I just played the demo of Is This Seat Taken? and it turned out to be a really fun little puzzle game.

Have ever looked at the wolf, the goat and the cabbage and thought "This needs more moving parts?" That's roughly what Is This Seat Taken? is - you need to find comfortable seating arrangements for anywhere between three and ten+ people with *very* specific requirements: Alexis wants to sit next to Youssef, Youssef can't stand loud music so he can't sit next to George, George hasn't showered so he can't be next to Sergei who hates strong smells, but would like to talk to another kid...

The game is out on #Steam and most wonderfully, has a playable demo which was a fun half-hour brain teaser:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3035120/Is_This_Seat_Taken/

#CiferRecommends #videoGames #puzzles

Yesterday, @Sirablopp and me tried out #KeyWe, a fun co-op video game about two kiwi birds starting to work at the local post office - the office is *not* kiwi-sized, so they spend a lot of time running around on desks, pushing buttons by jumping on them, and preparing letters to be delivered by the cassowary team. It's fun, it's less frantic than #overcooked and generally a good time.

And, importantly, it's currently available in a Steam sale for €4 for 7 more hours.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1242980/KeyWe/

#videoGames #CiferRecommends

Yesterday's discovery: How important the text behind a steam review is compared to the simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down.

There are of course certain lists where what's meant as a scathing damnation sounds like the highest praise to me (oh no, there are queer people in this and the main character is not a white man!), but even reviews by more well-adjusted people can have completely different value axes than me.

#Techtonica was recommended to me by friends as an automation game with an interesting story that steers clear of Factorio's uncomfortable colonialist undertones and it was on sale right now. I looked it up and found the reviews as Mixed, recent reviews Mostly Negative. So I hesitated, but looked into what the reviews were actually criticizing - turns out most problems only appear in the late game, late meaning 100+ hours into the game, while the early game gets praised.

As someone who isn't planning to actually sink that much time into the game (I'll probably drop out once the production chains grow beyond a certain complexity), it sounds to me like I'll definitely get more than ten bucks worth of entertainment out of this, so I grabbed it and I'm having fun so far.

I wonder what might be a good method of aggregating reviews that's not as binary and actually takes different preferences into account.

#CiferRecommends #videogames #steam

I really should be more active again. So here goes!

Yesterday, I played #VivaLaQueerBar by @plotbunnygames together with @Bratapfel, @curiouscat and another dear friend. It's a story game in the tradition of #ForTheQueen where we used card prompts to help us develop a queer bar and our characters within it. I've already played the game in a Roaring Twenties Berlin setting and a Shadowrun/cyberpunk future, but today, our bar was located in present day London. Also, it was a feeding ground for vampires.

Over the course of four wonderful hours, we found out that the primary team of the Broken Crown are Nigel Wilberburton (a fashion designer from Victorian times), Eugenie von Karnstein (a libertine highway woman from the Regency era), Charles Miller (modern photo model for the dictionary entry "superficial") and Nate Crandall (fledgling of the group, lawyer, masquerade keeper and *definitely* not to be called Jonathan).

Our bar was founded in, I believe, 1820 and we just had our bicentennial celebration with some of the original guests present. We found out what happened when Charles denied entry to a horribly unfashionable elder vampire, we had Nigel argue for (and Eugenie against) some necessary renovations, we saw Nate inch ever closer to a nervous breakdown trying to keep humanity from finding out about them and we finished the evening by holding a werewolf-themed party. As always with the game, we were reluctant to let our messy bunch of monsters go into the night, but fun was certainly had imagining their antics and I'd love to play again soon in another bar.

#CiferRPGMusings #CiferRecommends #TTRPG #ttrpgde

Because of @catrinity and @Ghulgrube, I watched the first episodes of #pokerfaceTvShow by #RianJohnson starring #NatashaLyonne (so many hashtags!), available for streaming via Amazon Prime.
It's a road trip case of the week mystery show where the viewer starts out knowing who did it and the main character also quickly gets an idea of who did it due to being a human lie detector, but because of her low social status and a justice system not accepting "Trust me, buddy!" as valid evidence, most of her time is spent figuring out how to prove what she already knows. I really like the characters, both Natasha Lyonne's Charlie and the people she meets - the virtuous, the villainous and the beautifully weird. And it scratches the mystery itch without being copaganda, which is always a plus in my book. I hope the series stays as strong as it started!

(CN: A dog gets hurt in the third episode.)

#CiferRecommends

Yesterday, I finished #ChantsOfSennaar, a video game about translation and the cultural exchange it makes possible. It's an adventure puzzle game inspired by the Babel myth where you piece together five different languages with their words and simple grammatical rules from context clues - so if you find a sign post pointing towards a mill with two glyphs, one of them will probably mean "way to" and the other "mill".

The game is ultimately optimistic in tone and the cultures are interesting to learn about - just what I needed these days. Also, the game is part of Steam's current sale. If you're looking for a relaxed puzzle game, give it a try!

#videogames #CiferRecommends