HomeFeatures
What’s better: character creation building backstory, or giant fungus?Vote now as we continue deciding the single best thing in games
Vote now as we continue deciding the single best thing in games
Image credit:Microsoft
Image credit:Microsoft
Character creation building backstory
I always like when games use character creation choices to build a little backstory rather than simply throwing numbers about. What in my life made me a rogue? How come I can read these runes? Why do I have a gun? You can always make up stories for yourself, I suppose, but some games explicitly make these decisions part of who we are and who we have been, giving us more personality as we pick perks and set stats.
This most recently came up for me in The Forgotten City, a game which has no stats but offers handy little perks depending on a conversation choice where you tell someone you were in life. A fugitive can run faster; an amnesiac somehow takes less damage in combat; a soldier starts with a pistol and ten bullets (far deadlier than the bow and arrow others can find); and an archaeologist has extra insight in conversations and can read some inscriptions. They’re small stories, unimportant on the scale of the plot, but I like their flavourful presence.
Giant fungus
Advice for juvenile mushroomsWatch on YouTube
Advice for juvenile mushrooms
Resident Evilskipped zombies and took a turn for the fungal in RE7, with mind-controlling mold and spores and hallucinogens and creeping fungusfolk aplenty, but fungus is more than the fruiting body. RE 8age especially delighted in the wacky science potential of the vast mycelium network below the surface, a truly colossal organism which here can store DNA and memories. Mycelium networksare extremely cool. The new expansion,Shadows Of Rose, even takes place inside the mind of the mold.
Fungus is enjoying the mainstream spotlight now, from the growth of foraging and amateur mycology through to sad dad simulator The Last Of Us, and I’ve been glad to see broad concepts rolled into the big pile of science that fiction will wilfully misunderstand for dramatic effect. Fungus is cool, and giant things are cool, so giant fungus is really cool.
