I keep seeing the “well its got nudity what did they expect” take and saw this article that talks about the meta-narrative and theme:

https://noescapevg.com/all-that-fucking-bullshit-abouthorses-and-for-what/

It being weird and uncomfortable is the point - Though obviously its not meant to be a game for everyone.

It most definitely takes a toll. Most devs don’t even talk about the weird sadness you get after finally getting something out the door either.

I don’t mean to make it all sound bad though, there is some genuine joy in making something and seeing it come together. Anyways good luck on your game dev projects.

As far as I understand it, the vast majority of ‘successful’ indie studios are in the same boat. You need to continual decent hits to keep afloat in an ever turbulent and flooding market. Even if the next title is successful, they already mentioned the other looming problem, burnout. You might be able to push yourself through one game, two is a struggle, and very few make it to three.

To me, and maybe I’m being a bit cynical, but this feels like a very foreboding article.

Its more likely they increased the price and immediately starting shaking down anyone who was paying for the old license price. Its a frustrating scummy tech company “strategy” that unfortunately works because someone at a developer or publisher will be willing to pay the hike if it means avoiding any legal battle.

Oh that’s true, I did forget about that one.

Looks glorious.

That’s pretty good for a first attempt, most people’s first games are barely functional, if at all, so I’d consider this a win.

You mean ‘ram’ it?

Good job Gordon, pressing right click and all, I can see your M.I.T. education really pays off.

This is likely not the case but I feel obligated to note that if you use Steam’s Proton and store games on an NTFS drive, its given me quirky problems in the past.

Mine was day ~75.

The RNG finally started to loosen its grip around day 60 because it started giving me items and rooms I had never seen before that, as it turns out, were pretty essential.

The RNG beat me up too. I will say that there’s a handful of permanent upgrades that either allow you to mitigate some RNG or give you buffs so you’re not as reliant on it.

I think their goal was to make it so you’re not hardlocked on a single puzzle so that you kind of wander into the manor without a specific puzzle to solve and see what you can solve/find as your tools for that run expand.

This kind of makes hours 0-10 kind of miserable because you don’t know what puzzles there are and you don’t have much you can do to avoid RNG so you’re just wandering and hoping for the best, but it does get better after that point.

Yeah, the point of this comic is less about people buffing their favorite class (though people do tend to lean towards that) and more about people generally thinking ‘balanced’ means everything is equal.

Though the man in the purple shirt is definitely wanting to get rid of the advantages rogues have on mages… The mages symbol also being purple lol.

I’ve seen prototypes of RPGs where you could freeform talk to NPCs and I pretty quickly lost enthusiasm for the idea after seeing it in action.

It didn’t feel like a DnD game where you’re maneuvering a social conflict with the DM or other players, it felt more like the social equivalent of jumping up on a table where an NPC couldn’t get to you and stabbing them in the face.

This is a weirdo complaint but one thing I don’t like that some modern games keep doing is adding a lot of visual/texture noise by having a lot of details.

Sometimes its OK, but sometimes it gets difficult to tell what’s going on in the chaos of a fight. Combined with particle effects, reflections, and the DLSS or FSR or whatever and it gets to be a bit of an eye strainer.

Halos usually pretty good about strong enemy colors and easy to read room layouts but a few glimpses of this have me raising an eyebrow.

Is that… Pepper as a playable character?

I quite liked Fields of Mistria though its still early access.

KB/M is a little easier for placing things but its not at all bad with a gamepad.