Today’s deck is the Steampunk Tarot.
Deck is fine, I’ve just never been much of a Steampunk person.
No signs of exhaustion in today’s reading but rather a call for patience. The readings lately also have an undercurrent about responsabilities. Basically it feels like it’s telling me to be patient as all the bullshit with the bank gets solved.
Woke up at like 4PM with no interruptions, and I was surprised to see Rakuten sent me a letter requesting directly for copies of my residence card.
Not gonna get too excited but I guess I read the email wrong… then again, I kinda tune out when I see “we apologize, but-“.
I went out to pick up my birthday present from me to me, but I haven’t had time to properly check it yet. I got a new camera lens basically. I’ll talk more about it once I can use it, hopefully during next week’s trip.
I made a quick stop by Evil to see if they had opened but they didn’t so I just returned home.
To my surprise, a new game called Dorokei (ドロケイ) released. Surprise because it was made by the same people that made another game I really like from 2023 called Keidoro.
I apparently didn’t bring it up in my 2023 GOTY list but Keidoro is a neat RPG about an investigation team that fucks targets into submission. Dorokei meanwhile, inverts the roles and you’re part of a phantom thief operation whose front gets blown off and has to rebuild.
The gameplay is a very typical Wolfgame RPG (less common but just as noteworthy as an RPGmaker RPG). The main difference is that there’s a stealth element of sorts where in specific indoor maps you can avoid combat by sneaking behind targets. You’ve got a detection hitbox of sorts that’s bigger or smaller depending on things like the terrain you walk in and the alertness level of everyone.
The main characters are also named after cats. You’ve got main character Kitty, hacker Puma, vehicle specialist Cheetah, a guy named Leo that’s basically the Charlie of these Charlie’s Angels, a warrior named Serval and a nurse named Marble.
The name is kinda clever because she’s named after the Marbled Cat, a wild cat that lives in the Himalayas. Get it? because she’s tall as fuck.
There’s also the newcomer Puppy, and if having a girl with a dog theme among cats sounds off you’d be right because she’s actually the main character of the first game going undercover.
And I’ll admit that between the gap since I last played and the costume change, the very obvious twist caught me off guard.
By the point this reveal happens, the party from the first game is back and it’s fun. I wouldn’t say you need to play the first one but it was a delight to be like “oh hell yeah, more animations with Milly-senpai”.
The game is very thematic even outside the stealth element, for example in the first one you could find money by picking up trash and dropping it in the bin since you’re a cop, but here you just find money around.
It was fun enough that it wasn’t until the last one or two fights when I decided I was Done and wanted to move on that I switched the difficulty to easy.
Definitely a highlight of this year so far.
I appreciate the fact that hyperfocus kicked in while playing this because it allowed me to push my sleep schedule forwards some more.