Reid Main

This month I learned about Detroit-style pizza and I absolutely must try making one.

Vampire Crawlers

Vampire Crawlers is the first of what I assume will be many spinoffs of Vampire Survivors. But I am genuinely shocked by how well it captured the feeling of the original game despite being a drastically different genre. As the name suggests it is a dungeon crawler but it somehow manages to maintain the frenetic feel of the combat from Vampire Survivors. At its core it is a roguelike deckbuilder but the way your abilities snowball as your deck expands feels just like when your abilities level up in Vampire Survivors. By the end of a run you're just absolutely blasting through cards, generating mana left and right, doing insane combos and damage to anything that opposes you.

I played it for 30 hours and got 100% of the achievements so obviously I recommend everyone try Vampire Crawlers.

Read Shorefall

I really enjoyed Foundryside, the first book in The Founders trilogy, when I read it back in December. It was an interesting take on how "scientific magic" can bend or break the realities of a world like ours. It was a good mix between magic that can make everyday life easier and seemingly godlike powers that bring wanton destruction. It also had one of those perfect cliffhanger endings where you didn't really care about what happened immediately. You wanted to skip months or years into the future and see how the characters were getting on.

Unfortunately, I think Shorefall (the second book in the trilogy) squandered all of this because it pivoted hard into a deux ex machina villain who was pulling abilities out of his ass simply to advance the plot. I don't think these sort of villains are inherently bad when they have constraints or limitations. But in Shorefall it seemed like this character would suddenly remember he was a god and do something that implied he could literally succeed at this very moment. He was just choosing not to so our heroes can eventually "defeat" him. When you combine this with almost no character development and a horrendous cliffhanger ending, you have a quintessential example of "middle book syndrome". It exists just so a third book can be written and from the summary I read of it things did not improve.

I still think Foundryside is a fantastic book and it actually could stand alone. But if you decide to read it please don't do so because it is part of a trilogy. I believe you're going to end up incredibly disappointed like I was.

Read Conclave

This month I read the novel Conclave after watching the film a few months back. Or was it last year? Good lord time flies. Regardless, they were both superb and come highly recommended by me.

What surprised me the most while reading Conclave was how faithful an adaptation the film was. To a certain degree the film does an even better job because the actors are so good at selling the stress they are going through trying to pick a new pope. It is actually one of the few times where being able to hear the inner monologue of a book character could actually be a detriment when compared to the film. You don't need to hear Ralph Fiennes' character think about his crumbling faith or failing body. All of that comes through spectacularly in his acting.

What I'm trying to say is you'll enjoy yourself if you read or watch Conclave but if you had to pick only one, go with the film.

Luck Be a Landlord

I was looking for something to play on my Steam Deck and I heard that Luck Be a Landlord was one of the main inspirations for Balatro. It must have been an inspiration on what not to do because Luck Be a Landlord is barely a video game. It is effectively a slot machine where you get to pick what may appear on the reels. But since everything seems to be truly random you are not really in control of anything. Sure you can try to strategise by picking things that may work together if they line up but because of how random everything is I had very little success.

After a couple of hours I realized I was just wasting my life playing a basic slot machine and refunded the game. Honestly, I'd probably have had more fun if I just spend the equivalent amount of money at a casino and lost it all.

Skull Horde

I really wanted to like Skull Horde. I have been jonesing for another great auto-battler but every single one seems to have the exact same core problem. The game starts out super fun for the first hour but then immediately devolves into a slow, pointless grind.

It always amazes me when I play one of these games and they market them as having "multiple playable characters" but after five hours I haven't unlocked a single one. Perhaps I'm old fashioned but in my mind you should be unlocking 80% of the playable characters within the first couple hours. Nearly every run in that timeframe should be giving the player something to chase so that by the time they are no longer getting new characters they see a build that they want to try and understand the steps needed to achieve it.

I played the same skull (their type of character) for basically the entire game and when a run ended there wasn't really anything I could do with the experience I had gained. There is a skill tree that you can put points into but it seemed to have very little effect on the gameplay and it took too long to gain points. So even after the end of a single 30+ minute run I only got to improve one thing which meant like 1% more damage.

But what made things worse was that every run started exactly the same because there is no way to change your starting troops. When you level up you're granted random troops but you can only have six different types and you're looking to gather three of one type so it can be grouped together and become a more powerful. This leads to almost every game playing out the exact same way because you're at the mercy of RNGesus as to which troops you get. Sometimes I'd get more of the troops I wanted so I'd be randomly stronger and complete a run. Other times I'd barely get any and get to a point where I physically couldn't do enough damage and just had to wait to die.

The straw that broke the camels back was when I finally unlocked a second skull and it didn't change how I played the game. Effectively all of your skill points are reset because you get a new skill tree and just have to start grinding for points all over again. It really ended up feeling just like Luck Be a Landlord where I was just pulling the arm on a slot machine praying I would get a certain number of troops to appear and 90% of the time it wouldn't happen.

Review May Goals

• ✅ Finish reading Shorefall.
• ✅ Play The Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship.

June Goals

• Run 10K.
• Eat 6+ hot dogs at Blue Jays Loonie Dog Night.