Fallen London/Sunless Sea

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Haramburger said:
Cultist Simulator and Sunless Sea are both great games with atmosphere and writing, but they expect way too much mechanical grind from you, it's quite disgusting. Making money/your job and dispelling depression or the steps to madness is Cultist Simulator are on WAY too tight of a timetable, to the point that it's distracting from the actual narrative elements. Then you start worrying about investigators and you can barely get anything done to even think about attempting puzzles on your own.
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I've beaten CS a few times. There are a couple great QoL mods available, such as one that automatically keeps your job running so you don't have to manually drag it over every 90 seconds. It will grab Reason as needed. Love the writing but it is such a grind that I only return to it every once in a while and I rarely finish a game.

Book of Hours seems interesting but I haven't actually given it a try yet despite buying it on day of release. If it's less of an aggressive grind than CS, I will probably enjoy it.
 
ZMOT said:
accused being the operative word.
unless they get a verdict they can fuck right off.
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How it seems to be in the industry, people will inevitably hire a crazy woman who will give an ultimatum of either they accuse the person of raping them, or the person selling out his ideas and insert the woman's retarded pozzed vision (and they'll accuse the guy anyways the milliseconds it stopped being beneficial).

Just don't hire women ever. At least trannies are so ugly no one will ever buy them being raped (they'll just dig up your past instead).
 
Haramburger said:
It's starting to seem like all the best games are made by accused rapists, unironically.
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Lol. The accusations are "He got drunk at the New Year office party and behaved inappropriately toward a staff member" AND THEN MARRIED HER. She is the other half of Weather Factory and got cancelled along with him after she refused to help the coworkers pull the rug out from their boss to steal his company. The other one comes from an unhinged American female game developer who was promised a position in his company but he changed his mind so she got angery. He managed to "rape" her despite literally being on a different continent. It was a shitshow.

Anyway, on the subject of "Book of Hours". This thing is worse than crack, I have clocked more than 60 hours on it already and can't let go of the thing. It is the krokodil of crafting RPGs, it's making my social and professional life die and fall off. Send help.

Having said that, it is a game about running a library, so you better be an autist who gets off from categorizing things. You need to practically create your own filing system to succeed, I have assembled the mother of all spreadsheets with 250+ cross-referencing entries and am nowhere near done. Books. Tea. Kennedy writing. Definitely my personal GOTY 2023.
 
Fighting Type Pokemon said:
Having said that, it is a game about running a library, so you better be an autist who gets off from categorizing things. You need to practically create your own filing system to succeed, I have assembled the mother of all spreadsheets with 250+ cross-referencing entries and am nowhere near done. Books. Tea. Kennedy writing. Definitely my personal GOTY 2023.
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How is it plot wise? Is there a single final resolution or it's primarily "create your own experience" game?
 
Fighting Type Pokemon said:
Lol. The accusations are "He got drunk at the New Year office party and behaved inappropriately toward a staff member" AND THEN MARRIED HER. She is the other half of Weather Factory and got cancelled along with him after she refused to help the coworkers pull the rug out from their boss to steal his company. The other one comes from an unhinged American female game developer who was promised a position in his company but he changed his mind so she got angery. He managed to "rape" her despite literally being on a different continent. It was a shitshow.
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Fascinating. How the heck was everyone doing the rug pulling not fired on the spot?
 
wtfNeedSignUp said:
How is it plot wise? Is there a single final resolution or it's primarily "create your own experience" game?
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Damn right there is a resolution. More than one, actually. You see, Hush House is kind of serious business: it is one of the few places where the secret powers of the world, both divine and mundane, have agreed to keep the knowledge that Man Is Not Meant To Know. Congratulations, you have been appointed its keeper. Except the place burned down in 1929, and now, seven years later, you need to restore it room after room, book after book.

The tone is notably different from Cultist Simulator. If Cult Sim was a desperate, mad race against the spinning timers and you were a self-taught, half-mad adept that conjured Humanity's primal fears out of cigarette smoke and uneasy tension floating in the air with a healthy dose of murder, cannibalism and occasionally
(the Grail ascension requires you to fuck and eat humans until you swell into a bloated monstrosity that splits open to give birth to a new, perfect and immortal you)
Book of Hours is a pensive game about a scholar. We do not do this kind of thing here, sir, this is a library.

So you just travel along unhurriedly, unbothered by timers (if you missed one, there is always tomorrow) and troubled only by the arrival of an occasional visitor who wants access to one of your books and the mysterious season of mists that can wipe your hard-earned lessons if you were an absolute melon and did not convert them into skills properly. it is a very mild setback mechanic.

The plot revolves around you puzzling together the history of Hush House, its formber inhabitants (the building was a prison at some time, and a castle before that, and before that a monastery, and before that a pagan shine...) until you decide
and rewrite the bloody reality in accordance with YOUR vision of what it it supposed to be.
Don't mess with librarians.

Of course, the game is challenging enough not to be straightforward, so it is likely to steer you in a different direction from what you had originally intended...
 
Fighting Type Pokemon said:
Having said that, it is a game about running a library, so you better be an autist who gets off from categorizing things. You need to practically create your own filing system to succeed, I have assembled the mother of all spreadsheets with 250+ cross-referencing entries and am nowhere near done. Books. Tea. Kennedy writing. Definitely my personal GOTY 2023.
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I can't wait. I love categorizing things. I have a spreadsheet to track the health of my plants, fountain pens/ink, and nail polish.
 
I really liked the concept of Cultist Simulator, but I don't remember actually finishing it due to the grind. So hearing that this one is a bit less of that is pretty enticing, I'll have to try it out.
 
Mr.Miyagi said:
I really liked the concept of Cultist Simulator, but I don't remember actually finishing it due to the grind. So hearing that this one is a bit less of that is pretty enticing, I'll have to try it out.
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Don't get me wrong, the crafting here does get a bit tedious sometimes. Tossing a book in a crafting station to get a matching memory each time you need to create something becomes repetitive after a while, but... There is no rush. Nobody says you have to do it immediately or the game ends. A crafting chain of 6 actions can be completed over the course of several days with leftover actions. Upgrading your basic resource or skill cards removes intermediate links in the crafting chain, speeding things up. It is still an improvement over Cultist Sim.
 
Just cleared the bridge to the House and I'm already liking this a lot. Obviously I'm not far in at all so I might encounter some hiccups but this is more enjoyable than CS so far.
 
I feel like I'm playing the game backwards, because I have a whole bunch of skills and soul aspects, but haven't been able to level up any (except one skill, which I miraculously got to level 4, thanks to Numa. Maybe I fucked up with putting skills in the wrong parts of the tree, but there's only two options so I don't know. None of the tools that let me upgrade soul aspects match what I've got so far, so I just keep digging deeper.
 
Finally finished Ambition: Nemesis, the first time I was able to complete one of those things. Knifegate was a right bitch, but I was assisted heavily with the past couple holidays having decent money grinds. The story and ambition mesh pretty well for my character, but it's a shame that the treasure I went with gives Shadowy +10 which is the attribute I have the least use of. I could have gone with the different ending to get a more suitable item, but RP wise it wouldn't have made sense for my character to go that far and NOT murder the shit out of a Master.

Also just got GHR through Parabola and building tracks en route to Balmoral. Doing Bone Market grinding to get all the shit I need to get the tracks and getting them laid.
 
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This feels ridiculously like a Sunless Sea song.

Haramburger said:
The latest game in this loosely connected multiverse of "occult british lore-heavy games" is out, Book of Hours. It's more connected to Cultist SImulator than the Skies games. The year is 1930, and you are appointed librarian of Hush House, a mysterious old manor that's also the hot spot for occultists and the psychos that hunt them. It's a visually lush solitaire card game where you re-build the massive estate, find books, sort them on shelves however you want and then read them at your leisure, pursuing occult goals like making the greatest work of art in your era, or forging yourself into an immortal god, or just sipping tea with the Alistair Crowleys of the day as they come to you for similar goals. It's likely to get 3-4 DLC expansions over it's lifetime based on Cultist Simulator's lifespan and has a calmer, less lethal approach to difficulty in general. If you buy it in the first week, you get all future DLC for free.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=38D565xKp-8
Also the creator, Alexis Kennedy, who also made the company Failbetter Games, got kind of kicked from his own company for abusing women allegations(which do seem shaky) and had to make this game under a new company name, Weather Factory. Also to make the mobile version of Cultist Simulator he had to switch publishers and the kickstarter for this game was provably sabotaged by his old company, lol. It's starting to seem like all the best games are made by accused rapists, unironically.
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I saw this too. It gives kind of faggy Harry Potter ish vibes, but I was still interested in that premise of running an arcane library.
I guess the Harry Potter vibes were me misunderstanding it.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
I saw this too. It gives kind of faggy Harry Potter ish vibes, but I was still interested in that premise of running an arcane library.
I guess the Harry Potter vibes were me misunderstanding it.
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BoH does put you into a massive lavishly furnished British castle/occult library with four poster beds and candles, but that's pretty much where simlarities end. It doesn't have any people in it aside from yourself and an occasional visitor from the village and has a certain lonelisness vibe, "the keeper of a remote lighthouse" kind. As for the library part, you are not loaning out books, but there is A LOT of cataloguing. Sometimes a special visitor shows up and asks for a consultation with a book from your collection, but it is entirely up to you if you indulge them.
 
Fighting Type Pokemon said:
BoH does put you into a massive lavishly furnished British castle/occult library with four poster beds and candles, but that's pretty much where simlarities end. It doesn't have any people in it aside from yourself and an occasional visitor from the village and has a certain lonelisness vibe, "the keeper of a remote lighthouse" kind. As for the library part, you are not loaning out books, but there is A LOT of cataloguing. Sometimes a special visitor shows up and asks for a consultation with a book from your collection, but it is entirely up to you if you indulge them.
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The game is pretty nice, but it's pretty thin on content in some aspects. All the different origins play exactly the same, making replayability a complete drag. Affairs and visitors is also seriously underdeveloped, especially since you have some pretty big names which can visit your place...then they just take a book a leave, it could have been a gold mine for storytelling; same thing with the affairs and being able to steer them in one direction or another depending on who you help and how.

Still, it has a lot of potential and is way better as a sequel than Sunless Skies was to Sunless Sea.
 
Need for Sped said:
The game is pretty nice, but it's pretty thin on content in some aspects. All the different origins play exactly the same, making replayability a complete drag.
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That's because the game was never meant to be replayed. Alexis, being the game design savant that he is, actually admitted it when he remade the endings gallery screen in one of the early patches, it was meant to be a one-shot experience because "why would anyone want to play it again". Bless his little striped writer socks, sometimes the man comes across mad as a hatter a little weird.

Anyway, he is currently adding quality of life improvements (last patch allowed using high-level memories instead of craftng stations to upgrade parts of the soul, next patch will allow you to order things like tea, coffee and copper wire from mainland by mail) and there will be DLC. He is saying he's full of ideas, so there is that. Affairs being underwhelming is the most common criticism coming from everyone who played them, so he is aware of the problem at least.
 
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