Souls Like Strings

Let the dice fall where they may

Why

• Well written characters with cool designs
• An interesting story with consistent themes
• Peaks and valleys of pressure make progress feel earned
• Role-playing elements are pretty strong

Why Not

• Themes are arguably a little too consistent if you zoom out a bit
• Success snowballs, you can be kinda OP by the start of the DLC
• Some DLC dialogue doesn't seem to change based on your choices

Impressions

Citizen Sleeper starts off as a pressure cooker. You wake up on a space station called 'The Eye' as a...

Liberty's Daughter by Naomi Kritzer.

Sadly the rich were not eaten

Beck Garrison lives on the seastead, the classic libertarian dream of a sovereign nation in the middle of the ocean. If one ever made it further than the 'buying a cruise ship' phase. In Beck's universe they made it quite a bit further than that, and the book's strongest point is building out what these seasteads would look like.

A few different 'nations' have sprung up on the converted cruise liners and sea platforms, from the debauchery of New Amsterdam to the unrestrained techno-capitilism of Sal...

What Went Well

Projects

Plenty of game & books reviews here, not so much progress on any coding projects because of that. Not so much being none, zip, zilch.

Games

SILKSONG IS DONE! What an incredible game, but man it took me a long time to beat. When it came out I wasn't expecting to sink anywhere near as much time into it as Elden Ring, but apparently Team Cherry made a(nother? Didn't finish to original back in the day) 100+ hour metroidvania. Or I'm just terrible at Silksong's combat, which is definitely possible. Either way it's definitely my...

Feel the power of a petty bureaucrat

Why

• Makes inspecting paperwork somewhat interesting
• Plenty of fun little interactions to discover
• Tells some interesting stories (Jorji!)

Why Not

• Pretty hard to not lose quickly on Steam Deck/a trackpad without Easy Mode
• Difficult to play for long stretches

Impressions

Papers please is definitely an interesting game; if not a fun one. But I suspect that's by design. Every part of the game from the music to the washed out color palette, tedious document checking and arbitrary rules handed down from on high conspires to make you...

I've never had so much fun clicking sentences

Why

• Innovative (at least to me) detective gameplay
• Genuinely interesting mystery, delivered (almost) entirely through transcripts
• Surprisingly intuitive, no tutorial and it's not needed

Why Not

• You'll spend a lot of time staring at transcripts
• Only one mystery, I could definitely play a whole game of this

Impressions

I won't spoil the mystery, but essentially you're a traumatized old detective trying to pull together the details of her only unsolved case from the shattered pieces of her memory. There's a bit of dialogue at the start...