been building a couple of farms with friends and can honestly say that the rejuvenated digital terrain and rapid ecological repopulation really assuages my sense of ethics whenever i fear i've begun to overfish or otherwise become complicit in logging! honestly don't think you can be expected to play this without hiring at least a couple of farmhands... small-town living and the new girl, i think this may perhaps be the first game that made me anxious over what the npcs thought of me when i wasn't in their line of sight! what a community, right?

actually quite good at demonstrating anarchist theoretical applications of the developmental state; much like real life, the mechanisms for trading and the legality of direct interference with capital operation is a complicated process that is impossible to understand and determine to what degree that it's even working! i'm not relearning a whole new way of doing economics just because the game's fictional economy has a vested interest in directing the player to extend beyond her own borders in the name of "self-preservation"!

the snow looks fake! will probably return to this for sick momentum superjumps and the endless fun that comes from crashing headfirst into the northeastern side of the matterhorn; but the frustration that comes with losing races due to a supremely unnatural camera control and bad tracing for obstacle clearance makes the satisfaction that it ought to achieve illusory and ineffective. its glistening 'realism' an affront to the superimposed images of prescribed locational interest, what if i just want a vibe?

also mountain stories? playing this game for the plot places it in a dilemma of total misapprehension of its whole exploratory objective, wld almost be cooler as a death stranding-type vehicle but with realistic placements and an actually usable travel system that doesn't feel like a tourist office's 1,001 ski slopes you must see before you die (1,001 times).