The Question Everyone's Asking! What's New On The Beat Scene?

God! These things just flash by, don't they? Once again, I was wondering if it was too soon for another What I've been Listening To Lately and it turns out it's been nearly three weeks! Past time, then.

Lots to choose from. How many do I have set aside for consideration now? Let me count them... eighteen on the desktop... let me just check the laptop... five more there, so that's at least... far too many.

Sidebar: I don't want to pollute a nice, pure music post with messy computer stuff but since I've mentioned the desktop and the laptop I'll just say I have no clue what's going on now. "Ol' Reliable" turned out to be anything but. When I booted up this morning it wouldn't. It's stuck on some bios issue that I so far haven't been able to fix. But in trying to, I started swapping components between the two machines and now the new PC works again. Go figure. For the time being I'm keeping it on an Integrated Graphics, No Taxing Games diet so no NTE for a bit. We'll see how that goes. My Buy-A-Proper-Gaming-PC plan has been bumped right up the schedule, though, I can tell you that for nothing!

Back to the good stuff and it won't be all old favorites this time, for a change. OK, Blondshell just announced a new album (YAY!!) and several other faves, who also have new albums either out or about to be, have all been pumping out the videos, so we might have some of those. But I do have new names! Here's one now...

Grease Baby - Clutter

Isn't that a great way to start? We'll call it a palate cleanser, if you can cleanse your palate with grease. They're Swedish, as if that matters. That sound is the property of the world.

 What's New On The Beat Scene? - Perennial

Hahaha! And you thought the first one was retro? Although what specific era Perennial are retroactively invoking is less clear. It sounds like someone welded the Beastie Boys onto the back of the Sonics. And what the hell is that chorus? Bloody art-house punks!

Perennial are on the Ernest Jennings Record Co. label and as so often happens when I find something good on a label I never heard of, I took a look at what else was there. There was this...

 At War With The Dogcatchers - The Taxpayers

Who could resist a title like that? Still got no idea what it's about - and I've read the lyrics - but it sounds great. Reminds me really strongly of something, too, but I can't quite put my finger on what. When, though, that I can do. 85-95, around then. It's kinda Brotherhood of Lizards meets Neutral Milk Hotel. 

Hmm. We'll be here all day if I keep footnoting my references like that. Okay, just one more from Ernest Jennings and Co. and we'll move on.

 Really, Really, Really, Really Sad 

 Carla J. Easton

Too many reallys to fit on one line. What's the plural of really, anyway? I typed "reallies" first and that triggered a spell check but so does "reallys". What do they want me to do? Re-phrase to something awkward and clumsy like "Too many repetitions of the word "really" to fit..." ? I am not a fan of rephrasing perfectly good sentences just to appease some self-appointed grammar nazi! 

Whatever happened to Reese Lansangan anyway?

 VHS Aesthetic - Reese Langsangan

Oh wow! Never seen that before! It's fantastic. Well, the video is. The song's merely excellent. Shot on a visit to Tokyo with her sister. The video, that is. Not Reese. It wasn't sororicide. 

No wonder everyone wants to go to Japan. If I had access to some of those stores I wouldn't be able to get into my house! (Because I'd buy a lot of stuff in the stores. And take it home. And put it in my house. Where it would fill up all the rooms. Please try to keep up.)

That's the last thing she's posted and it was two years ago but then, she's hardly prolific. I think I'd better subscribe to her channel so I don't miss it the next time she drops a gem like this.

That was a nice surprise. The Philippines by way of Japan. Now, where shall we go next? I know. Australia! 

PQC - daine

Damn! I'm such a sucker for a chanted chorus. That's three in this post alone, although I suppose the Clutter is a chanted outro. 

I had to look PQC up because it meant nothing to me. All the responses in three full pages of google search, which was as far as I got before I gave up scrolling, thought it meant Post-Quantum Cryptography. That seemed unlikely so I asked Gemini what the acronym might stand for if it wasn't that. 

Gemini suggested either Pavement Quality Concrete, Production Quality Control or Protein Quaternary Structure, all of which sounded even less likely. 

Gemini, clearly puzzled by what I was up to, asked me "Are you asking out of pure curiosity, or are you looking into specific construction engineering or manufacturing standards?" to which I replied "I'm asking because of the song PQC by daine. I wanted to know what she was referring to in the lyrics and title. From context, none of the options seem likely."

This got me an eight paragraph dissertation on the meaning of the acronym in the context of the lyric, complete with links to a reddit thread (in which no-one knows what it means) and a piece at New Zealand website Sniffers, (where the acronym isn't even mentioned.) Gemini also linked to articles on Stereogum and Rolling Stone Australia as well as daine's own Bandcamp page, none of which make any attempt to explain it, either.

Despite the complete lack of evidence and entirely unsupported by any of the references it linked, Gemini still felt confident enough to tell me "The meaning of "PQC" in daine's song is intentionally left as a bit of a mystery, but it stands for "Plastic, Tragic, Overly-Romantic" (with the 'C' loosely standing for the "Choreography" / "Chorus" refrain or "Classic")." It was lucky that made no sense at all or I might have believed it.

This is a shining example of why I keep saying Gen AI would be great if it worked. It does not work. It hasn't gotten much better than when I first used it, just better at hiding its mistakes. Don't worry, though. It can and will get worse as this excellent observation by Janelle Shane at AI Weirdness concerning the potential disaster represented by AI Agents, chillingly foretells.  

Dunno what all that's doing in a music post. Still don't know what daine's talking about in the last line, either. Great song anyway.

 Election Day - Lily Seabird

There. That ought to clear all that silty AI out of our heads. Nothing like a bunch of scruffs rocking out in the woods to remind you what's real and what's not.

And speaking of...

 Violins - Blondshell

You knew it was coming... 

Look, I'm buying the album day of release so this is coming from a place of love but would it kill her to write something with a tune? This one does eventually flirt with melody - that lovely run-out from 3.00 on - but even then it's not exactly sing-in-the-shower material, is it?

And still I love it. I love how her voice rubs and rasps and abrades the air, how she holds every note just a little longer than she should, how here monotony is the melody, how she rides the guitar lines like the surf coming in over shale. She transcends. It's not so much song as it's sound, every time. 

I guess that is what grunge was, kind of, It was one of the reasons I never much liked it. But I like this. I more than like this.

 Voyager - P. J. Harvey

Here's someone else I like but who I almost never feature here. Mrs. Bhagpuss and I saw P.J. Harvey back in the '90s, when we still went to gigs. She was third on the bill to I forget who now. She was dressed head to toe in firetruck red vinyl and she was doing stuff off her raw, explosive debut album, Dry, which I'm not sure was even out yet. 

And now here she is, being invited by celebrity astrophysicist Dr. Brian Cox to write a song about the Voyager space probe for some theater tour he's threatening us with. Some people have the oddest career trajectories, Brian Cox among them.

 Drive - Fousheé

I do like a good walking through New York video. I know it's often done but if you lived there, why wouldn't you? Some cities do the heavy lifting for you. 

Siren - Tierra Whack

And you thought that Perennial song was short at 1.49! Tierra Whack says hold my beer.

Time for just a couple more. Let's bang it up.

He's Great  - Aitis Band

Aitis Band is a truly terrible name. Is it some kind of pun? It sounds like "Eighties Band" if you say it out loud but they don't sound like anyone I heard in the '80s. They sound like The Orb! It would be a terrible name for a bunch of fifty-something dads trying to recapture their youth by playing friends' parties and the back rooms of pubs but for someone that sounds like this it's just fucking stupid.

How did I ever come to click on it? It's another Ernest Jenning Record Co. signing, that's how. All the others who had much better names were good so I thought, hell, why not? Paid off, too.

 Common People - My Chemical Romance

Redbeard often refers back to the satanic panic. We didn't really have that over here but we've had an almost never-ending sequence of moral panics based around pop groups. Ban them! Deport them! Don't let them in! 

I think the first I can remember was that national institution and much loved all-round entertainer Alice Cooper. I remember the Daily Mail trying to get him banned when I was still at school. Then there were the Beastie Boys, of course, inciting their fans to snap the hood ornaments off Volkswagens, not to mention their supposed dissing of disabled kids in some made-up tabloid tale. The Shamen got it in the neck for promoting illegal rave drugs with their oh-so-clever choruses and My Chemical Romance were supposedly going to have our children slitting their wrists when, for some reason, listening to emo got conflated with having suicidal urges.

I never really paid much attention to MCR, I certainly didn't know they rocked out like this. Gerard Way, lead singer and also, somewhat surprisingly, the creative genius behind Umbrella Academy, puts all the anger into his performance that's always been there in the words but which Jarvis always undercuts with irony and that world-weary insouciance he's made his trademark. Really great version of a song all too easily reduced to a pub sing-along.

And finally. Saved 'til the end as a little treat for the persistent and because it's so new I only heard it for the first time a couple of hours ago, here's Charli! Be warned, this is NSFW even by Charli's always-unsafe standards.

Wink Wink - Charli xcx

Sounds like Arab Strap doing Jamie Oliver Petrol Station. And with that, I'm gone. 

REVOKED!

So that was a bit of a surprise. Also very dramatic. I just logged in and BOOM! there it was. A big, black window all over everything. 

My immediate thought was that I'd been banned from something for some reason. Not that I could remember doing anything wrong but then I got suspended from Pinterest a few weeks ago for violating some term of service or other and I don't even use Pinterest. 

I mean, it had to be something bad, didn't it? All that black background. The heavy bronze framing. The stern, sans serif font. Put it all together and it spells "You're in trouble". 

The choice of verb strongly reinforces the messaging that the person receiving the notice must have done something wrong. A product code you registered has been REVOKED! Your Steam key has been REVOKED, by the people who gave it to you. It must be your fault! You ungrateful little wretch!

Am I being over-sensitive? Oh, no. No, I am not. 

I don't have many areas of expertise but I do know what subtext is. I didn't spend three years on what was, at the time, broadly acknowledged to be the best undergraduate course in English Literature in the world not to be able to read subtext. What do you think all those practical criticism tutorials were for? Just so we could all sit around drinking sherry and eating cake?!

But if you doubt it, here are the examples Miriam Webster chose to use to illustrate the usage of the word "revoke":

"Your driver's license could be revoked after about three convictions for driving under the influence of alcohol; some people's licenses are even revoked for life. You could get your passport revoked if a judge thought you had violated the terms of your bail and suspected you might skip the country. And if you're out of prison on probation and violate the terms of probation, it will probably be revoked and you'll end up back in the slammer. "

See? If you throw around words like "revoke", those are the kinds of mental images you want to put into someone's head. My head. 

Do I sound pissed? (American usage.) I am, a bit, but that doesn't have much to do with Valve's inability to draft a polite, friendly memo. Mostly it's because it's the hottest day of the year and my PC just broke again and this time I don't think I'm going to magically get it working. Luckily I have Ol' Faithful here, which I was able to bring back into service in literally three minutes, thanks to having done it once already, a month ago. I was going to buy a decent gaming desktop and a gaming laptop this year anyway with my inheritance, when I finally get it, and I'm good on security updates for Windows 10 until October so I'm going to manage as I am until then. I'll strip the failing PC for parts, probably. I can't be bothered to send it back.

That should have been a sidebar, shouldn't it? Oh well, opportunity lost.

I'm not really cross about the Steam notice but, as Mrs Bhagpuss is fed up of hearing me say, some people really need to run their stuff past a decent marketing department before they send it out to the public. Any half-competent marketing person could re-draft that notice in five minutes to make it sound helpful and informative instead of passively-aggressive and vaguely threatening, the way it most definitely does.

They might even be able to do something about the confusion it causes too, although I'm not sure that would be within their competence. The whole situation is inherently confusing to begin with. Look at these two screenshots from Steam for a start.  

Both of those are from my one and only Steam account, the one to which the REVOKED notice was sent. The first, with the 13 hour played time, appears in the Steam Library as "Stars Reach". The second, with just three hours played, is listed as "Stars Reach Playtest". 

Since Stars Reach is and has only ever been in pre-alpha testing, they're both playtests of some sort. The first, which I'm assuming is the one to which my Steam key activation has been REVOKED, is the one I used from when the game first went into testing, which I applied for in the old-fashioned way and for which received first an acceptance and soon after an invitation to the creator program. Those 13 hours represent the testing I did and the research that was needed for the several posts I wrote.

At some point I also backed the Kickstarter and got a key for that. I think I may have even received a third key from somewhere, although I never used it. Maybe that's the one that's been REVOKED? 

Later still, Playable Worlds farmed the awkward business of issuing keys and linking accounts to something called firstlook.GG. I got some confusing instructions about linking accounts and registering keys through them, which I did my best to follow, but I was never sure which account had been linked to what.

I always use a separate email account for anything on Kickstarter and never use that email address for anything else, which does cause problems but I thought I'd gotten those sorted out. Maybe that was too optimistic. I can't say for sure if the Kickstarter pledge I made ever got converted into Steam access, as it was supposed to, since I already had access to the testing anyway.

And I still do! The first thing I did after I learned my access had been REVOKED was to go and see if it was true. It was not. Although a key must have been, I guess.

The notice specifically says, down in the small print and in a much more reasonable tone, that a key has been REVOKED because the test has ended. Only half of that can be true, at most. Unless I've missed something, there's only ever been the one testing program and it's still running. I'm still none the wiser as to what's really going on.

The first account up there, the one that says "Purchase" instead of Play looks like it was still working earlier this year. It says "LAST PLAYED Mar 27." I haven't tried it since then, because the last couple of times I played I made new characters to test the new-new player experience and for that I wanted to use a new account. I had a spare so I used it.

And that one still works. As you can see, I logged it in today. Both my new experience characters were there and I briefly logged them in and ran them around. All the in-game screenshots in the post are from that short session.

What I hope is going on is that my Kickstarter pledge key is attached to the account that still works, my creator/tester key has been REVOKED and my mysterious third key has vanished into the void, never to be seen. (I nearly said "never to be seen again" but as far as I can tell, I never saw it in the first place.)

I don't suppose I'll know for sure until the game goes into Early Access, as it's supposed to this summer. We're in summer now, come to think of it... That will presumably require yet more bureaucratic process and maybe it'll all become clear then. Ha!

I was always expecting that to be a problem anyway. I bet I'll end up having to send someone my Kickstarter pledge details to get into EA without paying twice. Always assuming I can find them.

All this for a game I'm pretty much certain I'll never want to play. At this point, the most fun I get out Stars Reach is trying to figure out what the heck is going on with the admin.

Certainly nothing much seems to be going on in the game itself. Once again, when I got in to the game today, I appeared to be the only person there. I probably was. I just checked the Steam charts and there are two people online right now. The 24-hour peak was 18.

The UI looked a bit different and the whole thing felt tidier but that good impression was counteracted by the very awkward character animations and the inordinate time it took to zone through a space portal to a planet. I had time to read nearly a dozen of those not very helpful tips they put up to keep you from being bored while you wait.

Worst of all, when I did finally arrive planet-side, I zoned in dead. Nothing killed me. I was just dead. I re-lifed and reappeared about five meters away. No corpse to retrieve. No clue what had happened. Not the greatest first impression.

Assuming I still have a Steam key that hasn't been REVOKED, I'll take another look when Early Access arrives. It's going to be very interesting to see how many other people turn up. And how long they stay.

Lacrimosa Moves In - Peace And Quiet Move Out

If there's one thing that might finally force me to keep a post short (Speaking of posts, if you want to skip right to the actual content, please click  ^[1] . Otherwise, please carry on!) it's having to type it on my laptop. No laptop keyboard is ever going to feel as natural and comfortable as my mechanical. 

Today, though, it's 35c out, which "feels like " 38 according to the ever-reliable Weather Underground. And it certainly feels all of that, at least upstairs where the heat rises, at the front of the house where the sun hits, which is where my study, if that's what we're calling it, is.

So here I am, downstairs at the back of the house, in the room we'll call the lounge for the sake of having something to call it, which is the coolest room in the house and likely to remain so until the sun comes round to shine directly through the windows around six in the evening. Typing on my lap may not be comfortable but at least I can see the keyboard without sweat dripping into my eyes. 

And because I'm down here, Beryl is too, which is good for her. You can tell it's hot. She stayed down here for a couple of hours on her own earlier on today, which is something she never likes to do. One more day of this, with tomorrow possibly being a degree or so hotter and then a gradual slip back to more normal summer temperatures over the weekend, at which point I will be at work anyway, where we have do have some sort of (Not very efficient.) air conditioning.

I like hot weather generally. I don't even mind it as hot and humid as this, these days. Humidity used to make my brain stop working but age seems to have tempered that. It's not good for Beryl, though, so I'll be glad when it drops a few degrees. I just hope we don't get any more thunderstorms in the transition. 

On Monday we had the biggest storm we've seen in thirty years, living here. It was like those news clips you see of tropical rainstorms or the tail-end of a hurricane. The drain at the back of the house was completely overwhelmed and we had three inches of water in the so-called conservatory, which is the first time that's ever happened. The conservatory roof leaked, too, although that's nothing new.

I had to stand ankle-deep in water, soaked to the skin from the torrential rain, constantly pulling the debris that was sweeping in out of the drain-grill to keep it clear for about fifteen minutes and then we spent an hour going through all the stuff that had gotten soaked to see what could be salvaged, which was most of it although some of that is never going to be the same again. 

 

Fortunately, water would need to rise more like six inches to get in the house itself. We got off lightly. Down the hill from us there was some more serious flash flooding with some damage to the streets that caused them to be closed to traffic next day. Never live at the bottom of a hill is my advice.

As well as the influx at the back, the storm brought down our giant rosebush at the front, blocking the path, so after I was done bailing out, I was out there, cutting it up and tying it back, still in the rain. And just to put the cap on the day, before any of that happened, while it was still hot and sunny and we had no idea what was coming (Absolutely no thunderstorms were forecast - they were supposed to miss us by twenty miles...), I managed to break the fridge, trying to force-defrost it. 

Never do that. It's the second time I've broken a fridge by removing ice build up too vigorously.

So that was Monday. But by Tuesday afternoon we had a new, improved fridge (This is why people still use Amazon despite complaining about them all the time.) and the conservatory was clean, dry and in better order than before. And of course, with it being so hot, everything that was wet is now dry and you might never know it happened. Although I bloody know, I can tell you!

Hmm. That's one long-ass intro to what I said was going to be a short post. I do like talking about weather. We just don't often get any weather worth talking about here, which I'm now seeing is a bit of a blessing. I suspect we might get more anecdote-worthy weather as climate change tightens its apocalyptic grip. Something to look forward to...

What I thought I was going to talk about was Neverness To Everness. I might have to go back to the top and put in a warning so people who might be interested in that sort of thing don't tab out before they even get there. Like this...

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[1] Readers with no interest in my home life but who would still like to read about the home life of my imaginary friends, please carry on from here! Everyone else who just clicked out of curiosity to see what would happen  ^ back to top

Last time I posted about NTE I was saying how Flora wanted to get a bigger apartment and maybe ask Lacrimosa to move in with her. Both of those things happened. Flora's delighted with her new flat. Her new flatmate, though...

I love Lacrimosa. She's sweet and funny and charming and honestly you couldn't ask for a more co-operative housemate. If you remember, though, two of the reasons Flora was finding life with Mint a little trying were all the little sighs and strange noises she makes and how she keeps sleeping in Flora's bed. Or, rather, on it.

Sometimes you just don't know when you're well-off, do you? Lacrimosa makes a lot of strange noises, too, and she also talks in her sleep, which means she's making some kind of noise pretty much 24/7. And even though Flora's new apartment at Skyview Halls is enormous, somehow you can hear Lacrimosa all-too-easily, no matter where she is. 

Guess where she mostly is, though? Yep. In Flora's bed. Lacrimosa's favorite thing in the world to do is sleep so she's there a lot. Talking to herself. OK, fair enough, it's a big bed. There's plenty of room for both of them. But it's a big apartment! There's plenty of space for them to have a room each. Plus, I thought she slept in a coffin. Maybe she forgot to bring it with her in the rush...

So, having Lacrimosa move in was a bit of a mixed bag. Also, have I now effectively sublet my old apartment to Mint? She's still living there as far as  know, even though I'm not. Should she be paying rent? 

The really weird part was the way inviting Lacrimosa exactly coincided with a bond quest Flora got at the same time. You need Bond Level 4 to invite someone to live with you, which is also when you get a little bonding quest so you can get to know each other better.

Lacrimosa's quest involves helping her choose a suitable gift for her "Grandpa", who's had to go into hospital. I could write a dissertation on the subtext of this short quest but I'm going to restrict myself to a third of a blog post because it's important to retain a sense of proportion. 

Lacrimosa's "Grandpa" is no blood relation although he is a kind of tomato relative, since he lets Lacrimosa grow the plants in his garden, which is probably the same thing as far as Lacrimosa's concerned. Skia arranged for Lacrimosa to move out of dorm accommodation at BAC and into an apartment he found for her, in a block managed by an elderly couple, who he also asked to keep an eye on her. 

Lacrimosa calls the couple Grandma and Grandpa but as it transpires from conversations with her, she doesn't know them well. Grandpa has gotten ill suddenly with some unspecified ailment and Grandma is mostly absent, visiting him in hospital. Lacrimosa wants to visit too and she knows it's expected that a visitor brings fruit to a patient's bedside but the only fruit she knows anything about is the tomato.

Which is where you, the Appraiser, come in. Lacrimosa, like everyone you meet, seems to value your advice so she asks you to come help her choose a fruit for grandpa. And yes, there is discussion of whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. Whichever it is, it's deemed inappropriate for the purpose.  

 

Flora ended up having to choose between I think it was apples, oranges and strawberries. She went for strawberries and Lacrimosa was happy with that although I got the impression she'd have been happy with a house-brick if that's what flora has suggested. Lacrimosa toddled off to catch Grandpa before visiting hours ended and that was the end of it.

Except, since I'd just asked Lacrimosa if she'd like to move into my new apartment, the timing seemed very much to suggest she was moving in with me because her current carers weren't able to give her the attention she needed and I was stepping in to help. That's absolutely how it went in my head canon but I can't help wondering if it isn't there in the writing as well.

It's quite firmly established that Lacrimosa isn't entirely capable of looking after herself and probably shouldn't be left on her own for too long. She's unworldly, to say the least. She knows very little about life outside the strict confines of her job and her extremely limited interests. 

She also talks about herself in the third person, always a sign of concern. And I just noticed that the Appraiser follows suit, always saying "Lacrimosa" where it would be more natural to say "you". I'm reading that as empathy or at least compassion on Floras' part. 

The Appraiser is of exemplary character, highly emotionally literate, or she is if you choose those responses. You could, if you were one yourself, play her as an insensitive jerk, but who'd do that? Not me. I'm pretty sure she has Lacrimosa living with her because that's what Lacrimosa needs right now.  

 

Whether there'll ever be a good moment for her to move back into her own place depends, I guess, on how Grandpa does. I suspect he might be in the hospital for a while. I imagine Flora's going to have to buy yet another bed.

And that, I think, is where I'm going to leave it for now. I've had about enough of typing on this laptop. I was going to do a whole thing about the Ghost Train Ticket quest but that's just going to have to wait. Good quest, though...

 

Notes about AI used in this post

I asked Gemini to do me some html code for the footnote. I've done footnotes before. I could have looked it up old school but why bother? Gemini did the basics, I did the rest. I'd have had to. If Gemini ever had a sense of humor, it seems to have lost it. I remember being mildly irritated by how chatty the AIs used to be. I kinda miss it now.

WILD! Go WILD! Go WILD In The City!

And so we come to the end, which is just as well for my page view stats. Here's my advice for anyone who wants to keep their traffic to a minimum without actually making their blog private: review game demos. Still, for the handful of people with literally nothing better to do than read a verbose description of a small part of a game that isn't available yet and which they almost certainly won't want to play when it is, here we go!

WILD Tactics   33 minutes - Not wishlisted...yet. Oh, wait... now it is!

Of all the demos this time around, Wild Tactics gave me the closest match between expectation and execution. I thought I was going to get an XCom clone with funny animals and that's what I got. I could leave it at that but then I'd have to think of something else to post about today so I'll go into a little more detail.

First off, all the indicators are firmly in the green. Wild Tactics looks great, as you can see from the screenshots. The characters are all very characterful, the backgrounds are as stylized as the flats in a professional production of Guys and Dolls, the dialog is snappy and sharp, the voice acting is energetic and engaging, the UI is clean, the gameplay is crisp and everything works like clockwork. 

If you're looking for a tactical, turn-based strategy game featuring anthropomorphic animals and you've already finished Mutant Year Zero, relax. You've found what you're after. Speaking of which, excuse me while I just go wishlist that one. I said I'd get it if it ever went on sale but then I forgot all about it.

And while I'm at it, I guess I might as well wishlist WILD Tactics, too. Wishlisting isn't a commitment after all. If something strikes you as decent when you play the demo, it's only polite to give it the nod. It's like leaving a tip. 

It's also worth adding games to the list just so I don't forget abnout them altogether, like I did with Mutant Year Zero. I know I won't want to play that or Wild Tactics at the moment, partly because, as I keep saying, summer isn't really my favorite time to play video games but also because I have an innate sense that certain genres are better enjoyed on long, dark evenings. 

For me, Winter games tend to come in three sizes: Long, Medium and Short. Big RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3 take me away from the miserable, cold, wet world outside for weeks or even months on end. Point and click adventures with strong narratives and compelling plots take up all my attention for a week or two. Tactical strategy games work well in short, discrete sessions, where I finish a battle or two each evening, often as a palette-cleanser from the more story-driven games, when you just wish they'd all stop talking and kill something already!

I am quite fussy about tactical titles, though. They all play much the same on the surface but something as simple as one awkward key-binding or a clumsy camera can put me off completely. I also don't much go for being yelled at by the game, which was one of the main reasons I couldn't get on with XCom itself.

And I do prefer some humor with my massacres. All these games, or at least all the ones I've played, involve pro-actively murdering everyone who gets in your way. Generally, the writers try to set things up so it seems like a reasonable response:  the world is under attack by aliens and they don't subscribe to the Geneva Convention or you're a persecuted minority the authorities are trying to exterminate. Still, it can get a bit uncomfortable, the "shoot first, ask questions never" routine.

Wild Tactics is moderately light-hearted, if not actually a comedy. The demo gets the set-up out of the way very quickly, letting you know there's a crisis happening and the rule of law has to be put to one side for the moment just to stop everything descending into anarchy. Yeah, That's what all the fascists say, isn't it?

The nature of the crisis intrigued me a little, not least because it seems to be more than a little reminiscent of the basic premise of Beastars, a show I really ought to finish watching. The gist is, all the animals of Clawville live together in harmony except that carnivores aren't allowed to eat meat. It's illegal. But they wants it! THEY WANTS IT!!

Beastars is about a dozen orders of magnitude more subtle and nuanced about it. In Wild Tactics, it's basically Prohibition only meat not booze and supposedly with a " '50s aesthetic" although it looks pretty goddam '20s to me. And instead of Eliot Ness and the Untouchables you have the WILD squad (Is it an acronym? If it is, I missed the explanation of what it stands for.), which is pretty much DC's Suicide Squad only without the superpowers. 

OK, they're not all sociopathic criminals pulled out of prison and given a chance to be useful for a change. Only some of them. Some of them are brutal ex-cops or cynical ex-spies. The usual suspects in other words. And they all have personality defects and catchphrases and attitude problems and some of them can't stand each other and like that. 

The banter keeps things tripping along so you forget just what you're doing. Not that it hasn't been explained to you. Your handler back at HQ specifically tells you to shoot first and forget the body count. Which is exactly what I did.

Not that I had any option. Do any of these games ever let you take prisoners? Maybe once or twice, if it's for the plot...

In the demo at least, WILD Tactics has just about the shortest tutorial I can remember. You have to move your three-animal squad across a car park to a highlighted area. It takes two or three turns, during which you have to defeat precisely one enemy. He got clubbed to death with a baseball bat in one turn by my tank and that was that.

After that, there's a full mission in which you have to go into a night club, where The Golden Fang Clan is stashing... erm... something bad... maybe meat? I wasn't paying attention. You have to find the storage area, destroy whatever it is they're storing there and get out in one piece. Bonus points if you kill everyone in the club!

It was fun. Also easy, which might be why it was fun. It wasn't a walkover, though. The difficulty felt just right. No-one died but I had to use use several of the various healing options available. My tank, doing his job, took a lot of damage and everyone caught a bullet or got stomped. Most of the baddies were rhinos and they like to charge.

Crucially, I found both movement and combat to be intuitive and straightforward, something that's very much not always the case in games of this kind. Cover was clearly marked and easy to understand, targeting wasn't at all fiddly and everything felt logical. There's clear on-screen instruction when anything new comes up -  missions are a form of ongoing tutorial as they often are in these games, so you're coming across new tactics all the time - but I rarely needed the help. It was usually quite clear what was happening.

After the first mission you get to choose what you do next, as again is typical of the genre. You can also buy consumables or upgrades from the store at HQ and send injured team-mates to the medical center, although all my team were extremely unimpressed with the medical facilities and didn't hesitate to say so. I'm guessing upgrading those might be an option at some point.

About the only thing in WILD Tactics I can't remember having seen in a game like this before is the relationship element between the characters. When you select your team there's a diagram that tells you who's friends with whom and which of them can't stand each other. I did notice a little tension in the chatter between my crew as they fought but it seemed like it was there for color. Maybe it has some gameplay implications further in.

All told, I really liked the WILD Tactics demo. If it hadn't been so freakishly hot, I'd have played for longer than half an a hour. (We're in the middle of a another heatwave, a proper one this time, with all-time heat records set to fall over the next few days and a red warning issued for temperatures likely to pose "a risk to life for even the healthy population".)

I've wishlisted it but there's no release date yet. With luck it'll come out just in time for winter.

Job Vacancies Available - Strictly NO Humans!

And so we come to the end. The end of the half dozen demos I picked for this Summer's Steam Next Fest, that is. Do either of the final couple deserve top billing?

Let's find out.

Monstopia (69 Minutes - Wishlisted But Only After Some Thought)

This one racked up the longest playing time of the six, which has to go in its favor. I didn't finish it, though. I haven't finished any of the demos this time around which is very unusual for me. I think it's just too hot and summery for me to want to spend a long time in front of the screen just now.

Based on the description on its Steam Store page, Monstopia looked like it was going to be a fairly familiar sort of game. I was expecting some kind of crime story, most likely a murder, because it's nearly always a murder, isn't it? Something with clues and suspects and a plot, anyway. 

This is what it says in the developer's description. See what you make of it:

"This is a casual detective game featuring interview simulation and "find the differences" gameplay. You will play as an ambitious young demon, determined to transform the dilapidated park into the most thrilling horror-themed attraction."

"A casual detective game" is what made me jump to the conclusion there'd be something to detect. Like, y'know, a crime, maybe? I assumed the ""find the differences" gameplay" " and the "interview simulation" were just descriptions of how you'd gather evidence and prove your solutions. And I took it the rest was just the set-up. 

Well that was mistake. Monstopia is nothing like any of that at all.

What it actually turns out to be is a management sim. I do not play management sims so I have no comparative experience by which to judge it but I thought it was pretty good. People who play these things regularly may disagree.

Here's how it really works. There's a short scene-setting introduction where a few basics are explained, including the backstory. You're reviving an old theme park, which you  and then a series of applicants for jobs appear in front of you, as a demon yourself, hope to bring back into service as a place where monsters can legally enjoy scaring humans and get paid for it. 

Your job is to interview applicants for various posts in the park and assign the right monster to the right job. Most importantly, you need to weed out any horrible humans trying to pass themselves off as monsters so they can sneak into the park and put a lovely monster out of a job. Humans! Euughh! Ptui!

The game has a fairly unsubtle subtext about outsiders and conformity and acceptance that I initially found uncomfortable in its enthusiastic advocacy for exclusionism. Fortunately, that drifts out of focus quite quickly and after the first few applicants I'd mostly forgotten about it. I was enjoying weeding out those pesky humans every bit as much as a good demon ought.

To begin with, I found doing that a little harder than I might have done had I paid more attention to the pictures. I hadn't realized just how much is explained visually rather than verbally. You get a guidebook telling you the salient differences between the various monster species and I read it pretty thoroughly but I didn't immediately notice there are also some very helpful illustrations. 

I couldn't figure out why I kept making the wrong decisions over some applicants because I thought they either did or didn't have the appropriate "Special Body Patterns". It turned out I was taking things like stripes or spots to be patterns when in fact what I should have been looking for were some very specific, small colored blotches, as shown in the diagrams I'd been ignoring.

Once I'd figured out the specifics of what I was meant to be looking for, I made far fewer mistakes but I still had to pay attention because as the game goes along, the difficulty increases. As word of the park's success spreads, new types of monsters start to apply for jobs. At the beginning there were only three - Demons, Werewolves (aka Furs) and Vampires (aka Bloodnights) - but by the time I finished Undead and Dolls were applying as well.

As well as a wider variety of monsters, more posts open up, too, and it becomes important that you fit the right applicant to the exactly appropriate role. Then human customers start complaining some monsters smell bad so you have to test for personal hygiene before deciding who can work in public areas and who's best kept safely behind the scenes. Similarly, some monsters can't work in certain environments, so you have to check for that, too. 

You also supposedly have to take the applicants' preferrences into consideration, while also making sure the job you're about to offer them doesn't have some proviso such as no Undead to be offered work in food preparation. That didn't seem to work as described, though, because I found if I tried to employ a Monster to do anything other than their preference, they'd have a hissy fit and storm out, telling me I didn't know how to manage a business whereas, if I just plonked them down where they wanted be, regardless of any proscriptions against it, everything was fine. 

I found all of this quite enjoyable. It feeds the innate faculty all humans have for pattern-matching - ironically, considering it's a demon doing choosing. You also get scored after every round based on how well the park is doing financially, how satisfied your employees are and how much the public are enjoying it. I like getting scored for things I've done so that was nice, too.

Periodically the interviewing stops for a little cut scene or a news broadcast about the park and how it's doing, a topic of abiding interest for the local TV station. When this happens, you also get a little mini-game where you have to make a decision on how to deal with some management issue or other that's arisen, which serves to break things up a little.

Mostly, though, it's interview after interview. You'd think that might get repetitive but every applicant is different enough that I never felt bored. The visuals are excellent throughout, stylish and attractive. The differences that dictate who's a real monster and who's a pesky human trying to pass are always clear and easy to spot, or they are once you understand what you're looking for, at least. 

The writing is quite entertaining. Every applicant gets a couple of lines telling, you a little about themselves and what they think they'd be good at doing. Occasionally one will have a lot more to say although I was never sure if that had any gameplay significance or was just added color. 

Monsters are suitably outraged if you mistake them for human but humans accept discovery calmly in a kind of "It's a fair cop, Guv!" fashion. I felt bad for a couple of the humans, who'd clearly put a lot of work into their costumes and seemed like they might be decent employees but there were others who were just taking the piss. I was glad to see the back of them!

Technically the demo played flawlessly for me. No bugs or glitches. As the opening card reveals, before you find the button to select English as your language of choice, the game is translated and there is the occasional spelling or grammatical error but mostly it's a very good translation, idiomatic and with natural flow.

Apparently I was quite close to the end of the demo when I stopped. The developers estimate it should take around 90 minutes (An extremely generous 30% of the full game.) but by the time I'd played for a little over an hour, I'd had enough. I might go back and finish it if the demo stays active after Next Fest ends though. 

I'd have no hesitation in recommending this game to anyone who likes management sims.  Not so much if it's a detective game you're after. If I was in the market for a game of this type, I'd have definitely added it to my Wishlist.  I wasn't, though, so I didn't. 

Except now I've written all of this, I feel like maybe I would like to play it through to the end after all. So onto the Wishlist it goes!

Really, the only negative thing I have to say about Monstopia is that I do think the developers might make it a bit clearer in the description what sort of game it is. Call me difficult if you like but I do like at least a little actual detection in my detective games...

And once again, I've run on long enough I feel I ought to make this a single-demo post. That three-gamer I did at the start is looking like a real outlier now, isn't it? 

The Fifth Bell Tolls But Not For Me

Two more demos down. One still to go. I have to say I've been impressed with my picking skills this time. No complete duffers yet. 

On the other hand, there's only one out of the five I've tired so far that I might buy when it comes out, that being Hawthorn. Not every game can be for everyone, even the good ones.

I was going to write up both demos in the one post but to no-one's surprise, I'm sure, I've ended up saying so much about the first there's no room for the second. It was pretty amazing I managed to cram the first three into one post on Thursday. I'll try and get the final pair into one more post next week.

The Fifth Bell  (38 minutes - Not Wishlisted)

Playing this was an interesting experience but precious little of that interest came from the story or the characters, which is a bit of a problem for a game that so obviously styles itself on the great narrative-led, character-driven point and clicks of the past, particularly a certain very well-remembered series from the 1990s. 

I'll start there. I'm used to adventure games wearing their influences proudly, as badges of respect and honor. There's nothing wrong with that at all. In the case of The Fifth Bell, though, it sometimes felt as if the primary influence might be  The Da Vinci Code, not Broken Sword. 

The demo begins where, I assume, where the full game will too, with the player character talking to himself as he rides his motorcycle down the hill into Strasbourg in a beautifully animated scene that really didn't work at all for me, for a couple of reasons. 

For a start, it's so lovely to look at and such a surprise at the very beginning of the demo that I didn't really take in anything I was being told. Consequently, when I arrived in the town square, I had no idea why my character was there or what he was supposed to do next.

Secondly, although I've never been to Strasbourg, I was under the impression it was a fairly large city. As you can see from the screenshot, the introduction makes it look like a small market town, as you approach it down an empty, country lane. It does look more like a city when you get there but it's still disconcerting.

All of which brings me naturally on to the graphics, which are by far the most striking and appealing thing about the game. That could also be a problem because this is one of nearly twenty per cent of all demos in the current Next Fest that come with an AI warning. In this case, AI was used "for the 2D background art, character sprites, and audio". All particularly problematic uses for many people.

I read an informative and revealing article on AI by Rob Fahey at GamesIndustry today. It makes a number of telling points about the dubious utility of AI, evidence against which is beginning to mount up now many companies, large and small, have had a year or two to try it. We're nearing the moment when the promises made for the technology are either going to be broken or fulfilled and it seems more likely to be the former than the latter. 

Fahey also observes that, even if the utility is there, it will come at a cost that might be more than most businesses will be willing to pay. Not only are the AI companies beginning to ramp up their charges in an attempt to claw back some of their vast investment but opposition from the end users, gamers, to any use of the technology at all seems to be both increasing and hardening. 

Those two factors combine to make the whole affair seem much less attractive than it did a year ago. Then, the worry would have been being left behind in the gold rush; now the safe option looks like sticking with the tried and true.

None of which necessarily impacts a game like The Fifth Bell, which looks to me as though it might be the work of a single developer. For someone making their own game, the attractions of automatically generated art and sound must seem extremely enticing. 

And the results are mildly encouraging, in a way. As I said above, the visuals are the best part of this game. The scenes are pretty to look at; well-composed and coherent. I suspect they're also mostly AI-generated, even in their final form.

The Steam AI proviso says they were "extensively edited, cropped, and manually integrated by hand", which initially makes it sound as though the end result was mostly the work of a human, until you realize what it actually means is that someone took the AI-generated output, tidied it up a bit, trimmed it to size and added it to the game. 

I'm not sure how rigorous the editing can have been, either. I spotted one error that certainly should have been caught in that editing process but wasn't. The game is set in 1994, when the currency in France would have been the Franc. The text of one puzzle correctly asks you to get hold of a one-Franc piece to make a call from a payphone but the menu boards inside and outside the cafes show all the prices in Euros, a currency not in use until almost a decade later. 

In fact, if I was going to be really picky, they also show what look very much like 2026 prices, not even the correct prices for the earliest date the Euro would have been use, namely 2002. It just shows how careful you have to be if you use generative AI and how much clean-up work you could end up doing.

Perhaps the most obvious warning sign, though, is that, as I suggested in a previous post, I could somehow sense the AI in the screenshots on the game's Steam page even before I read the disclaimer. Once I got into the game itself, that sense that something was subtly off intensified.

Would it have put me off playing, had the story grabbed me more firmly than it did? No, I can't say it would. The pictures might feel a bit bland but they're not unattractive. Plenty of hand-drawn games have art that looks a bit wonky to me so it's not an aesthetic deal-breaker. If anything, found the odd, sidling, diagonal movement of the main character, presumably not the result of AI, more disturbing than the slightly flat backgrounds.

  

Leaving the visuals for a moment, what about the sound, for which AI was also at least partly responsible? Here I found the artificiality harder to ignore and less worthy of a pass. 

One of the core requirements of an adventure game of this stripe is convincing, engaging voice work. The Broken Sword titles are the gold standard. I can hear George and Nico's voices in my head even now and Mrs Bhagpuss, who hasn't heard them since the 90s, still occasionally imitates them in conversation for comic effect. The voice acting in that series, and in several other adventure games I've played, often does as much of the heavy lifting as the plot or the puzzles.

In The Fifth Bell, the dialog isn't all that inspiring to begin with but the vocal interpretation sometimes drags it down a little further. It's not bad, as some human voice acting I've heard in games has been. It's mostly just a bit flat and unconvincing.

The thing is... the voice-work here isn't very good AI. There were a handful of minor line misreadings that I would say were typical of AI, which I would have thought, once again, should have been dealt with in the edit. And it wouldn't have been hard. I've heard - and indeed created - more convincing speeches generated by free online resources. 

After I'd finished playing, I copy-pasted a chunk of my own prose into Suno and had it create a spoken-word version, just to see if I was being over-critical. Suno did a better job on the first attempt and a much better job once I'd tweaked it a bit.

That only took me about a quarter of an hour, most of which was spent listening to the output. I don't think it would be hard to produce some convincing voiceover for an adventure game using AI. On the other hand, I'm sure I could do a better job myself, just reading it aloud, and so could most people, I'd have thought. I'm not sure voice acting is a part of the creative process that really needs much automation.

The parts of the game that apparently don't have AI at the back of them are the story, the gameplay and the mechanics. The last of those is easy to dispose of: the mechanics are solid. Nothing much wrong with them at all. Everything works, nothing is more awkward than the average adventure game, which admittedly isn't saying a lot because the entire genre is generically fiddly. I didn't come across any bugs or glitches.

Gameplay is absolutely traditional for the genre. Walk around, inspect things, pick up anything that isn't nailed down, talk to anyone who'll talk to you, do whatever they want you to do, solve problems and remove obstacles by using Item A on Item B... We all know the drill. 

I found all the puzzles reasonably easy to solve without a walkthrough. Most of the solutions were at least semi-rational although I think it's fair to say no-one in any adventure game ever made has ever behaved entirely rationally. The characters were quite engaging for the most part. The builder was amusingly aggressive, the girl and her disturbingly photo-realistic dog were charming, the waitress was suitably harried and irritable...

The plot is mildly involving. During renovations, someone discovered a modern cassette tape, hidden impossibly in a medieval wall in Strasbourg cathedral. On the tape was some kind of dire warning about not allowing a fifth bell to ring. I was never very clear what would happen if it did or why the character I was playing, Evan Marek, an archivist, was involved in trying to find out but I was willing to go along with it.

The biggest problem is the sudden start I alluded to earlier. Most adventure games begin with a fairly lengthy, slow set-up, during which you get to know the characters as they're slowly drawn into some kind of mystery. The Fifth Bell, in contrast, begins with a short voice-over and then there you are in the cathedral square in Strasbourg with not much of a clue why. I didn't find it to be a start that engendered much commitment.

The writing itself is a bit of a mix. As I said, the character dialog can be entertaining but the item and location descriptions are workmanlike at best. In general, it all feels a little perfunctory except when people are talking, at which point it sometimes seems like the writer might be having too much of a good time.

All in all, I didn't think it was a bad demo or that it's likely to be a bad game but even as a fan of the genre, I wasn't motivated to add The Fifth Bell to my wishlist. I already have a few point and click adventures on there and a couple more in my Steam library that I haven't gotten around to playing yet. All would seem to have more going for them than this one.

That said, based on the demo, I'd say it will probably be perfectly fine. If you're an adventure gamer who can't get enough of the genre and you're sanguine about AI usage, I'm sure you could do worse. That's damning it with faint praise but the demo, which I haven't finished and most likely won't, makes it feel like that sort of game. 

How To Become A Tycoon In Neverness To Everness By Really Trying

It's been almost a week since I last posted anything about Neverness To Everness but rest assured I've been playing every day. Playing but not really getting anywhere...

I haven't been able to help noticing that everyone else, by which I mostly mean Malvaltar and Nimgimli but also literally every single person I ever see talking about the game when I google it or try to look something up, is way, way ahead of me. Everyone is Level 50. Or 60. The exact cap still seems a bit vaguely defined. 

Everyone has done a whole load of things I haven't done and quite a few of them seem to be things I haven't even heard of. I'm up to date with the main quest/story, which is a first for me in one of these games, but other than that I seem to be a long way behind.

Not that it matters. NTE isn't a competitive game. It isn't even an MMO and it makes absolutely no difference what pace anyone takes in a single-player game. There's no-one there to criticize or goad you along or wonder why you're so under-geared for your level and would you like some help?

So why was I bothered? Because my apartment is starting to feel a little cramped, what with that twelve-foot tall kewpie doll blocking the view and Mint wandering around in her nightie, sighing to herself, that's why. I already mentioned how I felt I had to buy her a bed of her own so she'd stop sleeping in mine and I wasn't exaggerating when I said there wasn't room for two beds on the upper deck. I can barely get to the stairs!

That's what started me wondering why I still only have the basic, starter apartment. Shouldn't I have the next one by now? So I began looking into it.

Access to housing, like most of the non-combat activities in the game, is controlled by your Tycoon level. That's a discrete progression system completely unconnected to you Hunter level. The two work independently and very differently.

Hunter is your basic MMO leveling path, a little bit more nuanced but still much the same process underneath. You quest, you kill stuff, you do dailies and you get xp which makes your level go up. For Tycoon, you have to meet specific criteria to complete each level. It's a literal tick-box exercise.

When I started playing NTE, I understood all that but somehow I'd mostly forgotten about it. I didn't particularly want my Hunter level to go up because all that seems to do is make the fights harder, which sends you scurrying around, trying to get the mats to upgrade your gear, just so you can get back to where you started. The traditional MMORPG gameplay loop, in other words. As for Tycoon level, that went up so naturally just through playing the game, I stopped paying any attention to it at all.

Which was why, after more than six weeks of regular play Flora was still only Tycoon Level 8. Enough get the next house, Eden Apartments, but having looked at the cost it seemed like it might be better to push through to Level 9 and buy the third,  Skyview Halls, instead. Eden costs 1m Fons but Skyview is only another 400k and Flora had more than 2.5m to burn.

(Of course it didn't occur to me until I started writing this that owning Eden Apartments might be a pre-requisite to buying Skyview. I probably should have thought of that. It's a common enough practice in games. Luckily, I just googled it and it seems skipping ahead is fine so long as you have the cash. Phew!)

Now I'd been encouraged to think about it at all, I was a bit puzzled why my Tycoon progress had stalled. It was very easy to find out. It's all laid out extremely clearly in game. I just hadn't bothered to look before.

It turned out I was being blocked by an incomplete Exploration Guide requirement. I'd barely noticed there were such things as Exploration Guides so it was hardly surprising I hadn't finished one. They're a sort of tick-list of stuff you can do in the game so I was one tick-list short of a tick-list.

The reason I hadn't already done everything necessary just by playing was mostly that a couple of the items on the list were so pointless I'd never thought they were worth wasting my time on. They were extremely easy, though, so knocking those off took not much longer than it took to find the location on the map and portal there.

As soon as that was done, I hit the big Level Up button and dinged Tycoon 9. Only the Level Up button was still glowing. I pressed it again and Ding! Tycoon Level 10!

Thanks to some very considerate game design, all the requirements for Tycoon are granted retrospectively. If you happen to have completed something on the Level 12 tick-list while you were still only level 6, you'll find it neatly crossed off the list when you get there. 

In that way I leapfrogged several levels on the way to Tycoon 16, which is where I had to stop for, as we'll see later, financial reasons. There were a few more Exploration Guide boxes to tick here and there along the way and I had to buy a motorbike to hit the "Own 3 Vehicles" qualification, a bike being by far the cheapest option just to get that box ticked. 

There were a number of requirements related to house decoration but of course I'd long since done all of those. I also had plenty of money which was fortunate because to be a Tycoon does demand a certain income.

The most interesting of all the asks was the Pink Paws Heist. Access to this is opens at Tycoon 10 and completing it at least once is a requirement for Tycoon 11.

Before I got the nod, I knew the event existed but I'd kind of decided I wasn't going to do it. Pink Paws is the bizarrely-named central bank in Hethereau and a Heist there sounded like a robbery, where you steal from the vaults. I didn't like the sound of that.

In a kind of throwback to my RPG days, I'd made up my mind Flora would not become a bank robber because it would be out of character, which is why I'd done nothing to find out more about the event after I knew it existed. Had I taken the trouble to investigate, I'd have learned the Pink Paws Heist isn't a robbery at all. It's perfectly legal. In fact it's sanctioned and run by the bank itself!

There's a whole backstory to it, albeit only sketched in outline by Chiz, who tells you all about it when you meet her in the bank lobby. It was apparently some media event run by a Streamer that went so well the Pink Paws board decided to stage regular reconstructions for publicity purposes. Or something. I wasn't taking notes.

It's fun, or it would be if there weren't sirens going off constantly. They're deafening! It's on a timer that gives you about nine minutes before something happens but what that might be I can't tell you because, since all I needed to do was complete the run to tick the box, I jumped into the ReRo Phone Box and teleported out at the earliest opportunity. 

I will be back, though. It's quite lucrative and I need the money. I finally hit the buffers at Tycoon Level 16 because the next level asks for more money than I've got. Or, I should say, than I've ever had. 

In another fine piece of game design, to level up as a Tycoon, you don't have to pay anyone any money, you just have to be able to prove you have it. Or have had it, at some point. The tick-box is for lifetime earnings and to reach the next level I need to have made another 450k or so. 

Looking ahead, it's pretty much all "Earn More Money" right the way to Tycoon 20. There are a few more Exploration ticks to get for Level 20 itself but otherwise Flora's already done everything that's going to be asked of her. 

The Tycoon ladder carries on past 20 but from there on it's locked for some reason. You can't even look at what you need to do until you ding 20 yourself. 

As for rewards or unlocks, there's Chiz herself at Level 18 and not a lot else. All five houses are unlocked already, although I can't afford the last two. 

Also unlocked is the Pawbes Rich List, a competitive table of who has the most money in the game. Uniquely in my experience, this includes both players and NPCs. I don't think it gets you anything other than bragging rights, a title and a fancy border round your name, which would seem to be of limited appeal in a single-player game.

I want Chiz, so that will motivate me to work on the next couple of levels. After that I guess I ought to make it to 20 to see what comes after. Yes, I could just look it up on the Wiki but I'm in no rush. 

What I really need to do is start thinking about which house I'm going to buy next and who I'm going to ask to come live in it with me. I'm thinking Lacrimosa would make a good flatmate. Or maybe Chiz, when she joins the team. 

I hear she's good at making money. That could come in handy. A tycoon always needs more money.