Souls Like Strings

Maybe I wouldn't like DnD after all

Why

• A lot of effort went into making a believable world
• Compelling characters with personality and their own stories
• Simple but effective art style

Why Not

• Swamps of dialogue with nothing to break it up
• No real sense of progress after 3 hours
• Trusts the player a bit too much

Impressions

I feel bad for dropping what's clearly a quality game so early, but three hours into what's meant to be a ~12 hour experience I need to feel more invested than I do here. I'm leaving...

Does this unit have a soul? Absolutely.

Why

• Nails exploration & world design
• Unique, beautiful artstyle with a matching soundtrack
• Modifiers allow for a variety of approaches to combat
• With Ground Healing on, platforming feels like budget Celeste

Why Not

• Runbacks are just unnecessary
• Brutal difficulty jump for the true ending

Impressions

Mio is an excellent Metroidvania which learns from its peers while adding enough to stand out. Despite a few frustrating design decisions I never wanted to stop exploring its incredibly designed and rendered world, eager to see what panoramas awaited.

The core...

• Cookies seem like they'd be complicated at first glance
  • then simple again when you do simple stuff with document.cookie (if a bit weird how = is overwritten)
  • then complicated again when you need to delete a cookie with path and/or domain
  • the CookieStore API will make this a lot easier once it's baseline
  • maybe I should have just left the js-cookie dep in
  • but it was only used once, to delete cookies with a certain prefix
  • that's so lazy
• It's possible for eslint/react-hooks to light up like a Christmas tree on your project but not...

My Husband by Maud Ventura.

The perfect couple

The narrator is just a normal woman who loves her husband. Over the course of a week, endlessly escalating revelations exemplify just how normal and healthy her love for her husband is. I'm hesitant to write about the plot in any detail for fear of spoiling it, not because it's reliant on twists or shock value (both of which are plentiful), but because the journey of perspective you go on as you read is part of the experience. The prose is also excellent, posessing that intangible 'quality' I so...

What Went Well

Projects

Finally decided to give a talk at Tokyo Rubyist and mentioned it to enough people that I can't back out now unless legal just tells me I can't do it. I have until sometime in April, so naturally I'll start working on it once I get back from the honeymoon in late March. Any earlier would be wasting valuable panic-energy.

Other than that the only thing keeping my Github graph green continues to be this blog; I'm pretty sure I'm just a date-filtering system & deploy away from the new spending tracker but never seem...