Firstly, many thanks to @[email protected] for providing a code for the game :)

Botany Manor is a charming little puzzle game in which you explore a manor house, gradually unlocking new sections as you work out the correct conditions to germinate different species of plants.

Visually it has the painterly, cell-shaded design of The Witness which felt perfectly at home in this pastoral Somerset valley. And flicking through the botany guide to check maps or clues reminded me of Obra Dinn.

Part of the puzzle of the game is sorting and assigning the clues to the correct plant; in each chapter you'd be given access to several different seeds and it's your job (having read through letters, posters and pamphlets) to work out which growing conditions relate to which plant.

I liked how the rough locations for clues were all listed in the book should you need any help, taking away a lot of the frustration of searching fruitlessly. And you'd only have three or so puzzles ring-fenced each chapter which stopped things becoming overly convoluted. All together it made for a relaxing experience that let you focus on exploration and solving the puzzles themselves.

The soundtrack is very peaceful too, with lots of bird song and natural ambience.

The puzzles themselves aren't particularly difficult, but I loved how varied they were. I got the sense of being in a cosy escape room without a time limit. There's a little bit of story as you go along which gets a satisfying resolution at the end.

The game took me just over three hours to complete, so it's quite short but it honestly felt like the perfect length. I'd highly recommend it for anyone into puzzle games!

Link for There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury (written May 1950)

I've been going to a queer book club, and we're currently looking for books with trans characters to read next month.

Ideally we'd like a standalone book (not part of a series), and a story where trans identity is a significant part of it.

Thank you :)

I'm not quite sure where else to post this, but hopefully it'll encourage some fun conversation in any case!

So I saw Killers of the Flower Moon is on offer on Kobo. And just out of interest I scrolled down to the review section, to be met with some very confusing posts.

The Bloom review almost sounds like a response to something. It sounds like some kind of treasure hunt? What's going on with all that weird code?

The Sorry review has a similar feel to it, with the l33t speak stuff going on. I feel like I've wandered in to some kind of alternate reality game from the early 2000s. Or something from Hypnospace Outlaw.

Can anyone enlighten me as to what the hell is going on here?

Don't get me wrong, it's still a good game. But I'm not sure it deserves all the hype it got last year.

It does some very clever stuff in terms of gameplay, with each character having their own unique battle system that synergise with the others.

And yes, the soundtrack is incredible.

In terms of the story, whilst it was interesting, the way the game drip-feeds you knowledge in the first two acts quickly became frustrating. There were multiple cutscenes where characters speak in such a vague, superficially poetic way. In reality it just felt pretentious.

Major story spoilers:

::: spoiler spoiler The overall metaphor for grief is unique. I liked the concept of the characters being creations in this painting, and how that layer of reality feeds into the one you begin the game in. But it felt like everything was revealed all at once in Act 3. The game gives you very little up to that point, so it's hard to emphasize with many of the characters. Perhaps replaying the game knowing what you know changes the perspective of it, but for a new player I'm not sure it's the best way to tell a story. :::

Perhaps this is an unpopular opinion but I found the game aesthetically quite ugly. Many landscapes had a feeling of copy pasted Unreal assets that looked so same-y at points they became confusing to navigate (especially given the lack of a mini-map). The characters had these blank, uncanny stares half the time and the designs for some of them (Esquie in particular) just didn't look good to me.

Oh and I'm really not sure why the devs decided to add entirely unnecessary platforming elements!

I found certain enemy attacks to be inconsistent and not well telegraphed, leading to some frustrating encounters were you had to memorise the parry timings rather than learn them from a valid cue.

I think the game deserves good reviews, but I'm not quite sure how it won so many GOTY awards. Perhaps it just wasn't the game for me.

I spent the last few months working on a fursuit head for my sona :3

For a first go, I think he came out pretty good! But I have a list of things to improve for next time.

I might have a go making a friend's head soon (they're a cat)! Although maybe some paws and a tail would be nice to have along with my own head first.

I've got Steam keys for the following:

Paradise Killer

Blair Witch

Please comment on which you'd like and I'll choose at random by next Monday.

For fun: what's your favourite pokemon?

Is this more common with the latest pack?

Not sure how long it had been there! It had no smell 🤔

I can think of one - auld lang syne. Are there any others? Why not? If anything, New Year's is celebrated by everyone whereas Christmas isn't.

I've read several Tchaikovsky books before, and some have been incredible (Children of Time, Guns of the Dawn) while others have just been 'fine'. So I find him a bit hit or miss.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the Shadows of the Apt or Echoes of the Fall series? Is this bundle worth it?

https://www.mybookshelf.dev/

Found this the other day - a website that takes a shelf from Goodreads and turns it into a digital bookshelf using images of book spines.

I found this quite cool as a way to display books I've read that might be a mix of digital and physical.

When I first tried it, it was missing quite a few of the book spines. However you can submit your own by finding the spines online and giving the dimensions. At this point I've submitted the majority of my missing ones - the website provides fake covers if you like.

If you give it a go, the shelf name is case sensitive so be careful with that. And the book dimensions are in inches if you decide to submit any.