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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • It kind of felt like the game was trying to tackle language as a barrier to entry in the same way that Tunic did, but ultimately failed to properly teach. The first language is learnable, but most of the others had extremely frustrating attempts to get the last few words. It fortunately tells you when the word is correct in your pocket dictionary, but if you haven’t encountered the item it references yet, you have to assign it what you think it is, rely on it, and figure out what exactly is wrong.

    I get that it’s a puzzle game, but there’s supposed to be a moment of “Oh, that’s how it works” euphoria when you finish a puzzle, not a consistent “Seriously? I got it this wrong again?” and an encouragement for random trial and error due to frustration. It’s cool that there’s different languages, based on different existing language structures, but it felt like the execution of unraveling it fell flat.








  • I had this on my list up until it released in early access. The concept was what caught my eye, but there’s just not much there.

    There is no fail state. A customer appears, says they want something, and if you don’t have it in your inventory yet (or even if you just don’t want to sell to them), they will wait literally forever. You can’t haggle with them over price, even though you can say no to their price. They just say they’ll wait, and they will. Forever. No new customers will come.

    The game has a set amount of time slots per day to clean and discover new items, but because you don’t have any requirement to sell, customers never leave, and you have an endless supply of trinkets to work with, the time slots mean nothing.

    And the game’s gameplay of uncovering trinkets is fun at first, until you realize that you won’t get anything really different. It’s going to be the same repetitive puzzle over and over, and then scrubbing every inch of it to clean it until you finish. It could have been somewhat zen, but it takes so long for each one that it’s just frustrating.

    I know the game just came out and it’s unfinished, but it’s in a state they feel comfortable asking for money for. It’s fun for maybe the length of the demo, but I didn’t even make it to the end of that without uninstalling it. There’s just not enough in the game, and zero pressure or management.





  • If I had to guess, he’s drawing parallels between Newman and Cruise’s careers. The Hustler was the first of several films Newman made in a short period of time that marketed him as a hero. It wasn’t his first Oscar nomination, but it did earn him one.

    The Sting was a huge box-office success Newman was in after a bunch of flops, and helped bring him back into the spotlight.

    The Color of Money finally earned Newman an Oscar, and it was reprising the same character he played in The Hustler after 25 years. You can definitely see parallels there between him and Cruise with Top Gun (36 years between it and the sequel), and weirdly enough Cruise is also in The Color of Money.