A Mostly Complete Diary Of All The Media I Consume That I Bother To Write Down And Then Also Post On The Internet 🍽️😋

It’s kind of like a roguelike choose-your-own-adventure story because it’s very narrative and very lethal. Every time you die, you have to start over. But there’s a friendly narrator who helps you keep track of everything you learn each playthrough. You eventually learn enough to know which paths are deadends and which ones are promising.

It is very difficult. And very fun!

These are the same folks who made Reflections: Nightingale. Which is another of my favorite playdate games.

https://kodiakgamesatx.itch.io/terratopiamotdk

Just finished playing this through for the second time. One of the best games on the platform. It’s a little disorienting at first until the disparate vignettes start to fall into place like puzzle pieces, creating a larger picture of pain and trauma, and how one deals with and escapes from it. The theme of inevitable and advancing destruction are subtly woven throughout. And the author took care to weave names and locations throughout the episodes so that the player is never quite sure who or what originated from where. Even the very name of the protagonist, elly, is uncertain. Sometimes it is short for Elhaym, sometimes Eleanor.

It is a profoundly lonely experience. elly seems to have a single friend, Cassie, who is available sometimes for texting. But Cassie is busy working and ultimately elly is left with her pain, her fear, and her haunting visions and dreams.

In the end, the creeping horror suddenly manifests, and the simple matter of abandoning the by then familiar dialog system in favor of the on screen floating text makes it feel like choices are no longer up to the player, but that the game is now on a runaway course of its own choosing, right up until the final choice that brings a sudden and abrupt end to the game, leaving the player to ponder elly’s fate and reflect on acceptance, pain, and destruction.

https://kodiakgamesatx.itch.io/nightingale

I don’t know the name of the genre where you get orders and have to fulfill them, but this game is that genre. You play Lune, a fledgling witch who just graduated witch school and just opened up Spellcorked! their very own potion shop! And apparently you’re the first witch to leverage modern technology by using your CubeOS crystal “ball” to take orders via emeow and get reviews via Welp. So there’s a daily cycle. Each day you get a few orders, and then you brew, bottle, and ship the potions, and then you go to bed! Throughout the game, you unlock new ingredients. And a large part of the gameplay is figuring out / discovering what effects the items have. I found this part fun!

The creators made a decision not to have ingredients be consumable. Thusly, because you can’t use them up, there has to be some kind of risk somewhere in order for potion making to be fun. The risk is that once you start making the potion, you cannot stop or start over. Consequently, there were times when I accidentally grabbed the wrong ingredient and immediately realized I was making the wrong thing. But I had to continue making the wrong potion, and then bottle it, and ship the wrong potion to the customer. Which felt really bad to me! But I get why the creators made this choice. And it made me feel very extra cautious when getting ready to brew.

The alembic alchemical still took me a very long time to figure out, and to be able to use confidently. It is a whole little mini-game in and of itself, and each of the six alchemical ingredients—and their animations—are so compelling and evocative and unique and magical. I eventually would play the animations on “fast mode” but never once wished that I could skip the animations even though it takes up a lot of time even on fast mode. It’s one of the best parts of the game.

For a Season 1 game, Spellcorked feels half finished: quips and jokes from Beau and Manny, Lune’s familiars, stop about halfway through the game, and the two of them just become background scenery. Correspondence from Faer, Lune’s significant other, stop disappointingly early in the game. Lune themself kind of fade into the background as the game as continues on in silence. Eventually, for lack of anything else to engage with (other than just brewing potions for its own sake) the player might end up deciding to ship potions until you get enough positive reviews to reach Tier 5 on Welp. After which you get a meta email from the Spellcorked developers congratulating you on finishing the game by winning the respect of your former professor. This was a surprise to me because the professor—although they do send Lune a skeptical emeow now and then—never seemed like anybody I should focus on, or whose approval I need.

I think there’s a memory leak in the game somewhere. Twice I noticed the game grind to a very slow crawl. Once, it crashed. And the second time, I proactively restarted the game, after which it worked fine again.

But anyway, this game is awesome and I love it! I find it peculiarly compelling. Many times I told myself I would put the game down after fulfilling these next three orders, only to take a peek at the next day’s orders and decide to just fill them real quick. I will definitely reach for it again in the future when I want to do some cute witchy potion brewing. 5/5 stars!

just finished playing this little game for the playdate. it was soo good! a spooky little mystery evocative of old lucasarts / scummvm point-and-click adventures. i was never sure until the end just what exactly was going to happen. five out of five stars. possibly my favorite game for the playdate so far.

Cute little Pico-8 game game. A bedtime story for a frog about a pumpkin who crash lands on a monster moon and has to hop around unburying a bunch of cryo-pods to terraform the moon. It’s a little zelda-like, or a metroidvania i guess you could say, where you have to get power ups that give you access to other parts of the map. Anyway, cute. fun. short. Seems like a lot packed into it for Pico-8.

it’s cute as hell! i love it! I need to go back and find the rest of the birds and finish it

I’ve been playing a whole bunch of playdate games! Casual Birder is the number 1 best season game so far. and the Pick Pack Pup and then Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure. the best 3rd party game is Woods. it’s a really well done and thought out tiny zelda-like. so many little art games and toys too. love it!

just started playing this and it is extremely my jam. an open world sandbox with a light crafting system and an emphesis on exploration? sign me up! the world is very large and scary, and i am very small and weak.

got this in an itch bundle a long time ago. somebody (cymen?) was talking about it on town, so i whipped it out and played the first zone. It is very fun! challenging, innovative puzzle game play. i shall continue to play it.

nick and case came over this weekend and we played donkey kong and ate pizza while the girls went shopping because GENDER ROLES. that game seriously has great 2 player support though. it’s funny to go back and look now at what then were the most cutting edge graphics

absolutely stumbled through the ice level in the dark world. luckily the boss was laughably easy. so much more so than Blind in the previous level. in this case, the hard part was just getting through the maze of the dungeon and figuring out how to fall into the boss lair from above. I don’t know why it’s called metroidvania and not metroidvanzelda

loving the crap outta link to the past, best game ever. Got into the dark world and got the first two crystals. playing super mario world with lasso which is super fun because they are super knowledgable about it and it’s super fun for them to be an expert in it metroid was too hard and too scary for me as a little kid but I am finding it super rewarding and fun now. Even so, it’s hard enough that i’ve had to look up walkthrus for it because i couldn’t find my way out of norfair.

guess what hosers, dozens got a nintendo switch for their birthday, so you can expect a whole lot more entries in the ‘playing’ category. Link to the Past is soooo good, one of the best games ever made I think. I just started it last night. it’s so familiar, but it’s been so long since i’ve actually played it that it’s also fresh and new: i don’t remember how anything works. well, most anything. broad strokes, i remember. but the finer details are all new again.

https://orb.farm/

• lots of cityinc.se. almost done with this cookie clicker.
• just downloaded cryptozoopeer for nostalgia reasons
• Bogeyman, xyzzyawards best game, 2018: http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2018/Bogeyman/bogeyman.html
• 7 Deadly Sins jrpg on iOS
• haven’t been on minecraft in over a week?
• weekly D&D game

ton of rpgs on discord mostly