It’s not reductive, it’s misrepresentative. A puzzle game is only a puzzle game as long as coming up with the solution is the main task. There are more than enough games where coming up with the right solution is not difficult, but performing it is.

Also the name puzzle game implies that there are designed puzzles. Any game where you have to make decisions in generated situations aren’t puzzle games. For example if you take a specific chess situation and ask which move would lead to check mate in x moves then that’s a chess puzzle. That doesn’t make the game of chess itself a puzzle.

Boy, this question hurts.

For anyone above a certain age with kids below a certain age this isn’t a punishment or a challenge, this is A DREAM!! Heroes of might and magic 3, system shock 2, Anno (any version up to 1503), Morrowind, Civilization 3, Age of wonders shadow magic, Baldur’s gate 1 and 2…

Whenever my wife finds the time she goes to her room to play Morrowind. She just got a new laptop and the first thing I did was install OpenMW and copy her save file.

It goes without saying that you couldn’t finish any of those games in those 12 hours, except for System Shock 2.

Because they are selling the product the customers think they are getting, not the one that they actually get. I guarantee that a device with thumb sticks and lousy performance will sell better than one without sticks and with better performance.

This is something I really don’t understand. Maybe you can explain it to me.

For me a “normal” day would be one where earth looks like the moon. The fact that we have all kinds of plants and animals is amazing and the fact that we have buildings, technology and culture is something to be very proud of, because every day that you don’t run around killing people or doing other horrible things is a day where you overcame your instincts and helped hold up culture. So to me every day, even one that you would deem “shit that happens in your life”, is absolutely amazing and something to be proud of.

But for someone who believes that there is a God a normal day would be one where everything works out great, and it would just be because God took care of it. A bad day would mean that for whatever reason this God decided to let you suffer. And this is supposed to make you feel good?

Isn’t it uplifting to say that you can’t explain why bad things happen to you? Do you really think it’s uplifting to think that bad things happen to you because an all powerful being decided that you deserved it?

When I start a free trial I immediately set a reminder in Google calendar. And when I am looking for a specific movie I buy it used online. That way I have all my favorite movies on my NAS and can cancel my subscriptions when there is nothing especially interesting.

Completely agree. I am German and it’s utterly ridiculous.

That’s the thing: progress quest isn’t an idle game. It’s a parody of modern games that was made long before idle games were a thing. It wasn’t fun just like a joke isn’t an interesting story.