My son set my up on Steam and recommended the game “Pronoun Palace,” as I enjoy word games. I’ve barely looked at the game, but I can see it’s not going to be easy for me at first to pick up the rules. The description of the game is:
Pronoun Palace is a word-spelling roguelike set in a dystopian future where the government has taken your pronouns. Use spells to manipulate letter tiles, catch fish, and abuse amphetamines to defeat the Party and get your pronouns back!
Umm, Boggle and Spelling Bee are more my style! But I love my son, and he was excited to do something nice for me, so I’m going to sort it out. Hopefully once I understand how to play, I’ll enjoy it.
If anyone here knows how to play the game, I’d appreciate insights.
ETA: also, where the hell is the noun in that first “noun phrase”? Is “roguelike” a noun in Steam world? I assume “set” is a verb …
ETA to my ETA: yes, “roguelike” seems to be a noun referring to: a genre of role-playing games defined by procedurally generated levels, turn-based mechanics, grid movement, and permanent death.
I know how incredibly busy you are, but if you get a chance to take a look, I hope you will! I will post any updates in this thread as I learn how to play.
I guess I should be flattered that my son (age 28) thinks his 67-year-old mother has the mental flexibility and acuity to dip my toe into this kind of game-playing. I’ll try not to disappoint him!
Okay, I’ve tried it! It’s not hard to get going (although I find the Steam interface confusing, since this is my first time there - it feels like you’re just supposed to know a lot about how to navigate).
Af the very beginning I had a little trouble because I play Spelling Bee every day so I was thinking up words that had more than one copy of some of the letters. But I got over that pretty fast.
I can see that with experience, one can get to be a much better player - I am practically ignoring the colors of the tiles right now, and that is obviously strategically important.
Seems fun - I think it will be more fun when I have a better idea of what I’m doing!
Rogue-lite games are similar to rogue-likes (arguably a sub-genre) in that they have procedurally generated levels and perma-death, but there is some mechanic that let’s you make your character stronger over time. So while the world is a harsh place, and rogue-lites are often times harder in the beginning than a rogue-like, over time they get easier as your character advances in powers/equipment/etc.
Rogue-likes don’t get easier. Every death requires a new character with nothing carried over.
Also, rogue-lites frequently shun turn based and grid movement. But so do some modern rogue-likes.
The genre is named after Rogue which was the first game of this type. Nethack was probably the best known of the early rogue-likes.
I told my son I’d started playing - he told a trans friend of his from college that he’d gotten his mom to play PP, and her response was “now your mom is woke.”
The game was $20. I have no idea if that was a sale price or not. But given the number of hours I am destined to spend on the game, I’m sure that was very cheap on a per-hour-of-entertainment basis.
