Thank you for this! Lots of people online have pushed forward the idea that Google search results are not as useful as before. This was the first article that I’ve read that did a good job of quantifying what that actually means and providing context as to why it is happening.

Thanks for this! I had no idea about the history of the game.

Damn. I had forgotten what actual journalism looks like. There was actual work done here to investigate and acquire facts. I’ve been reading “articles” that are just paraphrased PR statements for so long. This was a breath of fresh air.

Wandersong is a game about happiness that made me really happy while I was playing it. Not all the way through; there are parts that are sad too. But I’m thinking of replaying it because it made me feel really happy when I played it the first time.

I’ve been enjoying my Fairphone 4 a lot since getting it last year. This camera update really improved the experience of taking photos.

Thanks for that! I actually had to put the game down for several months because my child had just been born and I couldn’t handle one of the scenes in the game. It was heavily telegraphed, so I had time to stop the game before anything upsetting happened. And when I went back to it months later it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it might be. But yeah, it’s a game about the death of many family members, told through metaphor and fanatical imagery.

Oh man, I just want to give a shout out to the Splatoon ink mechanic.

The game is a competitive arena shooter. That would be pretty uninteresting, but instead of competing for kills or holding objectives, the teams are competing to cover the largest surface area with ink or paint. That’s pretty neat. But there’s more.

Every player has a special “squid mode” they can use when standing on ink of their colour. When in squid mode players travel much faster, can travel up walls, and are extremely hard to spot, but can not attack or lay new ink.

This makes the laying ink in specific areas valuable, as it makes it faster to get from the spawn point to the front faster and easier. It also rewards holding contiguous trails of ink, or conversely, cutting off your opponent’s ink trails.

I was going to say that Serious Sam isn’t terribly unique. But you’re right about the scale of the battles being far larger than anything else like it. Good call.

There is really something very different about this game. If you point to any individual part of it, there are other games that do that thing. But all together, it’s quite unique. And it’s a pretty fun game.

I come back to play Duskers often and I always enjoy it. There’s not much else like it.

Wow. I’m super impressed with all the suggestions here. I’ll add a few of my own that haven’t been mentioned yet.

Her Story - you query a police archive database for video clips, eventually revealing the plot. Kind of a mash between a murder mystery book with the pages out of order and Google. If you like it, check out Immortality

What Remains of Edith Finch - all you can do is walk around a very unusual house. The narrative reveals itself as you do so. That narrative is fantastical and heartbreaking and also very sweet.

Crawl - multiplayer game - you are all trying to escape a monster and trap filled dungeon. One of you is alive and the rest are spirits who can possess the monsters and traps. Any time a spirit kills the living player, they become the living player. Unique boss fight at the end where multiple spirits control parts of a huge boss monster.

Please consider WanderSong. It’s a small game and was made with so much love. Games can have a huge variety of plots and environments. But the vast majority of games, regardless of what they are about, are actually about victory. You’re a space dwarf mining for minerals, but the game is all about mastery and winning. You’re a dragon-kin with magic shouts, but every quest is about achieving a victory over a challenge. And so on.

I would say that WanderSong is not a game about victory. It’s a game about happiness. The character, the mechanics, the plot, the environments; they all serve first to explore the meaning of happiness. There’s nothing else quite like it. You can find it here.

Hard space: Shipbreaker was my go to comfort game for a long time. Dive in, cut some walls, and toss some junk. Just perfect.

I knew that I was going to enjoy A Short Hike before I played it. What I didn’t expect was how much I enjoyed it. There’s so much more there than I anticipated and some of it is really lovely.

I agree that the world does not need “you” to reduce your footprint to zero. But people do have collective power. If everyone reduced their footprint a bit, that would make a dent.

Even better is if everyone realized that the big polluting beasts are fed by us. Everyone withholding just a little money from these corporations makes the graph of their profit go from pointing up to pointing down. And they sit up and take notice at that, even if they are still making billions annually. They are literally a house of cards and we are the bottom layer.

Wow. Now I wish I knew more about him. I’ve used vim nearly every day of my career.

I’ve been thinking about the disappearance of God games. I think they didn’t disappear, but they evolved so much that we don’t recognize them anymore.

I feel some moved into the direction that we now call “simulators”, like RimWorld, the Sims, Two Point Hospital, and more. In my mind, the big difference between the God games of old and those new games is that in the older games your role as the player was explicitly defined, where in the new games it’s not. In the old games, you were “playing the role of a god in that realm”. The new games don’t bother to tell you “who” you are in this setting. You’re just the player, get on with it, play the game.

I feel like other God games moved in the direction of top down colony builders, like Against the Storm or Frostpunk. And again, I think the big difference between those games and something like Populous is that your role as the player doesn’t have an explicit name in the game world. You’re not a “God”. But most of the rest of the trappings are there, I think.

What do you think?

Really enjoyed Heaven’s Vault.

Surprised that The Enteral Cylinder only has 300-ish reviews. I remember seeing it all over the new when it launched. How is it?

I’ve been using my Fairphone 4 for a couple of months now and I really like it. It wasn’t easy to get it in Canada, but it works great with my carrier here. Getting my hands on some spare parts and a wallet case here wasn’t easy either.

But now I have a repairable phone with an extra battery and an extra camera module. I should be able to run this hardware for years to come regardless of wear and tear or the longevity of the company. I’m hoping to get 6 years out of it. I ran my previous LG phone for 7 before switching; had to replace the battery twice, which was easy because that model had a removable battery.

I purchased the Fairphone 4 a couple of months ago to use in Canada. It works great with my carrier here.

The phone I purchased runs stock Android, not the /e/ OS. And yeah, it’s super easy to open up and repair. I purchased an extra battery and an extra camera module. I have no idea what stock will be like 5, 6, or 7 years from now, but that’s how long I typically run each of my phones before switching to something new and I wanted to make sure I could keep the thing running regardless of how the company performs.