By the time my health crawled back to eighty-five, the sun was beginning to set over Meadowbrook.
The village went gold in that particular way I had specifically engineered, the lighting system shifting to warm tones at dusk to create what my art direction notes had called "an inviting, painterly atmosphere that rewards players who survive to evening." I had been proud of that note. I was sitting on a wooden bench outside the village inn eating stale bread that tasted like cardboard soaked in disappointment, and the painterly atmosphere was doing nothing for me.
The hunger system had opinions about the bread. Specifically, it registered the caloric value of one low-quality loaf as insufficient for current activity levels and expressed this through a stomach growl loud enough that a passi
