This is a great way to think about it… as much as I would love to completely drop the companies I hate like Microsoft or Google or Twitter, sometimes you have to use it for school/work/etc. (Good God I hate Teams.) Like food conglomerates it’s just far too hard for the majority of people to live off the big tech grid.

I just bought Subnautica and Cities Skylines, so I’m looking forward to playing them both.

A Hat in Time: 50% off at £12. A really cute 3D platformer.

Wobbledogs: 40% off at £10. Looks and plays like a pet simulator but is almost more about genetics and seeing what kind of bizarre “dogs” you can create.

Let’s Build a Zoo: 45% £9. I’ve seen this described as similar to a Bullfrog game (think Theme Hospital) and that’s good way to put it. It’s a zoo simulator, but full of silly humour and things you can do, like butcher your animals for meat. A big feature of the game is breeding, including crossbreeding animals to create hybrids like a snake/pig monster.

Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper: 80% at £2. It’s an old game and the dating shows, and nor is it a brilliant masterpiece of writing (it’s Sherlock investigating Jack the Ripper after all) but it does scratch the detective game itch. It’s fun to explore London as it was in Sherlock’s day, and it does provide its own theory as to who Jack the Ripper was, as well as laying out the events in a way that are much easier to follow than reading a book. I’d recommend it for true crime and mystery fans and I look forward to the other games in the series.

My picks for some (actually) hidden gems :)

I have not considered that, I think I’ll bring it up with my DM… it’s my first “all-evil campaign” so I just figured we’d be good to play without putting some guidelines in place! I’ve talked to the DM before about the player but I think next session I’ll talk to the player in private, tell them cooperation is key. They have a lot more experience with regular RP than tabletop which is probably where these issues are coming from.

As others have said, ads. The app is also overrun with spambots posting links to scams to buy followers or ForEx or whatever they’re selling. The algorithm is really, really bad, at least if you’re an artist of any kind. IG was one of the first apps to attempt to steal TikTok’s short-form video format, which means it’s hard to get your content out there if you’re just posting images. And there are a LOT of content reposters.

If you guys are interested in romhacks/fangames/Pokemon games with a little more meat and difficulty to them, I heartily recommend Pokemon Infinite Fusion. It’s based on FR/LG, with a slightly different story (but it’s still essentially Team Rocket doing Team Rocket things), with the big difference being that you can fuse Pokemon. Every Pokemon in the game is fuseable, giving you a MASSIVE possible amount of combinations. You can play it classic mode, like a regular Pokemon game, but there’s even a randomised mode which changes it up so every wild encounter and trainer battle uses randomly fused Pokemon. It’s great fun!

As for whether modern Pokemon games hold your hand too much, I dunno. I do recognise they’re made explicitly for children, so I can’t tell you how much is too much. In fact, I remember as a child being stumped enough that I quit playing Diamond halfway through because I thought the gyms were ‘too hard’. I still enjoy the newer games (I don’t care what anyone says, I loved SwSh) but I don’t let their shortcomings get to me as I recognise they’re children’s games.