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@Th3solution Sorry for the delayed response but I hope you’re feeling a lot better by now with your cold/flu. I know sometimes how I’m feeling physically determines how much I game and how much I enjoy it. In fact, the past week I was feeling poorly (not sick, just exhausted and busy) and so didn’t accomplish much in the gaming sphere.

• It's definitely balancing off thank you, my immune system crashed when I was sick last-month and of course once we started traveling I caught the first cold going. It may have been the change in temperature I went from cold/damp London to thirty+ something, which might sound wonderful but I'm not sure that the body is built to deal with those extreme speedy shifts. At least not with a drop in the immune system, we got back to Paris and everything shutdown. Now it's back to building it all up again, I should be good by the end of the week. Until then I'll work my way through many books, gaming and float around some chatrooms. I think the cold/flu is going around, I wasn't even outside/around people and I still caught it. I'm not complaining, some people have it much worse and as long as my head isn't pounding I can still work the left stick in my survivors games and enjoy reading/etc. I'm not sure that I'm up to trying that Cthulhu game today. I did ever so lightly ponder Until Dawn yesterday.

There is this too, the perhaps/maybe grows.

• You can significantly reduce or entirely remove button mashing and quick-time events (QTEs) in the Until Dawn remake on PS5. The developer, Ballistic Moon, added extensive Accessibility Settings to the game to let players customize how intense or forgiving these sequences are.

I didn’t play any Cocoon and spent the few gaming moments I had to peck away at Death Stranding 2 (which I continue to really enjoy). I’m not really feeling a drive to play Cocoon so whenever a few minutes popped up I always seemed to choose to do something else instead, almost as if I’m purposely avoiding it. Perhaps that’s telling.

• I forgot you were playing Death Stranding 2, I don't think there's anything wrong with shelving a game if you aren't feeling it. That's harder to do with Indies, there's that nagging 'it's a simple/small game I should be able to do this', if you aren't feeling it you aren't feeling it. I find it easier now that I've relaxed on needing platinums. Dredge is a perfect example, I could play for another hour or two and easily have that platinum, or I could start a new game, I chose to instead play something else. It's different for everyone, my fail-safe now is to do something else or play something else rather than pushing so hard that I do feel fatigued and regretful. Couple that with the fact that you yourself do have responsibilities/a job and these things? a game doesn't need to be extra weight, and shouldn't be.

I think one possible explanation is not necessarily a problem with the game itself, but rather my own mental fatigue after working on cognitively taxing projects all day and so when I game I would rather shut my brain off instead of playing a game designed around solving mind-bending puzzles.

• I don't know if I said it before (I did to WaveBoy) I read a paragraph/segment then reply. I don't read a whole post and reply, it's a method I use to better understand a language. If the next part matches what I just wrote or follows that same train of thought then I know I did get it. I mentioned work/fatigue and that a game shouldn't be a job or hold those same stressers. This is the time of year where SAD, seasonal depression starts to stealthily creep up on people too, it's darker, colder, the days are shorter and gaming is by nature a hobby based on isolation (unless it's online) it's better playing something you enjoy, something you feel accomplished in. I was saying to Sarge yesterday that if I know a game isn't for me I avoid it, I go with my instincts and it's helped me avoid those kinds of games/situations. I don't live a life of high-stakes stress but the People around me do, my job is to relieve that stress and I can't if I'm myself stressed, the only possible contributing factors for stress are gaming/this site. I'm not exposed to anything else that can cause it, I have to put that effort in to make sure I know what games could cause stress, then make sure I avoid them. And for here I've developed the 'whatever buddy' system where I genuinely don't care if someone has a certain issue with certain things/people/places that I'm connected to or with. That 'I walk passed bullet-holes every day that you are responsible for' was the last straw, I'm not responsible for anything I'm basically a house cat, so 'whatever buddy'.

I’m starting to lean towards just abandoning it for now and moving on to Still Wakes the Deep before spooky season is over. From what I’ve read it’s relatively linear and so it might be a good ‘turn my brain off’ game and just have all the scary moments burn off all my pent up fatigue through surges of adrenaline release.

• I was talking about adrenaline yesterday with Sarge too. He was explaining how much of a letdown that Gears of War game was and I was trying to explain how combat games/sniping games do something odd to me. At first I thought it was adrenaline, giving me the focus I needed to get into 'the zone' and then before I took the shot micro-muscles were tensing up. But that doesn't happen in real life so I eventually asked my firearms instructor and he said it's because I spent so long training my body/mind to only fire when I felt threatened. I didn't in Sniper Elite, I'd used stealth to find a comfy perch and the killshot was predatory, I wasn't under threat. My mind's response was to lock me out of the shot, I know the target was virtual but it didn't matter. This survivors game today features, guns/real-world weapons, I'm not taking the shot I'm only moving the left stick, then of course the lights/sounds and little victories. It's the perfect blend of all of those perfect little somethings, and might also be why I like Retro.

The more I did think about Sniper Elite the more I knew it wasn't adrenaline. I compared it to my everyday baseline, I do experience a kind of constant adrenaline. I'm trying to word it appropriately, it's tied to a constant need of making my Person happy, happiness is for me by proxy. If if He's happy then I can feel some of that too, but only with the confirmation needed to know I did a good job, if not I keep pushing, that's the natural drive behind that kind of mindset/dynamic, it made it's way into gaming too. It was already in every other hobby, but the difference there is that I do have Instructors and with gaming I have just me so for the longest time trophies were my main proxy with gaming, they were the 'you did it'. I know my own psychology and understand it, I operate entirely on that reward system, trophies are to a lot of people a reward for their hard work. I was never obsessed with them, it was purely that 'you did it' conformation. Or 'good job', because I can't see or sense it in my own efforts. It's risky because there needs to be Someone or something there to provide that confirmation, or else I burn-out.

Survivors are the exception and do serve as a kind of dopamine delivery system. When that natural adrenaline I feel with my Person does hit that 'They are happy', it knocks me out. All of those natural chemicals swirl, I blackout and then sleep. That's sleep regulation, Trophies were the opposite. They were why I was gaming at night, and it wasn't healthy. Survivors have become that kind of bridge between games/experiences, I went right to them after Crimson Desert, then again after Silent Hill. It comes down to understanding one's own psychology, triggers and ticks. Granted I had Someone else and therapy/etc to understand how/why/etc but if you yourself know a certain game is affecting you negatively? then it's not healthy pushing yourself into that 'I need to finish this', you don't need the stress. I'm not saying trophies are unhealthy, everything is fine in moderation but I can't moderate myself, I need Someone else do it. To quit trophies might sound trivial, it wasn't and I wasn't even sure if I could. If I can do that then you can shelve Cocoon and move onto something that makes you happier. You don't need Someone to moderate your time/life for you, if a game is doing that then it's probably not a good thing.

I don't know if you are familiar with the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson? He lived most of his life in Massachusetts and was friends with Henry David Thoreau. He wrote a lot about self-reliance and something that always stuck with me was the following 'for every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind'. If you apply that to a game, that's hours.

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@Th3solution Regarding trophy and platinum hunting, I also have relaxed on that initiative the last few years. I found a nice dopamine rush whenever I got a platinum, but I simply am running low on time. And energy. I’m not sure I enjoy gaming more without a platinum hovering over my head, but I enjoy it at least as equally. I still like trophies though and I like to try to earn as many as I can without going too far out of my way in a game.

• I had more time this Summer than any before it. What I said about being cast-away to Ravix, I spent most of it at sea doing the forced vacation thing. One of the main things I did was game, and lots of it. The Summer previously I was hardly even online, then I got sick and there was yet even more gaming. I can tell my time is about to slip back into busy/busy, which is fine I don't want to spend too much of my allowed time gaming to begin with. I saw a Tutor today too, worked on some lessons and before that managed a two-hour workout. When I was on the PSN I knew people who'd wake, have breakfast and go straight to gaming. They had everything in the game because all they did was grind content, I was allowed so little time myself, that's why I used multiple consoles and created my Bot network, it worked too. I accomplished the same thing as they did and in less than a fraction of the time.

Trophies were different, I think the Yakuza game was for me a moment of clarity, I put so much time into that platinum and instead of feeling accomplished I felt like I needed to work on stopping. Being truthful I felt disgusted with myself, I liked the game but the journey to that platinum wasn't fun. It spanned multiple time-zones too. I know why people do it, and good for them. But I do think they are better at managing their time and I've never done that for myself before and can't. I could be told in the next ten-minutes we're leaving this country for another, then just put my controller down and go. The way you explain it sounds like you naturally have X amount of free time and have to work around it, which also sounds like you know in advance how much time you'll have that day, I've never been able to do that.

And on the subject my pushing through Cocoon, I think you’re right. I’m simply not feeling it right now, for whatever reason. And I might be able to go back to it later on when my brain isn’t so squeezed and depleted of all its problem-solving attribute points.

• That does sound like fatigue. The puzzles in Crimson Desert did that to me. I was running on fumes and was sick and puzzles were the last thing I should have been doing, but I had no choice because they peppered them all over the game and even before a boss. I think a person needs to be in the right headspace for puzzles/problem-solving and I definitely wasn't. Youtube guides became part of the journey, other than Viewfinder (brilliant puzzle game) I've never committed to a puzzle game before. It was a wonderful experience, but that comes down to it's unique aesthetic and the fact that the puzzles in the game have multiple ways to solve them. I don't think I'd ever play another dedicated puzzle game again. Perhaps Portal if they remastered them for PS5, other than chess I don't really encounter puzzles in games/life. I suppose if I did focus on that genre I'd be sabotaging my reason for gaming, the exploration/virtual walk-about'ing. Unless of course the game had some kind of explorable world.

I do have a tendency to be obsessive and committed to giving a game its full chance. Sometimes a game doesn’t “click” right away, I’ve learned. Still, there’s no problem with shelving a game when things are stuck in a rut. I’ve done it many times. In fact, Witcher 3 is one that I’ll soon be ready to pull back off the shelf for attempt #2 and I expect it will click this time.

• I'll be ready to jump in too if we can get Ravix onboard, I won't push for a fourth hundred-percent, but will aim for full story completion and a lot of the side-content. Those missions are fun, have great lore and are rewarding. The other parts like combat trophies/Gwent trophies, not again. It should be interesting and if we're waiting for the DLC it will be next year. The Witcher 3 seems to be one of those games that a lot of people shelved and are now getting back to.

But first, Still Wakes the Deep. A bite-sized scary game. I’ll probably start it this week. Even though it’s only like 4-6 hours, I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes me 2 weeks, so I better get a head start on you.

• I was tempted to start it today, but instead installed Until Dawn PS5 edition, was it a crazy move? I have no idea yet. I did watch the trailer and thought 'nope'. Then I checked and saw how relaxed the quick-time events can be adjusted and changed my mind. Part of it is my experiment with fear (again) and another is that it has no photo-mode so once again I can photograph the screen with real cameras and see if I get anything interesting. I did see the movie and it was dreadful. I remember only two scenes, in one there was localized rain. As in the weather encompassed the building/they could walk outside of the rains range. Another scene I remember was a tiny cabin with writing, probably something like Bruja (Witch) I remember The Eye did the same thing and when I watched Until Dawn I remember thinking 'they copied The Eye', the rest was thankfully a forgettable blur. I'm not playing it alone either, it sounds short and linear so I'm back to making a nest in His office. Hopefully with less screaming this time, but we'll see. I don't think Still Wakes The Deep will scare me like Silent Hill 2 did. That game too has no photo-mode so I'm curious to see what I can do with those limitations.

I should be starting Until Dawn after lunch/meetings. Until then I can catch-up on posts, the Silent Hill 2 thread is now busy. DrVenture is now doing a journal/run too, except with the original game. It's been really interesting comparing journals and playthroughs especially since it's technically the same game but there are differences between the PS2 version and the Remake. I'm not going to journal Until Dawn but will add some feedback of sorts, probably. Definitely some pictures.