Souls Like Strings

Ballin'

Why

• Immaculate vaporwave vibes and soundtrack
• Chill but satisfyingly challenging puzzles
• Consistently introduces new mechanics with a smooth difficulty curve
• Diegetic menus and UI elements are great

Why Not

• Some levels require quickish reactions, so maybe not ideal for pure puzzle heads

Impressions

I initially picked up Axyz for my wife because she played Kula World as a kid, but ended up playing more than her and now I'm planning to 100% it. The puzzle gameplay is great, starting with a simple premise and gradually expanding it with new mechanics as...

Have you ever played a 90min music video?

Why

• Feels like one big anime finale
• Plenty of replay value with challenges/score chasing
• I replayed it immediately after my first clear
• Every level is great; some are spectacular

Why Not

• You hate music and creativity?

Impressions

Sayonara Wild Hearts is the ultimate argument for short games. The thing about rhythm games or endless runners (the closest comparisons in terms of gameplay) is their endless nature means the visuals are necessarily kinda samey and generic, so they can be reused across multiple songs/levels. Totally logical and...

Billionaire genius mouse philanthropist

Why

• Retro vibes with modern polish
• Gives hints, not answers to its many secrets
• Challenging but heavily customisable combat/traversal
• Endless cool details, starting with the in-game manual
• Achievements are meaningful/interesting, not just chapter markers

Why Not

• The burrowing/4-directional attacking takes a while to learn

Impressions

Mina the Hollower is a retro Zelda-like with combat inspiration from Bloodborne of all games. It's jam-packed with secrets and attention to detail, from the old-style in-game manual which is great as both a concept and source of extremely useful info to the many...

• Any invocation of display_page getting all its data from ReactHelper makes it really easy to add/modify that data
• Adding a network call to URL construction in an SDK which previously did not need one is not easy at all
  • the function constructing the URL now needs to be async
  • so its callers also need to be async
  • so the sample app needs to call them from async functions (sometimes)
  • just a lot of hassle
• If your CI job just randomly stops sometimes, it might be going OOM
  • If it's running JS unit tests with Jest,...

Projects

Honestly I'm probably just gonna drop this section unless I start working on something consistently again; I haven't felt like working on programming stuff outside work in months. Our current spending tracker is janky but it works fine/costs <1000 yen a month, so no strong motivation to finish the Cloudflare-based replacement.

Games

A pretty huge one this month; I had two weeks off where The Wife was either working or in a different country so I played a LOT. Some absolute bangers as well, both expected and surprising. Since there are so many I'll just list them...