Listen to the Rain

Was thinking lately about the problems I have with so many survival games and I realized that it comes down to a lack of being punished by the indifferent gods.

Okay, so like I wrote about in my recent gameing update, I've been playing Project Zomboid. It's a lot of fun, but it has a lot of limitations, and I've had some of the veil pulled back in how the game's simulation actually works and now I can't unsee it. For example, by default, zombies sort themselves into small groups that are roughly equidistant from each other, and they'll migrate to nearby areas with no zombies. But, crucially, they'll only migrate the equivalent of a few hundred meters, because the only area that's simulated is the area that far around the character. There's a mod called Wandering Zombies that cause zombies to wander around a bit more, and it does mean I need to be a bit more careful about stragglers and zombies having shown up near houses I've cleared, but it still can't cause zombies to wander too far away. The giant horde coming toward the protagonists' safehouse, one of the staple tropes of zombie fiction, is impossible in Project Zomboid because there are no far-away horde movement mechanics. If you clear out the area near your base, base defenses are useless because no zombie will ever find you.

Zomboid gets around this by just having zombies respawn, which is pretty gamey in a game that tries hard for verisimilitude.

Cataclysm has similar problems. It also only simulates the area near the player, but while it does have horde mechanics, the area it simulates is small enough that it's very possible if you have a large enough base that hordes would appear on the edge of the simulated area which could be inside your defenses. To deal with this, hordes were changed to prefer roads and city centers, but that leads to the same problem as Zomboid, where if you build your base away from a zombie hotspot--the obvious thing to do--you can farm and play post-apocalyptic Stardew Valley without a care. In a game about the inevitable decline of the world, nothing dangerous will come to you unless you go seek it out.

Unreal World has a similar but different problem, which is that the early game is a brutal struggle for survival as you try to carve a homestead out of the unforgiving wilderness but once you do, once you have a small cabin and food stored in your food cellar for the winter and some traps set out for animals, you usually wonder "Well...now what do I do?" and stop playing. I've done that several times and never actually played through winter because I knew I would survive and it would take months of the exact same gameplay to get there. I didn't have to worry about any trouble unless I made it for myself.

And that's my problem. City-builders are very good about providing unexpected challenges that you need to have the resilience to beat, like Timberborn's droughts and Badtide or SimCity's disasters, but a lot of survival games don't seem to have anything like that even when it would be appropriate. Now, I know that some of this is because these are games and if you sow an entire field and it all dies to drought, you're just going to quit the game rather than try to recover from it the way that our ancestors did. But it's very weird to me in a game that's about the zombie apocalypse you can avoid most of the tropes that are central to zombie apocalypse fiction. Zomboid doesn't have NPCs (they've been promising them for 12 years...), which means there's no raiders, there's no person who joins the group while hiding a bite, there's no conflict over who has to do what jobs. It has no wandering hordes so bases are totally safe. Cataclysm has multiple interdimensional invaders fighting over the Earth, except none of them actually fight unless they happen to spawn near each other and you can likewise just ignore most of them unless you deliberately seek out trouble. Once you've brought in one harvest, you've won the game.

I keep looking at Vintage Story for its robust survival mechanics but that has an entirely separate thing I don't like (it keeps the Minecraft-like system of mobs just spawning in from thin air), so who knows.

I've never played Harvest Moon or Animal Crossing. I've never played Farm Simulator or anything like that. But when Stardew Valley was announced as a Harvest Moon-like that fix all the annoyances and problems that had crept into Harvest Moon over the years, I was incredibly excited and I couldn't wait to play it.

I think it's because the one time I lived in a rural farming area it was amazing. Most of Chiyoda by land area was rice fields, and despite being foreigners and not speaking Japanese that well, our neighbors would drop off extra vegetables during the harvest season, invite us to local festivals, and buy us drinks when they saw us in the local izakaya. None of our friends who lived in Hiroshima City had any of that happen to them, but we drank sake and ate pickles and roasted fish with the neighbors as all of their kadomatsu burned in a giant bonfire in the center of the field. I don't have a connection to my Chicago neighborhood the same way I did to Yae-Nishi, and I'm not likely to get one any time soon. Even if I knew my neighbors' names, there are too many of them to really get a feel for the community. City living provides anonymity, for both good and ill.

In Golden Sky Stories, a translation of the Japanese RPG ゆうやけこやけ that I could describe as "Stardew Valley from the perspective of the junimos," there's a particular line that I loved that I could easily apply to Chiyoda:

Only a single rail line passes through it. A two-car train comes every hour, and no more. In front of the station are a row of shops not seen anywhere else. Many of the roads around the town are narrow, too small for cars to pass. Some of them are mere dirt paths, used by cats and rabbits more than people.

You can see open fields here and there. The rice paddies outnumber the houses. If you look into the distance, you’ll see only mountains and trees. Narrow rivers flow from mountains, from ponds, gathering into one big river. The water flows in, the water flows away

I could just as easily apply it to Stardew Valley.

The portraits in the screenshots below come from the Rikuo's Character Portraits mod, which edits everything to be more anime.


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