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I've just finished playing The Forgotten City; a first-person mystery game I bought after perusing a random forum thread.

The game's in the same vein as something like The Outer Wilds in that there's a looping mechanism that has you replaying a short segment of time over and over as you eke out secrets.

Where The Outer Wilds has you flying through space alone, The Forgotten City is a much more social take on the concept, and has you spending most of your time in conversations with ancient Romans.

It was honestly great! There's a couple places (especially at the start) where the dialogue was painfully awkward, and the character models sometimes take you for an uncomfortable trip to uncanny valley, but those are minor nitpicks when stacked up to the fun I had getting to know the characters and figuring out what was going on.

At 6-ish hours to get the "real" ending, it's not a particularly long game, but as of late I've definitely taken a liking to games I can beat in 1-2 weekend evenings.

Heaven is a hostel in Chongqing.

In 2018 I traveled to China to meet my partner's parents for the first time. I was nervous; China gets a pretty bad rap and has several travel advisories tied to it. I was also nervous to meet my future in-laws, but that was just the anxiety-cherry on top.

We had time to do some additional traveling, so we picked some destinations of interest that aligned with our travel plans: We'd enter via Hong Kong and leave via Shanghai. We had to go to Harbin for the parental meeting, but we had a little bit of time in the middle to add an extra destination. I voted for Chongqing.

I had only recently learned of the existence of the city after eating Chongqing Xiaomian (literally "Chongqing small noodle") which is a very spicy and very numbing regional noodle dish. A little bit of digging revealed that Chongqing wasn't just some small city that served spicy noodles, but a monstrous tourist destination in china with a population of 30 million. Also, it's the birthplace of hotpot. Hell yes we were going to Chongqing.

Warning: several large photos after the break.

I've just hit the 1000XResist credit sequence roughly one week after going into the game completely blind, having knee-jerk purchased it after 10 seconds of game trailer.

I regret nothing - the game was fantastic. I spent most of the week horizontal with a back injury, and couldn't have asked for a more engaging distraction as I healed.

This title won't be for everyone. It's a very linear visual-novel-esq game consisting almost exclusively of talking to NPCs and listening to monologues in small exploreable areas. You mostly watch the story unfold. But what a story!

This is games as art. This is a story that explores a lot of concepts via its bizarre post-apocalyptic setting. Humanity's been wiped out by an alien-borne virus that causes people to cry themselves to death. Only you and your clone sisters remain, dutifully serving the ALLMOTHER.

Warning: Massive spoilers after the jump.

A couple days ago I finished the audiobook version of Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson.

I didn't know what to expect going in (having never read anything Stephenson) but I honestly wasn't super into the package as a whole, despite all the good stuff packed into it.

About a month ago I booted up Final Fantasy Tactics A2 on a whim, and quickly became helplessly addicted to the game. I look now at my completed save file which claims I sank 111 hours of my life into this game -- this is untrue as I played the majority of the game on 2x speed, but I'm still shocked at how quickly those hours passed.

I often go into games seeking story or novelty. I like a game with world-building, or something that tells me a story. Character development, surprises, mystery.

This has none of that. In FFTA2 The characters are flat, the driving storyline amounts to "go explore and have fun, maybe that will get you home", and outside of some interesting or funny quest lines there's not much of note going on in Ivalice.

Everything else, however, hit all the right buttons so hard.

I beat Klonoa: Empire of Dreams today on my day off.

I got my hands on an Analogue Pocket about a month ago and really wanted to play something I hadn't before, so I took it upon myself to visit the local retro game store and drop too much money on old games I could easily emulate. Everything I actually wanted was out of my random-purchase range, so I ended up buying Klonoa -- a series I know by name only.

It was a great little puzzle platformer, and I must say the Analogue Pocket really makes GBA titles look good.

I think there was something like 5 worlds x 7 levels plus 6 bosses. The bosses and snowboarding levels were hot garbage, but the normal levels had some really decent puzzling throughout and the auto-scroll levels actually posed a challenge.

I'll need to play a different game to test out the Analogue's sound system, because the SFX and music in Klonoa were pretty terrible, but I'm excited to finally tackle some of the physical GBA and GBC titles I've collected over the years.

I finished the audiobook version of Babel by R.F. Kuang, and while I had a great time with the majority of the book, I feel like it really got lost in its own message at the end, which really killed an otherwise enjoyable story taking place in a slightly magic-ified alternative late 1800's Britain.

Honestly all aspects of the story were interesting, and I found that the anti-colonialist theme, while laid on fairly thick, was channelled very well through the characters and plot. At around the 3/4 mark, however, the author just kinda threw it all away to beat the reader over the head with the message, and as a result flattened the characters, truncated the story, and just kinda poisoned the experience.

Maybe that was the plan all along, but it honestly felt rushed and poorly thought out at the end, which is a shame because the rest was great.

Project Updates: Mar 26 2024

I figured it may as good a time as any to pen down a list of my current projects. Work intensity has been high lately, so I don't have a terrible amount of juice to pour into after-work creative stuff, but here's what we've got cooking:

TIC-80 Game: The Tower of Einar

I've had this very simple idea for a game for a long while: platformer that's all wall-jumps and no platforms. Not sure if it will end up being particularly novel, but I spent most of January building the first 10 screens and releasing a demo.

So far it's been a real joy working with Lua and TIC-80. I've fallen out of it for a month or so, but I'm looking forward to picking it back up for round 2.

You can play the demo on Itch.io or the TIC-80 website.

Static Site Generator

I maintain this website with a single .js script and a bunch of hand-written HTML files and honestly I kinda like it that way. I've got a friend, however, who's interested in maintaining a bespoke low-spec static site, but is much less enamoured by the idea of raw HTML or learning markdown.

There's a million SSG apps out there, but a good chunk of them seem to be targeting nerds like me, and I want to make something that can work without an install script, but still provide own-your-own-files autonomy, and discovered the Filesystem API in JavaScript.

If I pull this off right, I'll have a static site hosted on github pages or something that will act as a SSG for a local folder on your computer. A fun idea, I think!

Duel of Nobles

Finally, I've recently uploaded some old rules from a card game I made a while back (made is strong here, is a riff on an existing obscure game) called Duel of Nobles.

I started tweaking the rules based on some feedback from friends I got 3 years ago, and am going to work on assembling some graphics or animations or something to make the instructions a bit easier to understand.

It's a bit like playing Pokemon or YuGiOh cards, but it just uses a standard deck. You can check out the rules I posted (no pictures yet).

Future

I've got some other big projects looming in the back of my head that I'm slowly working up the courage to start on. I don't think I have the technical or philosophical skills to pull any of them off, but working on the Tower of Einar has reminded me that just making stuff can be fun, even if it's not stellar.

I tore straight into Children of Memory after the previous book, but only now got around to making my pixel art cover for it.

The final instalment is definitely the strangest by a long shot, positioning itself more as a mystery novel set in a SciFi setting. To that end, it was wonderfully weird. I loved the Corvids, the Witch, and the strangeness of it all. It picks at questions about sentience and identity and it does some interesting things with established races.

Like book 2, this novel can't hold a candle to Children of Time, but I'd happily read a hundred more weird scifi adventures in this universe.

...I mean that, Adrian. Please give us a full Star Trek experience but with your uplifted races; I'm here for it.

I also just completed the Skyward Inn audiobook, and I honestly didn't like it very much.

While the alien strangeness and occurrences in the novel were interesting, the presentation was just so weepy.

I think a lot of that is on the narrator, who made most of the characters sound like they were on the very edge of bursting into tears at all times. Perhaps they were, perhaps it was the right call, but holy hell it put a damper on the experience.

I'm no stranger to a little ennui in my scifi but this was just way too much.

By the time the ending was happening and things got explained I just wanted it to be over.

If you like your scifi with a lot of family drama and a side of mope, give it a go.