I have got so much stuff on Itch I really need to get round to talking about, it’s embarrassing.
Rummaging through stuff earlier and remembered about x_purrsonline_x a toy chat client for talking to cats. My youngest absolutely fell in love with it when I showed it them and they had an absolute ball with it.
Originally made for the 2019 A Game By It’s Cover Jam, it’s name your own price and just one of those things that’s really sweet and I’m glad exists.
As I wrote last time round, it’s the good kind of messy. The messy that keeps things interesting, keeps everything from seeming a little too rote, ensures the game never feels clinical in its approach. It’s the rough edges, unfiled.
Case in point: settlements.
One of the more recent additions to No Man’s Sky is the ability to run a small settlement for a bunch of aliens.
As the overseer of the settlement the player is charged with making planning decisions, helping out with construction and settling petty complaints between townsfolk like some sort of cosmic headteacher meandering through a space playground dishing out space litter duties.
In my own infinite wisdom, I’d decided that rather than try and find the best or nicest looking settlement, I’d take the first one the game threw at me.
Molyneux save me, did I ever end up with a rough one.
The settlement I look after is on a freezing world with regular long and blinding storms. Vy’keen scatter themselves around, taking brief walks in-between the hellish weather fluctuations and sentinel assaults on the base, running for shelter and safety when it all kicks off.
It is rarely not kicking off. This is a settlement of tremendously healthy and well exercised Vy’keen thanks to the storms.
The weather is so terrible that it often takes me five or ten minutes to find whatever half built building I need to drop some materials off at. It’s so terrible that on the occasions where Sentinels (No Man’s Sky’s intergalactic robot coppers) decide my settlement is an anomaly too far and opt to try and shut it down, I often have to take the game’s word for it because like I can see anything through the storm.
For all I can see, the Sentinels could be stopping by to hold a Punch And Judy show. Either way, they’ll need shooting.
It is honestly ridiculous. It’s so extreme that it borders on unplayable. I get mere moments in the clear even as fully decked out with protective gear as the game permits.
I love it. I love it because yes, it really sells the whole harsh world thing. But also, I love it because it’s frankly funny. There is absolutely no need for the game to have planets this brutal and plenty of other games would knead the kinks out into something vastly more controlled, more palatable.
No Man’s Sky is all like “nah” and goes all in. Nobody really needs to see what’s going on anyway, right?
It’s all part of the joy of the settlement stuff for me and kinda why the addition of these microgames within a larger game, and the way Hello add stuff to the game, amuses me so much.
It’s how absolutely unnecessarily completely Hello Games commit to them. Exploring derelict freighters doesn’t have to be an over the shoulder horror minigame complete with spoopy tales of how the derelict came to be! But it is.
Settlement management doesn’t have to involve procedurally fleshing out the settlement with new buildings, it doesn’t have to involve petty disputes, citizens determined to go and wander into harm’s way because they’re bored and especially doesn’t need little management game style bubbles showing the current thoughts of each citizen. But it does.
And it certainly doesn’t need to include planets that are complete stormy horror shows, but it does.
I don’t think I’ve played any game ever that’s been quite this sort of journey. From the strange, janky, Out Therebut you can explore the planets for realsies of the game at launch to this beast of an MMO that exceeds most of the promises that Cloud Imperium have been struggling to even meet the basics of with more money and more time available to them to begin with.
I suspect it helps that whilst each addition over time widens the amount of things to do in the game, they’ve been discreet enough so as to largely be optional – it is a big dicking around in space simulator first, a videogame second and once you’ve got the initial speed bump done with, the game leaves you be. It is the agreement every good MMO makes with the player, an understanding that this is a world to be in, the entertainment to be found there is on you.
And, as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, it’s definitely the jank too. That the game follows the all too rare Bethesda ethic of it’s better to have this stuff complete with all the problems it brings than not have it, we’ll worry about it falling apart later and it will forever teeter on the brink of falling apart. That, I find, is where the most magic has been found in recent years.
I know intimately the reasons why most games aren’t this, it’s because it’s bloody well difficult to pull off at scale. I don’t think I ever expected this silly little sci fi book cover generator to become what it is, I certainly don’t want every game to follow the same paths Hello have in transforming the experience so thoroughly into something else,
I’m glad this one exists though.
And I’m glad that for all the changes over the years, that little game I enjoyed taking screenshots of is still a videogame I enjoy taking screenshots of.
I realise I’m probably the only person on the planet who listens to The Anvil on quite the regular basis but I can live with that.
Whilst I reckon The Damned Don’t Cry is far and away the strongest song on there, I’ve long had a love of Look What They’ve Done To Me. Amongst other things, it sits really nicely next to Ultravox’s Lament on a mixtape/playlist, tried and tested since the eighties and still works for me now.
Whilst I still struggle to listen to the third album, the Visage stuff from just before Steve Strange passed away is some remarkably excellent new romantic stuff and well worth a listen if you haven’t given it a go. Shameless Fashion especially is solid pop gold and every bit as strong a pop record as Fade To Grey and deserves to be remembered as such.
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The online home of Rob Fearon, disabled videogame maker, games journalist, crap film watcher, gobshite and doodler. Rob’s been around games a very, very long time now and Punching Robots Club is their personal blog featuring whatever nonsense takes their fancy.
Sometimes it’s a sketch, a review, an article about videogames, a pointer to something Rob finds cool. Whatever, really. Expect anything, Rob’s tired of being a brand online and so it’s just stuff and things these days. Nice stuff and things, mind you.