Cheers, I’ll definitely give it another go, what I played of it was fantastic.

With the running out of pins, I just meant the map markers that you can place on the map. You have a few different colours and a limited amount of each, so I was using them for different types of gate/hurdle/blockage. But quickly ran out. That’s when I decided to draw a map

I don’t play metroidvania type games very often, and I struggle to remember details to come back to. For example, if I gain a dash ability, I want to be able to check my map and know where to head back to as there might be half a dozen spots it may allow access to.

Add in a few other types of blocked routes scattered throughout, and all of the branching paths etc, I find it hugely helpful to have a customised map.

I first tried with just the in game maps and the pins you can drop, but I ran out of pins before finding the abilities to revisit and clear out the areas.

Control is about story and atmosphere for me, I usually play games on normal or hard modes for the challenge but something about Control’s particular difficulty was annoying and got in the way. I tweaked some of the accessibility options and found a real nice balance, didn’t make it easy but made it super enjoyable

Hollow Knight for me also… I’ll resume once I find the damn paper maps I drew while exploring, I moved house and they’re somewhere…

Flying tips:

Always lock on to your target planet. For example, if you’re wanting to fly around Timber Hearth (home planet) instead of jetting off to someplace else, lock on to Timber Hearth first. This lets you use the ‘match velocity’ button to bring yourself to a stop any time you start feeling out of control. Use it a lot.

Until you have a hang of the controls, the landing camera can be helpful for exploring too. It doesn’t tell you this but when you’re in the landing camera, the flying mode changes too: the ship will automatically orient itself so that the feet (and landing camera) are pointing straight down (again, make sure you’re locked on to the planet).

Now you can stop worrying about pitch and roll completely. Don’t touch them. Just use the right trigger gently to hover, go up, or let go to fall a bit. Use the left stick to strafe around the planet. If it’s small like the moon, it can kinda feel like just rotating the ball beneath you to look at the surface.

The landing cam also has a cute little altitude meter that I didn’t notice for the longest time

Edit: feel free to message me in the future if you do give it another go and have any questions, I’d love to help you experience it. I wouldn’t worry about any ‘platforming’ in the game, if something is physically very challenging it’s usually not the intended solution. It is also usually very clever about any long trips to get back to where you were.

The answer to your last question should tell you why everything you wrote above it is fucking awful.

If you’re driving safely and an unleashed dog sprints into the road and goes under your car from the side, what the hell do you think you would do to avoid it?

It’s the owner’s responsibility and fault, not OPs

I’m sorry, that’s horrible. Did anyone else see what happened and stop? If so, chat to them first and see if they’d be comfortable backing you up on what happened (dog ran out, no time to react). Hopefully that’s not needed, but you never know.

I saw that exact thing happen when the car in front of me hit a dog. Poor thing was dying on the road and I heard someone down the street whistling for their dog to come inside. I went and told them what happened, and made sure to say that the driver is distraught and absolutely could not have done anything to avoid the dog. Fucking sucks for everyone involved

If the dog ran into the path of the rear tyre, what do you think you could have done differently in this situation? The owner is responsible for their unleashed dog

Checking in from NZ, sounds familiar to me

I’ve only attempted it once and can’t remember much of it except for those fucking tunnels being the reason I gave up also

The first Headless I encountered in Sekiro. I was seeing enough progress and understanding what was being asked of me just enough to be stubborn as hell and kept trying to fight it head on, without having any knowledge yet of any helpful items that make the fight less rage-enducing.

Outside of Fromsoft, my NG+ encounter with the green swamp monster thing in Lies of P seemed SO much harder than the first time. So I’m not sure if this boss is considered easy or hard, but I didn’t consider it to be very hard going in for a second time and got quite stuck for a while…

Counterpoint - almost all jobs will have elements of this type of stressful fuckery. Use it as a learning experience, and do your best to navigate the constraints while maintaining professionalism and value to your employer.

It’s a balance; if it’s truly soul destroying then your health and happiness is more important, get out. However, the more you learn how to deal with this, the less likely you are to burn out in other jobs when they get shit like this. Not so that you can just suck it up and grind away for awful bosses, but so that you can give yourself the maximum options for you, and stress less while going through it.

You already seem to have the right mindset about trying to do this right, so the one thing I’ll say is this: everything in writing, straight away. It’s easy to get too relaxed about this when it’s all going smoothly, but then something catches you out and it’s too late (eg already been told not to bring it up again).

This part will feel awkward, but to protect yourself, you need to send your boss an email summarising your conversation and your understanding of the outcome (not updating). Frame it as a “I hear you, and I apologise for my previous insistence” if it helps smooth things over, but just make sure it outlines your previous queries and suggestions and their response to you. It’s the only way to cover your own butt in these situations, and it’s a great habit to get into after every conversation that has decisions or changes etc. Put it in writing as a summary: you can refer back to it later and it let’s the other person know you understood their position / instruction

Yeah, definitely more about the tone and narrative for me, so I’d go with that plan and see it through!

Ahhh I wanted to love it, it’s one of my favourite scifi concepts explored really well, but I wish the big plot points at the end were told in the opposite order. Feel like it would have hit way harder, for me anyway

Came to make the same recommendation. It depends on what aspect of the games you find intimidating. Most people recommending Elden Ring will likely be assuming that you mean mechanical difficulty, but in my case, the openness, variety, stat numbers etc of ER are all intimidating.

Sekiro is more approachable in this regard, the way forward is mostly clear, and the mechanics are clearly communicated, so you’re just left with practicing them until you’re good enough to progress.

I’d say that most people who say Sekiro is one of the hardest fromsoft games probably came from playing souls or Elden Ring and have the extra challenge of unlearning some of the foundations. I hadn’t played any, and though Sekiro is hard as hell sometimes, it clicked with me pretty quickly. Completed 3 endings and most of the optional, hardest content so far

TW: suicide

Similar happened to me about 15 years ago, and it still bothers me. Mine was out of the blue though, nobody had shared anything remotely violent or gory in the team. One guy decides to share a ‘funny’ video with a subject line of ‘always search your detainees’ or something. A guy gets seated in a room by a cop, asks for some water, cop leaves, guy sits for a moment, then pulls out a handgun and shoots himself in the head. I had headphones on and still remember the sound of his last ‘exhale’ after dying. Fucked me up for a while.

In short, don’t stand for this shit. It’s no joke how much it can affect you if you aren’t desensitised already, especially if you aren’t expecting it.

For sure, and you know this because you also know exactly how many times you couldn’t tell… Wait

Anyway, besides how ridiculous that logic is, more importantly it doesn’t matter in the slightest how ‘feminine’ or not you think someone looks.

I only get half of the references in it, but it’s enough… Big feels, every time.

It was my first real Sci fi book haha. Definitely a struggle but I was hooked once I started grasping even a sense of what was going on in the conceptory at the beginning.

From there, I understood what I understood, and let the other concepts flow over me in a way. Sometimes they’d click once I was a few chapters deeper and something that was discussed earlier came into effect and I’d go back and re read, other things made more sense when I read the whole thing again years later.

Reading it, I definitely didn’t get the full intended effect that someone with more knowledge would have, but it still managed to stick with me for decades now and absolutely shaped my Sci fi tastes

Not quite what you’re after but I absolutely love Diaspora by Greg Egan.

It’s a different take on the same issues you’re asking about (not at first, but it’s not really a spoiler to say that it explores them whether or not it’s as necessary as your examples state), a take that leans more into different forms of existence rather than supporting our current existence in a different environment (but touches on aspects of that too, kind of). It’s mega-multi-generational while also not being that at all, depending on perspective.