Lukaszmik: Anyway, I strongly recommend it even in current state. For an "experimental" game, it's already a great source of entertainment.
I played it today, and I strongly NOT recommend playing it in its current state. Cards won't drop in place, every minute you need to do the same dumb shit click routine to earn money, the money-eating pod lolrandomly devours extra funds from active pods, dread and fascination juggle contentment between them.
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Pretty much no one except for a couple of named whales pays to reduce grind in Fallen London. It's a game
about the grind, and people
take pride in grinding.
From the article reative00 linked:
Fallen London is designed to either take extremely long time or to nickel-and-dime you with micropayments.
That's just blatantly untrue. Fallen London is one huge grind. The main quests (except SMEN) are still unfinished. The micropayments (although I won't call $7 per month "micro", considering the humble sub is 8+ games for $12) are meant to entertain you while you grind; they don't actually speed up the game. If you want to spend money to get an endgame item such as the Hesperidean Cider, it's cheaper to buy the company than the extra actions.
The sad excuse for an economy in Sunless Sea is indeed a monstrously boring grind. The upside is you really don't need to do it unless you're a masochist; the real fail is replaying the same content between lineages. Especially if you die, it'd mean you've gone too far exploring and should keep closer to home redoing familiar content until you're slightly better prepared and luckier. While it's possible to plot two or more playthroughs for your consecutive captains which don't share content, it'd require having the game spoiled beforehand. Sunless Sea is not an eSport-like game that you can replay and get better at and find entertainment value in that. It doesn't even have the replay value of a CYOA, because stories are linear and don't interact except via anonymized resources.
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As for Cultist Simulator, IIRC if you buy it during the first week you get all future content for free. But right now, it's terrible.
There's now a button to remove all card out of a pod, but more often than not it sticks them under a pod or other cards.
The writing is presented in possibly the most unappealing way. There's space for a sentence or two short ones, nowhere near Sea or Skies. The anonymization problem from Sunless Sea is even more glaring here because the presentation of everything is exactly the same and resources are even more abstract. e.g. there's no presentational difference between dream and research and talking and working, it's all click-click-click and happening simultaneously. Sea had npcs; here, the characters are tokens without personalities. You're not a cultist, you're a robot arm on a malfunctioning production line.
There's no difficulty as there exists in tabletop games; instead, the "challenge" comes from trying each and every card in a slot until you stumble on a combination that does something (and as there's randomness involved, and cards expire, it takes a loooooooong time to set up and conduct experiments). A typical situation: you drop a card into the only slot in a pod, the pod reacts by opening up more slots for your intended action but the status line says "haha fuck you this doesn't work".
You need to repeat the same action every minute:
- pause the game,
- open the work pod,
- take out the money and the employment (4 cards total) - either click the button or take them out one by one,
- if you clicked the button, find the employment card on the tabletop somewhere,
- put the emplyment card back in,
- start the pod,
- unpause the game.
If it persists until release, Alexis Kennedy will need to answer for it in the Hague.
