I have a bit more to say about Birdigo (John August, Corey Martin) and indie games in general. At the end of the last post (which you can read here), I mentioned that I was surprised when I got the ‘win each round with one word’ achievement. It was anticlimactic because I did not realize I had won it until after it was over. I had been going at it for so long, I didn’t know quite what I was supposed to do when I actually won or how I was supposed to feel.
It reminds me of when the boys fought
*SPOILER*
Malenia for three days in their Elden Ring (FromSoft) playthrough. And, yes, it’s amusing to me to spoiler tag a boss from another game in this post. Part of the series evolved into Rory soloing every boss as long as there were no NPC summons to summon (and even sometimes then). In Elden Ring, they decided through trial and error that he would not use the spirit ashes for bosses. Krupa said to Gav that he (Gav) would one day rue that decree, but to Rory’s credit, he adamantly refused to use the spirit ash during the Malenia fight.
They edited down the footage, obviously, but they revealed that it was fifteen hours in total over four days. They did not even show any of the footage for one of the days. I think? They split it into three episodes, and each was over two hours. The last was almost two-and-a-half hours. It was epic, and the struggle was so real. The reason I mention it is because when he fginally beat her, the celebration was muted. I mean, the initial celebration was pretty hyped, but it subsided quickly. It became much more an expression of relief than excitement. Rory said something about not knowing what to do because he should be running back to fight Malenia again (massive paraphrase). He died 265 times to her, and you could see it wearing on all three of them in the last episode.
Anyway, this is me whenever I go for a plat. I go blank on the inside and something deep inside of me almost gets angry. Like, “You’re not the boss of me, and I’m going to do this!” Who it’s saying it to, I have no idea. Also me, probably. This is why I don’t do competitive sports–I’m way too hard on myself when I do.
It’s funny. It’s not so much that I care about winning and losing–though I do to a certain extent. It’s just me feeling like I’m not doing enough. It’s all about me winning and losing against myself–not me winning and losing against anyone else.
I just now realized that Birdigo sounds like vertigo. D’oh! Huh. The video I’m including is an interview with the two devs. I didn’t realize that the game was a card game first (called AlphaBird). Huh. Made by the same two guys. Thats’ pretty cool!
The second achievement I went after was winning the seven daily migrations. I thought it was in a row at first, which I wouldn’t have even tried. But, no. It was seven migrations in general. A migration is a run, by the way. That was doable, but arduous. Why did I decide to do this one and not the last route? Because I had to do seven. So I wanted to whittle away at this one first. Also, if I won a daily migration, I could move on to the last route and try to win a run in that, too. For the first achievement, I was able to pick whichever route I wanted. Of course, I chose the shortest route (9 stops, if I remember correctly). The daily migration was roughly twice the length, which made it a slog. But even that was nothing compared to the last route. Sigh.
I really thought it was going to be the win with one word per round that tripped me up. I’m not great at thinking about the big picture or planning ahead. I tend to live in the moment. Not as a matter of philosophy, but just because that’s the way my brain works. This happened to me when I tried to clear the challenges in Balatro (LocalThunk) as well. The guy who was doing them at the same time gave me some really good tips–including using a calculator to figure out exactly how many points you needed to clear the blind.
I refused. I knew it would make it easier on me, but that was so not how I played those kinds of games. I was willing to do a lot to get that last challenge, but that was a step too far. I felt the same with the last two challenges of Birdigo. I did not want to pull out the calculator. Not because I had anything against using tools that helped me, but because I was already not having much fun with my achievement hunting–I did not want to make it worse.
It took me maybe 2 weeks to finish the 7 daily migrations achievement? I just looked, and I played the game for little over a month. As was my wont, I did not even think about getting the plat until I was well past halfway through the achievements. I would have liked to have quit before I reached the ‘I hate everything especially this game’ level, but I don’t have that much discipline.
The daily run achievement wasn’t that hard, really. It was just tedious and pretty meh. There was nothing outstanding about it in any way. Also, for some weird reason, when I got my last achievement, the game informed me that I had now unlocked the daily migrations. Which I had been doing for weeks. Maybe it was only supposed to unlock once you won the last route? I have no idea .
Before I go onto the last achievement (which, weirdly, was the hardest and most painful of the bunch), I would like to talk about a game I played the demo for. It’s a game I was looking forward to, despite the chibi graphics (not my fave). I tried the demo when it first came out, and it did not feel good at aall gameplay-wise. I played for about twenty minutes before giving up.
I was reminded of it today (yesterday, actually) because it was coming out on July 7. That meant the cozy gamers were all abuzz about it. I’m tired. I will write more about this and the last Birdigo achievement tomorrow.