Category: Gaming

Finally Finished Expedition 33

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m going to make this pretty short since Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been talked about so much since release, what with being a hit at launch, then winning awards, then having awards retracted, then news about the studio resisting the pressure to expand so they can get their next game out more quickly… suffice to say that the game is a critical and popular success.

I started playing at launch (April 24, 2025) and finished yesterday, Jamuary 24, 2026. And this wasn’t my typical ‘start over half a dozen times’ playthrough. The Save Game I finished on was the same one I started in April. My playtime was a little under 43 hours. I’d leave the game for weeks at a time before remembering it and circling back.

I liked it enough to finish it (mostly because the story, which somehow never got spoiled for me, had me very curious) but why the long breaks?

Basically I found Expedition 33 hard to get back into after ANY kind of break. When I’d play a good long session I would love the game, but if I left it for even 2 or 3 days getting back into it was difficult for me. It all comes down to the combat. Combat is turn-based with player-reaction coming in the form of dodging or parrying enemy attacks. By tapping a button at just the right time you can dodge or parry an enemy’s attack, mitigating damage and ideally leading to a counter attack. When you’re playing consistently and learn the enemies’ devious patterns (they tend to try to fake you out, but each enemy type has a few varieties of attack that play out the same way every time) and get good at parrying, especially, it is a lot of fun and combat becomes substantially easier.

But for me, at least (remember: I am old as dirt), even a couple days away and I’d have to re-learn all these defense patterns and I would SUCK for the first half hour or so. And, another quirk of mine is I often play games in very short sessions…like 30 minutes or so.

A screenshot showing the combat interface
Combat screen from fairly early in the game

While it took 8 calendar months to finish, I’d guess the bulk of my progress came in 3 or 4 spurts where I really focused on the game for a couple days. I guess this is all a long-winded way of saying that this is a game best enjoyed all at once. My advice is that if you haven’t played yet, when you do pick a time when there aren’t other games plucking at your attention and just focus entirely on this one until you’ve finished. To me this feels like the best way to enjoy Expedition 33. Oh and if you have both an Xbox and a gaming PC, don’t play this on both platforms at the same time. The dodge/parry timing is just different enough between the two platforms that it’ll really throw you off.

My only other issue with is is the lack of a map. That’s a personal peeve. I really like having a map, ideally with ‘fog of war’ so you do have to travel all the pathways to discover them, but after that you have a map. Presumably one of your party members is on cartography duty!

Everything else about the game: the story, the characters, the artwork and the music, was amazing. The characters in particular were some of the most beautiful I’ve seen in a game in a long time.

I have no idea if the devs will be coming back to this IP, but if they do I will surely play the next game in the series. My only request to them is to give us a difficulty slider specifically for the timing of the block/parry. I could have put the game on Story mode which I guess makes the timing more generous, but I didn’t want the enemies to hit less hard or have fewer hit points. I just wanted to be able to effectively dodge and parry even after a break from playing.

A Taste of Wasteland 3

Posted on by Nimgimli

Back in my younger days, before I gravitated to consoles, I was a huge fan of tactical strategy and wargames. Recently I’ve been spending a bit more time on the PC and wanted to see if this genre still scratched the itch for me (yes there are tactical strategy games on consoles but I’ve never found using a controller for these to be very comfortable, nor is reading a bunch of stats from across the room). Wasteland 3 in a CRPG with tactical turn-based combat and it’s on Game Pass so it seemed like an obvious choice.

Actually it was a choice I made a few times, bouncing off very early most times. But this time… THIS time would be different. And it was. I put about 9 hours in. Enough to do ten or so quests and to level up characters and gear, and to engage in a good amount of combat.

I found that I do still enjoy tactical combat. Y’know, figuring out how many things you can do on one turn’s worth of action points. Moving and finding cover. Healing your squaddies. Tossing grenades and accidentally blowing up your own guys. All of that was fun and I enjoyed building the characters as well. This guy will be the doctor and I’ll load him up with health and recovery skills. That one is the spy, give him a sniper rifle AND lock picking skills. Things like that.

So combat and character development, thumbs up.

The RPG aspects though, felt a little dull. Click to move, then scroll the screen, then click to move further, then turn the view so you can see down that side street, then click to move down that street. BORING. There’s a Map screen… why not just let me click on that and have my crew travel back and forth across town on their own? I might need to learn some patience.

The dialog with NPCs and such was pretty good in that there are a lot of choices and apparently these choices have long-term ramifications though honestly I didn’t play long enough to experience that myself.

In the end though, the aspect that convinced me to put this one aside was the tone. Yeah its post-apocalyptic and we know how “edgy” that can get, but this felt like post-apocalypse via the imagination of a 14 year old boy who is caught up in the grip of puberty. It’s really weird by design, and dirtier than it needs to be, and not dirty in a good way if you like your media to be a bit spicy. It just feels crass to me. For example, check out the helmet on this character. At this point I didn’t yet have enough helmets for everyone so I had to use what I could get but c’mon…

A character wearing a helmet that has sex toys as 'horns'
When I was younger I may have found this hilarious.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, just like I never thought there was anything wrong with the dildo club in Saints Row. I just personally think it’s dumb, and I dunno… I like to find cool armor in games, not armor I’d be embarassed to wear. This is just an example but you get the idea of the tone of the whole game. It can’t decide if it is a soft r-rated slapstick comedy, or a grim-dark story about how after civilization falls, there are no good guys left in the world. It tries to be both, in the way Fallout is both, but for whatever reason, for me personally, it just didn’t work.

I’m NOT saying it’s a bad game; in fact there’s a lot I like about it. It’s just not the game I’m in the mood for right now, so keeping with my new gaming outlook, rather than trying to force myself to keep playing I’m going to set it aside. I MIGHT come back to it some day but there are SO many games out there waiting to be played… life feels too short to play games that you think are “OK”. (At 9 hours in I still have 50+ to go from what I’ve read and that’s a lot of time to dedicate to something you’re not whole-heartedly enjoying!)

For what it’s worth, the Steam community has given this one a “Mostly Positive” rating with over 190K reviews, and it’s currently 70% off ($11.99 USD) and Open Critic gives it a ‘Top Critic Average’ of 86%, but keep in mind those reviews came out in 2021. Point is though, if it sounds fun, don’t let me dissuade you because my issues with it are personal and very subjective.

December 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

OMG I just realized tomorrow is the end of the month and I haven’t even create the ‘stub’ of a recap post (I’m writing this on Tuesday). My usual system is to create a recap post early in the month and just jot down notes in it because I WILL forget what I’ve done. I didn’t do that this month and indeed, I have forgotten what I’ve done.

The truth really is that I haven’t done much ‘fun’ stuff due to the move I’ve been talking about. We are STILL in the midst of this and painful, expensive lessons were learned about how much work it is, and how much time it takes, to move. Particularly if you’re a senior citizen and work a desk job so your stamina is shit. We spent money on movers to move the big furniture and planned to move the smaller stuff ourselves, but after many wasted days (and wasted gas) we threw in the towel and hired the movers to come AGAIN. And still there was more to do, like take down things we’d mounted on the walls, take down curtains… stuff like that. Then the cleaning started and eventually we threw in that towel, too, and hired a cleaning crew (this is gross and embarassing to admit but we’d had furniture that hadn’t been moved in a decade and it appears mice had been living under/behind said furniture, and what a mess they made). On New Year’s Day I’m making 1 last ‘haul’ trip. Friday PartPurple goes up to basically let the cleaning crew in. And next week we go back to turn in the keys and do a walk-through and then, finally….FINALLY…. we’ll be done. And I’ll be broke.

Anyway between shuttling back and forth between apartments, packing, unpacking, recycling runs, and organizing, not a lot of fun stuff got done this month. But here is what did:

Playing

My Time At Sandrock has been my ‘main game’ and I’ve been slowly chipping away at it. Realizing that — unlike in many titles in this genre — Sandrock lets you save pretty much any time has been a blessing and a curse. Blessing because, duh, it’s convenient, but a curse because now it can sometimes take me 2-3 play sessions to get through a single day. I keep forgetting what I was working on and so forth. Because of this I think I’m way over-level for the part of the main story I’m in, though I’m not sure I mind that all that much. Still really enjoying this one and looking forward to the next game in the series, Evershine, where the character models are a big more adult. It feels a little creepy running around looking like a 14 year old boy and trying to woo the (based on appearances) older women in the town!

My yard, with the stable to the right, my garden in center and a row of machines in the background

Winter Burrow was finally finished. Here’s the post on that.

I still play a session of Ball X Pit every day to keep the Microsoft Rewards streak going on console. To earn the points you have to play a game on console and a run takes just about exactly 15 minutes (assuming you don’t fail) so this works out perfectly and it’s the kind of game where you can really easily jump in, play and jump out without having to remember what you are supposed to be doing, or anything along those lines. Plus, it’s fun as heck!

Last is Relic Hunters Legend, which I just spoke about the other day.

Watching

The Mayfair Witches, S2 — This was a ‘her’ pick. She loves Anne Rice and that whole milieu. We’ve recently watched Interview With The Vampire, Talamasca, and now this. I like them, but not enough that I’d probably watch them if PartPurple wasn’t really into them. It’s all urban fantasy about witches and vamps and stuff.

Stranger Things, S5 — We just started season 5 and are only a couple of episodes in. I loved this show when it was new but honestly I like it less with every season. I think. It’s been SO long between seasons I can’t be certain.

Defiance — We always do re-watches for lunchtime TV viewing since we, and particularly me, can’t focus as much as we usually do. I’m always listening for pings from work while we watch. Anyway Defiance recently hit Amazon Prime so we’re doing a re-watch and loving it.

Reading

A Christmas Carol — For the most part, we just skipped Christmas this year. We did put up a tree, and I read A Christmas Carol, as I do every year. It’s a tradition!

Old sci-fi/fantasy magazines. In the back of a closet I found a stack of old magazines. Sci-Fi Age, Realms of Fantasy, the Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy, etc etc. They have dates from the 1990s on them! I’ve been having quite a good time reading this old stuff, particularly sci-fi that takes place in the near future (as of 1995 or whatever) which is often the VERY near future as of 2025. It’s fun to see what the authors got right, and what they got wrong. Also ‘interesting’ is the artwork that comes with many of the fantasy stories. There’s almost always an attractive woman in an alluring outfit. The era of the chainmail bikini, amiright?

So that’s December, and that’s 2025 done and dusted. 2026 is gonna suck (in world scale) but I’m hoping it’ll be less bad in personal terms. Losing our dog Lola was really painful, and frankly really expensive, and this move is driving us deeper into debt. Hoping in ’26 I can climb most of the way out of that hole. And we’re starting the year in a new apartment, and in a new area full of places to explore and things to do. So while the world burns, I’m hoping that we in our specific household have a better year.

And I hope that you in your specific household have a better year, too!

Early Thoughts on Relic Hunters Legends

Posted on by Nimgimli

Here’s another of those games I never would’ve tried if it hadn’t been on Game Pass. But it was and I needed one more Game Pass game to collect my Microsoft Rewards for having played eight different Game Pass titles in a given month, so I gave it a shot.

This isn’t a review since I didn’t play it enough, but the beauty of being a blogger rather than a professional reviewer is that you can just throw in the towel whenever you want. And after 5 hours of Relic Hunters Legends, I think I’ve had enough. It isn’t a bad game, but it isn’t a great game either, and there are plenty of great games out there waiting to be played.

RHL is a looter-shooter that seems like it was maybe made for kids? Your character is a kid, the art-style makes me think of Nickolodeon or The Cartoon Network (if either of those are still around) and the combat is pretty basic. It’s essentially a twin stick shooter played from an overhead perspective. Enemies are anthropomorphic animals, primarly ducks and turtles in the early game.

Big dude on the left is an NPC, white haired little guy on the right is me

At the start of the game you answer some questions like it is 1985 and you’re playing Ultima IV. At the end of this you get assigned a Planet, which I guess is a class. Eventually you can unlock the other classes but until you do, you have the joy of getting lots of loot your class can’t use. That’s always fun. At least you can break useless gear down for components, which are then used to upgrade gear you CAN use. Upgrading gear (whether through drops of new stuff or improving what you have) is the main way of getting stronger. There’s a level system but it just seems to be there to gate gear and not to make you inherently more powerfull.

My assumption is that they really want you to play this with friends, and I played it solo, so keep that in mind. What’s odd is that in the tutorial mission you are joined with some NPC companions, but once you get into the main game you don’t have access to them. I think adding bots to play along side of would’ve made the game more interesting. But anyway as is typical for this kind of game, it’s probably more entertaining when you’re on comms with your friends and you’re laughing at how that one guy keeps running off the edge of the world or whatever. The tutorial mission with NPC pals was frenetic and kind of fun.

Playing solo I tended to charge ahead, then fall back to let my skill cooldowns expire, which was effective but dull. The two mission types I experienced were skirmish (kill your way through a couple of short levels, then take on a boss) and ‘escort the payload’ (where you have to hang out near a vehicle and it moves forward, unless enemies are near it). The skirmish mission was easy until I got to the boss, and it wiped the floor with me. I thought I was going to have to grind the mission over and over until I realized I could respawn and the damage to the boss wouldn’t reset. So I just chewed away at him, dying probably a dozen times before he finally went down. On a second run, after having gotten some better loot from finishing the mission once, I had to respawn three times.

The Escort mission was arguably more interesting but since the payload only moves when you’re near it, you could still fall back and wait for things like your heal skill to cooldown so you could fix yourself up. It didn’t appear that the payload took any damage so I’m not sure if you can even fail these missions. I beat that one the first try.

The Ducans (duck-mans?) are messing with my payload!

The art style and the lack of fail-states is what makes me think the game was intended for kids.

When you’re not doing missions there a hub-world to run around in. This felt like another situation where it might be more interesting if you were running around in it with friends but as a solo player I just found running back and forth to be a little tedious.

I don’t have much BAD to say about Relic Hunters Legends; it’s fine. It just doesn’t really sparkle in any way. It’s currently on sale on Steam for $7.00 USD and might be worth a purchase at that price (there’s also a demo) but at the regular price of $20 it just needs more of a hook to be worth it.

Winter Burrow Finished

Posted on by Nimgimli

Winter Burrow is a pretty short game (12 hours for my playthrough) but it still took me something like 6 weeks to finish it, what with everything going on in my life right now.

That’s only relevant because I think stretching things out over such a long time took away from my experience with the game. I really enjoyed it at first, but over time I was less and less enthusiastic about it. The gaps in play sessions had a lot to do with this. At launch there was no map. It’s not a huge game so that wasn’t too much of a problem until I stepped away for a week and came back and had to re-explore everything to remember what was where.

Shortly before the holiday the devs released a patch that adds a map and that’s when I started focusing on the title again. I like maps.

Oh, sort of getting ahead of myself. If you’re unaware, Winter Burrow is a (self-proclaimed) cozy survival game where you play as a mouse. It has a really cute art style and that’s a big part of the burst of fun right out of the gate. If you played it over a few evenings that cute glow-up will probably last the entire experience, but as with anything familiarity breeds apathy and after a while I needed more than cute.

The actual gameplay isn’t far removed from most survival games. You gather, you craft, you fight baddies. You have to eat to stave off starvation, and you have to stay warm. Staying warm is enough of a challenge that I’d argue against the ‘cozy’ label. Cozy aesthetics? Absolutely. Cozy gameplay? Not so much. Being chased by a giant spider while you’re losing health from freezing isn’t my idea of cozy! Not that the game is hard; the cold mechanic just makes things a little tedious as you constantly have to cut short expeditions to return to someplace warm. This gets particularly tedious when, like me, you’ve been away from the game long enough that you can no longer remember where X is, even though you know you’ve been there before.

You have a home that needs repairs and such, but you don’t build any structures from scratch. You can build better tools, warmer clothes, and there are a LOT of recipes for furniture that is used purely as decoration. I’m not big into decorating so that whole aspect was more or less lost on me. If you’re someone that loves to spruce up housing in your games you’ll probably love this aspect.

Crafting is limited to Woodworking, Knitting, Cooking and some very lite (and generally not needed) farming.

There are a handful of NPCs you’ll meet and run errands for. Most of these quests are pretty simple “go find X” or “go craft Y”. They’re enough to nudge the story along, though. And all the NPCs are different small animals that nontheless appear huge to a tiny mouse.

My overall rating after finishing is that it was fine. I liked it, didn’t love it. But again, part of that is on me for playing so infrequently. The only truly ‘bad’ thing about the game, for me, was the ending which is really abrupt and is basically just “The End, Thanks For Playing” without any kind of summary or epilogue or something to just help you reflect back on your journey.

Other things I didn’t like were much more subjective. The cold mechanic just felt like busy work (you can eventually craft campfire kits and kindling to alleviate this aspect if you’re willing to put in the time to gather materials to craft them), inventory is crazy limited, and I often had trouble differentiating interactive objects with decorations. This rock I can hit with a pick and get resources, but that rock is just part of the scenery. That kind of thing. Not a huge deal, though.

I played on Game Pass, but Winter Burrow is currently 20% off on Steam ($16.99 USD), and there’s a demo available. I’d say this is an OK price but the full price of $20 feels a little high to me, though maybe I’m just cheap. The developers did add some Solstice content in the same patch where they added the map (the image at the top of the post is of the Solstice Tree that you can craft post-game, thanks to this new content). If they keep on adding bits to it (for free) it’ll make the price more palatable.

November 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

Been crazy here this month, and next month will be just as crazy. I really thought that spreading out this move over a couple months would make it easier and in a lot of ways it does, but it means instead of one absolutely crazy moving-week we’re experiencing weeks and weeks of moderate craziness. But things are coming along and we’re pretty excited about the new place. We’ve made two trips there so far. The first was brutal, the second much easier which was interesting because I think my body is actually just growing stronger that quickly. Or more flexible anyway. Whatever the reason, hauling boxes of books up and down stairs didn’t take nearly as much out of me during the second trip.

Somehow I’m still sneaking in a fair amount of gaming, but I’m going to rip through all this pretty quick cuz…. boxes need to be packed!

Playing

Wuthering Waves: Shelved for now. I did a couple of months of the subscription thing (where you get premium currency every day) and the paid version of the battle pass thingie. Made good use of both of those but, as is VERY typical for me, they also made the game feel a bit like a chore. When I started playing a swore to myself I’d just play for the main story line but alas, that was dropped in favor of logging in every day and doing all the things that give you battle pass progress and stuff. I did get in something like 150 hours before burnout hit though so… not a bad run.

My Time At Sandrock: I started this a year or so ago right after finishing My Time At Portia but soon realized I needed a break between two titles that are so similar. Glad I did because I am HOOKED on Sandrock now. If you’ve never played a “My Time At…” game they’re a lot like a Harvest Moon or Stardew valley, except in 3D and they take place in a post-apocalyptic world. But a pretty, mostly friendly, post-apocalyptic world. The tension is between two factions, one that shuns technology since it ruined the old world, and one that wants to rediscover technology to make the current situation better. You kind of straddle that line and mostly spend your time harvesting, building, farming, mining, fighting and trying to befriend the natives. It’s pretty casual and stress-free in site of all that stuff you have to juggle. One setting that I can’t remember if Portia had is the option to slow down time so each day goes by more slowly. I turned that down so I could just putter around without a lot of time management stress.

Ball X Pit: I wrote a post about this… still playing!

Winter Burrow: Wrote a post about this too. Also still playing. This one has turned out to be a bit harder than I thought it was going to be due to the lack of a map and the ‘cold’ mechanic that means you have to be careful of how far you wander from home. Also your inventory is pretty small. It’s cute as heck but that doesn’t mean it’s super easy, as it turns out. Or maybe I’m doing something wrong which is always possible.

Octopath Traveler: Picked this up on sale and I’m playing it on the Steam Deck in the evenings when we’re at the new place. Very early days and everyone interested in this game is familiar with it, so just sticking a flag in the sand to say I’m playing.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage: This game follows Bassim who was in AC Valhalla and I did NOT like him in that game so I had no plans to play Mirage. But then it hit Game Pass so I figured “What the heck.” I’ve barely gotten started on it, though.

That’s too many games to be juggling, isn’t it? Sandrock is by far the title I spent the most time on this month.

Watching

Nobody Wants This S2: This is the Kristen Bell sitcom about her dating a rabbi and all the trouble that causes because she is not Jewish. Loved S1, loved S2. Can’t wait for a Season 3 which I assume is coming.

Talamasca: This is set in Anne Rice’s vampire mythos. It was a PartPurple pick. The Talamasca is a shadow organization that keeps tabs on supernatural goings-on and in this show a new recruit is sent in to spy on an ancient vampire. It was actually pretty good, but I’ll never admit that to Purple.

The Witcher S4: I didn’t really miss Henry Cavill so much, though PartPurple did. We’re in the part of the story where a lot of the emphasis is on Ciri anyway. I enjoyed it but it is VERY similar to what I remember reading in the books. Almost too much so since I know what was going to happen next every step of the way.

Tales from Woodcreek: This is a D&D Campaign hosted by Deborah Ann Woll on YouTube. This is the 2nd time we’ve watched one of her campaigns (the other being Relics and Rarities, also on YouTube) and we really enjoy them for a few reasons. First, each episode is a manageable length: about an hour. Second, she brings in guest players, often ones who’ve never played D&D before, and generally her guests are actors. It’s fun watching the regulars help the newbies and being actors, the newbies tend to really get into their characters. Third, her campaigns tend to be really interactive with props and such. In this one she actually leads the party to new physical locations to set the scenes and such. Now I do not play D&D so I can’t speak to how authentic this all is, but it’s really fun to watch.

Reading

The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories — A collection of Isaac Asimov’s short stories, mostly written in the 1970s. Lots of robots. Lots of concerns about AI that seem pretty similar to the concerns we have today, for reals.

microserfs (Douglas Coupland) — A novel in the form of a journal. The narrator is a 20-something Microsoft employee and super-nerd, living in the 1990s when working 100 hour weeks was considered slacking. He and his colleagues decided to leave and start a company making a Lego-like videogame called Oop. (Oop, as described, seems a little bit like Roblox, though the game isn’t the focus of the story.) I really enjoyed this though it is hard to quantify why. In the end there isn’t much story there; it’d be like, well, reading the journal of any mostly ordinary person. I lived through this era so there was a lot of nostalgia for me. The team going to visit 3DO HQ, or going to CES and seeing the Ninteno VirtuaBoy. I was at that CES so, y’know, maybe brushed shoulders with these ficticious characters. It came out in 1995 but looks like it was re-issued at some point [Amazon link]. If you enjoy ‘nerd culture’ you might enjoy it. [I found this while purging to move and intead of sending it to the donation bin I held onto it to read.]

Old science fiction and fantasy magazines: I found a cache of these in the back of a closet. Most of them are from the 1990’s which means I’ve lugged them through 3 or 4 moves. Now I’m finally reading them and they’re pretty fun since in a lot of cases their “future” is our present and boy did they get a lot wrong (and some stuff right).

It’s strange to be reading physical magazines again! Remember “Continued on page 104…” WHAT? Why do I have to jump around you crazy editors!

OK, back to moving and by the time the December recap rolls around we should be (more or less) settled in our new dig! Happy Holidays!

Winter Burrow Early First Look

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Earlier this week Winter Burrow hit Game Pass and launched on Steam the same day. I’d seen previews and it was so darned cute I had to try it right away.

So far at least, it’s been a fairly typical survivalbox game, only this time you’re a mouse so everything is on a tiny scale. You’ve returned to your childhood home to find it in a state of disrepair; first order of business is to fix things up! You need to go collect twigs and pebbles to make tools and effect repairs. Then you need to use the tools to harvest better materials to make better tools in order to fix more things. It’s a familiar loop that we’ve all done many times and by now you probably know whether or not you enjoy this kind of game.

Aside from the cuteness, it’s the winter setting that makes the game a little different from most survivalboxes. In addition to gauges for health, hunger and stamina, you have a cold meter that is always dropping when you’re outside. You can knit (SO ADORABLE, your little mouse self sitting there knitting) warmer clothes to mitigate this, and there’s a day/night cycle as well. Colder at night of course.

A tiny mouse in his burrow knitting warm clothes
Knitting some warmer clothes by the fire

It’s billed as a cozy game but the cold mechanic kind of invalidates that designation to me, because you do frequently have to run home to warm up or you’ll start taking damage, and as far as I can tell there’s no map, so you can get lost and freeze. In the name of epic journalism I stayed outside in the cold until my health hit zero. When that happens you ‘pass out’ and somehow ‘stumble home’ to the burrow [aka you respawn at home], but you drop any items other than tools that you were carrying. You can go back to the spot of your misfortune and re-collect what you’ve dropped, though, so it isn’t a harsh penalty.

A tiny mouse outside the door to his burrow. The screen is feezing up!
The colder you get, the more the frost encroaches on your window into the game world. Better get inside!

In addition to gathering/crafting there’s some farming elements as well.

There’s also combat and hunting. So far I’ve attacked passive beetles to get meat that I can roast, and once been attacked by a different kind of beetle that was aggro. There’s also a setting in the options to toggle spiders on or off for folks with arachnophobia so expect some 8-legged enemies at some point.

I’ve only played for a couple of hours but wanted to share my very early thoughts, particularly for Aywren who was curious about the game.

So far I’m really enjoying it but have to stress the cuteness is the real hook here. Being a little mouse wearing snowshows and a yak beanie is just so adorable and did I mention the knitting?!

I’ll circle back once I get further in, but the initial TLDR is, not super original in the gameplay, but the aesthetics are keeping me engaged for now.

Two tiny mice having a chat
You’re not completely alone in the world!

Ball X Pit – Weird and Addicting

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I was really late to the Vampire Survivors party. By the time I discovered it, it was old news. If you haven’t played it, it’s a top down APRG where your character auto-shoots. All you do is steer around. You level up quickly and as you do you get a choice of power-ups to choose from and in so doing put together a build for that run. When you die, you hit a store to buy upgrades to make you stronger, then you try again. It doesn’t sound like much, but the sheer number of enemies on screen, each of which drops a bit of exp when they die, make it like a constant dopamine drip.

Anyway, now we have Ball X Pit which is scratching the same kind of itch. This time the gameplay feels like the love-child of Vampire Survivors and Breakout. The main gameplay has you in a tall narrow corridor with enemies marching down the screen from the top while you fire balls at them to destroy them. Both enemies and you have a health pool and generally one hit from a ball isn’t enough to destroy a baddie. If the bad guys reach the bottom of the screen they smack you for a chunk of your health, and some fire arrows or other projectiles at you as them make their way down the screen.

Meanwhile the balls you fire bounce around like they do in Breakout, the major difference being that you can aim them fairly precisely, and if you want you can hold them and then fire. There’s also an “auto-fire” mode that makes it a lot more Vampire Survivor-ish and it is how I usually play. But just like in Breakout if you can sneak a ball to the back of the enemies it will careen around and hit a ton of bad guys, doing a lot of damage.

I feel like a video will be a better explainer than I ever will be:

There are different kinds of Balls. Hero balls, and baby balls. Baby balls are weaker little projectiles that you don’t really control. Hero Balls come in a number of flavors. Fire balls cause enemies to burn for a bit (doing DoT). Earthquake balls cause area damage. Vampire balls heal you when they kill an enemy. And so on. You can hold 4 types of Hero Balls at once, and 4 passive powerups that offer bonuses like faster movement or enhanced damage when you hit an enemy from behind.

As in VS, every enemy leaves a gem which gives you experience. You have a variety of stats (Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity) and when you level up one or more of those get bumped up a point or two, and you get to pick a ball or a passive to add to your quiver or level up. Every so often (haven’t figured out what triggers these) you’ll get a little glowy thing spawning. When you pick one of those up you get some boon. Sometimes it’s random level ups for your existing skills, and sometimes it’s the chance to combine Balls into something new. So maybe you fuse a Fire ball with a Vampire ball and you get, well, a Fire X Vampire ball that both burns and returns health, and when these two fuse you now have an open slot to add something new.

Anyway eventually you die or beat the boss which ends a level. Then you go to your village. Here you can spend your rewards to buy farms and buildings and so on. Farms (wheat, forest, stone) just give more resources to buy more buildings. Houses (which you need to find a blueprint for in the ball-busting part of the game) unlock new characters, and combat buildings (eg Barracks) make your characters start the next run stronger.

But even in your village the ball motif continues. Once you place your farms and buildings and such, you have to aim and fire your characters at them in order to collect, and these characters bounce off things like your balls do. To build a building you have to hit it x times (5 maybe? I never counted). To harvest a farm  you have to fire a worker over it. And so on. Once you’ve built and harvested, it’s back to the pit for another run.

Here is what that looks like:

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Runs take about 15 minutes once you get a little ways into the game and have leveled up a bit (very early you might die much more quickly). This makes it a great game to drop into when you don’t have a lot of time but just want a gaming fix.

Anyway, I’m finding this one really addictive.  It’s available on Steam (Steamdeck Verified), Xbox and Playstation and it’s $15 everywhere. There’s a demo on Steam as well, and it has an overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam with over 6,000 reviews.

October 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

Happy Halloween, Hapy Samhain, Happy Too Much Candy Day. Whatever your denomination, happy end of October. Now we can say summer is truly gone and I no longer fear my electric bill (the air conditioner is finally silent). We’re all ready to receive our average of approximately zero trick-or-treaters. But that’s OK, PartPurple did a great job decorating and several neighbors have come by to compliment her display. Our new place has a much smaller entryway so I think going forward any decorations will have to be much more modest. So one last “it should be visible from space” decorating hurrah seemed appropriate.

I messed up this month. I went the whole month without taking any kind of notes on what I’ve been playing or that we’ve been watching. I’m going to have to rely on memory, which is never my strong suit. With the move coming up fast I’ve spent more time chorin’ and less time doing fun stuff anyway, so it might be there’s not that much for me to remember.

Playing

The Outer Worlds — I finished this and… it left so little an impression on me that I can’t really remember how it ended. I do know I got to an ending though. The sequel is out now but I haven’t tried it. At some point I will, just to see if they’ve made any quality of life improvements, because QoL was what really bothered me about the first game. But I talked about all that last month so…

Wuthering Waves — After being well and truly hooked on Wuthering Waves for a good long while, I think I’m ready to take a break from it once my Lunite Subscription (via which you get a daily login reward of premium currency) ends. I still really enjoy the game it’s just that sometimes familiarity breeds contempt and I just need to step away for a bit. I did pull Zani last night though and I really enjoy her so maybe I’ll spend some time building her to see how she plays. Currently my main team is Havoc Rover, Carlotta and Shorekeeper, though none of the three are 100% built yet. Those talent trees take a while to complete.

Little Rocket Lab — THIS has been my obsession lately. I find myself playing it any time I had at least 10-15 minutes free. I talked about it in a mid-month update but as of last night, I finished it. 🙁 I might actually play through it again. Once you finish the game once you unlock “Hard Mode” which could be interesting, or I could just impose some rules on myself to make a 2nd run-through a different sort of challenge.

Answering a few questions I had in my Mid-Month post, you never really are gated by a lack of resources, though one or two are slower to gather than the rest. There doesn’t seem to be any time limits so you can just play around and do whatever you like. There are Seasons but really they’re just cosmetic and they advanced based on you finishing certain tasks rather than being based on the number of days that have passed.

The team is still working on the game, adding QoL improvements and they’ve teased new features in a very vague way. So I’ll probably set it aside for now and revisit after some updates. There WERE, to be fair, parts of the game that felt sort of half-finished. For instance there are stores but I never really felt a need to use them. I did jobs to earn money to unlock some upgrades (there are only 3 of these) but once those were unlocked I had no use for money. There are also plants and shells and things that you can collect but I never found a use for them. I think you might be able to give them to villagers as gifts but I’m not sure what the point of that would be.

But just building conveyor belts and machines to process goods and to constantly tweak things to optimize the delivery of rocket parts and such? That was fun even though my setup was the mechanical equivalent of spaghetti code by the time I was finished!! So yeah, another play-through to be faster, neater, and more efficient is kind of appealing.

Screenshot from Little Rocket Lab showing a chaotic mess of conveyor belts
It just kind of evolved into this…

I was surprised to learn, when the credits rolled, that this was built by a very small team. Two programmers are listed, and one of them is also the game’s designer. There’s considerably more people in QA and localization but I’m guessing that the core game was just the two people.

Watching

Invasion (Apple TV+) — We finished our rewatch and the new season. Liked it all quite a bit. Season 3 put less of an emphasis on the kids, which I appreciated because some of the kids [looking at you, Luke and Sarah] were really annoying. Season 3 ended in such a way that it was a satisfying ending if there isn’t a 4th season, but there’s a few cracks that they could tease a new plotline out of if they did want to come back for Season 4. All in all I find it to be a good, not great, sci-fi show.

Foundation (Apple TV+) — Foundation is dense but really good. You probably don’t want to watch it casually but, if you decide to watch, give it your full attention. I’ve somehow never read the books and I think I might have to do that. I liked this one a lot, but my sense was that PartPurple wasn’t as thrilled with it and I think that’s because she constantly multitasks when we watch shows and I think she just missed stuff.

Interview With the Vampire (Netflix) — This one was for her. She loves sexy vampire stories so… I thought it was OK but she really enjoyed it.

Nobody Wants This (Netflix) — Season 2 of the Kristen Bell romcom hit Netflix earlier this week and we’re in the middle of it. Loved the first season and I might like S2 even more. I feel like the secondary characters are getting a lot more of the spotlight and I’m coming to enjoy them every bit as much as the leads.

Reading

Not much. In the middle of packing I found a copy of Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories” and I’ve been reading that. It is kind of eerie how many things he got right about AI and robots and future society, given that he was writing these stories in the 60’s and 70’s.

And that’s October in the books. I don’t know if I’ll do a November recap just because our plan is to do a kind of slow-motion move starting right before Thanksgiving and ending in mid-December, so it remains to be seen whether I’ve got my stuff together enough to write a post in the middle of that. We’ll see.

Mid-Month Random Mutterings!

Posted on by Nimgimli

Felt the itch to write a blog post so…. here’s a blog post!

I’m not sure where I’ve said what these days, but we’re getting ready to move from Raleigh, NC, to the suburbs of Wilmington, NC. So after years and years of talking about moving North to get to cooler weather…we’re moving south about 2 hours. So it’ll be even hotter! BUT, we’ll also be about 30 minutes from the beaches and even closer to Wilmington and its boardwalks and fun-seeming things to do. We’ve lived in Raleigh for 13 years, on the outskirts, and have gone into downtown Raleigh about 3 times. It just holds no appeal for me. But Wilmington is a bit tourist-y, and there are rivers and bays and oceans to explore if I don’t mind driving for 20-230 minutes. So I’m hoping I’ll become a bit more active. Since our doggo Lola passed I barely move and it is starting to have a real impact on my health and energy. I watched both my grandmother and mother lose their mobility by doing exactly what I’m doing (ie sitting indoors all day every day) and I don’t want to follow in their footsteps (none of the men in my family lived long enough for this to be an issue).

Anyway, we’re excited, both for the new locale and for going from a 2 bedroom to a 3 bedroom townhouse. This means 1 bedroom to use as a bedroom, then we each get an office/cave. I’ll finally have my own space again!! Right now we share an office and Ms Crafty McCrafterson has it PACKED with crafting tools and supplies to the point it’s hard for me to even get to my PC. But now I’ll have a nice gaming space with star-babe posters on the wall and open space for doing some VR and stuff. Woot!

But the actual process of moving is daunting for us, as we’re old and un-fit and every time we do something we have to take a day to recover from the exertion. I suppose we’ll get in shape during the process (our lease doesn’t start until just before Thanksgiving so we have over a month to prepare). We’ll hire some young strong folks to move the big stuff but hope to move a lot of the boxes and things ourselves, but we’ll see how that works out and if the economics make sense.

But yeah, big exciting changes coming up!

Gaming Updates!

Meanwhile, maybe partly due to having all these moving-related issues in my brain, I’ve been gaming quite a bit once again. Two games in particular have grabbed me.

The first is Little Rocket Lab which I tried on a whim, not expecting to really play it (it was on Game Pass and I needed to play a Game Pass game for MS Rewards Points and this was a small download). I LOVE it. It is basically Stardew Valley only instead of farming you’re manufacturing stuff. Initially you’re banging rocks with a hammer but you very quickly move on to automated drills, conveyor belts, machines that assemble things, machines that move items, and so on. I’m still early days so I don’t know how complex it gets. It’s a game that doesn’t appear to have any time pressure. You get quests and stuff but (so far at least) no deadline for getting them done. Like Stardew Valley it runs on a ‘day’ system where you eventually collapse if you don’t get to bed in time, but there’s no stamina meter or anything like that.

Resources do run out and I wonder if that will be a kind of gating mechanism eventually, but there seem to be ample outcroppings of iron, copper, rock and coal available, which is all I’m working with so far. And we just repaired a port and are importing container ships full of old computers and stuff. We’re going to be recycling the circuit boards from these if I ever figure out how to use a crane to unload the boat. But I wonder if we’ll get other materials from recycling, too.

Anyway I’m finding it a delight. It’s on Game Pass but also on Steam; there’s a demo on Steam and right now it’s on sale for $15. If you like Stardew Valley and are interested in, or curious about, automation games, I think this might be a must-play. Extra bonus points for me: it’s a “Play Anywhere” title on Game Pass so I can play at the PC or from the couch on the Xbox, and work on the same save.

The other game I’m really sucked into is Wuthering Waves. I finally got some characters to level 90, and I’ve been playing through the main story quests in an attempt to catch up. Those quests are long though, and feel like they’re best consumed in a single sitting. This has kept me up much too late for more than one night! And I’m still quite a few updates behind even though I’ve clocked 150 hours or so, I would guess.

I also completed the Pioneer Podcast (their version of a Battle Pass) last time around and I’ve got a good start to doing so again. It’s week one and I’m already to level 20 (of 70) so I feel good there. I start each night working on Daily and Weekly Pioneer Podcast tasks, which includes burning through the day’s stamina (Waveplates, I think Stamina is called) and I use the goodies I get from doing that for improving character and slowly building up some new characters I have in the works, after some lucky pulls.

My current team is Havoc Rover, Carlotta, and Baizhu (spelling?). I’m working on Shorekeeper to replace Baizhu on healing/support duties. I’ve gotten pretty good with Rover in terms of dodging, blocking and using her abilities, to the point where if I’m really in the grove I can beat an early-game boss without ever switching to a different character. I button-spam with Carlotta and every time I fight with her I think “After this I have to go through her tutorial to learn how to play her” then promptly forget to do that. She’s uses a gun and jumps around like Yoda so I’ve been doing OK button-mashing with her. But I should really learn to play her better.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on around here in the middle of October. Exciting changes afoot, exciting games being place.

[Note on the images used in this post:  Images are screenshots from Little Rocket Lab or Wuthering Waves. The image at the top of the post was modified via AI to remove UI components from the shot, which is why it has a Gemini watermark in the bottom corner.]