It's been a while, but yesterday I got around to playing the story mode of VOTV. I was tired then, and proceeded to sleep through something about an hour later, but it hit way too close to home for me. I freed some space on my computer, so it turned out the tutorial didn't actually just crash when I went on the slides, and there was more to it, but honestly I wasn't interested in taking the time to learn about things then, rather than doing so as I went when I wanted to do certain specific things.
Problem was, I didn't really know what to do.
First I had to fiddle with the controls to grab a suitcase containing a certificate that I felt had fraudulently been presented to me, and I couldn't go past the threshold so I spent a while running across the long wall of fence trying to get past it, but, failed. Then I returned to the checkpoint and decided to see if I could head to the base. I could use the flashlight in the tutorial, but not here because apparently you had to drop the suitcase (which I already wasn't very comfortable doing, since that would make it a loose object that could fly or get whisked away by something - at least that's how I felt) and fetch the batteries to use it. Also, I felt like having fiddly and slightly-convoluted controls was gonna be a problem if I ever needed to protect myself or do something quick, because I wouldn't be able to do much more than either just run around or stop and make myself exposed so I could handle a bunch of items. So for a while I couldn't read the signs because it was night-time and the render quality was...a bit low and indistinct, probably, but still a bit laggy. That meant I got lost and just ended up at a satellite running around on a dark balcony. Then I felt really, really lost. So I left and decided to run somewhere to try and find where I was supposed to go, ended up in the water, scrambled my way out and found myself back at the checkpoint. Great. So I opened the suitcase and used the batteries. Took me a while to get there, but I did.
Yeah, the place was a mess. I felt like the place didn't belong to me and I was simply intruding. Normally this would be fun, since I like to run around and explore stray construction sites around town, but I was feeling really tired and I felt bad because I couldn't just have a moment of collapsing on the laptop out of exasperation because the plug was broken and I would have to mess with it trying to make the exposed internal wires connect and stay put again if I did that. The lights were all out so it was really dark in there, and there were no light switches to be found. When I got to the signal processing room I saw there were actually some bar-lights on the ceiling, so I moved over a desk to see if I could do anything with them and I couldn't. The combination of the place being dark, laggy and trashed gave everything a sense of discomforting claustrophobia that I simply wouldn't have if I was running around at the shops instead, and I also felt like I was under pressure because of my food and sleep gauges going down. If you've been on my Discord server and read my speeches, you know what having a messy place that's overwhelming yet apparently having limited clear options while you struggle with ADHD and slow stagnation and self-neglect does to you. Eventually I drove out the buggy thing. But it didn't make me feel better because I was tired and disturbing the place would make it more chaotic and trashed than it already is. Plus, the controls were simple but also fiddly, it seemed. Left the headlights on when I got off it at some point and I immediately started worrying about whether it would run out of power when I couldn't even see how much it had, so I went back.
Tried going on the main computer station in a bit of desperation to try and do something, but just like the tutorial, I read a couple of emails, and everything was just long paragraphs and clusters of text and meta-exposition that I couldn't remember or skim through. Then I deleted both of those emails for some reason, so now I was really stuck. The game was auto-saving all the while as I did this, while I was slowly starving, so I just gave up and went to bed. The sun rose as I woke up, some event happened that dropped my sleep gauge, I went back to sleep again, I couldn't go back to sleep, I wandered around the place, and then I gave up and closed the game and slept through something as I mentioned earlier. Everything was just too overwhelming for me and aside from exactly two paragraphs of two deleted emails from two people, I had nothing guiding me on specifically what to do. I didn't need to live a double-life where one life was just as disorderly as the other one. I might get back to the game later, at some point when I get to the laptop again - which I'm sure you can wait for since it's been many months since I wrote that comment about the tutorial - but for now I suppose I'm just going to get over that. I didn't want to stay stuck in the tutorial for much longer since I already outran the spook and did a bunch of experiments that seemed fun and didn't progress to the main game for a really long time, but I suppose I'll have to stay there anyway until I get an intuitive grasp on how the game goes. Then I'll be able to deal with the base I stepped and ran around in, and find a way to accept and claim it as my own. No idea where to start but I suppose I'll restart and not delete those emails next time, as well as be patient and know when to stop and take a break or think things over.
Yeah it's one of these speeches again :P
Hopefully that was at least nostalgic to see, the stereotypical long walls of text on MrDrNose game pages by FireyDeath4, even if previous ones (and even this one) sounded very silly
I should probably give you a free cookie as an act of courtesy or something. Sigh... 🍪 Here you go