Last Week's Games (or whenever it was; I've lost track!) : Not Tonight, God of Word

The original draft of this blog was supposed to open with a paragraph about how I’d only recently published the previous blog and didn’t have much more to say, so I focussed on games I’d been playing the week before. Then I forgot to publish it. Thankfully, I got to the end of last week with precious little more to say, so these notes are equally applicable. I’ll try to have something a little more interesting to say by the next one!

Most of what happens in this game is pretty grim...

I had another go at Not Tonight, the queue management game that I’ve been playing on the Switch. Some of you may remember that while I thought it was a good game, I was struggling with the humour as the situation it describes was just a bit to close to reality. Coming back to it after a few weeks, I found I was able to take it a little more on the chin and enjoy the game a lot more. I got as far as the second chapter in the game, where it adds some very uncomfortable mechanics. One is the dress code system – some venues don’t allow you in if you’re wearing beach gear.[1] But the most horrific one is the need to manage your own health. How this works is that you’re hit with a huge medical bill after the NHS gets privatised (which hasn’t happened in reality yet, but I don’t hold much hope for the future as long as this government is in charge of it!) and then you get a tracker on your own health. It’s affected positively by things like the condition of your flat, heating and bed, and negatively by things like going to work. It’s necessary to buy certain things to keep your health up like a fridge and a heater, but also you have rent and bills to pay and if you fail a level, you lose the money you would have got from it. Having low health but needing the money for bills that were already in arrears, I took my character to work for the evening, and found out he’d died during the night.

Now the game gives you the option to go back to any of the previous days and carry the game on from there. However, I thought I’d do a lot better by starting the game again and, now that I had a better grasp of the rhythm of the game, turn around a lot more money by the time I get to the second chapter. I learned a few crucial things – you can use the X button to find out the requirements for each level, (very useful when deciding what does and doesn’t count as “beach wear,” cheers Kieran!) You don’t need to allow the entire guest list in, (which takes a bit longer to do,) and you get to keep the money from bribes and drug deals whether you beat the level or not – that’s very useful.[2] So I’m doing as much of that as I possibly can, and I’m still only barely getting by but at least I’ve got everything I need for the flat now!

I also downloaded a game I bought about a year ago and hadn’t got around to yet – God of Word. This is a word game set in Ancient Greece, where your character is trying to get a message to the king of Thebes, I think, and you must beat the monsters in your way by typing words rapidly. It’s a Unity engine game and lacks a certain polish, but I’m having fun with it so far. My main motivation for this was to have a game I could play on my laptop without having to plug my mouse or controller in; it’s a faff to have to do that when I just want to play a game for ten minutes!

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[1] This required some suspension of disbelief as well, incidentally, since the venue in question is in Swindon, Wiltshire. I went out with someone who lived in Swindon for four and a half years. There’s no beach there. I’d have noticed.

[2] Reading that back, it’s a good thing everyone knows I’m talking about video games here…