The title is a bit wrong. It is a top down RPG not side scrolling.

Just finished American McGee's Alice. I have not played this since I first played it the year it came out (2000). I have not had this much fun with a game in a while. Also, have not experienced the drive to finish a game like I did this one in a good long while.

The game is janky and difficult to control but I just found it so much fun and the atmosphere of the game is fantastic.

I cannot wait to replay the sequel.

Odin is quite a fun new language I just started learning. It is meant as a C replacement and comes with a decent standard library and third party library so there is a lot already built that you can use. It also is fully compatible with C and can use C libraries.

Just be warned that documentation is lacking and you will have to read the source code of the standard library from time to time or seek help from their discord.

I self host a searxng instance and I find the combination of bing, duckduckgo and qwant as the source engines to return decent results. You can use a public instance and choose those engines in settings.

I discovered Father Christmas by The Kinks this year and I got to say that it has become my favorite Christmas song.

The best VR experience I had was with Here They Lie. It is a very... unique game. But I think it is PSVR only.