psyq

Codefloe is very nice and fast, and their CI can do Jsonnet instead of only dumb YAML.

I tried this right after Baby Steps (which I enjoyed a lot), because DS was one of the inspirations for Baby Steps. I did get some of the same vibes from DS and the areas I visited were beautiful. The atmosphere is great and all. But even without 100% it just feels like a slog in every other way. I think I didn’t even hit the 10 hour mark.

For a second I wanted to defend myself by saying “that’s just what I was told”, but I think that’s not even necessary, it seems it really is objectively a very odd game then, even for people who know the rules.

I can understand getting fun out of a bad game, I had fun in Two Worlds and other janky titles. And I see some “famous” streamers like Sseth just enjoy completely breaking all the systems in a bad game. My trouble is that I can’t recognize those systems in enough depth to start abusing them, that’s probably one reason EU4 didn’t click for me. I tried to just play it straight, and then you run into all those problems you mentioned. From what I casually observed in EU4 forums and the like, people really tear apart the systems to find anything that can be abused to their advantage.

Europa Universalis IV, 244 hours. I don’t think I understood a single thing of what was happening. And with every free update, some of the rules changed, sometimes in unpredictable ways.

I was told “don’t worry, even the big-brains who plan out their entire campaign with spreadsheets don’t really understand the mechanics”. But that’s no consolation, I felt stressed and confused for every single one of those hours.

May I just say that it’s so nice and refreshing to see lots of people mention these supposedly amazing 10/10 games in this thread and hate them, I largely feel the same about all those titles. I used to think my taste was just broken.

• Cube (1997) cost 350k.
• Beyond the Black Rainbow cost a measly 1 million and it’s more of a cult/niche flim, but it looks like it cost way more, they did a lot with just atmosphere and practical effects.
• Coherence (2013) cost just 50k and I found it gripping.
• And of course The Man from Earth (200k), if you watch those back to back you wonder why this one even cost that much.

Absolutely, it’s also an accessibility and UX problem.

The fonts they use are too thin and frequently semitransparent (!) over a blurred and/or gradient background. So you end up with a thin light grey font on a darker grey, visually cluttered background. Unreadable if you have the slightest sight issues or if you’re out in sunlight.

I was an early adopter (first batch of their first phone) and posted issues to their tracker about their font problems already 12 years ago. They never acknowledged this.

We can’t fix the proprietary UI even if we knew how. The best you can do is splice your own font into the system, but that broke a bunch of UI elements when I tried. The video doesn’t show it clearly, but from what I saw it looks like the situation is still as bad as it was. Back then I ended up mostly using Android apps because they didn’t have that problem, they rendered with some halfway decent Roboto. If I’m just using Android apps, I don’t need to buy a Jolla phone.

For a mobile phone in 2026, you need someone doing proper UX and you should have the bare minimum of accessibility features. Other systems have screen readers and voice navigation built in, etc. Sorry for the rant, it pisses me off to no end that we can’t have a decent European phone and Jolla is our best chance. Maybe one day Plasma Mobile will run on more things…