straightforwardly (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
straightforwardly) wrote2025-12-29 09:37 pm
straightforwardly) wrote2025-12-29 09:37 pm
336.
A scattering of December thoughts, aka a grab bag of things I meant to post about over the past few weeks and never got around to until now:
► Earlier in the month, I tried out Spirit of the North, and ended up DNF-ing it near the end of the third chapter. It was by no means a terrible game (and it wins points for being a fox game where you get to play as an actual fox—a state of affairs which really should not be as noteworthy as it is, lolsob), but it also didn’t feel like anything special? The gameplay was fine, but not compelling. I liked the art, but wasn’t wowed by it. I was mildly intrigued by some of the story elements being set up, particularly the fox interacting with the corpses, but not so much so that I felt any regret about not seeing through to the end.
That all being said, I originally still intended to play the game through to the end, since according to HLTB it’s only about five hours long. But then… chapter three happened. For whatever reason, I found it particularly aggravating to play through, which wouldn’t have been a dealbreaker on its own, if it weren’t for two specific things that combined in the worst way possible.
Thing number one: a fact about how the game functions. Namely, the fact that there aren’t any mid-chapter save points—if you stop a play session mid-chapter, you start again at the beginning when you next boot up the game.
Thing number two: close to the end of chapter three, there was a jump I just could. Not. Make. I tried so many times. I even checked a video guide, where the person playing aimed for the exact part of the ledge I was aiming at… and made it on their first try. I continued to fail. I was tired, I was grumpy, but I didn’t want to stop for the night because that would mean redoing the entire chapter up until that point, a task which I’d already found tedious enough the first time.
There was no way in hell I was going to do that, but at the same time, I really really wanted to get to bed for the night. Eventually, I decided that I would make somewhere around 5-10 (can’t remember the exact number anymore) more attempts at the jump, giving it my best shot, and if I still couldn’t make it, I would shut down the game and consider it an official DNF. I continued to fail, and so here we are.
Honestly, though, the complete lack of regret I feel about the thought of never touching this game again tells me that I made the right choice. I feel like this is a game that will fade from my memory fairly quickly—the only reason I felt the urge to write up any of my thoughts on it at all is because this was a game on my 10 in 2025 list, and I had an unofficial goal of writing some kind of wrap-up for each of the games I played from that list. Otherwise, this would have been one of those games that I tried out, dropped, and never thought about again.
► Apparently, my Rose of Segunda replay had some fairly decent timing—because we got a Thorns of War update announcing a firm release date for Frederique’s route!!! (Specifically: 18 January 2026 is the release date.) I am very excited, but also a little appalled with myself that I still haven’t played any of Thorns of War yet. Especially since I did want to play at least a few of the routes (e.g., Loveless, Sofia) before playing Frederique's, and it’s going to be hard to resist.
Also, there is some very cute Frederique/Iolanthe fanart at the link <3 Hand kisses!!
► This month, I kept stumbling across licensing announcements that I somehow hadn’t realized happened. For instance, apparently the novel version of Love Between Fairy and Devil has not only been licensed in English, but has also already been fully released?
But the big one that surprised me was finding out that not only has Trash of the Count’s Family (under the title Lout of the Count’s Family), but they’re already six volumes into the series, with a seventh volume in preorders??? I’m so behind! Funnily enough, I was actually thinking about this novel only a few days before I found out that it'd already been licensed, reminiscing about how much I’d liked it and wanting to reread and catch up.
► We’ve had a rather unseasonably warm December, but temperatures have finally dropped, and we got our first snow—on Christmas! It started snowing on Christmas Eve, and I’ve very thrilled about having had a white Christmas. In general, it was an especially lovely Christmas for me, even though we didn’t actually do anything different than usual. The food, the time spent with my family, the general atmosphere… idk, everything somehow hit just right, and I very much treasured it.
► Earlier in the month, I tried out Spirit of the North, and ended up DNF-ing it near the end of the third chapter. It was by no means a terrible game (and it wins points for being a fox game where you get to play as an actual fox—a state of affairs which really should not be as noteworthy as it is, lolsob), but it also didn’t feel like anything special? The gameplay was fine, but not compelling. I liked the art, but wasn’t wowed by it. I was mildly intrigued by some of the story elements being set up, particularly the fox interacting with the corpses, but not so much so that I felt any regret about not seeing through to the end.
That all being said, I originally still intended to play the game through to the end, since according to HLTB it’s only about five hours long. But then… chapter three happened. For whatever reason, I found it particularly aggravating to play through, which wouldn’t have been a dealbreaker on its own, if it weren’t for two specific things that combined in the worst way possible.
Thing number one: a fact about how the game functions. Namely, the fact that there aren’t any mid-chapter save points—if you stop a play session mid-chapter, you start again at the beginning when you next boot up the game.
Thing number two: close to the end of chapter three, there was a jump I just could. Not. Make. I tried so many times. I even checked a video guide, where the person playing aimed for the exact part of the ledge I was aiming at… and made it on their first try. I continued to fail. I was tired, I was grumpy, but I didn’t want to stop for the night because that would mean redoing the entire chapter up until that point, a task which I’d already found tedious enough the first time.
There was no way in hell I was going to do that, but at the same time, I really really wanted to get to bed for the night. Eventually, I decided that I would make somewhere around 5-10 (can’t remember the exact number anymore) more attempts at the jump, giving it my best shot, and if I still couldn’t make it, I would shut down the game and consider it an official DNF. I continued to fail, and so here we are.
Honestly, though, the complete lack of regret I feel about the thought of never touching this game again tells me that I made the right choice. I feel like this is a game that will fade from my memory fairly quickly—the only reason I felt the urge to write up any of my thoughts on it at all is because this was a game on my 10 in 2025 list, and I had an unofficial goal of writing some kind of wrap-up for each of the games I played from that list. Otherwise, this would have been one of those games that I tried out, dropped, and never thought about again.
► Apparently, my Rose of Segunda replay had some fairly decent timing—because we got a Thorns of War update announcing a firm release date for Frederique’s route!!! (Specifically: 18 January 2026 is the release date.) I am very excited, but also a little appalled with myself that I still haven’t played any of Thorns of War yet. Especially since I did want to play at least a few of the routes (e.g., Loveless, Sofia) before playing Frederique's, and it’s going to be hard to resist.
Also, there is some very cute Frederique/Iolanthe fanart at the link <3 Hand kisses!!
► This month, I kept stumbling across licensing announcements that I somehow hadn’t realized happened. For instance, apparently the novel version of Love Between Fairy and Devil has not only been licensed in English, but has also already been fully released?
But the big one that surprised me was finding out that not only has Trash of the Count’s Family (under the title Lout of the Count’s Family), but they’re already six volumes into the series, with a seventh volume in preorders??? I’m so behind! Funnily enough, I was actually thinking about this novel only a few days before I found out that it'd already been licensed, reminiscing about how much I’d liked it and wanting to reread and catch up.
► We’ve had a rather unseasonably warm December, but temperatures have finally dropped, and we got our first snow—on Christmas! It started snowing on Christmas Eve, and I’ve very thrilled about having had a white Christmas. In general, it was an especially lovely Christmas for me, even though we didn’t actually do anything different than usual. The food, the time spent with my family, the general atmosphere… idk, everything somehow hit just right, and I very much treasured it.