A Year in Review, Jan 07 to Jan 14

Stellaris

Time Played: 12.6 hours

Stellaris is…

I think I’m falling out of love with Stellaris. I want to keep enjoying it but every game turns into exactly the same thing, the barren midgame of being unable to complete the Precursor quest, the weak AI, the ridiculous doomstack fleets, the way the framerate crawls like frozen molasses, and the

final

endless

slog

of grinding out a win, which I can’t say I’ve ever bothered with.

My current game, we’ve whittled down to about 6 big empires, one alliance of a bunch of smaller empires, one of the Awakened empires domin-onion-ing a bit, and the other one running the alliance. I out-fleet everyone else combined, but going through the long and tedious wars of attrition to bite off “liberated” empires that I crush into subservience is just, well, not fun.

The endgame expansion of Dyson spheres and ringworlds take years of game-time to build, and with the miserably slow framerate this mechanic, which should be fun, is just as exceedingly tedious.

I’ll go back for Apocalypse, the new expansion, but, I dunno, I think I’m drifting away.

The Beginner’s Guide

Time Played: 1.7 hours

I never played this when it came out

and

wow. Yeah. Definitely loved it.

I managed to maintain suspension of disbelief right up until the big reveal moment, (as well as remain fully unspoiled on the game), and it hit me excellently hard. It’s hard to talk about with also giving the story away, so I merely highly recommend playing it. It’s entirely unlike The Stanley Parable, but no less worth playing.