Have you ever had a big explosion in a video game? I’m not talking about kabooms, although…I could be, if that makes you a lot better at the game. I’m talking in stuff like knowledge, skill. I recently had one while playing Against the Storm, and while I’m still not particularly good at the game (the only difficulty I can win easily on is Pioneer, which is basically 2/24), I did find out something that made me a lot better.

If you don’t know Against the Storm, get to know it. It’s amazing. It’s a city builder where the city pretty much hates you. The longer you play, the closer you get to winning, the harder it gets. The one thing you need to do above all else is keep people in your town, because when they all leave or die, you lose. A few runs ago, I, for the first time in over forty hours of gameplay, placed down a comfort building. I’d never done it before, because it felt like a waste to build something that didn’t actually have a resource output. Boy, was I wrong. Nearly as soon as I got that building down, I won. Two species’ Resolve (their happiness living in Hatetown) skyrocketed so much that I didn’t really have to do anything else. The one click of placing one building completely changed how I played, and won, the game from then on. During my previous run, I got all three species’ Resolve up by using two buildings. Humans were crazy high because both buildings supported them, and even though nearly everyone was starving to death, they were so happy with their beer and their praying that I won. It’s kind of a joke in the community that you can have a “successful” town that burns down a second later, but hey, a win is a win.

This isn’t something new, either. When I first played Banished, I lost aaaalll the time. Like, probably my first three runs were lost before winter. Thing is, that’s also not a normal city builder, and I was playing it like one. I wanted to get as many buildings down as fast as possible, because when you play a “classic” city builder like SimCity or Cities: Skylines, that’s what it wants to do. Try to get as many people in your growing town as possible. Which is absolutely not what you want to do in a game where you also have to feed your people. Hello starvation! After that, I swung the pendulum in the opposite direction and lost. Freaked out that everyone would starve, I stockpiled a bunch of food without building many more houses. Aaand then everyone got old and died. Now, Banished isn’t a particularly hard game, at least not if you play vanilla, but I still got an explosion from my failures. Maybe more than my Against the Storm explosion, because it gave me a lot more for the total game, not just the low levels. Still, it’s something I’ll remember for a long time, even when I’ve stopped playing (which is sorta kinda now, thanks to Farthest Frontier) because the boost it gave me was so much.

I didn’t mean to talk about two city builders, I was just looking through my list of games on Steam for something that would fit, and Banished was what came up. Mainly, I just really wanted to talk about Against the Storm, because I love that game, and it has a DLC coming out in a couple weeks that I’m super excited about. Expect a review of that, just don’t expect it on time. Still don’t really know how these Quick Thoughts posts are going to go, this is about twice the size of my first one, and I thought that was too long. But I really like doing them, so do expect more in the future.

Is there any game you’ve had a knowledge or skill explosion in? What is it? Is it something you’ll remember for years? Be sure to tell us in the comments below, or on Facebook!