I’m not the person you’re responding to, but I love the story. It’s one of the best sci-fi stories in games, with tonnes of memorable characters and moments.
Gameplay gets better as you go through whilst the story suffers a bit, and they have their issues, but there isn’t anything else quite like them even now.
Derealisation, may want to see a therapist if it happens regularly.
Look at it this way, if the world wasn’t real and it was a simulation or something, it wouldn’t make any difference. Whether it’s a computer architecture or an actual universe or some other unknowable thing, we are less than a grain of sand in an unimaginably immense desert. Nothing means anything and everything is chaos, so the only meaning behind life is the one that means something to you.
Comedy Bang Bang - improv comedy where Scott Aukerman interviews interesting people, and by interesting people i mean comedians playing absurd characters. It’s been going for fifteen years, Paul F Tompkins, Jason Mantzoukas, and Ben Schwarz are all regulars, and it’s the only podcast I listen to almost every week.
Get Played - a gaming podcast featuring Heather Anne Campbell, Matt Wiger and Nick Apodaca (I’ve almost definitely misspelled or misremembered at least one of these names). They talk about games whilst being very funny - Heather is a comedy writer, Matt is occasionally on Comedy Bang Bang. It’s the only gaming podcast I listen to despite much of their coverage being games I am not interested in.
The world is invaded by day walker vampires somehow. Most of the human population is dead or turned, those remaining live under a cloud of distrust and paranoia - anyone could be a vampire. even the people you know could’ve been turned since you last saw them.
I don’t notice. Because of social anxiety, I stayed indoors.
That seems to be the way it goes DMing. Spend many hours planning things and then everyone cancels repeatedly because they just…made other plans on the day we usually play. Plan a sequence around a character and then the relevant player doesn’t turn up that session. We’ve been in the first act of our campaign for 7 months. Played 10 sessions.