frog 🐸

Spirit of the North

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1213700/Spirit_of_the_North/

An indie adventure/exploration/puzzle game. There is no combat in this game. You explore, solve puzzles, and take in the vibes of a story told without any dialogue at all. It’s all in the visuals, music, and mood. This is Abzu with foxes.

The gameplay is fairly simple, but also pretty forgiving - there are very few places where you need fast reactions or precise timing, and if you fall off a platform you only have to redo the last few jumps, not the entire level. It’s the kind of puzzle game where you have plenty of time to think things through and even more time to just enjoy the journey. Definitely a game for the casual gamer who wants to look at pretty landscapes, listen to beautiful music, and bark at things.

If you stick exclusively to following the story, it’s maybe 2-3 hours long, and getting 100% completion on all achievements, collectibles, and alternate skins took me 16 hours. So it’s not a huge game - which means the best time to buy it is when it’s heavily discounted, like right now.

I love this game so much. I like a lot of games, but it’s rare that I absolutely adore one. In fact, I might just go and play it again tomorrow.

Oh yes, if you liked Abzu, you’ll very likely like Spirit of the North too. :)

Abzu (undersea exploration, relatively chill, but I never completed it)

@troyunrau@lemmy.ca Abzu isn’t an RPG, but I’d still second this recommendation, as it’s very chill to play, has zero combat, and has a lovely story to it. Would also recommend Spirit of the North for the same reason. No dialogue in either, though - the story is very much in the visuals, music, and atmosphere rather than words.

I thought you suggested it because of my username. Even better than you didn’t notice, and have now realised there’s another reason I should play Frog Detective. 🐸

It’s on my wishlist! It does look so, so cute. <3

I played the entirety of “Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion”, which was short, fun, and cute. I’m increasingly finding that I lack the stamina and mental headspace for large games, and I’m appreciating the little indie games a lot more. Something about the combination of cute food characters and running around committing petty crimes and ripping up documents just really appealed to me.

Yesterday I started “Earthlock”, which I got a couple of months ago in a giveaway. I’m liking it so far. Has a lot of “Final Fantasy games in the 1990s” vibes which is working for me. There’s more frogs than I expected, which is always a pleasant surprise.

I haven’t played it yet either (waiting for the price to come down, and I’m largely withholding judgement until I’ve played it myself), but my understanding is essentially it’s not a bad game, and if it had been launched 10 years ago, or from a much smaller studio, it wouldn’t have attracted so much criticism. But it’s using what is now a very old engine (and a notoriously buggy one, which I can confirm from having played other games with the same engine) which limited its potential. My feeling is it was a difficult decision either way: do you keep using the engine that the dev team has spent the last decade learning inside and out, or do you switch to something newer with more capabilities but then have the enormous challenge of retraining everyone? I don’t envy that choice.

I’m expecting to enjoy Starfield but not be wowed by it. But that’s fine, because I’m fine with playing games where I go “I enjoyed that” rather than “this changed my life”, and it’s also pretty rare for me to really dislike a game.

But… yeah, definitely sticking with my thinking that I totally understand the guy’s frustration with the way gamers so often think they know more than they do, but I don’t think his public response is very professional.

Yeah, I agree with you there. Sorry if the point wasn’t clear in my post. Like, I do legitimately understand where his frustration is coming from, because I don’t doubt for a minute that he and the rest of the team worked their asses off, and unfortunately there is a tendency for people who know nothing about game dev to think they’re experts in it (you know, the way there is for every subject.) But just because his emotional reaction to the criticism of Starfield is valid, the way he’s behaving is not okay.

And honestly, on our course we’ve had the “you’ve got to have a thick skin in this industry, because you will spend ages making something that your boss or the fans will tell you they don’t like, and you’ve just got to deal with it and fix it” talk three times already. Criticism is tough to hear, but unless what you did was so shit that it got you fired, you take the criticism and you do better next time. Seems like Emil Pagliarulo might have skipped those lessons?

I have mixed feelings here, because on one hand, I actually do see where this guy is coming from. I’m a game design student on a degree course structured around live client briefs and projects for contests (ie, the stuff we make has to work for people outside the university, not just ourselves), and as design lead for the first project of the course, I was fighting with a member of my own team about design decisions throughout the entire project. Dude with zero capacity for empathy spent a considerable amount of energy arguing about how it was a waste of time developing the relationship between the characters in what was explicitly supposed to be a character-driven story. The words “character-driven” were literally in the brief, and right up until the last day he was insisting it was a waste of time focusing on the characters. So I really, really feel the Starfield design lead’s frustration on the “stop arguing about shit you know nothing about” front.

On the other hand, I don’t feel it’s very professional to air this frustration in public. If people don’t like Starfield, then they don’t like it, and the design lead complaining about it on social media isn’t going to change that, nor does it paint Bethesda in a good light. It just makes him look a bit petty, I guess?

I guess it all comes down to whether the product meets expectations. Players are disappointed in Starfield, and even if they don’t know why design decisions were made, it doesn’t change the fact that the game hasn’t achieved what it was meant to achieve. People that spent a lot of money buying it have a right to feel annoyed, and being told “I’m right, you’re wrong” by the design lead isn’t helpful. And if the project does meet expectations, and it’s only a few assholes complaining, then nobody needs to say “I’m right, you’re wrong” because the end results speak for themselves. If Starfield had been a massive, widely-loved success, a few armchair devs saying “you should have done X, Y and Z instead” wouldn’t be taken seriously.

Not many. The obligatory 50% of all mobile games that I played for 5 minutes and went “I hate this”, obviously. But PC games? Hmmm. Probably “Lost Ember”, I guess. What really puzzles me about this is I played “Spirit of the North” and was utterly in love with it, to the point that it’s in my top 5, and “Lost Ember” is very similar in many respects. I ought to have loved it, and I cannot put my finger on what I didn’t like about it. I just didn’t like it.

Yeah, I would agree that they probably didn’t even think about it. I’d probably interpret the spell as removing the “blinded” condition, whether it’s caused by magic or just someone throwing sand in the character’s eyes or other “normal” causes of the blinded condition.

The Pathfinder version also specifies “The spell does not restore ears or eyes that have been lost, but it repairs them if they are damaged.” Someone with congenital blindness or deafness may not have “damage” that can be repaired, and with the ears/eyes being naturally non-functional, the spell giving them a new ability (sight/hearing) that they previously didn’t possess could be interpreted as being beyond the spell’s scope.

Maybe the spell only removes acquired forms of blindness, say through the magic spell Blindness, curses, etc, and has no ability to generate new, functioning tissue for someone that never had any.

Another possibility is that maybe magic can only heal injuries and illnesses, but can’t do anything with congenital disabilities, because the magic restores the person to their natural state, and being blind/etc is what’s natural for that character. So even if magic could heal those who are disabled due to circumstances, there would still be plenty of disabled people who were born with their disabilities.

If these accounts are true, then Leif’s actions sound reasonable to me. Macing someone who is threatening you with a weapon is justifiable in my opinion, even if the wielder of the weapon is a minor - the real blame lies with the parent who gave a weapon to a 12 year old.

A Golden Axe reboot is something I did not know I needed. 👀

Dorfromantik this week. One day I will have the time and energy for something more complicated. My enormous list of unplayed games is staring at me.

The article does specifically state “60 per cent would be happy to play alongside a trans teammate”, so the research definitely did look into acceptance of trans people separately from LGB people. While 60% is lower than the mid-70s percentage that accept LGB people, it is still a majority.

The truth is that sports fans, like the majority of people, are accepting of trans people, but don’t care about the issue strongly enough to start pushing against discrimination. The issue isn’t a lack of support, it’s a lack of allies actually being vocal about it.

I think there is a difference between how sports fans feel about LGBT+ people, and how the people in charge of the league organisations feel. Stonewall’s research appears to have been looking at the former, while the latter are the ones who make the rules. That said, if the research is correct and sports fans are genuinely supportive of trans athletes, then they should be pressuring the league organisations to stop discriminating against them.

but if they actually have to pay the game developers/publishers for each copy they give away (rather than a flat fee, which probably seems more likely) then claiming free games might even cost them.

Not sure how it works with Prime Gaming, but with Kindle Prime and Kindle Unlimited, authors get paid based on the number of pages of the book that the customer reads. So the more people download and read the free books in those programs, the more authors get paid. I’ve heard that a lot of authors really appreciate this system because being in the program gets their book in front of more eyes than if it was just another ebook in the middle of millions of others, so they do come out of it better off. And often financially better off than if they’d published through a traditional publisher, too.

While I doubt Prime Gaming are paying devs based on hours played (the closest metric to pages read for books), since about half of the games I’ve claimed have been on other platforms, it’s definitely possible and even likely that they’re paying based on copies given away, rather than a flat fee.

I didn’t pay for Amazon Prime for the gaming. The free games are just a nice perk on top of a service I was already paying for for other reasons. De-Amazoning is surprisingly difficult when there are simply no local suppliers for many products. So my alternate tactic is costing Amazon as much money as possible, and also fucking up their data as much as possible. I claim every free game, even if I’m not interested in it, because it’ll make the data they hold on me look weird and the devs get paid for each one.

As a furry, I agree with this. While there are plenty of furries that are LGBT+ (Furscience did a survey a few years ago, with thousands of respondants, which revealed only 20% of furries are cishet), being a furry is a hobby, and not an identity/minority that needs support and respect. Living as one’s gender and sexuality is essential for life; enjoying anthropomorphic animal characters is not.