James Cunningham
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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.
Trapped in a cave with no way out, the only real option is to convert the monster-infested depths into a comfy home. Build a house, garden, fish, scavenge, and mine to get better tools, and beat on monsters to maybe eventually escape the sprawling subterranean map.
There's a lot to say about Animal Well, but the nature of the game is that most of it beyond basic mechanics is best left unsaid. The level design is excellent, the platforming controls perfectly after a short time to get a feel for it, and the moody art is far more detailed with fancy effects than its pixely nature shows in screenshots. The heart of the game is its mysteries, though, whether that be something as basic as scanning the map for breaks in the wall that indicate a missed secret passage, or realizing that one of the tools has a less-obvious ability that completely changes how useful it is. Even beating the game is just another step towards solving it, because the credit roll means a whole new set of more intricate puzzles has opened up. Animal Well is a stunner of a metroidvania, usually charming but frequently creepy, mysterious but by no means unapproachable, and filled from top to bottom with secrets that are always satisfying to uncover.