What I was supposed to be doing, was painting minis for Frosthaven. What I actually was doing was pretty much everything else.
I reached Hunter Rank 6 on Monster Hunter Wilds, and I have questions. We meet a lost tribe of people and then, soon after, another lost tribe of people. They both mention that they were descended the same ancient advanced civilization and then split apart from each other a thousand years ago. Only problem is: one of these lost tribes is literally elves. Four fingers to a hand, big ears, the whole package.
I’m playing in German; my boyfriend is playing in Japanese, and my son is playing in English. But somehow all the NPCs understand everything.
Game is fun; I am slow-rolling it in order to not get ahead of Drew and Kasul, as each is also doing a lot of other stuff. That led me to poke around to see what other PS5 games I could be playing, and that’s how I tripped over…
In Blue Prince, you play Simon, the titular “Blue Prince”, whose crazy puzzle master uncle has left him a mansion. Problem is, it’s been designed so that every night, most of the forty five1 rooms in the mansion rearrange themselves; some rooms come, some rooms go. It’s your job to daily explore the mansion and its shifting rooms in order to get to the antechamber and find your inheritance.
The puzzles range from the easy to the complex, and as the days go by, and more rooms are unlocked, the puzzles get more extreme. Some take place through different rooms that might not actually be discoverable on the same day. Some have delayed effects. Some have permanent effects. Each run takes about 15 minutes to half an hour; more if you are taking notes, which you should. There’s a plot running through the game; you don’t immediately know that there is an ongoing storyline, but there is a tragedy, and a mystery, and you’ll need to solve it to solve the mansion.
No spoilers, but it took until Day 10 for me to remember to do something that is automatic for me in every other RPG, and I Found Out Some Things.
I was consciously not working on Sword for Hire the past couple of weeks, but I found my fingers loading up Visual Studio Code entirely of their own accord. The last time I touched it, I was refactoring it as a series of cross loading Textual apps, but those looked so different from the Curses app I’d already made, so I tossed it all and continued with Curses. First up was to make a supervisor wrapper that would hand off control to various subprograms; the first of those was the banner, second was the character select screen. None of these are final. I also added some color to the main adventure.
I’d made a whole new character creator for the Textual rewrite; I need to fit that back into the app. Right now, you can’t create a character.
Kasul is eager to give the game a shot, but there’s just so much left to do.
We finally ordered and received Spirits of the Grove, the expansion to Bardwood Grove. It has a bunch of new mechanics, but I mostly wanted it for the fifth player board, and the two new bards, Brute Wintersteen and Bay Once. No idea who they were modeled after. With five players, we could bring it to the Saturday night table. Bay Once, with her ability to record scratch (seriously?) was able to clear the runes from her board and move time back and forth in order to get significant rewards every time she sang. I won with her with (I think) 45 points, but everyone else was in the same area and everyone had fun.
One Hit Heroes also showed up. In this board game, the heroes have just the one hit point. Any hit from the boss monster (whose health > 1 hit point) will kill them. The only way the heroes can win is to cooperate and use all their abilities to make sure they never, ever get hit. There is a solo mode for those who hate people but like robot dogs.
Don’t ask. Or maybe go ahead and ask.
Cryptmaster arrived earlier than expected from Limited Run. Looking forward to playing the full game after loving the demo last year.
I’m slowly getting repro cases for the GB/GBC games I pick up here and there. These cases came together last week.
Shadowgate Classic is the original NES (and not the Mac) version of the old point and click adventure. Whereas I got through Beyond Shadowgate fine by myself, I needed some help from Kasul to get past the first room in this game 
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is a bit of an odd duck, as it mostly follows the adventures of an elf named Link, and Zelda is mostly an offscreen character. A puzzling departure in the classic game series. Let’s hope they lose the lunkhead in the next game.
Puyo Puyo is, I think, the first in the famous Puyo Puyo series of goofy cartoon characters fighting to match colored gumdrops and fill their opponent’s board with junk. I’ve played a bunch of these and they’re always a lot of fun. When the delayed Analogue 3D N64 clone gets here, I have Puyo Puyo Sun ready to go for that, too.
Kasul gave me Galaga/Galaxian for my birthday last year and I instantly became far better at it than I ever was in the arcade. Love that game.
Still to come: FINALLY PAINT THE FRICKIN’ FROSTHAVEN MINIS.
Oh yeah, Malifaux is coming out with a new fourth edition. Be fun to see what changes.
- Forty six. IYKYK ↩︎
Blue Prince seems to be a diamond in the rough. Can’t wait to check out.
I nice, slow, contemplative game — like Firewatch, or Witness. Or even in some ways like Outer Wilds. It’s a fun game that doesn’t stress you out.
Blueprints, I mean Blue Prince, is getting a lot of buzz. I’m pretty busy with other games but may give it a go, though if I’m honest with myself I suck at puzzles so maybe it would just frustrate me.
I haven’t found any hard puzzles yet; my issue is that lots of things have to happen right in order to get the tools to solve them. It looks like once the major puzzles are solved, they stay solved, which is good.