I'm not only on time for once, but even ahead
of it. The year ends nicely on a Sunday, meaning my weekly post syncs
up neatly. This is the last post I'll be doing in quite such a format,
as I've mentioned previously. So... I'll start off with my thoughts on a
game I just finished, then move on to talk a little bit about the past
year and the coming one.
The mentioned game is Doki Doki Literature Club
- something I've been itching to play since it first came out on Steam.
"Oh, but Torn, this is a visual novel! You don't write at length about
visual novels here." Well, yes, but I'm going to make a slight exception
for this one, seeing as it's most definitely not your everyday visual
novel, and is ranked ~#10 on Steam right now.
Still,
Doki Doki Literature Club is a visual novel in structure through and
through. If you're looking for a game, i.e. an interactive experience or
gameplay, you won't find it here. In theory, you could pretty
mindlessly click through all the dialogue (don't do that, it deserves
better) and that would be the end of it. But where it heavily differs
from being a visual novel is the content it presents. I don't wish to go
into any spoilers, as I would really encourage you to play through the game yourself, but what is
clearly stated is that DDLC is a horror game, and a psychological
horror game at that, meaning no jump scares, but instead horror through
unsettlement - the best kind of horror. By the end of it, I would hope
you're left with some new things to think about, or at the very least a
deep impression. (Oh, and since some people have difficulty identifying
the end, it's when the credits roll. The true end is when you see a written letter from the game's creator.)
But what can
I say without spoiling anything? Well, for one, I think the polish on
most everything is great. The art and music are not only good, but fit
very well with the rest of the game. The writing is thought through, and
the timings between various events are quite right. Overall, the
execution is excellent. Perhaps my only minor annoyance is how long it
takes for the "action" to start in the first place. Sure, the game
benefits from the first few hours where it really is just a dating sim
because it helps build a connection to these characters. So when
everything takes a turn for the not-okay, it triggers more of an
emotional response. Still, the pacing could have been faster at various
parts in the game, as I felt myself getting a bit impatient. This is a
minor grievance though, and I stick by that, overall, the execution of
everything is excellent.
So, my
verdict on Doki Doki Literature Club? It's great! Go play it! I, myself,
was a bit overhyped, and I can't really say if it deserves this
incredibly high ranking it has right now, but nevertheless it was a
great experience.
So, with that out of the way, onto my thoughts about the past and future.
Like
mostly every year, I'm a bit disappointed in my overall
progress/accomplishments over the past year. But this isn't necessarily a
bad thing. You can aim low, and be happy with yourself by managing
more, or you can aim high and be dissatisfied with yourself by managing
less. But at the end of the day, maybe aiming high made you try harder,
so despite your dissatisfaction, you accomplished more than you would
have otherwise?
The vague plan I've
had in my head is that I want to get through my to-do list (a big
portion of which is my backlog of games), before I start to invest more
time into very time-consuming things such as game development. Reason
being that I know how much time a big project takes, and I would hate to
sacrifice everything else to free up time for it. I'm halfway through
university right now, and I feel like I've learned so much already. I
feel like there's so much I can do, so much I want to do... but oh so little time.
As
for the future, I'll just have to push myself harder to waste less of
this time. It's all really a very delicate balance. If things you need
or want to do accumulate even just slightly faster than you get them
done, you just keep falling behind more and more, never catching up. If
it's the other way around, you'll always have everything done and
finished, and even a little bit of time left over. Sure, the real world
isn't quite that simple, but a little increase in efficiency can have
tremendous results. In just about two years, I'll have to really start
making a living, and I want to have my ducks in as neat a row as
possible by then.
As for this blog
specifically, I mentioned switching to a slightly different format. When
I first started out, I wanted to write a post every day to make sure
that I was indeed doing something noteworthy every single day. Reality
is that life doesn't move that fast, and forcing myself to write so
often only took more time out of my schedule than needed. I still ended
up writing only once every few days, often filling the last days out
with some meaningless sentences. This end-of-week post I have now is not
super comfortable either, and was a bit of a band-aid.
So
my solution is this: Each game gets its own post when I finish with it.
Games added to my queue don't get a post. Anything else that feels like
a big enough topic to talk about also gets its own post. So I'm
basically switching from regularly scheduled posts to event-based posts.
There will still, however, be an end-of-week post every Sunday -
something of a progress report. I will automatically be reminded of that
now, so hopefully I won't miss it anymore. I predict the progress
reports will be rather on the short side, and I'll try to shape them to
have some sort of recurring structure. That is, if you want to compare
my progress on something week after week, it should be easy to do that.
Finally,
about the game reviews that I've really not wanted to call game
reviews. I don't think I'm a good writer. I can see from my stats page
that barely anyone reads what I write here. So this is just something
I'm doing 90% for myself right now. But I still want to do this "right".
I feel myself striving toward some sort of format in my write-ups, not
just a "liked it" / "didn't like it", accompanied by whatever thoughts I
can gather at that time. Of course it's not that easy, and not a change
I can make overnight. I would have to learn about proper ways to write
stuff in addition to the constant practice I'm getting from writing. But
the practice has made me a better writer, or so I believe. I can't see
this improvement myself, as it's incredibly slow, but I've started to
get more compliments from people that I write quite well. So I want to
keep improving, and it's not just an impulse I got from the recent
literature themed game I finished, heh.
Of
course, I shouldn't get too ambitious. If I wanted to be like a "real
game critic" or something, then that would be a full-time job I don't
have time for. My reviews would need to be on-time as the games come
out, I'd need a nice-looking site which generally includes a bunch of
bells and whistles which take time to make and maintain, as well as a
lot of something I'm very much lacking right now - pictures. Pictures
are a difficult subject for me for some reason, but they seem like the
easiest improvement to make my content more enjoyable.
I'll be working hard to accomplish as many of my goals as I can, and I hope you are too. Happy new year, everyone!
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