so, this is an extremely cool little game. it's also the second game I know of in my favorite new genre since Zachlikes: sci-fi games built around learning alien languages!

the basic concept is that you encounter a group that speaks a language you don't know, and then through context (and some guessing in my case) build up a vocabulary until you're able to solve whatever puzzles are there and move on to the next group. that might sound really simple, but it's actually really compelling and challenging at times, and I thoroughly enjoyed the process every time.

I think my favorite version of this is the couple of times where you have to translate conversations between two of the different groups. they don't all have the same sentence structure/grammatical rules, and they don't all have the same words for the same things, so it becomes a very cool little challenge (and I wish there was more of it tbh)

in general actually, that's one of the two issues I had with the game: I wish it was longer. I managed to beat it in under 8 hours, including getting every achievement (and I only even had to go out of my way at all to get two of them, the rest I got naturally in the course of the game). obviously there's nothing wrong with that, adding every new language must've been a huge undertaking, and taken a ton of work, but I definitely would've happily played significantly more if it'd been there, even with just the languages that're already there.

my other issue was navigation: I found it really easy to get lost or go the wrong way, even after I'd learned my way around the area. there's no map (except for in the world in some areas), and while I can appreciate that feeling of being lost as I'm first discovering a culture, it got annoying once I knew exactly what I needed to do but went the wrong direction multiple times. definitely a minor issue, but it was an annoyance at times.

I also don't want to say too much about the story, because this is the kind of game where going in as blind as possible is the best way to do it, but while it definitely wasn't the focus, what is there is well done and well executed, while still incorporating the language mechanics into the themes very well.

all in all, an excellent game. I would love to see a sequel to it someday, and it'll definitely be one of those games I'm recommending to my friends when they want something new!

This is about as good as this type of condensed strategy game can get. Obviously yeah, it has bad patches that require hotfixes but the core fundamentals are so strong. You set up a team of characters, all with their own little quirks, and have them fight against 7 other players' own teams of characters.

Boiling the whole game down to "RNG" is like boiling poker down to RNG. you know its more than that.

The whole point to TFT is mitigating that RNG by knowing what to do in different game-states. What's the general tempo of the lobby? Are people hitting level 7, with 2* 4-costs at 3-5? Roll down. Am I being cannibalized? if so in current game state, again, what nearby comps can I comfortably pivot into that maybe aren't as contested? My frontline isn't targeting their backline carry consistently, how can I reposition my units in a way that doesn't compromise my board? There's so much constantly going on that I think lower level play just doesn't pick up on, and as the game has gone through Sets (TFT's equivalent of Seasons or just major patches), the different factors you have to take into consideration change and update as well. You can still "low-roll" as in you just get flagrantly unlucky some games but for a good chunk of these games there's always some alternative - some decision you made at some point that brought you to the low-roll. If someone took all of the Tristana's in stage 1, was it really a good idea to try and contest a Tristana Carry comp when you were clearly running behind? It's knowing the pitfalls to avoid at such a microscopic, almost inane, level that may explain how the pros are able to entertain such consistency.

That's ultimately TFT's MO. TFT is a really obtuse problem whose solution is very unclear and over a couple hundred hours, the inner matrices start forming, you'll start seeing out of your third eye, this board at 2-1 transitions well into this comp and this comp and this comp, this emblem can be applied to this variant of a really bad comp with this augment and suddenly its showtime, you're shitting on your Vietnamese opponents, downloading their preferences with MetaTFT mapping everything out, there's no stopping you, you're fulfilling that idiot power fantasy - everyone else is playing for 2nd and you are a god amongst men. your subjects below quiver and quake at the sight of your perfectly itemized Gwen 3. "there's nothing i can do, fartgang wins again" they whimper. and they're right. I do win again. i ALWAYS win again

all things considered, tft is like if they made a version of Football Manager where you can go on reddit dot com and find all of the characters having sex with each other

Plays moreso as a social sim than anything else- so if you're looking to try this out expecting it to be very farm heavy, you'll be sorely disappointed. However, the social aspect of this game is quite nice and fun to play. The dev clearly spent much of their time developing the rather large cast of characters and it did not go to waste. Getting to know the characters and just relaxingly doing what you can to maintain your lifestyle (farming, fishing, cleaning, by all means you have a lot to choose from) is probably what this game aimed to be played like and I think it did that well