Backlog 2023

All other video games not related to the main farming series - Pokemon, Stardew Valley, My Time at Portia, and other indie-developed games.
User avatar
Kikki
UNoT Extreme Mooomber
UNoT Extreme Mooomber
Posts: 4252
Joined: Apr 14, 2015 6:01 am

Post  Posted:

When I made my two new folders last night, I was in the swing...so I made a third for 'Fitness' games. I decided to include YouTube in that category, as I realized (rather late!) that I could very easily watch the many (MANY) fitness videos on YouTube, such as BurpeeGirl's tabata walking workouts, which are good cardio yet low-impact and low-coordination-required. Or any video designated as an 'apartment workout', which are designed to be soundless, to not disturb neighbours below you. (So no jumping or thumping, which means it'll also automatically be low-impact...great for achy inflamed joints/etc that can't take the jarring.)

Before I only used YouTube to play music via my nice sound bar attached to the TV while I'm doing a longer cleaning session. Never thought to consider it a fitness application. Duh! Calling it a 'game', though, is a bit of a stretch, even if it is done via my Switch. Still, it was useful to have thought of it that way. Folders are more important than I thought. :)

Got more done in Dew Web, and played about an hour of the Cereza demo. I'm not really into the gameplay but the game is so pretty that I'm still willing to go back into it for an hour at a time. Then the looks aren't enough to carry me any more and I quit, but that's good enough. I like the story so far too, though it's currently relatively simple. But yesterday I actually did a load of housework including some (very) minor construction, and now I have a whole bunch of extra little bits I can do. But on the surface, it looks much nicer, now. I just have to do things like reorganize the kitchen cabinets. It's not glamorous at all, but it's very, very useful for daily QoL!

EDIT: OH, and we're at 55 days to TotK! Slipped under the two month mark some time in the last week :)
Last edited by Kikki on Mar 17, 2023 11:14 am, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Bluie
UNoT Extreme Mooomber
UNoT Extreme Mooomber
Posts: 3262
Joined: Jun 29, 2005 11:02 am

Post  Posted:

Mikodesu wrote: Mar 16, 2023 8:32 pm
Bluie wrote: Mar 16, 2023 6:59 amW h e e z e. I think I accidentally turned the newbie into a whale. He wanted Qiqi. He spend money until he got her. Two days ago he spent 200 bucks and came out with Dehya and Diluc + a crapton of 4*. Last night he sends me a pic of him getting Qiqi. I know he does have the money to be doing this, but still, I'm going to look on him with concern when I see him at work today. The only other characters he actively wants is Childe and Shogun, so hopefully he's done for awhile.
Oh « Harvest Goddess », Qiqi wanter. :lol: Poor kid. Hopefully he's happy with the characters he wants. At least there's a bunch of good 4 stars to help fill out teams/make them better. And worst case he has nice coworkers to help if he gets really stuck.

Reminds me... apparently Dehya's claymore is a buff for Diluc if you ever feel like playing him. Should be a buff for Xinyan too, now that I think of it?

--
Got my Abyss out of the way tonight... I hate having it sitting over my head. Floors 9 and 10 were such a joke I decided to try 11, and got my « Cow Poopoo » so thoroughly kicked I left before floor 12. Xiangling hard carried. Easily as good as my best hyperbloom team. Reminds me I need to level up her talents... she's no higher level than any of my other characters, but her talents are still 7's, and she just nukes early Abyss floors.

Probably doesn't help that 11 and 12 are designed around Dehya... big no thanks.

I also may have hit the 'time to start following the map' point in exploring upper desert. Kinda expected more in puzzles from the climactic underground area. Really pretty, and really weird to see the devs just throw that idea away so quickly. Maybe it'll come back in some form in the future?
I found out how much he spent and... it's the same amount I've spent overall in my 2ish years playing it. In two days. Lord. The plus side is he's REALLY enjoying the game, so if he's genuinely happy, then whatever lol. Me and my other coworker are going to have to escort him to the desert to go get scarabs and pupas though, because his Cyno and Dehya are stuck right now. We'll see if he's up for it tonight lol (just got to AR16 so we can start the chaos).

I need to upgrade Dehya's Claymore, but my upgrade materials are short in supply due to me upgrading a bunch of other weapons. It's basically preparation for when I need to switch over the friendship team to new characters, and I don't like characters sharing weapons so I'm chipping away at ones I've been ignoring as needed. IDK what it's called atm, but I have this 5* catalyst on Lisa that makes her run REALLY FAST. Put her on a double Anemo team + nighttime with Rosaria and the zoomies are incredible. Like, I didn't know you could actually run this fast in the game and it's hilarious to witness. I used this team for the pacman game in Windbloom and I probably hit a guniess world record or something lol.

Ugh, the Abyss... I once again tried to clear it last night and got stuck on 12-2 again. It's me and my characters, I know it is, but sometimes the enemies are just so bloody unfair. 9 through 11 was no problem. I added Zhongli into my team rotation and even in not being completely built, he's very useful (throwing meteorite on mobs helps with all the continual « Male Cow Poopoo » being thrown at you, for sure). I ended up completely ignoring the Pyro bonus because I literally only have Xinyan built. Anyways 12-2, I was a sliver of health away from killing the last enemy. I just need a little bit more of a push and then I can start fussing at 12-3. Also, I think I glitched out at some point? The dendro eremite girl had 0 HP and I wailed on her with my bursts and she just wouldn't die, annnd my timer was still ticking down. Super frustrating. Anyways, I'm begrudgingly building Raiden after my coworker talked me into it yesterday. I greatly dislike her character, but her accessibility to absolutely wreck « Cow Poopoo » cannot be denied. Siiiiiiigh...

On a more positive note, the primos I did get from the Abyss gave me Jean C1 off the standard banner (I JUST WANT MONA, MIHOYO, WHY) and Yaoyao C6! The latter is super nice because now there's moar exploding radishes. More nuke for Nilou! I also went and got a whole artifact set for Baizhu (running him with Ocean-Hued Clam focusing on HP) and I finished the Mysterious Stone Slates in the desert. All in all a pretty productive morning.
User avatar
FarmingForDaysMan
Snazzy Sheep Sweeper
Snazzy Sheep Sweeper
Posts: 249
Joined: Jan 10, 2022 5:57 am

Post  Posted:

Hiii, I don’t think I’ve posted here since the end of January. I’ve been doing quite a bit of gaming this month. Lots of Rune Factory 4…LOTS. I think the last time I posted here, I had taken a break from Rune Prana on my main file and started wooing the rest of the bachelors on my other files. The reason I took a break from Rune Prana was because I was stuck on the last room before the boss battle on the first floor.

Anyways, while I was lallygagging on my other files, my cousin in Indonesia caught up to me. I’ve been playing on easy mode the entire time; he played through all of the main story on hard mode, but during the third arc he switched to normal mode. I am quite competitive, so I challenged him to see who could get through Rune Prana first.

Very long story short, my cousin won the competition and I am stuck on the Siren 😂 I can’t remember what level I was at when I started Rune Prana, but it wasn’t until I started competing with my cousin that I realized that I was very underleveled. I want to say that my level was at most 115 when I started. Anyways, Leon and Dolce were in my original Rune Prana party, but now I have replaced Dolce with my child (I kept the default name of Luna).

During my competition with my cousin, I discovered seed dungeoning. It’s so addictive, my goodness 😂 Listen, the only reason my cousin got through Rune Prana first is because he found epic stuff in the Sharance Maze! The Sharance. Maze. I’m very certain that I was at a higher level than he was, and the Sharance Maze was kind of (and still is) kicking my butt. I have no idea how he was able to find chests in there. I wonder if the difficulty of our games made a difference.

I’ve been skilling up a ton, and I’ve been stuck in this cycle of crafting three of the best armor/headgear/shield/shoes/accessories/etc. that’s currently available to me, eating recipe bread, and instantly discovering recipes for stuff that’s better than what I literally JUST crafted. I’ve just now gotten out of the cycle for now, but that’s because I need to gain more experience. The last time I played was on Monday (I think? It’s been a rough week), and I had just barely gained enough max RP to craft Water Shoes, which are level 75. I’ll have to see if they do anything for me while battling the Siren. I’m not quite ready to go back and to try fighting her again. I need to either find or craft better weapons. At this point I’ve been making three of everything (if they have different stats, I get the best, Leon gets the second best, and Luna gets the third best 😂), so collecting materials has been quite tedious. Whenever I start a new game as Lest, I’m keeping literally EVERYTHING that I find xD Oh oh, but I did read about that snazzy trick where after defeating a boss, you can use escape before the barrier disappears and you can rebattle them over and over and stock up on what they drop.

Outside of battling, I’ve been doing lots of farming. I have three fields, and I’ve been using 3/4 seasonal fields (I haven’t accessed the winter field yet). I’ve planted all of my turnip seeds that I got from hours and hours of defeating Turnip Ghosts in an attempt to get a few Turnip Miracles.

Next time I play, I’m going to work on accessing all of the areas that I haven’t accessed yet. There’s a few, and they seem impossible to access, but I read that I have to wriggle around a bit to get to them.
User avatar
Roinda
Posts: 0
Joined: Apr 12, 2022 8:24 am

Post  Posted:

Finally played my Oled for the first time since buying it. Started up a brand new AC island.

Island’s called Red Bay. Fellow travelers are Quinn and Lyman. Nook’s Cranny has been built and the museum will be open tomorrow. I watched a couple of Crossing Channel’s videos. He’s doing a No Terraforming island challenge and his first three villagers are all autofills. I decided to do a similar thing. At least as far as the villagers are concerned, I will be terraforming.

Got all three houses sorted out and the new villagers are Sprinkle, Cranston and Marina.
User avatar
Kikki
UNoT Extreme Mooomber
UNoT Extreme Mooomber
Posts: 4252
Joined: Apr 14, 2015 6:01 am

Post  Posted:

Roinda wrote: Mar 17, 2023 4:27 pm Finally played my Oled for the first time since buying it. Started up a brand new AC island.

Island’s called Red Bay. Fellow travelers are Quinn and Lyman. Nook’s Cranny has been built and the museum will be open tomorrow. I watched a couple of Crossing Channel’s videos. He’s doing a No Terraforming island challenge and his first three villagers are all autofills. I decided to do a similar thing. At least as far as the villagers are concerned, I will be terraforming.

Got all three houses sorted out and the new villagers are Sprinkle, Cranston and Marina.
You just restarted a new island on your existing Switch, right? Two brand new islands at the same time has got to be a lot to manage.

By the way, in case you haven't tried it: Sprinkle looks unbelievably adorable in the light blue sheep costume. It's nearly the exact colour she is, so it just looks like she's wearing a bell collar and has a white tummy to match her white face and little white tail. SHe loves it, too, so she'll rewear it plenty. (I wish she'd never wear anything else, lol.)
User avatar
Roinda
Posts: 0
Joined: Apr 12, 2022 8:24 am

Post  Posted:

It can be confusing when it comes to things like house locations especially if I’ve moved in one of them, or I can be doing something and I’ll be thinking ‘haven’t I already done this?’ Although that’s more if I’ve restarted my island and I had things in certain places.

It helps that I (try to) have different villagers and my characters have different designs, and that I only play from my main Profile. When it comes to villagers, I find I always come across the same ones. Except for the odd one here and there like Mint, Cranston and Winnie.

I’ll keep an eye out for that sheep costume, might find it once Able Sisters is up and running.

One thing that I’ve noticed is, sometimes when you give Blathers a number of fossils, he’ll say ‘these are rare fossils each and every one that haven’t yet appeared in our collection’ yet when you go to donate them, there are one, two or even three different duplicates. Is this a dialogue mistake? That or it’s just Blathers getting over excited.
User avatar
Mikodesu
Huggy Chickens
Huggy Chickens
Posts: 313
Joined: Apr 07, 2016 7:45 pm

Post  Posted:

Bluie wrote: Mar 17, 2023 7:09 amI found out how much he spent and... it's the same amount I've spent overall in my 2ish years playing it. In two days. Lord. The plus side is he's REALLY enjoying the game, so if he's genuinely happy, then whatever lol. Me and my other coworker are going to have to escort him to the desert to go get scarabs and pupas though, because his Cyno and Dehya are stuck right now. We'll see if he's up for it tonight lol (just got to AR16 so we can start the chaos).
Probably good at this rate that there's only a handful of characters he's willing to whale on. Ah, well. So long as he's spending responsibly (within his means), who cares. He's happy. On the character level thing, I can't even remember what world level you're even allowed to start ascending characters with boss mats. I was gonna say that would be the bigger obstacle, but with more than one high level teammate the boss would just go...squish.

On Abyss, next patch might be the perfect time for you to clear it, if you can get Baizhu built in time, since you know you're getting him. And you already have every other dendro character, might not be too difficult to munch the whole thing, actually. :)

--
Sunk most of my evening into Genshin after the great puppy pick-up. Infinitely too many hours in the car, needed to go touch digital grass, and mindlessly smack things. Did a BUNCH of artifact farming tonight, got the emblem dungeon down to...37 seconds I think was the lowest, so I've been chewing through that and strong boxing for hydro pieces. Only got a couple that count as straight upgrades, but I'll take it I guess. (It is insanity that after 2 1/2 years playing this game I have like...5 artifacts that have sub stats as big as the main stat.)

Exploration is almost done. Finished two quests, neither of which really seem finished... got the baby tree maxed out for the time being. Caved and started making oculi trackers - don't even feel bad. Upper desert and the last area I haven't finished in the green zone are at 95%, green zone is the weirdly shaped area that for what the « Snuggly Bunny » ever reason wraps around the aranara area. Not a fan of that choice. Might have to look up some hidden chest guides or something, to figure out what I missed, if the oculi don't do it.


In other gaming news, Outer Wilds is 40% off in the the ongoing Steam sale, and I might not be able to resist. Apparently 40% off is all it ever is, and it's a very reasonable price, and I need to have the game in my Steam library to be able to force myself to finally get off my rump and play it. And then I can play the DLC and finally stop running from spoilers. :lol:
User avatar
midnighttherabbit
Carrots... yum
Carrots... yum
Posts: 545
Joined: Aug 06, 2012 12:00 am
Contact:

Post  Posted:

I've been pretty busy with school but my friend cancelled the plans I had this weekend so I've had two days to completely chill which is nice. Last week I finished my Dragon Age 2 replay which was a lot of fun, and all this week I've been playing Far Cry 3, after my brother begged me to.

I only did the story and none of the side quests because they mostly involved running around and picking things up, so it took me around 15 hours to get through. I've always heard the story was the draw of the game but it really didn't do it for me. Maybe if they'd taken it all the way and fully commited to having the protagonist become the antagonist it could have been interesting, but as it was it felt like they kept hinting at some huge twist or thesis behind the story (and whispering Alice in Wonderland quotes at me every few missions? Like please be serious...) then not going anywhere with it. Also I bought it on Steam forever ago when I was pretty out of the loop wrt gaming stuff and the Ubisoft launcher is the worst I've ever had to use by far.

Now I'm playing Divinity: Original Sin 2. It's pretty fun I like the freedom even if it is overwhelming at first. I can feel this is going to be a long one. I also bought a ton of games in the Steam sale with the money I was going to spend going out this weekend so RIP my backlog. :(
User avatar
greensara
Carrots... yum
Carrots... yum
Posts: 486
Joined: Jul 28, 2016 12:10 pm

Post  Posted:

Finished chapter 3 in Harvestella and the first chunk of the plot in chapter 4 before having to return it to the library. I feel like that is a decent stopping point for the time being, and a good incentive to start again should I check it out another time or purchase a copy. According to the Switch I have already put in over 35 hours, though that includes a lot of paused time, so not a short game if you want to do the side quests and stories.

In Pokemon Go, I nearly forgot about the Slowpoke event (because I was playing Harvestella), so I wasn't able to catch enough to come across a normal or Galarian shiny. I got enough candy to evolve a Slowking though. I'm hoping I have better luck this week with the odds for shiny Meltan supposedly being up again. I want my shiny Melmetal! :P Hopefully the weather will be nicer this week than it was for "spring" break too.
User avatar
simside
Wacky Weed Puller
Wacky Weed Puller
Posts: 140
Joined: Nov 28, 2009 10:57 pm

Post  Posted:

I was catastrophically ill this week, which was mostly spent vegging out and not sleeping (because one of my medications causes insomnia, which is honestly just as bad as what it's treating), and without enough mental power to do anything, including watch TV or play video games. A waste!

Paradoxically, I did force myself to finish and 100% Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom, which is a lot of precise action platforming for someone as out of it as me. But this game was great, like the perfect difficulty and challenge, and I never felt like it was too easy or unfair. Even the few really tough chests that I had to run for 30+ minutes felt pretty reasonable. It was more of a metroidvania and a lot longer (20 hours, over twice as long) than I thought it would be, but I really enjoyed it. So far, the best of the newer Monster Boy games, but I consider the Alex Kidd games among these as well, and I still need to give those a try.

I'm hoping to wrap up Idol Manager this week at some point, and focus more on TemTem... still haven't gone back after the main story yanked my party. But I have fun with it, and I doubt very much they'll leave me without my party for long. They released a nuzlocke mode this week, so I think a ton of folks are playing again. Apparently randomlocke is fun, but I'd really love to beat the story mode.

Monster Boy frees up my Switch Lite, so I'm going for Collar x Malice, for real this time. May intersperse that with some Theatrhythm, which I am dying to play but need to take some games off my plate. I may just play it anyway, because it will make me happy.
User avatar
Mikodesu
Huggy Chickens
Huggy Chickens
Posts: 313
Joined: Apr 07, 2016 7:45 pm

Post  Posted:

@simside: D: That sounds so miserable! I've only had full blown insomnia a couple times, having that on top of being sick is just awful. I hope you're feeling better now, at least. Save for catching up on lost sleep, I guess.


--
Green Man Gaming does it again... it finally popped into my head to check on there if the Outer Wilds sale was better than Steam, and lo and behold, sure was. Not a great deal, 49% to Steam's 40, but I'll take it. Base game + DLC was cheaper than the bundle of the two on Steam.

So now I have Outer Wilds + Echoes of the Eye on my backlog. I think the goal is to at LEAST see the base game through before BotW 2 comes out. If I really MAKE time for it I can for sure get through both.


Slowly catching up on Genshin content. Upper desert is 100% explored. Still got 5% of one region in green zone to knuckle down and get through, but I'm aaaalmost there. Silly me, I thought I was done with oculi, I was going for what I thought was my last one when another one popped up on the map. Dangit. Gotta go farm materials for more oculi trackers now. /facepalm

Not sure what I think of Jeht's story. In some ways it was well written, in some ways it wasn't. Game writing is almost always in service of gameplay, so I know why Benben was sidelined, but it's bad writing to do that. Realistically it's not the player that's closest to Jeht, it's her little robo buddy. He's been around just as long as you have, and went with her, so why are you closer? And she just about forgets he exists, the whole quest line. (It also doesn't make sense that nobody thought to hold the thing over her, hold it hostage, threaten to destroy it to get her to do what they want.)

Kinda talking myself out of liking what's even there, now. :lol: Sigh. Genshin's writing IS getting better, but it's still...so spotty. Even by game standards. I can't tell how much of that is being knee capped by the rest of the game. :/

Maybe tomorrow I'll clean up the rest of exploration. Make sure I'm done with obelisks, find the stone slates I'm missing, finish up the green zone. Then there's story quests and the archon quest. Not going to be wishing on Ayaka/Shenhe/Mika until I hear more about how useful chocobo boy is. The ice princesses are nice, but there's plenty of characters to save for... I'd rather bide my time. Maybe at least until the next update's livestream.
User avatar
Roinda
Posts: 0
Joined: Apr 12, 2022 8:24 am

Post  Posted:

Played more ACNH today. Boo, got Xelanor up to four stars, finally managed to upgrade my house to four rooms to get more storage space, tidied up all the clothes and items I had sitting around the island and my rating went straight back down to three. Admittedly I thought that it would do that, and I’ve got a few ideas to get it back up again, but it is annoying.

Took a break to play one of the games I haven’t touched in ages. Lego The Incredibles. The controls were a bit fiddly but managed to find my way around.
User avatar
Bluie
UNoT Extreme Mooomber
UNoT Extreme Mooomber
Posts: 3262
Joined: Jun 29, 2005 11:02 am

Post  Posted:

I feel like I haven't been back to this thread in ages lol. Five, six, days since my last post? :bunny:

I haven't been gaming too much outside of wind downs, but I did get some stuff done. I did escort both of my coworkers to the desert in Genshin and it was like corralling cats. I was using Venti to make wind currents for the newer player to climb easier, but every time I looked behind me, they were both gone. We were in a voice chat (all three of us) and there was a lot of 'where are you?', 'what are you doing!?', 'YOU'RE GOING TO DIE, STOP WANDERING AWAY!', from me. However, we made it, we got scarabs for Cyno, no one died.

In my own Genshin adventures, I've been finding things to do after doing my daily resin drain now that my exploration is maxed everywhere. I FINALLY got the rest of Enkanomiya's sigils out of my inventory (and I found two more chests while looking for them too lol). I then took up fishing and found out that it's easier to play on PS5 vs PS4, where I first tried it out and swore off of it. Actually feeling the tension in the triggers makes it a lot easier to deal with the fishing bar, and I now have the fish tank, pond, Liyue rod, and the swordfish bow. My main goal is the spear, because of it's crazy elemental recharge, but I need moar feesh. I have it down that my fish spots respawn a day after another, so yesterday my Liyue fish spots were active, and today the Inazuma ones will be up, and tomorrow it'll be Sumeru (then Mondstadt the next). I've been chipping away at the TCG too, at player level 4 now.

I also finished up the Near Future chapter in Live A Live, which was pretty OK imo. Now I only have the Present Day chapter to do (which is the quickest to do, according to reviews/guides) and then the rest of the game will open up. I don't work tomorrow, but we're having a bunch of kids over (church outreach program) so I don't imagine there will be a lot of time to game lol. We'll be playing Smash Bros with the boys, but I'll probably just not participate because I'm so rusty (but it might give the kids some easy wins, so maybe I should? Lmao).

FFXIV related; I got the new mount from the new tribe and I am back to owning all the music scrolls in the game again except the one tied to mahjong. That ONE scroll is my personal hell on earth, I swear. Even if I become a whiz at the game, the queues to GET a game going are hours long because NOBODY IS PLAYING IT! SCREEEEEEEEE!

Oh, and while not backlog related, I went and got a wired controller for the Switch! I've been using the bluetooth headset I use to sleep on noisier nights, but I haaate using it. I much prefer wired earbuds, which is what I use on PS5, but my wireless Switch controllers don't work in the same way. Anyways, found a cute Kirby one at Target. It's going to be my companion all through Xenoblade 3 lol.
User avatar
Code_Name_Geek
Tubular Turnip Farmer
Tubular Turnip Farmer
Posts: 341
Joined: Mar 13, 2017 7:14 pm

Post  Posted:

I managed to finish both Sonic Adventure DX and Pokémon Violet before the performances of the shows I was helping with, which was right in line with my goal I set in my last post. The rest of the achievements in SADX weren't that bad, except for a few of the missions, but I have now completed that game 100%. Pokémon Violet took longer than I expected since there was a whole other story part after the Pokémon League stuff, but that story was not at all what I expected from a Pokémon game so that was a pleasant surprise.

Unfortunately, I've been sick since the performances so I haven't started anything new yet. I've mainly been playing Love Live, which is nearing the end-of-service at the end of the month, and I don't think I'm going to finish all the things I wanted to do in the game but it's going to be marked complete either way when that happens. Today, I've mostly been finishing up purchases on the 3DS eShop (8 games, some DLC, and a few Pokémon utilities). I think I have everything I want, but I have a few days to decide if anything else catches my eye. I've stayed below the money limit I set myself and so far everything fits on my SD card, so it's probably good to stop here. What an end of an era! The 3DS might be my favourite console of all time so I'm sad to see it nearing its official end of life. I still have many games to play on it though so I should be thankful for that.

I haven't managed to start any new games this month, so my goal this time is to start a new game before the end of the month. If I'm sick for much longer it's probably going to be something easy I can play in bed, most likely on 3DS or GBA. Tamagotchi Connection: Corner Shop and Hamtaro: Rainbow Rescue seem like good options for that. I'd also like to pick up at least one in-progress game to finish, since I like having a couple games on the go at once.
User avatar
Kikki
UNoT Extreme Mooomber
UNoT Extreme Mooomber
Posts: 4252
Joined: Apr 14, 2015 6:01 am

Post  Posted:

I didn't even know FFXIV had a mahjong game in it. :) I hope your new controller works out as desired, Bluie!

~

I hope you feel better soon, Code Name Geek.

~

I've put about 12 hours or so into No Place Like Home. It's a game that plays a lot like a child with the DNA of My Time at Portia and Pioneers of Olive Town. It's a post-apocalyptic world where humans have destroyed Earth (apparently with trash, as the entire planet is essentially buried in compacted trash.) and moved to Mars, presumably to have a brand new planet to destroy. Call me cynical, but if humans really trashed the planet and managed to survive by abandoning it, I firmly believe they'd just do it again on the new one. In that way, it's depressing, especially since I think it's already happening (except that accelerated climate change is gonna do us in long before we have a chance to coat the entire surface of the planet in a thick layer of compacted garbage.)

But anyway...

The game is very fun, though it does play like an indie...it's mostly smooth, but at times it lurches, like it's skipped some frames or the processing speed can't quite keep up or something. You're looking for your grandpa (that's a monstrously stale tradition that I could really do without) as almost all survivors of the human race have already vacated to Mars and he's one of the few hold-outs left, and you can't get hold of him any more. So you go look for him with your trusty...vacuum drill thing. Squeeze one shoulder button and it drills into the trash heaps, breaking them up, and squeeze the OTHER shoulder button and the vacuum will kick in and you can suck all the trash up, presumably into some cousin of the Discworld's L-space where things like mass and volume and so on have no meaning.

It's quite fun, actually. I love beautifying worlds. Plus you can stuff the garbage into the recycler and get useful materials out, to build crafting and farming machines and buildings, etc. You can also free animals from the garbage and from cages and traps, and get them to join your farm, if you have something they like. (There are also these very strange robot llamas that gather rarer trash types for you. I don't understand the trash llamas, tbh.)

The world is broken up into regions with slightly different landscapes (perhaps more different later on, but I've only completed the questlines of farm and the village, and have just managed to break through to the Lonely Hills by upgrading my drill today.) It's a MUCH bigger game than I had guessed, since it took me all this time to do this much and there's got to be three times as much still waiting for me. There are more crop types than I'd have guessed, too...17 not including the 4 trees, I think, and 8...'animals' might be pushing it in two cases, but I'll go with that. Progress is gated by only being able to find certain seeds/animals/materials in certain regions, and the upgrades you need to your drill, which is what lets you traverse the garbage-packed landscape.

You can also decorate (perhaps all regions, I haven't tried anywhere but on my farm) outside and inside with crafting recipes you find while exploring/cleaning, and do quests to fix up regions and help the couple of people left. So far only one person per region.

The story is nothing special, nor is the dialogue. (Very few indie games invest in good writers. Heck, plenty of non-indie games don't bother to invest in good writers! The importance of a good story and interesting characters seems to be downplayed a painful amount of the time across Gamedom as a whole.) But the gameplay's pretty much tailor-made for me, even if I don't have any reason to care about Ellen, her grandpa, or any of the NPCs so far.

It looks pretty nice (though a bit fuzzy...that may be the settings I have my Deck on) and it plays quite well even though most features were supposedly unsupported on the Deck...the only thing that's really off is that you can't toggle on item descriptions/names or sort your inventory, since there is no button on controller or Deck for those things...they were obviously programmed only for a click of the mouse, and NPLH has no cursor. It'd also be better to place things like crafting stations and animal pens and crops if you were working with a mouse, but it's pretty functional with controller, it's just not ideal.
Locked