At least it wasn't Piglet in the City..?

Last night's dream was the trailer for the upcoming realistic CGI Winnie the Pooh movie Disney was apparently working on (a la Jungle Book, Lion King, etc.) I've never been a huge Winnie the Pooh fan, but I mean I've never been a huge Jungle Book fan either and I loved the new movie, so sure I'll bite.

We start in a farm setting where a certain baby runt pig is being nursed back to health after being caught in a rainstorm or something. The other major characters are introduced as he recovers. The bee non-aggressively snuggles up to him, and given the stylistic choice to go for total realism, no anthropomorphism, yet still scale the bee's size (and, uh, waspiness) up to match, it pretty much looked like a baby pig spooning a Japanese giant hornet. A bit "uh" but I mean if Charlotte's Web can make spiders endearing, sure I'll give it a chance I guess. 8| Then the pig looks up at a certain bear cub over by the fireplace and "you know these two are going to be best friends forever and form the entire plot of this movie" music starts playing. Etc.

It was very Piglet-centric for a movie ostensibly about and named after Winnie the Pooh, but I guess it works out because stylistically this was literally Babe. Christopher Robin was nowhere to be seen, unless he grew up and became Arthur Hoggett, so I guess the whole "child's imagination and adventures with his stuffed animals" framework is gone and everyone is just real now.

It built up to the big triumphant fanservicey shot of an entire barnful of miscellaneous animals singing... uh... the well-known fanservice song from Winnie the Pooh. Is there one? I'm sure there is and someone in the comments is going to be like "HOW DARE YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS NOT USE (song) HERE" but I DON'T KNOW, I WASN'T REALLY EVER INTO WINNIE THE POOH OKAY. I think it just pulled some other famous Disney number (possibly "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes"?) and in dream logic context I just sort of knew what they meant and had that "aaa it's the Winnie the Pooh song" reaction.

My ex from two relationships ago was squeeing with excitement proudly showing off this trailer because she somehow landed a voice-acting role and was in this movie, as a gamer(!?) named Snorch. Your guess is as good as mine how gamers get worked into the plot of a Winnie the Pooh movie, since Snorch wasn't actually in the trailer (but the "and (other ex) as Snorch" byline was) but I was told it was kind of a one-scene cameo type deal. Still, that's impressive! Congratulations and good job and etc.

I woke up about an hour before my alarm was going to go off, so I kind of rolled over and went over what I'd just witnessed, trying to commit it to waking memory so I could write this out later, then drifted back to sleep and--

Wait.

Wait just a goddamn minute.

Winnie the Pooh doesn't have a fucking bee in its main cast.

COMPLETE: Chocolate Castle

Much like Zen Puzzle Garden, I picked this up in the Humble Voxatron Bundle back in 2011 and it has been haunting me ever since. Now all I need to do is play Jasper's Journeys and I can finally exorcise the spirit of Lexaloffle from this household, I suppose. Man does it feel like an accomplishment to be done with this one, though.

So. Klotski puzzles. Also known as "sliding" puzzles, "daughter in the box" or "princess in a box" puzzles, "rush hour" puzzles, or "everyone's least favorite part of any given Professor Layton game" puzzles. With me so far?

Chocolate Castle is a slight variation in that many (but not all) blocks are various colored pieces of chocolate. The goal to clear any given stage is to have all of the chocolate eaten (the puzzle is solved when no more chocolate exists on the board) which one accomplishes by via the matching-colored animals. So, for example, if you drag that dark brown dog onto a dark brown chocolate block, the dog will eat the block and then disappear. Furthermore, if you end a move with two chocolate pieces of the same color touching each other, they fuse and are considered one block of that combined shape from then on. This often makes for a very interesting dynamic where you eventually need to Daedalian Opus every matching-colored piece together into one because you usually only have one animal of that color and need to get rid of all of it at once, but you'll want to keep them unfused so they're small enough to get around each other until the very end, which means you'll have to be very careful about where you move.

For the most part, it's a gimmick that's interesting enough to make Klotski enjoyable, which is honestly saying something. When they remembered to use that gimmick to good effect in the actual puzzle design, many of the levels were the best kind of brain-breaking fun, something I was delighted to be stuck on and mad-scientist-cackling when I finally solved. On the other hand, sometimes there's this bullshit.

Chocolate Castle has 120 built-in puzzles (40 each of Easy/Medium/Hard.) There's also an editor for the community to fling rooms at each other, and each puzzle keeps track of how many moves it took in case you want to go for a speedrun or something. I cannot possibly begin to convey the extent to which I don't care; if it took me 200 moves to get through a goddamn ocean of chocolate bricks, the important thing is I got through it.

And it only took, what, eight years?

ABANDONED: GET OUT of this Dungeon

"Well," I told myself, "I just finished Chocolate Castle. I feel like I'm in the mood for Lexaloffle Games to continue hurting me, but I don't want to spend another eight years on a massive project. What do they have that's bite-sized? Oh, an entire community of PICO-8 games, of course."

GET OUT of this Dungeon is a decently competent Metroidvania, which is pretty impressive when one considers that someone made this in PICO-8. You are Santa, for some reason. You must get out of this dungeon, also for some reason.

It's all well and good, and I did dink around with it long enough to satisfy the "have I actually attempted to play this game" baseline for writing a post. Buuuuut it's a masocore spike hell game with finite lives (100, a decent supply, but still,) the controls are kind of fiddly which is not a good quality to have in a masocore spike hell game with finite lives, and it's just short enough not to have a save feature yet long enough that people are posting their completed screens in the comments with times ranging from 45 minutes to 2 hours.

Nnnnnnnah. If I'm feeling an itch for Metroidvanias, I, uh. I have other options.