u/alexia_not_alexa

I was browsing the steam store the other day, and since I only have access to my MacBook currently, I sorted the games by reviews and only on MacOS and came across this game with Overwhelmingly Positive reviews - a mystery puzzle game, sign me up!

My wife immediately jumped on it because she'd already heard about it (she played a lot of similar games) so we started playing together. You basically have to fill in a family tree by looking up articles and publications about the history of this wealthy family and piecing together the information to lock in a photo, their birth name and their profession.

It plays a bit like Return of the Obra Dinn where locking in multiple correct answers is what advances the game until you have a final mystery to solve.

There's an expansion that further the idea but has a twist that makes the gameplay fresh (I won't spoil), and we just got to the 'final mystery' of the expansion which manages to somehow add more depth to everything we've done up to this point!

It's a clever game, with some really unique puzzles that requires your lateral thinking to piece together seemingly unrelated pieces of information together. The way the information is presented is very clever as well, especially the expansion.

My only disappointment is the artwork, which I thought were AI at first until reading it up just now - but they still have such uncanny quality that the same people can appear very different in different photos, and people look inconsistent in the same photos, which threw me off at first.

Anyway, we highly recommend it, we were close to giving up for the night last night when we accidentally stumbled upon the latest path of information. It's so addictive that we're just constantly thinking about it even when I have to start work right now!

Just to see if it'd be your cuppa tea, here are some of my favourite games in the genre (I'm just looking down my steam library here mostly) so if you like these you may like the Roottrees are Dead:

• Outer Wilds (always recommend this one to everyone, mixing puzzle with adventure)
• Tunic (tough souls like game with an amazing puzzle system)
• Chants of Sennar (really clever idea that I just had to immediately get when I learnt about this)
• All the Cracking the Cryptic Sudokus (I've finished each one I got, just bought Arrow and Killer, leaving these last because I'm not good at math)
• Return of the Obra Dinn (closest comparison)
• Disco Elysium (where you solve a case)
• Portal and Portal 2
• SOMA (horror's not my genre but the game's concept and the environmental storytelling is the best I've played)
• Life is Strange (not really a puzzle game, but there are lots of environmental details and notes that gives away clues to upcoming things)
• Antichamber (portal but non-euclidean puzzles)
• Day of the Tentacle (my first ever point and click puzzle game)
• Curse of the Monkey Island
• The Room 1-4
• Manifold Garden
• Cocoon
• Lightmatter
• Superliminal
• Fez

I’ve been replacing my tefal stainless steel with higher end cookware, and I’m at a crossroad with the sauce pan:

I’ve been using a bigger sauce pan for pasta and smaller one for rice for years, but I’m now wondering if I could combine both with a saucier?

I’ve seen that saucier’s good for risottos but I also cook basmati / jasmine rice for Chinese meals, and wondering if anyone have any input on this?

I’m not at all an experienced cook but I’ve been enjoying it a lot this past year and the kitchen is becoming my happy place, but I don’t want to buy things that I don’t use either especially with our kitchen being very tiny!

The size of the kitchen is also why I can’t justify a rice cooker because we simply don’t eat rice often enough, but I want to make sure the option is there!

Thank you for any advice / input!

A year ago I said I hated cooking, but over the past year I slowly got better at it from meal box recipes, and decided it’s time to upgrade my cookware.

I had a 24cm frying pan with vertical edges that’s always too small, the new 28cm feels a world of difference and today‘a lunch was enjoyable to cook and eat, with me being able to mix the cook pasta on the frying pan without issues.

But the stock pot, it was something else! Firstly I didn’t have to worry about the pasta and broccoli boiling over, but I also had so much more volume for the food to swim around during the boil! Then mixing the pesto didn’t feel awkward like I did with my saucepan, I could confidently stir everything around without flicking something out.

And I swear the same meals I’ve made multiple times now was just extra delicious tonight! Even my wife agreed it was the best one I’ve done!!

The only down side is that I’ll be using more water now to take advantage of the volume, and in turn more energy to boil the water. But if it makes such a big difference then I feel it’s worth it!

I’m so glad to have binged a lot of cooking YouTubers last week and “discovered” stock pots!

And in case anyone is curious, I did go crazy and got Demeyere stainless steel for the pan and pot, will be paying that over 10 months in my credit card! They’re very heavy but I can already feel the difference in the preheating and the temperature control. I’ll just need to get back to rock climbing to regain some muscles to be able to toss with the pan!