TWRP - The Odyssey - Icarus

3min read
This is a "ramble" blog post, it's sort of like a public journal with less structured and more experimental (read: bad) writing. Don't take it too seriously.

Tupper Ware Remix Party

I don’t really want to write about Tupper Ware Remix Party.

Writing about music is pain and suffering. Just listen to it, maybe you’ll like it.

look at those costumes!

The Odyssey

I just finished reading the Odyssey (translated by Emily Wilson). Odysseus is a mass murderer and a villain… yet in the story he’s presented as a victim and a hero. It’s… complex.

I can understand why some people have spent their entire lives studying this story and Greek mythology in general (especially after also reading Robert Grave’s The Greek Myths).

Zeus rapes a lot and there’s a lot of murder, but if you can stomach it, Greek Mythology is a wild ride.

These stories keep being retold again and again in different forms and understanding where all these tropes come from is fun.

Sonic is Hermes.

One Piece is a retelling of Jason’s, and the Argonauts’s, quest for the Golden Fleece.

Odysseus is a superhero, with powers coming from Athena’s favor, straight out of a comic book (or Marvel movie). Normal humans can’t murder 105+ people with a bow in a dining hall, make anyone believe anything and wear some rags to perfectly disguise their identity.

Icarus

I’ve been playing Icarus…

It’s got mixed reviews on Steam right now. It’s way buggier than it has any right to be.

But I guess they couldn’t delay the game any longer. Budgets are limited.

What they’re trying to do is ambitious and interesting although the execution isn’t all the way there yet (I’m not sure it’ll ever be).

Icarus is a hardcore survival game where you and your friends land on a terraformed alien planet, you gather resources, hunt regular ass wolves and deer and do whatever your corporate overlords ask you to do like scan some shit, gather weird flora and fauna and explore dark caves.

What makes it special and different other games of its kind?

  • An advanced weather system will pelt you with rain, wind, storms (I’ve never seen a forest of trees swaying in the wind like this, it’s breathtaking) forcing you take cover and play around the hostile environment in interesting ways.
  • Instead of being open-ended (setting your own goals), you’re given specific tasks to carry out each time you drop onto the planet.
  • Because everything you build gets wiped every new mission you take on, the game actively discourages you from just chopping down trees forever and building a fortress. You gather and build as little as you need to accomplish your mission and then you leave. It’s pretty novel.

What bugs have I run into?

  • Bears can scale any wall no matter how vertical it is (it looks extremely stupid, don’t imagine them climbing, they walk vertically) making it very hard to take them on.
  • After dying, my armor started clipping in and out of my field of vision. Unequipping and reequipping my armor fixed that.
  • Sometimes deer don’t have a hitbox? Arrows’ll just pass through them.

It’s pretty clear from the state of the game that the dev team ran out of money and they were hoping that the game would be “good enough” to sell well and keep funding the development.

I hope it’s selling well enough for them to continue working on this because what’s there and what works currently is interesting enough for me to overlook the few bugs I’ve run into.

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