Thoughts on Games

Lately I have not been able to focus on review at all. It is not exactly laziness. I would happily do puzzles, side projects, or anything outside the syllabus, including writing this post, but the moment it becomes “go review properly,” I immediately stop wanting to do it. So here I am, writing for fun.

A quick disclaimer

This is just my personal opinion. I do not play that many competitive co-op games, everyone has their own taste, and if you want to argue with me that is fine, just do not get too heated.

The actual point

Recently DreamStar got a huge amount of attention. I have always been a little resistant to games that feel like stitched-together reskins, though. I felt something similar when I first saw Eggy Party, and honestly even earlier with games like Fall Guys. Maybe the deeper truth is simply that I am not very interested in competitive games.

FPS games especially do not do much for me. MOBA games were okay back then, but only back then. Maybe that is because I do not really have a stable group to play with. I am not good enough, I am too lazy to grind mechanics, and all the fancy micro and muscle memory stuff feels tiring. I would rather talk, make a plan, and play around some simple tactics. But in games that demand real-time reactions, my brain cannot keep up, nobody wants to listen to your “commanding” anyway, and I do not even have enough friends online to make that work. Still, when I do play with friends, it is genuinely fun. I am just terrible at battle royales, terrible at Eggy Party, and the campus network is awful on top of that. So if you do not mind carrying dead weight, I am always down for something casual.

Still, I think people are very easily shaped by the outside world. Most of us cannot cleanly separate which preferences are truly ours and which ones just drifted in from somewhere else. Then again, maybe that distinction is not even that important. Even if you were changed by outside influence, the changed version of you is still you.

So if we start from the audience side of things, the logic becomes pretty simple. Players mostly just choose what looks better. Aside from a few nostalgia-driven exceptions, people usually move toward whatever feels more polished, more convenient, or more exciting. Once a game shows its strengths, people gather around it and pay for it. Content is still the first thing most players care about. Most people do not care too much where it originally came from. In that sense, copying almost feels inevitable.

And copying brings a lot with it. Look at Honor of Kings. It follows the familiar MOBA template, sure, but without it I doubt that many people in China would have gone out of their way to play League of Legends at the beginning. Foreign games have to cross a lot of barriers to enter the domestic market: language, distribution, localization, platform habits, all of that. A local giant can make the setting feel familiar immediately.

The same thing applies to Eggy Party compared with Fall Guys. Plenty of people do not even own a decent PC, but almost everyone has a phone on them all the time. Playing Fall Guys means using Steam, and for a while it was a paid game. A lot of people here are still not used to buying games up front. It is funny, because some of those same people will happily spend more than the price of a full AAA game on in-game purchases, but the market logic is what it is. Domestic publishers know exactly how to lower the barrier: one app, free entry, social features built in, endless activity loops, constant incentives to keep playing.

That is why big publishers are so strong. Games like Goose Goose Duck or Party Animals can lower their barrier all they want, but they still struggle against the totally frictionless, fully integrated ecosystem that Chinese internet giants can build. Personally that style gives me a bit of aesthetic discomfort, but from a business perspective it clearly works. The audience really does eat it up. When they get tired of one mode, they move to another. Social play means even if you do not have real-life friends online, you can instantly find new teammates. Add a little competition, a little vanity, a little stubbornness, and people can grind all day. Add a little spending on top, and the machine keeps running.

That is also why DreamStar spent so much on promotion. Its rumored giant marketing budget makes sense if the goal is to fight Eggy Party for the same audience. Eggy Party already had a strong base. Without brute-force promotion, it would have been much harder for DreamStar to explode. Public attention follows momentum, and money can manufacture momentum. Open Bilibili and you immediately see the effect. Nobody wants to feel left behind. The official Fall Guys license only made the whole situation even more awkward and funnier. From the outside, though, watching two giant companies crash into each other is entertaining. For players, some competition might slightly improve the experience. For NetEase, of course, it is a headache. I still laugh every time I think of those memes about phones “downloading DreamStar by themselves.”

For players in the short run, that kind of competition can be good. In the long run, I am less sure. If everyone just copies successful gameplay loops, then the original versions and riskier new ideas get squeezed out. When I look back over recent years, I honestly do not remember many genuinely new gameplay ideas from the biggest domestic studios. Maybe that is exactly the problem: giant publishers absorb too much attention into their already-successful products. If the fastest way to make money is to keep milking proven formulas, why would they take real risks? Here I mainly mean giants like Tencent and NetEase. HoYoverse feels a little different strategically. To be honest, NetEase even feels a bit less irritating to me than Tencent sometimes.

Without business deals and heavy promotion, games barely get seen. There is less room for hobbyist enthusiasm, fewer “hidden gems,” and less oxygen for strange new ideas. One workaround is to let players create content themselves, which is nice, but that still depends on a pre-existing platform. And for domestic developers, innovation is risky in every direction anyway. If you create something new, it gets copied. Getting licenses is hard. Why gamble when safer genres make money so much faster?

There is another thing I dislike about DreamStar in particular. The moment I entered, it felt like a wall of recycled memes and stitched-together internet junk. Screaming chicken props, messy skins, random expressions, a character design that looked ugly and vaguely sleazy to me, and a bunch of traffic-farming gimmicks everywhere. Even the promised red-packet hype was already gone by the time I saw it. I know I am being overly picky here, but visually it really bothered me. If I absolutely had to choose, I would rather go play Eggy Party than touch that.

The kinds of games I actually like

Tower defense, sandbox games, RPGs, puzzle games, rhythm games. Those are good. Add some collection elements, some story that rewards digging deeper, and the freedom to either engage with the plot or ignore it when I am not in the mood, and I am happy.

I also like games where the memes grow naturally out of the game itself and get used in the right places, instead of developers smearing stale internet jokes directly in the player’s face. Some games do this well. Honkai: Star Rail can be pretty funny with its jokes, even though I would not call it especially fun beyond relaxation and gacha.

There are also games I just genuinely love. Terraria is fantastic and I would strongly recommend it as someone who has spent over a thousand hours there. It has co-op too. It Takes Two was a lovely surprise because I actually got to play it with someone, which felt amazing. There is also our cyber-cat game, Stray: story-driven, stylish, and built around a cat saving the world. Hollow Knight is great too, though it is absolute suffering if you are clumsy like me. For rhythm games, Phigros feels especially good to play, maybe because it is easy to get into the flow, and it also has a big player community and lots of fan-made charts through Phira. Another game with a neat idea is Rotaeno, though my hands are terrible at it. And then there is the entire Rusty Lake series. Those puzzle games are so good. I keep getting stuck when solving them alone, but the co-op ones are thankfully not too brutal. The more narrative-heavy entries are manageable, but with Cube Escape there are not many I could solve cleanly from start to finish by myself.

So after thinking about it, maybe I really just do not like competitive games that much. Maybe it is some kind of avoidance. Maybe I am afraid of dragging teammates down. That would make sense. I am bad enough that winning-focused play feels stressful instead of fun.

Anyway, does anyone want to play Ultimate Chicken Horse sometime? It looks so fun. Other games are fine too. Nobody ever invites me, but maybe that will change eventually. As long as we are not desperately chasing victory, please come rescue this empty-nest elder.