I'm in a difficult position in regards Offworld Trading Company. My only complaint about it is that I wish it was an entirely different game. By that I mean that I enjoyed playing it, and I found the mechanics to be both interesting and apt for what the game was trying to accomplish, but at its root, it is something I am not particularly interested in - a quick and simple multiplayer game of cutthroat economics.
Or, to be more precise, this is the sort of game that's fun to play with friends, because it's competitive without being violent and it's tactically complex enough that no two matches are going to be exactly the same. But as a solitary activity . . . I have other things I'd rather do.
So that leaves me trying to put a vague and nameless feeling into words. I guess my experience with this game was one of "practice." I had to play it deliberately, and with my mind not on the present, but on the future. I was playing the game not for itself, but for what I might learn from it. Which, you know, is fine, but it had the unfortunate side effect of making it feel more like work than play.
This is definitely a game that I would play again, if I ever need a low time-commitment multiplayer game. I like that it is mostly pacifist (although the Black Market was kind of bullshit) and that you win by building yourself up rather than tearing your opponents down.
That said, I'm not sure when that situation will come up, so it is likely that it will take me years of owning this game before I get to my second twenty hours. I guess that's fine, though. Not every game has to become an obsession. If they did, how would it be possible to own two hundred of them . . .
(Oh, wow, I think I just had an epiphany that would have saved me a lot of trouble if I'd had it 4 years ago.)
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