Souls Like Strings

The longest pun I've ever heard

Why

• I liked the humour, pretty clever dialogue in places
• Cool aesthetic, fun minigames
• References abound

Why Not

• You'd better like the humour, because it doesn't change

Impressions

Later Alligator is a fun, silly game which accomplishes exactly what it sets out to. You play as a faceless but strongly mob-enforcer coded character who bumps into a hypochondriac alligator called Pat, who's convinced his family plans to kill him at a mysterious meeting they've set up that evening. You have the rest of the day to get to...

Paper Mario with bugs?

Why

• Combat is turn based but interactive, has some per-enemy strategies
• The art style looks basic at first but grows on you
• Light puzzle-solving and platforming mixes things up
• You can dodge random encounters/start with an advantage by attacking first

Why Not

• Nothing about it grabbed me in the first 2.5 chapters
• Pretty easy? I dodged a lot of encounters and never felt weak

Impressions

I grabbed this from an 'Overwhelmingly Positive' Humble Bundle which has definitely reminded me that 'buy stuff other people think is good' is not always...

This is the script for my first ever programming talk, delivered at the Tokyo Rubyist Meetup on April 15th, 2026. You can find a recording of the talk on Youtube (Github doesn't allow files over 1GB), and the slides (which you'll need if you want to see them) are here.

Introduction

Hi everyone, my name's Brett and unlike seemingly every other presenter I have not written a book, made contributions to Rails or used Ruby to write a presentation program I can use to deliver these slides from a Dreamcast. So what makes me...

• When fixing someone else's mistake it's generally best not to make one of your own
  • You can't rescue passing nil to JSON.parse for some reason
• The senior engineer who referred me for my job has (had) a blog!
• More of a 'today I remembered' but there's a native HTML progress element
  • It's much easier than using divs/pseudoelements
• expect_any_instance_of needs to go at the start of the spec, not the end
• Having a StandardError rescue for your controller action (or anything really) is a pretty bad idea
  • makes it very difficult...

Surprisingly souls-like

Why

• Nails the intangibles, feels better than it should
• Evocative pixel art
• Compact & fair, even on hard

Why Not

• Pretty short
• Not especially challenging, even on hard

Impressions

My expectations for this were right around Shantae given the similarities; retro pixel metroidvanias which at least from their store page look like they were drawn with one hand. In reality Momodora was more or less the exact opposite of Shantae; rather than being bright & cheery but clunky and frustrating Momodora sets a distinctly Dark Souls-like mood and plays with surprising...