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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I’ll recommend Escape From Duckov, a parody of sweaty extraction shooters like Tarkov. It avoids the worst parts of that genre by virtue of one thing: it’s entirely single-player. There’s no camping, no trolling, no meta to follow, just you going out on expeditions to explore the world, bring back as much loot as you can carry, upgrade your character and equipment, expand your base, and unlock new areas. The only two friction points are your limited carrying capacity (you’ll be limited by your slots at first, then weight once you have a decent backpack) and that dying twice in a row costs you everything you had equipped - the latter not really being a problem because the game keeps a backup of your last ten saves and lets you jump back in time directly from the load menu, so if losing all the equipment you spent several hours upgrading is a deal-breaker you can simply elect to undo it when it happens.

    The looting is the real standout here. Nearly every item you find is used for at least one quest or upgrade, and you continually unlock new places to spend them as you progress. All that food you’ve been hoarding comes in handy after you unlock a gym that uses them to permanently increase your base stats, for example. You’ll also sometimes be forced to make hard choices - say you found an expansion crate that’s used for upgrading the warehouse capacity back at base; unfortunately these crates are obscenely heavy, so if you want to haul it back you’ll need to drop most of what you’re carrying or be limited to slowly dodge-rolling your way to the nearest extraction point.

    It’s such an addicting experience, and I’m saying that as someone who normally loathes loot-driven games. If anyone ends up playing, I can’t recommend these three mods enough. The first shows how many of an item you already have in its mouseover popup, which saves you an endless amount of warehouse wrangling due to running out of space, The second shows how much an item would sell for, making prioritizing loot much less stressful when you’re low on inventory slots. The third is a simple luxury mod that adds colored backgrounds to items based on loot rarity.