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the valley of the shadow
Thursday, 25 April 2024 06:08 pmAs my personal cosmic wossnames will obviously dictate, I am whiling away large chunks of this disability-ridden long-COVIDed existence by playing video games, which I can, by dint of careful rearrangement and at least one PC upgrade, do from my comfy armchair with my feet up. Which is useful, because I can only sit at my desk for about 20 minutes before the fatigue kicks me hard, so my usual PC-gamer proclivities were a bit hamstrung until I worked out how to connect the PC to the TV with an HDMI cord and found a controller that actually worked.
I am brain-fogged, and absolutely cannot play anything new, so it's old favourites up in here, with the difficulty dialed right down to the lowest level, a declension about which I decline to be embarrassed, I am simply not up to anything more demanding. I have played Skyrim through, again, twice (orc warrior with big sword and shield, no bows allowed! never done that before! she was great! and a separate mage playthrough just to prove I can, it's tactically far more demanding as Skyrim magic is underpowered, and I'm surprised I managed to make it work even on easy in my current state.) Then New Kitten happened, who can't take loud noises, so I went back to Stardew Valley, which is cute and gentle and doesn't alarm her unduly.
I love Stardew Valley, it's nicely written and cutely retro-pixellated and the gameplay is satisfying, and it hits repeatedly and precisely my personal buttons about Making Things Work and Tidying Things Up and Restoring Order. And its certifiably insane designer (honestly, it's one guy, he wrote and coded and scored and soundtracked and drew the entire bloody thing, Renaissance men also ran) randomly puts out free updates with mad new content every few years, and the last one came out a month ago and is delightful, and I've been happily discovering its whimsical new added bits with small, joyous yodels.
But it has this weird side effect, which is that it makes me miss my dad. It's a farming sim; you inherit an old, derelict farm and basically build it up to functionality from scratch, and you end up, after diligent pottering around through seasons and years, with these lovely rows of crops and woods and fruit trees and barns full of chickens and cows and goats. And my dad was an animal scientist and grew up on farms and worked on research stations, and I keep wishing he was still alive so I could show him the game; I think it would have amused him. Like most video games, its representation of reality is necessarily emblematic rather than realistic, it strips down the actions and goals to a symbolic minimum, exacerbated by the fact that it's low graphics and relative simplicity because of the indie format. So I am occasionally niggled by the fact that you don't grow cranberries in bogs, for example. Or you can cheerfully fill up your silos with hay you've harvested while it's raining, and it doesn't subsequently spontaneously combust. It should combust. Compressed damp hay goes eeeeeevil.
And every time I accidentally milk a cow from the front rather than the back end, which you can cheerfully do because you can access the milk gesture from any direction as the game doesn't distinguish, I imagine how my dad would mock the slightly insane result. But I also think he might have enjoyed playing it anyway, given its idealised, back-to-the-soil, escape-the-rat-race ethos, and the way it allows you to create a small world of farm functionality in an unrealistic but deeply soothing way.
Or maybe I'm projecting. Anyway. I love Stardew Valley, even if it makes me miss my dad. It's not an unhappy reminder of who he was, and it feels, across time and death, like a tiny connection. I'll take it.
I am brain-fogged, and absolutely cannot play anything new, so it's old favourites up in here, with the difficulty dialed right down to the lowest level, a declension about which I decline to be embarrassed, I am simply not up to anything more demanding. I have played Skyrim through, again, twice (orc warrior with big sword and shield, no bows allowed! never done that before! she was great! and a separate mage playthrough just to prove I can, it's tactically far more demanding as Skyrim magic is underpowered, and I'm surprised I managed to make it work even on easy in my current state.) Then New Kitten happened, who can't take loud noises, so I went back to Stardew Valley, which is cute and gentle and doesn't alarm her unduly.
I love Stardew Valley, it's nicely written and cutely retro-pixellated and the gameplay is satisfying, and it hits repeatedly and precisely my personal buttons about Making Things Work and Tidying Things Up and Restoring Order. And its certifiably insane designer (honestly, it's one guy, he wrote and coded and scored and soundtracked and drew the entire bloody thing, Renaissance men also ran) randomly puts out free updates with mad new content every few years, and the last one came out a month ago and is delightful, and I've been happily discovering its whimsical new added bits with small, joyous yodels.
But it has this weird side effect, which is that it makes me miss my dad. It's a farming sim; you inherit an old, derelict farm and basically build it up to functionality from scratch, and you end up, after diligent pottering around through seasons and years, with these lovely rows of crops and woods and fruit trees and barns full of chickens and cows and goats. And my dad was an animal scientist and grew up on farms and worked on research stations, and I keep wishing he was still alive so I could show him the game; I think it would have amused him. Like most video games, its representation of reality is necessarily emblematic rather than realistic, it strips down the actions and goals to a symbolic minimum, exacerbated by the fact that it's low graphics and relative simplicity because of the indie format. So I am occasionally niggled by the fact that you don't grow cranberries in bogs, for example. Or you can cheerfully fill up your silos with hay you've harvested while it's raining, and it doesn't subsequently spontaneously combust. It should combust. Compressed damp hay goes eeeeeevil.
And every time I accidentally milk a cow from the front rather than the back end, which you can cheerfully do because you can access the milk gesture from any direction as the game doesn't distinguish, I imagine how my dad would mock the slightly insane result. But I also think he might have enjoyed playing it anyway, given its idealised, back-to-the-soil, escape-the-rat-race ethos, and the way it allows you to create a small world of farm functionality in an unrealistic but deeply soothing way.
Or maybe I'm projecting. Anyway. I love Stardew Valley, even if it makes me miss my dad. It's not an unhappy reminder of who he was, and it feels, across time and death, like a tiny connection. I'll take it.
