Second First Impressions - Palworld 1.0

Palworld. It's a game I played. To be strictly accurate, it's a game I played for just over forty hours, back in 2024, when it was the new hotness. Seriously, it felt like everyone was playing it. The title of my first post about the game was "If All Your Friends Jumped Off A Bridge..", in which I mentioned sales had already hit five million. 

By my next post the following day that had jumped to six million. By the fourth post a couple of days after that it was eight million. After that I stopped mentioning it but a quick google tells me sales climbed to more than 25 million during Early Access, with the total number of players estimated at 40 million, the discrepancy presumably coming down to Palworld being available on other platforms as well as Steam.

I liked Palworld well enough until I got tired of it, which didn't take as long as all that. Forty hours is a decent wodge of game time but other survival titles have hooked me much harder and for much longer: Valheim 358 hours, Nightingale 166 hours, Dawnlands 105 hours...

All survival games are samey. Formulaic is perhaps a better word. Palworld, despite having a new twist on the formula in the Pals themselves, still managed to feel samier than most to me. The Pals were wacky, sure, but wackiness only takes you so far. I can hardly believe it's me saying this, given my incredibly high tweeness resistance but after a while even I kind of wanted there to be something a little more substantial beneath the primary colors and kindergarten shapes.

It's also a bit rich of me to say so, given some of the negative things I've written about the inclusion of portentous, over-complicated narratives in MMORPGs, but I do like a bit of a plot, if only to tell me which direction to go. Back when I was giving my First Impressions, I said I'd been led to believe the game did have a story of some kind but in all the time I played, I never found out what it was.

One thing that often holds me in survival games is the building but I complained that the mechanics in Palworld were a bit fiddly and I very definitely got fed up with the management-sim aspect of the whole affair. It's all very well having Pals do your work for you but it got to be so it felt as if I was spending more time looking after their needs, to keep them happy and productive, than it would have taken me to do their jobs myself.

With a couple of years now, between me and the last time I played, my memory is of a game that started out fun before becoming first a little tedious, then quite annoying and finally something of a chore. Looking back at the posts I wrote at the time, though, it seems like I was having a better time than I remember. 

I published my penultimate, full length post on Palworld on Valentine's Day 2024, less than a month after the first. At that point I'd played for 35 hours so I only had about another six or seven to go, not that I knew it at the time. I was still very positive about the game but already I had my eye on a replacement: 

"How long all this can go on is less than certain. The world is curated not procedurally generated. Given time, I'll have cleared all the fog from the map, captured all the Pals, learned all the recipes... or I will if I stick around long enough. That's unlikely. I'll be surprised if Nightingale doesn't nudge Palworld into the background and after Nightingale there's going to be another game and another..."

My played hours suggest Nightingale did a lot better at holding my attention. I even finished it, after a fashion. But Nightingale was a commercial failure. It's still there and it's still theoretically getting updates but it's been downgraded to a single-player, offline title and it's in effective maintenance mode. 

Or maybe that should be upgraded. An awful lot of games that require you to have an internet connection to play would work just as well or even better for many people without one. Palworld, for example.

But Palworld doesn't need to retro-fit an offline mode. Palworld is a success. A big success. 

After two years in Early Access, this month developers Pocketpair made things regular with a 1.0 launch and as Wilhelm reports, players came flooding back. Well, some of them. I'm absolutely certain most developers would kill for 800,000 players all playing their game on Steam at the same time, two years after a soft launch, but it's a long way short of the twenty-five million copies they sold or even the two million concurrent all-time Steam high.

And of course, as I'm sure you've guessed, one of those 800,000 players last night was me. I'd been thinking about it since I heard the game was leaving Early Access, particularly given the developers were recommending everyone start over from scratch because of how much things were going to change with the 1.0 build.

The new player experience had supposedly been extensively re-vamped and there was even talk of a proper storyline. That sounded worth looking into, if only to get a post or two out of it. I could use something to write about during Blaugust other than Neverness To Everness and AI.

What finally swayed me was knowing I could play Palworld on GeForce Now. I'm really enjoying the stability and ease of access of the service. It feels a bit like when I finally succumbed to Steam - playing games locally feels a bit clunky and awkward now, just like starting games from their own launchers began to feel slightly old-fashioned once I got used to having everything in a nice, tidy Library.

Yesterday evening, having nothing much else planned, I logged into GFN and opened Palworld on Steam. Just writing that makes the kerfuffle about physical copies over at Playstation Towers look a bit provoncial, doesn't it?

Just under an hour later I logged out. I'd started a new character and a new world as instructed and I'd played through the tutorial until I got as far as the first settlement. My new character was Level 5. She had a dog, three sheep and a penguin. And everything seemed just the same as I remembered it.

Okay, not exactly the same. New things I noticed included

• Fast Travel Towers
• Quest NPCs

Er... that's it.

Just to be sure I wasn't imagining the similarities, I went back and read through my first First Impressions posts. What I described myself doing then was pretty much what I was doing now.

Character creation didn't seem to have changed although I at least managed to avoid making a sour-faced misery-guts like last time. She started in the same place, though, and I had to stop myself putting down the crude workbench and palbox in exactly the same spot, since it was clearly the best and most obvious place to build.

That led to me picking a really dumb spot instead, just to be different. I'm going to have to change it if I plan on playing any more, something that's still in the balance. Other than having a base in the middle of a bunch of trees, next to a ten-foot drop, where I can't easily place anything, it all felt very familiar.

Supposedly some things have been made easier but I kind of messed up my own experiment there by choosing the easiest, casual setting when I made the world. Last time I played on "Normal" but with the repetitive tedium of the game still large in my mind and this only being a quick dip to test the waters, I thought I'd try and make things as painless as possible.

Consequently, I can't now tell if it's easier or not. It feels exactly like I remember it, even with the difficulty at rock-bottom. It was easy then and it's easy now. I don't remember it getting difficult until quite a bit later. I guess it can't be, though. Unless it's all so simple at the start the settings don't do anything. Wouldn't be the first time.

Also supposed to have been tweaked are the progression trees or the recipes or... something. It's meant to be smoother and faster to progress at low levels, anyway. Once again, I don't remember having much of a problem with any of that to begin with. In my posts from '24, I certainly seem happy enough with the way progression worked then.

The first thing I noticed that definitely seemed to be new were the magitech pillars with eagles on the top that you can use to teleport around the world. You still have to be at one to use the system, though. It's not instant travel via map as it is in most games nowadays. 

I recall traveling being very slow and annoying back when I last played, especially when I needed to get back to places I'd been before, especially when I was jogging back to pick up all the stuff I'd dropped when I died. (I have that switched off now.)  Any fast travel, even a limited version, is an improvement on that.

The second new thing was a pair of NPCs, squatting by an archway by the path at the end of the first stretch of grass. I have a vague memory of someone being there before but I don't think it was these guys. And I'm sure I didn't get a quest to deliver a pie to the settlement. What is this? Misty Thicket? The Shire? 

Someone - I think it was one of those two - also told me about the World Tree, the huge tree you can see in the distance from pretty much everywhere. This, by the way, seems to be a trope of survival games. Valheim has one, Nightingale has one... 

And part of the trope is that you can never get there. Not in Early Access, anyway. I seem to recall reading that in both Valheim and Palworld the way will be opened when the game officially launches. Too late for Nightingale, sadly.

There's also a huge transparent dome out to sea that I don't remember from last time but that might just be me. It certainly looks more like somewhere you might want to visit than a big-ass tree, though. Unless you're an elf, of course. Or a woodpecker.

Anyway, I didn't head off to either the tree or the dome. I went to the settlement to deliver the pie. Also to get the hell away from the awful spot I'd picked to live in. 

And I got killed going there. Of course I did.

Not by a mob (Or should I say a Pal?) I saw some wolves but I steered well clear of them. It was avoiding the buggers that got me killed. 

I went down a cliff into a river to get past them and from there I had to swim. I couldn't get out of the river. The sides were too steep. That was fine. Since it went right into the settlement I didn't want to get out. Not until I ran out of stamina and drowned about ten yards short of the gate, that is. Even on the easiest settings the game can still punish you for poor decisions.

I revived back at the very start because reviving in the settlement wasn't an option. Then I ported back to my pathetic base and logged out. Will I log back in again? 

Well, yes. I already have. I didn't take a single screenshot last night so I had to go in just now to take some for this post. (There's a nifty photo mode now. That might also be new?)

As far as taking another real run at Palworld goes, I can't say I'm keen. Everything about the game feels far too much like it did when I gave up on it two years ago. 

And the Pals are really quite annoying, aren't they? If they're supposed to be cute or endearing I'm not exactly feeling it, which is the opposite of what I felt when I first saw them a couple of years ago. Their charm wears out fast. 

I might give it another session or two to see if things feel any better further in but my second first impression is that even if Palworld has changed, I don't think it's changed enough for me.  

For Every Dawn, There's A Sunset

 

Here we are on Thursday with the sun shining brightly outside and the buds beginning to pop on the trees. What better time to say goodbye to an old favorite?

Well, an old favorite of mine, anyway. Not, I imagine, of anyone else. 

Who remembers Dawnlands? Hands up... 

No-one? Okay, then.

There are fifteen posts tagged "Dawnlands" here and most of them are all about my time with the game, which ranks sixth in my Steam library by hours played at 105. The last time I wrote about that was on April 29, 2024, when I made a brief visit in the wake of the close-down of another of my favorite games of recent years, Noah's Heart.  

Back then, as I wrote, "I decided to spend some time in a game that's still around - although, if I was going to bet on it, not for much longer." I was right about that, although in the event Dawnlands hung on a while longer than I expected. It's still up as I write this but the servers are due to go down for good on 27 March.

Not that you'd know unless you were paying very close attention indeed. I only found out because I happened to see a passing comment about the closure when I was looking for something entirely different. I didn't get an email or see a news item about it on Steam. There's been no word at all from Seasun Games on the platform since December 2023. I had to go to the official website and hunt around until finally I found this closure notice under the News tab.

There's no mention of the shut-down on the Steam Store page, where you can still download the game. Since it's free to play that's not such a problem as it might be but even so, you'd think they might want to warn potential new players of the extremely short time they'll have to enjoy that new game they just downloaded.

Except, of course, there aren't likely to be any new players. That's why the game is closing down. Lack of interest.

It's not that no-one's playing. Dawnlands isn't a dead game, or at least not for a couple of weeks or so yet. Steam records a fairly consistent population over the last year of between fifty and a hundred players, mostly hovering around eighty. There are plenty of games with a lot fewer people playing than that.

 

Still, it's obviously not a viable population for a commercial product, especially one that relies on micro-transactions to keep it going. Then again, Steam isn't the only way to play. Dawnlands is available on mobile devices via both Android and iOS and there's a stand-alone installer for Windows you can download directly from the publisher.

All of those platforms together must not add up to enough income to keep the servers running, or so I have to assume. It's always possible the company has just lost interest in maintaining it but I imagine if it wasn't costing them money they'd have just let it run silent as they have for the last two years.

All of which raises the question of why Dawnlands ever needed to be a live service game in the first place. As Tyler F. M. Edwards asked in his MassivelyOP piece on the about-to-launch horse mystery MMO Equinox Homecoming, "Why is this a multiplayer live service game?"

Dawnlands doesn't even have the excuse that it's trying to be an MMO. You can play up to four-person co-op or solo. There's absolutely no need for it to be a live service game at all, other than to support the business model. It's cartoon Valheim and Valheim has an offline mode. So could Dawnlands - if it was buy-to-play.

Here's the thing. All of these solo and co-op open-world survival-and-craft games, of which there must by now be hundreds, if not thousands, would work perfectly well, not to say better, as buy-to-play titles. It's perfectly possible to be successful using that model as we've seen with Enshrouded, which fully supports offline play.

It's also possible to retro-fit an offline version onto the business model if the live service route fails, as happened with Nightingale. The conversion was a bit clunky, sure, but it works. But Nightingale was also buy-to-play.

With a free-to-play model, though, there's very little incentive for a developer to offer any kind of local solution. Why would they? You get what you paid for and you paid for nothing which is exactly what you're left with when the servers go down. Seems fair.

All of which is a bit notional, if I'm honest. It makes little difference to me whether the games I play persist or don't any more. I rarely go back and never for long.

Still. the collector in me would love to have a copy of the game stored safely away and the nostalgist would like to be sure he could drop back in whenever he felt like taking another look around the old place. It's better to have and don't need than to need and don't have, as Don Covay used to say, even if by "need" you mean indulge the occasional whim.

 

Realistically, I would never have played the game in any meaningful fashion again even if the servers stayed up until doomsday. I last logged into Dawnlands on 27 September 2025, when all I did was wander about aimlessly for a few minutes, soaking up the ambience, before logging out and forgetting all about it. If the game wasn't about to close down, I certainly wouldn't be here writing about it now.

The same applies to any number of titles. Looking at my Steam library, it's unlikely I'll ever again spend a serious amount of time with any of the dozen most-played games I see there. I do, occasionally, log in to a few - Valheim, Nightingale, Once Human, Bless Unleashed, Rift, New World... but the only ones I might ever spend any significant time with again are the MMORPGs and then only if something new happens there.

MMORPGs do need to be both online and Live Service. They rely on lots of players sharing the same space and they stagnate without a continuing stream of new content. When either or, worse, both of those stop, there probably isn't much of an alternative to closing the whole thing down, at least as far as the official, money-making operation goes. They may live on in an emulated afterlife but in most cases only as museum pieces. 

For MMORPGs there's also no real prospect of any kind of offline port. It would be nice for nostalgia but without a population much of the content would be meaningless.

For most other genres, though, and particularly for single-player or co-op titles, there seems to be no good reason, other than money, why they ever needed an online connection or had to be played on someone else's hardware in the first place. I don't generally have a lot of sympathy with the Stop Killing Games initiative but the evidence against both the Live Service and the Online Connection Required models does seem to be piling up now. It's being applied indiscriminately and it doesn't suit many games at all.

I'm a long-time advocate of the better free-to-play payment models but I'd have to acknowledge that what you gain on the ease of access roundabout you often lose on the long-term stability swings. The F2P revolution has meant I've been able to play far more games than I otherwise would but also that many of them are no longer available to me now.

 

Which begs the question would I have wanted them to be? Would I even ever have played most of them at all? 

For example, had Dawnlands been a buy-to-play title retailing at $30, would I have bought it? Almost certainly not. There are dozens of better games at lower prices on my wishlist and I'm not ponying up for those.

There must be scores of games where I spent many entertaining sessions that I would never have played at all, had I had to pay at the door. It renders the question of how much longer those games would have lasted had they charged an entry fee entirely moot, at least for me.

On balance, I think I prefer to have more new games available at zero cost, even in the knowledge they may only hang around for a year or two. Why pay just for the security of knowing I could play them forever when I know I'd only play for a while and then never think of them again?

More to the point, how many would I buy anyway? Even the really good ones stay on the shelf. I still haven't bought Enshrouded, for example, even though I played and enjoyed the demo and keep reading about what a good game it is and how it's getting better all the time.

I guess the flip to that coin is that I can buy Enshrouded any time I feel flush. And having bought it, I can play it for as long as it interests me. It feels like a very theoretical advantage all the same. That's exactly what happened with Nightingale and am I ever going to play that again? I doubt it.

I don't have a good answer to this one. It seems like there are strong arguments on both sides. I guess the ideal would be for the games to be both free-to-play and offline but that's a pipe dream. No-one's making any money with that.

As for Dawnlands, I'll remember it fondly. I had some good times there. Like some holiday I took years ago, though, if I want to relive the experience I have my screenshots and the posts I wrote about it. I'm happy for it to remain a pleasant memory and I'm glad I had the chance to enjoy it while it lasted.

If anyone else had it in mind to get around to playing some day - tough. You missed your chance. 

We're On A Road Trip To Nowhere

Given my current circumstances, I've had to abandon my usual plan to play and review half a dozen demos from the current Next Fest. Instead, I'm limiting myself to a more achievable two or three. I already had a couple of definites in mind, one of which was Outbound.

The game's Steam Store page describes it as "a cozy open-world exploration game set in a utopian near future". I spent a few minutes yesterday, skimming the list of demos on offer and the first thing I noticed was just how many games like this there are now. I started at the top of the "Browse All Titles" list and worked my way down and eight of the top ten were some kind of survival sim. 

Of course, that's a list tailored to what Steam believes is likely to interest me. If I look at the options without being logged in, I get a much broader selection of genres. Even so, I notice I'm getting no point-and-click demos and very few tactical rpgs, both of which I play more than survival games. That's because there are far fewer of them, I'm betting.

In a crowded marketplace, most of the survival games make some vague attempt at grabbing attention with a trope or quirk that supposedly makes them special. Scanning down the list again I see, in order from the top, pirates, creature-collecting, medievalism, Old West, space, ranching and, after an unscheduled interruption from something that's not a survival game at all, Outbound, whose USP is that you drive a camper van.

I've often fantasized about buying a camper van and heading off into the unknown, just driving around, stopping anywhere that seemed interesting and staying as long as it stayed that way. That was what attracted me to outbound the first time I heard about it.

I have to say my fantasies of a life on the open road have never included making tools, on a workbench in the back of the camper, out of scrap metal and bits of wood picked up from the side of the road so I can repair broken barriers, clear fallen trees or rebuild collapsed bridges. Nor did I imagine I'd be living on berries scrounged up from the undergrowth or fueling my van with fallen tree branches I'd have to feed into some weird device in the engine compartment.

For that matter, I hadn't envisaged the van itself turning into some kind of Wacky Races house on wheels. One of the goals of the game appears to be to turn your compact camper into a traveling farmhouse-cum-luxury-apartment. Like this:

Who would live in a house like this? Professor Pat Pending, perhaps?

That monstrosity isn't my van. I doubt you can build anything like it in the demo. It is the ambition you're expected to have for your vehicle, though. I took the picture from the Steam Store page, where it's presumably supposed to trigger desire rather than, as it does in me, disbelief. 

After 78 minutes, my camper was much more modest. I hadn't built anything outside the van at all, just a couple of utilities inside, neither of them anything I would have envisaged needing on a road trip. Would you expect to build a trash compactor and a sawmill inside your camper van?

It's obvious Outbound has no interest in simulating an actual road trip, at least not in the demo, and since the demo is basically the first of the four biomes scheduled for launch, I guess the same will apply to the finished game. There's nothing particularly unusual about a lack of realism in a survival/crafting game but what did surprise me a little was the complete absence of any kind of plot or narrative.

I think all the games in this genre I've played have had some kind of story. It's not always very deep or convincing but there's at least a nominal reason for you to be pushing forwards, beyond a simple drive for self-improvement and desire to see what's over the next hill. In Outbound, as far as I can see, that's all there is.

Well, perhaps not exactly all. There may not be a narrative but that doesn't mean there's no structure. There are lots of short and medium term goals, called Objectives and Side Tasks, respectively. Objectives are things like "Build a Recycler on a Counter". Side Tasks are cumulative actions, such as "Light four campfires". 

The game constantly prompts you to make the next tool or utility and you really have no choice when you find an obstruction blocking the road. That happened to me three times in the first hour I played, meaning I had to make myself a wrench, an axe and ten planks before I could carry on driving.

As well as tasking you with removing obstacles, the game also asks you to visit specific locations, not all of which are close at hand. In other games, this would be part of a storyline but in Outbound there's no ostensible reason to go to any of them other than that the game is telling you that's what you need to do. Chances are you'd have gone there anyway, out of curiosity, though, so it doesn't feel as directive as it might.

When you get to the location, you may find something of practical interest. The Firewatch Tower had a blueprint terminal, for example. Blueprints are needed to make new tools and utilities and, well, anything, really. To download each blueprint you need a token. You get tokens by picking up litter and feeding it into your trash compactor. I guess they did say it was the near future.

There are Download Towers along the road and as far as I can tell, each tower offers specific items. I needed to make planks, for which I needed a Sawmill, but I couldn't find the blueprint until I went a long way up a side road to a tower I wouldn't have otherwise have passed. 

The rooftop patio of the surprisingly well-appointed Firewatch Tower, where I found two of three items I needed.

I'm not sure if the placement of blueprints is randomized or not. When I couldn't find the one I needed, I watched a YouTube video of someone else lookingg for one and they found theirs in the Firewatch Tower. When I was there, all I got was a blueprint for a food mixer. Of course, the game is still in development so maybe they just changed the locations.

The terminals in the regular towers are immediately accessible but the one in the Firewatch Tower required me to find three items first before I could switch it on. That was about the only puzzle I came across, if you can call a scavenger hunt a puzzle. Maybe there's more of that sort of "content" later but so far it's been the exception.

And that's OK. The game bills itself as "cozy" and describes the setting as "utopian". Threat of any kind doesn't enter into it and I very much doubt challenge does, either. You're on an extended vacation in some beautiful scenery, living off the land, which is exceptionally hospitable, providing everything you need. 

If that's not enough to keep you entertained, you probably need to look for another survival/crafting/exploration game. The good news there is you won't have to look far!

I really enjoyed the Outbound demo. Not that I've finished it. The map looks huge. It feels like I've hardly started to explore it. 

And exploring it is a pleasure. The landscape is very pretty, with a simple, attractive aesthetic that employs a lot of flat surfaces and plenty of saturated color. Sunrise and sunset are particularly delightful and night is a gorgeous, rich, velvety blue-black that feels oddly safe.

But then, the whole game feels safe. Not only are there no enemies, in nearly eighty minutes I didn't see another human being at all. Not one NPC. Very little wildlife, either. I think I saw a rabbit, once.

Perhaps more surprisingly, there are no other vehicles. I had the road to myself.

Just as well. I was driving in the middle of it half the time. Controlling the van isn't difficult but it's not particularly smooth or intuitive. There may have been some lurching. I might have hit a few rocks. 

Fortunately, there doesn't seem to be any way to damage the camper. Or to hurt yourself. If this is a survival game at all it's very much survival-lite. 

In true survival-sim style, though, there are a couple of meters that have to be kept topped-up. One for you and one for the van. Your meter measures how hungry you are and so, I suppose does the van's. It tells you when you're running out of fuel. What happens if either hits zero I can't say because I didn't let it happen but I doubt it's anything very bad.

The absence of anyone at all to communicate with does give the demo a somewhat lonesome feel. The game is co-op four up to four people, though, and in the full version of the game you get a dog to accompany you on your travels, so the final version ought to be a lot more social. (There's an apology at the start of the demo for the dog not being available yet.)

Leave the door open all night if you want. It's not like anyone's going to steal anything.

I really enjoyed Outbound. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting but I liked what I got. I didn't run into any bugs or glitches although my overall impression was that there might need to be some optimization before launch. The controls and movement felt a little off at times although not in a way I could really put my finger on.

I have some minor concerns about the complete absence of any kind of narrative structure, too. Not that the game necessarily needs one if it's supposed to be a building/crafting/survival sim. No, it's the use of the term "road trip" to describe the gameplay that worries me. I can't imagine how you can have a road trip without a goal or a destination or a purpose. Road trips always tell a story.

Without a story, it's not a trip, just an existence. And that's probably how the game should be framed; as a life-sim. You're not really going anywhere, just driving aimlessly around some beautiful countryside, enjoying your freedom. Honestly, who needs anything more?

I already had Outbound wishlisted. There's a decent chance I might even buy it, one day. If I do I'll definitely wait until I can have a dog to share my adventures.

Nuts To This!

A couple of days ago, I mentioned I was downloading the demo for an open-world survival game called Squirreled Away. I said I might write a post about it, after I'd played it. Well, now I have and now I am.

Not that I have an awful lot to say about the demo or the game. It's pretty much what I expected from a light-hearted survival title, where you play as a squirrel. All the usual survival mechanics are in place and they feel there or thereabouts as compulsive as they always do. 

The reverse is also true. I very much doubt, if you've found it easy to resist the attractions of the genre until now, this is going to be the game that changes your mind. I wouldn't say the demo feels by the numbers but equally it's not out to shake up anyone's expectations. It's a good introduction to a game that looks like it was primarily designed to give the punters what they want.

I certainly enjoyed my seventy-six minutes, split across two sessions. If I was looking for a new survival game I might well have followed through and bought it, not least because it looks to be good value. The full game is only $14.99 (£12.99 for me.), which sounds like a very fair price. As it is, I'm not in the market for a new survival game just now and if I was I'd be more likely go for Dragonwilds even at twice the price but as a demo, this one does the job.

And the demo, which obviously is free, makes for a fun little diversion in its own right. If you wanted to get into the building elements, you might squeeze a few hours out of it. 

Mostly, though, it's the tutorial island, where you learn the basics by way of half a dozen quests, given to you by your fellow squirrels, all of whom have weirdly human names. They also all have problems only you, a complete stranger, can solve. Isn't that always the way?

The best thing about the game from my perspective was the movement, which felt fluid, intuitive and entertaining in and of itself. Your squirrel (Now I come to think about it, I'm not sure he/she/they even has a name...) bounds around in convincingly squirrely fashion, running up trees as though gravity doesn't exist. 

Actually, gravity barely does exist. There's no falling damage and you can't fall off a tree unless you press Ctrl first.

You can also swim, although it requires endurance that runs out very quickly, preventing you from swimming across the lake from the all-animal island to the enticing shoreline opposite, where the humans live. You can't even swim to the next island but fortunately there's a friendly turtle with nothing better to do than ferry curious squirrels from one island to the other and back again.

At least, he's willing once you've proved your community credentials by helping all those aforementioned squirrels with their fallen-down houses and such. "No freeloaders", that's Terry the Turtle's motto. (It's not, by the way.I just made it up. He's much friendlier than that.)

One of the squirrels, Maya, teaches you how to meditate. It would have to be Maya, wouldn't it? Not Claire, Mike or Sam. Meditation is how you learn crafting recipes, which might seem odd but you can't really argue with it. How do you imagine a squirrel would learn to make an axe out of a stick, a pebble and some resin they found up a tree? Meditation seems like as good an explanation as any.

My first session, I played for fifty minutes, doing exactly what you'd expect. I scampered around, picking up sticks and pebbles. I climbed trees to get resin. I collected strawberries and nuts to snack on because Squirreled Away is a survival game and you do have to eat. Although not, as far as I can see, drink or sleep, at least not in the demo.

When I had enough, I made my axe and my pickax and ran around chopping up bigger twigs for more sticks and breaking up bigger rocks for more pebbles. I learned how to find and fill a cache, which is where the squirrels keep their nuts, among other things. 

I helped all my new squirrel pals and ticked off all my quests so Terry the Turtle would ferry me to the next island and then when he was ready to take me, I wasn't quite ready to go. I still had a Golden Acorn to find. As well as leading the guided meditations, Maya also minds the mystic circle of pillars where, if you can find and place all five Golden Acorns, a ghostly blue squirrel appears and gives you a permanent buff that gives you more stamina.

I didn't want to miss out on that so I carried on looking. I had four but the fifth eluded me, even though the pillars themselves give some hefty hints. In the end I found the missing acorn at the bottom of a hollow log. Then I hopped onto Terry's shell and off we went.

I had some minor issues with the UI, particularly when it came to building, which felt fiddlier than it does in many games, but there's one very useful function I really liked. If you hold down RMB, the screen fades and the names of every creature in a very wide area appears, along with a headshot that lets you know what species they are and a distance, measured in Paws, that tells you how near or far they are.

I found it very handy but when I jumped off Terry's back onto the sand and turned it on to see what was waiting for me, I was a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of options. The second island was clearly going to be a lot busier than the first.

It was getting late, so I decided to leave exploring the new place for another day. It looked like the demo was going to be one of those really lengthy ones you can play for several hours without repeating yourself.

It wasn't, not really. Most of the second island turned out to be cordoned off by an impenetrable grid. I could see all the new squirrels waving at me, no doubt desperate for me to come and help them with stuff they ought to have been able to do for themselves, but I couldn't get to any of them.

As far as I can tell, there's only one reason the demo lets you go to the second island at all and that's so you can try out the housing. Okay, I guess it also whets your appetite for what you could be doing if you bought the full game - all those juicy exclamation marks with their as-yet unknown quests - but you're obviously really there to give housing a go.

And the housing offer looks pretty solid. An embarrassingly-named seagull called Lotta Land fills you in on the details although it's all very straightforward. I was able to knock up a nice little shack with a roof and a balcony and somewhere to place my bed in about a quarter of an hour this morning. Construction required nothing but sticks, which made it pleasantly simple to get started. I assume there's more complexity later.

I admit I'm a little curious to see for myself. As I've said before, these days I find the early stages of survival games at least as addictive as I once found classic MMORPG starting areas. Both are pleasures in themselves, regardless of whether you  go on to play the games seriously, which means the fun never seems to wear thin. I spent the best part of two decades very contentedly replaying what was effectively the same content in scores of different MMORPGs, not to mention multiple runs in the same ones, and now it seems likely I'll do the same in dozens of open-world survival games.

Whether I'll want to do it as squirrel is another question. Even though I generally enjoy playing anthropomorphic animals even more than I like playing humanoids, this particular quadruped didn't immediately catch my fancy. It felt a bit characterless, hardly surprising given there's no character creation. You're just a squirrel and that's that.

If you've ever fantasized about becoming a tool-using squirrel, though, this is your game.

Survive Or Die (Then Do It All Over Again)

The last couple of posts were quite substantial so I guess it'll be okay if I scrabble up a grab-bag today, even though it's not Friday. If not, tough. It's going to have to be. That's all I've got.

Will The (Dire) Wolf Survive?

(Maybe. Next Question.)

Here's an odd one. Who knew Dire Wolves were real? Well, I did but I'd forgotten, so it was a bit of a surprise when I read they were coming back. 

The NME, which bizarrely enough is where I saw the news, seems to have jumped on it because of the Game of Thrones connection. The headline blares "Dire wolves from ‘Game Of Thrones’ have been brought back from extinction", which does seem to suggest a lack of journalistic rigor in a number of directions. The claim is dubious and anyway it's not like George invented the creatures, after all, or even that he has a unique claim on them from his fiction.

The author of the piece, Max Pilley, does attempt to justify the assignation by saying the long-lost species "re-entered the popular imagination in recent times thanks to George R.R. Martin selecting the animals as the sigil for the Stark family in his epic fantasy series", which is fair enough except that it ignores the previous few decades, when dire wolves were being stuffed into pretty much every generic fantasy epic and every D&D-inspired role-playing game out there. They're about as over-used a trope as dragons or orcs.

Speaking of orcs, for an orc chieftain, a dire wolf has to be the canine equivalent of a blood-dripping skull daubed in blood on your shield, doesn't it? You pretty much have to turn up to clan gathering mounted on the back of a Dire Wolf or who's going to take you seriously?

I couldn't begin to count the number of Dire Wolves I've killed in a whole bunch of MMORPGs, where they're generally encountered about one step on from the Holy Trinity of starter animals, bears, boars and regular wolves. Name recognition meant I was initially quite excited to hear the extinct species was being revived through the magiscience of genetic engineering but the scientific reality, as usual, turns out to be less thrilling than the headlines. 

On deeper examination, it turns out the extremely cute, fluffy puppies aren't true Dire Wolves at all but mere hybrids, the result of a combination of "DNA from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull" and "20 edits of the genetic code of the gray wolf, the species’ closest living relative".

The resultant embryos were then brought to term by "domestic dog mothers", as reported by the BBC, whose journalistic standards are, of necessity as well as by tradition, considerably more rigorous than those of the New Musical Express. The resultant animals aren't purebred dire wolves, more like genetically modified grey wolves with white fur and larger skulls.

And much greater marketing potential, of course. Let's not forget that.

Still, I look forward to seeing what the mad scientists do with the Tasmanian tiger, the next extinct superstar animal on their short but highly evocative list, which includes mastodons and dodos. If they're taking suggestions, I've always wanted to see a Giant Sloth, a creature from the past that features surprisingly rarely in fantasy but which always seemed to turn up in the dinosaur books I read as a child: "As tall as a giraffe and much heavier than a Grizzly Bear". That'd give even a dire wolf pause, I should think, although it might look a tad less impressive on a shield. 

Will The Survival Game Survive? 

(Are You Kidding Me? Next Question.)

Two new survival titles caught my eye this week. I realize I don't need any more but they're hard to resist. They're like the M&Ms of the online gaming world; they look so deliciously different in all their different colors, even though you know they all taste exactly the same. And you just can't stop yourself grabbing another handful.

These two come in similar shades of cute. The first, already available on Steam, is called Squirreled Away and I'm guessing that tells you just about everything you need to know about it but if not, here's the trailer.

There's a free demo, which I'm downloading as I type this, so there may be a whole post about the game here one day. I suspect the demo will be about as much as I need (Or can take.) of being a squirrel so if there is it'll likely be the only one.

The other game looks like it might have longer legs (Than a squirrel? Not difficult...) but it's not coming until 2026. It's called Tomo Endless Blue, which sounds like something you'd see on a paint chart or possibly in the 2pm slot on the opening Friday of a minor music festival. Depending which source you believe it's either a "survival MMO" or "a Monster-Taming ARPG set in a Voxel Open World."

Whatever it is, it's probably going to have Nintendo's lawyers checking their precedents. Given Palworld's problems, presumably the developers, Onibi, will at least have the wit to steer clear of anything round, hand-held and throwable.

Then again, maybe not... 

Will My Patience Survive

(Too Late! Next Question.)

Speaking of festivals, I never did get around to listening to the eighty or so acts on the Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent Contest long-list. Too late now. 

I did, however, waste half an hour of my life listening to the official playlist, showcasing the submitted song from each of the eight finalists. It was grim.

The only ones I could say I liked - and "like" would be pushing it - would be Sarah Meth's Steps and Westside Cowboy's I've Never Met Anyone I Thought I Could Love. The other half-dozen I either barely noticed or actively disliked.

Luckily, there's no Glastonbury next year so I'm saved the embarrassment of claiming this is the last time I'll bother with the ETC, knowing, even as I say it, that I won't be able to resist at least taking a look at the damn thing.

Will My Channel Survive?

(Hell If I Know. No More Questions.)

Finally, and since we're on the subject of music anyway, here's something I very much do like. I came upon it in a mildly curious way that might be worth reporting. 

One of the many pieces of advice I took on board when setting up my new YouTube channel was that you should never just start one from scratch and immediately begin uploading. Do that and YT's algorithm will assume you're a bot and ignore you.

What you're supposed to do is use the channel like a normal person for a while so it builds up a viewing history that makes the algorithm feel loved and wanted. Consequently, these last few weeks I've all but ignored the channel I've been using for well over a decade in favor of the one I made last month.

To get things started, I subscribed to a few channels I already follow. Both of my channels belong to the same Google account but it seems YouTube doesn't care about that. It doesn't make any "helpful" observations like "You already follow this channel" when you add one you've been following for years, anyway. It just does as it's told, which makes a nice change.

Because they were the first I thought of, I added Lana del Rey, Polly Scattergood and Sunday (1994), all of which, it has to be said, bear some superficial similarities. This had an immediate and intriguing effect on the kind of recommendations I was getting.

Instead of the usual mish-mash (Itself admittedly far better-targeted now than it was a year or two ago.) I found myself being pointed almost exclusively towards very new uploads by solo, female artists or female-fronted bands, all of them in broadly alt-pop range of sub-genres. Quite a few of them looked worth investigating so I clicked through several and that seemed to start a kind of snowball effect with more being offered up for my attention all the time. 

From the many possibilities I've heard quite a few I've liked but so far only one I've liked enough to add to my subs, the oddly named R. Missing, who immediately leapfrogged the competition by the simple expedient of including the keyword "Pony" in the title of one of her songs.

Pony Yeah - R. Missing

More incontrovertible evidence for my theory that any song or band with a name that includes the word "Pony" is more likely than not  to be worth your time and attention. At this point, I don't even think it's a theory any more; it's clearly a proven fact.

I listened to a lot more of R. Missing's enigmatic electronica and I liked all I heard. This, I think, is the best of them but that's just as well. When you discover a  new artist, you always want their current work to be their best. It suggests there's more great work to come. If all the best stuff was from four years ago, it wouldn't inspire much confidence in what's coming next, would it?

I'm sure she'll be turning up in future posts. As for my own, new channel, none of the advice on how to get noticed seems to have made the least difference. But that's material for another post and another day.

It's Punk, Jim...

And so we come to the final demo from the recent Next Fest. I won't say I've saved the best for last but it is the one I spent the longest time playing. A shade under two hours and it could easily have been longer.

The game in question is 

Solarpunk

and the first thing I have to say about it is... what the heck is it with the "punk" thing?  I just typed "punk" into the search field on the Steam store and here's what came up, just on the first page:

• FragPunk
• Evilpunk
• Mech Punk
• Noir Punk
• WizardPunk
• TeamPunk
• Ocean Punk
• CatPunk
• WastePunk
• WastelandPunk
• CraftPunk 

Sometimes it's all one word, sometimes there's mid-word capitalization, sometimes it's two words - but what does it mean? I understand suffixes in general. I know where "gate" comes from, when you're trying to suggest some kind of scandal, and "core" is self-explanatory if you're trying to emphasize  focus but "punk"? What's "punk" about most of these games, in any sense of the word? 

That's not a rhetorical question. There is an answer. I looked it up. The problem is, the answer makes no sense. 

Here's what Google says the "punk" suffix means:

"a combining form extracted from cyberpunk used to denote a rebellious, alternative genre or aesthetic in speculative fiction, art, fashion, etc., and added to a word that names its distinctive theme, often a form of technology: steampunk solarpunk hopepunk."

That definition even uses the name of this game - Solarpunk - as an example. Only I just spent two hours playing the demo and there is absolutely nothing about it that could rationally be described as "rebellious" or "alternative". If I had to stick a label on it, that label would be "cosy", which is about as far from "punk" as you can get.

I won't derail my own post any further, other than to say there's a long and intersting discussion on the topic on this Reddit thread if you want to dig into it further. I was already toying with the idea of  posting something about this before I ever heard of Solarpunk because it's been getting on my nerves for a while now but I think this little rantette may have gotten it out of my system, at least for the moment, so you've been spared the full two thousand word essay on the subject.

On to the game. If it isn't rebellious or alternative, just exactly what is it?

It's a twee survival game with cute airships, that's what. Set among an archipelago of islands floating in the sky, of course. What else would it be? If there's anything less rebellious or alternative in gaming in 2025 it would be hard to think of it. I guess it could be a PvPvE extraction shooter...

Is it a good survival game? Hard to tell from the demo, really. I mean, let's not kid ourselves here. They're all the same at the beginning, aren't they? Pick up some sticks, pick up some stones, make yourself an axe and a pick, chop down some trees, break some rocks, make a workbench, build a shack, realize you're starving, pick some berries, scoop some water...

All of that. As these things go, I thought it asked a little bit more of me than some, although the notes on Steam say certain mechanics have been "adjusted" for the demo, so presumably the game proper asks even more. 

For example, the night is quite long and I couldn't do a lot while it was dark. That was offputting, until I managed to make a shelter, put a bed in it and sleep through the hours of darkness. Hunger and thirst seemed quite insistent, too. I didn't quite die of either but the edges of the screen went red a couple of times. There was no shortage of water on my island but berries were hard to come by until I tilled the land and planted some. Ditto cotton, which I needed for some of the key tasks. It's not Valheim but it's not as easy as the child-friendly graphics suggest it might be, either.

The demo is the tutorial, give or take, and it's quite an extensive one, although the game seemed to think the instruction phase had finished well before I did. I think I got a message at one point saying the tutorial was over and then it just seemed to carry on. Or maybe I imagined it.

There didn't seem to be much of a storyline - in fact, at this remove, a few days later, I can't recall if there was any kind of narrative at all. I don't think there wast but I guess there could have been... but it would have had to have been somthing so unremarkable I've already forgotten everything about it.

There is a structure to gameplay beyond simply surviving, all the same. The demo offers a number of suggestions as to what you could do, the most compelling of which is obviously to build your own airship so you can get off the damn island and go look for somewhere more interesting. You can also build ladders of seemingly infinite length that require no support, so maybe you could skip the airship and just make a bridge.

I didn't think of that at the time so I made an airship. It took me maybe an hour and a half to get airborn. For the rest of the time I was failing to fly it. 

This is not one of thiose games where you just get in your ballon and steer it like World of Warcraft before Dragonriding. It requires actual flying skills, something I do not have and which it's clearly going to take longer than the natural length of the demo to acquire.

I did at least manage to lurch and yaw my way across the sky far enough to establish that, in the demo, there's not really anywhere much you can go, anyway. You can see other islands in the distance but if you try to get closer a whole mesh of electric-blue lines criss-crosses the sky and there's a message telling you onward travel isn't available in the demo.

The only place you can go is to another, larger airship. It's easily visible from your island and I'd wondered what it was from the moment I noticed it. It turnes out to be a home and garden hanging from two large gasbags. I did eventually manage to get to it but I wasn't able to dock, due to my own incompetence with the controls, so I had to jump out of my ship and hope I didn't miss.

Luckily I landed safely in the back yard. Less luckily, when I'd finished looking around, I couldn't find any way to get back to my ship. I had to jump over the side and kill myself so I could re-appear at home in bed, which I'd earlier set as my respawn point.

Inbetween the two leaps into the unknown, I fully explored the mystery airship, something that took me about thirty seconds. It's a shop. Unfortunately, it was closed. I peered through the window but no-one was home. Something else not available in the demo, obviously.

And that's a bout it, I think. There's not an awful lot more to say. Solarpunk: it's a survival game. That just about covers it.

Actually, I think that should be a survival sandbox. Reading the full description on Steam there's no suggestion of any gameplay other than exploring, building, crafting and farming. The farming and automation options look quite extensive but there's no hint of a story, not even the flimsy pretence for one most similar games throw in as a sop to convention. Maybe that's what's supposed to be rebellious about this one.

Mechanically, there's certainly nothing to frighten the horses. It works like every other survival game. I can't recall any surprises or even moments of puzzlement, where I couldn't figure out what to do. It's textbook. I also came across no bugs or glitches and everything worked so it seems very competently put-together.

One thing that's missing is personalization. There's no character creation in the demo. My character was completely anonymous and also invisible, since I couldn't find any option other than first-person. There must be one because the game is multiplayer and there are videos on the Store page where you can see other players and what certainly looks like the player-character, too. 

Character models definitely exist but whether there's any sort of character customisation in the full game I can't say for sure. It would be crazy if there wasn't, wouldn't it? 

I can already imagine waht clothes in the game would look like. Aesthetically, Solarpunk is extremely coherent and consistent. Too much so, in my opinion. It looks lovely but it all looks much the same. The color palette is restful on the eye but rarely shifts far from blue-green-yellow. Design-wise, everything looks charming and homespun. It's a toddler's picture-book come to life.

I did only see the tutorial island, of course. It might be that different islands have different aesthetics. That would make a big difference. I've looked at the screenshots on Steam and watched the videos, though, and there isn't much sign of variety there. All the same, it is a beautiful game. It seems a bit unreasonable to complain that the developers have chosen a look and then stuck with it. 

All things considered, Solarpunk seems like it should be very successful. All the necessary parts are there and they're all in the right order. If it doesn't take off, that's most likely because there are more cosy survival games these days than people willing to play them. I think we probably passed peak Survival and peak Cosy a while back.

Nevertheless, I had a good time playing and I might well play again. The demo is open-ended so I could carry on for a while longer but I'd really like to see a few more islands. Always assuming I could figure out how to fly the airship, that is. It's definitely not a given that I could.

Wishlisted and Recommended, if you're not survivaled-out already.

Looking for Nightingale : More First Impressions Of Realms Rebuilt

Anyone remember the original trailer for Nightingale? I didn't, not until I went looking back at my old posts for confirmation that the game we got wasn't the game we were promised. Which was when I watched the trailer again and discovered it more or less was.

Here. Take a look if you don't believe me.

With the possible exception of the big dinosaur thing at the beginning, just about everything in that video is in the game I played earlier this year. So why did it feel like something quite different when I got to play it?

Partly it was because the UI and the mechanics were (Mostly still are, I think.) kinda clunky. Everything feels just a tad more laborious than it should, which makes the whole thing feel a little more like playing a game than a really slick game does. There can be bit too much thinking about how you're going to do something, sometimes, as opposed to just doing it. It can take you out of the world for a moment.

Partly it was the procedural generation that some said made the Realms feel a little generic. That was a frequent complaint I saw. I didn't think it became as obvious as all that until maybe fifty or sixty hours in, which would have been fine, had it been a straight-up RPG with an ending. Not so great for a live service game you might spend months or years with. 

And then there was the whole "There's no Nightingale in Nightingale" thing...

Nightingale is the name of the game but also the name of a mysterious city, de facto chuman capital of the Realms and quite possibly the one remaining center of human civilization, now the Pale has spread to Earth. You get glimpses of it and every NPC tells you about it but you never get to go there yourself. 

The whole thrust of the narrative in the original version of the game was that the player character was seeking a way to get to Nightingale. That premise has been retained in the revised edition. The biggest question I have about the new build is whether that goal will ever be attained.

The gates to the city? Not a chance.

There is supposed to be a much stronger storyline this time around, although as of yet I've seen precious little sign of it. Granted, you sometimes don't get much of the narrative in a tutorial zone but I made it through the first dungeon today, beat the first boss and opened the first portal to one of the new, hand-crafted Realms but the story seems as elusive as ever.

However the story turns out, I really would like to get to Nightingale this time. If I knew for certain that the tale, or at least the opening chapter, ended with my character freely able to walk the streets of the fabled city, that would be all the motivation I'd need to make it through. If, on the other hand, we're  all going to finish up in that not-all-that-glorified mission hub like last time, then I'm not sure I'd want to bother.

I did expect that by this time - I've played for more than six hours now - I might have seen at least some sign of the new, narrative-driven direction. Instead it's been a very enjoyable but largely disconnected series of minor tasks and tutorials. I get that the game needs to introduce its mechanics slowly enough for the often confusing complexities to be understood but I do feel there ought to be some narrative hook other than Puck's gnomic, disdainful hints of adventures to come. 

Mechanically, the new game feels, by and large, much the same as the old. Some of the really rough edges have been sanded down a little but there are still a lot of loose ends to trip over. I'm not sure whether I would really want them all to be tied up too neatly - one of the attractions of the game for me has always been its endearing funkiness - but if the goal is to make it as accessible as possible to players used to the kinds of games that do most of the behind the scenes heavy lifting for you, I'm not convinced it's mission accomplished just yet.

Visually I do think there's been a significant upgrade. I always thought the Realms were beautiful but there did seem to be quite a lot of fairly obvious asset re-use. There still is some of that but at least there are more assets now and the environments definitely have more of a hand-crafted feel to them. There's a palpable sense that exploration might be rewarding, not just in terms of the mats you might gather but for the new sights you might see. 

Wouldn't want to waste the day in bed.

One thing I do find hard to parse is the difficulty. I found the original game largely consistent and logical in terms of challenge but the new one feels all over the place.

Some of that is manageable through the UI. The game now has four optional difficulty settings, Explorer, Balanced, Champion and Nightmare, which translate to Easy, Normal, Hard and Very Hard. The default is Balanced. I haven't changed mine but I could, any time.

It's not a one-time choice. You can switch difficulty without even logging out. All four appear as options every time you sleep. You can also now decide whether to wake at Dawn or Noon or Evening, the last of which would have been a very odd choice before, when darkness brought an endless series of attacks but it seems that dubious pleasure may have been curtailed. The warnings about it certainly have. I haven't tested it by staying up all night yet but, given the beauty of the night sky, I hope I'm right. It's a great game for star-gazing.

Travel has been simplified and streamlined. There's no longer any need (Or indeed option, so far as I've seen.) to make your own portals, something that was a huge part of the game before. There's now a ring of statues, which turn into portals as you progress through the storyline. You can port to that ring at any time so it acts as a sort of terminus for travel across the Realms. Or it will, when I get them all working. I only have one lit up so far.

All of that speaks to changes intended to make things as convenient as possible, sometimes by giving more control to the player, sometimes by taking potentially confusing options away. As Azuriel observed in a reply to a comment I left on his first impressions post, the pivot to a more structured, narrative-led direction doesn't always seem to sit comfortably with the survival mechanics, which ramian largely as they were. Indeed, they may have actually been made somewhat more onerous with the addition of a new condition, Hunger.  If that was in the game last time I don't remember it at all.

Just need one good hit!

 

After my time with the new build so far, though, I'm beginning to wonder not so much about whether the survival tropes fit the new Nightingale as whether they really matter at all. I'm starting think they may be little more than decoration. Hunger, for example, seems to be removed as a factor entirely just by gorging, so all I do is stuff myself until the bar fills then forget about it. As for item degradation and repair, so often a real nuisance in survival games, here it's barely an issue.

Items wear out quite quickly but they can be repaired instantly with a single click from the UI, anywhere, at any time, all of them at once, using a resource that is in plentiful supply. It may be that this gets more taxing later but at the moment I'm finding it hard to see the point of having item decay at all when it can be fixed immediately at no meaningful cost in either time or resources.

And then there's the death penalty. Unless I'm misremembering, in the original, when you died, you had to do a corpse recovery to get most of your stuff back. That could be very challenging indeed. I remember one particular incident that took me two sessions to recover from. Maybe that was later in the game but I'm already fighting Tier Two mobs and when I die, which is often, I still wake up with all my stuff. As far as I can tell, there are only three tiers so if corpse recovery is in the game at all any more, it's going to have to make a fairly late appearance.

In order to get to where I could die to Tier Two mobs, though, I first had to die to a Tier One boss. And I died a lot. The boss is called Jabberwock (Because of course he is...) and he appears at the end of a long dungeon that was itself quite draining of resources to get through, meaning I was pretty low on food and health when I reached the final room.

Jabberwock waited for me there, standing on a platform on the far side of the very large room, the floor of which was filled with explosive traps. From his perch, he peppered me with an endless stream of magical  missiles from the moment he spotted me. When I managed to snipe him to about 90% health he took to teleporting all over the room, blasting me all the while.

Unsurprisingly, I did not get the better of him that first time. Or the second. Or the third. After several deaths decided to regroup. I ported back to my camp and upgraded all my gear as far as I could, which wasn't far. Then I went back and tried again with much the same result.

I considered dropping the difficulty but although I talk a good game about wanting things as easy as possible, I have a fairly strong dislike of changing the settings once I've started. No logic to it but there you go.

One thing that I hadn't done at that point was to hire an assistant, something you can do almost immediately and which costs you nothing. A companion would give me some extra dps but more importantly they'd pick me up you when I  fell over. 

I went and hired the first one I saw, made her some gear, gave her a slingbow (Which it turned out she couldn't use so I had to swap her to axe half-way through the fight, which was fun.) and went back for a third try.

That went much better. It turns out the combination of a very lax death penalty and an endless series of free rezzes completely trivializes the encounter. It no longer mattered how many times I died. I just let it happen, waited for my pal Janie get me up, took my chance to hit the boss once or twice before he knocked me down me again and on we went like that until he was dead.

Or, put another way,
97.6% of players
have not completed the Tutorial

It helped that for no apparent reason Janie seemed to take far less damage than me and that Jabberwock didn't regain any health, even if we both died and had to respawn. Since the respawn point was maybe fifty meters away, even a wipe was barely an inconvenience The whole fight felt extremely sloppy and inelegant but that's how the mechanics work and you get no bonus points for style so why try harder?

I'm not complaining. Once I'd figured it how it worked, I was fine with it,ugly though it was. It just took me a while to realize it really didn't matter if I was any good at fighting or not. The game doesn't care. It's possible that this approach won't always work when I progress to more dangerous Realms and more challenging opponents but I feel a precedent has been set. 

That first boss battle suggests it's not worth trying too hard because the game doesn't care how you win, just that you win. It wants you to progress and it's going to let you do it no matter what. I don't have a problem with the intent but I'm not so sure about the execution. I am absolutely not suggesting I would prefer the Big Fights to be harder in any way - that's the last thing I'd want - but I do feel I might quite like them to be easy in a more aesthetically pleasing fashion.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying I'd be quite surprised if this version of Nightingale turns out to be massively more successful than the last one. It feels very much as though the same thinking is still being applied and the results are just as - shall we say idiosyncratic? - as before. 

Personally, I like it. I think it makes the game feel both original and peculiar and that's a combination that works for me. I'm just not sure it's going to bring in the numbers they need. As yet, I sill don't feel as though either I or Inflexion have found the real Nightingale. And I'm not just talking about the city this time.