You have to remember, the price isn’t only due to the hardware.

We often still think of “hardware” as if it’s some tool we actually own like a wrench or a hammer that we can freely use how we like, and the price of it should depend only on the cost of manufacture.

But in the modern world, the electronic hardware we buy is subsidised through gated ecosystems, and by profiting from slurping data and selling ads.

The reality is that Meta hardware is priced aggressively low to encourage adoption - on the basis of all the money they expect to make later from your data. Same with smart TVs and everything else with a similar business model.

Valve’s hardware will seem expensive, but that’s just the price you have to pay in the modern world for some small amount of control and privacy.

Personally, I’ll pay it gladly.

Looks interesting in other respects too, thanks for the suggestion

Thank you for all the suggestions!

Buddy Simulator 1984 looks great because it (seems to?) combine text chat with other gameplay.

I honestly did a bad job with the title of the post (entirely my fault!) because most people have been going straight to the text adventure genre for recommendations, and that wasn’t what I had hoped for.

Text adventure games are easy to find. So are games that simply involve a lot of typing of any kind.

What’s not easy to find are games which aren’t necessarily entirely text-based or text parsing in their interactions, but have natural language chat as part of their gameplay loop.

So they could be absolutely any genre - walking sim, puzzle, horror - anything! Even an FPS or an RTS! Of course, I struggle to imagine how a game could fit natural language chat as part of a single player FPS, but if someone did it, I’d be interested!

In all, what im trying to find is a pretty specific, weird and rare non-genre that doesn’t fit established categorisation, and that’s why I needed Fellow Humans to help.

So, thank you for the Buddy Simulator recommendation. I’ll certainly be playing that :)

Definitely a left-field suggestion but could be interesting, thanks!

I played the demo - it seemed novel but it didnt grip me and I dropped it.

However! I watched a friend stream it further into the game, and it seems like it got a lot more to my taste later on, with more puzzles and riddles, so it’s now on my watchlist :)

I played Starship Titanic as a kid, and loved it! Its one of four or five games I still kept the original PC “Big Box” for, all these years later.

The text parser being used only to talk to characters isn’t a detriment for me, it’s a feature! Clicking on things is much more intuitive for interactions, so just like Event[0] (which works the same way) I consider that a plus. Thinking about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if the devs of Event[0] were actually inspired by Starship Titanic…

As for AI, that’s something I imagine we’ll see more of in the future. Something like KathaaVerse isn’t that exciting to me as it’s mostly a thin wrap around an LLM - which as you say is liable to go off the rails, and it’s not a rich experience.

For it to be compelling to me it needs to be a curated game first, with environments and interactions and actual programmed mechanics, and then AI second to potentially enhance that game experience with rich and natural conversation. It will be a fun match when someone gets it right.

Thanks, interesting suggestion. Even if it doesn’t have free-text interactions (not sure on that point) it still seems to have other mechanics around how doing ‘investigation’ in the game works which makes me want to check it out.

Those kinds of old text-based adventures are definitely worth a shout, but I think you mentioned their biggest flaw - that other means of interaction are much more natural and intuitive than text parsers.

It’s very frustrating and not fun to be trying to find the right phrasing the game wants for “combine the x with the y” or “use the a in the b” when we can just click on things.

In Event[0] for example you are free to move around and look at things and click on things and find clues by yourself, but KaIzen is always there to chat to - and you often need to. So it’s a great blend because it’s a “normal” and modern game in most respects, but with free-text conversation as a core element.

Again it’s a flawed game (Only ‘Mixed’ on Steam and I agree with that!) but it’s an interesting experience regardless.

For anyone else on the fence, you don’t need to wait. Lots of distros support gaming right out the box. I switched my gaming desktop (nvidia card) to Pop_OS!, installed Steam, and it just works.

What factors lead you to select Cachy?

You edited it! Put it back lol, doesn’t make sense to change the context like that :)

Ohhh you really got my hopes up there. I was like “There’s an Outer Wilds 2!?” all excited

But no. There’s only an Outer Worlds 2, sadly :(

That’s a valid opinion if you want ownership over everything else, fair.

But to blanket-label Game Pass as “shit” right from the start really isn’t fair to all those people for whom it was good value, and gave access to a lot of games they probably wouldn’t have been able to justify otherwise.

Personally it wasn’t for me, because I too don’t like subscriptions, but for some of my friends it was and I respect that.

1. Fuck preorders

2. This isn’t a post complaining that Silksong brought the networks down, it’s people celebrating it, because it’s amazing to see a small studio doing so well and absolutely crushing their launch - not because they had an insane marketing budget, but because the community is just organically so excited for it. And all at a low price that puts big studios to shame.

Depends on what basis one is comparing it.

They are very different scales of game, but they both exist within the same economic realities.

Big studios seem to be working on the basis that just because they spend millions on a game, the game automatically becomes worth whatever price tag they want to slap on it - as if it’s a natural law that pumping in more money should directly translate to more revenue, without fail.

But it turns out the value of a game is not what publishers hope its worth - its what players percieve it is worth.

So it’s no surprise that indie games with amazing price-to-value ratios are seeing a surge, while big studios are struggling and don’t seem to have any ability to understand why their business model isn’t working.

Publishers are all shocked pikachu when their big budget games fall flat, but If people don’t want to buy an $80 game it’s not their fault - it’s your fault for not doing enough to justify the price tag.

My message to studios isn’t “your games should all be $20” (although some of them should) it’s “you should provide value that matches the price tag” - and Silksong over here just laid down the gauntlet as a game which looks set to deliver tonnes of value for relatively little cost.

Take note AAA studios - this is how you do it.

With this pricing, Silksong may be the only game this year that I’ll actually purchase on release day.

For some people the only things that brings them joy are 1) winning 2) making other people suffer

If E3 was still a thing I imagine the execs would have felt inclined to keep a few projects going, just to avoid the public humiliation.

100%.

I haven’t bought a full price game in a long, long time.

That page won’t open for me because it’s http only, won’t upgrade to https, and my browser won’t allow it.

But I know the story you mean and it’s brilliant lol.

Here’s another report on the same: Welsh translation gaffe

Bizzarre mistakes in signage, just like in real life! Realism++

I bought a refurb Pixel 7 on eBay for like ~$150 and put Graphene on it. It’s not like you have to spend four digits unless you want to.

I don’t personally like Nintendo’s actions, but I’m not sure why this article is trying to imply Nintendo miscalculated and don’t know what they’re doing - as if bricking consoles will somehow lose them money.

From Nintendo’s perspective, turning the used market into a minefield of bricked consoles can only be a good thing, because it encourages people to buy new, and buying new is money in Nintendo’s pocket.

And the conclusion that people won’t buy the console for their kids because of this? “Sorry kids, but Nintendo are bad so we cant play your favourite Mario - you’re getting a steam deck instead!” Like heck! A small minority maybe, but people will generally buy their kids what the kids ask for.

Nintendo know what they are doing.

I’m glad I’m one of those people who can’t seem to percieve any difference above 60Hz

Having low standards is pretty convenient

My rule is I can’t buy a game unless I am going to play it that same day.

Even in cases where the rule causes me to miss a sale and end up buying the game later, I’m sure it still saves me money, and - more importantly - saves a tremendous amount of regret and stress caused by buying games that would just sit my library unplayed.

The beginning of this headline had me mislead.

I read ‘creepiest publisher’, and with the state of the industry these days I immediately thought it was going to be some exposé piece on a toxic culture of workplace misogyny, and sexual harassment.

Glad it’s actually a cool studio doing interesting things!

I suppose it happened because from a mainstream perspective handhelds like the DS and PSP were far behind dedicated systems in terms of graphics, and so the expectation was never there to have “triple A” visuals - neither from consumers nor industry.

Made for very fertile ground in terms of games that had budget, but still had a long leash to go and get wacky.

Wow yeah. That must have been a really infuriating gameplay issue, no wonder players were upset with it.

A shame the game was so rushed or I’m sure the dev would have fixed that in code.

What was the bug and workaround? :)

To me, the unspoken premise of the game is that you’re a kid in 1986 with a parent or cool uncle who went on a business trip to Japan and brought you home a Famicom and a copy of the original Zelda - months before the console even launched outside Japan.

The whole game is about replicating that sense of childish fascination and wonder.

The ‘Alien Language’ game manual is supposed to mimic the feeling of trying to read the Japanese manual that came with the game, muddling through as best you can with the pictures, and a few random English words they included just because English is ‘cool’ in a gaming context.

It’s a very fun mechanic, and my favourite thing about the game.

I agree. After all, they are still selling it, and people are still happily buying it. A friend got one about 3 months ago and he’s been very pleased.

The Steam Deck is still under four years old, let’s remember. The Nintendo Switch is over eight! Of course that’s not an apples-to-oranges comparison as the Steam Deck aims to run any game, not just specifically optomised titles. But it’s an indicator.

On the subject of being old, we get way more life out of PC hardware right now than we did back in the early 2000s. Nowadays if you buy a high end GPU you might get a decade of gaming out of it. Back then you’d get 2-3 years and it would be obsolete, because graphics tech was just evolving so fast. (Of course, cards now cost ten times what they did back then, but that’s another story…)

Point is, there’s plenty of life left in the steam deck yet :)

The ship was one of the best parts for sure. Once you are competent it feels super liberating how nimbly you can zip around a planet.

The other good parts of that game were progression, and death.

I love that knowledge is the only thing retained between loops - the only currency of value. And I loved the feeling of making new discoveries.

And with death as an expected mechanic, the game doesn’t have to put up any guiderails to save you from it. There are no training wheels. You want to go outside without a spacesuit? Bad idea but we’ll let you. You want to literally lose your ship so you can never get it back? Sure, go for it. You want to fall into a space anomaly and see what happens? Be our guest.

Masterpiece game honestly.