For me, if I ever hear “card-based” or “soulslike” I have absolutely no desire to play a game, no matter how many people reccomend it.
I’m also not a huge fan of modern “roguelikes” but I’ve sunk days into nethack and games like that.
For me, if I ever hear “card-based” or “soulslike” I have absolutely no desire to play a game, no matter how many people reccomend it.
I’m also not a huge fan of modern “roguelikes” but I’ve sunk days into nethack and games like that.
Counterpoint: games where you speed through the early part of the progression and get around to automating or otherwise trivializing many of the initially tedious elements are pretty cool. I’m talking about games like Scrap Mechanic or Astroneer. The core gameplay loop is going out exploring, collecting materials, bring them back to base and repeat. But by allowing you to get the basic resources automated you can focus on building setups to defend your base and produce more resources passively. It’s a very satisfying form of progression.
I think Subnautica really did that loop really well. Starting out you needed to grab fish to stay alive, a bit of an investment but not super tedious, exploring gave you some farming options, more exploration let you recharge batteries, and you kinda kept going and going. It’s the game that made me enjoy the genre under very specific circumstances. It gave you the feeling of needing to survive while also not tugging at your coat asking you to eat another dozen potatoes or something.
Subnautica’s standout feature compared to most survival crafting is that its world is actually designed rather than randomly generated.
Automating everything to the greatest possible degree is the entire fun for me with crafting games, but a lot of the more survival focused survival crafting games really seem to resent automation and think it’s “broken/OP”