Souls Like Strings

I bet you're hoping I do-nut make any puns

Why

• Satisfying core loop
• Expands (slightly) beyond 'eat small then big'

Why Not

• Doesn't expand on the core concept enough to be memorable
• Story best described as 'functional' and 'there'

Impressions

You can spend a solid 2 hours with Donut County, but you might not remember them in a month. The concept is fun (you control a hole which grows as it eats) and there are some nice touches of humour, but despite some token efforts at puzzles nothing much changes from the first...

• Writing tests for a migration from qs to URLSearchParams takes way longer than the actual changes
  • But probably saves even longer than that in future emergency debugging
• Old browsers used to accept ; as a separator in query strings rather than ?
• Apparently asking the user for their login info so you can reproduce the issue is a valid solution
  • Admittedly their account is entirely unusable and we have no idea what's happening after weeks
• Microservices work much better if they're actually separate; i.e. changing a user's unconfirmed email doesn't require manually propagating...

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann.

The Director follows the broad strokes of G. W. Pabst's life during the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, with liberal sprinklings of fiction to fill in the gaps of what various characters would have been doing and saying at any given moment. There's an eerie, surreal quality suffusing the book, and not just in the sense that a man with a Jewish wife voluntarily returned to Nazi Germany from America. Events often toe the line of reality before stepping over to highlight the unreal situations characters find themselves in, before jumping back...

Pretty but no personality

Why

• Much more realistic graphics than most (any?) Metroidvanias
• Tries to differentiate itself with combos/multiple weapons

Why Not

• Combat is going for weighty but lands on clunky
• Story/characters do nothing for me
• Never felt any desire to play it

Impressions

FIST (what a name) stands out with its impressively realistic graphics compared to others in the genre, but falls down more or less everywhere else. Despite being fully voice-acted the story is ham-fisted and formulaic, exploration is there but basic and the combat just feels bad. There are plenty...

• I really need to stop asking Claude how to mock stuff in Vitest and actually learn it; I've asked for it about 20 times and never remember which approach to use
• Hard refresh on Mac is cmd+shift+r
  • And it can reveal bugs a regular refresh wouldn't
• Make backups before doing ANYTHING with your game saves
  • Otherwise you might lose 40 hours of Dark Souls 3
  • Luckily there's some saint on NexusMods who created a save repo with saves before each boss
  • Careful if you wanna play online though, I have suspicions about how vanilla some...