The Queue: Let’s get it done

I know Kal’s written about this before in his Queues, but I just have to shout out the whole parallel buddy work thing in Spirit City. In conjunction with the pomodoro timer, I’m more productive than ever before!

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us questions and we have the answers. Yep, that’s right, so productive I don’t even have a witty rejoinder.

I think my day one, overall Highlander pick is Wanderstop. It looks like a cute charming cozy little farm sim, but with the hint of something darker. Since the devs behind it also worked on The Stanley Parable and Gone Home, I’m expecting the overarching narrative to be quite deep and compelling.

Speaking of deep and compelling, I’m also really excited for everything coming out of the newly announced Blumhouse Games. I’m one of the few on the team who adores horror and murder mysteries, so I gotta rep. Among the Blumhouse choices are some really interesting, neat ideas, like Grave Seasons, which doesn’t have a Steam page yet but is basically Cozy Murder Mystery, The Videogame and frankly given the proliferation of the Cozy Mystery genre in books, and “cozies” in gaming, I’m shocked it took someone this long to make one. Blumhouse is also publishing Half Mermaid’s next joint Project C– the steam page of which is nearly entirely redacted, but frankly given Immortality, Telling Lies et al, I’m already bought in so any additional info or pitching of the idea is merely a spoiler.

Finally, the emotional roller coaster of riding the high of the announcement of Cozy Grove: Camp Spirit, all the way down into the “exclusively on Netflix Gaming” just a few seconds later was a wild ride. I’m one of those weirdos who subs to Netflix for an excessively bingey month like twice a year rather than just staying subbed, which is directly contrary to the design ideals laid out by the OG Cozy Grove, and was part of what I enjoyed about it. Happy for Spry Fox for getting that coin and all, but it’s a nah from me.

Oh, and also, Building Relationships.

On the one hand, as a reporter, it’s really nice to be able to sit back with a tub of chex mix and a seltzer and sprint through a whole bunch of games, sort them out later. It does make it so that patterns start to emerge, too — one kinda funny one we saw over the weekend was a proliferation of games best described as “I’m so happy you got to make this game, but I will absolutely not be playing it.” Cairn and all its incredibly scary mountain climbing is a good example. So is Creatures of Ava, which looks like an adorable, thoughtful game where you Do Ecology and save animals — but it also has an undercurrent that you cannot save them all, so no I shant, thanks so much. Happy for you tho.

On the other hand, believe it or not but I do have a life, where things happen. Sectioning off an entire weekend to shotgun hour after hour of trailers with corny commentary between (or an absolutely unhinged mini-movie, thank you Devolver Digital) is a little much for me. Not only did everything start to smear together, but man, I needed a break from the break.

If it were just two or three events at once — like if it was just Day One of Summer Game Fest — I’d be happier with that.

Almost certainly just A. While you do get the perk of getting to continue to play your Remix characters on live, there is a trade-off there. I am a bit surprised at the overlap between Remists and TWW, just for logistics reasons for the poor server teams, WoW has four or five different builds running at once at this point. I’m not surprised they’re starting to overlap and conflict a bit between flavors.

I’ve established a routine where, in the evening before bed I get together a basket of laundry, then in the morning I wash and dry it, and in the evening I fold it and watch a show. Lately my son has been loving Mythbusters, but it ranges from The Office to Orphan Black to Bridgerton.

If I get out of the habit, well, it mostly just stays in the basket until it gets worn again.

I bought some baby bok choi at the farmers market over the weekend, so I’ve been jamming on chile crisp peanut noodles and summer rolls to use it up. I also finally got off my butt and went to the Asian market, and Shaoxing wine is absolutely worth the trip in that combo.