Considering you can go back and play the levels again with a completely different team and more powerful perks (you unlock some new characters as the game progress), while the devs certainly have some solutions in mind (and may hint at those through the confidence “challenges”), there are definitely plenty of different solutions to each level. So while sure, there might be an optimal solution, there’s also a solution where you defenestrate every enemy.

Which is kinda fun, because it’s also fun to go back and replay some earlier missions that had a “survive 5 rounds” with a challenge of “survive 7 rounds” and deciding “I bet I can survive 9 rounds” (though I was a bit disappointed the enemies stopped coming after 9 rounds. But I think there is a bonus side-mission with infinite rounds, so that one might be fun to go try.)

Or a mission that had the confidence perk of “defeat all enemies in 2 rounds” and being able to do it in 1, when the first time took 3.

So while this one is maybe more “puzzle-tactics”, the puzzles are very open-ended.

I’ve played through the entire main story, but only a few of the optional side missions (I am planning on playing through them, just haven’t had the time yet). I picked it up because I love their earlier game, Gunpoint.

It took me around 15 hours, and there’s at least probably 5 more hours for me to get all the optional objectives in the main story missions, plus the optional side missions.

I would highly recommend the game - the story and gameplay are both pretty entertaining. The little bits of character conversations you get at the start of each mission are pretty funny and well-written. It’s not very difficult (as there’s no % chance to hit like in x-com, actions are guaranteed when you execute them, and there’s unlimited rewinds within a “turn”) - more puzzle-like than tactical combat, but the added “Confidence” objectives are fun to try to get.

Very neat article, glad you shared it!

Interesting to think about now, they mention how modern digital cameras are not great at taking photos of interracial couples. I’m sure / hope someone is working on that, or at least maybe that’s a use case for some of the fancy photo post-processing - to take two photos with different exposure levels and somehow combine them to get accurate features from multiple people of various complexions in one photo.

You could checkout keeb.io, I have the Iris and it’s fairly ergonomic, and you can customize the switches you want.

Trying to tent it for even more ergonomic is a little weird, but I think it is doable.

There’s also (not from keeb.io) ergodox keyboards.

Link to the Iris: https://keeb.io/collections/iris-split-ergonomic-keyboard

Ergodox: https://ergodox-ez.com/