Another Time || Day 13: Keeping Score

 

If things like this can happen in other Creatures games, I suppose it only makes sense that it could happen in Creatures 1, too... even though I never thought about it.

It seems that Darla's child was a stillborn, as I waited for a while with the game minimized for the egg to hatch, only to return to find the child dead on the spot. The Creature Graveyard brought me a page that couldn't be registered, probably because the child had never been registered in the Owner's Kit in the first place. Poor thing... at least Potroast and Ernest were there with her, for just a little bit. Potroast even laid down next to her for a while to rest, which made me feel a little more emotional than I was expecting.

After the newborn's unfortunate death, nothing particularly interesting happened for a good, long while. The Norns generally stayed in the garden, chasing each other about and picking up and dropping carrots repeatedly as if the activity had some kind of meaning. 

Curious and maybe just a little bit bored, I realized I hadn't seen head or tail of the Grendel in several hours. I ended up flipping through the locations I'd saved as "favorite places" in my Camera menu: the Caves, the Island, the Distillery, and the Observatory Tower, a concise but workable list that spanned the majority of Albia. It was on the Island that I found the Grendel, apparently sleeping and perhaps a bit lost.

To be honest, at least so far in Creatures 1, Grendels seem less like a threat and more like kind-of-pitiful scaly creatures that happen to get a bit aggressive or make Norns sick if they get too close. Except for the one confrontation we'd had early on, every Grendel since then - and who knows how many have been born and died without us knowing, since we don't see their events - has just been off somewhere else, mostly on the island.

I brought this one some carrots. I'm not sure if he appreciated it or not.

He was a very chatty little dude, and seemed a bit more interested in throwing the carrots around - they were bouncy carrots, after all - than eating them. I'd have thought he would eat them, since surely there's not much food on the island (and the apparently-buggy coconuts aren't helping), but... well, maybe Grendels aren't that different from Norns, after all...

In other news: This is how my Performance Kit looks now, and I can't help but feel like this probably gets increasingly interesting as time goes on. When I first opened it, I remember thinking that the "Breeders Score" was particularly odd. A score? In Creatures, what I've always thought of as "the game with no true objectives"?

After having played it for a little bit now, though, I think I get it. If I was playing this back in the '90s, it would probably have been pretty fun to compare my Breeders Score with the scores of my friends or even people I met online!

It's also just interesting to see everything - eggs from the hatchery, eggs laid by Norns, Norns that have died and Norns that are currently living - laid out visually. That scroll bar looks like it goes for pretty long, so surely it's good for long-lived worlds too! I wonder if I can manage to keep this world going for a long time, and build up a really big chart to look at...

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