Hello.
December has been a busy month for me. Family, grad school, et cetera. I started working on some blog posts but they fell to the wayside. No work has been done on the text based experiences because I cannot justify working on them when I have actual, real things to work on. I'm all finished with any proverbial heavy lifting for a while and can start putting more energy into the yarbus zone again.
No updates about anything on the site. No big changes are planned. I'm happy with its status.
I have been playing quite a few games lately. Since this website is a hobby I do not need to feel shame in admitting I prioritized video games over it.
In particular, I've been playing Pathfinder Kingmaker. I don't have any idea how far I actually am in the game and I also don't really have any idea if I like it.
I've been playing it in turn-based mode since that's easier for my brain to parse, and it is very clear it was a mode slapped on after launch. Music tracks will play in combat for, at most, a good two minutes, then they cut off to silence. You're left sitting there for about three minutes taking turns in combat, then the music kicks back in. A lot of it is very generic fantasy RPG music that would, at best, be innocuous, but when it plays in a weird loop filled with pauses it is very grating.
The kingdom management is almost something. That's all I can really say about it. Number goes up. Random event cards show up. Assign an advisor to them. Click the "wait a day" button ten times. Number goes up. Sometimes it goes down. Spend this number to build this thing to make this number better. Spend this other number to increase your chances of increasing that number. Boring.
Companions are basically nothing. I don't find myself wanting to interact with them, not because they're annoying, but because I just don't care. Luckily, you basically never have to talk to them. This is a CRPG where you can fill your party entirely with hirelings.
In the opening act of the game, there's a dungeon full of traps that spray webs all over your party if they're triggered. These webs slow your characters and require a saving throw to even move while the trap is active. This isn't that out of the ordinary, but the saving throw is required even outside of combat. This lead to, no joke, 20 real life minutes I spent waiting for every character to successfully roll to get out of the trap.
My next blog post I'm going to talk about the Gene Wilder Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I have no intentions of seeing that little French boy's adaptation.