The Queue: A peaceful stop

I’ve been having a bit of a love/hate relationship with cozy games of late, because to me there can be a fine line between smoothing over the rougher edges of reality and utterly obliterating them to the extent that it seems like a cruel mockery of lived experience. I’ve enjoyed Wanderstop so far, and part of that is that there’s clearly some kind of magic surrounding the tea shop, where you don’t have to worry about your expertise as a tea seller or the solvency of the shop. The other is that this is a temporary escape, a short respite to breathe deep, enjoy your surroundings and the tea, and then move on. Of course, the escapism is that you get to move on when you’re ready and only then, but who’s counting.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us questions and just sit for a minute. Listen to the birds. It’ll be okay.

Frog Bard came out today, and it’s very short but looks adorable (though they unfortunately do not have a mac build, this is a bigtime Liz vibe). South of Midnight comes out today, and that looks really good. I love anything that really delves into Southern Gothic, especially as it extends to the occult, and the gameplay looks interesting, if a bit standard for soulslikes or RPGs. Blue Prince comes out the 10th, and the reviews for that are shockingly good for what most people are calling a puzzle game — but as a puzzle game sicko, I am all in. Also coming out the 10th is Promise Mascot Agency, which looks incredibly chaotic and unhinged and fun in the gleeful technicolor violence way I love to unwind. Open world game where you unravel the mystery of your past while your bestie is a severed pinky finger? I’m hooked.

Also, the BAFTA game awards ceremony begins about an hour from NQT, if you’d like to watch.

I am kind of an oddity in that I am not a gamer who enjoys the tweaking and builds phase of gaming. Collecting gear and items is fun for me in a kleptomaniac sense, but actually looking at them and making the weighty decision of whether I’d prefer +1 to X stat or +2 to Y absolutely is not. In base building games I usually have a utility base, which is an upgraded boring little box structure of the strongest materials with tons of storage and crafting benches, and then a hanging out base which frequently uses weaker materials because the textures used on those is usually much more of a vibe. I will hoard crappy items and not craft better ones simply because I cannot be bothered. I’ll swap out to a better gun or sword if I pick it up but collecting ore and wood to make a thing? ugh.

So the talent trees in general is not a piece of gameplay I enjoy. I am 100% a “ugh, let me just check Icy Veins and do whatever they say” gamer, because that is not a compelling piece to me. It’s busywork. It’s a chore I have to do before I can actually go play the game, alongside inventory management and auctioneering. And as such, while I understand that the choice between hero talents is an interesting and compelling one for so, so many other people, allegedly, if I were the queen of WoW, I would just as soon not even have the option. Off with their heads.

I’m really glad there was a positive reception for the Lore Watch episode where I read all the Steamy Romance Novels, because it felt pretty unhinged to do, especially since I thought I’d be reading for five, ten minutes, max. That was actually what I was banking on, since I’d already recorded three chapters of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain for my own channel that morning, so by the end I was pretty tired and trying to not rush through it too much. Since Matt had that gnarly bout of laryngitis and couldn’t record last week, my silly little April Fools joke didn’t actually take the place of a serious episode, so I hoped nobody would be too mad about it.

The reception has actually been all but universally positive, with the few people who weren’t jazzed about it saying they liked the concept, but wished it was serious content instead of the Romance Novels. I don’t disagree, but with stuff like the published novels, we’d have to worry about issues like copyright. We may try to hunt down some actual serious primary source material to make into audiobooks later, but it won’t be a frequent thing, simply because there aren’t a lot of those primary sources we can use without getting slapped with a C&D.

I split the difference and cut at a slight angle, but not enough so that it’s fully diagonal. I find that fully diagonal makes it so things like tomatoes or pickles fall out of the tips, and rectangles isn’t as nice to eat.