James Cunningham
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The '90s were a fascinating time in gaming, with an incredible number of cultural forces dragging it every which way. The Sega CD, and to a lesser extent, TurboDuo had brought multimedia gaming to the living room (at least for the niche audiences who bought them), but it was clear which way the future was going even if it wasn't within reach yet. CD-quality sound, including and especially voice, were making characters much more lively, and while 3D was obviously on the way, it was still a work in progress. This was the market the 3DO was released into, ridiculously overpriced but incredibly ambitious, even if it was released a few years before the technology that would have made it work was available. The 3DO company spun off Crystal Dynamics, and Crystal Dynamics gave birth to a smart-talking media junkie gecko named Gex.
Everything breaks and entropy always wins, which is all very nice for the nihilists, but the rest of us are trying to get things done. Inevitable deterioration is a problem and in the long run all is dust and ruin, but the long run can be pushed relentlessly into the future seeing as people are basically tool-using monkeys that have gotten very good at making things as they could be rather than accepting them for how they are. When things break we fix them, and while it's a lot easier when the broken things are small enough to pick up and repair by hand, we've also got the tools to work on the damages when it's the entire landscape in need of repair.
There are good career decisions and bad ones, but it's safe to say that any job requiring company solvency a century after it starts can best be described as "terrrible" and only goes downhill from there. Still, it's too late now for a lone settler dispatched to a remote solar system to oversee the creation of a homestead for colonists who will never arrive, so the only options are to either accept living out the rest of their days alone or figure out a way back to civilization. With an upbeat floating robo-drone by their side and a pile of equipment that was cheaper for Alta Interglobal (motto- Fueled by families) to write off than recall, the settler starts exploring to try and make the best of their new home.
As has been mentioned many times before, the end of the world isn't the end of the world. It's just a change in state, from a planet where humans can live comfortably to one where they can't, leaving room for something else to rise up and take their place. This time around it's rabbits, living comfortably off the wreckage humanity left behind on the frozen Earth. It may be winter everywhere, but Smokestack Mountain has warm thermal vents where good crops can be grown and is large enough to support multiple towns around its base, and not a bad place at all to be a grizzled old junk collector scavenging the ruins for useful tech.
The hero of the planet Woanope has earned her rest, if by "rest" you mean an endless publicity tour for the Bureau of Shipping. After the events of the original Crashlands, Flux Dabes and her best robo-friend Juicebox were sent to every corner of the galaxy to recount their adventures, basking in the fame and admiration of an adoring public until burnout inevitably reared its exhausting head. Having done all she needed to, Flux quit her job and headed back to her friends on Woanope, where she settled down peacefully to live out the rest of her days and nothing adventurous ever happened again.
Ruling Hell is a grueling job and the transition can be rough when a new successor takes the reigns. Hell isn't just where the worst of humanity goes, but is also home to countless powerful demons, and they're not the type to sit back content in their positions. When Enma rose to being Hell's new ruler, it didn't take long for them to be deposed, with Gouma stealing the throne for himself. With the last of their power, Enma summons a champion from the mortal plane to engage in battle on their behalf, who in turn commands a small army of heroes to carve a path through the souls of the dead on the way to depose the usurper.
Death is an event horizon. On one side there's life, and everyone alive knows how that goes, and inevitably there's death but it's only seen through life's perspective. The body stops and becomes fertilizer for the next generation, and unless someone is lucky with immediate medical care, it's a one-way transition with no coming back. If there's anything after death that information isn't coming back to the world of the living, so maybe there's pearly gates, maybe a river with a ferryman needing a couple pennies for the fare or maybe it's every bit as strange as Everhood 2.
There's a lot of polish needed in many different places in Techtonica, such as the way most -- but not all -- items and components tell you which specific crafting machine can build it or how on the PC version every item uses the V key to switch modes except for the mole, which wants Z, and "you get used to it" sounds like a terrible excuse. That doesn't change that I've got 100 hours on my save game and have stayed up until 3-4AM several nights not because I had to, but due to the way Techtonica encourages having a million projects all running at once, whether that be a major construction to produce a new complicated part or tweaking layouts on existing factories to optimize their efficiency.
Enotria: The Last Song is a little rough around the edges, but still nicely playable in spite of this. The standard-level difficulty feels hard-but-fair, providing a good challenge once you get the various systems sorted out while filled with a strong variety of enemies and bosses with plenty of attacks to learn. The parry move isn't all that generous with the timing, but highly effective once you get the hang of it, and feels great when you successfully fend off a multi-hit strike. Customizing a character gives a lot of room for experimentation, and while the best method is to pick a class and build towards it, there's still plenty of leeway in how that class can play thanks to the large number of weapons with different handling and elemental affinities. Most strikingly, while Enotria is hard it's not dark, with the different qualities of sunlight feeling like a stronger theme even than the aspect of the world being a play that runs through the story. Enotria: The Last Song is a solid soulslike with a unique, appealing identity, which is plenty to paper over the rough spots on the quest to free the world from a script nobody asked...
And it just keeps growing from there. Newer, faster machines mean tearing out and rebuilding the current setup, while new resources such as quartz and oil open up a host of options like enhanced computing, different types of fuels and plastics. Transportation items like trucks and trains or eventually the aerial drones allow moving large amounts of resources across the map, and each new upgrade requires rethinking the current setup to see how it can be made better. There's a story with an end-point, although not at all intrusive, but climbing through the tech tiers to complete it can easily take a hundred hours or more. That sounds like a lot, but in a game with the scope and polish of Satisfactory, that can be just the beginning of retooling a planet to be the industrial powerhouse of your dreams.