The Stray Sheep #2 – Back to the Roots!

The Stray Sheep is basically a little series of posts about anything and everything! Here I comment on all sorts of topics and whatever crosses my mind. So, when I don’t know what category to put a post in, I’ll put it here since it’s the stray sheep on my blog. I guess that makes sense.
Anyways, now to the actual post.

Today I talked with some people about Minecraft and about how it’s the go-back-to-after-six-months-game for everyone who’s getting bored of the game he’s playing right now. I mean…it’s true. Now and then I feel like playing Minecraft again. Once you’re at it, you get nostalgic and then you drop it a bit later and don’t touch it for another six months until you kind of feel like it again. Minecraft is one of those back-to-the-roots-games, as I’d like to call them.
But there’s more of them and I thought I’d share some of these games with you guys.

For instance, there’s Stardew Valley. It reminds me of games like Harvest Moon where you could just do whatever you wanted and you always had something to do. In Stardew Valley it’s the same. At the beginning you’re presented with your farm, your duties as a farmer and NPCs.. but over time you’ll get to forage, fish, adventure, craft, help and do all kinds of other stuff. Right now I’m re-organizing my farm and trying to polish it so that it looks better. I’d like to have my animals in that corner and an optimized field in the other one with paths and lamps in between and even though you don’t need fences all that much, I’d still like to fence everything in. My house is already upgraded and just in case some of my friends feel like playing Stardew Valley again, I’m planning to build the multiplayer-houses just to show them around my farm and to adventure together. I think that’d be cool.
However, once you get to big plans like that, you realise how many materials you need and how much work it is to put them all down. After that, you finally managed the first half of the farm and realise that you misplaced one thing and have to take everything down and get started with it again for another hour or so. It’s just frustrating, so you, of course, drop the game for now and come back to it in a few months…

Another game like that is Warframe. It’s cool to grind and fly and roll over the world and kill enemies using cool ninja-weapons and that kind of stuff. It’s cool and you’ve got so much to do. You’ve wave modes, bounties, all kinds of missions. They added in new open-world-areas with huge world-bosses and escort-missions that you can go for. There’s also fishing, mining, scanning, new animals as companions and tons of stuff to grind for. On top of that, they added a new season pass and quite a few main-story-lines, as well as missions where you have to fly in space or fight people while watching a point or hacking a system and escaping before people see you.
However, with all the new changes it takes me quite a while to get used to the new features. It’s overwhelming and I feel insecure. There are all kinds of things to do and I’m not understanding most of them since there’s little to no explanation for people like me who’ve been playing the game for quite some time. I feel like a veteran with PPSD: Post-Patch-Stress-Disorder. It takes me way too long to get used to the new features and once I got to that point of understanding, I’m already at the point where I’d like to drop the game for a few months.

That’s the point where I go back to games like Banished. It’s a great game where you get to build a civilization and have farms, mines and all kinds of other buildings. It’s fun to create different districts for your city and take care of the needs of your citizens. Once your little settlement reaches a certain point of growth, you’re going to run into problems though. There are not enough tools, people are getting cold, some are starving, your animals are getting sick, you don’t have enough materials to finish up your building-projects. One of your smiths died of starvation, you need to reassign jobs but after that people are dying like a flock and you’re not even able to carry your materials from one place to the other since you’re low on labourers. At last, you lose the game and set aside this game for another while.

There are games you can always turn back to after a while. They all may make you drop them for a while, but you always get back to them and there they are, awaiting you. Are there games like that for you as well? :)

Anyways, cheers.