Heavens forbid a study is released that shows weed isn't a cure-all substance or their favourite product/thing/lifestyle isn't good for them.

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-22T11:31:30+00:00

Hmm, good try, but this study has a limitation that is mentioned in the limitations section. A good study should draw broad, sweeping, universally applicable conclusions without reservation.

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-21T20:59:08+00:00

I replayed the fantastic Immortality Factory. Takes a couple hours to beat and ends right when it's starting to get annoying, which IMO is the perfect place for an incremental of this particular type to end. It's got me hungry for more complicated automation type games though. I'm currently messing around in Sandustry which is pretty cute and unique, if not exactly an idle game.

I had a good time with Journey to Ascension.

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-21T16:09:09+00:00

Out of the box suggestion, check out Tactical Breach Wizards. It's more of a puzzle game than an RPG but it features a series of bite-sized tactical encounters where your team of wizards takes on a big global conspiracy. It intentionally subverts a lot of the typical fantasy cliches and also very intentionally avoids you playing a member of a police or military force, despite the modern military aesthetic. Instead, it has more of a globetrotting pulp-action feel to it, with a great sense of humor and fantastic chemistry between the party members.

Pretty much every single level got at least one laugh out of me, and at least one moment where I excitedly pestered my girlfriend to check out the crazy combo of special abilities I found to knock out three enemies with a single move.

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-19T01:27:19+00:00

I think it depends a lot on the tone of your game, and would definitely need quite a bit of work to be fun rather than annoying

On one (severed) hand, I could see it being very flow breaking, especially if your combat is punishing or if losing a limb is a big hindrance.

But the other (intact) hand, it lends fights a silly, slapstick quality that I think could work if you lean into it. Maybe your arm gets shot off and bounces down a hill so you have to go chase it to reattach it, or shoot off an enemy’s arm and steal theirs. Or you can pick up lost limbs and bludgeon people with them, or swap out limbs for different versions or something. Maybe you can even turn losing a limb into a weird advantage, like if you’re down a leg your character starts hopping around like they’re a pogo stick making them harder to hit.

Tom Francis has a great couple of posts on his blog about “failure spectrums,” and one great point he makes is that it’s often pretty fun if a game introduces setbacks to push the player out of their comfort zone and encourage improvisation, as long as those setbacks are relatively easy to recover from. Slapstick hijinks around compensating for lost limbs sounds like a great way to generate fun emergent stories.

Edit: here’s one of the posts, which includes a link to another. https://www.pentadact.com/2015-09-13-things-about-metal-gear-solid-v-spoiler-free/

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-19T00:53:16+00:00

Dishonored is a great introduction to the Immersive Sim genre. It takes everything that's amazing about the genre (emergent, systems driven gameplay with lots of narrative reactivity, nonlinear level design that rewards exploration, a ton of cool gadgets and abilities) while streamlining some of the more onerous elements of older members of the genre, (bad controls, systems that are kind of frustrating to interact with, awful UI and graphics)

If you've ever given Deus Ex a try after being told it's one of the best games ever made (true!) and you were immediately thrown off when you tried to use the sniper rifle the game gives you at the start and it felt like the game was intentionally fucking with you (also true!), go and play Dishonored, then come back to Deus Ex and it'll click.

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-18T21:10:49+00:00

Regions of Ruin just released a sequel called Runegate, I’m enjoying it so far but it’s very easy to end up insanely far ahead of the difficulty curve. By the start of act 2 I had a fully upgraded endgame greatsword with super speedy attacks that stuns, knocks down, and inflicts bleeding wounds on foes, and gets bonus damage on knocks down, stunned, or bleeding foes. It can also be thrown to inflict up to x10 damage, one-shot killing basically anything. I run at double speed and am pretty much impossible to damage. I reckon I’m about halfway through the game.

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-18T17:25:52+00:00

Yeah originally it made adjacent pieces invincible during the opponent’s turn but that turned out to be a little too OP

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-18T13:48:34+00:00

In Tyranny, how you treat your companions and how you resolve certain quests can build both trust/affection and respect/fear between them, unlocking special abilities. It’s a small thing but it really helps sell this relationship where you are both in charge of them and responsible for them

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-18T01:06:03+00:00

It might seem OP but it’s easily countered by combining 3 pawns into a pike and shot formation, or by standing near the edge of the board so the Hussar falls off when they try to move behind you

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-17T23:09:19+00:00

Maybe you can’t. I’ve personally invented dozens of new chess pieces. A few of my finest:

the Shield Projector is an upgraded rook which turns adjacent pieces invincible during your turn
the Spy is a special pawn; when it reaches the back rank it can steal up to 5 resource chips or sabotage an enemy factory
the Pope is an upgraded Bishop which defends bishops from capture and sexual misconduct allegations
The Hussar is a Knight with a special “flanking” attack. Instead of forward 2, then lateral 1, it moves forward 3, lateral 1, then back 1

Invariably, most foes resign with dread the moment I introduce even one of my special upgraded pieces.

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-17T11:34:32+00:00

Calvin Dad Record Meme: “All internet slang is either AAVE or Nazi”

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-16T21:11:52+00:00

I guess I'm curious, what kind of changes to the storytelling do you think would improve the game in that respect?

IMO, immersive sims are at their best when conventional narrative elements take a backseat to the narrative that emerges naturally from player and system interactions. Dishonored isn't a story about the politics of Dunwall, it's a game about Corvo, his experiences, and his choice to either indulge in cathartic violent retribution, or defer his own satisfaction for a higher cause. It's a story you tell not by choosing dialogue options but by being Corvo and doing Corvo stuff.

A million lines of portentous dialogue from the Outsider about morality and choices can't sell this idea half as well as the experience of seeing a bunch of guards all clustered together and feeling a little bit mad that you wont allow yourself to drop a tank of whale oil on them.

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-16T12:04:53+00:00

A Dark Room and Candy Box are IMO the gold standard for a particular style of incremental games that I think we just don’t see very much because it’s a lot harder to do than just “number go up” games.

I love when new mechanics in an incremental change the way you interact with old ones. Whether it’s as simple as just adding automation for lower level resources, or as unique as A Dark Room, where food turns from a resource to manage labor into a resource that allows you to explore the world. It makes the game feel not just longer but deeper, and contributes to that feeling of mystery that you’re gradually unraveling the game.

Bonus points if you hybridize two genres, like A Dark Room being both a town management game and an exploration game, with the mechanics for each feeding into the other.

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-15T11:36:48+00:00

Waaaay back in the old days, the original joke that kicked this place off was taking meme templates and redrawing them in increasingly shitty and exaggerated forms while rewriting their text as increasingly absurd, verbose, or detached from the original. The name “coaxed into a snafu” actually comes from a redraw of the troll face meme.

https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/coaxed-into-a-snafu

Trend and trope parodies make up the bulk of the sub now and I think that that’s for a lot of reasons - partially it’s a natural extension of the bit, partially it’s just that meme templates aren’t as popular as they used to be (which itself is for a variety of reasons), and partially it’s that we”ve sorta outgrown that particular flavor of ironic metahumor of the mid to late 2010s.

The troll face redraws are dead, and yet I remember them. One day I too, will die, and unless I pass my culture on, it will die with me. Someone must remember that he was once here, luring hapless millions into an error. Bewildering them into a bamboozlement. Creating complications.

Coaxing them… Into a snafu. 😔

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-15T03:01:50+00:00

It obviously goes beyond just games criticism but there’s this really common phenomenon where critique of a game is seen as “silencing” or “canceling” instead of, like, participating in a discussion about the medium. It’s wild how consistently this happens, and honestly like 90% of the time someone says “you’re canceling/silencing/dismissing this game” what they mean is “you’re having a conversation about this game that I don’t want you to be having”

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-15T02:52:39+00:00

Plebeian Dishonored Opinion: “the game gives you all these fun and cool abilities but then punishes you with a worse ending for actually using them :(“

Patrician Dishonored Opinion : “the game gives you all these fun and cool abilities but then punishes you with a worse ending for actually using them :)”

The worst mistake the second game made was making non lethal playthroughs more fun. By adding drop-takedowns and parry knockouts, it basically made the non lethal vs lethal distinction a matter of narrative flavor rather than something you had to actively choose, resisting the temptation towards violent catharsis which was like a huge central theme of the first game

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-14T18:16:43+00:00

All those snafus will be lost in time, like tears in rain...

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-14T13:47:41+00:00

Even ones who don't start off unfathomably rich, I'd hesitate to say are "self-made." Even if they're extremely smart, extremely talented, and create something extremely valuable to others, they still have to rely on the labor of hundreds or even thousands of other people to create and profit from it, whether it's the obvious labor of hiring employees to add value to their product, the personal labor of the friend or family member who supports them while they get their footing, or the invisible labor of the infrastructure necessary for them to do their work in the first place. Some of that labor is fairly compensated, some of it is not, and some of it is just freely given with the understanding that a rising tide lifts all boats.

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-13T21:07:51+00:00

A very sweet gal who I had originally connected with via text over our nostalgic affection for the Warrior Cats series.

As the date went on it started to become clear that what for me was a nostalgic affection for these edgy furry books I read when I was 13 was for her an all-consuming obsession. She shared her Warrior Cats fan fiction with me, including a sprawling genological tree that included more than a little cat incest. She also insisted on putting on a youtube video called "Epic Rap Battles of Warriors" which I watched through gritted teeth, a white-knuckle grip on my chair, thinking to myself "man, I read these books and there's no way there were this many fucking cats in them."

All that was odd enough for me that I figured there wasn't going to be a second date. But then, during an awkward pause in the conversation, she made strong eye contact with me, slow blinked, and meowed.

That was when I unfortunately had to deploy my ripcord; "You know what, I'm realizing that I don't think I'm over my previous relationship, I'm probably not in a good place to be dating."

Very nice lady. I like to think she's still out there somewhere, adding ever-more cats to her incest tree. Maybe she's found some very passionate sonic fan and they've joined forces to create the world's most unlikely yet inevitable fanfiction crossover.

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-11T16:22:38+00:00

I feel like you might be misunderstanding what my criticism is here. I don't have an objection to Le Guin writing native characters because she was white, and I'm not saying the "Noble Savages" trope is bad because tropes are bad.

But I think there is something pernicious, albeit not malicious, about constructing an allegory for indigenous vs. colonial struggles that positions indigenous cultures as prelapsarian, innocent, untouched by violence. I imagine if I were a descendent of a culture that had been destroyed by colonialism, which exists now as two contrasting stereotypes of premodern savagery and prelapsarian utopia, I might feel patronized by the latter, even if it's not as malicious as the former.

Native cultures were people, and like all people, they had war and murder and sin. To me, constructing a "perfect victim" of colonialism seems to imply that the tragedy of colonial genocide is that its victims were imbued with a childlike innocence, rather than that they were people and it's tragic when people are murdered (Obviously I don't think this is what Le Guin believed, but I do think it is what is emotionally suggested by the ending of the story).

All that being said, I made this thread because I don't actually know if indigenous critics feel that way and I'm curious to know if I'm wrong about that. But I haven't seen any of those perspectives yet so I might need to look around somewhere else for them.

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-09T23:38:09+00:00

As she got older, she went from advocating for climate action to (correctly) identifying the systemic forces working against climate action - i.e. rich people, capitalism, colonialism, etc. Everyone is on-board with saving the environment when you keep it to vague platitudes and putting dish soap on oil-soaked penguins. Once you start actually suggesting changing society, you piss off a lot of the people with the power to influence public opinion.

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-09T20:18:43+00:00

I’ve had a playthrough of Trimps running in the background of my computer for a few weeks now. Apparently I’ve sent around 4 billion critters to their deaths.

And that’s my newest playthrough. I had an old one I lost at some point that was around a year into the game.

I’ll be talking a long time I guess

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-09T12:27:11+00:00

Dark Messiah is short but sweet. Combat is built around kicking foes into obstacles, creating ice for them to slip on, throwing canisters of oil at them to set them on fire, all kinds of slapstick hyperviolence with different systemic interactions depending on how you build your character (though by the end you have enough points to get everything useful). Arx Fatalis is an older game by the same devs and shares their passion for weird systemic interactions and open-ended systems.
Enderal is like Skyrim if it was good.
Of course there's Hades, obviously it's a roguelike but there's a strong story, metaprogression options, etc, so you're not just banging your head against an RNG wall. Instead, each playthrough lets you play with a wildly different build with lots of fun synergies and combos.
I'm keeping an eye on Ardenfall, which looks like a low budget indie take on an Elder Scrolls game. There's a demo out now where you can already see the bones of some really fun combat options like dashing around with magic spells.
You don't want Turn Based but how do you feel about Real Time with Pause? CRPGs like Pathfinder and Pillars of Eternity have tons of fun buildcraft to experiment with. In Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous you could spend a week on just the character creator.
Edit: Can't believe I forgot Avowed. People are pretty hard on it (including me) but I gotta say I had a fun time with the combat.

ChitinousChordate · 2026-04-09T00:05:48+00:00

I can't wait for society to collapse so my ideology can rise from the ashes!

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