Tag Archives: PC

Politicians and Other Psychopaths

Returning to something more traditional for my partner and I, the good old narrative heavy modern take on the adventure game, which we’d played so many of together over the years, we played our very first ever Supermassive Games title, The Quarry. Supermassive is probably best known for its PlayStation exclusive Until Dawn, and from what I gather, there are quite a lot of similarities between the two games – I’d even read that The Quarry was the product of an aborted attempt to make an Until Dawn 2. For better or for worse, since I’ve yet to play Until Dawn, I won’t be tempted to fill this entire review with those kinds of fun comparisons. They’ve also got the Dark Pictures Anthology series, which I gather consists of similar, though smaller and generally less ambitious games that each tackle different horror subgenres.

“In true horror movie style, it doesn’t take long for shit to get real.”

Like those titles, The Quarry is also a horror game. I went into it somewhat blind, and was pleasantly surprised by having my assumptions about what the game was about quickly challenged – judging it by descriptions I’d read and trailers I’d seen, it looked like your stereotypical Friday the 13th style slasher affair. You know, a bunch of teens at a summer camp in the woods getting picked off one by one by a deranged psychopath, that sort of thing. It is that, but, being vague so that others might have the same experience as I did, it also, almost immediately, introduces monsters, witches, and weird Southern family tropes, which kept me guessing about where the story was actually going (at least for a little while) while being appropriately creepy throughout.

I have to say that The Quarry, overall, looks fantastic. The graphics are fairly realistic to the point of occasional moments of “uncanny valley” when it comes to those trickier to nail things like facial animations. Even more so because of their preference to base character faces on their actual voice actors, including some you’ll likely recognize – David Arquette’s character was featured heavily in promotional material, for instance. Overall though, the game looks really, really good. For the most part, the UI, hell, the entire presentation of the game, is also really nice and quite polished. Being that this was my first Supermassive game, I didn’t quite know what to expect in terms of quality, but this definitely feels a million miles away from your stereotypical low budget PC-only modern adventure game. Oh, and the audio here is all great too – the effects, music, and voice acting are very good, and more importantly, they’re all used really effectively too. On a technical level alone, most of my hesitation about jumping onto the Supermassive bandwagon quickly disappeared.

“Choices are usually binary and often timed.”

Gameplay-wise, The Quarry feels like a weird melding of your minimally interactive modern FMV or “interactive movie” games, like Late Shift, your old school, very interactive point and click adventure games, and the middle ground, something like Telltale’s Walking Dead series, for example. I think it works quite well, providing opportunities for puzzle solving and even action sequences as well as dialog choices and other decision making, while leaving a ton of room for setting the scene or advancing the narrative via long cutscenes. Interestingly, you’ll be jumping between playing each of a group of camp counselors, and the co-op mode lets you assign who plays which specific characters, and even lets you divide up the entire cast to different players via the online “Wolf Pack” mode. My partner and I divvied up the characters based on their profiles and swapped the controller as needed, which, in terms of who gets to play for how long, was more than a little random at times, but was fun and more tonally consistent than having to take turns making sometimes contradictory decisions as the same character.

“YESSS! A game the ridicules me for missing useless collectibles!”

I’m still of two minds over whether this is a actually bad thing, but sometimes these major branching moments didn’t come about by an obvious decision. For example, early in the game there was an action scene where, if we had reacted quickly enough, we could have killed a character which would have had a huge effect on the rest of the story, and the fact that this was based on a semi-twitchy, high pressure scene definitely caught us by surprise. Oh, and speaking of which, yes, major characters can die or be affected in very big ways that have ramifications throughout the rest of your playthrough, which was one of the charms of Telltale’s adventure games as well, and feels cranked up to 11 here. I understand this was also the case with Until Dawn and most of Supermassive’s other adventure games, and while this could be criticized as being gimmicky, personally, I’m a fan.

I can’t say I absolutely loved every character or every story beat, plus the ending felt a little sudden, which sadly isn’t an uncommon issue in these types of games. In this case though, I could definitely see myself playing through it again one of these days, especially given all of the fun extras and collectibles and the insane amount of deviation and branching your choices and actions can bring about – apparently there are 186 variations of the ending available. As I said, insane. In the end, we enjoyed it enough to buy the entire first season of the Dark Pictures Anthology the next time it was on sale. ‘Nuff said!

Next up, wanting to play an actual cooperative game on PC that wasn’t yet another tree punching survival game, I came across the We Were Here series of asymmetrical co-op games. Now, we’ve played a few co-op focused games, most notably the Hazelight ones, but reviews made We Were Here sound like it was much more likely to test the strength of our relationship. Now that’s true horror! 😅

“A creepy castle filled with creepy puzzles.”

The setup is simple: Without much further explanation, you and your partner are walking with a larger group through a frozen wasteland and split off to check out and then take refuge in a mysterious castle. The next thing you know, you’re both waking up to discover that you’ve been split up. One player takes the role of the “librarian” whose primary job is to, confined to a small area, reference books and other useful objects spread throughout. The other player is the “explorer” whose job it is to, well, explore. That mostly involves navigating from room to room and investigating the mysteries therein, which ultimately lead to the way to the next area, like multiple relatively simple escape rooms chained together. Each player is given a walkie-talkie near the beginning to communicate with one another (using in-game VOIP, a feature I always really like even though I usually eventually end up abandoning for out-of-game voice chat) and from then on, the game is on.

Naturally, communication is key to solving these puzzles – the explorer might need to describe symbols or pictures to the librarian, or vice versa. That communication needs to actually be good too, as a lot of the things you’re asked to describe are intentionally extremely similar, so the players need to be detailed to avoid mistakes. There are also puzzles that involve one person helping the other person navigate through mazes, and as typical as that sounds, a lot of these scenarios have some pretty clever twists. Look, I grew up in the UK in the 80s and 90s and watched a ton of Knightmare, so I was more than up for the challenge. (If you know, you know!)

“Guiding the Explorer around a maze as the Librarian.”

While obviously done on a budget, the presentation is pretty good, featuring the same kind of low polygon, colorful, stylized graphics I mentioned learning to love with Firewatch when describing a lot of other games recently (I really need to find a term for this style…) and yet it manages to be quite creepy a lot of the time too. It’s definitely a vibe, and your mileage may vary, but it works for me.

Interestingly, the whole thing only lasts a couple of hours, though you’ll likely want to switch roles and play it a second time, especially if you’re into achievement hunting. Still, the game is often free, and as such, makes a perfect demo for the rest of the series. That strategy certainly worked on us – we were impressed with it enough to immediately turn around and purchase the sequel, We Were Here Too, which I’m sure I’ll talk about here eventually.

Finally, we’ve just completed our playthrough of The Council. The Council is an episodic narrative heavy adventure game developed by Big Bad Wolf, who are probably best known for their later take on the Vampire: The Masquerade universe with Swansong in 2023. I don’t know too much about Swansong, but it appears to use a lot of the same gameplay mechanics as The Council, though it has significantly worse reviews. Hmm. 🤔 This might just be a result of The Council attracting more of a niche, adventure game loving audience than Swansong, which probably attracted a lot of players hoping for a sequel to the cult classic Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, which it clearly is not.

“If you think these guys are ugly, you should see Sir Gregory Holm!”

I distinctly recall having some hesitations about this game when first coming across it on the Microsoft Store, but my partner was very intrigued and its reviews were surprisingly positive, so we eventually purchased it. It’s funny, we played them far enough apart that I didn’t really compare it to The Quarry while playing it, but now writing this compiled review, I can’t help but to weigh them against each other, at least a little, given that they’re in the same genre of gameplay. On the surface, this does not bode well at all for The Council, but in some ways, The Council is actually much more interesting.

The main reason for my hesitation was the visual presentation. Screenshots and trailers made this game look almost comically bad looking. You have a variety of historical figures, like Napoleon Bonaparte and George Washington, with ugly, stylized character models, and hey, there’s some kind of a murder mystery or something afoot too? Seriously, what the fuck is this game?! While I have to stand by that initial impression of the graphics, particularly the character faces, as being bizarre, sometimes exaggerated to the extent of being grotesque, overall, I actually came to enjoy the style once I got used to it. This will no doubt be a divisive point though – I’d expect a lot of people will absolutely loath them. That said, the scenery, particularly inside of Lord Mortimer’s mansion, where you’ll be spending the majority of the game, was well executed. Really, the only technical issues with the visuals are around the character animations, which range from “eh, decent I guess” to utterly abysmal. Well, actually, the bottom of that range would be “not there at all” as we did encounter a few bugged moments where characters weren’t animated at all while their dialog played. All but one of these instances were brief enough to not take us completely out of the game though, thankfully.

“Flashback to classic adventure games.”

The bulk of my impressions were around the gameplay though. On the surface The Council seems to follow a Telltale-like take on the adventure game – a lot of dialog choices, decisions which appear to branch the storyline, and plenty of cutscenes. I’d say that there’s a lot more free roaming and even the odd inventory puzzle in The Council, and there are no real QTE scenes since there are no real action scenes, so this edges it a bit closer to the traditional point and click adventure game of the 90s. Where this gets interesting is that there is a layer of almost RPG-like mechanics on top of all of this: a skill-based system complete with experience points to advance those skills, traits that affect them, and using skills requires spending limited “effort points.” I was initially skeptical…

To go into that all in just a bit more detail, many of your dialog choices and some of your special actions in the game are tied to specific skills. Using these skills requires you to have the skill, of course, and the use of a set amount of effort points, which is reduced depending on what level your skill is at. You level these skills up as you gain experience from chapter to chapter, and there are also books that you can read in limited quantities each chapter, and traits which can sometimes grant you skill points as well. Interestingly, you will still see the options to use these skills even if you don’t have them, which can help guide you to where you might want to allocate skill points later, or in a subsequent playthrough, though every skill gets its turn sooner or later. Your pool of effort points grows as you level up, but can also be affected by items – you’ll find consumables that let you restore some of your points or even make your next skill use free. There’s also one that removes your alterations, which negatively affect the number of effort points you need to use a skill.

“The Council’s dialog system is surprisingly complex.”

The dialog system also has a few other surprises. First, there are “confrontations” which are special dialog events in which you need to choose the correct options in order to convince someone of something or win an argument, that kind of thing, and your success or failure will often cause a decision-like branching of the story. These all felt a lot more tense than normal conversations, even if the stakes weren’t particularly high. Confrontations are particularly affected by that character’s specific vulnerabilities and immunities to certain skills, which are usually discovered the hard way by choosing the wrong dialog option, though there’s another consumable that will temporarily reveal them to you. Finally, we have “opportunities” which are as close as The Council gets to Telltale’s QTEs – moments where you can, if you’re quick enough, move your cursor to an interactive hotspot that appears briefly, usually over part of the character you’re talking to’s face or body. These unlock special dialog or actions, often revealing new information, including vulnerabilities and immunities.

Overall, some of these systems were a bit bewildering at first, but in the end I think they work surprisingly well, and add a nice gamey component to the otherwise rather simple dialog system that most of these sorts of games employ.

Finally, there’s the story itself. If you’re the type of person who likes ancient and old world conspiracy theory along the lines of something like the Da Vinci Code, you might be as drawn in as I initially was. Right off the bat we have something of a “whodunit” mystery, all kinds of mysterious characters and related subplots, and a backdrop of political intrigue complete with secret societies attempting to pull the strings of events across the entire world. I constantly found myself wanting to learn more about what was really going on here, at least until the rather heavy-handed main reveal (something of a twist) comes in a later episode. While I found that twist, which brings in a supernatural element, and especially my character’s reactions to it to be a little silly, by then I was invested enough to say “fuck it” and just roll with it.

“Like I said, confrontations can feel a little tense…”

Unfortunately, the end of the game was a bit of a let down. There was a final confrontation which just… well, it just suddenly ended. As the game summed up how bad of a job we’d done in the last chapter and the post-game character wrap-up started to play, it took my partner and I a full 30 more seconds to realize what had just happened before we looked at each other and let out a simultaneous “OOOOOOooooooooohhhhh!” It was jarring enough that we did something we never do in these kinds of narrative games – loaded up our last save, corrected a mistake we made (an easy to miss but vital item we didn’t pick up) and went through it again, this time achieving a much better, even if it was similarly abrupt, ending. This does speak of one of the game’s strengths though, in that, not unlike The Quarry, there is a good amount of deviation and branching that can take place here, with over a dozen distinct endings. In fact, there was one major decision in the second to last chapter of the game that really had us debating amongst ourselves about which way to go, which should suggest it was an interesting and impactful one if nothing else.

That sums up The Council pretty well. Despite the weird, somewhat janky graphics and the plot that goes to some unexpected places, then ends faaaarrrr too abruptly, I enjoyed the game, especially its take on the narrative adventure mechanics, which has me suddenly much more curious about Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong, a game that hadn’t really been on my radar even a little bit before.

Unfortunately my dumb ass didn’t take enough screenshots of any of these games, and some of the ones I did take contained spoilers, so instead I’ve opted to steal them from various random places on the net.

New Year, New PC

“Big, expensive pile o’ hardware.”

As mentioned in my last post, here’s a little insight into the decisions that went into my new build. This could hopefully help some new builders make decisions regarding their own component selections in the future, though many of the parts selected for this build will be ancient history in only a matter of months. So it goes!

Initial Goals:

Since I’ve had the luxury of enough money to be selective, I’ve used a simple methodology for my own personal PC builds, and I’ve always been pleased with the results. I start by looking at popular, commonly recommended specs and specific components, and then do a huge amount of research on those components, tweaking them to avoid technical issues as well as conform to my own brand and feature preferences. Most importantly, I will adjust those components until I hit the sweet spot between performance and price – usually there is a very obvious cutoff where spending more goes above what I’m comfortable with and/or no longer feels like a reasonable upgrade for the cost. The end result is typically a premium spin on a mid range gaming machine that has just enough added oomph to serve me well for productivity purposes, and last a very, very long time with (hopefully) minimal issues. My current (now old) machine has lasted me 8 years and is still going relatively strong, with only a couple of minor upgrades along the way, and I had my last machine for a similar amount of time.

The thing is, having my PCs stick around so long was never really a stated goal. It’s a combination of being somewhat frugal with my money (read: cheap) and also absolutely hating migrating from one primary machine to another. I usually make a ton of tweaks to my systems, I run servers, do development, and do a bit of casual data hoarding. It’s by far the most unpleasant part of building a new machine for me. This time around, I’ve decided that I can no longer deny that truth – I’m going to purposely build a machine that can last me a ridiculously long time. Of course, it’s hard to predict everything that could happen in the next ~8 years, but I can at least do a couple of things that can help.

First, I’ll invest more in the basics like CPU and RAM upfront. Since heavy multitasking, including running some VMs, will be my primary use-case outside of gaming, I’ll want to go with a processor which both has a ton of cores as well as great gaming performance. I’ll also start with an unreasonably large amount of RAM. Second, I’ll spec some of these parts in a way that will more easily allow for an upgrade at around the midpoint of this PC’s lifespan – For example, I’d like to be able to relatively easily swap in a new CPU and/or GPU without needing to replace my motherboard, if possible. This means perhaps spending a tiny bit more now for features I might only be using down the line.

The timing of this build is interesting and needs a mention too. I’d originally had loose plans to build a new machine sometime later in 2025, but as an American, the threat of large tariffs on imports from many countries, not the least being China, possibly driving up component prices became much more realistic after the election in November 2024. My decision to bump up my build to late 2024 also happened to coincide with the innumerable end of November sales associated with the the holidays, particularly the weeks of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. As such, despite the very recent launch of AMD’s new Ryzen 9000 series and looming announcements from NVIDIA about the RTX GeForce 5000 series, I decided to dive in right then and there.

CPU Selection:

This is usually the most logical place to start with any build, as it will dictate my motherboard selection, what memory I need, etc. and the rest will kind of fall into place from there.

I was immediately confronted with a lot of unexpected complications right out of the gate. While I won’t go into detail here, the high-end Intel CPUs like the 13900K and 14900K I was looking at, really all 13th and 14th generation Intel CPUs, have had some controversial issues around stability. I also have some (relatively minor) concerns over their whole “performance core” vs “efficiency core” scheduling thing.

This led me to looking at AMD’s Ryzen processors, which have been making big waves for a while now. I was immediately impressed to learn how much less power they draw and heat they generate, which practically sold me all by itself. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D seemed like the obvious choice for both gaming and productivity, but I quickly discovered all of the numerous multitasking issues associated with its 16 cores being divided between 2 different chiplet dies, and only one including the 3D cache. I almost went with this regardless, as the common workaround of using Process Lasso or similar tools to manually assign programs to the two different CCDs didn’t seem too challenging, but the deeper I looked, the more I discovered reports of incompatibility with certain programs (specifically games) and some other big issues that only added to the potential headaches involved in using this processor. I run a lot of older applications and games, so such incompatibilities are a bit scarier to me than they might be for your average gamer who is only playing the latest releases.

Speaking of gamers, a lot of people recommended the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which apparently still beats the 7950X3D and virtually all other newer processors when it comes to pure gaming. With only 8 symmetrical cores/16 threads living on a single die, the 7800X3D doesn’t have any of the core scheduling issues the 7950X3D has. Of course, it also has half the cores. That said, I find the commonly repeated recommendation that you need a 7950X3D for productivity while the 7800X3D is only for gaming to be a little reductive. My relatively ancient 4 core I7 can handle productivity tasks, including running a dedicated VM, quite well. With double the cores, and many games using 6 cores or less, this should be a huge improvement for me. I’m also not gaming for hours every day these days (sadly) and the type of productivity work I do doesn’t require crunching a huge amount of data (rendering, etc.) that would greatly benefit by throwing more cores into the mix. With that, I settled on the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

“Freshly installed!”

I should mention that when I started working on this the Ryzen 7 9800X3D had only just been released. Coming in at very close to the same price as the 7800X3D with all of the other advantages of it along with being ~10% faster, this might have been a more logical choice if it weren’t so new, and availability and subsequent artificial price increases weren’t a thing. I’m not worried about this, but I am really intrigued to see what the next generation or two of 7950X3D equivalent processors look like – maybe some of their issues will be sorted out, whether by AMD or Microsoft. In any case, I’m thinking I’ll end up throwing something from the last line of AM5 processors into this thing when/if I do my mid-life upgrade, assuming my motherboard can support it.

While I’m on the subject, I’ll use a Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 SE on this for cooling. I used a Silent Assassin on another recent build and these coolers are quite well regarded, especially for their price. The 7800X3D doesn’t need anything too crazy, but this is a nice enough cooler to work with something beefier way down the line, and I’d rather go a bit heavy handed with cooling than have thermal issues later, and this thing is still quite cheap regardless.

Motherboard Selection:

This is the decision I struggled with the most. At first, I was pointed to B650 chipset motherboards, of which there are a huge number and some with very nice feature sets, though uncomfortably high prices and a general lack of availability often accompany the higher end boards. Initially I settled on the MSI MAG Tomahawk B650 WIFI due to having great VRM timings which would hopefully help support a future processor upgrade and/or future overclocking endeavors, along with the rest of its feature set. There are better choices, but again, my selection was heavily tempered by price and availability, and I’ve had good luck with MSI products in the past.

The biggest thing the Tomahawk B650 lacked was PCIe Gen 5 support. Now, I don’t currently need PCIe Gen 5 support, but I kept coming back to the idea of “future proofing” this build for a mid-life upgrade. While a Gen 5 GPU likely won’t be required even then, having it available will at least give me more options. The same is true with PCIe 5.0 M.2 drives – current testing suggests that they run incredibly hot, and unless you’re very comfortable with an optimized cooling setup, should probably be avoided for now if you don’t have a legitimate need for such blazing speeds, so I’m not going to worry about them. In the future, Gen 5 NVMEs might improve in that area, so this is another “nice to have.”

Naturally, I started looking at the MSI Tomahawk X670E WIFI instead. This motherboard includes a single Gen 5 PCIe x16 slot and a single Gen 5 M.2 slot, while overall being a fairly similar board. Another notable feature is the inclusion of an ALC1200 chip instead of ALC4080 for sound. This is a minor concern, and which one of these codec chips is better is fairly contested, but the tried and trusted ALC1200 feels like less of a potential problem, and sound is important to me. In fact, this will be the first time I’ve put together a personal build that doesn’t include a dedicated sound card (although, if I do end up having any sound issues, that will be an early upgrade!)

Anyway, one basic requirement this motherboard doesn’t meet is that I was hoping to have two onboard NICs. One improvement I’m going to make to my server setup with this machine is to have my primary VM use a dedicated NIC on its own a segregated VLAN. I could accomplish this with only one NIC using VLAN tagging, sure, but quite a lot of desktop NIC drivers don’t support 802.1x and I’ve even had one that did lose all of its associated configuration options after a driver update. Yikes. Two NICs is ultimately more reliable. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any AM5 motherboards that included this option and were reasonably priced, so I’m going to throw a Intel EXPI9301CTBLK Gigabit Network Card into one of my slower PCIe slots.

Back to the subject of the motherboard, unfortunately, the more I researched MSI’s line of AM5 motherboards, the more issues I ran across. Honestly, you’ll find issues that are at least a little concerning with ANY motherboard if you dig enough, but there were a couple of widespread issues that required me to make some major changes to my early part choices. This almost scared me off of MSI entirely, but ultimately I feel like my concessions were fine.

Memory Selection:

Continuing from the above, first of all, people complaining about memory issues and associated stability problems, often related to using XMP and especially EXPO, with DDR5, is common. During troubleshooting, whether or not the memory is officially supported is one related concern. I’d initially selected the cheapest set of G.Skill EXPO RAM I could find, the Flare X5. While lower capacity kits are in the compatibility list, the exact one I picked was not. After looking at my options for quite a while, I eventually settled on the slightly more expensive G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo which is on the list, is well regarded, and reviews suggest it works well with EXPO.

As for how much, I opted for 16 GB on my current build, but decided to throw another 16 in a year or two ago after running into some issues while gaming with my RAM hungry web browser (with far too many tabs open) running. 32 GB is plenty, but again, future proofing! Initially I only wanted to make sure I had a motherboard with 4 DIMM slots (spoilers: they almost all do) but quickly discovered that with these AM5 chipsets, running more than a single pair isn’t advised. At the very least, you’ll probably need to run your memory at a lower speed, and at worst, stability issues seem to be common. This is pretty lame, but reinforces my impulse to double what I currently have and start with 64 GB. Hopefully I won’t need to replace it if I do my mid-life upgrade.

Storage Selection:

Obviously I’ll want a Gen 4 M.2 NVME drive for my OS and primary storage. Right now I have a 500 GB SATA SSD and I threw another 1 TB M.2 drive in there a couple of years back to have more places to dump games after getting a little low on storage more than a few times. Given my current usage habits, a 2 TB drive seems perfect.

I also have a 3 TB spinning disk RAID 1 for more archival storage, though my VM disks also live there. My initial impulse was to forgo the RAID this time and just throw another, bigger Gen 4 M.2 NVME in. This was cemented after researching what RAID options were available to me with this motherboard and discovering that it’s apparently an “all disks or nothing” setup, which is frankly terrible. I could always try to find a more suitable motherboard or perhaps an add-on RAID controller card, but for now I think scheduling a backup job to replicate some of my storage data to my NAS (which is a 13 TB RAID 1) will be adequate. A single 4 TB drive it is!

Originally, I chose the universally lauded Western Digital Black SN850X for both purposes. There are cheaper drives to be had, of course, but these ones are always recommended for speed and reliability and are often on sale for good prices. Returning to the subject of motherboard issues, however, apparently there’s a defect with these Tomahawk AM5 boards (and perhaps others?) where the SN850X won’t be detected at boot up. While it seems not everyone is impacted, apparently this issue suddenly appeared after a BIOS update and still hasn’t been fixed a year or two later, leaving people stuck running a much older BIOS release or moving their disks to another, slower M.2 slot. I decided to avoid this potential debacle altogether, and began looking at alternatives. I finally settled on the Crucial T500 for my OS drive. Crucial has been a trusted name for me in the past, and this drive includes DRAM cache, performs similarly to the SN850X, and is priced similarly too. I also chose a Crucial P3 Plus for my storage drive. This is also a speedy Gen 4 NVME, but lacks that cache for a price that’s a little easier to swallow.

GPU Selection

While I bounced between NVIDIA and AMD (ATI) graphic cards a lot back in the day, I’ve been a staunch NVIDIA GeForce fan for a long time now, and a recent build in which I used an AMD renewed that preference yet again. I just don’t love their driver / configuration utility. I’d personally prefer to pay a bit more for what I feel is a much smoother experience in terms of features and functionality. That’s not to say I’m afraid of change though – I’ve also been a 1080p 60 holdout for ages now, and I think it’s finally time to go to 1440p after being very happy with the results of that same build. Given the prevalence of G-Sync and FreeSync compatibility these days, it also seems reasonable to also go up to a higher refresh display, which I can always lock to a lower refresh rate if I can’t stand for one reason or another.

“It’s alive!”

Now, my GPUs selection strategy has always been to go with an upper end, middle tier card. For instance, my current build has a vendor overclocked GTX 1070 which I got near the start of that generation in it and it’s still going fairly strong – zero regrets! With all of this in mind, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 4070 Ti Super seems to fit the mold perfectly. A bit more expensive, sure, but again, I’m going for longevity here. I was originally going to go with one of the cheapest ones available, the MSI Ventus 3X, but discovered that I could get that card’s slightly shorter, and now on sale, little brother the MSI Shadow 3X OC for cheaper, and without needing to order it directly from MSI. In any case, between my mobo and now my GPU, I guess this is going to be an MSI heavy build.

Monitor Selection:

So, given what I just said about picking a GPU, I don’t have to say too much here. Essentially, I just wanted a well-reviewed 27” or bigger 1440P 120 Hz+ monitor. I took a look around at some YouTube recommendation videos and narrowed my choice down to a few readily available budget monitors pretty quickly, settling on Acer Nitro XV1 XV271U which is a 1440P 180 Hz IPS monitor with pretty great reviews within its tier, with the usual caveats for a cheap IPS panel that it’s not going to have anything resembling decent HDR and its black levels and back lighting in general probably won’t be anywhere close to amazing. I’m fine with that for now, as just with TVs, while you can get some really good stuff for really cheap these days, the very best screens are still quite expensive. For the price I paid for this ($170 new) I can always replace it down the line if I feel particularly compelled to, and I probably won’t!

I also grabbed a little HDMI to DVI converter so I could keep using my old Dell 2007FPb 20” 1600×1200 monitor as a secondary display. Hopefully this works well enough, as I’ve been unable to come to grips with possibly abandoning my second screen. If I had, I’d probably have gone with a bigger primary monitor. For now, I prefer using multiple monitors, and having a dedicated 4:3 for running older PC and console games full screen is a nice bonus.

Case, Power, and Cooling:

The only real requirement I had for a case besides supporting my ATX motherboard and not looking like something off the Vegas strip, was that I wanted to bring my Plextor DVD-RW drive over from my current PC. Call me a fossil, but I do still have the rare occasion to read a CD or DVD, and possibly even write one. For better or worse, this requirement VASTLY slimmed my number of options down to single digits. I mean, I knew cases without any exposed drive bays were popular these days, but I didn’t know that they were being made almost exclusively that way. I ended up opting for a Fractal Design Pop Solid which is a pretty nice, somewhat budget case with two 5.25” drive bays hidden behind a little door. I’ve been happy with Fratcal’s cases in the past – in fact, my current machine is using one which I could have just re-used if it weren’t for making the transition practically impossible to do without a lot of downtime.

As a quick aside, in retrospect I’m a little upset with myself for not looking into smaller form factors. While they don’t save you a ton of space unless you specifically target going for as small of a footprint as you can handle, I still hate how monstrously big even a modest mid tower ATX case can be. My last build was a Micro ATX and I’m happy with it. I’ve also been reviving an old ITX build recently too. There’s two main reasons why I didn’t put much effort into going that route. First of all, case availability, as mentioned. Yet, there is actually a ”Fractal Design Pop Mini” which is practically the same case, only downsized for mATX builds, and it still includes those external bays. So, no excuses there. Beyond that, I could have easily sourced an older mATX case with external 5.25” bays too. The second, actually decent reason, is that there aren’t a lot of mATX options in the AM5 range that had the features I was looking for. In fact, there’s only a single nice mATX X670E board out there, and it’s been discontinued for long enough to drive the prices up to insane territory. Oh well. That size and weight should only be an issue when I want to move my box around for cleaning or other maintenance.

As for cooling, at first I figured the 3 included 120 mm case fans should be enough to keep the air moving well enough, but upon watching several reviews of the case I noticed a pattern of comments related to airflow, particularly affecting GPU temperatures. An easy fix is just to replace the 3 120mm Fractal Designs Aspect 12 fans with something a bit better. Since this was an unplanned, last minute addition, I ended up staying on the inexpensive side, but a Thermalright TL-G12B (120mm) for rear exhaust and 2 Thermalright TL-C14s (140mm) for front intake should greatly improve the situation. Both models have superior airflow to Fractal’s stock fans and are PWM controlled so can run slower and more quietly when I’m not gaming to boot. These replacement fans may not have really been needed, but could hopefully help in a future upgrade scenario, and this was only a ~$24 addition.

My PSU is another area I purposely went a little overboard with. By my estimates, a 750 watt power supply would have been totally fine with this build, but just in case of mid-life upgrades, I bumped it up to an 850 watt unit. I also don’t like to cheap out too much on my PSUs, so a 80+ Gold certified or better PSU is a must. Looking at some detailed reviews, tier lists, etc., I settled on a be quiet! Pure Power 12 M 850 W Fully Modular ATX Power Supply. It’s also ATX 3.1 spec’d, making wiring it up to my 4070 Ti Super a little cleaner, and further hopefully helping to ensure compatibility with a new GPU 4 or 5 years down the road. This is my first “be quiet!” brand anything, but reviews are great and the company has quite a generous warranty, so I don’t have any real worries there.

Peripherals:

I didn’t have much reason to abandon my current peripherals for this build, so I’ll be migrating my HyperX headset, my Razer keyboard and mouse, and my old Altec Lansing 2.1 speakers over. Yes, I’m as shocked as anyone that my old Razer gear is all still working after all these years (although I did replace my old DeathAdder Chroma mouse with Naga Trinity several years back, but more for the optional MMORPG button configuration than any functional issue with the DeathAdder.)

“I don’t actually play Helldivers 2 with a controller…”

The one purchase I did make was an 8bitdo Ultimate 2C Wireless Controller. This is a significant change of direction for me, because outside of emulating much older consoles, I don’t ever play PC games with anything but mouse and keyboard. With this new build though I’ve decided to tee up some console-like games in my Steam backlog, and wanted a suitable controller. I could have gone with my tried and true Xbox Series X or Xbox One controller, but instead decided to purchase something completely dedicated. The Ultimate 2C has very similar ergonomics to my beloved Xbox controllers, but despite its dirt cheap price tag, has scored some pretty impressive reviews. I’ve barely used it, but so far so good. Oh, I went with the limited edition “blueberry” color scheme, for the record.

That’s about it. Beyond all of this, the logistics around ordering so many things from numerous places can be a minor challenge, and the actual assembly is, of course, its own thing, as is making numerous adjustments to Windows 11 to make it suck a little less. In some ways, Windows 11 has been far more of adjustment than I’d have hoped for, and I definitely vastly prefer Windows 10. Back to hardware though, the only post-build change I’ve made so far has been to replace all of my case fan mounting screws with rubber pop-in “screws” (like this) to dampen an annoying pulsating hum I was getting from my 140mm fans. Despite seeing them around and probably even getting some as pack-ins before, I’d actually never used them personally or professionally before, but I’m glad to report that they seemed to do the trick. Anyway, you made it to the end. If you found this while working on your own build, good luck!

Surviving Survival Part 2

As I teased at the end of my original “Surviving Survival” article, Enshrouded was the next game on the menu. Seemingly along with a whole lot of others, previews of this game really caught my eye and I wasted no time jumping in by myself and exploring the world once it hit early access. While I liked what I played, I quickly decided to save it for a future cooperative playthrough, and it ended up being the next game my partner and I played after wrapping up Raft.

“First Steps into Enshrouded’s Embervale”

Unfortunately, this is going to be a pretty quick synopsis, because she totally bounced off of this game. I shouldn’t have been surprised as Enshrouded tends to feel much more action RPG or action-adventure heavy than your typical “tree-puncher” game, while she’s particularly into the building and decorating, as well as the crafting and organizing aspects of these games, often leaving much of the combat, exploration, and gathering up to me. She also commented on how she wanted to play a game where building bases actually has a purpose. That is, in Enshrouded, like in so many survival games, your base is simply a place to store your stuff and do your crafting and, at least up to where we played, serves very little other purpose. She specifically mentioned preferring 7 Days to Die, in which it’s critical that your base also becomes a stronghold due to its “Blood Moon” events and the ever-present threat of wandering zombies.

In retrospect, I guess Enshrouded does feel a bit more like a hybrid between a very adventure-forward, RPG-light action RPG – something like the Fable series, for example – combined with a more stereotypical voxel-based, open world crafting/survival game. I mean, don’t get me wrong, that sounds utterly fantastic to me, but I suppose I’m still trying to figure out exactly what really grabs her about the genre. Still, she’s played through Breath of the Wild and similar games, so I thought she might still find a lot to like in Enshrouded. Sadly, after a couple of sessions, she pretty much lost all interest. Personally, I know that Enshrouded has had something like 4 major patches since I first picked it up in February, so I’m sure it’s only continuing to get more content and develop its already fairly polished systems, and I enjoyed the 10 or so hours I’ve put into it so far, so I think I’ll be going back to it at some point. Whether I go back by myself, with her, or with our larger co-op group, who knows?

“A chaotic sprawl is practically unavoidable in late-game Satisfactory…”

Speaking of our larger group, after wrapping up Grounded, we decided to go for something a little different, and played through an entire run of Satisfactory. I’d never played Satisfactory, nor similar manufacturing focused games like Factorio, so this was all new to me. It’s perhaps a bit of a stretch to toss these types of games into the open world survival category, though there’s certainly a common lineage in my mind. That is, if Astroneer perfected the mindlessly enjoyable mining/gathering aspect of Minecraft’s survival mode, Satisfactory and its ilk are doing the same with late game large-scale crafting and automation, and personally, I fucking loved it!

Dropped onto a planet with practically nothing, the game generously drip feeds you your first string of goals, and soon you’ll have a base of operations and have extracted your first few types of resources. Very quickly, you’ll be installing automatic extractors and the means to power them, and automating getting those resources to your processing and manufacturing devices and/or storage containers… and that, well, that’s basically the whole game!

Satisfactory could very easily cut the umbilical right there and let you figure out how to move up the tech tree on your own, but instead it continues to push you forward via a series of milestones in which specific numbers of certain finished resources are shot up a space elevator in exchange for unlocking new recipes for new and upgraded machines and other gear to help you in your efforts to, of course, meet the next, even more demanding requirements. This progresses until the final couple of tiers have you manufacturing parts used to manufacture parts used to manufacture parts (and so on…) for end products that require multiple of sets of such complex components, turning your once humble factory footprint into a massive sprawl of extraction units, automated assembly, manufacturing machines, mazes of twisting conveyor belts, nuclear power plants belching waste, and delivery drones, trucks, and even trains darting about, blighting the once pristine landscape, while you keep focus on growing and especially optimizing every aspect of your operations.

“Have ramps, will travel.”

There’s also an exploration component of the gameplay, as the players have to explore to seek out more and more natural resources as the demands increase, and find special power-ups hidden throughout the world to increase your output. There’s also a slightly more free-form research component to go along with the milestone system which ties directly into that. Playing cooperatively provides the benefit of letting one or two people go on these scouting runs while others continue to focus on meeting the manufacturing tasks at hand. Building utterly ridiculous transportation systems to bring materials (or even finished components) from extremely remote harvesting sites and exploring some treacherous new biome looking for more cleverly hidden Power Slugs were some of my favorite parts of the game, in fact.

We ended up completing Satisfactory not long before the 1.0 patch was released, which would have added finished versions of some exploration related systems we only had placeholders for, and would likely make the final milestone tier a little less insane than what we went through (which eventually saw us just leaving our server up for a few days while as, close to as large and fully automated as we could will ourselves to get it, we let our collective factory run for hours and hours on end.) Apart from a few annoying bugs (like the often incredibly janky Hypertubes) the game felt finished enough, but had we known it was coming, I think we’d all have preferred to wait until the game was actually finished to do this play through. As it is, I think we’ll be back at some point to see what the actual ending looks like, and what other new goodies the developers add between now and then. All told though, I really enjoyed Satisfactory.

“*Cues Immigrant Song*”

After that, we decided to move back to more traditional territory, and headed to beautiful sunny grasslands and dark forests of Valheim. I talked a fair bit about Valheim in my first Surviving Survival post, though that playthrough was with a group of work friends rather than my normal weekly co-op group, so this was new territory for us. One of the other members of the group had played it before, though closer to its original early access release, and he and I dove right in with building a small village and exploring our surroundings. I think the other two members of our group, including my partner, struggled a little bit with the combat until we got a round or two of gear upgrades under our belts, but overall it seemed like everyone was getting to grips with the gameplay well enough.

Despite being ideally placed for the start of the game – that is, right on the sea and very close to big chunks of black forest and mountain biomes – the randomness of the map found us having to go on epic sea voyages to visit the swamps. Of course, we quickly established a forward base complete with a portal back to our village, but between that, and that biome’s less than friendly inhabitants (we were almost wiped by a Wraith at night more than once, and chased around the entire area by Abominations on several occasions) our group’s enjoyment of the game started to wane considerably, culminating in a group Sunken Crypt clear that went a little sideways, causing one of the party to need to make a seemingly impossible to solo corpse run multiple times, coming perilously close to resulting in a rage quit.

As with Enshrouded, it really wasn’t just the combat or the difficulty, but more something to do with the overall balance of combat, exploration, crafting, and base building (and I suppose how grindy all of the above feels, which can be a bit of an issue in Valheim) that didn’t sit quite well with my partner in particular. Specific complaints centered around the relatively unguided, sandboxy approach to game’s progression goals, and while I ultimately disagree, I can see where those complaints come from. I was disappointed, but it seems Valheim wasn’t quite the game for her either. Like Enshrouded, I would like to get back to Valheim again in the future, but it likely won’t be until the last big content patch is released, and perhaps even on a modded server as well.

“Green Hell? This doesn’t look so bad!”

It’s ironic then, after just mentioning potential struggles with difficulty, that my partner chose Green Hell as our next duo game. She’s been interested in Green Hell, as well as the similarly themed and probably better known The Forest, for quite some time, and that whole time I’d been a little worried about how much of a brutal exercise in survival it might be, as gleaned from various reviews. It turns out that my concern was warranted. While it wasn’t quite as unbearably difficult as it sounded, we definitely found it falling more on the side of frustrating than fun.

In Green Hell the players are thrown into the middle of the Amazonian rainforest. As is typical with these games, you’ll need to gather material to build tools and structures, hunt, fish, and forage for food, and deal with the sometimes less than friend wildlife. In Green Hell, we can add some rather aggressive native tribesmen, both real and imagined, to the list too. What I mean by “imagined” is that native attacks are often one of the end results of the kind of cool sanity system the game employs. That is, certain actions and conditions affect your sanity, making it, along with food and hydration, one of the basic stats you’ll need to keep track of in this game’s simulated version of survival. I mean that literally too, as even imagined native attacks will kill you. In fact, rather a lot of things in Green Hell will kill you. Just about everything you do, from sustaining a minor injury to simply picking up a rock or a log, or hell, even just moving around the environment, can result in some sort of negative status effect which, if not addressed, mostly by means of crafted healing items, can lead to a very bad time.

At first we decided to play the campaign, which does a fair job of justifying why in the hell you’re in the Amazon in the first place, as well as making the Waraha Tribe more than just an lazy depiction of native stereotypes, but after struggling with navigating the campaign’s tasks while dealing with the constant distraction of basic survival for a session or two, we opted to start over in sandbox mode so we could have more opportunity to learn the mechanics without the added pressures of the campaign’s objectives. Early on, we were fortunate enough to locate an abandoned camp relatively close to a river, and started rebuilding it, making it our base of operations as we got to grips with the basics. Soon, we’d learned to get enough fresh water and nutritious food for it to no longer be a massive burden and developed tools to be more and more efficient at gathering. Even after this new level of progress, things like the aforementioned negative effects could still feel like an annoyance at best.

“Never mind…”

Funnily, I think I was the one who was more frustrated this time around. While I would usually get into the game, at least for the first couple of hours of a session, I didn’t look forward to the prospect of playing it again, and at some point all of the struggles and random-feeling deaths started to just feel absurd. She finally came around when, feeling like we had things around our camp reasonably figured out, we decided to venture out, knowing that we’d yet to encounter some of the resources that would be required to continue to tech-up. We quickly ran into new, even more challenging wildlife, and found ourselves having to run back to our base to lick our wounds. Even after over 20 hours of gameplay, we kind of felt like failures.

To be clear, I’m not calling Green Hell a bad game. In fact, I’d hazard to guess that a harsher take on the survival genre was one of Creepy Jar’s goals here. I do think, however, that overcoming some of these challenges felt less rewarding, not to mention more ephemeral, than many of its contemporaries, which, personally, just didn’t provide the dopamine hit I needed to flip the switch from the gameplay loop feeling like a chore to being entertaining. With this genre, that’s probably a thinner line for most of us than we might think. That all said, even after all of this, I’d still really like to go back to the campaign and try to complete it. Unfortunately, by the time we reached that point, my partner was fully ready to move on.

“Sitting on the throne in Abiotic Factor more often means something very different.”

The next game our larger group played was Abiotic Factor. This was one I was entirely unfamiliar with, but everyone else seemed to think it looked fun. Personally, from the trailers I watched and the little bit I read, I really didn’t know what to expect. Scientists living in an underground bunker, having to craft new experimental devices to survive? I don’t know, I was getting some major Fallout and Silo vibes, though mixed with the primitive graphical style and odd mix of multiplayer scares and zaniness of Lethal Company. Okay…

Now that I’ve played it though, the premise of Abiotic Factor is easy enough to convey. You play as a random worker in a massive underground research facility that is researching… let’s just say, some very exotic things. You know, inter-dimensional portals and the new and lifeforms inhabiting them, that kind of thing. It’s your first day of work and, thanks to some impeccable timing, a major catastrophe occurs and you’re trapped inside as the facility goes into lock down. With almost everyone dead or evacuated and the facility in shambles, your objective is to survive long enough to find a way out. Now, if you’re getting Half Life vibes from this description, you’re right on the money. It seems like the first Half Life was a huge influence here, although, as implied by the comparison to Lethal Company, the whole thing is done in a decidedly less than serious way.

The writing is fun, from humorous voice lines to the fact that at times the size and scope of the facility almost feels more like parody than homage. This is also conveyed by some of the mechanics, like the fact that regular bathroom breaks, complete with a minigame to “ease the passage” are one of the survival elements you’ll need to manage. It’s also present in the graphics, which, particularly when it comes to human characters, border on being preposterous, which I’m fairly sure was intentional. For me, this quickly fell away, as the enemies and environments looked nice enough, and I found myself so immersed in the seriousness of the situation that we, as players, found ourselves in, that I forgot all about that aspect outside of the occasional moment of playful downtime back at our base.

“A Defense Robot versus a Composer?! *Grabs popcorn*”

Initially, the game had us exploring abandoned offices, looting anything we could find, tiptoeing around the alien creatures roaming the darkened facility corridors, and hiding for our lives wherever we could barricade ourselves in when night came. These early areas were fun, and definitely got us on the hook. From there, the temporary base we’d established was relocated to a better location and greatly expanded, and the breadcrumbs the narrative dropped for us to head to our next objectives were more than enough to keep us entertained. Despite these objectives quickly devolving into a treadmill of “Go here, no, sorry, go there instead!” like encounters, they led to some unexpected places, including some challenging navigational puzzles, very dangerous enemies, and some memorably tense and scary moments. Of those, Flathill, particularly the library, the damnable Hydroplant, and the deep-dive to the Neutrino Detector, immediately come to mind.

Mechanically, the game is more or less your typical open world crafting/survival game, though some of the decisions in how those pieces are assembled make Abiotic Factor feel like a fresh take to me. New recipes are learned when acquiring new materials, and then researched via a simple minigame where the player attempts to deduce which other components are required to craft the item. This is used quite cleverly to advance the narrative – a new material and/or recipe is introduced which will then require the players to seek out the other required components, which leads to having to explore new areas which in turn means overcoming new puzzles and enemies. Of course, the more exotic the materials you encounter, the crazier some of the items our team of mad scientists can cobble together become – this is not a game where you spend ages progressing from wooden spears to bronze spears to iron spears. In fact, in some ways, the item progression feels a bit more horizontal. It’s not all perfect – ammo for guns is scarce, perhaps being one of the few things you’d ever need to grind, and unless you’ve purposely built your character to use them, shooting them isn’t a whole lot of fun either. Similarly, many of the other items you get along the way feel like they’re of questionable use, though I’m sure this improves considerably with subsequent playthroughs.

“If your swimming pool yields unlimited fish it’s time to call a pool cleaner.”

Exploring is a big part of the gameplay. Thanks to being so in-step with the narrative, you’re always focusing on new parts of the sprawling facility. While travel time isn’t a huge issue (these areas are connected via a tram system to a central hub area) navigating some of these areas, between confusingly complex layouts and a less than generous in-game map, coupled with situationally respawning enemies can be, so it might make sense to build new, smaller bases in each area as you progress, leading to the more nomadic style of base-building that some other games in the genre, like Return to Moria, employ. For our playthrough, we ended up building our base so close to that central hub that we were able to just stick it out, making our excursions into other areas a major group event. It doesn’t seem like my partner, with her preference to hang back at base and work on building, crafting, and logistical matters, would be into this at all, but, thanks to an early agreement that we’d always try to stick close together when running missions, this really wasn’t an issue.

A lot of the other mechanics in the game are similar to other games in the genre too, of course. Besides your bathroom breaks, you need to manage your food and water, sleep/rest, and body temperature. The latter comes into play in some specific areas, where you may need to equip appropriate clothing to stay warm, or keep cool, but overall, none of these are too hard to manage. Food, for instance, feels like it is going to be a huge burden, but we quickly discovered how easy fishing was and, luckily, our base was situated right next to some water for extra convenience. Really, pretty much every challenge we ran into was soon met with some sort of solution to ease the burden, if not outright remove it. I’ve yet to play it myself, but I’ve seen many of the mechanics of this game compared to one of the early standouts of the genre, Project Zomboid, which it seems most people would consider high praise.

“Hey Project Zomboid, we’ve got zombies too!”

So, pretty much exceeding my expectations at every turn, the biggest negative about our experience with Abiotic Factor is actually how our playthrough ended. After struggling through the last area of the game, which definitely felt like a culmination of the gradual difficulty curve we’d felt up to then, the breadcrumbs just… stopped. You see, the game is still in early access, and not unlike Satisfactory, despite feeling reasonably polished the entire way through, simply wasn’t finished. The difference was that we knew we were reaching the end of Satisfactory, whereas Abiotic Factor just abruptly stops. We were left with no way forward and no conclusion to the story, our characters doomed to spend the rest of their lives trapped in the depths of the GATE Cascade Research Facility. That said, we definitely all enjoyed it enough to go back when there is more to do (one of our group, who plays a ton of games, even called it one of his games of the year) though I suspect we’ll be waiting for the game to exit early access before that happens.

That rounds up this game log, though naturally our group has already moved on, and we’re currently exploring the lush planet of Olympus in Icarus. Next time!

A few of these screenshots were swiped from the Steam Community, as I shamefully didn’t take enough good screenshots of my own. I need to get better at that. New Year’s Resolution?