adventuredog What, me worry?

gamerdad It would seem that I made it thru the first chapter, and not without some considerable effort. I did some more reading and my impressions and impressiveness with the climbing mechanics were on track as this game seems to be 98%all about that exact thing. But as a puzzle game those climbing challenges are getting increasingly more complex as I progress—obviously, huh? Where Of left off last time turned out to be right at the start of one of those impressively challenging climbing puzzles so a couple days after playing the tutorial I had to give my memory a plunge into the depths of medium term storage to recall all the tricky bits and beat the stage. Somehow I managed, but not without some tired fingers from manipulating the climb controls. I can only imagine how tired the little dude clinging to the wall must feel—and if he could talk, how frustrated with my skills.

castironguy They’re not nearly ready to harvest but after three years the plum tree in my front yard is coming along nicely and looks like we’re gonna have about 40 pieces of fruit.

gamerdad I haven’t been buying many games but in celebration of some anticipated new income in the coming weeks I spent my first hour’s pay on a title that had been tucked away on my wishlist for a while. I don’t remember where I heard about this, maybe from a podcast? but it looked intriguing enough as a chill out zen game to have on the #steamdeck for bursts of quiet time play.

I didn’t quite make it through the opening act, but I think I’ve got the vibe. It’s like 95% exploration and climbing so far, and before you think it’s just pressing the arrows and moving around on a wall, think again. It’s strategic, and you need to be increasingly more thoughtful about placing ropes and leaping and resting and then of course the multi-button climbing controls where each hand is controlled by a different button. It’s deliciously complex. I think I like it.

gamerdad An odd chain of events led me to playing #flightsimulator on my #steamdeck this morning. Ultimately it kinda started with a power failure that borked an update on the deck and forced me after about four hours of effort to bite the bullet and reimage my device. It was one of those sacrifices that led me to have basically a fresh install and lots of room to install games—particularly when I’d been struggling with the motivation for a digital purge. When I first got the deck, FS2020 wouldn’t even install on it, only stream, and the lag was unbearable. But for some reason it gave me the option and since I had the room I, again, bit the bullet and endured a three hour 129GB download over wifi to get the game on there. Of course I had to crank down all the graphics settings to “medium” at best, and in many cases just off (I mean, you can’t tell on a small screen anyways) and I actually got some respectable performance out of the thing, even flying over a small city like my hometown. Now I just need to tweak the control scheme and maybe I can actually play on this thing, huh?

squwetchy I sat atop a waterfall and painted this plein air #watercolour with water from the creek.

squwetchy A plein air #watercolour painted atop a mountain. #waterfall

Now that I’m back home and actually have decent paints… a proper brush … few mosquitoes buzzing in my face.. and less rush, I want to try this screen again.

gamerdad Back at home after our mini vacation we kicked off a second campaign of this little tile game so we could both preserve the campaign we started with our friends and also kick off a new run with just us two now that we got our heads wrapped around the rules a bit better. There had initially been a bit of confusion around the scoring of tasks, particularly around the ability to build compounding tasks that multiplied or efforts per tile played while not breaking the resource count. See, the point of the game is to string together specific landscape resources to chain points.

Our initial read of the rules was quick (because we just wanted to play and we were sitting in a hotel lobby) but on a more thorough comb over the scoring we got our heads around some of the deeper strategy which is simple enough to learn but still has some depth and randomness baked in. Or new campaign got a couple game sessions checked off on the campaign sheet and we made a lot more progress now that we’ve figured it all out.

On our last full day backcountry camping in August, we decamped over Guinn’s Pass and down to the Galatea trail out. #hike