Now in one conveniently ignorable place!you know me irl
:DThe one and only sylva (they/she). (in)famous for:
masssive stem nerdery,
comedically long watchlists/readlists,
a crippling addiction to speedrunning games,
and liberal use of brackets.*yes i know i didnt code the website im not using made in that sense
Instagram: sylvas193
Discord: Sylenzo#6538
Email: [email protected]
Steam: Sylenzo
(Friend Code 1008733182)
Bri'ish (from worthing)
born 25/10/06
(that makes me 19 before you get a calculator out)
(and if you were instead about to get an astrology chart out instead of a calculator, 😞)doing a chemeng course at surrey uni
(hard but hey maybe ill be less broke)used to do maths/further maths/chem/compsci
If ur annoyed:
having a go at me early is probably optimal for not having to deal with it as long, not having a much more anger in the way of us talking, and making a habit of having a go early makes me worry a lot less about unknowingly annoying other people"Can I ask you X"
the offense of someone asking a question usually comes from the associated pressure to ask it - if you give ways out (i.e "sorry if this is too personal but can i ask you X") im very permissive with what you askdescriptive vs normative
if its not clear whether im implying anything about what should be, I'm not, I prefer not to make moral statements until I really need to because they're hard (to the point where I often come down on flagrant immoral things from the wierdest function-based angles)
In general I will give a top5 with a brief review and then a link to somewhere else if you'd rather window shop a longer list of stuff
Scroll to:
12 angry men
if you told me from three years ago that one of my favourite films was a 1957 black-and-white film about epistemic responsibility I would say “what a fucking nerd”. I'd be right.The Machinist
A mystery that doesnt make shit up from the blue, and manages to make it clear enough to suspect the answers but not obvious enough to guarantee them - probably also helps that this is the one christian bale that is literally me guys trust (jk).Lawrence of Arabia
(intentionally underspecified because its better blinder)
Its like a coming-of-age story but the age is like 22 and also there is colonialism. Fair warning, it is long - not that it fails to fill the length - but there is a built-in "intermission" that is a decent opportunity to come back to it after idk like going off and eating dinner or something.Django Unchained
pretty versatile film - my original watch made it work a lot more as a thinker but also ive had a rewatch where i enjoyed as racists getting shot simulator and it still hit so really just do with it what you want.The rest of my films reviews are on letterboxd
The Plague - somehow a pandemic mood despite being written in 1940s and the pandemic being an allegory for wwII occupation in france. I also want more highly respectable protags like rieux, who - alongside his ensemble of challenged yet honourable men (yes, only men, 1940s...) - complement the story of radical humanity under all pressures.House of Leaves - MAJOR format fuckery, its on like 4 different layers as its 2 publishers attaching proffesional-passive-agressiveness background details into a mentally ill deadbeats annotated copy of a dead old shut-in's essays on a (nonexistent?) filmmaker's films about his fucked up house - it bounces around footnotes and appendices and plenty of heavily stylised page layouts, and overall defies having a reading order or a single narrative, and even the expectation you will read all of it at allNaked Economics - A very easy read for a book with "economics" in the title - no equations, no graphs, just a few instances of addition. It was designed to be non-political in 2007 america - which practically means its a relatively globalist, centralist neoliberal take, but to be frank, I think you kind of need to understand this take before you hold anything too far from it.
Brave new world - 1932 (saving you a google and saying JUST before ww2) science-fiction book, with a nice take on the usual "the world is awful" dystopias to instead make the world actually fairly well off - at the cost of freedom, art, and individuality - the commentary prefigure shockingly far ahead of its publication date, and the plot leaves you with a lot more to think about than rich=badExile and the Kingdom - As a short story collection, its a little harder to comment on, the most I can say about them as a whole is that they're a surprisingly utile collection of short reflections on the gaining and losing of community. (If you read this, IMO it starts with a weak first 2 so stick with it until The Silent Men)
I wasn't sure whether to do 5 songs or 5 bands so i've done 5 bands and given each 1 song as a main representativeFriday Pilots Club - Spectator
FPC supply my high-energy sad songs for DAYS, with things like Nosedive, IDWBS and end of it - some of their straight-boy-songs get a pass for slapping hard enough (like Hot mess and We Dont Wanna Talk) but some dont. They also sometimes do well when they slow down for songs like Life SupportMachine Girl - Scrape My Data
Machine girl is raw electronic chaos - often too much chaos for other people and sometimes me, but I usually show them something like psychic attack or grindhouse if i don't want them to hate me and something like uzumaki or ignore the vore if I do.
They also get into my no-lyrics playlist via the neon white bangers like glass ocean and thousand pound butterfly.Paledusk - BLACK ICE
Paledusk go fast :D depending on how you are with foreign-language songs you might want something all english like BLACK ICE or WIND BACK, but HUGs hits hard(as verified by the big lead in listens) and GUNGUNDA hits hard too (but its a collab so idk how much of that is paledusk's credit).King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Witchcraft
King Gizzard are a fucking CONTENT MACHINE so I'm still yet to listen to everything but I mostly take from their higher energy songs like Robot Stop or Supercell. Extra shoutouts to Phantom Island tho I love that little wierd child (with 200 wierd siblings).Kasabian - Stevie
Propah brexit band. Powered through their frontman change fairly well (old one assaulted his gf). They've been around for a while so theres also a lot to go through, but pre-change I'd check out Clubfoot, eez-eh and Comeback Kid, and post-change I'd look at SCRIPTVRE, Call, and Darkest Lullaby
Pyre - supergiant visuals and music go hard every game, this time accentuated by totallly original narrative and mechanical takes that make this game REALLY hard to describe given that comparison is basically off the table
Neon white - I love quick restarts, perfecting short, carefully crafter gameplay segments, silly OTT plots, shortcutting, and Machine Girl. This game has all of the above. I'm like top200 rn.Trackmania - I'm a sucker for a level editor, and if you put the single most capable one i've ever seen into an IL speedrunning game im happy.Celeste - Story hits deep as a fellow anxious mess, the minimal-controls precision-platformer is quick to get started but because of the masses of SICK modded content what i know still expands at 500+hrsSSBU - played so much of this in voice calls in lockdown, i just love hitting sick reads, started playing again a few weeks ago because i can go compete at cathedral clashThe rest of my games & more reviews (& more detailed than here) used to be in a pastebin but then i realisd i can easily just port them into the website easily (also, my steam account is listed in contact details)
'Main' games (including ones that i played a lot more but arent main rn):Neon white:
It just wholeheartedly is the gamiest game, wearing all its influences on its sleeve, and it just works - fast restarts, the cards picked up throughout are both shootable as guns and discardable as movement abilities, and in conjunction with the level design it centres shortcut-finding as an intended puzzle mechanic and through medals and gifts it encourages you to explore and perfect all the high-depth low-complexity levelsDespite it being my most beloved game I actually don't have a shitload to sayTM2020/TMNF:
Bundled together because a lot i have to say is shared - The aforementioned love of quick restarts and perfection is going to be a recurring theme behind a lot of these beloved IL speedrunning games. I'm also a sucker for a level editor, especially the highly capable one in TM2020 (Beware! the console version of TM2020 has a much worse editor, feature-wise and controls-wise) - the capable editor and huge range of user-generated content (conveniently centralised on tmexchange) makes it a little too easy to play a lot. The review branches a bit here; TMNF is completely free (and still has servers 17 years on!) - has a moderately less capable editor (forced grid-align and less visual options doesn't hurt beginner tracks that much but the tracks looking similar and getting to do less dank off-grid thinks makes the advanced scene) - whereas TM2020 has a lot more and a wider variety of user-generated and dev-made content, but much of the dev-made content is partially paywalled. (word of advice - much of the paywalled stuff can be bypassed by downloading it directly off of tmexchange)Celeste:
Another game with VERY quick recovery from death, this time with a simple, precise, high skill ceiling movement system - complete with a slightly too close to home story about anxiety, and an overwhelmingly trans playerbase (partially related to that, partially related to main dev maddy being trans, partially related to the banger soundtrack from trans artist lena raine (yes from minecraft)) - also the modding community have made a level editor and a LOT of completely transformative custom items though the editor is tricky enough that you're more likely to appreciated the glorious usermade content (eg strawberry jam) than make some yourself.Ultrakill:
Fast-paced singleplayer movement shooter with a lot of weapon/enemy cross-interactions. The "key feeling" behind the game is the bursts of creativity like realising the enemy rocket launcher is the same as yours, swapping to the one that lets you freeze your rockets mid-air, freezing theirs, jumping on it, and rocket riding it back into itself. and because hakita is fucking crazy, that sequence of events has a dedicated style bonus message for it. (in fact, in general, the style bonus system is a fantastic way to acknowledge and encourage player creativity & discouraging repetitiveness) - ULTRAKILL also benefits from having the best soundtrack of any game i've ever played.Titanfall 2:
Banger campaign, banger movement, great gunplay, great multiplayer, the pilot-titan systems really help the pacing & variety between slower, strategic low TTK gameplay with more abilities to focus on and faster, high movement low TTK, gunplay-focused gameplay, both in singleplayer and multiplayer - bonus points for the absolutely hilarious way effect and cause works under the hoodPyre:
Gloriously creative narrative focussed game with gameplay that nobody seems to be able to describe well, as "wizard NBA" is the best the community has got. Pyre makes SURE to show your choices matter, throughout the game and especially during the ending, tying together the larger narratives with the centre of the gameplay with a completely upside-down take on character permadeath - the GOAL of the game is to redeem your characters and escape exile - forcing you to always be saying sorrowful goodbyes to the characters you've spent the most time with - which is both narratively and mechanically bittersweet.SSBU:
You have no idea how much of this i played in lockdown. i also started playing like a month ago cause theres a local tournament, though i only play dogshit characters so i get destroyedRocket league:
One of the best new-player experiences for a multiplayer game - a physics-based rocket-powered-car football game so extremely easy to learn (i could get my dad to understand this game), yet so hard to master that the top 0.1% impress the top 1%Valorant:
Kinda bad new player experience but i powered through it from having a lot of friends play this game - we still do so you can see me on it often (under the username sylenzob#judge)Overwatch (1!!):
The other lockdown crippling addiction. i regret playing it this much but i also didnt have much else to do so i dont blame myself too hardBreath of the wild:
"fuck it lets take linear dungeoncrawly zelda franchise and make it and open-world imsim" was probably the hardest games pitch on planet earth but OH MY GOD did they cook - and honestly any game with fun enough system interactions could probably benefit from something like the shrines - little locked down sub-areas with more linear puzzles (not to say you cant ABSOLUTELY CHEESE them, but they definitely do have an intended solution) - the combat is fairly dull - mostly coming down to learning the parry/dodge timings and then pressing flurry rush - but given the number of ways to not do combat and the more complicated patterns of the forced combats (i.e bosses) it gets a pass.Super mario maker 2:
me when the level editor :D
also me when platformers :D
also having a range of different editions of mario to make within helps with the visual staleness that other level editor games can getModern tetris (via jstris or tetrio):
I dont know what ADHD demons looked at already stressful puzzle game tetris and went "what if we had like 100 apm* 1v1s on this" but they understand what i want EXACTLY
*if ur a confused tetris player reading this i dont mean attacks-per-minute i mean actions-per-minute i.e kpp*pps*60Chess (via lichess):
skill game, no bullshit, no unlockable characters, no paywalls, no bad wifi, no bad fps, what more can you ask
Mindustry - Good zoneout game - factory management/tower defence is a great pairing - it has a lot more of a tower-defence focus than something like factorio - it also has multiplayer but i havent touched anything except playing co-op w/ a friend
Ori and the Blind Forest - Looks beautiful, plays nicely (especially after bash) - floaty and forgiving movement, some might find it too easy but idm that
Apex legends - Solid battle royale, slighly complicated equipment system but you get used to it after a few times - character abilities supply most of the depth.
Wargroove - Funny dialogue, kinda RTS kinda fire emblem combat but w/o the jrpg building/levelling elements and with much less randomness. Replayability is hurt by the difficulty options just being asymmetric health/damage upgrades - also has usermade content and an interesting "puzzle mode" to test the limits of the combat system
Void Bastards - fun comic-stylised imsim with some of the character permadeath from games like xcom or (traditional) fire emblem -
Forager - honestly have nothing to say that isnt on its steam page, played it, no disrespect but just kinda was what was advertised
Fe: Three houses - Had a lot of fun playing through the campaign on my 1st playthrough - things like the time rewind mechanic is greatly appreciated in strategically tricky games. Played without character permadeath 1st playthough because im a pussy - started a 2nd playthough with another house, expecting a differentish story based on how it was advertised, got not much different besides developing relationships with a slightly different set of characters, by about 1/2 way in i left it there because a lot of the interesting characters just died - i think the point of the permadeath + character relationships is to make death hit harder but if you die too much the entire campaign just gets cooked
Undertale - fun fact i died just under 200 times to muffet because i vastly misunderstood how to spare her
BTD5 - nostalgia my beloved
Factorio - enemies are both reallly annoying and not threatening - numeric-based difficulty adjustments sometimes leave you in comedically long combats - the factory building is fairly nice tho
Opus Magnum - Lovely little puzzle game about building little chemicals by programming an alchemy machine that grabs and moves them around - with little leaderboards for efficiency (lowest machine cost, fastest output, or least space, which are all different goals to aim for)
Hades - My typical dislike for roguelikes is strongly mitigated here both by being polished enough that dying to bullshit doesn't happen, having a wide range of inter-run progression (narratively and mechanically) to not make failed runs feel meaningless, and having supergiant games trademark mix of really pretty art, great voice acting, and a wonderful story.
Into the Breach - Roguelike who's central mechanics are all about using the enemies precommited actions against them in this rube-goldberg machine gameplay loop where you do things like push enemy X left one tile so it shoots enemy Y instead of its own target, killing before it attacks your Z
CS2/go - alright game awful community
Golf with your friends - great party game - its minigolf, you can hit eachothers balls if you are evil
Haste - fun movement system, mitigates some of the roguelike bs mostly by being fairly hard to die up until the area boss
Killbug - if you like the ultrakill cybergrind, pick this funky arena shooter up for VERY cheap
PEAK - Roguelikes fit the party-game genre really well, and with a very streamlined and comprehensible concept, everyone can pick it up and play it fairly quickly - proximity chat, slapstick humor, and the inevitable leaving behind of the guy with no stamina lead to a lot of fun moments.
Mediterranea Inferno - Highly stylised visual novel, probably too short to be worth it w/o it being on a big sale
Portal - man its portal its good
Dawn of War - nostalgia my beloved - used to have an actual honest to god CD of this to put into the laptop (which had an actual honest to god CD reader
Wii sports - nostalgia my beloved
Mario kart Wii - see above
Minecraft - building is fun, surviving is fun, but i spent most of my formative years redstoning in creative mode and its probably why im a stem nerd
Forza horizon 2 - probably objectively bad, but i have fond memories of taking a car and bombing through forests at mach 10 trying not to hit a tree
Star wars battlefront - only ever played missions mode in coop with my brother but even then it was fun tbh - give me the weapon variety like that in more games
Pokemon Showdown - i was a battling nerd in year 6 ok, shoutouts to anything goes level 1 magnemite and shoutouts to ninjask
Pokemon Platinum - honestly actually playing pokemon compared to like showdown or something is REALLY slow but i was a kid so i had basically infinite time and didnt mind
Pokemon Sword - i, at this point, was not a kid and so despite the exact same critisisms applying to both games i hate this one and like platinum (probably also having played another pokemon game made this feel repetitive
Animal crossing new horizons - DNF - it was aight but i sold it
Slay the spire - DNF - i just dont like roguelikes tbh
NoReload Heroes - actually have a lot of hours playing random runs as a party game but never actually made it far
League of Legends - DNF - no explanation needed still dont forgive harry for convincing me to try it
Satisfactory - DNF - just too clunky for a factory builder (which i usually play as a zoneout game)
Hitman - still need to finish
Noita - DNF - too hard
Paradise killer - still need to finish
Hollow Knight - DNF - dogshit death mechanics
Stardew valley - i actually have a lot of hours from like 4 different coop games but never got far in
Citizen sleeper - still need to finish
Doom eternal - DNF - i dnf'd when it stopped gameplay to open a big text box to tell me to equip the 7th weapon i wield simultaneously by pressing the "7" key (in a fps?) (and before you tell me to rebind it theres like 20 different non-weapon things on the other keys surrounding wasd)
FTL - DNF probably - too hard
Transistor - still need to finish
Civ 6 - want to play, but difficult to pick up so probably wont on my own
Cruelty squad - still need to finish
Furi - DNF - dysfunctional on keyboard
Elden ring - DNF - you can have overpunishing death, or random suprise deaths, never both
Disco elysium - still need to finish
Hotline Miami - DNF - comedically fast enemy reaction times + one shot death = randomly losing advantage gunfights = stop playing
Xenoblade chronicles 2 - DNF - sold it