Hannface

“a seventeen year old girl is just never, ever, ever in her prime! ever! i am in my prime! would you test your strength out on me? there is no way, there is no way anyone would dare, dare test their strength out on me! because you all know there is nothing stronger than a broken woman who was rebuilt herself.”

I started playing the Hogwarts Mystery game yesterday and learned how ridiculous it is as a game, but omg it is FANTASTIC as a spoonie metaphor!

So basically you have “energy,” and almost everything you do in the game takes energy. I think sometimes you can talk to people without energy, but learning spells or potions is a lot of clicking, and every time you click it takes 1 energy. So far at least, you click anywhere from 1-5 times to do things like, “pay attention,” “demonstrate,” “read book,” etc. and there can be dozens of those per lesson. So 25 energy points, recharging completely every 100 minutes, does NOT GET YOU FAR.

It’s the games way of trying to get you to spend a ton of money on energy in order to get through the game in a reasonable amount of time, but it’s so badly done and is just BEYOND ANNOYING because you run out of energy SO FAST. Read a page, listen to the professor, get halfway through trying to add a potion ingredient, and now you have to wait 4 minutes every time you want to try to do anything else, because you’d need to buy SO much energy.

Reviews have criticized this system as making the game “borderline unplayable,” which is true, but I feel like I’m now going to use this as my new Spoon Theory to explain how spoonie life can be “borderline unlivable.” (Unlivable sounds hash, but I don’t mean not worth living, just how hard it is to be supposed to “keep up” with people who DON’T have to recharge their energy for 4 minutes in order to do anything.)