I want to be able to enjoy things like this, and sometimes can, but often I just can't and it sucks to like try to crunch the numbers in my head about that.
The first game from director Nic Tringali at Bithell Game’s new Lunar Division, The Banished Vault has been described by me as “what if a Euro board game was squeezed through an indie journaling bookmark game,” “a brutal tutorial in logistics wrapped in a cruel test of executive function,” and “a minimal approach to a maximalist mobile game exclusively for a self-hating god.” But, mostly, I’ve been referring to my 30+ hours spent reviewing The Banished Vault as “the worst time four guys can have in a boat.”
There is nothing better than men having a bad time in a boat.
Before deciding to give my Exiles a moment of reprieve and putting them in a semi-permanent hibernation to actually write this review, my desk was littered with scraps of paper covered in math. My phone had math in it. My Google Keep had to-do lists with the buildings I needed to still construct, an ever changing accounting of resources on hand vs resources needed. At one point, I just wrote “WHERE IS THE FUCKING SILICA, DAVE?” at the top of a quartered sheet of printer paper next to a little symbolic drawing of HAL9000.