people had no idea what the internet would be like, or smart phones. What it would do for us, how it would change us. Twenty years from now, what amazing things will we take for granted? If nothing else gets you through your day, know that the future is always worth holding out for. We are in a singular, amazing time in history, and even if things get rough, overall, we all just want the world to be a better place, and we all have the power to make it so. It's up to each of us to help, but the fact is, we're doing it! We're all doing it!

Don't let the scary nonsense on the news or the everyday pains of life stop you from seeing that. The world is a better place today than it was ten years ago, and maybe even than it was yesterday. We don't stop to appreciate that often enough, I think. To take heart from it. I believe we have a lot of great things to look forward to, and a lot of good work to do. I know you've been doing a lot to help me, just for starters, and I appreciate that. I want us to see the great things that are coming together. So even if things are hard, just hold my paw, and we'll get through it, okay? We all have hard times in our lives. But it gets better.

It'll always get better.
-Lith