malvasia bianca

The original Slay the Spire is a great game. When the Kickstarter launched for a board game version of the game, it had been two or three years since I’d played the video game version; that was recent enough that I still remembered the game fondly but enough time had passed that I didn’t mind […]

(If you’re super spoiler sensitive, then I guess there are spoilers here. If you’re only moderately spoiler sensitive then this post should be fine, I think.)   Animal Well is a platformer Metroidvania. And, I suspect, it’s a somewhat unusual one? One way in which it’s unusual is that the abilities that you acquire are […]

I was very much looking forward to playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Its predecessor, Final Fantasy VII Remake, was probably my favorite game I played that year; and the parts that I liked the most about it were wandering around town with my party members and interacting with them while helping townspeople, I wish the […]

Three quick game notes, with the unifying theme being “games that I didn’t like as much as I hoped I would”. (Balatro is pretty good, though. Loop Hero might be, too, I just don’t have a feel for what I would have found if I’d spent more time with it.)   Balatro is pretty good […]

I was really looking forward to Baldur’s Gate 3: I’m a big BioWare fan, and while Baldur’s Gate 3 is of course by Larian instead of BioWare, it sounded like Larian had brought over many of the same virtues (e.g. rich party interactions), and added more of their own (a wide range of techniques to […]

DodecaDragons is a clicker game. Its distinctive feature compared to other such games that I’ve played is how far it leans into numerical growth; such games sometimes switch into numerical notation (1e9 instead of 1,000,000,000), but, in DodecaDragons, sometimes your exponents get large enough that the game switches over to exponential notation for those, too. […]

Wow, I really am behind on my game blogging – I finished Chants of Sennaar in April and I’m only getting around to talking about it now. Anyways: it’s a translation game, but one with five languages, in a Tower of Babel setting. And this opens up some pretty interesting possibilities for a translation game, […]

Genshin Impact was our March VGHVI game, and I was happy to give it a try. The game had caught my eye when it first came out: I liked the art style, and it apparently took some level of inspiration from Breath of the Wild. I’m dubious about free-to-play games but this didn’t sound like […]

A month or two back, I ran across a mention of the game Magic Research; my replaying of Kittens Game had reminded me that I like clicker games, and Magic Research looked interesting, so I decided to give it a try. And it’s good! It’s no Kittens Game, but it’s solid, and there’s stuff in […]

Two more games this time that I started but didn’t finish; both played because of VGHVI discussions, both pleasant games that I might have finished in other circumstances, but also both games that wouldn’t have been at the top of my list otherwise and where that placement in my list was correct.   Lies of […]

Earlier this year, we had a VGHVI discussion of Against the Storm. That game is Windows-only, so I couldn’t play it, but the discussion and a let’s play that I watched got me thinking that I probably would enjoy playing Against the Storm if it were available on console. And, during that discussion, Frostpunk came […]

I was surprisingly nonplussed by The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom while going through the tutorial island. The first tutorial shrine was fine; it gave me a power that let me move stuff around, which seemed useful enough, and to stick things together, which sounded fine as long as I wasn’t constantly having […]

Earlier this year, I played Crank and The Barnacle Goose Experiment. And, as I noted at the time: Ultimately, I think the lesson here is that what I really want is more Kittens Game. So I dived back into Kittens Game. And, you know what: it’s an amazingly good game. You can see the spreadsheet […]

Some notes on games I spent a few hours on recently:   I heard a surprising number of mentions of PowerWash Simulator on the Waypoint podcast, as a chill relaxing game, and it was available on Game Pass, so I figured I’d give it a try. Or at least my memory is that it was […]

I don’t have anything deep to say about The Case of the Golden Idol, but it’s a very good game. It’s a puzzle game where each puzzle involves figuring out a murder, both who did it and the context behind the murder; each murder has you presented with some scenes that you can navigate through […]

I’ve been on the board of the HOA of the townhouse complex that I live in for the last three years; and we just passed a new set of governing documents. And there was enough going on there that I figure I might as well write down some notes on it.   When we first […]

Some notes on games I’ve played recently where I don’t have enough to say to fill up a full blog post: Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE A few months back, I was in the mood to play something joyful. And I knew that I’d be going on a trip soon, which argued for that game being […]

(If you really want to go in blind, don’t read this post, just play the game; it’s quite good! But I want to talk in some detail about how the mechanics of Vampire Survivors unfold because I found that unfolding process to be surprisingly interesting.)   I’m quite impressed with the way Vampire Survivors is […]

(If you’re super sensitive to spoilers, there are some mechanical spoilers in this post. Nothing you won’t hear in many podcasts discussing the game, but I figured I should warn people just in case.) Pentiment is an unusual game. Which is, I suppose, obvious: it’s a game about life and murder in a small medieval […]

When playing Yakuza games, I’d started to wonder how they’d keep the series going both from a narrative point of view and a mechanical point of view. Kiryu was trying to stay out of the Tojo Clan, but something would come up that would threaten the entire clan that only Kiryu could deal with, so […]