If All Your Friends Jumped Off A Bridge... A Continuing Series.

Hands up, everyone who knows what game the screenshot above is from. Hah! You, too, eh? Well, you're in good company. There are five million of us so far and that's not counting everyone playing for "free" on Game Pass.

Among those millions are a couple of bloggers. There's Tobold, who bought the game on Steam, then refunded it almost immediately because it gave him motion sickness. Too late, he found a fix but by then he'd also realised it was on Game Pass, which he already had, so in a way his nausea came as serendipty. It saved him a few Euros. 

And then there's Scopique, whose very positive First Impressions post was at least in part responsible for my buying the game today. He makes it sound very appealing.

The main reason I bought it, though, was last night's storm, Storm Isha. (I really don't see how giving storms a name makes them any more friendly, although I guess that's not the point.) It was pretty windy but I didn't think much about it. We get a lot of storms this time of year, where I live; the tail end of hurricanes or tropical storms, wearing themselves out after crossing a few thousand miles of Atlantic ocean. They make a lot of noise but don't often do much damage, this far inland.

It used to be a lot more worrying when we had a falling-down fence on one side of the back garden and two precarious, sixty-foot conifers on the other. In those days I received news of any forthcoming wind stronger than a light breeze with a deep sense of foreboding. In recent times, though, we've had both trees taken down, along with another problematic one at the front of the house and two years ago our neighbors put up a new fence between our properties, a very sturdy construction that ought to be good for a few years yet before it falls down. (All fences fall down, eventually.)

It was an unpleasant surprise, then, to open the front door this morning and find a large sheet of lead lying on the front lawn. A chunk of the cladding had blown away in the night, leaving an eight inch gap between the top of the wall and the bottom of the roof. 

The good news is that within literally five seconds of registering my problem on a website designed to put householders in touch with suitable tradespeople, I received a call from someone offering to do the job the same day. A few hours later it was all done.

The bad news was the cost. I could have bought myself a new laptop (Okay, a reconditioned laptop...) for about the same. 

I did contemplate doing it myself. It just looked like sticking a lead plaster over a hole, after all. How hard could it be? I got as far as putting up a ladder and fiddling around up there for a minute or two before I decided that a) it was going to be a lot harder than it looked from the ground and b) my life was worth more than the cost of getting someone else to do it.

I was quite miffed about having to spend the money just to put the house back into the same condition it had been just twenty-four hours ago, especially since the actual work took less than five minutes, but that's ever the lot of the householder. After moaning about it for a while to Mrs Bhagpuss, I talked myself into feeling happy we were able to get it fixed so quickly, instead. There's another storm coming tomorrow (Storm Jocelyn) so it's as well we didn't have to wait. 

It's all in how you look at these things. Keep telling yourself that.

All of which is very interesting, I'm sure (I'm really not sure but I've written it now and I'm damned if I'm going to start this post again.) but how does it factor into my decision to buy this game everyone's talking about? I'm glad you asked!

Obviously, I bought it because I felt I deserved a reward, after I'd been so grown-up and all. And nothing says "Congratulations on being a responsible adult!" like buying a video game you don't need, just because everyone else is playing it.

Oh come, on! I deserved it!

I mean, it's not like I haven't finished the two games I bought on Steam in the Winter Sale, now, is it?

Okay, I haven't finished either of them.

Okay! One of them I haven't even started.

This one, though, is a survival game and those I do play. I play the hell out of them, in fact. I need to do a post about that sometime because it's begining to dawn on me that I may have moved on from MMORPGs to survival games, something that has implications all of its own, not least for this blog.

In fact, given the extreme numbers of units games like Valheim and now this one have managed to shift in a frightening short amount of time, and also given that "Survivalboxes" are self-evidently a lot easier and less problematic to make and market than MMORPGs, I suspect we might all have to get used to every new game coming in some flavor of Survival for a while, just like for a decade every game was marketed as some sort of MMO.

I like them because they're relaxing to play (Odd, given the supposedly brutal premise of being cast alone and naked into the wilderness...), because they have clear and straightforward progression and because they make for a series of blog posts that all but write themselves. And for a lot of other reasons that some day I hope to uncover in one of those posts.

Today, though, I am going to go learn how to play this specific survival game. On the evidence of the hour or so I've spent with it so far, it is a bit different from the others, although quite possibly not as different as its developers are going to come to wish. 

The game, of course, is Palworld, not that anyone needed to wait for the reveal. I'll let everyone know how what I think about it as soon as I know, myself.