Just Ellie 🐍 @noelle@chat.noelle.codes

@magicalmilly I'd never heard this term before, huh.

@Morgan I was just thinking today about how I've had the same wallet for 15 years

@Morgan despite appearances, they're totally unrelated. "sacrilege" is "sacri" ("holy things", plural of "sacer") and "lege" ("stealing"), and originally referred to the theft of idols, relics, etc.

better picture, lens was foggy

angy

Getting tired of the only option for dismissing certain notifications being "see less often" or "maybe later". Your engagement strategy is turning me off. I do not ever, ever, ever want those notifications and if I somehow change my mind in the future I will find the setting to turn them on manually. If you don't start giving me a "never show me this again, even if you really want to" button I'm going to start not using your site.

Realized a few minutes ago that my resistance to the "it seems to be impossible to get everything you want in a single run" part of "Teenage Exocolonist" is probably related to my "nothing I do will ever be good enough" hangup.

@Morgan or so help me

Also, thinking about it, it made me miss not only being younger but having local friends I could see on a regular basis.

Which reminds me: there are a couple important concepts the game doesn't explain to you, including that most character events happen at certain friendship levels, not randomly like I'd thought at the beginning. You should check in with your parents once a round, but otherwise if a character has an event for you it'll be there even if you do an event before you talk to them.

Also, something I forgot to mention in my initial post: the game lets you skip challenges altogether if you just want to see the story. This will probably shorten playtime by 20-30% (130 rounds still takes a long time).

@monsterbot13 good morning bitty~

(This isn't really a review so much as I'm talking out my thoughts about it.) I think it's a very good game, I like it quite a bit, I'll probably play more of it, and I'm genuinely not sure I can recommend it to a general audience.

It is a hard game. By that I mean not only that it's difficult (I lost probably as many challenges as I won, and while losing still progresses the story you don't get as many skill points, meaning you're less-prepared for the next challenge, and so on), but that it can be emotionally straining (you find out as early as the fourth or fifth round that your choices can have permanent and terrible consequences, and there are some major-character deaths I think you just can't avoid). The game does have an autosave, but I'm not sure how often it fires, and if you're invested in getting a good ending on a given playthrough you'll probably want to keep a rolling manual save (e.g. Save 1, Save 2, Save 3, then save over Save 1, etc) so you can undo some choices safely.

I'm probably biased, because I think I managed to get the worst possible ending on my first playthrough even though I made the choice every time that felt right in the moment - I wasn't deliberately trying to start an apocalypse, but by the time I knew it was coming I couldn't stop it - and also learned that the person I'd chosen to romance will always break up with you in the ending no matter what, both of which have left a sour taste in my mouth.

That said, it's a game that not only allows but encourages multiple playthroughs. The conceit of the game, which isn't made clear until your first ending, is that you're essentially in a time loop, and every new game you start is the same character reincarnating back at the start and going through these events again and hazily remembering previous versions of their previous lives, so you're able to use that knowledge to make better choices this time through. It's NOT an un-hopeful game (although "this event IS going to happen and there's nothing I can do about it" is still rough), and it speaks to every time I've wished I could go back and do things over. You're not supposed to get it right the first time. Which I think is all the more painful, because in real life I'm pretty sure I'm not going to start my life over when I finally pass on.

If all of this sounds fun to you, then Exocolonist really is a good game. (It has the best approach to gender I've ever seen a game take.) If you're like me it'll take about 6-8 hours per playthrough if you don't reload saves like I described above, and it's apparently playable on your phone? That came as a surprise, although I suppose it shouldn't; even on PC the only control you need is the mouse.

Odd dreams all night, many of them sad and lonely. The last one was a "you haven't been to class all semester" dream, which I haven't had in a while.

I can already tell I'm going to have a hard time today. Good morning, all.

@thamesynne @monsterbot13 It was gonna bug me if I didn't do it now. She got a 502 from Elekk when I was doing the server upgrade last week and stopped posting new stuff, but was still active so she could respond to messages. Happened to @justinbailey too.

@thamesynne @monsterbot13 I'll take a look in the morning. Thank you for reminding me.

@magicalmilly That's a lot of words to say "I badly need to be the smartest person in the room and for you to pay attention to me".

@baronvonjace I like it a lot. They've put a lot of thought and care into the stories and setting.

@baronvonjace In this game (I Was A Teenage Exocolonist) I would be absolutely shocked if it were.