malvasia bianca

Good Sudoku is, of course, a Sudoku app, but one that takes a rather different angle from most Sudoku apps: it wants to expose the conceptually interesting parts of solving Sudoku puzzles, instead of having you spend time on surface rules. Some of this is done via mechanical shortcuts. Typically, a part of solving a […]

I probably should have written about Yakuza Kiwami more quickly after playing it, but honestly I don’t have much to say about it. The series has totally turned into comfort food to me: the familiar cast of characters, the familiar location, the familiar patterns of gameplay. And the dance between Majima and Kiryu; I think […]

A few short visual novels that I played recently between larger games: Eliza There’s some good stuff there, but it didn’t quite click for me. It’s about a woman who had a key role in what I think was a skunkworks project in a tech company, who left and disappeared for a few years, and […]

So: Death Stranding. It’s actually the first Kojima game that I’ve played, or at least that I’ve finished: I dipped into the first Metal Gear Solid a while back, but it wasn’t really my thing, and I haven’t played any of his subsequent games. It turns out, though, that I kind of like Kojima’s approach […]

My PS4 bricked itself during a system update a couple of months ago, so I needed to take a break from playing Death Stranding. Which was bad timing: Sony’s repair centers were closed because of COVID. (They reopened this past week, so hopefully I’ll get it repaired soon…) I decided the next large game I’d […]

I didn’t play the first four episodes of Kentucky Route Zero when they came out: I generally try to avoid playing games on PC, and while I was willing to make an exception for Kentucky Route Zero, I figured I’d at least wait until all the episodes were released and hope for a console port. […]

I Love Hue starts off as this super chill game about colors. You get presented with a rectangle full of colored squares; some of them are fixed in place, and you want to move the rest around so the whole thing makes a smooth color gradient. And it’s all very pleasant: more or less obvious […]

At first, I was actually a little put off by Heaven’s Vault. I expected the game to mostly be about translation, with maybe a bit of clicking to select options, but somehow the controls ended up being surprisingly fiddly when I was first getting used to them? (Somehow I was always hitting the wrong button […]

I’d given up hope that I’d ever see another Shenmue game; but then the Shenmue III Kickstarter happened, and here we are. And, unsurprisingly but gratifyingly: Shenmue III is very much a Shenmue game. There are tweaks to the formula: martial arts practice is a little different, fighting is a little different, there’s an mild […]

I’m behind on my blogging, unfortunately: I normally try to have no more than one game finished and unblogged, but right now I have four. So I can’t quite remember what I had to say about Minit; fortunately, I didn’t have a ton to say about it, so that’s not the worst thing. It was […]

Some notes on Apple Arcade games that I’ve played: Guildlings This is super good. The writing is charming and funny and moving, but also there’s really interesting rethinking of what it means to be an RPG. Directly addressing the “hero who saves the world” trope; rethinking combat / spell mechanics in interesting ways. And managing […]

I don’t play a lot of AAA games; there are certainly specific AAA series I like, and I do play my share of Nintendo games, but most of the big releases just don’t catch my eye. (Or at least don’t catch my eye enough for them successfully fight their way up my queue.) But I […]

Slay the Spire is a deckbuilding roguelike. And it’s a pretty good deckbuilder game! But, unfortunately, it’s still a roguelike, and one of the things I’ve learned over the last couple of years: I don’t like roguelikes, or at least I haven’t yet found one that I like. Slay the Spire is the roguelike I’ve […]

I kind of waffled about whether I should write about Erica, but it’s on the list, so it gets a post. And I do think it’s a good game. You’re watching filmed interactions most of the time, but the bits where you have to interact with the environment (even if they don’t involve a choice, […]

I’d never played a Pokemon RPG before. I’d seen a few episodes of the anime a couple of decades back, and I played Pokemon Go when it came out, but the main RPGs never made it to the top of the list of potential games for me to play. This summer, though, I had a […]

Outer Wilds sounded like a really neat game. Heck, it still sounds like a neat game to me! A tiny solar system, and a ship to explore it; a mystery or two to seed your curiosity, growing as you explore the planets in the system; and then, after 22 minutes, the sun goes nova and […]

I was very glad that Shenmue and Shenmue II got a re-release in preparation for the forthcoming third game: I thought back on those two games incredibly fondly, but I didn’t actually remember so many details about them, and in particular I could use a plot refresher. Maybe I was a little curious how well […]

It took me quite a while to get around to playing Persona 5: I don’t normally play games close to their release date, but given how much I liked Persona 4 and Tokyo Mirage Sessions, I would have expected Persona 5 to be an exception. But some of the stuff I’d heard about the game […]

I wasn’t expecting to bounce off of Baba Is You nearly as quickly as I did: I think of myself as somebody who likes puzzle games and who is good at them, but neither of those proved to be particularly the case with Baba Is You? Maybe I like puzzle games with consistent rules? Maybe […]

(If you’re super spoiler-sensitive, probably don’t read this, just play the game? Though if you’re only mildly spoiler sensitive, it should be fine, I’m just going to talk a bit about the approach to problem solving in a couple of places.)   Liesl and I played Return of the Obra Dinn together. It’s a good […]