Definitely “Abzû” and “Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice”. One is a beautiful piece of art that touches me every time I replay it and the other finally gave me a wonderful example to show to friends & family of how noisy it is in my head sometimes.

Now I’m left wondering what the children of a water system look like.

Having JUST finished replaying it myself last week, I wholeheartedly enjoyed your review. Thank you!

I had the exact same thought regarding the ending: the girl that in this game is so often depicted as vulnerable and caring (she loves her friends) is at the same time a ruthless serial killer who doesn’t seem to hesitate for a second about setting dozens of stranded survivors on fire who “just” want to escape the island as desperately as she does. When the final outro cutscene was playing and she ends with "I’m not going home…" I couldn’t help but fear for the next group of people she’ll encounter. ;)

Non-sequitur: OMG did I hate the quick-time events, though! Felt like I needed to fail at least 3x for EACH quick-time event before I got it right. /o\

Long-term custom ROM user here.

Regarding security: as always, it depends on your threat model. If you fear a government actor getting access to your phone, a locked bootloader won’t slow them down.

Regarding privacy: I’ve had both VPN logs and external Wireshark running against traffic going in&out of my custom ROM phones & sometimes I still do it for fun. If you know what you’re getting into (e.g. LoS still using some Google services) then a Custom ROM usually holds far fewer surprises than some questionable OEM ROM (and which is terrifyingly scarce regarding changelogs while still having OTA update power).

tl;dr: stick with well-known ROMs & you get … not the best of both worlds … but a “good enough” of both worlds.

“Because you’ll be together”.

• Inception, Mal, with her head on railroad track

The Banshees Of Inisherin.

It was like finding razorblades if you are in a really razorblade-y kinda mood.

Shorter is not necessarily better: “THE Fall” from the early 2000s was a much better value-per-minute movie. :P

Poco X3 NFC with LineageOS.

200,-€ price, excellent photo quality if paired with fitting GCAM mod (AGC) plus config. Powerful enough as daily driver, privacy-frieendly enough after some simple changes, runs everything I need & if it drops & breaks (2 kids at home…) it’s an affordable loss (I’m diligent about backups).