For single player games, I don’t see why players shouldn’t be able to play on their own pace.

Agreed, I always hate when games force me to rush an event or situation. I’m here to have fun! Let me enjoy it at my own pace!

Although I think the days in this game are plenty long enough. Just when I’m getting tired from running around, I realize it’s evening time in-game. It’s mostly morning that comes too soon. Once I’m prepped for the next day, I don’t have much time to run around and explore before it’s time to reopen the tavern.

I could just close earlier, but the more stuff I sell each day, the more money I have to work with for the next day. Upgrades cost money to unlock, so I’ve been saving up to expand the tavern. I haven’t bought any decorations and I only bought more tables so I can sell to more customers at a time. Although I don’t get enough customers to fill all the seats right now.

Not at all. I believe the game was actually made for English audiences because the speaking animations seem to match the English subtitles and look like a bad dub in French. There is a lot of French in the background, but it’s more like immersive world details. The important stuff is either place names that are explicitly mentioned, like the Saint-Michel Rotunda in the first screenshot, or written in English. Heck, I think there’s more English in that first screenshot than French.

For Karl!

The Driller I regularly play with has a nasty habit of abandoning our group to go drill tunnels where we don’t need tunnels. He’s always looking to take shortcuts directly to his objective instead of following the caves.

Then, when we’re trying to run to the drop pod, Molly will just go straight up one of his tunnels in the ceiling, where we can’t follow. Then we’re frantically running around, trying to find another route to the drop pod without Molly’s flags.

Oh, and he fights every large bug with C4, nearly killing us all in the process.

I’ll get there one day… but it’ll be a while before I have the free time and motivation to slog through it again.

Good to know, thanks!

You’re absolutely correct, I am approaching it from the wrong mindset. The thing is, I like my crafting games to be chill sandbox games. I have ADHD and am easily distracted, so being dumped into a world where I’m struggling just to survive, and then finding threats everywhere while I’m trying to progress on a build or something… I find myself stressed and unable to focus on progression. So I prefer games that let me go at my own pace, without distractions from the task I’m focusing on.

With Subnautica, I don’t know where to go to progress without spending time exploring and getting distracted along the way. So it will take me hundreds of hours to actually complete the game; time that I rarely dedicate to any single game. And too much time if I’m not having fun along the way.

I’ve been meaning to give Techtonica another chance. I was enjoying it, but I tried to play it with a friend and he checked out early because the build menus and crafting mechanics were too complicated for him. Because of that, we switched to another game to play regularly and I never really got back to Techtonica. I agree with my friend that it was a bit complex at first, but I was enjoying figuring it out.

For me, games are strictly a form of entertainment. I play to escape reality and do something fun for a while. So when a game “treats you like an adult,” I feel like the fun is gone and now I’m stuck working just to gain a little bit of progress. I don’t get a sense of reward from that, I just get frustrated.

Especially if there are important events that you can miss. I used to be a completionist with my games (I still am, to a degree) and I wanted to explore every nook and cranny of a game to really enjoy every bit of effort the developers put into creating this world. But finding out a game takes 50+ hours to beat, and then realizing that I may have missed important details and that I’ll need to replay that lengthy game to find them again… no way. That’s too much effort. I mentally check out really quick.

I agree with you about The Outer Wilds. I think I’ve played about an hour of that game and I had no idea what I was doing or what the plot was about. Everyone kept saying it’s better if you go into it blind, so I didn’t read anything before playing and, well… I don’t know what I was playing. That’s another game on my list to give a second chance before I give up on it completely.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t been able to get into Subnautica. I spent like 2 hours swimming in circles, trying to figure out what to do in that game before I realized I was supposed to check messages or something on the escape pod first. I felt totally abandoned and alone in the ocean, without much of a direction to go. It was a little too “open world” for me, if that makes sense.

Pacific Drive, on the other hand, drops you right into the action, with three people in your ear helping guide you through this strange and unique world. You can always go off and explore regions on your own, but your primary objectives are always clear. I don’t think I could get lost if I tried.

I’ve been meaning to go back and try Subnautica again. Maybe I’ll do a write-up on it and see if I enjoy it, now that I’m used to crafting/exploring games.

Yeah, it’s pretty easy. There’s a little technique required for climbing/balancing on ledges, but it’s not super challenging and you can always adjust your camera view to make it easier.

You’re welcome! Like I mentioned, I almost didn’t get to post today thanks to computer issues. Fortunately, I have a few other non-gaming computers floating around my home (I used to be an IT guy), so my screenshots might not be 4K quality, but I could technically find something else to play with if I needed to.

Actually I have a Steam Deck too! I wonder how decent its resolution/graphics would look on a PC screen…

If you like, the developer displays his phone number on screen every time you die. You could try to reach out to him and let him know his game is broken. If he’s still engaged with the game, he might look into it.

In the 18+ hours I’ve played, I only had one enemy takedown mission where the number didn’t go down as I killed enemies. Other than that, I’ve never experienced any bugs in this game.

But I’ve played exclusively solo campaign mode, so maybe there’s something there. I did try to go online last night and it just errored out, so maybe multiplayer/online mode is buggy.

This is actually a spiritual successor to the Road Rash franchise. Made by a different studio, but a tribute to that older game series.

I usually give a warning in advance that spoilers are upcoming and to skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to read them, then do the spoiler tag for an entire paragraph. That way, even if the spoiler tag doesn’t work, people know to skip the next paragraph to avoid it. Sometimes I’ll even do a full-caps “END OF SPOILERS HERE” to catch eyes and help people skip over them.

Unfortunately, it’s not just an Epic Games exclusive, it’s actually published by Epic Games. Which means it probably won’t ever come to Steam.

The rest of the Alan Wake franchise (and the Control franchise, including the upcoming Control 2) are published by 505 Games or Remedy themselves, so those all get Steam releases.

I have yet to beat it myself. The first time I played it, I eventually came across a boss fight that proved too tough, and the only way to level up Jesse was to go and fight random spawns around the building. I got tired of the grind and stopped playing it. But I’m hoping to actually play through to the end this time around. I plan to do all spawn events as they come this time, instead of skipping them to focus on moving the plot forward, so that I’ll be better prepared for that fight when it comes.

This doesn’t seem like it would work. Debris falling off the trains, dusty buildup, vibrations, rocks bouncing around the tracks; heck, even just wildlife crossing the tracks. So many things are gonna damage those panels if they’re just lying on the ground between tracks, and solar panels are extremely fragile.

I hope they have some sort of bullet proof glass or something over those panels. Probably going to need a special train to spray water over them to clean regularly, too.

I dunno about Swiss trains, but the tracks behind my house in America leave a thick black film on everything, and it’s very hard to clean by hand. I think they transport coal.

I knew a guy when I served in the US military who got caught cheating in a semi-related way. He got assigned to a base in a new state and his wife refused to relocate their whole family for the few years he’d be assigned there, so he went by himself, leaving his wife and kids in his home state.

Turns out, he was sexting one of his younger subordinates at work. One of his daughters found out when she tried to use an old tablet and found out his account was still synced to it. She saw all his texts updating in real time.

He was ultra-conservative and didn’t believe in divorce, so he was doing everything he could to save his marriage. His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended. He was basically on house arrest until his job was done and he could move home.

The last I heard, he told his wife the landlord needed to paint the walls, so he removed all the cameras, dunked them in the bathtub, then played dumb when none of them would work when he set them back up again. He was seen inviting young women over to his apartment after that. So, you know… he didn’t learn his lesson.