it's funny, I played thru origin recently and by and large did not have any real "need to leave" issues, but to be fair Napishtim is one of my fav games so I'm used to the arduous level scaling

the capper to all this is that I'm pretty sure my uncle would have found this incident absolutely hilarious and so imagining it as some sort of ghost prank, a final message from beyond, feels extremely fitting

the world may never know

this incident has been in my head as the "Thanksgiving post-mortem time bomb" for the better part of a decade now

I need to get back to that, I remember being pretty into it (Though I think I would currently place DW:Origins as my top)

yeah some wizardries (etrian) and some roguelikes def retain this energy yet

you cannot possibly miss the fact that gaining levels makes you stronger in this game because every time you enter a new area you Suffer until you don't

funny how this is a conceit I recognize most clearly in modern _idle games_ actually

I don't want every game i play to have this sort of thing - god knows there's a whole argument one could have over what's experiencial and what's padding here - but it's interesting how these days "power growth" tends to be more in, like...you _get stuff_ for leveling rather than it being Evident

like your experience first entering a dungeon vs the last time you go into it all grinded up is a big difference! and sure that experience still exists in different contexts nowadays but this particular take on it SURE does kick you right in the face with that feeling every time

and I think in a modern context it's exceptionally rare to see this behaviour anymore because it's not in vogue other than in a specific subset of roguelikes

but it's interesting to be reminded that this style exists bc it really does make the leveling-up FEEL more noticable

hellllllll yea

you can find a terrifying amount of information online

The vertical-text plugins/ereaders were called T-Time and dotBook, respectively, btw

....also video-game-wise they published two editions of the game Personal Automated Wagging System and the discrepancy in the publisher branding was what led me down this rabbit hole last year to begin with

...by creating the Voyager Company to own Criterion, which then got a japanese subsidary (Voyager Japan, though there's evidence it was originally planned to be Organa Japan) to import Criterion titles, which then significantly outlived the "original" Voyager as a books-on-CD and ebook publisher