if you trust your rebel heart, ride it into battle

I quit two phone games recently and want to work through some feelings about it.

Farm RPG

I started playing Farm RPG a while back because I was looking for something that was like Stardew Valley but more idle focused.

On the surface this is the case, but it’s not so much an idle game as it is a clicker. Some resources accumulate over time once you've bought the upgrade, but for the most part you are clicking to obtain them. Fishing is a twitchy “click on the moving dot” affair. Farming involves waiting (minutes, hours, days) or expending an item, but is not very profitable.

There are villagers to befriend (not marry) and quests to complete, but there’s a cynical snideness to the writing that didn’t really work for me. Some quests require items you get from sending your animals to the slaughterhouse, which I didn't want to do and used workarounds that just take longer (weeks/months instead of days.)

All of this I could deal with but I’ve reached a point where I cannot progress in the story without putting the raptors I have raised in a fight club and I just don’t want to. They’re good raptors! The only alternative I could see would involve many, many more months of grinding.

And then one day I missed finishing my daily quests, took a step back and asked, am I actually enjoying this game? Am I looking forward to doing the daily tasks or is it tedious?

So I’ve stopped.

nb. there is a social aspect to the game which I turned off shortly after starting. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I engaged with the community.

Pokémon TCG Pocket

If you want the feeling of opening packets of collectible cards with cute art but don’t want the clutter or to spend actual money, this game is almost perfect! You can open 2 packs a day for free! You can make decks and battle (against the computer or online)!

You can spend real life currency on a monthly subscription to open an extra pack a day, or à la carte to reduce the time until you can open new packs. But I wasn’t even tempted.

I quit because quitting Farm RPG made me question if I actually enjoyed this game too, and I thought how long the app takes to load every time, how unlikely it is that I’ll ever complete my collections, how I always battled in auto mode because it was slow and not interesting to me… so I’ve quit.

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What games have you recently quit? What are you Actually Enjoying right now?

I have been trying to read more but ironically most of the time this is more engaging than playing a game and leads to more time on my phone.