Raid: Shadow Legends (2018)

Something strange is happening to me. Of course, life is bizarre right now. Not only is the world in a weird state right now, but my day-to-day is just so different. I'm only working 2 days a week now, I have a successful Kickstarter project I have to deliver by August/September, I'm helping my brother's business with some marketing and design stuff, I'm exercising (boo) and eating healthy (BOOOOO), and I'm teaching myself how to code Python in hopes of one day making good money. Oh, and the US is on fire and we're still reeling from a global pandemic.

All of this brings about a strong amount of mental scarcity for me. I'm engaged in things that are objectively difficult and the last thing I want is to be challenged by anything extracurricular, video games included. I can't bring myself to put any time into "real" video games. Instead, I've been playing these awful, awful, awful mobile games that a very slightly trained chimpanzee could excel at. And I mean that.

I've been playing Raid: Shadow Legends because it's hard to "lose" (well, unless you're grinding arena which I am not). You just hit the buzzer and win a cookie. Even weirder? I started playing a friggen slot machine game (7 Heart Casino) on my iPad. Important to note that I refuse to pay any money to these games. In downtime, I just put on YouTube videos (I enjoy uncut police interrogations and strange VHS tapes. I have my own channel where I archive weird old VHS tapes), pop one of of these "Skinner Box" games and switch off. And you know what? I'm not even really upset about it. I just find is fascinating that there was some kind of switch in my brain and now this is what I do.

That's all. I just wanted to share this.

BZZZ

"You won a cookie!"

BZZZ

"You won another cookie!"

I needed something to really take my mind off of everything, so I downloaded this so I could plink away at some dumb mobile game while watching YouTube videos. It's addicting in the beginning. Leveling up characters with very little effort is nice, for a while. After about 6 days the paywall began encroaching. I've never played a gacha game before, so I was unfamiliar with the concept of energy/stamina in these games. It's a bummer that you can only play every few hours, and only for tops 15 minutes at a time. In the beginning they gave you so much free energy it was fun to just grind away mindlessly. But now that I can only play for a few moments every 5 or so hours it's much, much less fun. I'll keep poking at it for another few days, but I'd be very surprised if I found myself playing at all past that. Sucks, because I was enjoying it and would even possibly sink some money into it if it wasn't for the really harsh restrictions on how much you can play.

If there are any games like this that don't have an energy/stamina mechanic I'd love to hear some suggestions.