CLAVICUS GAVE HIM AN AXE

Ok well. Pinned post I guess. Hey I'm Meat/Die/Clavicus. He/she/they. check out my CARRD and my ART TAG. I'm kind of just hanging out. Commissions are currently OPEN.

My examples in the last post were kind of extreme but even like. I played the demo for a game called About Fishing recently. Its very good and you should play it if you can stomach like. Unsanitary stuff. But mechanically it is a game that I found very calming to play? It is, as the title implies, About Fishing. You interact through the world entirely through that. It has controls inspires by fishing games on the Wii of all things, and it encourages patience in the player and a lot of the time you will sit there for a few minutes waiting for the fish to bite before you go through the wild motions of swiping your mouse around in the imitation of tugging at something in the water. If you mess up in some way, the consequence is just losing the fish, which remains in the water and will bite again if given the chance. You sell the fish for money and there's little secrets everywhere and there's a fun resident evil-esque inventory mechanic but you're just storing fish, and there's an aquarium side quest like Animal Crossing. But it's also a dreary murder mystery. You're trapped in a miserable, small town full of struggling people. If the mechanics are "cozy" but the atmosphere is not, then what?

Cozy Games are so weird as a genre because I feel like the de factor idea of them is "cute game with no crazy goals which doesn't confront you anything worrying and you don't have to think." And there are a lot of games like that, and they all suck because there's nothing particularly engaging in them beyond aesthetics. But then there's also the recent Moomin games, which are by all extents is a cozy little point and click with no real risks or failures you can encounter in your gameplay - but one of them is literally a game about Moomin Troll witnessing winter for the first time and learning about its association with death and being mortified. Games like No I Am Not A Human, Papers Please, and the one billion other takes on those concepts have a lot of mechanical overlap with cozy games where you run a shop or cafe or whatever - it's an ever-rotating cast characters on the other side of a barrier asking for something and hoping you do your job right. Mechanically, what is the difference between handing a desperate individual at the boarder their passport back after checking it over, and handing a cute little animal the coffee you just made for them. Nothing. But if I looked at you and called NINAH cozy, I'd be lying, because it isn't. But there is no difference in code between a customer revealing a little more about their life each day, and a personal huddled up in your closet opening up to you about where they were when the world went to shit.

Also please remember not to post deltarune spoilers until a week after release please god I wont be able to play when it first launches SHOW ME THIS ONE KINDNESS

Every once and a while I remember that most people here don't like lesbians. Or women in general.

Would you guys forgive me if I said I started playing DBD again.

I need to be in a Discord server full of theme park enthusiasts so I just don't dump this all on my unwitting friends. Holy shit. What the fuck happened.

I hate AI all the time but I feel a particular rage every Nextfest. It's not really making a difference in telling which games definitely suck, but at least those fuckers had to find a font. I miss seeing devs with no idea what they're doing try to format a steam page.

I desperately want the new Fable to operate, on surface level, with the same basic morality system, but as the game goes on deconstruct it further and further and confront the fact that a single, objective scale measuring Good and Evil is inherently flawed. But it's Fable, so it won't do that.

something something The Backrooms and Borderline Forever.