Souls Like Strings

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.

Choose-your-own-adventure Suicide Squad

Why

• Fantastic characters
• Nice animation & music
• Gameplay is actually pretty fun
• Story has some twists but a hopeful tone

Why Not

• You're a child/going to play in front of one
• If you only care about gameplay it's might not be for you

Impressions

Robert (Aaron Paul) is just a dude. Albeit a dude who's a renowned hero with a giant flying mech suit. Until his pursuit of revenge lands him without the suit or its macguffin power source, but with responsibility of dispatching his team of "reformed" villains to resolve...

Girlfailure makes friends

Why

• Focused, intriguing plot
• Small cast of characters you'll get very familiar with
• Visuals and music add a lot to the atmosphere
• Lots of personality jammed into the limited character illustrations

Why Not

• Essentially 'just' a book with pictures and music
• No choices if that's something you need in a Visual Novel

Impressions

Our POV character is Asya, a Russian high school girl with many friends who like to play pranks on her and a very strong grip on reality. One day a girl (sometimes) in her class is nice to...