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Cultist Simulator
Mostly complaints about not feeling enough pressure that playing it seems the simpler option, which happened with Sunless Sea. At one point I got close enough that opening the Peacock Door seemed a possibility, but then my former compatriots put Constable Sinombre behind bars thanks to how I had him put about half the available recruits for his cult away in the early game. w h o o p s
Mostly complaints about not feeling enough pressure that playing it seems the simpler option, which happened with Sunless Sea. At one point I got close enough that opening the Peacock Door seemed a possibility, but then my former compatriots put Constable Sinombre behind bars thanks to how I had him put about half the available recruits for his cult away in the early game. w h o o p s
Love Nikki, or, why in the world did I protest the sorting quiz when it put me in Andan*, subtitled, came out shipping two best enemies playing sexy games of chess on a mountain as usual
Play experience:
The art is incredible, and increasingly extravagant, but I can't call it an amazing dressup game in good conscience. Came here for the classical chinese dresses (and I've surely spent enough for at least one real set of quality hanfu) but while I don't feel bad, since I'm used to buying attractive pixels, the items on LN aren't that flexible in use -- movable background items are nice, but the default skin tone being light (10 unique non-white makeups out of 273 total in game), plus the clipping issues and how you can't freely layer the non-movable clothing items -- it's frustrating. (From the bottom of my heart: Small items that allow your pictures to be smoothed out are critical!...) I'm also disappointed by the faces/makeups -- if only the eyes and mouths were separate. It looks like the artists aren't paying attention to how the faces work at phone size rather than in closeups on the HQ pics, and there are honestly some terrifying faces with what looks like bloody maws ;-;
*Spending Money To Solve Problems**, the Andan Way!
**the problem of not having pretty things
On plot:
I hear that games that begin with light silliness and expand into a [tackboard of strings meme] aren't uncommon? LN could...have done with it earlier. Up until ch 15 the game dragged, prompting players to skip the plot, so when the fun melodrama finally began you get complaints about too much tapping.They finally started using the mechanics to bolster the action after ch 15, which was fun. (Also \\\o/// STAIRS OF SORROW FINALLY A PICK AND CHOOSE HELL but a hell where I still love most suits, tragiquelly, so there goes 10k diamonds) Anyway I've had this image as my desktop for a week. World as chessboard I'M FAR TOO SUSCEPTIBLE.
-- I'll admit I loled when reading about the chapter fifteen spoiler. Like nothing does drive home that it's a chinese game than,,,,swords forged by sacrificing people rehashing the national trauma from nine hundred years ago (I'm not over the Jin invasion of the Song dynasty either given the knock-on effect on the later dynasties BUT LIKE) Invaders from the North taking a city and forcing the inhabitants to flee, which causes the capital to flee? A scumbag in the military hierarchy dragging his heels in sending reinforcements, leading to a broken siege?
.......unfortunately as a webnovel consumer I am exactly the sucker pandered to by writers dropping a generic historical chinese power intrigue into the middle of ten million floofy pink lolita dresses.
On ships:
...Along with all the other conspiracies running merrily along in Miraland, there's a plot tangle in the China-expy. Unfortunately I...have a ship manifesto in me, for the fancy dragon and phoenix themed family heads (which makes them as good as married through mythological symbolism alone....)...........I ship baizhu 20% setup, 25% That Chess Game, 25% Bai Yongxi's personality, and the rest for their fashionable sprites next to each other.
I hear that games that begin with light silliness and expand into a [tackboard of strings meme] aren't uncommon? LN could...have done with it earlier. Up until ch 15 the game dragged, prompting players to skip the plot, so when the fun melodrama finally began you get complaints about too much tapping.They finally started using the mechanics to bolster the action after ch 15, which was fun. (Also \\\o/// STAIRS OF SORROW FINALLY A PICK AND CHOOSE HELL but a hell where I still love most suits, tragiquelly, so there goes 10k diamonds) Anyway I've had this image as my desktop for a week. World as chessboard I'M FAR TOO SUSCEPTIBLE.
-- I'll admit I loled when reading about the chapter fifteen spoiler. Like nothing does drive home that it's a chinese game than,,,,
.......unfortunately as a webnovel consumer I am exactly the sucker pandered to by writers dropping a generic historical chinese power intrigue into the middle of ten million floofy pink lolita dresses.
On ships:
...Along with all the other conspiracies running merrily along in Miraland, there's a plot tangle in the China-expy. Unfortunately I...have a ship manifesto in me, for the fancy dragon and phoenix themed family heads (which makes them as good as married through mythological symbolism alone....)...........I ship baizhu 20% setup, 25% That Chess Game, 25% Bai Yongxi's personality, and the rest for their fashionable sprites next to each other.
Script for their romantic mountaintop date, under summary. It is customary to use dragon and war metaphors in weiqi, but this mini visual novel bit was intense as hell even in translation, and the translator was good. They picked sexy dragon proverbs out of the I Ching for the section headings! "Leap in the Abyss", "Dragons War in the Wild", and so on. I enjoyed the pacing of item drops during the mini story, whose descriptions provided commentary from a bamboo growing on the charred temple overlooking their game, and on BYX's character.
Just -- Bai Yongxi is the dragon (themed character) most to my taste that I've found so far. He appears in chapter seventeen when I'd already gotten to play with his free model (brief moment of mourning for past me who assumed it was Nikki who'd get to wear his azure dragon court robes ;-;) My face when it turned out he has a personality! ... He looks like the bog-typical restrained confucian gentleman. That blank face, those solemn perfect brocades. The staidness represented by the regent of the empire, also the head of the most orthodox family. He doesn't have that brutality that you get sometimes with dragons because he's too much of a junzi gentle as jade, so that wildness got funneled straight into ambition for reform. ZYX may be a smirky turkey but even he acknowledged BYX's abilities, placing the stability of Cloud into his hands, when BYX himself would like to drive them into the wind rather than be the steady helmsman --- and in return:
Just -- Bai Yongxi is the dragon (themed character) most to my taste that I've found so far. He appears in chapter seventeen when I'd already gotten to play with his free model (brief moment of mourning for past me who assumed it was Nikki who'd get to wear his azure dragon court robes ;-;) My face when it turned out he has a personality! ... He looks like the bog-typical restrained confucian gentleman. That blank face, those solemn perfect brocades. The staidness represented by the regent of the empire, also the head of the most orthodox family. He doesn't have that brutality that you get sometimes with dragons because he's too much of a junzi gentle as jade, so that wildness got funneled straight into ambition for reform. ZYX may be a smirky turkey but even he acknowledged BYX's abilities, placing the stability of Cloud into his hands, when BYX himself would like to drive them into the wind rather than be the steady helmsman --- and in return:
Romance! <Also, Bai Yongxi's hair was definitely, totally, absolutely pink like his cousin Bai Jinjin's before stress (ZYX) turned it white. Pink hair BYX forever.
Nikkimi is canon, so is best girl Yue Qianshuang x Zhu Ruosheng. Gallant general and her strategist!! They eat the tangyuan Yue made at New Year's <3
Nikkimi is canon, so is best girl Yue Qianshuang x Zhu Ruosheng. Gallant general and her strategist!! They eat the tangyuan Yue made at New Year's <3
...........There was a tumblr post about how games should be enjoyable during the play process rather than only for what you get. Playing Cultist Simulator is not enjoyable - someone said it could be renamed "societal lifestock simulator" which, too real. Constantly running down on money and the ability to deal, flailing through a tabletop of things to check up on that constantly refreshes itself into a messier state, while having to concentrate on talking to people beyond that ---------- I have fifty decks of ominous cards irl! I can put Karol Szymanowski's Nocturne and Tarantella, Op. 28 on repeat by myself!!....
I want delicious words, but they also have to be acquired through the game (I've seen Frangiclave but was too optimistic about my patience). Bought the phone version where I could take screenshots to my heart's content, at which point I hoarded them without ever taking another look _(´ཀ`」 ∠)_
Love Nikki I also play without using my acquisitions - forty percent of total clothes in five months, which means I haven't touched the majority of those items HOWEVER what LN replicates is....the emotion of buying craft supplies, which as we know is totally different from using your craft supplies. Constant tiny hits of pleasure when I finish making a piece of clothing. Amazing. You can tell I've played like one game in my life ever.
I want delicious words, but they also have to be acquired through the game (I've seen Frangiclave but was too optimistic about my patience). Bought the phone version where I could take screenshots to my heart's content, at which point I hoarded them without ever taking another look _(´ཀ`」 ∠)_
Love Nikki I also play without using my acquisitions - forty percent of total clothes in five months, which means I haven't touched the majority of those items HOWEVER what LN replicates is....the emotion of buying craft supplies, which as we know is totally different from using your craft supplies. Constant tiny hits of pleasure when I finish making a piece of clothing. Amazing. You can tell I've played like one game in my life ever.
To conclude, not saying I'm a vampire but why are there so many decorative crosses everywhere I didn't actually want a catholicsona simulator, greatly yikes @ the treatment of '''Wasteland''' which is an exoticising mess, not that the generic Europe state is better when they had a city called Heidi, I hate the gachas, the English server needs to bring the scores of free/inexpensive events over rather than sucking our blood dry without giving us Blood Moon {ETA the awful capitalists at Elex decided to give us blood moon this sdfjkhf morning, aka one full month ahead of schedule, and, don't play this game and recharge like I do >:<}, also I went on weibo for this game and oof I remembered why game comments are bad.
Ink Mountains and Mystery
Played this in the winter -- a point and click puzzle game with lovely aesthetics. TBH wandering through grand estates, gardens, and underwater dragon heads is all I want out of a game. It...counts as mise en abyme, when you have representations of paintings nestled inside another, with these paintings being portals to chapters in the game itself? I'm very susceptible to media based on another older work that credits the original creator at the end, and Wang Ximeng died at twenty three with the final painting his only surviving work. Here in this thousand miles of rivers and mountains he has all the time in the world to paint, free as an immortal, while outside the painting the golden age crumbles in the hands of his instructor the Song emperor Huizong (the one that lost the empire). They ride off into the sunset on craneback!! I CRY EVERY TIME. (Also susceptible to floaty bendy immortal-like cultured artists in the Wei-Jin style like Master Miaoshan >.> His best ideas were thanks to two pancakes he cooked for his senior ;-;)
Played this in the winter -- a point and click puzzle game with lovely aesthetics. TBH wandering through grand estates, gardens, and underwater dragon heads is all I want out of a game. It...counts as mise en abyme, when you have representations of paintings nestled inside another, with these paintings being portals to chapters in the game itself? I'm very susceptible to media based on another older work that credits the original creator at the end, and Wang Ximeng died at twenty three with the final painting his only surviving work. Here in this thousand miles of rivers and mountains he has all the time in the world to paint, free as an immortal, while outside the painting the golden age crumbles in the hands of his instructor the Song emperor Huizong (the one that lost the empire). They ride off into the sunset on craneback!! I CRY EVERY TIME. (Also susceptible to floaty bendy immortal-like cultured artists in the Wei-Jin style like Master Miaoshan >.> His best ideas were thanks to two pancakes he cooked for his senior ;-;)
I would probably rec this? It's free! (collab with the Palace Museum in Beijing), if a bit finicky, and so so pretty. Trembling sepia parchment-sky in the distance, pigment spirits going 'kronk' in the foreground, pipas plinking away, the occasional giant salamander and celestial drought causing lovers and rain deer god forming taiji diagrams out of the earth.
