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Fields Of Mistria is a game with almost no friction. When you’re farming crops, your watering can is always full. When you’re catching fish, there’s no minigame but waiting for the bite. If you forage something but don’t have room in your backpack, it will sit where you left it. After not too long, you’ll unlock the lost and found system, meaning on the next Monday it will be whisked away into a big bucket conveniently near your farm for you to collect.
And, I think because of this, my experience with Mistria is strange. It’s soothing to zone out for an hour and run through several days of wandering around the village and farming, mining, fishing, gifting bits and bobs to NPCs and so on, all working towards new ticks on the game’s absolutely massive checklist. And my checklist is getting full. The museum is overflowing; the mines are reopened down to the depths; my heart levels with the villagers are almost complete. I can’t deny that that feeling of pleasure, while insubstantial, has led to me sinking nearly 70 hours into the game in the last month or so, and I can’t deny enjoying it.
Like everybody else, I am a March girlie.
But I can say it has also been grating. During the low-tension cycle of the daily tasks, there’s plenty of time for thinking about both the (inherent?) political tensions of the farming simulator and the issues I have with this one in particular (more on both of those later). And yet I keep falling for just one more day. And even when I do decide I want to do something more thoughtful, give me a few hours and I’ll think, damn, breaking a few hundred more rocks with a pickaxe sounds really good right now, actually.
Good morning, videogames. Last week's Lie-In was written in advance to cover for my absence, and frankly it was rude for people to continue publishing articles while I was away. Now this week's Lie-In needs to somehow contain almost two weeks of links to writing about videogames. Terrible for me; a bumper crop for you.
Aftermath launched Hater Week, a batch of articles in which they got a lot off their chests. I love this idea. Here's Gita Jackson on why survival games are annoying.
A video game character does not need to eat, drink, or sleep. They do not need to take their meds every day. They don’t go to the bathroom, or get hair cuts, or trim their nails—all these tiny chores that take up time in my life that I never think about but must complete. So why, why, would I play a video game where doing all these chores is not only necessary, but the point.
It’s been another week in PC gaming, plus an extra day because I had some family business so apologies for the late running. Jeremy Peel kicked things off by explaining that Microsoft has always been a problem for PC gaming so we should not expect it to change now. Yes, they gave us DirectX, but they also gave us Games For Windows Live.
It was never clear what value GFWL offered players. Nobody wanted its achievements, Gamerscore or messaging functionality, since the social hubs of PC gamers existed elsewhere. The much-vaunted crossplay between Windows and Xbox 360 barely materialised. And of course, it was the home to plenty of clumsy DRM, a role that sealed its fate in the court of public opinion. GFWL was there to police players rather than to help them.
Graham somehow curated good game writing without even being here. Upon his return he reviewed Emuurom and wants you to know that while it contains vast and complex depths you can still enjoy it for much simpler reasons.
If you love Animal Well and Blue Prince, I think Emuurom could be your new favourite game. Someone less dummy than me might therefore
My hometown swimming pool had this one weird corridor. It was a long, tiled hall from the men's changing room to the main pool. This narrow corridor housed an ankle-deep pool of water, which you stepped down into, went on about two or three metres, and then you stepped out. I think the idea was that your feet are disgusting and must be cleansed before they are allowed to meet other feet. Whatever the rationale, this footbath came to feel like a ritual. A hoofwade before you plunged in proper, a minor something to pass through on your way to better water. It gave a sense of anticipation to this long wet hall. The sound of laughter and whistles echoed from the far end, and to get to those sounds you had to splosh through a rectangular puddle full of concentrated foot cells. Gross, a bit creepy, but also sort of fun.
That swimming pool is gone now. They bulldozed it and built a new one the next town over. But I thought of its weird hallway more than once as I waded through the eerie and abandoned megaleisure complex of Pools. It is suggested this place is a mysterious and sinister purgatory, but I would 100% visit it in real life.
Pools is a walking simulator from 2024 based on the internet fad of "liminal space", the same uncanny architectural Reddit fuel that spawned the Backrooms. You wake up in an echoing and dripping waterworld and are forced to explore its labyrinth of swimming pools. It is a cathedral to chlorine. The sound design is incredible. Walk from one tightly flooded tunnel into a huge cistern with towering pillars and you can hear the entire atmosphere change. Sure, this is a first-person wanderabout for stoned architecture students, but it's also just a good soak for the senses. It is the closest I have come to feeling wet through a screen.
I am back from my Scottish absence, which means that instead of being prepared a week in advance, this article is being written in real-time. Click on it quick enough and you can see my cursor still scrabbling across the screen, laying out words about three new games you might like to try this coming weekend - and, as a new bonus, adding words from the Jank crew on what we're hoping to divert ourselves with this weekend.
Let us know in the comments, as always, what you're going to be playing.
I've been reading Tower Dungeon, Tsutomu Nihei's manga which answers the question: what if there was a big tower? This RPG makes you the manager of such a place, with a Round Table of hot knights to send on quests and keep happy. I love the loose lines of the character artwork and UI, and am encouraged by the ability to turn back time (via a demon in the basement) to reverse previous decisions.
Total Playtime is now the official Jank podcast, and is produced thanks to the support of our paying subscribers (and formerly ourbackers on Patreon). This week’s episode is free, but subscribers get additional episodes every other week. You may join them bysubscribing here, and you can findall previous episodes here.
It’s a free-to-all episode this week, so Alice, Nate and myself turned ourselves to the major issues of the day: Xboxes are really expensive, how a Skyrim username error can get you wrongly imprisoned for soliciting minors, a new Thimbleweed Park and a very detailed explanation of how good the Space Marine x Helldivers 2 partnership is.
Join us for a detailed overview of the Astra Militarum, a half-remembered summary of the Xbox P&L and a fleeting cameo from Alice’s dog. Plus: children who chew on cigars from birth, engaging worm protocol, and clown husbandry.
Our music is by God Ribbon, our art is by Marsh Davies and this week our editing is by Dave of the Sonic The Comic podcast who did a banger job even with limited guidance. Thanks to backers of Jank (formerly
At its best, Emuurom leads you to make new discoveries several times per minute. You are exploring a world, screen-by-screen, with nothing but a scanner you can point at the flora and fauna. Scan a cloud? It rains. The rain falls on a flower? It blooms. Scan a bird? It flies left to right. Scan a different bird? It shrieks. The shriek touches a flower? It splits into seeds. What do the seeds do? You'll discover that soon enough, with a little playful experimentation, and then discover another thing and another thing. Playing Emuurom is like being parachuted into the middle of Moominland without Tove Jansson's prose to guide you and so each new creature and interaction is yours to piece together.
That's Emuurom's surface layer, and it's a joy. It's where I live. Many people will try to convince you that this puzzle-platformer's greatness lies in the cleverness beneath that surface, however. Its developer has spent eight years constructing layer upon layer of secrets which reveal themselves only via perseverance and effort. Emuurom contains, for example, a unique language to translate. That's the kind of worldbuilding that makes a certain kind of person immediately excited, and it's a transparently impressive act of design. For me, a dummy, such depths are both admirable and off-putting, and so I am here to tell you that Emuurom is something much more than clever. It's fun.
There's a pronunciation guide for every weird lil' guy's name.
Jumping on things and scanning them are the only modes of interaction here. Emuurom has no combat and your character, sent to this planet like a data upload, has no health bar and cannot die. Instead, the creatures that populate this planet either passively let you shove them around, move along fixed paths, or shove you back when prompted. One area has dolphin-like creatures that leap out of the water when you scan them, for example, so you scan them when they're beneath you and they shove you to a platform that's higher than you can jump.
I'm giving away that discovery for free because Emuurom is full of them, and you will intuit much of what you must do to progress without much conscious thought. The trick is to just keep scanning everything, old or new, and to trust that the game will reveal itself to you, at least until you reach its endgame. These reveals are delivered in part via written descriptions of the creatures and plants you encounter, each of which have names, behaviours, and occasionally short snippets of dialogue. They build up a picture of a world that is playfully alien and silly, when the pixels and puzzles might otherwise have been austere.
