Pile of Shame Sunday - 26th December 2021

Screenshot of The Rat Pack game
Later missions focus on gaining ranks with the King Rat and keeping the Human Alert level low gets trickier

The following post is part of a series of posts that are published every Sunday to update readers on what Mark G has been up to with respect to finishing off games on his "Pile of Shame". The games to target are picked by Choicest Games contributors Choona, Luke and myself. As I'll be talking about my progress through these games, there may be spoilers ahead, especially for games containing a narrative. Consider yourself warned.


Disco Elysium

  • Picked by Me
  • Percentage Complete = 44%

I've been focusing on other games this week so I didn't get time to play this.


Pillars of Eternity

  • Picked by Luke
  • Percentage Complete = 10%

I've been focusing on other games this week so I didn't get time to play this.


Psychonauts 2

  • Picked by Me
  • Percentage Complete = 5%

I've been focusing on other games this week so I didn't get time to play this.


The Rat Pack

  • Picked by Me
  • Percentage Complete = 80%

Made some more progress with this game and I'm now three missions away from completing this. A lot of the game could be considered grind I suppose or micro-managing but this wouldn't be the first game where busywork is the means of making your way forward (games like the 2013 SimCity is an example of this - taking a more micromanagement approach to city building instead of the macromanagement perspective in the original SimCity games). I think it's tricky striking a balance. However, like the SimCity games, you can find yourself in an addictive gameplay loop while playing The Rat Pack, just trying to finish one more turn to see whether you can finally make it past the level.

Another interesting aspect of the game I'm finding though (and I'm not sure if this was intentional or not) is that the larger your colony grows, the harder it is to keep your Human Alert level below a certain percentage. I'm not quite sure what happens when it hits 100% but I'm not willing to find out which means I spend a lot of time trying to lie low once your colony grows beyond a certain population. While it's reasonably easy to keep on expanding your colony and storing more food, I'm guessing there's a certain point you have to say "no, the colony is big enough as it is" and just deal with the fact the colony is restless due to lack of space, since managing the rat population is at least easier having to deal with alerting the Humans.


LINK: [ The Pile of Shame ]

Comments

  1. It's great when you spend considerable thought on a particular game mechanic only to read "I don't know if it was intentional or not"! :-D

    My idea was that while having a few rats around might be easy enough generally to hide from those pesky humans, once your colony grows to the hundreds or even thousands even the most dense human might just notice you're around, particularly when they go foraging.

    You might have seen but I am releasing an update soon which makes some things slightly easier so that the game progresses smoothly and there is a tad less grind (albeit it's not really possible to make this type of game challenging AND grind-free). Hoping to release that in the coming week or thereabouts, you might be finished before then.

    BTW if you reach 100% HAL it won't end the game, but next time your rats go looking for food you're going to lose A LOT of them...

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    Replies
    1. Hah. Hi Dave! No offence intended. I don't know the internal workings of the game, I can only guess that's what's happening in the background and what you've described makes sense. Thanks for explaining how it works!

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