I played through Herdling this weekend and exuberantly recommend it. It’s a short, beautiful journey with a growing group of rescued furry beasts, and it’s long enough to make you feel connected to each and every one of them without wearing out its welcome. The mechanics are just right, and it’s punctuated with exhilarating moments and peaceful campfire rests.

At campfires, some of the Calicorns wait away from the fire, providing gentle signals that they need something from the player — one would wait near firewood to make sure I found it, another always wanted a few rounds of fetch with a toy it found, and others need cleaning, a pet, or a bite of fruit before they’re ready for bed. I got invested in making sure they were all taken care of.

The game is mostly about pathfinding, with increasing danger from the environment as you progress. The intensity is really satisfying, with risks and reveals that contribute to the sense of being part of something grand and mysterious. It’s a lovingly crafted adventure.

Playing a lot of Lonely Mountains Snow Riders this weekend. I really enjoyed its mountain-biking predecessor, and this version – on skis – is a treat. It adds a chaotic, fun multiplayer racing mode that gave me a surprisingly great co-op game last night, in which an opponent would zip ahead of me, then pause and turn to watch me descend to their location, emoting cheerful hearts and thumbs-ups.

When I yard-saled myself off a rock or into the river, which happened a lot on one of the maps we raced, they patiently waited, cheering me on, occasionally falling off their own skis so that we respawned together at the same checkpoint starting line to try the pitch again. When I finally found the right line, we glided together down the rest of the route, angling around long curves and dipping through a field of bumps before crossing the finish line to our camp. It was like skiing with a coach, or, sometimes, like skiing with my dad; and it reminded me of the surprise co-op session of Ashen that I played last fall, and was, 100%, the most wholesome and warm and encouraging game experience I’ve had in a long time.

Sometimes games are really good, gang.

I am so looking forward to this game: Cairn is a realistic-ish climbing game with a layer of survival and resource management mechanics, and it feels really good to play, right down to the calming breath from a bomber hold to the Elvis-leg twitching you get from holding too long on a sketchy, fatigued toe edge.

After a hard pitch, you can roll out your little bivvy sack, cook some instant noodles with your ultralight stove, and sleep with a view of the stars. It’s delightful and a perfect depiction of dirtbag climber downtime.

You have to manage food, water, and consumables like climbing chalk that give you a temporary boost, and at one point in the demo I had to rappel all the way down several crags to fill my water bottles and spend my meager few coins on a packet of fruit chews – I just hoped it would fill my energy meter enough to get back to, and then finish, the final long pitch of the climb. I had barely enough food energy to make it to the top, and when I finally topped out, doubled over from the effort, exhaustion and hunger, it felt like an amazing triumph.

I knew this game sounded familiar, and I found Riley MacLeod’s great writeup of the demo from a couple months back, which I’m sure I read at the time. The demo now has a mode that lets the player somewhat-gracefully select the limb to move, which I found I needed when I got myself into tricky, awkward positions on the wall. This game looks like something special and I can’t wait for its full release to see how it handles things like expedition-length trips – route finding for resupply drops, heck yes! – and what it does with the hints of story found in the demo.

I started playing Caves of Qud this weekend. It feels like a retro-throwback Rogue combined with an amazing amount of procedurally generated complexity and narrative depth. I keep dying. I’ll make another run.

I picked up Arco for myself to play this long winter’s holiday, and, wow is it good! Highly recommended.

Oh my gosh, the “crank to buy” mechanic in the Playdate catalog is delightful.

My Friday “day off” turned into a “well, I’ll work about half of it” day. But I got enough downtime after mid-day to end my work week pretty relaxed and on a positive note, having learned enough to solve an interesting problem and make mild progress on a couple of things. Among my weekend tasks so far is reaching out to the public radio station in my old town to cancel my monthly donation; it’s clipping one more tether to that place I lived for nearly 20 years, and it has me feeling kind of moody.

This week, Annie Mueller posted this beautiful piece. In reflecting on changing her blog platform, not only has she written something really moving about why she writes and shares online; she overcame the friction that the whole endeavor had got wrapped up in for her. When I think about why I continue to care about Writing On The Internet, I’m often torn between liking the systems, the machinery, and the actual things I’m saying, such that I think there’s much that I don’t actually put to paper because the tools aren’t satisfying, or the output doesn’t look the way I imagine it might.¹ I really love how Annie found the right landing place for her own why and how.

• 💉 I got my flu and COVID boosters yesterday. So far, I’m a little tired and achey, but not feeling the side effects too badly, which is a nice change. The prior COVID vaccs have really flattened me hard for about thirty-six hours.

• 📼 I rewatched Edge of Tomorrow in some evening downtime this week. You know what? It’s a really good, well-executed sci-fi banger and more people should be really into it. Also, Bill Paxton in this movie is amazing.

• 🕹️ Most of the gaming I normally do has felt really heavy lately, a combination of limited time to really get into anything, an absolutely wrecked attention span, and general dissatisfaction with … everything? I picked up Inertial Drift and it’s hitting the spot: It’s a fun and well-designed racer with cool twin-stick controls, easy to pick up and put down. It’s a perfect Steam Deck recliner, too.

• 📖 Molly White wrote a good article about POSSE publishing to own one’s online presences. She links to her software implementation, too! But, usefully, her writeup focuses on the reasons to do this, too.

Diablo IV on the Steam Deck is a great time.

I’m really happy to have found a group to more regularly run raids – fun and challenging endgame content – in Destiny 2. It’s particularly special because my kiddo is big enough now to regularly run with us and this group of friends is generous and welcoming to them. Last night we completed Kings Fall together, and this raid is a real nostalgia trip in D2, in addition to being a lot of fun. It was kiddo’s first completion of this one, so a memorable one for both us.

🎮 Now that I’ve finished Citizen Sleeper, maybe I’ll head back to my long-time Destiny hobby, but maybe … Elden Ring!