Souls Like Strings

Team Cherry does it again

Why

• The level of polish explains it taking 7 years
• Crests provide genuinely different playstyles and are all viable
• Every boss was at least memorable, and at least 5 are truly amazing
• Just moving around feels so good once you get a few abilities
• Hornet having a personality & dialogue adds a lot of character
• The sheer amount of content is ridiculous, it took me as long to finish as base Elden Ring
• Somehow, very very little of that content could be considered filler

Why Not

• People saying it's hard...

Florence but sadder

Why

• Nice artsyle/sound design
• Gameplay/story combine to really make you wonder what's going on
• Exactly as long as it needs to be

Why Not

• You don't like these kinds of narrative-heavy games

Impressions

and Roger is another game in the style of Florence, which got me into the genre, though it's definitely a lot darker. I won't spoil too much about the story, but where Florence mostly combined its beautiful art and music to elicit emotional responses, and Roger adds gameplay to the mix in a much bigger way. The...

Too wholesome for me

Why

• Pixel art conveys the differences in worlds well
• Nice music
• Background mystery seems like it would be interesting

Why Not

• 'Puzzles' are basic/tedious
• Story hasn't done much to pull me in after ~4 hours
• Moral of the story seems... obvious?

Impressions

Rakuen definitely has some strong points, but I think it's just not for me. You play as a (probably terminally ill) kid in a hospital, whose family conveniently happens to own a magical book granting access to a parallel world with a wish granting deity (the Morizora). Less...

• When a deadline for some piece of work seems unexpectedly lenient, it's worth double checking that deadline
  • Even if your manager has repeatedly said it's a 'soft deadline' and scheduled work around that
• Making a single "Link" component which can be any of the following based on the props passed
  • an a tag
  • a React Router link
  • a button
  • or a span
• One of many reasons for that is you get fun interactions like adding an onClick to your a for analytics, then discovering it's suddenly a button

No TWIL next week...

• If your Rails tests need access to cookies with the secure attribute, you can make HTTPS requests in RSpec by using the url variant of path helpers and passing protocol: :https
• When using expect_any_instance_of in RSpec, you need the expectation before the thing that causes it to be fulfilled, not after
• Passing everything as arguments makes testing much easier than having stuff implicitly available in the environment

Links

• The Size of Life - Neal

Not dev-related other than being a website, but it's a cool website.