Coelacanth

Doctor Who had the best idea for time travel stories: you can travel in time, but not change anything meaningful. Though even they broke that rule too often for my liking and had some trouble with paradoxes.

Thankfully this game seems to take more combat queues from Bioshock and Dishonored. Bloodlines combat is janky as hell, but you at least have some fun disciplines that can make short work of it. Arcanum combat is truly atrocious.

You're doing amazing work on this app.

I don't love time travel stories, it's very hard to write them without breaking everything, creating plot holes everywhere and wrecking suspension of disbelief. On the other hand....

"I've always described [Clockwork Revolution] as the love child of [Arcanum] and [Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines]."

Say less! That is an absolutely glorious inspiration lineage.

I mean, the statistical properties that set Voynichese apart from natural languages are very widely documented. The very low entropy is perhaps the largest issue, playing into the repetitive nature of it and creating "loops" as per this video (elaborated on in this blog post)

Even then though, we can never prove a negative. It's impossible to prove it's not a natural language, we can only demonstrate that it works in ways that are completely different from all other known languages.

showing statistical regularity in it that's of a type that wouldn't exist if it was statistical random gibberish (which many people have tried and failed to do).

I don't quite follow you here as several people have demonstrated in various ways that the Voynich manuscript text does not at all conform with random gibberish. In fact, the highly regular and peculiar (often repetitive) structures of it is part of the problem. Now, that doesn't mean it contains meaningful information, or indeed that it is a language at all. In fact those rigid and repetitive structures that distinguish it from random noise also make it incompatible with known natural human languages.

It could (and most likely is) simply be highly structured, deliberate and constrained nonsense, devised by a semi-random process following a complex algorithm. This doesn't preclude the possibility that the semi-random part somehow hides encoded information, though with the number of distinguished codebreakers who have had a crack at it I am skeptical. It would also be a highly sophisticated form of cryptography for 15th century Europe.

2. Ah damn it I'll fix the link

3. Isn't 90s web design just the absolute pinnacle?

I don't believe Voynichese is any known or unknown natural language, and even unusual Romanisation wouldn't explain the peculiarities of the manuscript text. In my opinion, there are only two likely scenarios:

1) Voynichese is an unknown constructed language

2) Voynichese is highly structured gibberish, created systematically and with great care to mimic the behaviour of real language.

Even if the second is correct, it would be a remarkable achievement for some early 15th century scribes. The amount of linguistic awareness required to create this language-looking gibberish is impressive in itself.

You might be interested in this paper

Only just started Pentiment. And by that I mean I got through the background selection, and I'm now trying to decide if I'm happy with my choices or want to go with something else. The game looks really good so far, I've heard good things and I'm excited to see how it plays out.

FromSoft reported sales of Elden Ring increased by over 200% following its GOTY win, if I remember right. It definitely has an impact. I can't imagine it's irrelevant in terms of attracting or keeping talent either, and it probably would help maintaining creative integrity and sticking to your vision in talks with investors.

It's still completely up in the air, and as I said above: paradoxical. Voynichese doesn't behave like any known language, and has several problems besides just entropy. On the other hand it obeys Zipf's Law, and topic analysis indicates the content of the writing varies with the subject matter of the pages, like a real language would.

I have a very hard time seeing any of those competing with either Clair Obscur or Death Stranding 2, apart from maybe Silksong (if it actually ever does come out). But even then I'm not sold.

Mina the Hollower will probably duke it out with Blue Prince for the indie game of the year.

So it's this versus Expedition 33 for GOTY then? I feel for Sandfall, that's some unfortunate timing if they end up upstaged by Kojima.

I think both Great Pyrenees and Kangal Shepherds are used already to defend livestock against wolves (and other predators).