Lacrimosa Moves In - Peace And Quiet Move Out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

Notes about AI used in this post

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

Settling In or Just Another Day In Hethereau

Here's a first-world blogging problem if there ever was one: new games give you far too much to blog about. Such a terrible situation to find yourself in! Enough ideas for a dozen posts but how are you meant to choose? 

Maybe pick the most immediate, the one that's right there in front of you, shimmering with vitality and immediacy? Or should you let it rest a while to settle and prove? But if you do, will it join all those other, unwritten posts? Drift away into the void, never to be seen?

Should you stand back, take the broader view? Focus on the details?

What are you trying to achieve, anyway? Do you want to tell stories? Offer advice? Share information? Analyze and explain? Are you looking to give a show and tell with pictures? A critical essay on one specific aspect of the game? Half a dozen bullet-pointed paragraphs on several?

Or perhaps you find yourself so stunned by choice all you can do is write about how hard it is to choose at all.

Yeah, that really would be a waste of time, wouldn't it? So let's not do that. 

Lens Flare

When this blog was young, I'd have done a whole post about it. Just the sort of sidewise lean I loved back then. Mind you, that whole post would only have been the length of one section of this one. I valued concision more then, too.

Oh, but how I love lens flare! It hits me like a drug. When I say I like a game there's a non-trivial chance what I really mean is it gives good lens flare. Quite a lot of the imports I've been keen on the last few years answer to that.

On any given day you care to name, there's a strong possibility I'll have been staring into the sun, mesmerized by the glare, fascinated by the halo, seeing the eternal in the ephemeral. Again. 

And taking screenshots. 

Do you know how hard it is to not take screenshots of lens flare? Especially at sunset or sunrise. Games have golden hours just like Hollywood needs. I have to talk myself down, convince myself they aren't magical moments never to be repeated. Just coded performances, another show same time tomorrow. 

By The Clock

It should get easier now, I found the clock. I found it yesterday. 

Actually, I didn't. The game told me about it. Oh, wait, I didn't mention the name of the game yet, did I? Neverness To Everness. I guess you guessed that, though.

I was doing a quest. Not that they call them quests. Games with contemporary or futuristic settings tend to avoid giving that mystical gloss. Come to think of it, I'm not sure what they are called in NTE. Missions, maybe? Doesn't matter anyway, except that names always matter. But let's not go there just now.

It was one of those deals you get in games sometimes, where the NPC tells you to come back in a while. A few minutes, a few hours, tonight, tomorrow, after dark, when you've had time to think about it. Any time but not right now, ok?

They're annoying, aren't they? Does anyone actually enjoy being fobbed off by an NPC with a "Give me a day and I'll have finished making your boots."? Why do developers even bother? Is it just to piss people off?

Rhetorical question. Of course it is. Here's a tougher one. What might be going through a developer's mind when they add a quest like that, one with a hiatus, then pop in a hint telling you if you can't be bothered waiting you could just spin the hands on the clock and make it happen right away?

That's what NTE does. I met this woman who was selling her car for real cheap except you could tell she didn't really want to. She asked me to come watch her race so I could check out what a great bargain it was but the race didn't start until six in the evening and it was midday then. 

The car was a real steal and I wanted it plus there was obviously a backstory and I wanted that too. I thought I'd do something else for the afternoon and come back later. 

Only I didn't need to bother. It seems you can set the time to anything you want. The weather, too. Those sunrises and sunsets? Any goddam time you please! 

All of which is top quality of life and so very welcome. Only, if you're allowing that, why even suggest waiting?

I think it's for "realism".  It's not clear if the street races are even legal but they all happen after dark. Maybe the roads are just quieter then but I kinda doubt it. All the bad things happen at night, don't they?

I guess it would make even less sense if you could talk to an NPC any time of day and a race would magically begin right there and then, though. Oh, the compromises we make for authenticity.

Friends Would Be A Reality Show Here

You know that thing everyone mocks about Friends? Ok, ok! I'll be more specific. You know that one thing? How everyone always points out how unrealistic it is, to put it mildly, that a bunch of twentysomethings with crap jobs, if they even have any job  at all this week, could afford live in those apartments in New York? Or any apartment?

Yeah, well you ain't seen my pad in Hethereau! I got it yesterday and it is saaweeet! So sweet!

I was wondering when housing was going to appear, so I had a poke around and found you have to get to Tycoon Level 5 first. Tycoon Levels probably needs a post of their own but the tl:dr is that it's how you get all the casual/leisure options, like fishing and housing and runing a business, assuming you call that last a leisure activity, which I fricken' do not.

I was momentarily concerned it might be a grind to get to Level 5 to open the feature that most interested me but it wasn't. I'm sure there will be grinds in the game but I haven't hit any yet. 

It took me a couple of sessions to get to where I needed to be and by sessions I mean fragments. I did some Tycooning in-between exploring and questing and taking screenshots of atmospheric weather conditions. I suppose it might have taken me an hour, all added up.

So, getting on the housing ladder was quick and easy. It was also cheap. And like most things in the game it was quasi-realistic. I had to go to a real estate agency, where the realtor showed me what she had on her books. That part was convincing enough.

The illusion of reality started to break down when I saw that only one property was available at my level, the rest needing to be unlocked. Then it shattered completely when I found out how much it cost: 200,000 Fons. That's almost chump change!

What? It sounds like a lot? I suppose... I mean, 200,000 is a biggish number. But then, of course, if you don't play the game you have no idea what a "Fon" is so it might be a fortune or just a whole lot of nothing. 

I can't say I have a clear mental image of a Fon either. Bloody stupid name for a currency if you ask me. Every time I see it pluralized, it makes me think of Henry Winkler. Maybe they should have called it the Winkle. 

The important part is that, even though I've only just started playing, and even though I've spent most of my time goofing around, I still had enough cash on me to buy the apartment outright. And that was after I'd leased a cafe and bought a car!

I imagine there'll be a whole post on housing at some point, not to mention the truly bizarre entrepreneurial economy, but for now I'll just say that just the starter home is a fifth floor duplex with huge picture windows and stunning views. If this is what a part-time gig at a down-at-heel, back-street enterprise in a poor part of town, run by a drunk and staffed largely by children gets you, god knows what I'll be able to afford when I get a real job! 

I bet you wish you lived in Hethereau. I know I do.

Otterness To Notterness

Nimgimli posted yesterday, listing a few things that were harshing his mellow in NTE and one of them was Taygedo. 

Taygedo is an otter with a television for a head because what else would he be? He works for the Eibon Antique Shop, the struggling business the PC gets drafted into right at the start of the game for reasons that are still not as clear to me as they probably should be. 

Taygedo communicates almost entirely by the use of the word "Taygedo" or slight variations, a bit like Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy. He occasionally throws in a few grunts and squeals but conversations involving him mostly run along the lines of the old subtitled movie gag, where several sentences of dialog are rendered in the titles by just that single word. Only in reverse.

I feel relatively neutral about the gimmick but it's self-evidently as likely to infuriate as delight. It certainly annoyed Nimgimli. However endearing or otherwise you find him, though, I do think making Taygedo the central figure in a lengthy storyline close to the start of the game is a high risk strategy.  At best.

Add to that, the plotline doesn't just give you an otter with a televison set for a head repeating one word over and over ad infinitum. It also asks you to stop whatever you're doing so you can help him set up a date with another otter (No TV head for this one.). You have to take him shopping, buy him clothes and gifts and then to pretend he's your boss so he can impress his date, who he's given the impression he's much more important than he really is. 

Basic 1960s sitcom plot in other words. I was going to say "minus the mechanical animism" but then I remembered My Mother The Car.... I can see why Nimgimli was losing patience if that's waht he'd been doing.

I'm quite enjoying it myself. I've bought Taygedo the gear. I haven't yet been on the date yet. So that's something to look forward to... 

Setting Boundaries  

Finally, for this post that is, there's the issue of where to go next. Or rather where the game's going to let me go. 

I've been doing a lot of exploring and some of it has taken the form of seeing how far out of town I can get. It varies and it's not nearly as obvious as you'd imagine.

Hethereau is bounded on one side by the ocean and on the other by some lush green hills. I was fairly sure neither would be available to explore and I was mostly right but not entirely. 

The sea is just sea for the most part. The distant hills are out of reach but there is a substantial out-of-town wilderness area with campgrounds and a somewhat manicured stretch of woodland you can wander around in if you want. Not much to see there except trees but it's nice to get out of the city for a while.

Across the river and stretching along the coast is what looks like another part of town although it could be a separate conurbation entirely. I wanted to see what it was like. 

It would be an exaggeration to say I felt confident I could go there. That would imply some element of doubt. I had none. I didn't think about it at all.

I happened to be strolling along the beach opposite when I got the urge to go take a look so I took a right-turn to the ocean and ran straight into the red No Access barrier that materializes when you try to go somewhere you shouldn't. Because I can't take a hint, I tried a few other ways- gliding, crossing the bridges, swimming - no joy.

You can see the area is fully developed. There are even cars moving through the streets. You just can't go there. Ooh, I was cross! Why even put the thing there if it's just a tease?

I was crosser still, when I tried to go to PukaLand. PukaLand is an amusement park on an island just off the coast. Or maybe its on a peninsula. You can see it from anywhere on that side of the city, its fairground identity established by a huge ferris wheel and a Disneyesque castle. 

You can see it but you can't see it. You can go up to the gate but you can't go in. That damned red screen again.

I can't say whether these and other inaccessible locations are places not yet "in the game" or whether they open up at certain points in the storyline but either way it's frustrating. I guess the positive take is that it means there's more content ready and waiting to go, one way or the other but damn! I wanted to go there now!

And that's it for today. Just some random thoughts among many. Plenty more where those came from but I'll try to narrow it down to just the one next time. 

Maybe.

No promises. 

Mr. Barnabus Builds His Dream House - #3 In The Series No-One Asked For!

There very nearly wasn't a post at all today thanks to the insidiously addictive nature of building houses in video games. I was in the middle of trying to figure out how to build some stairs and very nearly getting somewhere when Mrs Bhagpuss asked me if Beryl had been fed, which led to me asking what the time was and finding out it was an hour later than I thought because time just evaporates when you get into the fiddly detail of a build.

Or it does for me, which is why I'm always extremely wary of any game that has base building, as it seems to be called these days, as a feature. It's the most "just another ten minutes..." of all game activities as far as I'm concerned. I don't relish the loss of control. Especially when those ten minutes turn into two hours as they inevitably will.

To pick up where we left off last time, having cobbled together what has to be the smallest, ugliest, most pathetic shack I have ever built in any game, I moved on to something better. A big, ugly shack.

Okay, not quite that bad. The next build was more of a wonky bunker. The important thing wasn't what it looked like, though, It was the size of it. The first, my Ratonga Warlock could barely fit inside. The next had ceilings three times his height.

What happened was that I suddenly remembered that one of the most useful features of housing items in EverQuest II: scalability. You can blow anything up or shrink it down to quite a significant degree. With that in mind, it occurred to me it would be a lot easier to make a big house if I used big blocks. 

So I tried it and it really wasn't. I'd forgotten how thick it would make the walls. As thick as the actual walls of a real medieval castle and then some.   

Luckily, I'd also thought of an alternative to building with blocks like a five year-old giant. How about walls? There was a whole set of walls in my Carpenter's books. The set is called Seru's Duplicitous Tileset and I have no clue how she got it but among other things it makes sections of wall with frames for windows and doors. Just what I needed.

I got her to make twenty or so of each, went through the rigmarole of passing them across via the shared bank and then got on with building something out of them. It was not as easy as it could have been, mostly because I hadn't considered the flatness of the surface when I picked my plot. It's hard to line up walls when the ground slopes down to the sea.

Once again, EQII's wide-ranging options for placement and alignment came to my rescue. Well, almost. You can swivel and rotate objects and also raise and lower them. Most importantly, you can sink walls down through the earth and into each other which makes it easy to line them up so there aren't any gaps at the joins or at the bottom on sloping ground.

Sadly, the same can't always be said of the top. Still, I muddled through, eventually. There were a lot of small gaps here and there, some of the walls were far from straight and the top edges were a bit jagged but it was better than my first attempt.

Of course, it didn't have a roof. There are, as far as I can tell, no roofing items you can make or buy, let alone any prefabricated roofs. There are also no ceilings per se. For those you need to use floor tiles. I guess one person's ceiling is always another one's floor. 

I had my Carpenter knock out fifty floor tiles from the Seru set and with some of those I put a flat roof on top. Oh, how simple that makes it sound. It took me ages and it looked terrible. I had to overlap tiles to cover all the gaps because not only is there no snap-to-fit, the area I was trying to cover wasn't even a regular shape, thanks to the walls not being straight.

I got it done somehow. It looked awful. But it was late and I had to stop so I left it at that. I had, at least, learned something and also I was starting to find placing things and lining them up a little easier.

When I came back to it today, really I should have torn the whole thing down and started again. But I didn't. I had some walls left so I thought I'd add a second story. And when I'd done that, I thought I might have a bash at a roof. A sloping roof.

That was fun. I worked out how to place the tiles on the floor, raise them up and swivel them. You have to do it that way because if you try to put them on the walls themselves they insist on sitting half on one side and half on the other. Nothing ever wants to go where you want to put it. It's infuriating.

There are ways around it, though. All of which make the end result look like a barn that's barely survived a tornado going through. But it's a roof. And it slopes!

That took an hour or two. Shame I didn't think about the trees when I started. In some games, if foliage gets in the way you can chop it down. Here, it just has to stick through the walls. Maybe I'll put a wardrobe over the branches. It'll be like Narnia.

The main lesson I'd learned by this point was to take a very great deal more care about where to put the damn house in the first place. The second was to build on a firm foundation. I see what those blocks are for now.

For the time being, though, I had a two-story building with a roof. Good start! No windows or doors, of course, but you can't have everything. 

Except I wanted some windows and doors. I know you can have doors, at least. I remember making some before, when I was building a Gnome Trap (Don't ask...) I got the Carpenter out again and had a more careful look through her recipe books and yes, she can make doors. Quite a lot of different doors. Wood, metal, stone, jail. All sorts of doors.

She made a couple of wooden ones and I played around with those for a bit. It was surprisingly easy to scale them up, fit them into the frames and get them opening and closing. Very much the wrong sort of doors for the rest of the build but with proof of concept established, I'll make some more suitable ones later.

Windows, though... Windows were a lot harder. I couldn't figure it out. I had to go look it up out of game in the end.

It transpires the main reason I couldn't find any recipes for windows in my Carpenter's books is that Carpenters don't make windows. Makes sense. Windows aren't made of wood, are they? 

So who does? Tinkerers, mostly. Also there are some holiday-themed windows that anyone can make. I had a look at what was available and settled on the Frostfell ones. They have a snow effect that seemed ideal for the setting. Most windows seem to come with a visual effect of some kind. What you can't have is a good, old-fashioned, plain glass window you can see through.

Getting my hands on the Frostfell windows was a bit of a performance. There were some comical misadventures in the Frostfell Winter Village, where I thought I might be able to buy them, ready-made, off the elves and goblins (They don't sell them.) Then I thought I'd need to use the workbenches in the Village to craft them only I couldn't find where they were. (Didn't even need them anyway. I'd forgotten I have my own set of all-year-round Frostfell crafting stations in the Mara home.) 

Eventually I got it all figured out, made myself half a dozen of the two types of window, vertical and horizontal, and went to fit them into the frames. And guess what? They don't fit.

Not even close. Neither of them. This is the part I don't get. Why even have tile sets with window-frames if none of your windows fit the holes?

I'm convinced I must have missed something. It makes no sense otherwise. Maybe I need to do a bit more research, although it won't be easy. Information on any of this seems hard to find. 

For now, though, I have a reasonably effective workaround involving scaling the windows up and sinking them into the walls. The end result doesn't look too bad. Not compared to the rest of the shoddiness, anyway.

All of that took much longer than I thought because time moves at an entirely different pace when you're building. When I finally had to stop, I was in the middle of figuring out how to build those stairs. I think I have it but if I'm right it's going to take a lot longer than I want to spend doing it. 

Who needs stairs when you can fly, anyway? Do birds have stairs? No, they do not!

And that is as far as I've gotten so far. This post ended up a lot shorter than I was planning, thanks to the building itself taking much longer so I guess we all dodged a bullet there. I strongly suspect this will not be the last in this series,either, but I have to go to work tomorrow so at least we can all have a day off before the next not-so-thrilling installment. 

I don't know about anyone else but I bloody well need one. Building is fun but it's hard work.

Island Life In EverQuest II

Back on Black Friday, Wilhelm at TAGN posted a piece about the cash shop in Palia and "micro" transactions in general. In the course of the piece, he pointed out that unspent cash-shop currency is a drag on the balance sheet for the Accounts Department and the last thing they want you to do is hoard the damn stuff and never spend any of it.

Which, of course, is what I do all the time. It's partly due to something Wilhelm was complaining about, namely how tough it can be in most games to find anything at all in the cash shop that seems like it's both good value and worth buying in the first place. For me, it often seems as though everything in most in-game stores is either ridiculously overpriced or hard to figure out why anyone would want it at any price.

I spent a decade playing Guild Wars 2, for example, and in all that time just about the only things I ever bought were storage upgrades. Those were useful but, like just about everything in the Gem Store, very expensive, so I always waited until they went on sale, which they reliably did - once a year. 

Even at that attritionally slow rate of purchase, I still had all the storage space I wanted, if only because of diminishing returns. No-one can ever have enough storage space in GW2 for the intentionally overwhelming torrent of very-slightly-not-quite-worthless items that rains down on you whatever you do but at some stage having more room to stash it all  just adds to the sense of desperation that the flood is never going to stop and you'll drown in all that junk you can't quite bring yourself to destroy.

Ahem. This wasn't supposed to be a post about GW2 and its many shortcomings. Or, for that matter, about inventory management, although I could tell you some tales...

Getting back to the point, thanks to a combination of overpriced and/or unattractive stock in the shops and my personal psychology, which, thanks presumably to convictions instilled in me, growing up, by people who lived through two world wars and a global depression, leads me to feel a lot more comfortable with funds unspent than with the not exactly essential goods or services those funds might have purchased, I tend to build up a lot of savings in any game I play for more than five minutes.

It doesn't help that I also suffer from choice paralysis. If a game is lucky enough to have developers willing to fill their stores with useful and attractive items at reasonable prices, my eyes glaze over as I stare at them through the shop window, incapable of deciding which to buy. 

The EverQuest II cash shop is pretty good as these things go. There's a lot of vaguely useful stuff in there, not least because Darkpaw has been running a soft Pay-to-Play regime for many years. At least, it has if you want to get groups or, god forbid, start raiding. Then you either have to come at the game like it was a full-time job or get your credit card out. 

Or, so I understand, from the forums, which I confess may not represent the most unbiased testimony. As a solo, casual player, though, none of that really affects me at all. I could buy Familiars and Mercenaries and throw them down a well to boost the various buffs and boosts and bonuses that gives but why would I bother? 

Ditto the xp boosts and spell research reducers and all the other time-saving devices. I don't even use most of the ones I get for free, so why would I want more? 

Same story with the cosmetics. I have so many of those I literally had to designate a character to hold them all in storage for everyone else. That character has a bank full of costumes and appearance gear. And still no-one uses any of it!

All the while I'm not buying anything from the cash shop, my funds keep increasing. Not because I ever spend a cent on cash shop cash. Not for at least a decade and a half, anyway. I did, once, back in the glory days of SOE, when Smed's team were so far out of touch with reality that they ran Triple Station Cash sales and let you buy expansions off the back of them.

I bought some Station Cash then, alright. Everyone did. It was like they were giving it away. And then, naturally, I never spent most of it. I still have it. Some on my main account. More on the account that used to be my main account back then. And still more on Mrs. Bhagpuss's long-dormant account. And her second account. Darkpaw's accountants have got to love us...

Most of what I have on my subbed account doesn't come from those long-ago sales but from the monthly 500DBC stipend that come with the subscription. That adds up over time. 6k a year and it's a rare year when I spend even a third of it. 

When I logged in this morning I had just shy of 35k in the bank. 

So I bought an island. 

Frostfell has started. I knew it had because I saw Stargrace's post about it last night. This morning I thought I'd check if there was anything new for this year, which there isn't, really, other than the expected stuff you can buy either for gold and platinum in game or for DBC in the store. There's a new Achievement and some new places where you can mark your name for everyone to see (Always inexplicably popular.) A couple of odds and ends but no new quests or anything like that.

And, really, why would there be? Do you have any idea how big the Frostfell event is?  No? Go read Angeliana's post on the forums then! She lists over two dozen specific quests, many of which are actually quite lengthy chains, and that's not even all of them. Plus the gazillion other non-quest activities and entertainments you can enjoy between now and the fifth of January. It sounds like a long stretch but if you wanted to do everything, it'd probably take you that long.

But as I was skimming the list I spotted something I hadn't seen before: "Introducing your own wonderland."

A Prestige House. Now that's one thing I will spend my funny money on. I bought one only a couple of months ago, during the other big holiday of the Norathian year, Nights of the Dead. I think I mentioned it in passing but I didn't do a post on it. I was probably waiting until I'd decorated it, which of course I haven't.

Haven't set foot in the place, in fact. Redbeard was saying only yesterday how decorating wasn't really his thing. He was spurred into talking about it by the arrival of housing in World of Warcraft, my own thoughts on which I originally intended to include in this very post. We're a long way in now, though. It seems a bit late to start. Probably better to save it for a post of its own.

Decorating kind of is my thing, as in I enjoy it and I'm not bad it it, both in game and in real life, but in both cases the downside of decorating is that it takes ages. I have several well-decorated houses in EQII, not all of them on the account or even the server I currently play on, but every one of my characters has at least one home and most of them have several and I just do not have the time to make all of those houses look good.

Or even most of them. I ought to log everyone in and count the houses one day. I would guess that, just on  my main account alone, there are more than fifty. Who has time to decorate that?

So, naturally, I've just bought another. Only this one is a little different. 

Most Prestige homes, even if they're really full zones, which in EQII they often are, come with a pre-built residence of some kind. Mara, for example, the place where my Berserker has been living for many years, ever since he moved out of his huge, sprawling Maj`Dul mansion, is a full zone with a complete town, many of the buildings in which are fully habitable.

Winter's Island, the absolutely beautiful new Prestige Home I signed the deeds on today, is exactly that: an island. Small, somewhat bean-shaped, in the middle of a blue, blue sea. It has an odd climate. Winter at one end, Fall at the other. Grass or snow. Bare branches or autumn leaves. 

All around, sticking out of the sea like spikes, are rocky islets. At least twenty of them by my count. Most of which you can get to and build on. 

The place is big. Bigger than it looks. I flew between the two farthest-apart rocky islets and timed myself on a stopwatch. It took more than three minutes on a fast flying mount. Just to ride from one end of the main island to the other takes half a minute.

As Angeliana says "There is so much potential." There really is because all you have to start with is some land and a lot of sea. 

Here's where EQII differs from many theme-park MMORPGs when it comes to housing. (The exceptions I can think of would be WildStar, which hardly counts any more, and maybe Rift.) You aren't limited to decorating. You can also build.  

In the before-times, back when Mrs. Bhagpuss used to be big on the decorating scene, all building had to be done by re-purposing existing furniture items, something people did with enormous imagination and skill. Latterly, though, Darkpaw has catered to the obvious demand by supplying actual building materials, bricks, tiles, stairs, doors, windows, the lot, all of which you can obtain in abundance both through crafting and questing and via the Cash Shop.

I have never built anything in EQII. Which, now I come to think of it, is weird. I build things all the time in survival games. I've been doing it for years. Until now, though, when I'm in Norrath I've been content to stick to decorating.

Will Winter's Island change all that? I have no idea. Yet. 

If I do get the building bug, though, maybe it'll finally give me something to spend my imaginary money on.

Or You Could Always, Y'know, Write Less?

All year I've been talking about not spending as much time playing video games as I used to but, coming into November, I think I might have hit a twenty-five year low. If I play more than a couple of hours a day now it's a big gaming day for me.

I'm not having one of those burnouts that used to be so common and which I always found so peculiar. I seem to hear a lot less about those lately. I guess most of the folks that were prone to them have flamed and faded now, leaving the rest of us slow-smoldering remnants slowly turning into gaming charcoal, barely glowing, giving off almost no heat at all.

No, I haven't had enough of gaming. Nor have I really chosen to take a break. It's just happening.

It's as if a lot of other things have drifted up and gently nudged me off the gaming highway I was on, leaving me to putter down the slow, meandering back roads of the hobby instead. I'm not even sorry about it, really, although it does feel odd, if I stop and think about it

I've commented before about how strange it is that the more free time I have in theory, the less free all my time feels in practice. I got a lot more gaming in when I was working full-time than I ever have since I reduced my hours and shifted down into semi-retirement, that's for sure. Also I watched a lot more movies then and read more books. 

I strongly recommend anyone who thinks they can safely defer their cultural experiences until they retire to think again. I had so many plans about what I'd use the extra time for when it came. Not a one of them feels realistic now I'm almost there. That whole "Ask a busy person" saw applies to leisure, too.

All of which might sound a little negative, which would be misleading. I'm enjoying my new routines. Well, by and large. For example, following her minor heart-attack in the summer, I have to go visit my 93-year-old mother three times a week now rather than the couple of times a month, which had been my schedule for years. It could have been a problem but it led me to acquire a car of my own for the first time in many years, which feels good and it's a very pleasant drive. I like driving anyway, so it's nice to have a reason to be doing it.

Then there's Beryl. One of the big eaters of time in recent years has been having a dog around. I spend more time almost every day taking her for walks and playing with her at home than I spend on gaming and I can't help thinking that's a good thing. 

I've always loved being outdoors, walking, in both city and country but I'd fallen a little out of the habit, particularly when my gaming time was at it's peak. Even when I made the effort, I wouldn't bother if the weather wasn't great. Now I'm out every day for at least a while, although it should be said that Beryl is not a fan of wet weather. If the rain isn't actually hammering down, though, we can usually find somewhere to go for a half-hour walk. If the weather's even halfway decent that'll often stretch to an hour and a half.

Luckily, she tends to lie fairly dormant during the day, which gives me a chance to do other things, like gaming. Except mostly I'm more likely to be doing this instead; writing a blog post about the gaming I'm not doing. Then, in the evening she wakes up and wants attention, meaning I don't often get to do much else but play with her, feed her and walk her between tea and bedtime.

When Beryl crashes out around eight or nine in the evening, I tend to go to bed, too. It's earlier than I've ever gone to bed since I was a child. I could stay up (I'm a grown-up. I can stay up as late as I want.) but since I got my (Refurbished.) laptop I've found it too tempting to lie down in comfort and use it instead of sitting up at my desk. 

For most of the year that's meant a few hours spent working on AI-assisted songwriting but very recently I've swapped back to watching TV and... playing games. Partly because I had a gap in my schedule with the music-making on hiatus but mostly because I'm still using the stand-in desktop pending Black Friday, it occurred to me it might be worth doing a little experimenting to see just what games would run on the decidedly non-gaming laptop. I tried it back at the start of the year, when I was playing several titles via an external SDD, most notably Cloudpunk, but I'd not done much about it since.

One of the things that nudged me into trying again was the news that Amazon's withdrawal from the gaming sector had led to a rebranding of Prime Gaming. They sent me an "important update" about it. 

Before I read the email, my first thought was that they were going to close the gaming offer down altogether. Then I thought maybe they were just going to stop giving away free games. Eventually, it dawned on me I could stop guessing and just read the email.

It turned out to be good news. Instead of closing the whole thing down, it looks as though Amazon has slightly expanded its Prime offer. There will still be new games to claim every month and access to all previously-claimed games continues (Although the fact they even had to mention it suggests it isn't considered a permanent right, which hadn't really occurred to me.) 

I can see how we might lose access to the games that were playable only on Amazon's own gaming service, should that be terminated at some future date, but I hadn't considered that the titles claimed via GOG or Epic might also disappear. Not, I should make it clear, that there's any suggestion of that happening just now. But the phrasing does make me wonder about the long-term prospects for those libraries.

The bonus for Prime members is that now, instead of having access to a selection of games on Luna, Amazon's remote gaming streaming service, now we have full access to everything on the "Standard" package. Also Prime Gaming has been rebranded as Luna Gaming, effectively if not officially. All claims are now made through the Luna website.

It nudged me into wondering just how many games in my Prime Gaming library would be playable on the laptop. As I've often mentioned, sometimes satirically, there's always been a tendency for Prime to hand out some very old games. My laptop may not be capable of running much that's new but some of these Prime giveaways are virtually pre-historic!

I installed Prime/Luna and also Good Old Games and started trying a few out. I began with Lake, which I'd almost finished on the desktop, but the save files would appear to be held locally. I could transfer them, I'm sure, but it seemed like too much trouble, especially since I'm most likely only a session or two from the end.

I tried The Academy, Dungeon Rushers and Dark Envoy. They all ran perfectly but none of them grabbed me. Next, I looked at the huge quantity of point&click adventures I'd claimed, all of which, I'm sure, the laptop would handle easily, but nothing caught my fancy. I really wanted something combat-oriented and turn-based, like Dungeon of Naheulbeuk. 

Surprisingly, DoN has become my benchmark for turn-based RPGs. Well, I guess that would still be Baldur's Gate but it's a long time since I played any of that series The German spoof is a lot fresher in my mind. And so far I've had very little success finding anything that feels both similar and satisfying.

It was in that frame of mind that I was going through the list of games I'd claimed, well over two hundred of them, when I spotted a familiar title. Familiarish, anyway: Naheulbeuk's Dungeon Master. I'd completely forgotten about that one.

It's a standalone game set in the same dungeon as the original, featuring some of the same characters only instead of being an RPG, it's one of those management sims where you have to set up and maintain the dungeon so that NPCs can come in and do the adventuring. I've never really fancied that end of things, which seems like all the work for none of the glory or indeed the fun but I figured I might as well give it a go.

And it hooked me immediately. I've played every evening for the last few days, at least ninety minutes each time. There's a campaign storyline, which is where I chose to start, but there's also a sandbox version, which I'll very likely try after I lose the campaign.

I'm pretty sure I will lose it because I had no idea what I was doing for quite a while. The first two stories of my tower are a chaotic, muddled mess. The third, to which I've just gained access, is only any better because it's mostly empty still. I'm sure it'll be just as bad soon enough.

That I'm already considering my options for a second run through the campaign, and imagining what I might do in a sandbox setting, says everything that needs to be said about how enjoyable I'm finding the game. I'm not sure what it is about the Naheulbeuk series that works so well for me but clearly it's something.

That constitutes the main thrust of my gaming at the moment. Apart from NDM, the rest of my game-time of late has been limited to Overseer missions in EverQuest II and the occasional, short session in Blue Protocol: Star Resonance. 

I did manage to stay logged into EQII long enough during the Nights of the Dead holiday to collect the new craft books and buy my Necromancer all the petamorph wands she was missing from years past. There were a lot. I also had her buy the new, prestige house, which looks great and will be far more manageable than the vast, sprawling castle she supposedly lives in but which she barely ever visits. Now I just have to find time to move her stuff across and start decorating.

The very interesting-looking new scenario for Once Human has arrived, along with the oddly appropriate crossover event with Palworld. I'm keen to do something about both of those but there are several things stopping me and only one of them is personal inertia.

Even though I thought the stand-in computer wouldn't be able to run a big, flashy, new game like Once Human, I patched it up anyway and logged in to test the theory, which proved to be false. The game runs acceptably on the same graphic settings I've always used and better still if I turn them down just a notch. 

That means I can't use my old PC as an excuse for not playing. Another get-out clause would be that I'm holding back from trying out the new scenario because I'd need to swap characters. The one I'd been playing has finally found herself on a Permanent server and I am not about to move her after the time it's taken to get her onto one. I could either start over from scratch yet again or I guess I could move my original and best-equipped character to a server running the new scenario. Still thinking on it.

The real reason, though, is that I don't think I'll be able to find the time to progress any character very far. At most I might manage a bit of dabbling. That's about all I'm good for at the moment - dabbling.

I noticed Syp saying he was planning on focusing more on CRPGs and less on MMOs in the future. I find I'm no longer able to make that much of a distinction. Unless I stop and think about it, I'm not always even sure to what degree some of the games I'm playing are multiplayer or otherwise. What I do notice now is that the level of regular commitment required to make consistent and meaningful progress in a traditional MMORPG is often beyond me.

Of course, as this blog evidences, I've always been a dabbler and a dilettante by nature when it comes to gaming, be that on or offline, solo or multiplayer. I haven't undergone any kind of sea-change in attitude or approach. It's more that where I used to dabble at gaming for hour after hour, day after day, these days I just dabble at dabbling. 

Not that any of the above is enough to stop me adding yet more games I won't really play to the pile. Today's post was going to be about something else entirely. It was going to be a First Impressions piece about Duet Night Abyss, that not-a-gacha open-world RPG I said I probably wouldn't be playing. Except then I read a piece at MMOBomb where they said the story was quite good. They also made it sound as though there was a lot more to the game than just fighting, which made me think I ought to take a look at it after all.

I remembered DNA was on Steam, which always makes me more likely to give something a try. No wonder almost three-quarters of game developers feel Steam "has a monopoly on the PC games market." Unfortunately, when I went to the game's Store page to download it, I found a note saying "This game is not yet available on Steam". There's no release date, either.

I could download it from the game's own website but who knows if an account there will be transferable later and anyway I really do not want to be filling out another set of details. I'll wait until it comes to Steam, by which time, with a bit of luck, I'll also have a PC capable of playing it properly.

And that, I think, is likely to remain the state of play regarding my gaming for the immediate future. As soon as I do get a new machine, I intend to re-install New World and take a look at the very considerable amount of content I've missed. I'll also be playing the EQII expansion as soon as it arrives, whether or not I have a new machine to play  it on. If necessary, this one should cope well enough.

Whether any of these games, or any more I haven't thought of, will get enough play-time from me to make a lasting impression is another matter entirely. I don't see me freeing up much in the way of gaming-hours unless something quite unexpected happens. 

But then, none of us expected the pandemic, did we? So you never know. 

Property Liable To Flooding. Danger Of Turtles. Would Suit Adventurer Or Similar.

Yesterday's post started out as a double-feature - games I'm currently playing, co-starring EverQuest II and Once Human - but I ran on at such length about EQII I decided to cut Once Human out of the edit altogether. Just as well, really. I didn't have much to say about it.

I do have some screenshots, though. I take a lot of pictures in OH. It begs for it, what with all the gorgeous scenery and the plethora of odd and interesting details. Also, the in-game camera options are fairly easy to use and give very good results, which encourages scrapbooking if not actual photo-journalism.

The reason I don't have much to say about the game itslef, despite having played it a bunch of times recently, is only partly because I'm going through the same old content I've been through and written about several times already. Mainly it's because I've been spending most of my time building my house.

Once Human has excellent housing options although in common with far too many games they don't really begin to show their best side until you've invested a ton of points going down the various branches of the skill tree. That's not what it's called, by the way, but I'm not going to log in just to check the vernacular. We all know how these things work; no-one cares what the labels say.

Because you have to have done a lot of other, unrelated things to earn the points to spend on better materials and architectural features, there's an annoying tendency for all low-level housing to look like prefabricated boxes. I seem to recall this used to be called "ranch-style". That's if people even bother to put a roof on, of course. All too many players just slap down the foundations, place the utilities and leave it at that.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I had my house on a small plateau overlooking one of the starter towns, a location that was attractive enough to acquire several message markers from players suggesting it was a great spot to build a starter home. 

Once Human has an odd - I want to say unique because I can't recall seeing it anywhere before - feature, whereby you can craft a glowing spike to stick in the ground just about anywhere. Then you can append a message, saying anything you want. There seem to be very few restrictions on placing these; you can put them on other people's property or in towns, for example. You see them pretty much everywhere although not any longer in the ludicrous profusion of the weeks following launch, I'm pleased to say.

Initially I found them very annoying. They seemed like nothing but visual pollution and if you took the trouble to click on them and read what people had written they usually turned out to be verbal pollution as well. Most of them wouldn't even qualify as tagging. They didn't even have that much style. 

In my initial run, having been infuriated to find someone had placed one of the damn things inside my house, I searched through the settings until I found the option to switch them off completely. After that, for a long time, I never saw them at all and was very glad of it.

Sometime later, though, probably after I re-started in a new Scenario, I began seeing them again and for some reason I didn't immediately switch them off. Instead, I read a few and found that as the game had matured, so had the players. Some of them, anyway. They were leaving very helpful details on things like where to find gear chests or what strategies to use on instance bosses. The messages can include images and hyperlinks so some of them amounted to full strategy guides inside the game. 

Consequently, I didn't switch the feature off again and now I quite enjoy clicking on the little glowing sticks to see what stories they can tell. I was pleased to read all those confirmations of what a good spot I'd picked but puzzled as to why no-one had followed their own advice and built a home there. Didn't take me long to find out.

Although the site is extremely favorably placed for facilities and views, it's also altogether too close to a "stronghold", a term that seems to mean just about any permanent structure currently infested with deviants. There's a small, unnamed camp of them at the far end of the plateau - completely harmless, decent neighbors, keep themselves to themselves, always ready to lend a cup of sugar provided you put a couple of bullets into them before you ask, that sort of thing - but the mere presence of the buildings they occupy hinders development in that direction and completely prevents expansion.

I found that out when I spent the necessary points to expand my territory only to find the machine wouldn't pony up the extra floor space. As it happened, I'd just received the nod to move on to the third town, Meyer's Market, so I figured I might as well move my whole operation down there.

You can just pick up your entire house with all the fittings, pop it in your bags and flip it out again where you want it to be. I thought about doing that but my house, if you could even call it that, was a mess so I thought it might be better if I just started again from scratch. Building in Once Human is both easy and fun so I was looking forward to it.

And it went really well. I found an excellent spot, also recommended by a previous resident, completely flat, on a large sandbank in the river next to the town. I put down my terminal, claimed the jumbo-sized plot.and started building. At the start pretty much all you need is to build is wood and gravel and there was no shortage of nodes for those right outside, so I started mining and chopping until I couldn't carry any more and then I turned to building.

After two or three sessions doing not much else I had the biggest, most sensibly laid-out house I've had in the game to date. It still looks like a box but it's a well-proportioned box with big, open rooms and high ceilings with plenty of light coming in through the numerous windows and skylights. It isn't much to look at from the outside but the interior has huge potential. I'm very happy with how it's going so far.

I'm not so happy with all the snapping turtles that keep wandering in from the river. They're no threat but they're highly aggressive and when one attacks it makes my character jump back about a yard, which in turn sometimes makes me jump, if I'm not expecting it. I may have to build a fence all around the property to keep them out.

I was enjoying building so much, I went out and did a bunch of missions to level up and get more points to spend in the housing tree. I could now build a much more impressive-looking structure in  stone instead of wood but that would mean going to higher-level areas to mine resources and doing more missions to get more points to open up the recipes for more sophisticated equipment...

And that's how they get you. Not that I'm complaining. It's very entertaining. The only shadow of doubt I have about carrying on down this path is whether the Novice server I'm on is eligible for permanent status, when the current scenario ends. I'm not at all sure the starter servers are included in that program.

And anyway, I want to set up my forever home in the game on one of the servers that has the full map open all the time, north and south. That's going to necessitate a move at some point so there's probably not much point my getting too invested in the server I'm on.

That's what I've been up to in Once Human. I said it wasn't anything new. But it's been a lot of fun. Sometimes more of the same is just what I want.

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.