Souls Like Strings

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...

Existential crisis as a psychedelic space odyssey

Why

• Brilliant start and finish
• Visuals never fall below spectacular

Why Not

• Drags a bit in the middle

Impressions

The Artful Escape takes you on a carefully curated journey through the cosmos and a teenage boy's attempts to get out from under the shadow of his famous uncle. You won't find any meaningful decisions here, and to be honest not much gameplay either, but there's just enough to keep you engaged and moving through the spectacular alien vistas Beethoven & Dinosaur have crafted, accompanied by an...

• Vite is great, but different behaviour in dev/prod makes it very difficult to roll out with confidence
  • Especially when building and previewing locally doesn't work well with the way the project is set up
• Not having types for your JS package should be a crime; how am I meant to know it crashes unless the options object has an attributes key?
• Make sure you don't have 'Persist Logs' on when trying to figure out why cached files are still being served
• Vite (8 at least) has oxc built in as a minifier
• Alternatives to passing sensitive...

Solid with a smattering of spectacular

Why

• Detailed pixel art which improves in creativity as the game progresses
• Some very unique/mechanically stimulating boss fights
• Plenty of secrets, some creatively hidden/hinted at

Why Not

• Instakill lava
• Only one type of map marker
• Story is kinda just there

Impressions

Kingdom Shell starts off as bog standard as a Metroidvania can be, albeit with very detailed pixel art. You have some basic melee and ranged enemies to beat up, ability gates to bounce off and secrets to discover. This persists even after the first boss, where...

Number go up in its purest form

Why

• Great second screen game
• Very committed to its excellent blobby aesthetic
• You can have runs so broken that it doesn't matter where you launch the ball
• Probably not something you can sink hundreds of hours into

Why Not

• Probably not something you can sink hundreds of hours into
• (Seemingly) not that much strategic depth

Impressions

I put in about 2 hours of shifts at Nubby's Number Factory while watching League, and it did its job of filling in gaps in the action brilliantly. I like...