VampireExpert

cohost's #1 sleepyposter

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Approximate age36
LocationSweden
Trans?Yes
Goth?Yes
Lesbian?Yes
GF?No

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@crepe asked me this, and my reply got long enough to be its own post. I could mention some more, but this is probably good for something to read if you're like "Say, what kinds of video games does that Freja girl like, anyway?". In no particular order:


Spiritfarer

#1 game of all time by the metric of tears cried per hour played. "A cozy management game about dying" describes it very well - it's relaxing, fun, very cute, beautifully drawn and animated, and well-written, where notably the intent of the writing is occasionally to hit you very hard emotionally - saying goodbye to the nice grandma who's losing her memory, etc. There's an interesting thing where some players (including myself for a little while) make the game more stressful and less fun for themselves by deciding they have to do as much and produce as much as possible every day, even though the game gives you no incentive to do that at all, not even so much as a way to tell that you have been doing it. Gamer culture! Just relax. Grow crops when you feel like it, not as soon as you're able to no matter what.

Tunic

I wrote a little bit about Tunic here. It might be instructive to point out that it is easily my GotY - Elden Ring is very good, but it doesn't do what Tunic does. I really like the feelings of being surprised and figuring stuff out and discovering things, and this game gave me so much of those. Very joyful.

Zachtronics puzzle games

And puzzle games in general, but I love the open-endedness and presentation of these in particular. It's kind of hard to say more about them, but I can't not mention them!

Per Aspera

This is really about city-building games in general, so I could put The Settlers II or SimCity 4 here, but I really like the setting of Per Aspera in particular. In it, you play as an AI sent to terraform Mars for human colonization, and occasionally throughout the game your programming generates observations about your situation that you pick your reaction to as a personality test kind of thing. One of them is "If only it were me and Mars... Just the two of us. Creating perfect systems together in solitude. Wouldn't that be nice?", and yes, that's all I want in life. It also has a cool story, and is a really neat experience visually as you watch the planet go from red to blue and green. I think "gardening games" is a term I saw a little bit a while ago, for games about peacefully growing things (not necessarily plants).

Europa Universalis IV

I guess this is a comfort game for me. It's a fun and neat sort-of-historical-ish grand strategy game that can be enjoyably challenging, but I think more importantly it has a million different little mechanics, and playing EU4 pushes everything else out of my head. When you're playing it, you're in the Ducats and Manpower and Sailors and Stability and Corruption and Prestige and Legitimacy and Power Projection and Merchants and Colonists and Diplomats and Missionaries and Army Composition and Estate Privileges and Imperial Authority and Province Development and Monthly Power Focus and Alliances and Favors and Rebel Factions and Aggressive Expansion and Innovativeness and Royal Marriages and Personal Unions and Religious Mechanics and Advisors and Policies zone. Among other things.

Factorio

Perhaps the greatest "constructing perfect systems in solitude" game. I showed someone my EU4 and Factorio play times, and they said "this image is in the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for autism", which... yeah, fair enough.

Super Metroid

There's this Polygon article that talks about being into Halo as a closeted trans kid; I've never been into Halo very much, but I read it and was like "Oh, it's like me and Samus". I wish more metroidvanias had the feeling of solitude that the Metroid games (that I've played) do. If only it were me and Zebes...

The House in Fata Morgana, Butterfly Soup, and Eliza

I haven't played a lot of VNs, but these ones really burrowed into my heart. I finished Fata Morgana and took like a year to uninstall it because I didn't want to say goodbye to it. Butterfly Soup is really funny. Eliza made me go "Fuck!!!" more than any other game has.

Dark Souls (II)

I like the Dark Souls (and Sekiro and Elden Ring - haven't played Demon's Souls or Bloodborne) games for the usual reasons. They're pretty good! The biggest thing for me is having to struggle to get through them while knowing that my struggles will eventually be rewarded if I keep at it, unlike in real life. I like to say that DS2 is my least favorite one to play - it has some truly bad areas and bosses - but it's the one that tries the most and is the weirdest, and so it's my most favorite one to think about, and the one I would pick if all but one of them had to be erased from existence. That intro cutscene, that conversation with the Emerald Herald, those item descriptions... The others just don't have quite the same atmosphere. Feels like the world is running on fumes. I love it.

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I would also like to say Final Fantasy XIV, but what really does it for me with it is the Dark Knight job quests, and it's hard to say an MMORPG that takes one hundred thousand hours to play through is one of my favorites when it's really about such a small slice of it. Though the rest of the story is also generally good, if you like that kind of thing, once you get past the slow first... 50 hours? It's a lot. But the DRK job quests are really something special to me - they do more than I think any other game I've played to use the interactivity of the medium and the conventions of the genre to make the writing more emotionally affecting. This is a character writing to your character:

Time to go. I don't know when we'll do this again─*if* we'll ever do this again. The little trick you've learned doesn't count, you know. But even if this is our end, it won't change what we had. I love you more than you'll ever know. Be well.

But it also works as the writer of the quests writing to you, the player. It's really neat! I really like it when game writing takes advantage of how easy it is to identify with a character you've been playing as.

OK, bye.


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