bone-knower

I'm gonna level with you: I have begun a second character in Melvor Idle with as many mods as I can conceivably activate without breaking the game on, and my results currently feel "highly illegal" but also "uniquely thrilling" as every single new pop-up and level and skill brings with it a horrifying new surprise

Make sure to bind this to a key, as the highlighted toggle is the one you'll need to put the asteroid back into orbit. Delaying its use may cost more people their lives.

There is a game I enjoyed, and it had a particularly rocky road to begin falling apart to the point I no longer recommend people play or purchase it.

Demoncrawl was basically Minesweeper met Puzzle Quest, with classes, items, various playstyles you could adapt, and it was a neat roguelite title. But. The developer was... let's say "inexperienced" to be polite, and the game's tech debt really added up over time, especially when he went dark for months at a time. Patches would add new content to the game, and some of these items, modifiers or skills just 100% broke the game. I don't mean broken as in they were overpowered, I mean "if these spawn in your run, the game is going to crash, guaranteed". I think a lot of us realized that this game was not being tested particularly thoroughly at this point in time, and that was ~2 years ago now.

Some of us were figuring out there was writing on the wall prior to this, because of the game's Arena Plus DLC, but we wrote it off as a failed experiment. Arena was a mode implemented in the base game that added "multiplayer", in a form that could be played against bots, or you could try to connect to the server and find human opponents. You'd be placed in a bracket with the other players, get a randomly rolled selection of starting class to use, and then start running boards on a timer, adding modifiers to yourself or other players as ways to fuck with performance, and any uncleared board resulted in an HP loss, meaning over time, people WOULD wear down and die as the game continued and the boards became infeasibly large to solve.

Except. Arena Plus was basically $10 pay to win DLC for this. You gained 1.5x XP gain, +2 class choices and +1 "homeland" (base board rules) to pick from at the start, and this is huge. Suddenly you had a much higher chance of getting something you could work with instead of just getting fucked out the gate. This would probably have made people a lot madder except Arena barely functioned on a good day. At one point in time, and I legit forget if this was a patch that did this, or just "the Arena server keeled over one day and the dev never fixed it", the game stopped recognizing the DLC. Nobody had Arena Plus anymore, whether you bought it or not! This only applied to the Steam release, because I don't think Arena ever fully manifested in the mobile port¹.

Red flag #2 was when the dev decided to go all in on a pre-"AI" machine-learning, trying to randomly generate the pixel art the game used heavily. I think the common consensus in the community is that this was why the guy eventually disappeared altogether, he began chasing that devil instead of returning to his work in progress. We don't really know because he put out one final "stability" patch after saying he'd had a HD crash with no backups, had to recreate a lot of the game and try to fix it up (and, in his defense, he did fix most of the 100%-guaranteed crashes... while adding two more), and then never appeared again. The game still functions because whatever server he used as a backend seems to hold on, and it still generates a daily challenge and, as of that final patch, turns on the seasonal events.

The seasonal events were, to put it politely, controversial, mostly because you could not opt out of them. A new stage had a chance to appear as a result of them if you fulfilled conditions in a run, but each of them basically locked down the end of run bosses to one or two specific seasonal varieties, which a) really makes unlocks and progression hard for new players since they can't see the full suite of things, and b) sometimes just sucks for everyone based on, say, the currently active Summer event in which one of the unskippable potential events is "sunburn" where you take guaranteed burn damage every so many turns if you don't have the Sunscreen item or a mastery that prevents this specific thing... or Hurricane. Hurricane is a negative item which makes +1 whirlpool spawn on a stage. While you have Hurricane, you can't interact with them to destroy them. If one's visible, it gains charges for every move you make. So once it appears in the cleared board, you're now on a timer. If the whirlpool charges fully, drop every non-Hurricane item in your inventory on the ground and delete everything visible in the same quadrant of the board as a whirlpool.

Summer is not a particularly loved event in Demoncrawl.

Anyway, I told you all of that to tell you this story: for some reason I looked back in on the official Discord for the game recently for I don't even know why, I basically just leave it idle to occasionally go "did the guy confirmed die and/or return? no? okay", but something seems to have turned the community up to 11. Maybe the summer sale on Steam brought in new players. Folks are popping in, bemoaning the state of the game, and just getting to the point of realizing the guy's never coming back so they're discussing all the little things they were too polite to bring up prior, like how to manipulate the game's RNG or openly cheat despite its "I crash if memory is touched" fragile Game Maker status. I can't tell if I find this heartwarming or depressing but also, I kinda want the dude to come back just to see what the nest he made looks like at this point because I find that mental image funny.

(And because I bet he'd get fucking savaged the instant he tried shutting the discussion down.)

1. The mobile port is a whole other can of worms. Holy shit, I feel bad for mobile players, because they were clearly the second-class citizens of Demoncrawl, and it seemed pretty likely this was just because the dev did not want to do the legwork twice (I guess thrice if you count Mac/Linux ports). The final mobile update just rendered the game nigh-unplayable with crashes to the point the official Discord has people going "if you're on Android, we archived the last good .apk from a patch or two back." (This also removes a lot of the later classes. Welp.)

"A look at the state of open-world space RPGs", which, no matter how you slice it or try to rephrase that, still means you end up stuck deep-diving Outer Worlds, Starfield, Elex and Star Citizen.

Star Trek Online, too, if you're erring on the side of inclusivity.