1. Love the new farm that starts with chickens. As someone who - before 1.6 - never left Year 1, animals had such a big initial cost that I avoided them. Starting with animals was much nicer. I got comfortable with how husbandry works, so when I had resources for more, I was more willing to make that investment. It was nice to get big into an aspect of the game I hadn't touched before!

2. Stardew Valley is better without the wiki. I tried avoiding it as a reference this time, and, oh yeah, giving gifts is interesting when you have to find out what people like! Not knowing what to have for bundles and requests made me keep stockpiles, which ended up being convenient all the time! Just overall, collecting knowledge is more fulfilling than checking reference material, and gives you the freedom to make interesting mistakes.

3. Not sure why the game clicked for me this run. To give credit to Stardew itself, the new progression is more compelling than what the game was like originally, and there's tons of small changes I like: fishing bait choices, new seasonal holidays, a hint system for secrets, hotbar quick swapping, a whole extra area to explore in the endgame! But to give credit to me, I was sick as hell and needed to melt onto something for a while. Maybe that's the necessary mindset.

4. I think the game gives too little away with fish; I made an exception to my guide avoidance pretty quick when I needed to hunt down fish. If Stardew saves every gift you give to a big journal, couldn't it save fish catch information (location, season, time, weather) after you reel one in?

5. By comparison, maxed friendship being stagnant is too generous. I want Linus to hate me when we don't speak for a full year because I'm too good at cooking and too blasted on coffees to visit the bathhouse.

6. For a couple years, I've felt the community centre, as a conceit, leaves you needing to always be plate-spinning rather than leaving you to do what you want. I still agree? But I decided to feel indifferent towards it, and did just do what I wanted. What I've concluded, now that I have more experience with the game, is it's where wiki dependency begins. You're asked to fetch a good you don't recognise, or a rare fish you can't catch; the instinct is google it! And after that, why not look up what rocks Abigail likes to eat? It's a slippery slope! The game TELLS YOU which rocks after you play long enough!! You don't have to open the wiki! Close your tab!!

1. I played the 'Untold' 3DS remake first, which informed how I approached the game. I was liberal with guides, feeling "well, I've already done all this, so it's okay". I hope I didn't damage the intended difficulty, which I thought was as challenging my Untold playthrough on 'Standard'.

2. My favourite part of Etrian Odyssey - any version - is drawing the map, no contest. It's beyond satisfying seeing an empty map grow into a full one, and empowering to use what you've drawn as a resource in exploration. A fun part of going backwards to this version, though, was how much more limited your mapping tools are! There's only a couple icons, and you can't paint the floor tiles different colours, or draw paths to auto-walk down. I say 'fun' because I found this a fun challenge! I used the limited tool set to communicate the floor's specific mechanics in more creative and concise ways. Ironically, the restrictions made my maps more personal!

3. The lack of 'Floor Jump' was the biggest change coming from 'Untold'. (You enter the dungeon at any floor you've explored instead of a checkpoint every five floors.) I like the game more without it! Clambering down to where I was last made the labyrinth bigger, fighting to get there felt stressful, and learning what paths to take made it more familiar. Fast travel makes for a less interesting experience.

4. Respect having the items you need for pub side quests so painfully scarce. Farming them typically gets a level up, so I never needed to grind them out. It's pretty elegant - though frustrating in the moment.

5. Having to think about how my characters react to the story was fun - a lot different from Untold, which has a premade cast and cutscenes. My imagination never ran that wild, but getting to think up little scenarios for my fellows was cute. That said, I did regret basing them on my actual friends. I was always worried about them acting out of character...

1. Awful as it is, I doubt I could have finished without the shutdown deadline. Xenoblade X took me 180 hours over two years - 30 with COVID in 2022, and 150 to get ahead of the shutdown in 2024. Maybe it was a good thing!!

2. I got really stuck in Chapter 10. I felt I had intuited combat, so I looked online for some advice. I realised I had absolutely no idea how the self-healing mechanic worked. It's easy to be annoyed when you have a moment like that, but I like it.
I don't understand why I win encounters, because the game doesn't want to tell me that. What I do understand is what to do to win, which is what the game actually taught me. Because I never managed to kill Xenoblade X, it feels more alive. Fights could always go either way, so I try my best to survive with the tools I have. I think that feeling is perfect for this game. I definitely think it's why I kept feeling tense in fights for 180 hours.

3. I was disappointed that after your mech starts flying about 120 hours in, the area themes all get replaced by a jaunty Sawano track. But I realise now that the Skell flying theme was actually a valiant, self-sacrificing hero, protecting the area themes from being zoned out by the player after 180 hours. Thank you, Monolith. Thank you, Sawano.

4. It's fascinating how good the side missions & affinity missions are. Xenoblade X's narrative is about a merc exploring a whole different planet, taking on the wildest sicko-inclined jobs, and spending time with their cool friends while nasty things happen to them. Xenoblade X is not about the main story, which is about 5% of the runtime. The moment you realise and appreciate that, you recognise how great it is to be engaging in X-Files nightmares through the cockpit of your giant mech.

5. Worth noting you only enter that cockpit after spending 60 hours on the ground earning your license. This is the true face of pinnacle.

In the last sequence, with the disappearing platforms wrapping around a tower, I ran out of camera space halfway through. I adjusted my camera to see further, but failed the jump and fell to my death. I tried setting the camera to a less generous angle at the start to have more visibility later, but then accepted the additional risk and bumped the camera slightly between jumps. This created an interesting choice between player vs. camera movement, and made the camera part of the platforming. Moments like that were what reminded me the most of the original Celeste.

I love note-taking as gameplay - so satisfying to have a physical artifact that develops and fills up as you play. But what made it wonderful in my time with Void Stranger was sharing it with others, and getting complimented on my sketches and theories. That made playing so much fun. That's a really personal fun a game designer can't make for you, only provide an opportunity for. In that sense, this was the most fun I've had with a video game. Beyond grateful for such a unique and fascinating play experience, outside of the incredible artistic craft on display.

As time has gone on, I hardly remember anything about this - I'm sure almost no one does - but I remember how I felt getting lost in a series of rooms loosely connected, exploring empty houses made by somebody not that I knew who, the late nights I spent sneaking out of my room onto the family computer and returning to see more, the confusion when it closed, the understanding I could never go back and what I saw would only be known by some other me I couldn't go back to either. I think that experience was valuable, I think it probably shaped me as I am now in some ways, shaped my tastes, the games I play and the games I want to make