If you and your partner enjoy RPG’s, I highly recommend Divinity: Original Sin (and Divinity: Original Sin 2, though we haven’t finished that one yet). Very story-driven, the tactical combat is a blast when you get into strategizing and collaborating, and there are all sorts of non-combat shenanigans you can get up to as well (the second even more so than the first).

From an admitted non-expert, the way I understand it is this: A roguelike is turn based, procedurally generated to some extent, has some form of time/turn crunch tied to a carried resource (food/hunger is pretty common), and has leveling involved as part of the core gameplay loop. The idea being that you try to balance out luck (with the items/equipment you find, enemies that spawn, how well you’re doing in a particular combat, etc) with skill (knowledge of the game systems, knowing how to build, knowing when to cut your losses and run, when you have enough resources to gain some levels, etc.). There is also perma-death: Once you die, your run is over and you have to start fresh.

A roguelite involves some of these aspects, but plays things much looser. Typically there’s some level of perma-death in that a run is over when you die, but there’s also a meta-currency to allow for progress/power upgrades between runs (like increasing starting health per run by using items that have a chance to drop during a run). They are often not turn-based, and don’t necessarily have the same time crunch. The similarities lie in the fundamental idea: balance luck introduced by randomization/procedural generation and skill from game mastery, and if you fail then you have to start a new run. Different folks will have different criteria for the two terms (I saw a purist say that it’s not a real roguelike if it has anything other than ASCII graphics), but that’s how I summarize them.

As someone who registered under Beehaw (and thus, a potentially biased party), Beehaw isn’t exactly looking to be a 1-to-1 replacement for Reddit from my understanding. It’s more looking to create an actual community, similar to how online communities were once upon a time. I don’t foresee pro-Russia sentiment taking hold there (especially since they apparently defederated with Lemmygrad, which is where a lot of tankies live), but I understand the concern.

For what it’s worth, the Socialism community is essentially a transplant of the subreddit /r/LeftWithoutEdge, which I would lurk from time to time while I was still on Reddit, and it was one of the few leftist subreddit where I didn’t feel shunned for being a veteran. A lot of other leftist subreddits would do stuff like pre-emptively ban anyone who posted in a military subreddit, so I think Beehaw’s Socialism community has a great foundation to work off of at the very least.

This is definitely a great technique to bring attention to and I considered mentioning it too. I opted for a more general batch of tips, hopefully the “tutorial” for pogoing hits its mark… There’s a room with floating spike chunks that leads to either a money node or a collectible (can’t remember which offhand), and that’s supposed to be a hint that you can pogo on spikes. I only tried after my third time passing it though, since I thought maybe there was a power-up later that I could use until I decided to say screw it and gave it a try.

My pleasure, I hope it helps! Just don’t get discouraged if you’re having trouble - there’s one platforming challenge (completely optional, don’t worry) that took me something like 2 or 3 days of 8-hour sessions to finally get through. Like I said, I’m not really a great gamer nowadays thanks to not having much time to keep my skills sharp (I used to play Kaizo Mario hacks on a regular basis when I was younger), but it was a compelling and enjoyable enough game to motivate me to keep going.

Hollow Knight is a solid contender for my favorite game, so good choice! I’m going to try to keep things spoiler-free as much as I can since a huge part of the experience is exploring and slowly unraveling things. Here’s a list of (hopefully spoiler-free) tips that I think might help.

Not much will make sense at first.

Hollow Knight follows the Dark Souls school of lore: You don’t get an exposition dump in the beginning giving you the whole background behind what’s going on. It’s perfectly fine to be confused about what you are doing and why. In fact, I’d say that’s an intentional choice that winds up making a ton of sense after a certain point in the game.

Careful looking up info

Because of this fact and how long it’s been out (as well as how popular it is), it’s unfortunately very easy to spoil things. Be careful with that, and make sure to tag on “spoiler free” to any searches you do on the game.

It’s difficult, but fair

You’re likely going to die a lot, that’s true. That being said, there aren’t really any situations that I can think of where I had no way to avoid dying. The nice thing is, the game sort of sets itself up in a way that you (hopefully) learn different techniques over time, and the fact that it’s a metroidvania means you get upgrades drip-fed to you, so you don’t have a million things to try to learn at once. I’m not great at games nowadays, but I did still manage to beat the game. I never completed the boss rush stuff, but that’s more because I’ve never been a huge fan of boss rushes in general.

It’s methodical

You don’t have a time limit during fights. Feel free to take your time learning an enemy’s attacks; there are generally tells you can keep an eye out for so you can prepare to react appropriately. Don’t be afraid to keep your distance as much as you can while in a fight.

Don’t forget your Soul

Soul is the game’s “magic” system, and it’s a pretty big help in keeping you from dying. You recharge it a bit each time you hit an enemy, so as long as you’re able to run in, hit an enemy, and get away without getting hit, you can recharge enough for another use. There are also generally minor enemies in each area that are relatively easy to deal with - these are basically prime candidates for recharging Soul if you’re low.

Be sure to explore

There are going to be quite a few dead ends during your journey. These are usually places you just don’t have the tools to deal with yet, so if it seems like you can’t progress, try somewhere else and come back later! Another thing to keep in mind is you’ll sometimes hear or see weird stuff on your journeys - it can be worth putting in some extra effort to see what the source is. Something that I would say is important for this is the map and quill you can buy in the shop in the first town. It updates when you sit down at a bench, so don’t worry if it doesn’t seem to “work” right away.

If you’re having money troubles…

Grab the “Gathering Swarm” charm from the store in the first town, go sit on a bench, and equip it. It won’t make your money problems disappear, but it’ll help.

Enemy spawn mechanics

Enemies only respawn when you sit on a bench. Yes, that goes for the entire map. Yes, I have cleared a significant number of enemies across multiple zones without sitting on a bench and verified this (it was to help me finish a specific side quest). No, bosses will not respawn.

Hopefully this gives you a decent set of tips to get you started! I hope you enjoy your journey as much as I did when I played the first time!

I think the federated approach Lemmy is taking can both help with that and exacerbate it. While it’s easy to push fringe views, it’s also easy to quarantine/block off servers that are going in that direction. I’m not sure what tools are available for doing that in Lemmy, but I don’t imagine it would be hard to block users from a Voat-like server if push comes to shove. It winds up coming down to the culture and values of the server you’re on, and if those go in a direction you don’t like you can also go elsewhere. Sort of like how there were bots that would pre-emptively block people that post in specific subreddit, but more granular control so you don’t wind up with situations like where someone would post in /r/conservative to argue against misinformation, then find themselves blocked from leftist subreddits. Here, if you’re a member of a leftist Lemmy server, that’s part of your identity so it’d be easier to see situations like that and prevent collateral damage from blocking members of the alt-right server from brigading. The only issue there is that it also becomes easier to set up echo chambers, so there’s a fine line to walk. I’m rambling a bit, but hopefully I’m making sense.

This was the moment that cemented my choice to move away from Reddit. My plan initially was to see how the blackouts would play out, but this showed even more clearly than the initial thread about Apollo’s woes with Reddit just how garbage the decision-making at Reddit is.

This is my concern. That being said, I don’t think that’s quite as likely to happen because the reason for Voat’s creation was fundamentally different. The Lemmy exodus is because of API changes and the treatment of Apollo’s creator, while Voat was created as a result of a crackdown on hate subreddit (/r/fatpeoplehate was the big one, but this was years ago so I might be misremembering things).

That being said, I do specifically remember that the driving force behind the Voat push was “free speech.” I’m pretty sure we know who screams the loudest about free speech at the expense of all else, and it looks like Beehaw at least was created with the core idea of being against that crowd. So, while I can’t speak for Lemmy as a whole, I’m trying to at least be optimistic about Beehaw, since the reason for the exodus is completely different from the Voat exodus,meaning the migrants will have a different composition.