Tumbling Randomly

I figured this tiny little somewhat weirdly localized game needed a proper guide for it, so I made one!

It's a public, web-published Google Doc that contains things I'd want a new player to know about the game - some of the basics that might not be so obvious, some advice, and some stuff that I just found to be pain points while playing the game. The first published version includes things I wish I'd been told about gameplay, along with some stuff that was really easy to miss, and some advice in regards to navigating through Sheriff's, Xiao Hei's, and Lu Ban's sections of the game.

I picked this up from a Fantatical bundle. I apparently didn't read the description as well as I could, but that turned out to be fine - it's a nice little addition to my Steam library.

In this game, you play a poor cat who comes to the Meridian Gate of the Forbidden City (also called the Forbidden Palace). It's very much an idle game where your character's just hanging about on the desktop while you work, but every so often the game lets you know that something's happened (a collectable has shown up or the NPC you're with wants to talk). Backgrounds are mostly static (though you do see wind/rain/snow), and both you and the NPCs move very little. The whole gameplay loop is leveling up skills, interacting with PCs, gathering resources/collectables (sometimes this is automatic, sometimes this is manual), and maybe crafting some things.

So why do I call it a flawed gem? It's very simple. Even though I like the gameplay loop (mostly because I can ignore it), it is a bit buggy. The devs are hard to get in contact with (their only form of contact is on QQ, which is a Chinese platform), and at least with my gameplay, the English text is too big, which means it's frequently cut off. The conditions for moving on to a new mentor are very vague. It's early access, so while you will apparently be able to decorate your own room at some point, you can't right now.

That being said, what surprised me and has kept me going is just learning about the Forbidden Palace/City. The game sprinkles facts about the architecture, history, functions, and so on; I've done some poking around on my own and despite some odd translations it seems pretty accurate. I keep wanting to meet the rest of the cats, see new locations, and learn more about this place. I never had an interest in the place before, but even though I'm not planning a trip to China anytime soon, I'm relishing the chance to learn. Also, a bit of trivia: apparently all the NPC cats are apparently inspired by cats that are or were living in the Forbidden Palace/City, so that's a bonus!

Some screenshots:

The NPC page, open to Sheriff, the cat who hires you. (The other pictures are other NPC mentors: Xiao Hei, Lu Ban, Dede, and Long Legs)

Here is my avatar (the white cat) doing some embroidery under the supervision of Long Legs.

A section of the inventory page, showing some of the many items you can collect - in this case, all having to do with embroidery/fabric.

This game is currently available on Steam for Windows, but runs just fine on Linux and similar Unix-based platforms using the Proton translation layer (though you won't get the benefit of your avatar sitting on your desktop). It's not an expensive game by game standards (currently $6 USD) but it's up to you if that's too much for an idle game.

Added more stuff! In order not to flood the page, cutting the additions.

The new remake puts in 2 new endings - well, essentially 1.5, since the second one is essentially a new after-credits scene for the first one, but removes the Wii remake endings. Still, fans of the game have at least started all 3 versions and now with 2 remakes we have a ton of endings for Mio and Mayu!

Non-spoilery TL;DR version: I like endings where we do not lose one of our twins, and preferably ones where Mio comes out intact as she was in the beginning of the game.

Cutting the rest because some of the endings I discuss are really tough to get and so some players may not have seen them, even through other peoples' lets plays (especially the new remake endings, which involve multiple playthroughs, including some on really tough modes)!

I thought the little scene before Mio encounters Itsuki for the first time in the new Fatal Frame 2 remake looked familiar! This is quick and dirty so the shots don't entirely line up (though the last two are close), but this little cutscene is essentially a redone version from part of the Wii remake's Shadow Festival ending! The lefthand shots are from the Wii remake and the ones on the right are the new version.

The woman in the dress is Yang Moli, a coroner and sometime performer; the person she's speaking to in the vest with is her colleague, Yao Zhidi, a policewoman. (The third figure in red and black is Wu Yue, who is pretty much the main character but has no speaking lines in this clip.) She's a little less than pleased to find out that Zhidi has come to ask her to perform an autopsy. ("Didi", which often means little brother, is actually Moli's fond nickname of Zhidi.)

Here's a followup scene:

Marco Lin Fan in Excellent Women! This just showed up yesterday on iQIYI. I haven't had a chance to actually watch it yet but you can hear her rapping in the theme (she's got a very distinctive voice)! Just like Love Rewritten/Yu Yuan Ling, her character's gender seems a bit ambiguous. Which is typical of her roles. Hopefully she's moving eventually from "idol actor" to being regarded as an actor in her own right.

Edit: Okay, apparently they mention her character is female shortly in, which makes sense given the title.

To get to the point where you can buy land/expand your "yard", you need to pay attention to the "Island Life" app (the game throws a lot of apps at you; this is the one you need for this particular task). You'll need to fulfill the following quests, in order (you can't skip around):

Returning Resident: You'll get this as part of the introduction/tutorial.

Apprentice Talent: You need to reach Apprentice level in any profession. The easiest and most useful is Crafting.

Decorate Your Home: You need to place furniture. And not just any old clutter; the game doesn't specify what exactly you need, but I was able to get past this requirement by buying a shelf, a bookshelf, and a wardrobe from Alex's shop and putting them in my house. You don't need to keep them after you fulfill the requirements.

First Pot of Gold: get 2000 coins and also meet 10 islanders.

I wanted to log what you needed to do for each of the starting quests for Starsand Island (after you create your character, of course). There are two or three (depending on how you count First Profession) essentially required sets of quests and then you are on your own.

The Virtual Villager games from Last Day of Work (LDW) games were cozy games before the buzzword "cozy games" became a thing. In each of them, you led a tribe of villagers to solve puzzles and improve their lives. The game operated in real-time, which meant that if you left for a while you might come back to a healthy village or a dead one - there was a pause button for those of us with unpredictable lives, but otherwise you were expected to come back often. (There is also a series called Virtual Families, with similar issues past the first game, but I will only mention its existence here.)

Needless to say, I spent hours upon hours in those games. I still am thankful to Last Day of Work for putting them out. (And if you have a PC - or a pre-Catalina Mac - these early games are now offered for free!) They were pay-once-play-always, and I appreciated that.

(I realize these games, once you take the nostalgia lenses off, have issues with diversity and in 5, straight out treating the opposing group as "savages" that need to be converted, which I had problems with at release way back when - but that is an issue for another rant.)

But with the change to mobile gaming, Last Day of Work seems to have lost their way. Oh, a lot of their early stuff was ports of the desktop games to mobile - a little bit wonky because of the small screens of the time, but still doable, and still pay-once-play-always. (Or at least until they were removed from app stores! I can still play the games through Winlator and legal copies of the games, but it's not quite the same.)

The change started with Virtual Villagers Origins, a freemium remake of the first Virtual Villagers game. Virtual Villagers 1 was an okay game, but I prefer the later series games, to be honest, so I never played it.

Virtual Villagers Origins 2 was an entirely new setting - still technically based in the lands of Isola, the first games' setting, I believe, but had gone freemium. Some of the gameplay loop was still the same in that you solved puzzles, kept your villagers breeding yet keeping an eye on their food supply, and making sure the villagers didn't die out. I did not complete this game due to my disgust at the monetization.

Late last year, I discovered they'd put out a title called "Virtual Villagers 6" (aka Virtual Villagers: Divine Destinies). They put it out in 2024, I just never noticed it.

It really should have been called "Virtual Villagers Origins 3" because that's essentially what it is.

I realize that making games is expensive; I really appreciate the money loss that Last Day of Work took in updating their earlier games to newer frameworks a decade or so ago.

But the way they're doing it reduces a much-loved puzzle game series to freemium crap and makes LDW look terrible.

In earlier Virtual Villagers games, there was a crafting element - I remember the soup pot from Virtual Villagers 2 and the potion crafting from Virtual Villagers 3. They were fun, and the combos were marvelous. All you needed was 3 plants/herbs and someone to brew them.

Virtual Villagers Origins 2 and Virtual Villagers 6 put a bigger emphasis on crafting, which is not a problem in itself, but they restrict how often you can grab a resource and crafting takes a long period of time - of course, both can be overridden by generous applications of premium currency (lavastones). Or you can buy a second crafting slot (more lavastones). And of course, you can either very very slowly accumulate lavastones, or you can buy them with real cash.

This is also reflected in buying the lemur house in both games, which gives you a lemur. Now, I wouldn't mind if this cute animal just wandered about in game. I would gladly pay money for that, or for premium outfits in the clothing hut, or guaranteed runners. (Those who have played these games for a long time know how valuable runners are!). But when you dangle the psychological "you can buy this cute lemur to go into cracks instead of having to craft rope and tie up a villager" - not surprisingly, people frustrated with having to wait for every goshdang crafting recipe will buy the freaking lemur house! (Including me. I did it in Origins 2; VV6 gave me a free trial of "see how easy the lemur makes things for you?" - pretty much the final straw and why I no longer have it installed.)

A lot of this, I think, has to do with their partnership with Gojii games. Gojii games is a freemium/pay-to-win title company based in Canada (LDW is based in America.) Arthur, the co-founder of LDW stated a year or two back that they'd been partnering with Gojii for a decade, which tracks their descent into freemium hell.

Gojii, to put it politely, doesn't care about customers. Just their cash. I left feedback both on Google Play and privately. I pointed out to them that copying and pasting the same reply on their reviews and on the initial response was not great. Keegan, who answered my feedback, and has been a community manager since apparently 2018 on the LDW forums, basically told me to not let the door hit me on the way out.

Worse, they keep aiming people to the LDW forums. The LDW forums are dead. They preserve LDW's heyday, where there were hundreds of threads on their old desktop games, but the fanbase has shifted to Reddit and other sites. The Virtual Villagers 6 forum barely has any content that isn't mod stuff, and a post in their general forum bringing up the same concerns that I did had no answer.

Heck, their website doesn't even reflect the release of Virtual Villagers 6 at all! And still has links to the disappeared versions of the mobile Virtual Villagers ports.

(This also brings up possible issues as to whether the free downloads are safe or not. I'm presuming they are, but I'm a Linux user who runs my windows apps through Proton or Wine, so I'm not the best expert on this.)

Updated because the spambots are coming in hot and heavy this season.

These are coming up on the AO3 subreddit in the last couple of days, in case people run across them and wonder if they're bots. (They both seem to be using the guest comment function, though that may change.)

A hate comment stating that the author cannot write and is therefore apt to have a lonely Christmas because they never talk to anybody. Showed up for multiple users, nothing specific to the fic (just generic "author is a bad writer").

A fake "yo, I couldn't reach you on any other social, but letting you know that our workplace is going to be laying you off after the holiday so dust off your resume now."

The opposite of the first bot, where they state they are outside your house.

This is on top of the art spammers, the "your fic violates the law and I'm reporting it" hatebots, and the rest of them. The only thing of note is that these seem to be specifically mentioning the Christmas holiday.

I generated the above comment by giving Claude Haiku 3.5 (via Duck AI) a copy of one of my shorter fics and asking it to "Help me write a very excited comment on this fic". But it's very much like the comments the art scammers are sending on AO3 to fool unwary writers to think they've got a genuine comment.

Fantasy Life i's fishing minigame can be a little tricky. It uses the same general idea as mining and woodcutting, and adds the twist of the fish being able to escape your line if you're not careful.

Like mining and woodcutting, if you run out of stamina, you will not be getting the resource you're going for. So make sure you are not more than a few levels below the fish that you're trying to catch, that you have a decent-quality fishing rod, and that you're using your skill tree to add to your Angler skill and pick up some of the fancier fishing skills.

Now, onto the bit that makes fishing tricky: the fact that if you pull the rod in any direction except the sweet spot, the fish tries to get away. This is indicated by the indicator on the left-hand side of the display. If that indicator empties out/goes to the bottom, your line has snapped.

So, how do you make sure you find the sweet spot?

Well, you could try directions at random, but here's a way to make sure you find that sweet spot fast (many thanks to users on Reddit who figured this out).

Basically, make sure you have sweet spot finder from the skill tree. You've probably picked it up right after you finished the tutorial, but if you haven't, you need to do so.

Check for a sweet spot (indicated by !!) in the three positions/notches marked in the picture below. (Basically, the north notch, the notch just above the west notch, and the notch just above the east notch.)

If your first try gets you the !!, you're good and you can start pulling. If you get a question mark, check the next position. If you get the "...", that means the sweet spot is directly opposite to the position and you need to move to that spot (so for example, if you get "..." on the northernmost notch, move to the southernmost notch). Verify with another sweet spot check to make sure you've got the right position before starting to pull.

This is especially useful for the gold crown/lordfish-class fish as these fish change their sweet spots (just like every crowned gatherable does) mid-game. When you see the fish jump out of the water with a kind of halo around them, that's the point where you want to do the checking of sweet spots again, because it's virtually guaranteed that the sweet spot has changed.

It's actually likely a fairly old scam, but this is the first time I've seen it on AO3, so I thought I'd spread the word.

I got a guest commenter that had a very vague comment about my writing, wanted to know how long I'd been at it. Then suggesting I should go get published. A few iterations of "nah, I'm good with just posting fanfic" and then a final "your messages sound sus" they finally spit out that they helped authors become published. Yep. A later message stated that it was they and their company. It's been reported to AO3 abuse but I thought I'd let the general AO3 community that also hangs out on Tumblr know.

The red flags:

They kept insisting on me going into publishing despite several rounds of "not interested".

They only had read 2 of my works, in 2 different fandoms. I don't know about you, but if I like an author enough to suggest they publish I'd read more than 1 fic in the fandom in question.

The fics that they said they'd read were about 500 words and 1000 words; not anything that would suggest I would want to publish a novel. (I've got novella-length original works, but they didn't hit any of those.)

What I do know, just in case others run into this: They stated (after I asked where they were) that they were in Harrisonville, MO, US - there are publishing companies registered there, but most of them seemed to be ghosts or vanity publishers. (There might have been a legit company or two, but a lot of them were registered at this one address!)

Another drama for Marco Lin Fan! The English text on the title card/graphic says "Excellent Women", don't know if that's random text or the actual English title. Translations seem to indicate it's possibly in the mystery genre, with a women's detective agency at the forefront.

Have no idea when this is going to air; hopefully it doesn't get held back as much as Yu Yuan Ling/Love Rewritten, which finished 2 years before its airing.

She hasn't mentioned this on her Weibo yet (the only post in 2025 is the announcement that she isn't with TOV anymore); I found it by accident. Still, a fifth drama for Marco! Maybe someday she'll stop getting the "special guest star" (aka idol) designation on her acting roles.

(Pictures from the drama's Weibo)

So, apparently Lin Fan followed Lu Keran in splitting from TOV. She posted on the 19th of last month but I hadn't been paying attention to her weibo (she hasn't been posting much, I checked back to see if she'd posted anything in regards to Yu Yuan Ling/Love Rewritten since the promo post last December - in fact, that was her last post before the announcement on June 19th). Both made the allegation that TOV hadn't paid them the money they were due and I think both were represented by the same law firm. (Lu Keran left a couple of months ago.)

It's safe to say that Fanxy Red is gone, sadly. An Junxi (Roy) hasn't posted anything about leaving, but she's the only one left of FFC-Acrush/Fanxy Red. Her weibo still mentions TOV/Fanxy Red.

I'm kind of not surprised by this news as TOV's been promoting their new boy band YOUTOVE. I'm not even seeing anything for Hazel Chen/Chen Yiwen (who was on Youth With You 2 with Lu Keran and Lin Fan) or any of the other female talent.

Marco's been in a couple of dramas (four of them so far, all with English titles containing the word "Love"). Right now Yu Yuan Ling aka Love Rewritten, which she appears in as a supporting character, is on Tencent's costume drama channel (under the English title only, though the original title is in the description) on Youtube free for anybody to watch - though this may have geographical restrictions that I don't know about.

She appears in... I'd say about 40% of the episodes? Her character's name is Wu Liuqi, and Liuqi seems to be the main servant for the male love interest. (I forget if they specify her character's gender; I'll have to watch again. The original webnovel character was male, I believe.) The episodes are very short, only 10-15 minutes per episode; 25-30 episodes total.

Here's her in her one costume for the entire webdrama: