Hobee’s is a NorCal breakfast institution. There are other good breakfast places around, but Hobee’s has the double threat of also having good lunches, and that’s before you get into their yummy coffee cake.
Hobee’s was founded in Mountain View in 1974 in a former Dairy Belle burger joint. And it turns out the first location is in walking distance of my house! I started going there when I moved to Mountain View in 2001, but before that I’d been to the Palo Alto and the now-defunct Cupertino locations. Hobee’s emphasized meals made from natural and often California-sourced ingredients, and I’m pretty sure they didn’t have a deep fryer.
In 2015 the original owners sold the chain to a pair of employees. For some chains this might have been the beginning of the end, but it seemed to breathe new life into the Mountain View location: New lights, new physical menus, and some nice changes to the menu contents, my favorite being the addition of buttermilk pancakes, as I’d never been a fan of the whole wheat ones. Late in the pandemic they set up tents and outdoor seating in the parking lot and they were the first restaurant we started going to regularly once we got vaccinated.
Sadly, all good things come to an end, and we learned a little over a week ago that yesterday would be the end for Hobee’s Mountain View. They wanted to make some upgrades to their space, but the landlords were unwilling to do what they wanted. The mall they’re in is old, decrepit, and half empty, so none of this really surprised me. (I’m more surprised that there’s a new massage parlor in it, as it seems the end is not far off. Then again, the Sunnyvale mall for my comics store used to be seemed to be in that state a decade ago, and it’s still shambling along. I guess there’s just enough demand for these aging and presumably low-rent retail spaces.)
We made two trips to the place last week, for breakfast on Monday (when the coffee cake was especially good), and for lunch on Wednesday. I took some indoor photos, but as they have people in them, I’m not going to share them here. They’ll make for some nice memories, though.
Hopefully they’ll be able to find a new space in Mountain View, though it’s very unlikely it will be as convenient to us as their old one was. Meanwhile, I guess we’ll be driving to the Palo Alto location in the future. And boy has it been a long time since I’ve been there.
I don’t think I can provide a more succinct review of The Marvels than what I posted on Mastodon after we came out of the theater yesterday:
#TheMarvels was 1000% better than I’d expected.
If you enjoy Marvel movies, you should go see it. And if, like me, you were a big fan of #CaptainMarvel and are, like I was, worried that it’s not the sequel you wanted, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
This was a really fun film. When I first heard it announced I was disappointed because I had wanted a sequel to Captain Marvel (one of my top three films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe) which explained what she’d been up to for the 23 years between that film and her return in Avengers: Endgame. But with two other characters sharing top billing, and therefore clearly taking place in the “present” of the MCU (which I suspect is about 2025 right now, though I forget what made me think that, other than that Endgame concluded in 2023 and it’s clearly been at least a couple of years since then), it seems doubtful that we’d get that.
In fact the film gave me everything I’d hoped for, and while it was a lighter film than Captain Marvel, it had plenty of serious moments, and while I could (and will) quibble with some parts of the story, overall it worked for me. I would say it’s on about the same level as the first Avengers film.
The film has been performing poorly at the box office, which I suspect is due to a confluence of factors: The post-Endgame MCU seems to be considered pretty disappointing, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in particular was panned and did poorly, and The Marvels looks like another team-up crossover film – which it is, but also isn’t, and it in particular doesn’t play into the ongoing “Multiverse Saga” story arc the series is working through, but is just a straight-up continuation of the stories of its main characters. Which for most of these films is what I want. Indeed, when they do a big crossover story in what should be a story focusing on its main characters, that’s when you get garbage like Captain America: Civil War.
All of which is a long-winded way to say: Unless you just don’t like these characters, don’t let any of that dissuade you from seeing The Marvels. It’s a fun film with good action scenes, some broad humor, and plenty of character development.
(And if you hate it because you find the dialogue to be stilted or contrived, well, then I assume you hated the first Avengers film for the same reason, because it was way worse on that count.)
Aaron’s Mahnke’s Grim & Mild is either a true cottage industry or one of the biggest names in independent podcasting, depending on who you ask – maybe they’re both! I listen to a bunch of their shows, and have tried a few others; they’re not all for me, but some of them one.
One of their projects since 2020 has been 13 Days of Halloween, which starts each year on October 19 and releases an episode a day through Halloween. I started listening in 2021 and went back to listen to the 2020 series after last year’s. This year’s series was the most ambitious – and longest – yet.
The basic framework is that the main character is thrust into an unusual environment, often with a guide of some sort, and they listen to the spookystories of the people they encounter along the way. The first season, “Hawthorne Manor”, in which the listener is guided by a caretaker (played by Keegan-Michael Key) who is searching for something in the manor, is a pure distillation of this form, in which the ongoing narrative is little more than a simple framing sequence.
The second season, “The Sea”, is about a woman who wakes up on the beach of a mysterious town and is guided by another woman through the town in a journey of discovery. (The credits on the web site do a poor job of explaining who plays who, but the two main characters are played by Kathy Najimy and Bethany Anne Lind.)
The third season, “Devil’s Night”, concerns a boy, Max (Carter Rockwood), who gets lost on Halloween night in his rural town (it’s implied this takes place in the first half of the 20th century) and is aided by a mysterious figure (Clancy Brown) as he tries to get back home through the surreal landscape.
This season, “Penance”, is about Sayuri (Natalie Morales), a young woman who is abducted and locked up in the Pendleton Rehabilitation Center without being told why. She makes friends, adjusts to life in the combination prison/institution, and over the course of many months tries to figure out how to escape.
This season breaks with the strict format of the first three seasons: Some episodes have more than one story from other characters, some have none, and some Sayuri is directly involved in. She has both higher stakes personally, and more agency, than protagonists in the previous seasons. Her personality reminded me a lot of Mallory in Greater Boston, if Mallory were placed in a scenario where she had little control over her day-to-day life. The season does have more implied violence and gore than past seasons, as far as I can recall.
Overall it was a really successful season, though I imagine the ending might be a bit divisive. I’m still not sure how I feel about it, it almost feels like it it wasn’t quite finished, but for a spooky Halloween tale maybe that was the point. It did leave me a little confused about the title of the season, though, as it’s not clear to me who was doing penance for what.
I’m not sure how they’ll top this one next year. Though I hope this is about where the length of the episodes peak; this was a lot to keep up with on a daily basis. (I’m still playing catch-up with my other regular podcasts that release episodes over the past two weeks!)
Anyway, if you are looking for some creepy, haunting tales around this time of year, keep this one in mind in the future.
Halloween seemed a little quieter this year. I didn’t write about last year (though I did write about the season in Boston a week earlier), but I thought that things were basically back to pre-pandemic levels for trick-or-treaters. Our street is pretty nuts when it comes to the flocks of kids, and even in 2020 we got about 50 kids, before the COVID vaccines were available.
We set up our usual little Halloween light display earlier in October. Walking around the neighborhood there were a lot fewer houses with lights up than in past years. I’m sure people were more motivated to put the effort in during lockdown, but really there were very few this year.
We usually buy at least 4 big bags of candy from Target or Costco each year, and this year Debbi bought a couple more than that. Then we set up our large folding table in the driveway to hand out candy. This way people aren’t constantly coming to the door, which is important because it would be constant at the peak of the evening, and neither the cats nor the dog get freaked out. (Domino spent the evening in the guest room, where I think he was mostly bored. The cats took turns looking out the front window.)
One of our neighbors came to sit with us to hand out his own candy, and a few other neighbors set up in their driveways, and sometimes we’d wander among each other to say hi.
The first couple of young kids came by between 5 and 6, and the numbers gradually ramped up until about 7:15 when it remained a pretty steady stream until 9 pm. In past years there would usually be one or two waves where there would be a crowd almost as far as the eye could see, but this year I think we maybe ended up with 10 or 12 people at once as its peak. We let people pick their own two pieces of candy off the table, which was funny because some kids would think very seriously about it, and some would pointedly take the not-chocolate ones. And then there was a girl who just said, “Whoppers are awesome!”
In the end we guess we had about 300 people pick up candy, and it turns out we overbought by maybe a third of that, so we have a bunch left over. New neighbors never believe us when we say how many people come through our street, so almost everyone else runs out before the night is over. But by 9:15 everyone’s just about done. We suspect that our street gets a lot of people because it ends at a major road and one of the houses on that corner puts up a huge Halloween display which attracts people from out of the neighborhood. Plus we have two elementary schools and a middle school nearby. But even just the next block over they get maybe half as many kids as we do.
Inflatable costumes seemed popular this year, including someone in an 8-foot-tall Garfield outfit. And while last year Wednesday Addams was the popular character (we saw a couple last night too), this year it was Spider-Man, presumably because of Across the Spider-Verse having been out over the summer.
We wound down with a late dinner and a little playtime for the dog. By bedtime there was no one walking the street that we could see. And this morning decorations were already coming down.
I’ll wrap up with one of the neighborhood houses which does put on a big display. It’s a little freaky to walk past it before 8 in the morning and have a spider jump out at you:
(Yes, it’s a bit unnerving to realize he was only 3 years older than me.)
I became a fan of his when he came to the Red Sox in 1995 and had two-third of a Cy Young caliber campaign. (Having him on my fantasy baseball team that year didn’t hurt.) He’d come up with the Pittsburgh Pirates and thrown almost 100 brilliant innings in 1992, but couldn’t repeat it in 1993, and got sent down and then released. A knuckleball pitcher, he relied on a pitch which was notoriously hard to control. Go read up on how baseball pitches work, and then read how knuckleball pitches work, and frankly it’s almost hard to believe any pitcher manages to throw strikes with them with any regularity.
It’s easy to love the great sluggers like Albert Pujols (and I do love Albert Pujols), but I also love the quirky players who bring something unusual to the game. Ichiro Suzuki’s unbelievable ability to make contact. Mike Boddicker’s ridiculous curveball. And Tim Wakefield having an almost 20-year career in the Majors throwing a knuckleball.
One of my enduring baseball memories was attending the Red Sox/Twins game on July 24, 1995. This is the only time I recall attending a game at Fenway where I sat in the bleachers. Wakefield started the game and gave up a triple to Chuck Knoblauch. He then struck out the next two batters, while Knoblauch danced around third base. Finally, while facing the next batter, he looked over at Knoblauch and cocked his head towards home plate, saying “If you’re going to go, then go.” Knoblauch went, and Wakefield threw him out on the steal attempt. Presumably on the knuckleball, since he rarely threw anything else, although he did occasionally throw a “fast” ball which was probably slower than most pitchers’ breaking balls.
The other memorable moment was in a game I didn’t watch, since I refuse to watch Yankees playoff games, and none more so than the 2004 ALCS. In game 3, the Yankees were tee’ing off of Red Sox pitching, to the tune of 10 runs in 3-1/3 innings. While the Sox were not completely out of it, Wakefield came in and threw 3-1/3 innings himself, giving up another 5 runs but likely helping save the rest of the pitching staff for the team’s historic comeback over the next 4 games.
Wakefield supposedly had a team-friendly contract which got renewed every year until the end of his career. I haven’t been able to find details of this deal, so maybe I imagined it, but as a very durable mid-rotation starter and long reliever, he probably appreciated the job security and he objectively made plenty of money while being able to stay with the Red Sox for the rest of his career. Sometimes it’s not all about the money. And he did win 2 championships with them.
Although he never got the attention of David Ortiz, Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, or other star players, Tim Wakefield was an ever-present part of the Red Sox for a really, really long time, baffling pitchers (and catchers) with his ridiculous stuff.
There are a couple of webcomics artists I’ve been enjoying tremendously, though both of them update only sporadically, presumably because this is a hobby for them and they both have lives which take most of their time. They have a common theme of what I’ve been calling “everyday monsters”, as they primarily feature nonhuman (or formerly human) beings in dark fantasy environments, but emphasizing the everyday lives and concerns of those beings
Both of them (coincidentally?) primarily post on Instagram and Twitter. Both of them post anonymously and have very little Internet presence beyond these sites as far as I can tell.
Pocketss (Instagram, Twitter) has “i like to draw fantasy nonsense” as their Twitter profile description. Their work has a running theme of people (or whatever) caring for other people. For example this strip about a swamp dweller who sees a passer-by carrying a lantern on a stock. Or this one about goblins looking out for each other.
There’s also a cute running story – starting here – about a witch who invites a harpy to a girls’ night party, throwing the harpy into confusion and anxiety. Poor harpy!
My favorite one, though, is this one about a vampire (?) who orders her thralls to leave her alone so she can… well, go see for yourself.
Pocketss also has a Patreon which I just signed up for.
Saint Monster (Instagram, Twitter) has “Monsters need love too” as their Twitter description. Ironically their work features far more actual humans than that of Pocketss, and a few more recurring characters. For example the halfling apprentice witch, who later appears here. Or the trio of human, elf (?) and goblin (?) travellers, who appear here, here, and have their best moment so far here.
More like a month and a half of maintenance, to be frank.
Since we got back from Massachusetts in mid-July, I’ve spent sizable chunks of my weekends doing home maintenance and improvement.
The big thing we did was to buy a new dishwasher. Debbi never cared for our old GE dishwasher, and while I thought it was okay, I admit it was loud. And it didn’t always do the best job of cleaning things. Maybe it wasn’t so okay. But the forcing factor was that it started leaking: We’d occasionally find a bunch of water at the bottom of the machine, or worse, on the kitchen floor. And our cat sitter got to clean up a spill while we were away. So it was time. We replaced it with a Bosch SHP865ZP5N from Airport Home Appliance, which is where we bought our refrigerator two years ago. We’re pretty happy with the no-nonsense experience we’ve gotten there, as well as the ease of delivery and installation.
Installation did come with one little hiccup: The valve for the water at the wall was stuck and had to be replaced, which was not cheap. A little annoying since they basically had us as a captive audience for the installation. They said these valves break all the time because they’re all pretty cheap these days. Someone on Facebook suggested we should test them all every year, but it’s not like I want to replace them myself, or hire someone to come out and replace any ones which stick. Still, this valve lasted about 15 years, which doesn’t seem too bad.
Most of my other work has been in the yard. Our yard is pretty nice, but it’s about 15% larger than I have the time and energy to care for, so projects have built up over time. Consequently, I’ve spent a few hours each weekend cutting back the jasmine, trimming the rosemary, and pulling up tree seedlings and blackberry vines. The plum tree has suddenly decided to produce a whole bunch of plums this year, which caused many of its branches to start leaning to one side, so I gave it a good pruning, too. The plums are not great, and there was way more than we could eat even if they were great, so I’ve been raking them up occasionally, but they’re pretty messy. I’m also getting ready to start trimming back the fig tree which has been slowly growing over our fence since we moved in.
I also cleared out a space and bought six cubic feet of dirt to start a dirt pile for Domino to dig in. I probably need to buy another six-to-ten cubic feet to make it really satisfying, but it’s a start.
Then last weekend I give our bathrooms a good deep cleaning, mopped the floors, and scrubbed the floor of the master shower, which it really needed. So they’re just about as clean as they’ve been since we moved in. I also want to mop the kitchen floor.
Then I took my car in for its annual maintenance, where it needed its serpentine belt changed. It also has a leak which is likely around the seals for the convertible top (some might remember that I have a Volkswagen Eos), and is going to be expensive to fix. So I decided to defer that until we get closer to the rainy season.
Car ownership seems like it’s gotten a lot more expensive in the past decade! Or maybe it’s just the difference between Hondas and VWs.
We’re also coming out of a long stretch of warm weather, after a stretch of what seemed like cooler-than-normal weather. Globally, July was the hottest month on record. Here in my hometown:
In May, we had highs in the high 60s (°F) in the first third of the month, highs between 70 and 85 in the second third, and in the low 70s in the last third.
In June highs were in the 70s almost every day until a spike at the end of the month – which I was back east. These are what I recall were typical summer temperatures when I first moved here.
I was gone for the first third of July, but highs were consistently in the 80s for the rest of the month.
And August was more of the same, with several spikes in the low 90s, and a few days with highs in the high 70s. And the overnight lows were stubbornly above 60 for about half of the month. It was also unusually humid, with dew points in the low 60s a number of times, which is nothing for places where it gets genuinely yucky, but it’s unusually moist for here.
So July and August were both hot. Yard work on some of those days was no fun, I’ll tell you. And our electric bill was not much fun either, thanks to the air conditioner. (Someday we’ll put in solar panels!)
Out of curiosity I checked June-to-August for my first 2 years here, and my recollections match the data: Highs mostly in the 70s, with a few spikes along the way (though the data for 2000 looks untrustworthy).
We’ve also been having some challenges with Domino, in particular that he hasn’t wanted to sleep in his crate at night, panting and whining when we put him in there. We suspect he had some unpleasant event in there – maybe even just a bad dream – but it’s meant that Debbi has been sleeping with him in our guest room until we can figure it out. They’re going to see the vet soon to see if there’s anything physically wrong, though he’s been about the same in all other ways. Hopefully he’s okay, but it’s been frustrating.
Speaking of frustrating, I’ve also been dealing with both (self-diagnosed) plantar fasciitis and achilles tendinitis in my right foot. It’s been gradually getting better – the new running sneakers I bought have helped a lot – but not as fast as I’d like. I should probably look into some exercises to help with them, too. (Also: For some reason New Balance running sneakers run smaller than their walking sneakers. Shrug.)
So that’s been my summer, not counting work, since I rarely blog about that. I have spent most of the past week at work working on improving some long-neglected but still-useful code I’d been thinking about for a while. It’s been fun.
Hopefully we can continue to dodge COVID until we can get new boosters this fall, and otherwise enjoy some cooler weather this month, starting with this long weekend.
Rainbow over Mountain View, August 13, 2023 Rainfall was negligible This photo doesn’t really do it justice
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is a spin-off from Star Trek: Discovery, in the second season of which Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) takes command of the Discovery after the Enterprise has been damaged, and it wraps up with the two ships and their crews teaming up to save the day. This series takes place about 7 years before the original Star Trek series and chronicles the adventures adventures of the Enterprise under Pike, who is living with the knowledge that he is destined to be crippled saving several crewmen a few years in the future.
The elevator pitch for this series is basically, “If you want more of the original series, with better effects and updated for modern social sensibilities, then this is the show for you.” It’s not nearly as good at this – or as good overall – as the Star Trek: Year Five comic book, but it’s enjoyable.
Early on in watching this show I decided to embrace something someone suggested on Twitter: That each Star Trek series takes place in its own continuity, even though it pretends to maintain continuity with the other series. SNW has this quality in spades, with lots of nods to the original series, which don’t stand up to even casual examination. After enough continuity-jarring moments involving Spock or some other character or alien race who appeared in the original series exhibiting very different behavior or characteristics in SNW, it just becomes easier to treat the two shows as being in different continuities.
But once you get there the show is an enjoyable episodic sci-fi romp with a few excellent episodes and a few poor ones. The acting is stronger than usual for a Star Trek show. It still contains all the pseudoscientific nonsense one expects from Star Trek, there’s not much of an ongoing storyline, so it’s hard to get too invested or too disappointed.
Back in January I wrote a post titled “What Mastodon Needs”, about what I felt were the most serious shortcomings of that social media platform after I’d been on it for a couple of months. (Some of those issues have been resolved by my settling on Ivory as my Mastodon client, but others remain stubbornly unresolved, joined by new ones such as a lack of quote-reposts.)
I thought it’s time to write one on the other would-by Twitter replacement platform I spend some time on, Bluesky.
Full transparency: I find Mastodon a lot more useful and enjoyable than Bluesky. But many people are the other way around. Indeed, when I see someone compare the two, it’s almost always in Bluesky’s favor. Last month I made the following observation:
There are also people who have found Mastodon to be a mixed-to-negative experience. I could pull a number of examples, but here’s a particularly prominent one from today:
All of this is fair enough. And Bluesky does have a few significant detractors, often people with problems with its ownership. Which is also fair enough. After all, I’m not on Threads because I don’t really want to get deeper into the Facebook ecosystem.
Anyway, my main goal here is to hit major points of usability where I feel Bluesky is lacking. And I should be clear that I realize that Bluesky is a platform which is still in beta (indeed, it feels like it’s not quite ready for beta and I suspect it opened up before it had planned to), is still invitation-only (only users with invite codes can invite new users), and reportedly has very small development team. So I expect progress will be slow, and it’s starting from a point of being much less mature than Mastodon.
So here we go:
1. Lists: I’ve been an avoid user of lists on both Twitter and Mastodon. I have a dozen or more lists which I use to divide up accounts I follow by category, saving my main timeline for accounts I either want to check in with whenever I check in on the platform, or which don’t fall into a category. But, for example, I put most Magic: The Gathering accounts, or audio drama accounts, into their own list. And I remove them from my main timeline. (This last point is something neither Twitter nor Mastodon supports natively, I think, but some apps like Tweetbot did and Ivory does.)
Not having lists is likely to impose a strong cap on how many accounts I follow. This isn’t an issue yet (I’m following only 39 accounts – Bluesky is still small, folks), but it will be if the site gets popular.
2. Remembering my reading position: This was a bullet point for Mastodon, and it’s a problem on Bluesky, too.
3. An iPad app which doesn’t suck: Presently the iPhone app runs on the iPad in compatibility mode, which is frankly pretty lousy – especially because it’s pretty buggy and its UX is not very polished. Instagram also has the problem of no native iPad app, but it’s not as much of an issue there because Instagram is image-centric.
4. Disabling reposts per-user: Some people repost a lot. Which is fine – people can do with their accounts what they want. But I find being able to disable reposts for a few users significantly improves my experience on social media, when I enjoy the personally-written posts by those users but mostly find their reposts to be a fire hose of things which are way more important to them than to me. Right now my only option is to mute them entirely (which I have done a couple of times).
Related to this is being able to mute a user (or a keyword!) for a day, a week, or a month, since sometimes people get focused on something which is time-bound which doesn’t interest me, but once that time is passed I want to resume following them.
These are little things that Twitter and/or its third party clients provided which turned out to be indispensable to enjoying it in the long run.
5. Bookmarks and a way to see your Likes: Mastodon has both Likes and Bookmarks. Bluesky has Likes but no Bookmarks, and as far as I can tell there’s no way to view a list of the posts you’ve Liked.
6. Hashtag support: This would be a more useful way to find like-minded people and posts than Bluesky’s feed system, which my experience with so far has found it to be pretty clunky.
The other big problem is one I think all social media sites going forward will have: Fragmentation of communities. The tech community is mostly on Mastodon, the science fiction and comic book communities are on Bluesky, and the Magic: The Gathering and audio drama communities are still very sticky on Twitter (or, as I like to call it after its X rebrand, Shitter). There probably isn’t a “solution” to this, it just means that people like me who follow multiple communities will need to be on multiple platforms.
Anyway, Bluesky does have a fair bit of fun stuff happening (and not all of it revolving around Neil Gaiman, John Scalzi and Popehat), it’s just that the platform itself makes it difficult for me to interact with. I hope it gets better, but I’m not going to hold my breath for that to happen.
Earlier this summer I played Firmament, the new puzzle game from Cyan, the creators of Myst.
I love these sorts of games, and I wrote about what I like about them a few years ago in the context of Zed. I enjoy a mix of puzzles, setting, and story, which Cyan has historically been good at providing. I backed Firmament on Kickstarter as soon as they announced they’d be doing a Mac version, having also backed their previous game, Obduction, which I enjoyed a lot, though I thought it had a few flaws.
Firmament modifies the traditional point-and-click interface with a device the player uses called an Adjunct, which they use to connect to sockets throughout the game which provides some additional flexibility in how the player interacts with the world. It also both makes it clearer what you can interact with, but it feels somewhat limiting since everything has some small variation of the same interface. I’ve seen it theorized that the Adjunct mechanic was created to make the VR experience of the game better or more consistent or something. I guess it’s possible, I dunno. Maybe that was a concern 4 years ago when they started making the game?
A spoiler-free review first, and then some further thoughts:
The setting for Firmament is that you wake up from long-term sleep and are greeted by the Mentor, who appears to be a ghost of your predecessor. They’ve woken you up and advise you from time to time. The world consists of three settings, an ice zone, a botanical garden, and a sulphur-based power plant, along with a central structure1 called The Swan. You travel between them via conveyance pods, and have two waves of tasks to accomplish on each world to get to the conclusion.
There are basically three sorts of things in these games that I dislike: Puzzles that are too hard (this is obviously subjective), having to walk back and forth a lot to solve a puzzle, and things that are hard to see. Firmament has a few spots where there were things I just couldn’t see and I had to use a walkthrough – a video one in one case – to figure out what I was missing. This is frustrating because it feels like I just was never going to figure it out on my own. The game does pretty well on the other two points, although there was one puzzle I didn’t so much figure out as stumble into the answer for. Better lucky than good, I guess?
The game’s weakness, I think, was its story. Since Cyan’s games are solo endeavors with little capability for you to interact with anyone in the game, they all take place in environments where the people who used to be there are gone, and finding out what happened to them is part of the adventure. Firmament feels pretty thin, here, as the Mentor and one other character are the only ones you learn much about. There were clearly more people around, but we learn very little about them. I think they could have threaded more characters and more events into the game and provided a richer story to explore. As it was, it definitely felt less sophisticated than Obduction.
(I’m inclined to think that the use of AI to assist in generating parts of the game are not really at fault as this article thinks they might be. I think they just didn’t spend enough time coming up with enough story to make it satisfying.)
I think the game took me about 15 hours to complete. I did run into one bug, but it turned out not to affect me in that puzzle. Other people have run into more serious bugs, but they’ve been fixing them. If you enjoy games like these, give this one a try, but temper your expectations, especially if story is your main interest.
