Going back for more Vintage Story

I spent some time checking out Vintage Story again. I've written about it here several times before - looks like I was super into it last January?

It's still good! The game has been updated quite a lot since I last sat down with it. One of the bigger updates was the addition of fishing earlier this year. (The update post is pretty wild.) In traditional Vintage Story style, the fishing system is more detailed than you'd expect, and involves the creation of worm grunters to acquire worms. This led me down a rabbit hole where I was watching worm grunting videos:

This is what worm grunting looks like in vintage story:

Vintage Story is the kind of game that exists, sometimes and for some people, to be a weird ritual in verisimilitude. Like, the goal seems to be to hew as closely to strange visions of "reality" as possible, and to create a collage of arcane and gnarled realities. This collage is so dense that the experience of learning and navigating them leads you down these various rabbitholes, as a sort of meditative meta-experience in itself.

In general, that's also been why I prefer Vintage Story to Minecraft now. I find both of them to be a kind of smooth-brain, agreeable-drudgery experience, no matter how hard I'm working or how challenging or engaging the material is - but the Vintage Story stuff is much better for acquiring bizarre stories that I can tell my friends.

I tend to want only two things from games: drudgery that sands down the corners on my brain, and bizarre, unexpected, hard-to-enjoy, hard-to-explain spectacle. This one gives me both!