A problem with The Witness is that the game’s single biggest excitement comes from a twist that revealing completely spoils

So it’s stuck in the position of letting 80% of its player base walk right past the best part, or preserving the moment of discovery.

I’m personally grateful it has the integrity to let me find it on my own, but it’s also a bummer since at least two of my friends beat it without ever realizing

The Witness has a lot of generative puzzles that I guess technically are replayable, but you can’t go back to before the moments of joy of discovery and that’s the core of what made that game incredible to me

Thanks for writing all this up! I have a friend group of mixed attention spans and this will be invaluable for next time. Asymmetric instruction is always such an uphill battle

Neon White isn’t necessarily low-poly, but it has a dreamcast early-2000’s vibe to the levels

I’m taking it on two fronts (though admittedly reading right past “inkflowers” and “metal pans”) 1- the literal planet and moon, with the moon eventually drifting out of orbit, overcome by the gravity of some other body 2- a more metaphorical relationship of a girl and her brother. I’m reading it as a family member with special needs or just in need of a caretaker. She uses him to hide in some sense, using the need to caretake as shelter from other things in life. But eventually that brother is gone for some reason or another, and she’s left adapting to the new exposure

Metal pans may be hospital trays/bedpans?

It does, but when I click away that pop up at 10am mid-work, I almost always forget to plug it in at 5 later in the day.
I need something present but not intrusive so I don’t just x it out. I always see the pulsing LED on my Logitech mouse, so it’s hard to forget about it entirely

Largely agreed, although I specifically just now opened up Lemmy on my phone because my mouse died and I’m having to top it off to make it to my next work meeting. So it’s definitely not not a hassle sometimes.
I love the mouse, but even a tiny red LED visible on the top to remind me of low battery at the end of the day would be great if they’re intent on keeping the bottom port

If for any reason you wanted to stick with PHP, Symfony + Doctrine has been a delight to work with. For JS projects I pretty much always go Node for easy startup, but the frontend changes based on project needs and my whims.