Night And The City - The Cloudpunk Review

Last night I finished Cloudpunk. According to Steam it took me a little over eleven hours, which feels about right. It's one of the best games I've played in a long while and I'd recommend it highly to anyone with even a passing interest in either cyberpunk settings or strong storytelling.

There's really not a lot I can say about the main storyline that isn't going to stray into spoiler territory. In fact, even confirming there is a central plot might be giving away too much. I'd probably been playing for a couple of hours before I even began to suspect there was one and honestly the game would work perfectly well without, as the purely episodic collection of short stories I originally thought it was going to be.

That said, the plot, when it develops, is excellent; coherent, intriguing, exciting and eventually satisfying. It's so complete in itself that I'm somewhat put off buying the DLC that carries on from where the base game finishes. It's one of those problems of success you very occasionally hear about. Things finished so well, I'm not sure I want to hear about a whole new set of problems threatening to spoil the happy ending.

Let me see what I can safely say about the story and the characters without giving too much away. 

The set-up is that Rania, a youngish woman from the Eastern Peninsula, has arrived in the vast, sprawling city of Nivalis, where she knows absolutely no-one. Rania is an outsider in the city, which allows for your own ignorance as a player, but she's also a cultural outsider. She wears a head-covering and her background is clearly rural and possibly also ethnically diverse, although what the ethnic norm in Nivalis might be is anyone's guess. Just being human gives her privilege.

She's on the run from a debt collection agency with exhaustive and terrifying powers. What she owes, to whom and what the penalties might be for not repaying the debt is never specified but we meet other people in similar situations to whom very bad things have been done, so her sense of endangerment is patently justified. 

To pay the rent on her one-room apartment, she's taken a job as a delivery driver for a borderline-illegal company called Cloudpunk. It's never entirely clear how much of their operation is tolerated by the authorities but it's certainly not all of it. 

This gives her the use of a HOVA, a flying car, but she has to pay for the fuel and repairs out of her earnings. The game begins with the start of her first shift. It's a night-shift, naturally.

And that would be enough for a game, in my opinion. I was quite happy, picking up the deliveries, flying around the incredibly detailed and complex city, discovering new areas, meeting new people and hearing snatches of their stories. Particularly since I was doing it in the company of Camus.

There are a lot of good things about Cyberpunk but the best might be Camus, the "s" in whose name is sibilated, not silent like the existentialist for whom he may or may not be named. 

Camus is a dog except when he's not. He's an Automata, which from context I believe is some specific kind of AI. There are AIs, Automata, Androids and Humans in the city but at least one Automata we meet used to be Human and the term AI doesn't always seem to mean exactly the same thing.

This ambiguity, of course, plays directly into my own, personal preferences when it comes to science fiction. Having grown up on, and having had my core intellectual conceptions shaped by, the work of Philip K Dick, any discussion of machine consciousness presses all my engagement buttons. There's a lot of that in Cloudpunk and it's done with considerable subtlety and nuance. If you want a game to make you think, this one will do it.

Camus's situation is a prime example. He's an Automata with self-awareness, who used to be housed in the body of a dog, presumably an android dog, although I'm not sure if that's ever explicitly confirmed, as neither is what he may have been before he was a dog. 

When Rania fled the Eastern Peninsula she brought Camus with her on some kind of hard drive and when she acquires the HOVA she installs him as its resident persona, replacing the generic one that comes with the car. He's her pet, her friend, her companion and in some indefinable way, her conscience.

Most of the time, Camus is in charge of communications and systems in the HOVA but occasionally the original, generic persona is re-instated and once Camus even ends up back in the hard drive for a while. 

At times, Camus muses at some length on his existential situation, conversations I found fascinating and could happily have heard much more of. He also asks some very searching philosophical questions, not least whether he can still be considered a dog now he's a car. People who meet him in the city for the first time naturally believe he's the HOVA. They have no idea he is or even was ever a dog. We do, though. He's a constant, affable, occasionally questioning presence and I just couldn't get enough of him.

When he speaks, he's represented by an icon that looks like the head of a border collie and his naive, innocent way of expressing himself somehow manages to make him sound like a dog, but also like a machine intelligence, or more properly what we might imagine either of those things to be like, could we hear them. It's exceptionally convincing, in equal part due to the quality of the writing and the perfectly-pitched voice acting.

The writing throughout is of that same, high standard and it's all the work of a single person, Thomas Welsh. The voice acting, which is handled by literally dozens of actors, is more variable. 

Most of it is really excellent. Andrea Petrille, who  voices Rania, gives one of the best performances I've heard in any game, pretty much note-perfect throughout. The other voice actors are almost all on top of their game too, so it's jarring when you very occasionally run into one who isn't. The two gang members I talked to a couple of times and Rania's co-worker, Baz, I found less than convincing but they were the exceptions and even they only stood out in contrast to the rest of the cast. In most games their performances would have been just fine.

The story, dialog and acting would be more than enough to recommend the game on their own but the visuals are also wonderful. Nivalis is immense and overwhelming. Like every cyberpunk city ever, it owes an immense debt to Ridley Scott's vision in Blade Runner, but unlike many it takes that as a starting point and carries on from there to become something original.

There's a vertiginous complexity to the cityscape, made up as it is of skyscrapers rising above the clouds, criss-crossed by highways and transected by tunnels. Piazzas and boulevards are separated by chasms, the only access being by flying car, pater-noster or the blue-screen portals that somehow flick pedestrians from one side to the other.

It's a wild and dangerous environment, where vehicles careen at speed, appearing to follow no rules, not even which side of the stream to fly on. Drug pushers and gang members pace the walkways in direct sight of sinister Corpsec police. Preachers rant about the endtimes and confused veterans panhandle for lims. Anyone you meet could be a threat or an opportunity or most likely both.

One of the very best things about Cloudpunk is that when the game ends, it doesn't end. Again, no spoilers, but when the credits have rolled and you've beaten the game, Nivalis just carries on and you can carry on with it, if you want. 

That apartment Rania's renting is a lot nicer than she'll admit and nicer still when you help her decorate, something you can do - if you have the money. It has a balcony, even, and a fish tank, now she's paid for one. There are other things more special and meaningful, too, but I can't tell you or even show you a picture or it would spoil the surprise when you play the game, which you really should.

About the only thing I haven't mentioned is the gameplay itself. It's pretty good, too. I think it would class as great if you're more adept at flying your HOVA than I was. 

From a reddit AMA with the writer that I read after I'd finished playing last night, I gather the main thrust and thrill of the game is supposed to be the driving itself but I never got good enough at it to relax and enjoy myself. I was too concerned about crashing into oncoming traffic and more than once I managed to steer myself into tight spaces I couldn't get out of, which was stressful, especially that time I had a ticking bomb in the car with me.

I suspect the whole thing would be easier with a controller. If I get the DLC I might try it that way. Even so, and with all the ineptitude I brought to the game, I enjoyed the traveling. Which was just as well because there's a lot of it. 

Fortunately, the HOVA is easy to control, for the most part, and very forgiving of damage. There are garages everywhere and repairs aren't too expensive. Nor is fuel. I also found out that you can't destroy the car or run completely out of fuel but I didn't discover that until I'd finished the game. Might have taken the stress down a notch if I'd known.

Instead, out of caution, the longer I played, the slower I took things and the better it felt. There are quite a few modifications you can make to your vehicle but I only bought the ones that decreased the damage it took, never any that made it go faster. Go faster was the last thing I wanted it to do.

In the overall design of the game, there were only a handful of things I felt might have been done differently and even those were more an aesthetic issue than anything. For example, I did find it strange how you could quite easily make more money just wandering around the city, picking up discarded objects to sell to vendors, than you'd make in a night's work delivering packages for Cloudpunk. It made me wonder why she'd bothered getting the job in the first place.

Then again, if Rania didn't work for Cloudpunk, she wouldn't have a vehicle and she wouldn't be able to zoom around picking up salvage from here there and everywhere. There's only so much valuable litter to find on a single block. 

Then there was the parking paradox: since no-one ever seemed to do anything in Nivalis without getting paid for it, and since the authorities were militaristic goons, it seemed unlikely all the parking in the city would be free. It's not like I wanted to be made to pay for it but it felt like an oversight that I wasn't. 

These are just tiny cavils but they do occasionally remind you you're playing a game. I prefer to avoid that whenever possible. Slightly more annoying was the over-zealous reaction of the game engine at certain crucial moments, when it would decide that, since I was standing right next to an interactable object, any key-press must mean I wanted to use it. That made getting in and out of my apartment more of a mini-game than it needed to be and left me driving a different vehicle to the one I meant to choose, when I was given an upgrade.

The worst thing was when Rania ended up making a choice she hadn't intended because she was in the exact spot the game expected her to be when the time came to make it and I foolishly tried to move her somewhere else so I could think about it. The game revolves around morally challenging dilemmas but a couple of my more dubious decisions weren't actually my choices at all, just mis-clicks.

None of that detracts in any way from the overall experience, which was engrossing, involving, moving and not infrequently thrilling. I loved my time in Nivalis, which is why I was extremely happy to discover the same team that made it has spent the last four years working on a sequel, all about the city itself.

The new game, called simply "Nivalis", takes the form of an entrepreneurial sim, possibly one of my least-favorite genres, in which you start with a noodle bar and work your way up to a chain of restaurants. Not my thing at all but I'll take it as a way in to a full-on simulation of this amazing city.

There are three trailers for the game, which is in the late stages of development now and has a release date of "2025". If the trailers are remotely representative of the game itself, it's going to be absolutely stunning. I've wishlisted it and for once I might even pay full price for it as soon as it goes live.

Before that happens, though, I should probably buy the DLC, City of Ghosts. I'll get to that just as soon as I've finished up all the side quests I missed in the base game. And finished decorating Rania's apartment. And when I've explored the rest of the city...

Here, There And Everywhere

As may already be apparent, my game-playing in recent times has become fractured and fragmentary. I play something every day but what and for how long depends almost entirely on factors not wholly within my control. It's weird and annoying.

Factors affecting my "choices" include but are not limited to

• Dog-related interruptions and demands.
• Changing climactic conditions inside and outside the house.
• Work.
• Television programs to be watched at time of broadcast.
• Cloud gaming queues.
• Scheduled testing slots.
• Inertia, laziness and mithering.

For a few weeks now it's been a rare day when I've been able to sit down at the time of my choice, in the place of my choice, with the device of my choice and play the game of my choice for as long as I choose. I can't remember any point in the entirety of my gaming life, which goes back to the very early 1980s, when I had this little control. It's ironic, considering I am now semi-retired with ostensibly fewer responsibilities or commitments than at any time since I left college.

I only mention it to explain why it's so hard to find any through-line in what I post here any more. Of course, that's assuming there ever was one...

As I say, though, I am still playing games. Quite a few, in fact. The selection I'm mostly choosing from at the moment includes

• Cloudpunk
• Wuthering Waves
• Divinity: Original Sin
• Solasta: Crown of the Magister
• The First Descendant

That seems like more than enough to be flipping between but missing from that list only because I have not, as yet, gotten around to making it possible for me to play them on the laptop are

• EverQuest II
• Once Human
• Nightingale

Those three theoretically remain in my "Currently Playing" pile, a designation flawed only in that I'm not currently playing any of them.

Astute readers will notice the absence of a couple of titles I supposedly was playing

• The Outer Worlds
• Hard West

I'll refrain from listing all the games I've bought recently but not yet played at all or those I've signed up for or am thinking about. I probably need to play some games before I add any more to the heap.

On the positive side, I did finish something! Granted, it was only a demo but still. When I posted about Hard West, an anonymous reader left a comment recommending I try Mutant Year Zero. So I did. The demo, anyway.

And I liked it. The setting is interesting, the characters are appealing, the graphics are attractive and the gameplay is involving. When I finished the demo my immediate response was to go to the Steam Store to buy the full game. It was on sale at the time, although I forget what the discount was.

I didn't end up buying it, for two reasons. The most sensible was that, as I think I've made clear, I already have way too many games going unplayed to start adding more. MYZ isn't going anywhere so it makes much more sense to wait and buy it when I might actually play it.

The real reason I didn't pull the trigger right away, though, was the reviews. I read a bunch of them and they were mostly very complimentary. The game has an all-time Very Positive rating on Steam. Many of the reviews, however, make a point of saying how challenging and difficult the game gets in later stages and how important stealth becomes. 

I am not really in the market for anything "challenging" right now, if indeed I ever was, and I have never enjoyed stealth mechanics all that much, so that put me off somewhat. All of which goes to prove that, yes, reviews can make a difference to purchasing decisions.

Nevertheless, chances are high that I will pick up the game at some point, most likely in a sale. I have it on my wishlist. Thanks again to the anonymous recommender. 

As for the games I have been playing, I have a few notes:

Cloudpunk is really good. The story is really draws you in, helped enormously by the way it's told. It would work as a TV show or a movie but for once playing the game is adding to rather than detracting from the narrative experience. 

Things have opened out somewhat from the endless fetch quest architectonics of the early game and there have been some unexpected twists. Camus gets more and more delightful as does Rania's relationship with him. I'm loving the whole thing.

Divinity: Original Sin, though? Not loving that so much. All the same, I'm playing quite a lot of it, mostly because so far it's the only game I have set up to play directly on the laptop without using some sort of remote streaming. That means it's my default choice far too often just because it's less of a faff to log in. I need to do something about that.

Interestingly, when I visited Can You Run It? to see what games would run on the laptop, I checked D:OS and apparently it won't. The laptop doesn't meet the minimum specs. Weird, then, how it runs smoothly at high settings for entire sessions, with the laptop showing absolutely no sign of strain. I used to trust that site but I'll look at the results there a lot more skeptically in future. 

As for the game itself... it's a bit wordy, isn't it? I mean, I count myself as someone who's willing to undertake a good deal of reading (Or listening.) when playing video games. I generally like to give myself the full quest text/voice acting experience. But even I'm finding this one a bit much. It's all talk. If I play for an hour I'm lucky to get five minutes of combat - and I have to go looking for even that much. 

It wouldn't be so much of a problem if the writing was great. It's not. It's good, as in competent, grammatically correct, appropriate and all those professional kind of things so many games fail at but it isn't really doing much for me. The jokes aren't very funny, the characters aren't very characterful and the plot isn't very compelling. I'd rather it had less polish and more heart.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister, by comparison, is less professional in just about every possible way but also way more fun. The plot is much more linear but that means I know what I'm doing every time I log in, something that absolutely cannot be said for Divinity: Original Sin. I need to get Solasta onto the external drive asap so I can play it instead.

The First Descendant, as Tyler Edwards suggests, is a lot more fun than it has any right to be. It's the video game equivalent of one of those dumb action movies your friend drags you along to see and you think you're going to hate but you end up having a really good time even though you don't want to admit it. 

I'd be playing it more if it wasn't that the queues on GeForceNow are pretty chunky in prime time. I dropped out of the line twice yesterday evening because it was taking too long and I lost patience but then I tried again in bed and got in almost immediately. Bad omen. 

I played for an hour and spent my free token on Sharen before the event ends today just in case the option goes away. (I wanted Freyna but she wasn't in the offer.) Then I did two missions in a group to get the parts to make the Bunny costume. I had no idea what I was doing of course. I just followed one of the other players and shot stuff and we beat both missions and no-one yelled at me so op success!

There was some issue with the Bunny rewards. One I got, the other I didn't, which I suspect might be because my inventory was full (Don't say a word...) or maybe it was the wrong mission. I think there's a machine you can go to to get stuff from missions you didn't pick up so I'll have to check that next time. 

It's a fun game, anyway, if insanely over-complicated on the back end. I will be playing more.

Once Human I also want to get back to at some point. It's going to need a post of its own soon, for one thing. They're making even more peculiar changes to the Season system, which is now so ludicrously convoluted I can't imagine most players have a clue what's going on. I know I don't. 

I would have picked a new scenario but there's not much chance of me playing until I'm back on the desktop full time. I will try to make time to go through the process though, so I can at least attempt to describe it, if only so I understand it myself.

EverQuest II is another game I really want to get back to playing. It might run natively on the laptop, too. I need to get it onto the external drive to find out. 

I haven't really touched the new expansion, which just feels wrong. I saw the 2025 Roadmap and as usual it's a case of get on the bus or get left behind. I don't want to get left behind but I do wonder if my days as even a semi-regular player may be coming to an end. If I'm honest, I just like modern games better than old ones now. I enjoy the old games when I play them but when I'm thinking about playing I mostly want to play the new.

Speaking of which, I absolutely am going to get back to Wuthering Waves very soon, not least because Naithin says the new content has raised the bar on storytelling in the game and I already thought it was pretty darn good. I have to finish the Black Shores to get to Riniscita so I'd better get on with it.

And that's where I am right now in regards to gaming. I suppose this almost counts as one of those "My Gaming Plans" posts that I keep reading on other blogs but never do myself. Maybe I need to start. Winging it doesn't doesn't seem to be working quite as well as it used to.

First Impressions Box Set

I've had several days to get used to my new laptop and I'm pleased to say I'm extremely happy with it. It does everything I wanted and more than I expected. I'm still in the process of setting things up exactly as I like them but all the basics are in place and I've had the chance to test how a few things work so I thought I'd do a kind of batch First Impressions post to cover what I've seen and done so far.

If you're not really interested in hearing me go on yet again about how easily impressed I am by a four-year old piece of tech that wasn't very exciting when it was new, then I recommend skipping the first few sections of the post so you can read my first impressions on a couple of games that came out several years ago and that everyone's already played. I'm nothing if not up with the times!

The Laptop Itself

The reconditioned Lenovo T480 looks brand new and functions perfectly. (Crosses fingers and touches wood. Not that I'm superstitious, which is what all superstitious people say after doing something extremely superstitious.) 

The vaunted keyboard is very responsive; firm keys and a good, solid feel. The dedicated function keys threw me for a while but that was a quick and easy fix. 

I've written a couple of blog posts on the laptop and now I'm writing this one. The only issue so far is that it takes me a little longer. If I type at my usual speed, I keep missing the smaller space bar so I have to take it a bit more slowly. It takes even longer if I have to keep going back to fill in all the missing spaces.

I can't say I'm delighted with the placement of the touchpad and the pseudo-mouse buttons. The pad is too big so I keep resting the heel of my hand on it by accident, which causes some odd results and the buttons are too close to the space bar, which ditto. As for the red button between the G and H keys that acts as a mouse if you press it, that's a gimmick I'll never use. I have an actual mouse plugged into the usb port.

Performance is excellent, as is the screen. Obviously there's no problem with all the usual stuff - web-browsing and  watching video and so on - but the T480 also works very well as a gaming machine, thanks to streaming technology. All things considered, I'm extremely pleased with it.

Windows 11

I was curious to see how Win11 differed from Win10. I'm going to have to decide whether to make the effort to upgrade later this year, when Microsoft stops support, so it's very useful to get a hands-on with the replacement well before that happens.

So far I can't see much difference. There's absolutely no learning curve to absorb as there was between, say, Windows 7 and 8. It looks the same and most of the functions are pretty similar, as far as I can see. 

The only negative I've encountered is that you have to set default apps for every single file type individually now, instead of ticking one box for all formats. That's annoying but no big deal.

The only positive that stands out is the screenshot option, which I discovered last night by accident. For all I know, this was in Windows 10 too but if so I never noticed it. Now, pressing Prt Scr brings up a tiny toolbar that lets you take screenshots and video but also allows you to select areas of the screen to save, including freeform shapes. I foresee making considerable use of that feature in future.

Other than that, nothing really feels any different. A few things seem to have been simplified or tidied up is about all. At the moment I think I prefer it and I liked Win10 so I'm happy.

Remote Gaming

Splashtop streaming from my desktop works flawlessly, apart from the spinning PoV in Wuthering Waves I mentioned last time, a problem for which I have yet to find a solution. I played a couple more sessions of Cloudpunk that way and it felt smooth as silk, even though it was being streamed and the laptop is using WiFi. If there's any additional latency as a result it's not apparent to me.

I also tried Amazon's Luna cloud gaming service last night and that was a complete success. I have yet to try GeForce Now but I see no reason why that shouldn't also work perfectly. I envisage making more use of cloud computing now I have the laptop than I found the need for previously. I'm not saying it's the future but it's darn handy.

Native Gaming

I wasn't really planning on doing a lot of gaming directly on the laptop but I figured I'd give it a try just to see how it went. I installed one of the games I bought in the Steam Winter Sale - Divinity: Original Sin - on the new 1TB drive I got to go in the enclosure I already had. I'm going to try and keep the laptop's internal drive as tidy as possible although it's probably a lost cause.

The game played perfectly. The laptop's integrated graphics can handle it easily at high resolution but so they should - the game came out a decade ago. Still, if the machine can comfortably run ten year-old games I'm well set; there must be thousands of games, new to me, that I'd enjoy from that era or earlier.

It did get noticeably hotter running that game locally, so I'd probably prefer to play games remotely whenever possible anyway. The most worrying thing is that I can now play video games in bed. I'm not sure I want to be able to do that. It's one more temptation to resist.

Amazon Luna

This was a bit of a surprise. A pleasant one. I knew Prime members in participating regions, including the UK, got to play several games on Luna for free, with the selection changing every month. I had not realized until I logged in that you can also link your Luna account with your Good Old Games account to get access to a selection of GOG games, which you can then play via Luna as well. 

Those don't rotate every month and you can add plenty more from the GOG store. It's a decent selection - 279 titles, although that's misleading since many are DLC for a much smaller number of core games. Looking through the list, I think it might be all the games Prime has given away through GOG over the past couple of years.

I chose The Outer Worlds, which I got free with Amazon Prime a few months back. It played flawlessly with everything on what looked like the highest settings, which is how Luna defaults. I didn't change anything. I saw no lag whatsoever and the laptop remained cool and quiet throughout. I don't think the fan came on at all.

The addition of games claimed on Prime but registered on my GOG account is something of a game-changer (Golf clap...) for Luna. I was never going to subscribe to the service and the monthly choice bundled there directly with Prime hasn't held much  interest me so far but every month I claim two or three titles through GOG and this makes it considerably more likely I'll actually play some of them.

The Outer Worlds

So much for first impressions of the technology. How about the games? 

I played Outer Worlds for long enough to get to the first settlement. Maybe an hour. It's slick and amusing, which I was expecting and ludicrously violent, which I definitely was not. Enemies literally explode when you kill them, even when you're using a sword. I tried to pick up an item in the ground after I killed a Marauder and it turned out to be the poor guy's foot.

The game opens with a good cinematic before dumping you into character creation. I found it fairly easy to get an appearance I was happy with. There are enough options but not too many.

Once into the game itself, I was a little surprised to find there's no third-person option. Looking this up online, it seems the developer literally ran out of money before one could be added. Whether or not that's true, they haven't added one since so first-person it is. I can deal with that although it's never my preference.

I chose the default difficulty and at the tutorial level combat is easy enough. I went all-in on melee so my tactics consist of sneaking as close as possible then rushing in and swinging wildly. So far it's working but I don't imagine that will last.

There seem to be a lot of fiddly skill upgrades and there doesn't appear to be a way to respec so I imagine I'll gimp my build sooner rather than later but for now I'm just dumping points into melee and charm. I'll lie my way out of anything I can and when that doesn't work I'll cut their heads off.

I like the aesthetic, the dialog is mildly entertaining and slicing people into chunks is a bit of a novelty for me so I'll probably give it a few more sessions. Not sure I'll carry on with it for long though.

Divinity: Original Sin

I like this better than the sequel so far. It was very quick to get into. I picked the first two characters I was offered, tweaked them a little and just got on with it and things seemed to go fine. 

Graphically it looks a little less detailed than I remember D:OS2 but not that much. The dialog seems considerably less... Larien... than usual, which is an improvement. I am not a big fan of the studio's house style. 

I noticed quite a few of the reviews on Steam criticize it for being too light-hearted - "more Terry Pratchet than Terry Goodkind" one of them said. While I agree that Pratchett wannabes can be embarrassing to read, I never remotely rated Goodkind as a prose stylist so if I had to choose... And anyway, this is crisper than that comparison suggests.

The fights, as always, are fun. I did find it funny that in both this game and The Outer Worlds, even in the tutorials I was killing enemies by shooting barrels full of explosives they just happened to be standing next to, but that never gets old, does it? I look forward to throwing oil in all directions and setting it liberally on fire in pretty much every fight, which was my go-to tactic for most of the ninety hours I spent with D:OS2.

I expect to play this one quite a lot until I get really fed up with the repetition but maybe Larien will surprise me and come up with a plot I actually care about this time. We'll see.

Cloudpunk

Not going to say much more about this one other than I love it. It's really excellent. Subtle, intriguing, endearing, satisfying... all the good things you want from a game that's aiming to tell a story worth hearing.

The gameplay consists entirely of fetch quests. I mean that's literally all it is. You get given a location to collect a parcel, you fly your HOVA there, park as near as you can, walk to the location, pick up the package, walk back to your vehicle, get in, fly to the delivery point, get out, hand it over, go back to your car. Then you get in and do it again. And again. And again.

And it's fun. Every time. Each location, each pick-up, each delivery tells a story and they're fascinating stories. And while you're driving you get to talk with Control, who's having problems of his own and with Camus, your AI dog. Camus is going to get a post of his own here one day, I'm telling you now.

Add to that the atmospheric world-building by way of commercials and broadcasts and warnings and the whole city of Nivalis comes alive. I got to the part where you work out how to use the radio last night so I'm hoping for some music as I navigate between the skyscrapers and try to avoid smashing into flying trucks.

I think that's about it for now. Did I play anything else? 

Oh yes, I did a whole chapter of The Black Shores in Wuthering Waves yesterday and it was very good. I still have two more chapters to go before I can start on the latest update. Well, I could start on it right away - it's not locked - but there's a warning that it won't be as good if you haven't done all the parts that come before, so better not.

If only I could figure out how to stop the camera spinning, I'd go do another chapter now. Otherwise, I'm going to have to wait for the weather to get warmer.

Is This thing On?

This is going to be a fairly short post, in part because it's kind of a proof of concept. I'm writing it on my new laptop, instead of my desktop, to see how comfortable it feels. 

So far? It feels pretty good.

When I say "new laptop" I mean, of course, new to me. Have you seen the price if new laptops these days? I have and I was shocked. Shocked, I tell you! 

Refurbished ones, on the other hand... They're really cheap. I paid a little under £200 for this one to get a much higher spec than anything brand-new in a similar price range. To get a similar spec on a new machine would have cost around three times as much. Maybe more.

And this machine is probably about as low-spec as I wanted to go. I don't need a laptop that can run new, AAA games but I would at least like one that play some of the older games in my Steam library. The model I bought is meant mainly for business users, I think. It only has integrated graphics but it should be able to run quite a few of the games I want to play. It's going to be interesting, finding out which ones are playable and which aren't.

Oh, I suppose I ought to say what it is. It's a refurbished Lenovo Thinkpad T480. The model came out in 2018 and was discontinued in 2021 so it's three-to-six years old, I guess. Somewhere in there. That might not sound great but it's replacing my Dell XPS PP28l, which I bought pretty much when it first came out - in 2008.

And it still works, kinda. Dells do go on and on. I had to replace the Hard Drive a few years back and for about a year now the B,N and Space keys haven't worked, which makes typing fun, but it's fine for web-browsing and watching YouTube and Netflix, which is what I've been using it for. 

Beyond that though, it's so old and feeble it can't even reliably operate as a remote terminal for my desktop. I used to use Splashtop to play games on it but now it just cries if I try. The new one can, though. Perfectly. All part of my cunning plan. 

Because our house is old, the upstairs front room, where I have my P.C., is too cold in the winter while my other hideout, downstairs and also at the front, gets too hot in the summer. Consequently, I've been in the habit of moving up and down with the seasons. 

This year it hasn't really gotten cold enough to force me to shift my PC and associated clutter downstairs but January is predicted to be bitter so I either have to deal with higher heating bills to keep myself warm upstairs or make the effort and move down, even though by now it will only be for about three months. I really don't want the hassle, which is why I've been putting it off.

I was thinking about replacing the ancient Dell anyway, for obvious reasons, and it occurred to me that if I had a laptop that was good enough to write blog posts on and also play some less-taxing games, I ought to be able to "work" and play in any room of the house, all year round.  I could even sit out in the garden in the summer, now I also bought a more powerful router last year. 

If I felt like it I could probably play newer titles, like Wuthering Waves or Once Human, on the laptop using Splashtop, like I used to before the Dell rolled over and begged for mercy. GeForce Now and Luna are possibilities, too.

I spent a good while pondering on which laptop to get. I didn't have a specific budget but I didn't want to spend more than I needed. In the end it was more a matter of deciding what I didn't want than the other way round. 

I didn't want any kind of Chromebook for a start. I didn't want anything running on a processor too weedy to do much more than my Dell, either. I did a lot of research on that and it's amazing how feeble some of the CPUs in brand-new laptops. I guess if you just watch stuff, look stuff up and do your admin, you wouldn't really notice. Some people seem to prefer it that way. If you read the reviews on Amazon, you'll see people almost boasting about how the new machine they just bought can't play any games at all as if somehow that makes them better people.

I also quite liked the idea of being able to open the thing up and swap some components if I wanted, or needed to, later on. Even repair it, within my limited capacity. Not that there's much I can do but I can at least change a battery or swap out a disk drive. Not an option with most of the machines I looked at.

Finally, given the imminent demise of Windows 10, I wanted something Microsoft wouldn't be able to wash their hands of in a few months. Neither my desktop nor Mrs Bhagpuss's meet the criteria for Win11 upgrades (Although they would if I put better CPUs in them, which I might when the time comes.) so in that sense, if in no other, the new laptop would actually be the most up-to-date computer in the house. Always excluding Mrs Bhagpuss's new iPhone 15, I guess...

The T480 I chose came with Windows 11 Pro installed. It has 16GB Ram and an i5 CPU. 8th Gen, whatever that's worth. It also has what's reckoned to be a very good keyboard and after writing this I can confirm it's well above what I'm used to on a laptop, although it's still going to take some getting used to after my mechanical one. Definitely good enough to blog with, anyway, which is the important thing.

Apart from the lack of a dedicated graphics chip, pretty much unavoidable unless I wanted to pay a fortune, the only real thing I don't like is the size of the SSD, which is only 256GB. That seems to be standard for laptops in this price range and some way  above, though. Easy enough to upgrade if I feel it's necessary.

In fact, I've already ordered a 1TB SSD as an add-on but I'm in two minds whether to use it to replace the current one or to put it in an enclosure and use it as an external drive instead. I actually think that might be better for my purposes, given my seeming inability to resist downloading every damn game I see. It'd be nice to keep the drive with the operating system on nice and clean for once.

So much for hardware. Software is another issue altogether. One thing I never remember is just how long it takes to get a new PC set up in the particular way I like it. The Lenovo worked perfectly straight out of the box or at least it did once I'd jumped through Microsoft's hoops, but then came the hours of installing all my favorite apps and changing  endless Windows defaults to eliminate as much of Microsoft's malign influence as possible.

To be fair to MS, it's not so much that there's anything wrong with Edge or Media Player and the rest per se. It's just that other options are so much better. I guess one day I'll have to give up using Firefox, since already there are well-known websites that refuse to recognize it, but until that dark day comes I will keep the faith.

That said, it's ironic that the single biggest problem I've had so far, getting Splashtop running on the laptop, turned out to be precisely because I was using Firefox. Or, more specifically, because the first add-on I always install is No Script. It's an essential protection in my estimation but you do have to remember to whitelist stuff sometimes, or at least toggle it off when you need to. That's how I came to waste those two hours this morning - I forgot I had it installed.

Splashtop is working now and I've tested it with Wuthering Waves and Cloudpunk. Both run perfectly through the remote connection to my PC upstairs with no lag or delay that I can tell. 

Unfortunately, while Wuthering Waves is perfectly playable when my character is stationary or I move her using the keyboard, something is making the point of view spin wildly whenever I use mouselook, which is unfortunate because that's how I move all the time. I'm looking into that but I won't be exploring the new continent on the laptop until I figure out a fix.

Cloudpunk has no such problems. In fact, if anything, I find driving the HOVA a little easier on the laptop, for some reason. Maybe it's the smaller screen or because I have it closer to me. Or maybe I'm just getting the feel of it. 

I played for over an hour this afternoon and had an excellent time. It's a very good game and my suspicions of a deeper, darker narrative beneath the surface are already proving to be well-founded. More on that another day, I'm sure.

Quite possibly more on the new laptop, too. It's going to be a while before I get to grips with all its idiosyncrasies. For example, I couldn't figure out how to take screenshots in Cloudpunk because the default Steam screenshot key, F12, didn't seem to be doing anything. Turns out Lenovo assigns specific functions to the F keys and you have to turn the feature off if you want to use them as God intended. 

All things considered, though, I'm very happy with my new toy. Fingers crossed it carries on behaving itself. It has a year's warranty but I could still do without any problems cropping up that need more of a fix than looking something upon Google or watching a YouTube video.

They All Rolled Over And Two Fell Out : The Steam Winter Sale

Happy New Year everyone! 

And with that out of the way, rest assured this is safe place! There will be no resolutions, predictions, reviews or any other acknowledgment of the change of date. There may be some looking ahead or looking back but nothing that mightn't just as easily crop up in a post here at any time of year.

For example, I'm about to recount my time with this year's Steam Winter Sale, which is only seasonal in the loosest sense of the word. It's still going, by the way, in case you haven't committed. You still have until 10AM Pacific tomorrow to make your mind up. Unless you're reading this after then, of course, in which case I guess you'll have to wait for the next one.

This year, I bought some games in the sale, which might well be the first time ever. It wasn't as as many as it could have been but it was still quite a few for me. 

I took my time over it, too. I had a good look at what was on offer when the sale began and picked out half a dozen likely prospects. For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me now but presumably related to me planning some kind of blog post about it, I took a screenshot of my Basket so I can confirm the six games I picked. I'm pretty sure I'd have forgotten the ones I didn't buy already, otherwise.

I can remember how I made my choices though. My thinking went like this:

Divinity Original Sin: played D:OS2 a few years ago and enjoyed it, until it annoyed me and I stopped. Never finished it but I clocked up over ninety hours, making it my sixth most-played game on Steam. It seems a fair bet that I'd get some value out of the original, although you do have to assume the sequel improved on it, so it could feel disappointing in comparison. The deciding factor here, though, was the price. At 90% off it seems positively rude to refuse.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister - Lost Valley: This is DLC for the main game, which I played last year and mostly enjoyed until the very end, when I couldn't beat the final boss. That was fine because I realised I didn't need to anyway, since when you do the game just stops so why even bother? This DLC adds a complete campaign, starting at Level 1 using fresh characters, so it's basically a new game on top of the old one. Reviews are decent and although the discount isn't huge, it was cheap to begin with so why not?

Cloudpunk: Had this on my Wishlist for a while. Not sure when I added it or how I came to hear of it but it very much looks like my sort of thing. It's a cross between NeoCab, which I loved but which apparently took me less than five hours to finish. (Seemed like a lot more but in a good way...) and Cyberpunk 2099, which I really would like to try but is a) still too pricy for me even at 50% off and b) might not run well on my aging PC. 65% is a very attractive discount and again this one wasn't very expensive even at full price.

Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain, Hello Goodboy, Cats and the Other Lives: I added all three of these to my Wishlist after I played their demos at various Next Fests. They've all been on sale before and I haven't succumbed so either the discounts back then weren't great or I don't want to play them as much as all that. 80% on Cats... is very appealing and 65% on Goodboy is pretty sweet. 40% on Penny isn't all that tempting but conversely it's definitely the demo, of the three, that I enjoyed the most.

I am quite good at not rushing to judgment on this sort of thing and the sale does run for a while so I left the six in my basket until after Christmas, then sat down and had another look. In the second round, only Penny Larceny failed to make the cut. I do want to play it but I'm pretty sure I can do better than 40% off - although now I check, that's the best offer there's ever been for the game on Steam so maybe I can't.

I still didn't press the Buy button. I gave it another couple of days for the final thrill of the hunt to dissipate, then I went back a third time. I was about to buy all five when it occured to me that there was one game in the list that I didn't really remember much about: Hello Goodboy. All I could recall was the obvious fact that it had a dog in it. 

That lack of recognition seemed concerning. I could remember quite a lot about both Cats and the Other lives and Penny Larceny so not knowing anything about Hello Goodboy other than what I could deduce from the title and the thumbnail seemed odd. 

So I did a little digging, by which I mean I read some of the Steam Reviews. The common theme among them seemed to be how very short the game was. That made me wonder just how much more entertainment I was likely to get out of the full game than I'd already gotten from the demo. Added to that, it's one of those games where extended gameplay comes from replaying the whole thing several times to see all the different endings, something I almost never do. I pretty much always accept whatever ending I get and move on.

With that new information, I not only took Hello Goodboy out of my basket, I culled it from my Wishlist, too. I should probably go back and do that to a few more games I added after playing Next Fest demos. As I've said a few times, for me there are often quite substantial diminishing returns from full games after I've played the demo. I can be something of a tapas gamer at times.

That left me with the four titles shown above, which I duly purchased, although not without a modicum of confusion as to what I'd actually bought. Somewhat confusingly Solasta: Lost Valley appears on the invoice but doesn't merit it's own spot in my Library, being subsumed as DLC into its parental Solasta tab and I seem to have been gifted not only the listed D:OS - Enhanced Edition but also D:OS Classic as well, which does apear in its own right in the Library. What the difference beteen them might be or why anyone would want both I have no idea and most likely I'll never find out because I'm sure I won't be playing both.

The whole enterprise cost me less than £20, well under my budget, so I may yet add another game or two before the sale ends. On the other hand, there's the small issue of finding the time to play whatever I buy, so maybe not.

On that, I have already made a start, at least. I put an hour and a half into Cloudpunk over the last two evenings. I'm loving it so far but I find it takes too much concentration to stick with for much more than an hour at a stretch. I can see why some reviewers describe it as a chill experience - certainly I haven't had to fight anything yet - but they must be considerably better at flying a hovercar than I am.

More on that one, no doubt, when I get further into the story. So far it seems charmingly episodic but I suspect there's a more robust narrative lurking beneath the surface. Cyberpunk tales are rarely heartwarming, after all.