Ninety-Three

Wow, the looks on their faces at the end. I feel like their expressions are saying to each other "Can you believe we just did that?"

My theory is that you died in the opening minute of the game. Ghosts plural still unconfirmed.

You say they're dicks, but they took every evil and locked it safely in a box. Seems like a pretty nice thing to do. From that perspective hope makes sense as a safety measure: "Well in case they do go and do the one thing we tell them not to do, let's at least put in hope so they can cope with the evil they release". Of course they were generally dicks, but in this story their only fault is failing to understand that humans are more curious than trusting.

Because "Did you hear about the pigeon dating simulator?" makes a good headline, and a good conversation starter. It's super silly, and people like talking about super silly things. This isn't exactly data, but a lot of people (more than average for any random popular game) I hear talking about it haven't actually sat down and played the thing.

I don't think flipping it works though. If Pandora had kept the box closed, the world would be a better place. Sure there's no hope, but there also isn't a box's worth of evil running around necessitating hope. Even putting aside that, who unleashes hope? In the versions I've heard, Pandora doesn't want to open the box a second time, and she has to be persuaded to do so by someone else*, so the cure for blind faith is more blind faith? *I remember a version where the second opening isn't ever Pandora's intent, but that doesn't exactly help cast her in a positive light either.

I am still on the first non-tutorial prison. I've been there a while, because I keep losing all my progress when I get caught by some bullshit untutorialized rule like "Tower guards can't see you at night, unless you're digging" or any one of the many "Oops, you got magically caught, no you can't evade any guards, get teleported directly to solitary" situations. The pay phone definitely does not unlock recipes which is why I wikied tool recipes, I have neither the time nor the patience to rub everything on everything else, and one definitely needs those recipes. Everything I can do requires tools to break through something, and then often paper mache so that I'm not magically teleported to solitary ( ) when someone notices a missing vent/wall/etc and omnisciently determines me to be the culprit. Even spending all my time searching desks/buying from inmates (I'm swimming in money)/mugging inmates, those resources (the biggest bottleneck being files/premade tools) just arrive so damn slowly. I could take a job that yields metal or lumber, but I find enough of that in my quest for other resources. It feels like I'm playing an MMO, grinding mobs with a 1% droprate. It's boring, samey, and slow. I assume that you don't have that problem, could you give me an idea of how you play the game? How do you gather resources, and how much time (over the course of one prison) do you spend gathering each resource?

To list a few I've seen: An always-on bullet-time bubble that makes nearby projectiles slow down. Regular old bullet time. An activated ability that destroys all projectiles on screen. I once played a bullet hell where there was an ability that prevented nearby enemies from shooting. It made for an interesting tradeoff: stay near groups to disable their weapons, but then you have to avoid crashing into the enemies you put yourself near. Leave a trail of fire when you move, damaging enemies that touch it. Normally this is just a way to get more damage, or trivially kill fragile enemies, but you mentioned the game is about manipulating AI, and if the AI were programmed to not just charge headlong into a fifty foot line of fire, I could imagine it being used tactically. Lastly, I've never been a fan of this one myself, but if you're on a healthbar instead of one-shot kills, there's always the old "retaliate when damaged" ability, which you can have trigger any effect you want.

I can't even imagine someone using it as a positive. Do people do that?

Woah woah woah, I wouldn't go that far. There's still plenty of time for delays to arise.

I think the system fell down on more than just clumsiness and clashing. If you make the good choice, you get 40 ADAM per Little Girl, plus 80 ADAM and a miscellaneous gift basket every three, but if you make the evil choice, you get 80 ADAM per Little Girl. The characters try to tell how you need to do this to survive, but it's the difference between 20% more ADAM and random lootbags, which is not exactly make or break. Even if it was a larger difference, there was never a point during my playthrough when I found myself thinking "You know what I need more than anything else right now? A little more ADAM."

I didn't memorize every recipe or anything, though I did spoil myself on how to make tools (because it seems like the only way to learn in-game is to luck out and have that crafting note be exacty what you need, or spend hours doing the adventure game "Rub every item on every other item" thing). My big problem though is that my progress seems to be gated entirely by my ability to acquire tools, and there's nothing I can do to increase the positively glacial speed at which that happens. I'm just stuck checking everyone's inventories and desks, then twiddling my thumbs waiting for them to refresh. Eventually I'll hoard enough to make some progress. Is that working as intended, or am I missing something? Should I be mugging every inmate I see in case they have a file in their pocket that's not for sale?

I tried this out and I have not been liking it. The tutorial feels like it's fifteen seconds long, and fails to teach you a ton of important mechanics, eventually I just read the wiki. It's possible that the criminally brief introduction has left me under-informed about how the game works, so I could be mistaken in what I'm about to say. It seems like escaping always comes back to depending heavily on crafting and tools, which spawn very slowly, forcing me to spend most of my time just waiting. I'll spend my first few days maxing out stats, then the only thing to do is loot everyone's desk, mug anyone carrying a useful tool, and wait for those things to respawn so I can do it five more times until I've built up enough supplies. Left untouched, heat dies down quickly, and relationships trend towards 50%, making those systems feel somewhere between "pointless" and "a brief inconvenience". Can anyone who's played it weigh in, is there something I'm supposed to be doing in this game?

So that whole thing is accurately summarized by Reyturner, but I'd like to talk about one part in particular. I found it weird that TB took her statement to be going after Ken Levine. To me, the statement seems on par with "I wonder if David Fincher is ever kept awake at night, haunted by how many people think Tyler Durden is totally awesome". Taking that as an attack on Levine seems like the classic gamer mentality of "But I like this thing! How dare you say it is anything less than perfect!" Though maybe him being defensive is too optimistic an interpretation, and TB was just using it as an excuse to be a dumpster fire.

Sometimes, to make a game more interesting for myself, I will force myself to conform to an arbitrary rule or set of rules while I play. Usually it's for one of two reasons: making the game more challenging, or because working around the rule will force a change of playstyle in interesting ways. I've heard from other people who do this, and the most common challenge tends to be permadeath, where if you die, you have to delete your file and start over. Permadeath might be the most popular, but there's lots of weird and unique challenges as well: Only use a particular weapon in an FPS, only one city in Civilization, never move less than 100% of your forces in a cell game, the list goes on. I thought I'd create this thread to share and discuss the challenge modes people have tried for themselves. To start us off, my favorite is a challenge for Plants vs Zombies. PvZ is a great, fun game, but it's also really easy. In thinking about what it would take to make the game hard, I irreverently declared "No using any plant that fires a projectile". I thought it was silly, but upon reflection it didn't seem totally unworkable. Eventually I started a playthrough of it, and I was shocked that I was able to get all the way to World 5 with the restriction (at that point everything promptly fell apart, oh well). It was a great challenge, as it managed to add some threat to a previously easy game, and it forced a lot of adaptation and lateral thinking to work around the restriction. It even ended up teaching me a tactic that improved my normal play of the game. With that, I throw it open to the forum: what's the most fun, or the most interesting play experience you've had with a self-imposed challenge?

Easter egg is probably accurate to this example, but in general I quite like "buried" to describe this. It describes obfuscation, without any implication of being difficult to find. Thanks folks!

No problem. I enjoy talking through this kind of thing, as it usually forces me to think about and figure out exactly why I feel the way I do. Call it a philosophical version of rubber duck debugging.

I sort of agree. That's how the world works, and not just because that's the lousy reality we're stuck with, but because how else could it possibly work? That said, I wish the world didn't work that way. It's a system in which murder, or, say, the Jim Crow laws, become legal if supported by popular opinion. In a magically perfect, probably impossible world, we would have a system where unambiguously bad stuff like that couldn't become accepted. Theoretically the US legal system is sort of doing that: It wouldn't be impossible to legalize murder, but there are checks and balances that mean it would take more than simply a majority of the vote.

Right, context. One of the songs on an album is, for no apparent reason, nothing but white noise. There's a "hidden" message which is not heavily obfuscated: If you open it in an audio editing tool, the visualization of the song contains readable text. The message is hidden, not difficult to find when searched for, and intentionally so. How would you describe that concisely?

What is there to dislike about that though? It's literally just "more resource you have, more things you can do" because... that's what resources are. It enable us to do stuff proportionate to their amount. Unless you are disliking hugely disproportionate resource distribution aspect (which is what I'm guessing here) then I can see why but that seems like a separate issue. It's not just the distribution of resources. The idea of using purchasing power to direct the world towards the framework we choose is, while realistic, kinda gross to me. It's essentially saying "We can buy feminism". Average out the distribution of resources and it's still "We can vote on feminism". I don't like the idea of a system where important things like that simply reflect the majority opinion. Edited for clarity.

The obvious problem is that it makes an individual's ability to support something directly proportional to their buying power. To be cynical, maybe that's accurate, but it's sure not something to like.

I encountered a language problem today, and I wondered if any of my fellow Idle Pedants had a solution. How do you describe something which is hidden, but not particularly resistant to being found in a search? I found myself describing something as "poorly hidden", but I realized that implied the hider intended to hide the thing better, which wasn't the case. Phrases like "lightly hidden" just feel strange, is there a clear and concise way to convey this concept?

The involvement of the extra person seems unnecessary. Surely the writer is better equipped than a reader to assign a number to their experience. The part that I object to is the idea that the score assigner's number trumps the writer's number, should the two differ (after all, if the writer's number took precedence, surely they would just ask the writer and not spend time making their own number which must be reviewed and potentially shot down by the writer). Maybe it's just a weirdly designed system and the writer gets the final say regarding the number, in which case I don't have anything against it. But it looks an awful lot like a system where that's not the case.

At this point I admit I'm speculating about hypothetical people, but I can't imagine anyone who looks at Metacritic scores in precisely enough detail to care that a score comes from Polygon, but doesn't care which reviewer it came from. I agree that the thing you're pitching, Polygon as one numerical "reviewer" with known tastes, has a theoretical use, I just can't imagine the market for it. As for why it matters, I can give two reasons. First, it's a system that encourages the reviewer to modify their review towards the Polygon score, which compromises the review. Yeah, they can fight for it, but Polygon undeniably has more pressure to modify their opinion than the normal system. Secondly, it's just gross. There's a number attached to the review, which implies that it reflects the writer's opinion. I'm not sure if I should call that disconnect "lying" or just "scummy", but it's not great. "If you don't like, you can always quit" is a pretty terrible defense of a practice.

I need some background music. I recently got a new audio setup, and now I can listen to music while I'm in the kitchen working on supper, but I've run into the problem that most of my music is ill-suited to having bits of it randomly drowned out by occasional kitchen noise. I've found that videogаme music is pretty good for this, since it's basically designed for not being heard in full, but I'm looking to expand my catalogue. Does anyone have recommendations for something to put on in the background?

The more I think about it, the weirder a thing that is. What does it mean that that's what Polygon thinks of a game? Just that it's the average of the opinions of everyone at Polygon who played it? Why is that important? I ask non-rhetorically, if everyone mistakenly assumed the reviewer's opinion to be representative of the Polygon average, in what way would that be bad?