anchorhold

Just for isis!

I spent most of my week off playing Mass Effect: Andromeda obsessively, and am now about two-thirds through, according to the save game screen. ( Detailed thoughts - with spoilers )

Anyway, I think from here I am heading fairly rapidly towards the end game.

Other things I have played since my last gaming post:

• A Normal Lost Phone and Another Lost Phone: Laura's Story - really nice tiny games, no more than an hour each, where you "find a lost phone" and have to look through it to find out whose phone it is and how it was lost. I got the first one in a Pride sale, and they're both fairly Issue-y, but felt well done. No real replayability, but well worth the couple of quid each they cost - I would buy more in this series.


• Got a bit addicted to Terraforming Mars for a while and played quite a few games. I'd played this as a board game with S and her husband a few years back, but we ended up getting confused about some of the rules and failing to score things correctly - that sort of game is just so much easier as a computer game where it keeps track of all your special abilities and so on for you! Also, the music is gorgeous but sadly I can't find anywhere I can buy it.


• I played the start of Paper Trail, looking for something a bit like Carto; it's not, really, but there's a somewhat similar mechanic where you origami fold the screen in order to reach the other side of a broken bridge, etc; I quite enjoyed it, and should go back to it.


• Venba is a game in which you cook a series of South Indian recipes as an excuse to explore the immigrant experience (specifically as an Indian in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s). It's really charming, and I liked the whole family; the "puzzles" are really mostly an excuse, but it was quite fun anyway (...well, maybe except for the idli steamer when I had to do it a third time while trying to get the achievement for making everything correctly...).


• I'd heard lots of good things about Chants of Sennaar, and picked up the demo, which was delightful; you're a mysterious hooded figure exploring a city? palace? and interacting with other mysterious figures, who talk to you in symbols which you can slowly work out the meanings of; once you do, you can hover over the speech bubbles and get partial and full translations.
  
  I loved the demo, and bought the full game a couple of weeks later in a sale, but have ( run into a wall of frustration )
  I liked this enough that I do want to keep playing it, but I'm not sure I'm smart enough...


• While I was on the watery games kick from last time, I also played a few hours of In Other Waters, where you are a scientist exploring an alien planet where another person had previously disappeared, navigating the underwater world and learning about the flora and fauna while trying to find her. Again, this was satisfying to play, but I got a bit stuck about an hour and a half in, and can't work out what to do next - and it's frustrating to backtrack, because you can't jump around or zoom out and see the whole map, you're stuck moving from visible point to visible point in your current map section.


• Briefly went back to Submachine and did another couple of levels. Also played some Hidden Folks, which is a Where's Wally type of thing only monochrome and with some of the little figures animated, again using hint guides to find the last few items in most of the scenes! There are levels of varying difficulty, but mostly it's either "tiny level, dead easy" or "massive level, super hard", without much middle ground.


• And I just started Monument Valley III, which was released about a week ago! I loved the first two games, which are very gentle meditative puzzles where you manipulate buildings in a sort of Escher-esque fashion so that your little person can get from one point to another, rotating a walkway so that your path is suddenly linked to the arch overhead etc. I'm playing it very slowly, no more than one level at a time, and having a good time so far.


• I also just picked up Dorfromantik, which I'd heard a lot of good things about; again it's quite mellow. So far it seems a bit like a sort of single-player Carcassonne, you put hexagonal territory tiles together to build villages and forests and rivers and railways and fields, and the tiles come with point-bearing challenges to do things like connect village tiles together until you have 25 houses in a clump, or 465 trees, or whatever, plus there's points for having a hex where all six sides match their neighbours, and so on. I expect there's fiendish depths of strategy that I will never actually explore, but at the moment it's about 20 minutes for a game and I'm quite enjoying it; I can see myself picking this up every so often to play for a bit.

I meant to post yesterday, but I was distracted by reading a season and a half of transcripts of Eight Days of Diana Wynne Jones, which is a delight. I don't do well with podcasts, but I am a big fan of transcripts.

I'm currently having a very frivolous week off; S came up with her baby on Tuesday, and we went and visited my parents and then had lunch; I have read some things and eaten many things and done all the backlog of ironing and washing up (the kitchen was a very sad post-graduation place). And played many more hours of ME:A.

Have also cleaned the worst of the dust from the inside of my computer and am now transferring my Steam library to a new hard drive because apparently 2TB is not! enough! and I see no prospect of kicking my game-buying habit and also everything is 60GB a game now.

I also bought several new and secondhand books and have run out of money until payday, because "frivolous overconsumption" is apparently my motto for July. Except that I promised Miss H cinema snacks for Superman on Friday (in return for a lift!) so I can't stop just yet. I am getting £9 back, though, because Rebellion sold me three 99p ebooks, charged me four times, and then told me that the order had failed so I couldn't download them. They were both polite and rapid at sorting it out though! I've bought plenty of books from them before with no issues, so not entirely sure what went wrong...