post #2: Game review: Cloud Meadow

[^^ one of the loading screens when playing as the girl player character ^^]

     The game is kind of strange with regard to its sexual content. At some points it seems like it wants to be a full sex game with the silly fantasies that come embroiled within that -- i.e., random npc characters jumping to ask for sex or all the dialogue and diegesis being sex oriented. At others, though the game will be fairly sex-absent and there's not clear demarcations when the game is in sex mode or not. This means that sometimes there's a: surprise! you're having sex now (to me, who didn't read the dialogue -- I skip the sex scene anyways, so I guess it doesn't matter) while others there's: sex? what's sex? I just wanna sell you farm equipment and be obstinate over seed prices :3. I think a lot of porn games struggle with this balance, so it's not necessarily remarkable in Cloud Meadow's case, but, irregardless, I think this phenomenon is worth further consideration in the future.

     The development cycle has been very sporadic and I'd say, arguably, unreadable. What this has to do with sex is that in most content updates it seems like they add some kind of sex scene to the game. but the npc they add to have it with (it's almost always a new character, despite the fact that there are many existing characters I feel get underutilized for how neat their sprites are) is usually in a specific and hard to reach area such that if you aren't reading the patch notes when new updates come out (say if you come back to playing after several years like I have) then 50% of the sex scenes are essentially non-existent. I have no idea who these people are or how anyone is supposed to bone them. Returning to the subject of the high def sex scenes, the obvious standouts are the sex scenes between the player character and the,,, monster farm animals? idk how to explain it. its not bestiality, this is a furry game after all. but the main farming gameplay loop is that you're managing this farm -- you have some number of plots you can plant things in and fertilize with whatever to try to make money and improve quality of the seeds/produce,, this gets used most tangibly in recipes you can experimentally learn or in feeding your people.

     Who are your people? well this is the other side of the game. In a Monster Musume sort of style, it's that you're managing your farm with monster labor -- dragons, centaurs, harpies, etc.. You can get more monsters by hiring more or by hatching more from eggs. You can get eggs from the dungeon exploration sections (from interactable pickups or as loot drops), from the market on certain days, or from monsters breeding and laying the eggs. The game structure incentivizes this latter portion for to manage your farm. in a manner similar to pokemon breeding (but with more inheritable and mutable traits) it's a balancing act of breeding your monsters with each other or with the player character to hatch new eggs to potentially replace previous monsters and repeat the cycle. thankfully, im told, there's an incest prevention system that prevents you from breeding monsters that are too genetically connected. The monsters breeding with each other are animated with sprites and the interactions with the player are hi-def animations. These haven’t changed since the game launched and are one of the best parts of it, imo. Additionally, compared to the arcane and who knows where secret npc sprite sex scenes, most monster scenes are accessible pretty much from the beginning (or at least the first couple of hours). I’ll leave the sex talk here for now, but I’ll get back to it a bit at the very end.

[^^ one of the loading screens when playing as the boy player character ^^]

     I think it next makes sense to talk about this game in comparison to Stardew Valley. I guess both have dating sim elements? I suck at dating sims because I'm not interested in that sort of thing, so I just skip all the dialogue and have no clue what's going on or what to do. That is to say, I never did that part of Stardew Valley and I didnt engage with it here, so I guess effectively they're the same in that regard. The other main aspects of Cloud Meadow are the farming, the sex scenes, and the dungeon/pvp combat section / the story. obviously Stardew Valley isn't sex centered, so I wont talk about that here.

     As for the farming, I think for the most part Stardew does a better job handling those systems than this game. Stardew's grid system works well for its scale of automation and incremental improvement of the farming gameplay loop. I like a little Stardew farming at the start of the game, but once it gets to fall or winter, I pretty much fall off and am not interested in it any more. part of it I guess is it feels too much like the actual repetitive labor of working in the real world which I dont like and so continuing to do that when I get home isn't a big sell for me. I can't put my finger on it more than that. I appreciate how many little quirks the farming has, like that there's different events that can randomly happen and affect your crops in a certain way. The automation is nice enough -- the sprinkler, for example. the animal husbandry, though, i've never been able to get into. and the automation, to be clear, is more of a pleasantry and doesn't go far enough, in my opinion. I can't explain what I mean by this that much. I've never played to the point of end game sprinklers. but I guess what I mean to drive at is the constant micromanaging of all these different things that farming sims require, it overloads my executive functioning and every (in-game) day i'm running around trying to remember a million things I need to take care of or deal with in the future and simultaneously forgetting a million things I need to deal with or take care of in the present. this experience of sisyphean or tantalus-esque or whatever, this tartarus punishment of a gameplay experience isn't that fun, to be honest. but it's addicting in its own moment so that deserves to be acknowledged.

     Anyways, Cloud Meadow doesn't have a grid system and in fact many of its internal systems seem to be cobbled together with duct tape (the lack of cohesion between systems or menus is astounding, like, for example, that every vendor/shop npc you interact with has their shop button in a different place among the dialogue options, so you have to memorize where to click for each person; and they're labeled differently [only one vendor has it called shop]; otherwise you trigger a bunch of dialogue that doesn't matter every time you go to check what the weekly deals are)--- however, despite lacking a grid system, I find a certain charm in the chaos of Cloud Meadows farming gameplay. it controls terribly, to be fair, and none of it is intuitive or consistent, but it's funny and sometimes I lock in and deal with it. The major benefit the game has over Stardew Valley is that your monsters work the farm (more or less) for you in your absence, so you actually don't have to deal with the frustration of farming and you are subsequently not punished for not dealing with it. the system for assigning monsters to work on the farm is not clear and you still have to do a whole micromanaging routine to equip different guys with farm tools and keep those on the right people when you swap guys out, but the ability to tune out and not be punished is a god send, in my opinion. in all fairness, if your gameplay is me trying to figure out how to avoid your gameplay as much as possible, probably there's some kind of problem there (ahem, isaac) but I will pretend that's not the case for now.

     The crafting system is a lot of fun in Stardew Valley and slots in neatly with the other resource gathering routines. I always love crab pots and throwing your junk into the junk recyclers every night and then picking up the scraps in the morning was a fun little song and dance. I can't speak to stardew's food system, though. I know it's part of the crafting system but I rarely ever used it. I have too much of a conservationist (hoarder) disposition that I couldn't bring myself to make any food or consume and foodstuffs I had been gifted or picked up. I also never eat any food in Cloud Meadow, but I love the food making (or rather, experimenting to make) gameplay, so I spend a great deal of time tinkering with that. Basically, for whatever reason, you start out with 0 recipes and you just have to click buttons until you accidentally press foods in the right sequences as an actual recipe in the game. On paper, this is gibberish and I don't know why they made it this way, but the sheer joy of beep boop clicking random buttons and 1/10 times actually getting something popping up from it I cannot understate. Most of the time I click a sequence I've clicked before and get the same non-result, but sometimes there's a gem and when that happens I'm like :OOOOO . I think you can make any recipe you've previously made once you learn the recipe, but i've never done that. I'm just in it for the love of the game. also it's funny because sometimes you'll click all the buttons and it will be like: you made: cinnamon rolls! and what you put in was 5 rainbow fruits and everything from the pantry, and i'm just like,,, no? but thanks anyways, lol? I guess?

[^^ help manual / guide book from Cloud Meadow ^^]

     Aside from farming, the other main gameplay, in my opinion, to Stardew is the mining and dungeon crawling elements. Frankly, they kind of suck. The procedural nature that Stardew and many other games use is nice for resource gathering but, as for the gameplay, it's kind of side-eye worthy. Stardew is a farming game that happens to have a combat element and the combat is so clunky and arcane it feels punishing even when you win most of the time. I've seen speedruns and youtube videos of people clearing the whole thing in a day or getting to level 200 in the desert or whatever, and I'm glad others can find reasons to come back to that but I sure as heck haven't been able to. sadly, methinks, I guess.

     In comparison, the dungeon elements in Cloud Meadow are pretty good, I'd say. The combat, though, is... kind of sucky, but the dungeon is fun to crawl around in and has a lot of awesome art and sprite work to see. What you're supposed to do in the dungeons is never clear -- I constantly get stuck or end up missing the obscured jump pad to move on to the next section -- but it's fun to spend time there. It's very chaotic, though, and feels much disconnected from the farming aspect. I think my save file glitched somehow since i've had it since the game first came out, so I just one shot every enemy, which is fun lol and I like pressing the button on the big green lady’s moveset to have a giant tree trunk drop from the sky and send all the enemies flying. This is also to say that I never had a fight where I was even close to losing, as a result, I don't know how well balanced the combat systems are -- and i've only ever used like three characters -- but again, the sprite work is impressive and its neat team nimbus developed unique play styles and mechanics for each nonplayer character ally you can adventure with (though sometimes that means stepping on toes). After two or three hours, though, the fighting becomes more of a chore. Sure, it's fun to see what new sprites there are roaming around once the weekly migration happens, but 95% of the time I get into an encounter it's just me trying to figure out how to get out of it as quickly as I can. The loading times before and after every fight are unfortunate and lengthy. I'll talk more about the loading screens later, though. I also have no clue why the vast majority of player actions don't have keybinds -- like why does everyone have 4 move options but you're telling me I always have to individually click on which move I’m selecting and click on the tiny enemy hitbox to say who I'm attacking? Similarly, there's weird inconsistencies with regard to which moves you need to select targets for and which ones you dont and I wish any of this were better integrated. the game has a extensive guidebook you can view in the menus, with great pixel art and neat displays, but it's not that readable and the division between each of the sections only goes to show how disconnected the game's systems are -- like there 14 different tabs (i don't know about the actual number) sticking out like bookmarks from every side of the open guidebook when you pull the menu up, thus indicating that everything is cordoned off into its own separate area. all of that said. The story was fun and featured art I enjoyed, so, for that alone, I preferred the combat dimension of Cloud Meadow to that of Stardew Valley.

[^^ one of the loading screens when playing as the boy player character, showing some of the monsters you can manage on your farm ^^]

     There's no fishing in Cloud Meadow, to my knowledge, so I guess Stardew wins by default there. The true champion, however, continues to be MCC Islands fishing (continues, that is, since like 5 months ago or whenever it came out). Congrats to Etho for reaching rank 1 in the world! (still sad I messed up my screenshot with him lol)

[^^ random town npc that looks cool but, to my knowledge, can't be interacted with in any way ^^]

     I think I've said most of what I was winding up to say. I'll close out with a few more thoughts on the furry-ness of this game. It's in this way that I'm captivated by the game's art: the sensoriality, rich as fat, running in the veins of everything that's alive. In the realm of porn games, I'd say there's a bit more body diversity here than usual. While most of the characters are still attractive in a male-gaze aligned way, there's also a concerted emphasis on the tactility of flesh. This is what the hi-def sex scenes capture so well, in my opinion. In a way I'm trying to justify how attractive I find the fat, hanging penises on, for example, the male cyclopses, but what if it was something else as well. The loading screens get at the heart of the sensations the game appeals to best. Withheld only in that the game is not full furry (the player character is decidedly human), the loading screens screen flesh embracing flesh. I can imagine the warmth and the vitality. I don't know how many of the loading screen art is m/m m/f or f/f, but I think there's somewhat of a decent spread across them. But then to get back to the detriment w/r/t the sporadic updates and difficult to discover sex scenes, there are several loading screens where people are being intimate and I have no idea who they are or where they are. That takes me out a bit, but I still find them hot. But yeah, just seeing the dogboys or catgirls walking around the farm and getting to give them pats and then seeing them pause, smile, and give a bunch of <3 's; it's very :3 -coded, in my opinion. I have very rudimentary vocabulary to describe these things, but I'm working on it. You gotta incohere before you cohere.

[^^ For no particular reason (lie) here's some of my lil cyclops guys :3 ^^]

     Oh, the last thing I'll say is that the breeding system in its proximity to pokemon breeding, is a eugenics incentivizing system. Which is a bummer. The gameplay is fun, which makes it a bummer too. I wonder if there's a way to incorporate breeding and genetic systems into a game and not have it reproduce or incentivize eugenics. Compared to pokemon, I guess the way this game frames the releasing to the wild-equivalent gesture (here: letting your monster go and join society) is maybe marginally better than how pokemon does it.

     I'd say check it out if you want. Maybe worth figuring out cheats or something to circumvent the tedium. I don't know how much they're selling it for, but, as with most things, I think you're fine to pirate it if you feel like it. I'll leave the channels to do that out for now, but I can sew them in in the future.

[^^ one of the weekly vendor npcs that looks cool but, to my knowledge, can only be interacted with for to shop ^^]

[^^ random town npc that looks cool but, to my knowledge, can't be interacted with in any way ^^]