The weather this week was suuuper weird! It's like Autumn was throwing out one last hurrah. After a couple days of -6°C last week, we had some pretty warm ones this week. So much so that I had to carry my jacket on my walk to the shops! So long Autumn 👋

Zelda continues to be an impressive feat of game development. Switch hardware aside, the scale of this thing is immense! That immensity isn't padded out by a bajillion markers on the map pointing you to the same 5 kinds of quest. Instead you stumble upon Koroks (either hiding or looking for their friends), a builder who is eternally committed to holding up a sign, or a shrine that has been so well designed to allow for multiple solutions. That sense of discovery, I think, is what makes the game so good. You are essentially handed the keys once you land in Hyrule and then need to go exploring to figure everything out (which is incredibly rare in modern games). The other night, for example, I discovered "The Depths". Not by doing the introductory mission (I found that way later), but by diving in to a Temple! Nothing was broken by this apparent break in sequence, I wasn't hand held back in to the intro mission, I was just able to fuck around and find out!

One of my better moments handling the gliders:

Some friends of ours lent us Blockus the other week — short of Unstable Unicorns, this is the only game that Abby has been eager to sit down and play! It's one of those games that is super simple to pick up (it has 1 rule), but is surprisingly complex. You can plan ahead as much as you like, but you also need to account for the plans for 3 other players who either might have pans of their own, or are just taking it 1 chaotic turn at a time!