Souls Like Strings

Why ask forgiveness when you can just murder god?

Why

• Side-scrolling, religion-inspired Dark Souls
• Nails the strong points of both souls/metroidvania genres
• Boss/core character designs are crazy
• Challenging without being punishing

Why Not

• Platforming is frustratingly clunky at times
• Getting all endings requires a second playthrough

Impressions

I cannot overemphasize the degree to which this feels like a Souls game but side-scrolling. The Game Kitchen nailed everything FromSoft's games do from the looping paths & shortcuts to the atmosphere and difficulty. Managing this while also making the game a great Metroidvania is even more...

Always read the Terms and Conditions

Why

• Genuinely funny, surprisingly good story
• Makes 'turn based' combat interactive & interesting
• Endless cool little details to discover
• Should be way more popular than it seems to be

Why Not

• You hate fun

Impressions

With over 19 000 games released on Steam each year it's inevitable some will get lost in the shuffle. It's an absolute crime Deathbulge was one of them though; its cant-miss humour may be subjective but the music-themed, far more active twist on traditional turn-based combat alone would make it worth playing. But...

• Making tickets is important, otherwise you might forget to implement the whole reason a feature exists
• If you're gonna dump a whole bunch of nested JSON into a column, at least separate it out so the validation logic doesn't clutter a mostly unrelated model
  • Probably just don't dump a bunch of nested JSON into a column if you can avoid it though

Links

• An in-depth guide to customising lists with CSS - Richard Rutter

It's crazy how many options there are for something I have literally never done (apart from using counter...

Beats up your heart along with the baddies

Why

• Typically Yakuza drama with heart
• Side stories are also typically fun, the cabaret club in particular
• Deuteragonist structure used to brilliant effect

Why Not

• Bosses have a lot of health & huge difficulty spikes
• Kuze epitomises 'How many times must I teach you this lesson old man?'
• Majima is too much of a real person for later games to make sense haha

Impressions

After playing (and loving) Like a Dragon I decided to jump back to where it all began for some context on...

• Any meeting with more than one product manager will result in 0 decisions and a future meeting with just the product managers
• Creating a global FormStore shared by all your components
  • might make sense for some cases like long, complex forms with many different input
  • but makes absolutely no sense for a form with 4 inputs with virtually no validation
  • and having the global form store can lead to fun bugs like the balance entered for the previous account showing up on the next one
• Always check information isn't already available to the frontend before trying...