malvasia bianca

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 […]

I saw a bunch of people positively mentioning The Barnacle Goose Experiment on Twitter at the end of last year, so I gave it a try. I ran into a game breaking bug, so I stopped playing while waiting for that bug to be fixed; but playing it did remind me that I like clicker […]

I wish I had more to say about NORCO. I could blame that on me being almost three months behind on my blogging but, honestly, it isn’t that: I just don’t usually have that much to say about games if I can’t find a mechanical hook as an entry point. And, mechanically, NORCO is a […]

I don’t have a lot to say about Marvel Snap. It’s well done; it’s got an honest monetization strategy, where money gives you cosmetic stuff and unlocks the possibility to earn some cards in the current season. (And that earning is done in a deterministic way, it’s not a random draw.) Or at least that’s […]

I more or less ignored Bayonetta when it first came out. It seemed like it was all about superfluous sexualization: lots of ogling of body parts, special moves that removes the protagonist’s clothes because apparenly her clothes are made out of her hair and of course how could a special move not involve spinning your […]

I never played any of the original Monkey Island games. I played lots of text adventures growing up, but I wasn’t playing games much during the heyday of graphical adventures, and so I basically missed that entire side of the genre. Over the years since then, though, I’ve heard people I respect bring up the […]

I’m definitely glad to have played I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, but I don’t have a ton of big things to say about it? We’ll see how this post turns out, maybe I’ll discover something by the end. (Update: the more I typed, the more impressed I was with the game.) It’s a narrative game, […]

A few months back, I was looking for a game to play to take me out of a gaming funk. I ended up playing NEO TWEWY; and, in fact, playing it did make me happy. Which surprised me a bit: there’s a part of me that expects JRPGs to be some combination of too much […]

I’m behind in my blogging, so I’m going to cover Tunic and Stray in a single post. Because I have the same thing to say about both games: each of them starts from a conceit that is compelling enough for me to have been drawn into the game, but neither of them manages to expand […]

Dicey Dungeons first caught my eye because it was a Terry Cavanagh game; ever since he released Super Hexagon, he’s been somebody whose work I am curious about. Though, to be sure, Dicey Dungeons seemed quite different from Super Hexagon! It’s clearly dice-focused; and the game blurb says that it’s a deckbuilding roguelike. All of […]

I’ve been listening to a lot of role-playing game podcasts recently that use rolls of six-sided dice to help advance their narrative. So, when I heard that Citizen Sleeper was using some of those ideas in a video game format, I was curious to see how that would work out. I’m used to video games […]

When NEO: The World Ends with You was released, I was surprised at its existence and not particularly interested in the game. I’d played the original The World Ends with You back when it came out almost a decade and a half ago; my memory was that it was a stylish game, with an odd […]

As I mentioned in my last post, I’d been at a bit of a loss of what to play, and had ended up grabbing Another Sight from the list of Xbox free games; actually, in April, there were two free games that caught my eye, with Hue being the other one. Hue is a puzzle […]