Aimlessly Going Forward

Life is Strange: Reunion

2026-06-10T08:51:45+00:00

Tags: video-game, review

When the Double Exposure ending hinted at a new story, I didn’t expect it to come out a year and a half later. That feels way too early in the videogame land and it made me a little worried. On the other hand, I could believe that this kind of game — especially if it returns to existing places and characters — could cut down on time and costs whilst still delivering a great experience.

It mostly succeeded!

The title says it all — this is Chloe and Max coming together again. Chloe, more sensible yet still her awesome fucking self, travels to Caledon in the nick of time to rescue Max who’s now fully in control of her time rewind powers again.

A terrible fire is going to engulf the city and Max travelled back in time to stop it and save everyone.

You get to play as both Max and Chloe, the latter with her "backtalk" power of getting what she needs through "word combat". Like in the original Life is Strange, it feels like no time elapsed at all. Any past transgressions are in the past and you get the dreamest of teams: the two women and the resident nerd Moses. Only Safi’s missing to round out the picture.

I was happy to return to Caledon. Double Exposure did a fantastic job of making it feel like a real place with people I loved (or loved to hate — hello Lucas). You get to retread the old grounds in pursuit of the fire mystery, but also trying to figure out what happened to Safi as well as Arcadia Bay years ago.

This was overall a welcome and enjoyable experience. In many ways improved upon the previous games — there were no horrible long dreamy sequences (the handful that did appear were mercifully short and to the point), time rewind is the best superpower in the franchise and being able to wrap things up felt great. You got to see Chloe actually living rather than just being alive. I enjoyed where it all ended up.

And yet, it all felt… less… real? I got really emotional with every Life is Strange game except for this one. It all felt nice, but not as intense. Even though (or maybe because of?) the threat was far greater here.

And it felt less life-is-strange-y overall. It took me a day or two after finishing it to really put my finger on it. This is more a DLC than a "proper" Life is Strange game.

There are no episodes here — it’s all a single story told over three days. And there is a potential strength to that: you don’t need to force a periodic cliffhanger, the story can flow more naturally.

But I believe the episodes are a crucial part of the experience. They allow you to reflect, to speculate. And they allow for the world to evolve. Typically, some (sometimes significant) in-game time passes between the episodes even if you play the game back to back. And it is a far better experience have at least a night’s sleep in-between.

You also get to see more places and crucially, experience a new world and new characters. What allowed the authors to deliver a good story relatively quickly also prevented one of the greatest joy of Life is Strange: going somewhere new (or familiar but changed), exploring it, talking to people and living there a little.

Each game had a very strong sense of atmosphere. Sense of a real place, from the Arcadia Bay town with its school, diner and junkyard, through the to the Heaven Springs' tavern, shops, mines and nature to Caledon’s campus, Max’s house and the Snapping Turtle.

Reunion has no genius loci, it relies on your memory of the one from Double Exposure. Nothing really new is happening here. There’s also no downtime here. No space for exploration. You’re always on the hunt for clues.

And unlike any other Life is Strange game (including Before the Storm!), it makes no sense to play this game without having played Double Exposure first.

Still, I really enjoyed what Reunion did. I’m happy to see Max and Chloe and Safi and Moses and I’m delighted that they brought a close to all that’s happened. But I wish I went there not expecting a Life is Strange game capable of standing on its own.

Games Played in 2025

2026-02-23T13:54:19+00:00

Tags: video-game, retrospective

I genuinely planned to not play anything big in 2025…

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

…but then Expedition 33 came out of nowhere, blew everyone’s mind and I gave it a go. It blew my mind too. It is a soulsborne and Final Fantasy hybrid with a very French personality and it just works really well.

The thing that drew me in first was its music. You get a sense from the trailers, but I recommend listening to Lumière:

You enter a world that’s quite bizarre but distinctly French (you can spot a twisted and bent La Tour Eiffel right away). Most everything you see has some connection to painting. There’s chroma, lumina, gommage and creatures that resemble living paintbrushes. The game fully commits to this painterly vibe and it goes beyond a mere setting or theme. Have I mentioned the soulsborne influence already?

You come from a small city after a disaster that struck the world — it twisted and bent it, ripped it apart and reshaped into something that’s more dangerous and less coherent. But what’s even worse, every year all people of certain age die. And that number is going down. There is a huge tower in the distance shining 33 for all to see.

And so every year, some of the people at the end of their artificially-shortened lifespan travel to the continent, trying to reach the tower. Or at least clear the way for those who come after.

So on you go, exploring the world, finding shortcuts, clearing out monsters, growing stronger and learning — what happened, how to get to the Paintress, read messages from the previous expeditions.

When you die, the world resets (Dark Souls style) and you respawn a checkpoint. You encounter bosses that are challenging and require to learn their attack patterns and dodge or parry.

But combat is where the Final Fantasy influence comes in. It’s turn-based with each of up-to four characters in your party having completely separate abilities and combat styles. But, when the enemy is about to attack, if you time it right, you can dodge their attack and even parry for massive amount of counter damage.

I’d not believe this would work, but it does. There’s no run to the boss — if you die, you can restart the battle at a press of a button. This lets you 100% focus on the boss fight. But, it is also really draining. Compared to soulsborne, the combat is more static (it is turn-based), but you have to watch the enemy attacks like a hawk, learning their patterns and trying to counter them. Do that for 20-30 minutes and you’ll be tired without even realising. I 90-minute boss session can get really exhausting.

It is all glorious though. While I do prefer Dark Souls or Bloodborne, Expedition 33 is far more accessible (you can pause! There’s in-game help! You don’t loose anything upon death! The enemy attacks' names flash on your screen so you don’t have to guess! You can choose a difficulty level!) and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s curious about that experience in a less obscure environment.

I love the characters, each exquisitely designed and written. And I love the story itself all the way up to the ending.

Which is where my one complaint lies. There are two choices there and as far as the game is conterned, one of them is clearly "correct". Which, if you’re of a certain mindset or lived experience, is obviously clear to you. But if you’re of a different mindset… it is far less clear cut.

I wish they offered the latter ending the same weight. There is a strength and growth you can see throughout the game that’s just taken away at the end and I found that quite disappointing.

Tactical Breach Wizards

I loved listening to Tom Francis speak on The Crate and Crowbar podcast back when he was a co-host there and I’ve been following his game development career ever since he started.

And, alongside Christine Love, he’s my favourite games writer. Games are so rarely genuinely funny and both Tom and Christine are the two, who can consistently make me laugh and squeal in delight.

Tom also has this fantastic ability of figuring out what’s good in the games he loves and what can be done without. Which he applied to the turn-based tactics games such as X-COM. I’ve tried some of these (most recently Invisible Inc. and Into the Breach) and I always become quite frustrated and give up pretty quickly.

So to hear Tom discuss all of these design choices that take the fun out and seeing him put it to practice with Tactical Breach Wizards, I gave it a go. And was delighted.

It is a ridiculous game. You’re placed in the world of supernatural powers and you form a group of special forces agents that’s composed of witches, mages, shapeshifters and clairvoyants.

They breach a room, deal with the enemies inside, secure the objective and get away as quickly as they can. Using brooms, magic, grenades and seeing 1 second into the future.

And it’s the best game of the genre I’ve played. Beyond the wonderful level design and hilarious writing, you have essentially infinite rewind. You can test out all the actions within a given turn, observe their consequences and either commit or come back and try something else.

The abilities you can apply interact with each other and the environment in wonderful ways and even once you come up with a solution, you always want to keep trying different (more efficient or funnier) approaches.

Plus, each mission has a set of optional objectives which are absolutely not necessary to progress, but they very much make you think: "can I really take everyone out in the first turn? That doesn’t even seem possible". And if you feel like it, you’ll start tinkering. If not, you move on, no worries.

It’s great. It’s the most time I’ve spent with a game of this kind. When I got about halfway through the final act, I’ve had enough and moved on.

But this is absolutely time and money well spent.

Dispatch

Now this was an unexpected surprise. Remember Telltale? Them of Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us? In my mind at least, they kind of invented the sort of modern take on narrative-heavy adventures that focuses more on exploration, dialogue and story than on looking for objects and solving puzzles.

I never got on well with the point-and-click kind, but these games worked for me. And again, at least in my mind, they were the precursors to games like Life is Strange that are more free-form.

Dispatch harkens back to the Telltale past. In a world full of supernatural beings, you become a dispatcher at a "call a superhero" agency, directing a team of former villains who are ready (or possibly court-mandated) to do good.

They’re an unruly bunch, not sticklers for rules or ethics, being shoved into what’s strongly resembles a call centre.

The game is episodic and splits its time between the actual day job (you receive calls, decide which "heroes" to send in, help guide them) and the pre/post-work life. Which is where the telltale magic happens.

I wasn’t keen on the actual dispatching part of the game. You get calls in real time and at least for me, the pace was such that the messes I caused (either by missing appointments or sending wrong heroes or failing the challenges) wiped out any successes, with me resulting in the one percentile of all the players.

This was likely exacerbated by the fact that I was playing this on the Steam Deck and the controls weren’t working great there. It’d work much better on a PC I reckon.

Otherwise though, the game is really funny and well written. I loved the characters and how they grew over the course of the game. The episodes were short and sweet and while you could play the whole game in one sitting, I find it’s better to stick to an episode a day.

I’m not a huge fan of the straight-up superhero genre, but taking the off-beaten track — one that’s focused on the "real" lives these people would live rather than just running around with funny costumes — works really well for me. The Watchmen are amazing, the Heroes TV series was pretty decent at that.

Dispatch does this wonderfully.

The Dark Queen Of Mortholme

This is a really lovely short game.

What if Bloodborne, but you’re the boss. You stay the same, but the pesky little "hero" keeps coming after you time and time again. And she learns new attacks. Learns how to dodge your attacks. Picks up new items.

To a boss, the hero must be really terrifying. They start weak and you keep killing them with a single attack. But they keep coming. They’re relentless. And bit by bit, they get dangerous.

And yes, you have your second phase and special attacks. But you don’t improve. You don’t level up. You can’t even leave your room. When you die, it’s over.

So as the hero gets better, the game gets more frustrating as they start dodging your attacks and picking away at your health. But it takes maybe 1-2 hours to get through all the endings and so it all works out.

It’s a really wonderful look at the other side of soulsborne games.

I Was A Teenage Excolonist

This is really cool. A colony ship arrives on a planet. Things don’t go as planned, but they settle down and begin their new life.

You play a ten year old kid — a child to a colonist couple. Along with the other children, you study and learn skills that should be useful in the future.

The game is split into months and every month you pick an activity to focus on. Each year, you grow up a little and over time the relationships with your friends and adults change.

You can study, work, explore or just lounge around and each month there are people to talk to.

Each game challenge (study session, monster encounter, attempt to solve something) is resolved through a collectible card game. You gain cards by performing certain activities, sometimes you can find them or buy them and of course, forgetting a card is much harder than gaining one.

Overall, you settle in a nice rhythm. Months turn into seasons turn into years, but every now and then something bad happens. The planet’s not exactly hospitable and you’re far away from Earth — there’s no help coming.

The way you play — whom you spend time with, what you do — has huge effects on what happens. There were several traumatic events that I thought were just plot points beyond your control, but they weren’t. With the right skills, I could have prevented them.

Which plays into: the game is meant to be played several times, which I missed somehow and I think knowing that would have affected how I played.

I really enjoyed it, it looks like a really lovely cozy colony management sim with almost Stardew Valley vibes, but you feel the time ticking and when it hits, it hits hard.

PS: When going through the screenshots for the game, I was all delighted and saddened again, it still affecting me months after I’d played it. I’m thinking about picking it up again.

Sekiro
- I heard it’s more focused on parries and I avoided it for that reason. Having played Expedition 33 where a lot of bosses are heavily dependent on parries, I want to give it a go now.
Scarlet Hollow
- The fifth episode was supposed to come out in 2025, but it got moved to 2026. Can’t wait.
Deltarune
- It’s basically a new Undertale. Yes please.
Life Is Strange: Reunion
- A sequel to Double Exposure announced very recently and coming out in 26th March, 2026?
- It feels a little too soon (about 18 months after Double Exposure), but if the sequel was always planned, it might be fine? I am a bit apprehensive, but I will play a Life is Strange game.
Stop Burying Me Alive, Beautiful
Promise Mascot Agency
- By the creators of Paradise Killer
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 DLC
- This came out a few weeks after I’ve finished Expedition 33 proper and I was ready to move on. So I’m savouring this for another time.
Citizen Sleeper 2
- Loved the first game, but I need to be in the right mood for this
Hades 2
- Ditto. Also, this will be a huge time sink

Now this is a fairly large list and I doubt I’ll get through even a majority of this. Plus, new things come in and completely change things up (like Expedition 33 did in 2025). But these are the sorts of things I’ve been thinking about.

A Conventional Boy by Charles Stross

2025-10-15T07:38:31+00:00

Tags: book, review

4/5 stars

It’s the mid eighties in England and Derek Reilly got swept up by the Satanic panic for running a D&D campaign. After it got cleared up, his mates were let go, but Derek remained incarcerated in Camp Sunshine — a deprogramming place for cultists and other magic users. Magic is real and turns out Derek had a latent ability.

A few decades pass and Derek, who’s been running a play-by-mail campaign learns of a D&D convention happening nearby and decides to visit. Except his experience with the adult world is essentially zero and as mentioned before, magic is very real.

Derek the DM’s character appeared in some of the previous books. This is his origin story and not a sequel to the last Laundry Files book (Dead Lies Dreaming), nor the New Management spin-off (Season of Skulls). Instead, it’s a fresh look into this modern-adjacent world, its unspeakable horrors and of course massive bureaucracy fuckups.

The start was a bit slow, but once it picked up the pace (starting with Derek’s escape), it kept sprinting towards the end and I really enjoyed it. Derek, whom I knew as a grumpy seasoned forecaster of the future is presented here full of childlike wonder and uncertainty — seeing the world for the first time. And yet when push comes to shove, he’ll take initiative and save the day.

I was struck by how much this resembled The Atrocity Archives — the book that spawned this whole series. Length-wise, it’s almost a novella with a single plot thread, but executed really well. It’s topped off by a couple of short stories and the author’s essay on AD&D and the Satanic panic throughout its recent history (QAnon, anyone?).

All great stuff.

This review was originally posted to Goodreads.

Picks and Shovels by Cory Doctorow

2025-10-06T12:52:47+00:00

Tags: book, review

5/5 stars

A wonderful end to the trilogy.

The Martin Hench series revolves around the eponymous Marty, who’s a forensic accountant. Tracking down money — mainly money its owners want to hide. Going backwards, the first book (Red Team Blues) was about the "one last job" while this one sees Marty in his college years and early adulthood.

He’s hired by three religious leaders who provide repurposed Aple II computers to their congregation. It soon becomes clear that rather than serving their users’s specific needs, they milk them for every penny they’ve got using tactics that are extremely resonant to today’s acts of enshittification: their computers only accept the matching floppies (which are sold at a significant markup), ditto for their printer paper, not to mention their printers being engineered to jam more often, requiring (paid, of course) technical support.

And when their three most prominent sales women leave, start their own company freeing these systems up and try to recruit Marty to their side, things really get going.

This is a techno thriller true to its word: full of now "vintage" technology (this is the eighties, baby) with march against time, reverse-engineering, coding, violence and partying.

One of the things I really enjoyed here is that Marty being in his early twenties, he has a tendency to be a bit self-assured and knowing he’s smart, he believes that things come easily to him — without the hard work "normal people" need.

So early on, he meets someone who’s a really good listener. He observes this, pays attention and then for most of the book operates under the conviction that he is a fantastic listener as well. Only to be brought down, hard.

Marty’s a great character, but the author’s always ready to call out his hubris and take him down a peg. These scenes are always a delight not just because it’s funny to see the overconfident guy fall but also because this provides a genuine growth, painful as it is.

The book is funny, but gets quite emotional and dark at places. With rich and powerful people as their enemies, the protagonists don’t always leave unscathed. There’s a melancholic undercurrent in throughout the series.

But all of this makes for a fantastic reading. Do not open Picks and Shovels in the evening!

And as ever, the audiobook is narrated by Wil Wheaton who, as ever, is absolutely amazing.

This review was originally posted to Goodreads.

Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding

2025-08-25T10:17:55+00:00

Tags: book, review

4/5 stars

I’ve seen the movie as a teenager. Liked it, but had no intention of actually picking the book up once I’ve learned of its existence.

Two things changed: first, I’d read and loved Pride and Prejudice (another book I never expected to pick up). And second, when Miles’s fantastic review of Emma (spoilers!) implied that the Bridget Jones’s diary is loosely based on Pride and Prejudice, I’ve checked the first few paragraphs and was hooked.

What should have been obvious, but still surprised me was that this book, called The Bridget Jones’s Diary is in fact… told in a series of diary entries. This resonated with me: I went through fits and starts keeping a diary (or "journal" when I’m feeling fancy) throughout my life, but I’ve finally managed to make it stick starting January 2020.

While our life circumstances, personalities and behaviours are completely different, I felt kinship to Bridget. Felt really lonely for about six years (doing better now!), felt not having had life figured out (I secretly suspect a lot of / most adults feel this?), struggled with relationships and vices and walked around with a really high baseline level of anxiety.

The eponymous Bridget is in her early thirties, single, lives in London, has great friends and projects happiness and independence to the incessant questions about marriage and kids from her parents and all of their friends. Inside, she’s terrified of dying alone, her body being eaten by pets because no one will have noticed her being gone.

In a nod to the classic, she meets Mark Darcy at an annual party her family is invited to and takes an instant dislike to him (that the surname is noticed and commented on is a relief — I worried the book would feign ignorance which would be extremely grating). In the meantime she starts flirting with her boss (great idea!).

Throughout the eventful year (new job! mum going insane — even more insane than usual, that is; betrayal, a disappeared friend) Bridget diligently records her weight, calories, alcohol and smoking habits. You cheer her on during her love-induced 0 alcohol units and 0 cigarettes streak, dreading inevitable backslide. You get exasperated as she discusses another diet to try and delight when she realises all this fussing about diets being a concern manufactured by a patriarchal society and egged on by the media to siphon money from vulnerable women. Before the next backslide hits.

Bridget Jones feels absolutely human in every aspect. Alive as much as a character from a story could possibly be. I am not her, but in so many ways I felt the same — and even where I did not, I sympathise.

The Pride and Prejudice connection is very much not on the nose (Mr. Darcy notwithstanding) and it’s more of a bit of a scaffolding to tell a story of a wonderful messed up person. Though when the final crisis hits, the parallels become clearer and you can’t help yourself grinning.

v.g.

This review was originally posted to Goodreads.

Games Played in 2024

2025-05-29T11:57:55+00:00

Tags: video-game, retrospective

The theme of "Tomas has no time for games and especially no solid chunks thereof" unsurprisingly continued. But I did manage to find some time regardless.

Telling Lies

I have not actually played Telling Lies on account of it being essentially unplayable.

However, I was invested in the characters and so I found an edit on youtube that played the videos side-by-side (as the game should have let you).

And it’s good! Great acting, I’ve enjoyed the whole story, went places I hadn’t expected.

This would have been a fantastic game if it were… you know… playable.

(maybe it’s just me who struggled so hard there?)

(Steam page)

Slay the Princess

Lovely little horror VN by the Black Tabby Games (them of Scarlet Hollow). Played it a good bunch times, enjoyed it a lot.

It is gruesome and scary, but more weird (in a good, fascinating way) than actually frightening.

Definitely fun, but can’t wait for new Scarlet Hollow episodes.

(website, review)

OPUS: The Day We Found Earth

This is a nice little narrative game about a cutesy little robot on a mission to find Earth, centuries after humanity left it.

It’s about 80% visual novel with bits of gameplay where you scan galaxies to look for planets similar to what the databases and myths said Earth would be like.

You talk to your creator to learn why humanity’s looking for Earth again and what happened. It’s a sweet short melancholic little story. Can and should be played in one sitting.

I’ve played it on the iPad and found that the planet exploration and space travel part of the story was barely interactive at all only to find out, that on the PC, those sections are a bit more involved and puzzly.

This isn’t a strong rec, but it’s a lovely little game providing nice change of pace.

(website)

Thumper

I absolutely adore Thumper. It is metal, violent, anxiety inducing, but when you get in the zone, it’s calming and delightful.

The music is amazing and the game looks great.

I’ve picked it up again at the beginning of the year and spent wonderful two weeks with it.

However, what this game wants (demands) is some dedicated regular play time. You can’t just dip in and out or you’ll lose your ability to play it and pretty much have to re-learn everything (or at least I do).

This is fun, but also frustrating: I want to either progress in the game, or get better so I can flow through the earlier levels, enjoying the feeling of mastery.

After putting it down for a few days, I get nothing and need to start from the beginning to build the ability up again. You need to keep playing to build and maintain a momentum.

And that’s not something I can actually dedicate time to these days.

But it is a wonderful game that in another situation I’d be all over.

Thumper plays wonderfully on the Steam Deck.

(website, previous thoughts)

Baldur’s Gate III

This took most of my game playing time this year and I genuinely worried I won’t be able to finish it before the went by.

But I did and the game is absolutely fantastic. But it is way too long.

I’d love to see what Larian do next, but I genuinely don’t think I’ll be able to pick it up.

(website, review)

Life is Strange: Double Exposure

The last game I’ve played in 2024. Had a week-long vacation scheduled for December and basically played an episode a day. It was perfect.

Perfect as in the situation was great, not the game itself.

I liked it, but it’s definitely got issues. Which, to be fair, is true for every Life is Strange game.

Being back with Max felt great, but the absence of Chloe (forced upon the game because the team decided to let both endings of the original game stay) was jarring.

Still though, I’ve definitely enjoyed it and I’m happy the game exists.

(website, review)

Done With

Thumper
- I’m just not able to dedicate the time to get into the game
Pokémon Fire Red
- I’ve had a session saved that I planed to return to
- But I’ve just realised I haven’t played it in over four years

Won’t Even Think About Playing

Any AAA RPG. And basically anything that’s over 20 hours long is out of the question pretty much. I’ve burned so much time on Baldur’s Gate III and I’m burnt out on long games. They can be fun, but I just can’t fit them in my current schedule.

And even if I do pick one, it’ll take over the year and I won’t get to a ton of smaller games I’d really enjoy too.

Plus, Mass Effect 5 (or whatever they’re going to call it) will come out at some point and I will definitely want to play that and it will be a huge.

So goodbye to:

Cyberpunk 2077 and/or the Phantom Liberty DLC
any new Larian game
Witcher 4
any Spiderweb Software game (Avernum, Geneforge, Queen’s Wish)
any soulsborne game
- I may go for a quick dip into Dark Souls 1 or Bloodborne depending on the mood — these now take much less time
any Skyrim-like (The Elder Scrolls, Fallout)

Tactical Breach Wizards
- Been looking forward to Tom Francis’s new game
- He basically took things like UFO, Invisible Inc., Into The Breach, removed all the frustrating bits and added his sense of humour
Scarlet Hollow
- No new episode came out in 2024, but there should be one in 2025
Citizen Sleeper 2
I Was A Teenage Excolonist
Stop Burying Me Alive, Beautiful

Fieldwork Fail by Jim Jourdane

2025-05-28T05:58:03+00:00

Tags: comic-book, review

5/5 stars

I’ve learned about this book by seeing a few comic strips shared on a social network. They were all one-page thing with sentences like: "I accidentally glued myself to an alligator" / "When you realise the bat you’ve been radio tracking is actually the beep signal from the crosswalk…" / "Suited up to approach an angry beehive. Trapped biting safari ants inside the suit."

Each is accompanied by a gorgeous illustration and a page or two of deeper explanation on what the scientist was doing and how they got in this situation.

Fieldwork Fail is a really special book. It shows scientists as human being, exposing (as the tagline says) the messy side of science. There is this idealised version of science that’s all pristine, always going forward, rigid in the "hypothesis / data / refinement" cycle that’s rarely true in real life.

And this books shows the other side of that story, dirty laundry (literally!) and all.

It is endearing, hilarious and I’ve learned a lot. It is extremely approachable, too! Read it with my three-year-old (playing up the laughs more that the science itself) and they loved it.

This review was originally posted to Goodreads.

Baldur's Gate 3

2025-01-26T09:35:35+00:00

Tags: video-game, review

As the name suggests, this is a sequel to a couple of games I would absolutely not expect anyone to make a sequel to anymore. I loved Baldur’s Gate, but out of all the classic RPGs that could use a sequel, this (or the D&D ruleset) weren’t anywhere near the top of my list.

Hearing Larian was behind it made me hesitant. I’ve played a decent chunk of Divinity: Original Sin and while there was a really solid game with fantastic ideas in it, I did not get on with its sense of humour and the overall writing and world building. To the point that I gave up on it.

I’ve watched a bit of a Divinity: Original Sin II playthrough and that felt less grating, but I never got around trying it.

Baldur’s Gate 3, on the other hand, is fantastic. It takes the spirit of the old classic RPGs (big on world building, big on a grand, epic story, big on characters, big on turn-based combat) and absolutely delivers on everything.

It’s almost unbelievable how well they make all this stuff work. They keep the D&D rules, but tweak them enough that they fade into the background. You still feel this vast legacy and can engage with it if you want. But you can just not pay too much attention to it and still have a grand time.

You pick a starting character (there’s a list of pre-made ones — each with their own personality and background), or you design one yourself. The rest of the characters will appear in the game as your potential companions. You also pick/create a "Dream Guardian" — a character that you’ll see in visions throughout the game and who’s mystery you’ll slowly start to uncover.

Here’s my character: Talia^[1] Maarschalkerweerd de Klotzs^[2] (a Drow trans woman):

And then you’re just thrown right into it. A flying ship is ravaging a city, kidnapping people to turn into mindflayers — you among them. The ship is attacked and you find yourself freed, not yet turned and needing to get out. You might be able to rescue some of your future companions before the ship crashes and you find yourself on a coast — stranded, confused and with a mindflayer tadpole inside your brain.

And it only gets better. There’s the Githyanki, dragons, a lich, dimensional hopping, dark elves, dark dwarves, the Underdark itself, genuine druids, clerics of the goddess Shar, hags — and all that and more within the first act of the game. Unlike the first Baldur’s Gate it just dives straight into the weird and interesting stuff of the setting. I was expecting a bog-standand fantasy quest where it takes 20 hours to even get anywhere and here you’re talking to this strange weirdly attractive companion in your dreams right from the start. And how the hell are you not a mindflayer already?

I really liked that aspect of it. The game is huge, but there’s something interesting going on elsewhere. None of it feels like dead space.

There are three acts — each with a genuinely different feel and even the way you move through it. The middle one felt the weakest to me, but not by that much and it was still fascinating with lots to do. The third one gets you to the city of Baldur’s Gate itself and that’s where everything comes together.

The companions all have their personalities and agendas in the finest Bioware-like fashion — they wouldn’t be out of place in Mass Effect or Dragon Age. You still only get to take three on your adventure and that’s still a bummer.

And there isn’t a reliable indication over when they’ll drop some new lines of dialogue.

There is an exclamation point floating above their heads when the character has something important to say, but they react to smaller things with no way of knowing (other than chatting them up) so I ended up checking up on everyone every time I was in the camp (to comment on what just happened), every time I was about to head to bed (sexy times!!) and every time they woke up (what’s lying ahead) just in case.

I wish we could have moved past that. I don’t want to lose basically any in-character banter or reaction, but this gets boring quickly.

Side note: this was solved perfectly in Hades and every game of this mould should adopt that thoroughly. There you do have an exclamation point above the character’s head every single time when there is something new to say. And there’s enough dialogue written that you always have someone to talk to. It must have been incredibly labour intensive, but it is great.

I have a thing about game endings — especially for games as massive as this one. Hate when they completely change the game and put you through an annoyingly long fighty section just to put add more hours between you and the end.

There is such a section here and you can absolutely grind it out. Or you can do a bit of sneaky action, then do a small bit of targeted fighting. And then before you get into the big dangerous area that ends with the Big Honkin Fight With The Big Final Boss, there’s a way to just like… kill it and go to the epilogue — if you’ve played things right and you’re ready to make some sacrifices. I did this and it felt absolutely amazing. Great end to a fantastic game. This is one of the few massive RPGs where I don’t have serious qualms about the final section (Fallout 2 was like that. And Fallout 1 too I think?).

Such a refreshing thing. It’s a bit weird talking about respecting your time for a game that took me 164 hours to complete. But despite its ridiculous size, I rarely felt bored or lost or wishing something should be cut.

And yet, the game is extremely long. Way too long for me. I’ve basically played this for over a year at the expense of plenty other excellent games. I might have felt differently had this come out ten years ago. But at this point it is too big.

Other than the sheer size, the only two qualms I really have are about its inventory (there are way too many items and the management becomes a neverending chore — I wish the genre could move past this busy work) and spells (again, way too many choices — and while I believe there are uses for all of them, frontloading this decision before resting is a D&D tradition they could have gone without). Both would result in an even better game I think.

And that you can’t change the speaker mid-dialogue. There’s a lot of situations where you need to pass multiple skill checks to get somewhere in a dialogue. And your crew has all those skills, but they’re spread out. Lae’zel can intimidate, Shadowheart might have crucial information about the deity whose temple you’re in and your main character can be great at persuading.

You might need all three to get through a single dialogue, but whoever started the conversation is the only person who gets to use their skills or insights. Everyone else is just standing around watching your character’s doomed efforts trying to remember a crucial thing about the religious symbol the cultist is wearing.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an excellent game and it truly feels like something special. Combining Divinity: Original Sins' strengths (great environments, lots to do, the varied ways of combining items and status effects, many different approaches to solving each problem and the way how the "premade" characters just integrate into the story and you getting to meet them later on) with Bioware’s focus on conversations and relationships with your crew and the rich, fascinating world all clicks together wonderfully.

P.S.: A special shout out to Amelia Tyler who voiced the narrator. Her voice accompanies you throughout the entire game and it is possibly the best thing about Baldur’s Gate 3. There’s this bemused quality to it that just fits the situation you’re finding yourself in so well.

P.P.S: I feel I’d trust this group to build a good Planescape: Torment successor. They go into a lot of weird places and make them work. A lot of areas have serious Torment vibes and the team handled them brilliantly.

Life is Strange: Double Exposure

2024-12-30T19:02:21+00:00

Tags: video-game, review

I had no idea what to expect. I mean, this is as direct a sequel to the original Life is Strange as you can get. A sequel to the game that essentially kickstarted a new genre — half 3D adventure half visual novel (with a tiny bit of super janky puzzling on the side).

Life is Strange: Double Exposure is the fourth (fifth if you count Before the Storm, sixth if you include Tell me Why — I do) instalment in the universe where children or young adults gain supernatural powers — triggered by trauma — and… shit gets real.

Except this one features Max Caulfield from the first ever Life is Strange. Without Chloe Price, because the developers were too cowardly to follow up on the obviously correct ending of the first game (you know the one I’m talking about). Or possibly wanted a clean break and focus on new characters.

And it’s Life is Strange with all that entails: janky controls, bad but thankfully rare puzzles, fun people to get to know and snoop on and of course — a traumatic tragedy that now brings new powers.

Max’s new best friend Safi is shot and instead of rewinding time (I would be well up for more timey-wimey hijinks with Chloe FWIW) Max can shift between two realities: one where Safi is dead and the other one where she’s alive.

In-between trying to cope with another death she’s taking it upon herself to figure out what happened and save the remaining Safi in case she’s in a similar danger.

Oh and Max is now an actual successful professional photographer who got a teaching position at a university — and most of the people she interacts with are either students or other teachers.

She feels more mature (far more open to foul language, more judgemental and no stranger to being black-out drunk) while still riddled with the same self-blame and anxieties as the teenage Max. Still trying to figure life out, still being basically a high-functioning emotional wreck (which, given her past, fair).

I’m well up to picking things up a few years later, but there’s a bit of a weird tonal shift here.

You have this jaded adult Max and the curious naïve student she used to be all mixed together. One moment she’s lost in thought looking at a frozen pond and the next one she literally calls a student who’s a bit nosy "this little shit" in her journal. Like, have you looked in the mirror? What exactly are you yourself doing at the very same time?

And that’s kind of the whole game — absolutely wonderful bits mixed in with some really bad ones. They’ve beautifully ramped up the character’s facial expressions so the dialogues feel far more natural and able to convey emotion and meaning. It’s really cool most of the time, but occasionally people pt on the strangest expressions.

But that’s basically every Life is Strange game, isn’t it? Decent story, wonderful people and sense of place mixed in with jank, bugs and headshaking nonsense that brings you out of it all. It’s not like the original game (even remade) holds up great today (though I still love it to death and replay it every now and then).

I’ve enjoyed it, but groaned really hard at the "dream sequence" in the final episode even as it helped illuminate some of Max’s past and her state of mind.

I don’t think it’s the sequel anyone expected or hoped for, but I’ve enjoyed it and if I ever bring myself up to braving the less-appetising aspects of it, I’d love to do a replay, connect the dots and make some different choices. Giving more agency to Gwen for example.

One thing I really appreciated: the game lets you skip the few mechanical puzzles that are in there. I think True Colors had something similar and though I didn’t need it much, it was great to have.

And finally, they’re hinting at another return of Max Caulfield in the future. Which I’m a bit more unsure about, but I’m definitely here if/when it happens.

Spoilers

I liked the ending — more optimistic, hinting at something interesting going forward. It’s the first time in any of the games that two people with powers learned others exist (I think). And actually even met here and were like… "wait! You too? I thought I was the only one!". That felt great.

I would lose all "dream sequences" in all games (chiefly among them the original Life is Strange as well as this one). Also the Dark Room callbacks and the replaying of the torture scenes and Chloe’s killing. You can show Max being broken without showing those moments over and over and over again.

At this point, it’s a deliberate choice by a human being here in the real world. Someone had to come in and in essence say: "wouldn’t it be awesome to add in all the worst parts of the first game". And they did. And it’s bad. Because guess what: it’s just repeating the worst parts of the first game.

The murder investigator was such an odd thing. I can’t figure out any purpose to his character other than add some drama and kind of forcibly move the plot forward towards showing the photo of Max pointing a gun at Safi. And the way he just disappeared — absolutely nothing came out of that. There was that one scene where Max was convinced that touching someone from a mirror world would kill you like it did the police officer. But no, not even that was true there.

Literally that whole situation seemed to have no reason, no consequence and just could have been cut with very little impact.

After having played the full game I love Safi’s character. I felt a bit uneasy about her throughout. Sometimes great, other times giving me really bad vibes — that there was something off from the very first moments. And like, that is basically all true. But knowing the background, her abilities and what she plans to do next — she’s awesome. An amazing ally, but also she could (and maybe will be!) be a fantastic villain.

As much as I’d love her to be the force of good who brings all the "gifted" people together, seeing her just take the matters into her own hands — with the best intentions of course — would be glorious(-ly terrifying).

Really wonderfully written character.

Endgame Stats

At the end of each chapter, you’re presented with the important choices you’ve made and the percentage of people who took each choice. Here are mine:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Bea Wolf by Zach Wienersmith

2024-11-22T06:59:57+00:00

Tags: comic-book, review

5/5 stars

As the name might suggest, Bea Wolf is a comic book retelling of Beowulf, but with and for children. The warriors are rowdy (aka… you know… normal) children who built a tree house next to a fun-killing grouchy neighbour whose touch turns you into a disgusting teen or worse — boring adult.

The book is written by Zach Wienersmith, the author and illustrator behind the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic — one of my favourite things online.

I got it last year because I loved the premise and wanted to support the author whose work I’ve been freely consuming for over a decade. And then it laid on the shelf, waiting for the right moment.

It wasn’t until several days ago when my three-year-old couldn’t decide which book to read at bedtime that my eyes glanced at Bea Wolf again. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I could read it with the kid until then! But when I mentioned it was about warrior children fighting a big scary monster, it was on.

A week later, we’ve finished it and started a re-read right away. It is fantastic!

Bea Wolf is a poem and while I’ve never read the "original" (i.e. a translation from Old English to something one can actually understand) the rhythm and word choice absolutely hint at a more ancient inspiration, beautifully alliterated:

Just look at this:

Listen to the lives of the long-ago kids, the world-fighters,
The parent-unminding kids, the improper, the politeness-proof,
The unbowed bully-crushers,
The bedtime-breakers, the raspberry-blowers,
Fighters of fun-killers, fearing nothing, fated for fame.

There was Tanya, treat-taker, terror of Halloween,
Her costume-cache vast, sieging kin and neighbor,
Draining full candy-bins, fearing not the fate of her teeth.
Ten thousand treats she took. That was a fine Tuesday.

Epic. The three-year-old was absolutely hooked and so was I. It is a glorious, action-packed struggle for freedom and survival.

The book ends with the defeat of Grindel (the names are slightly different) and hints at the upcoming encounter with his mother. I really hope there will be a follow-up.

This review was originally posted to Goodreads.

Slay the Princess

2024-09-11T16:54:18+00:00

Tags: video-game, review

I absolutely adore Scarlet Hollow. A horror visual novel just teetering on the edge of being and RPG without actually crossing the line. Beautifully drawn, wonderfully written.

But it’s episodic and each episode is coming out wayyyyy too slowly.

Slay the Princess is the project Abby Howard and Tony Howard-Arias built in the gaps between the Scarlet Hollow development.

It’s a visual novel. You’re a person without a name who is supposed to walk into an old building and slay the princess imprisoned there. Why? Don’t ask questions. She’s dangerous.

And so you go up. And meet the princess. And talk — or not. And try to kill her — or not.

You’re not alone though, there’s the narrator who’s as reliable as you let him be and over time, other characters will join. There’s mystery (who are all these people? Why do you need to kill the princess? When will it all stop?). Whom do you listen to? And why?

While not necessarily exactly a time loop, you can think of the gameplay as close to being one. Your first encounter with the Princess will not be the last. The circumstances will change, so will the attitudes and your options.

The game is very choice-driven, but that doesn’t mean you can always end up making the same choice as before.

And it is all quite fascinating. I loved the central premise and the mystery. It’s obviously a bit gruesome, but not exactly scary or disgusting (at least to me and I tend to be sensitive to these things).

I don’t want to contrast this with Scarlet Hollow, but the parallels are inescapable.

Slay the Princess has fewer locations, simpler graphics and more repetition — which is what I think allowed it to exist in the first place. Unlike Slay the Princess — it has full voice over! This is something I love and miss in most VNs (and RPGs and all other games).

It’s not something I expected given the presumed constraints. But we’re only talking two voice actors so I guess it was less of a pain than a fully-acted game of similar size with a wider cast would be?

Slay the Princess is shorter, less haunting and scary. Less tense — though it still is all those things too.

I’ve played through to the end in 2-3 hours or so? There’s more to do if you want to see all the scenes (and, presumably, get all the achievements), but by the end I’ve had my fill and ended up being quite satisfied.

Just wish the next Scarlet Hollow episode was here already.

Life Is Strange Vol. 3: Strings by Emma Vieceli, Claudia Leonardi and Andrea Izzo

2024-07-13T08:05:36+00:00

Tags: comic-book, review

5/5 stars

Spoilers for the previous books ofc.

They know. Max, Chloe, Rachel and Tristan are finally on the same page. Rachel’s of course perfectly zen about knowing there’s a reality where she was gruesomely murdered. And likewise Chloe is totally chill with this not being her Max and there being another Chloe who has it far worse and was abandoned by the same Max twice.

But, Rachel has a play to prepare to, Chloe has a secret project and it looks like Max might be able to come back with Tristan’s help?

At this point I’m just repeating myself. It’s fantastic, I loved every second of it and I can’t wait to read the rest.

This review was originally posted to Goodreads.

Life Is Strange Vol. 2: Waves by Emma Vieceli, Claudia Leonardi and Andrea Izzo

2024-07-12T06:23:18+00:00

Tags: comic-book, review

5/5 stars

Spoilers for the first book — you’ve been warned.

So… Chloe. And… Rachel? The trio that never was — together at last.

And it starts really nicely — Chloe and Rach dating, Rachel doing her insta influencer thing. Chloe working in a car shop and also building cool art out of scrap metal. And Max is trying to live a normal life.

And failing hard. Because she’s wracked with guilt over abandoning Chloe in the past and how that affected her ability to trust people. And about not telling her about her powers. Chloe and Rachel of course notice that Max is hiding something.

And then a mysterious boy appears that people sometimes see and sometimes don’t.

It is again — fantastic. You get a glimpse into a far happier life that Chloe and Rachel could lead. Not without issues, mind. It’s just that they’re not existential ones.

But new mysteries spring up, the two realities seem to be connected at least in some way. And then the shit hits the fan.

Loved it and grabbed the third book right after finishing this one.

This review was originally posted to Goodreads.

Life Is Strange Vol. 1: Dust by Emma Vieceli, Claudia Leonardi and Andrea Izzo

2024-07-11T09:46:49+00:00

Tags: comic-book, review

5/5 stars

Life is Strange is one of my favourite video games. Despite the flaws that even the remaster didn’t fix, the tale of the time-rewinding Max and her ~~sidekick~~ best friend Chloe is something I think back to frequently and with fondness.

I longed for more of their adventures. And yet, I was hesitant to read the comic. It was authored by different people and as Max swore off using her powers I felt that they would either come up with a way to force her hand (which I wouldn’t like) or… it’d be a bit… not exactly boring, but lacking the mystery of the games.

Well, this is why I’m not a writer. Of course the book fits very well within the Life is Strange genre/universe without having Max break her vow at the first available instance.

Moreover, it is emotionally exactly what I’d have wanted from a sequel — you get to see them happy, but also struggling to process the tragedy that happened and try to build a new life.

There’s no wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff there, but that doesn’t make mean it’s completely free of the supernatural that’s par for the course of the series.

I’m deliberately not saying more so as not to spoil things, but I’ve enjoyed this so much! Seeing Chloe doing better was such a wonderful thing. Living a life. Not being alone. I have "a Chloe" in my life and I desperately hope they’ll be able to calm down and get through the ever-present anger and sense of betrayal.

I’m really looking forward to the next books.

This review was originally posted to Goodreads.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin

2024-07-10T20:17:08+00:00

Tags: book, review

4/5 stars

The Bennet family has five daughters, all of them in a marrying age, so when a new, rich, polite and handsome neighbour appears, their mother immediately sets out to have one of them married off to Mr. Bingley.

And when Bingley and his party arrive at the local ball, the eldest daughter Jane indeed gets closer to him with the feeling seeming very much mutual. What’s more, there’s an even more interesting prospect in the form of Mr. Darcy. However, his distant aloof manner and.. ahem… pride puts everyone off immediately. In particular, overhearing an unflattering comment about herself, Elisabeth Bennet (the second daughter) becomes… prejudiced against Darcy from then on.

I think you can guess where that particular relationship is going to go.

And yet, this is far more than a clichéd love story of people who don’t like one another very much and the resulting comedy.

Pride and Prejudice, set in early 19th century and written likewise is a well-observed book full of intriguing people and sarcasm so subtle you might miss if but so biting it will make you guffaw. It is a delicious book, far more enjoyable and intriguing than I thought it would be.

It evokes a visceral distaste of the pompous Mr Collins, disgust with the condescending Lady Catherine de Bourgh and immediate liking of Elisabeth (who for all her cleverness will make you say "oh, honey" out loud on several occasions).

While the whole thing is rather lighthearted and no one is ever in any real danger, the plight of the women — having to secure a well-off and well-positioned husband before their 25th year or facing no support and few opportunities to support themselves — was keenly felt. Not all marriages in the book were loving or even based on mutual understanding. Nor successful or happy.

There’s a couple of things I did quite struggle with.

Partly, this is the "Tomas can’t handle more than three characters at a time" thing. The book starting with five Miss Bennets and one Mrs. (and my tendency to mix those up) didn’t help. Similarly, it took me a long time to realise that Mr. Collins and Mr. Wickham were separate characters — this owing to them being introduced roughly at the same time.

But the book also has a tendency to be almost obstructively indirect, saying things like:

When Mrs. Bennet approached Miss Bennet and Elisabeth, she asked whether their travel was satisfactory. To this the latter replied in the affirmative.

(not a direct quote, but things like that are quite common there)

I understand what it means, but it is still a tax on my frequently exhausted mind and I don’t think that putting "Yes, the trip was wonderful", Elisabeth replied there would have hurt the novel’s literary acumen. Maybe everyone wrote that way in 1813, though?

But overall, I have thoroughly enjoyed Pride and Prejudice and I’m sure I’ll come back to it again some time.

This review was originally posted at Goodreads.

Skeptics in the Pub: Cholera by Mark Crislip

2024-07-10T07:36:36+00:00

Tags: book, review

3/5 stars

I’ve been meaning to pick up one of Mark Crislip’s books for ages. As a regular reader of Science Based Medicine, his writing is informative as well as hilarious. An infection disease doctor with decades of practice and a sharp tongue — what’s not to like.

So imagine my surprise when he started posting a bona fide work of fiction (within the medical field, but still) to SBM. That’s not the book I expected to read, but here we go.

Skeptics in the Pub is set in more or less modern (2017) North America with a twist: the revolutionaries failed and America remains a British colony.

Consequently, the Continent (Europe) and anything coming out of it is at best looked upon with distaste and a lot of the new philosophies, medical discoveries etc. are viewed as heresies. And you don’t want have the Crown’s attention for studying texts on some invisible animacules which supposedly cause disease.

Plus, it would undermine the fine balance that the officially recognised Medical Guilds (the homeopaths, acupuncturists, naturopaths) maintain.

And then the cholera hits. And despite projecting confidence, the Guilds are not really stopping the outbreak. Quarantines help only a little, there’s no cure and of course, each Philosophy has a different explanation for the cause of the disease. Can they all be right?

It is a great setup and it’s really easy to read. I knew very little about cholera and watching the protagonist try to use scientific inquiry to map and investigate the spread, form hypotheses and eventually stop it at the source and provide a cure against the background of quacks fleecing everyone was both informative and satisfying.

The book is apparently inspired by past outbreaks up to removing a water pump’s handle.

I’ve had fun and learned a lot.

And yet: it was an extremely heavy-handed depiction of "alternative medicine" (which to be sure is an extremely dangerous grifty utter scum that we can’t get rid of soon enough) but other than evoking schadenfreude for the people who know about the altmed’s (lack of) efficacy and the damage they cause, the strawman on-the-nose representation won’t likely sway even people on the fence, much less the true believers.

The plot is almost completely straightforward as well and while that can be a good thing, something felt missing here. Despite the risk that going against these powerful people as well as the Crown itself, the protagonist had an easy time and secret benefactors who always nudged them in the right direction.

There was no real danger, not plot twist, no setback. As I was gearing towards the end, I kept thinking: "is this it?". And yep, it was.

Which isn’t bad necessarily and I did enjoy the book, but it did feel like it was missing something.

This review was originally posted at Goodreads.

The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow

2024-07-09T07:42:43+00:00

Tags: book, review

5/5 stars

This is the second in the Martin Hench trilogy, set roughly 20 years before the first book.

Just like the first one, The Bezzle follows (several) financial crimes that Martin witnesses and/or investigates. But the main focus here is on the american prison situation and the enshittification that the tech used within goes through.

And how that affects people on the inside and outside.

Having had three people close to me in prison (each one for multiple years) I was nervous about The Bezzle. I cannot imagine what it is like behind the bars, but trying to maintain contact and make sure they know there are people caring about them — that they have people to come back to and that it’s not all helpless — Cory fucking nailed that part perfectly.

Not just that, but also the helplessness. What to talk about, what to avoid. What to do when the person stops responding and all the thoughts running through your head ("surely they have all the time to write — why haven’t they done so?", "has something terrible happened?", "have I said something insulting?", "are my letters too egocentric/boring/inquisitive?").

Prisons are terrible and The Bezzle captures that terribleness really well.

But this is a Cory Doctorow feature so you have the shitty tech, DRM, the privatisation of prison administrations to squeeze every bit of money from some of the most vulnerable people (the prisoners' families). It is frustrating and infuriating and makes you want to scream.

But the entire novel is a romp that really resists being put down. It is fun to read and funny in addition to being so rage inducing.

Oh, and the audiobook is once again narrated by Wil Wheaton who is perfect for the role.

This review was originally posted at Goodreads.

The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin

2024-07-08T16:05:15+00:00

Tags: book, review

5/5 stars

I didn’t necessarily feel The City We Became needed a sequel, but I grabbed it as soon as I could of course.

And while the first book tied up most of the loose ends, the big one of course remained: what’s going to happen to Staten Island under R’lyeh’s control?

The white tentacles are less of a common occurrence, but the influence is undeniable. Political campaigns saying the quiet part out loud, dog-whistling "artists" invading Bronka’s centre and a mysterious donor who could help so much if only she doesn’t look deeper and accepts the teeeny request they have on her otherwise indisputable and unimpeachable freedom to choose whom to platform and whom not to.

And of course this is the perfect time for Manhattan’s past to catch up with him.

The danger here is greater, the stakes are higher and we learn about the events beyond this particular reality and the cities that didn’t make it.

And it’s still a great book. I love the characters — how they’re not your typical super heroes, but also not you atypical ones either. They feel far more like genuine human beings. There’s conflict, disagreement and just being so fucking done with this shit. And yet they try to do their best.

I’ve had fun reading it though it lost a little of the original’s allure as that’s now a familiar territory and so things had to escalate.

This review was originally posted at Goodreads.

The Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow

2024-07-04T13:01:56+00:00

Tags: book, review

5/5 stars

We didn’t stop climate change in time. Epidemics of novel, deadly pathogens are a regular occurrence. So is wearing a mask due to nearby fores fires or toxic fumes. Cities need to be abandoned when they’re no longer safe to live in.

Everyone knows climate change is real — even the Magas feel its effects. But despite being mostly a slowly dying relic of the past, they oppose every measure to mitigate the issues and build a better society: jobs guarantee, welcoming refugees, multi-story buildings in place of single-family houses. Intead they dream of forcing crisis through domestic terrorism, unknowingly egged on by the libertarians who all fucked off to the seas where they wait until all hell breaks loose so they can come in, save the world though technology and take their rightful place as the kings (sorry — thought leaders) of the world.

It is quite the setup and when you know how often Doctorow mentions the Checkov’s Gun principle, and literal guns make appearance early on, you know this is going to blow up.

The Lost Cause doesn’t have a particularly deep or twisty plot, but it just keeps on going. Except for Doctorow’s signature "this is where we explain MMT / prefab buildings / making the perfect cold brew" dialogue which everyone grew to love (or hate).

I’ve enjoyed The Lost Cause thoroughly. It’s more young-adulty then its actual adult sequel (maybe?) Walkaway. It’s about a generation that knows what to do to fix the world and has the means and will to do it, but what if your own family elders fiercely oppose every effort?

This review was originally posted at Goodreads.

Season of Skulls by Charles Stross

2024-07-03T14:19:33+00:00

Tags: book, review

4/5 stars

Season of Skulls is the third book in the Laundry Files spinoff New Management.

Eve Starkey’s worst nightmare becomes reality and she’s in bigger trouble than at any point in the previous books, really. The only way out seems to be to travel the Dream Roads that lead to a fictional 1816 where she ends up in The Village - an open prison for occult practitioners captured during the Napoleonic wars (I haven’t wathed the 1967 The Prisoner but it’s been an explicit inspiration).

She meets friends, find suspicious people and desperately tries to (a) set her life back under her control and (b) survive and escape.

Unlike the previous two novels, Season of Skulls is almost entirely focused on Eve. If expands on her character and past, giving her a much more rounded view. She’s still a deeply cynical individualist who’ll kill you with her tongue (or — more literally — with her sorceress mind). But she’s also more human than the firs book might suggest.

We learn about Eve’s past, including what made her the the calculating hyperefficient assistant (beyond patriarchy at the top exec levels I mean) and what really happened to Rupert.

Season of Skulls has welcome callbacks to both the previous New Management novels as well as the OG Laundry works.

It is also far less revolting than Quantum of Nightmares and just a really nice book to read — especially if you’ve enjoyed the previous two novels.

This review was originally posted at Goodreads.

Games Played in 2023

2024-01-16T16:49:59+00:00

Tags: video-game, retrospective

Just like last year, it was really difficult to find solid chunks of time to dedicate to playing games. So, just like last year I’ve focused on smaller games that I could finish quickly or pick up and drop any time.

And just like last year, there was one massive exception albeit an unexpected one this time.

With a couple of exceptions, everything I’ve played was on Steam Deck. That machine is definitely delivering exactly what I was hoping from it.

Neo Cab

This is just an excellent Cyberpunk visual novel. Set in a future with actual self-driving cars (that no longer murder people or block emergency services) you move into a new city where you’re one of the last human gig economy taxi drivers.

The friend who invited you to crash on their couch disappeared and so you’re trying to make enough money for your car upkeep and roof over your head competing with machines and the relentless five-stars-or-bust rating system.

So you pick up passengers on the map based on how much fuel you have to get there as well as their star rating. And then try to get through the conversation visual-novel style.

You obviously want to get the five star rating out of each. But does this person even want you to speak? Make small talk or go deep? Will being nice be perceived as just fishing for a good rating?

Or, saying the obviously right things will help the passenger, but net you fewer stars. Or: you’re just fucking livid and will simply not be kind no matter what.

I love when games sometimes take choices from you to reflect your character’s situation. I mean, it’s terrible in action games, RPGs etc. where suddenly you’ve lost your abilities. But not being able to say what you want/should because you’re angry or depressed is awesome.

There’s more to the story (whatever happened to your friend?) amid the city-wide backlash against the monopolisation and machines taking over. And despite a lot of it being bleak in the finest cyberpunk fashion, Neo Cab has a lot of genuinely wonderful human moments.

I got put off by the art a bit at first, but it definitely grew on me as I got deeper into the game.

(website)

Get in the Car, Loser! The Fate of Another World

I have a standing rule that any time Christine Love makes a game, I’ll play it.

The Fate of Another World is a DLC for the Get in the Car, Loser! road trip VN/jRPG.

This DLC sends you into an alternative reality where things that went right in your world’s past… didn’t.

I really enjoyed the banter in this one (just like in the original game and the first DLC and… every single Christine Love game). It’s got basically the same combat so I wasn’t a fan, but yep, great.

Perfect length (maybe… four hours?) and just great fun.

(Steam page)

Vessels

Oooh, this was quite good. I didn’t love the visuals at first, but I got intrigued by what John Walker wrote about it on Buried Treasure.

Vessels is basically a horror story where you play the alien-infected character. The one they end up chucking out of the airlock.

Except, it’s a time-loop game and when you die, you’re back in that airlock trying to convince your shipmates to let you go. You’ve lost all your memory (cliché alert!), but by talking to them you learn information you can use in your next turn.

The game is unsettling, your objectives not necessarily clear from the get-go (but you get a sense that they’re not super noble either). Plays really well with player agency and expectations. Gives you meaningful choices and lets you put the picture together in a way that feels natural and great.

One thing I had a bit of a problem with was that there’s no manual save and the autosave only happens when an act ends.

That means if you happen to start it up when you have 40 minutes while the baby sleeps and before you need to hit the sack too, and you make a good chunk of progress but do not in fact make it through the first act, you will lose that progress.

And like, it’s not a lot of progress or time, but it’s still frustrating.

It takes 3-4 hours to get through the two endings I’ve discovered which is absolutely to its benefit, though.

Otherwise though, great game.

(website)

Citizen sleeper

Okay so the reason I wanted to play this game is something that almost never happens: I’ve seen the trailer and was completely floored.

I actually didn’t know much about what the game play is like or whether I’d like it and as the game came out and people started to talk and write about it, that never really got answered to me.

But every time I’ve heard about it, I’ve watched the trailer again no remind myself of why I had been so intrigued and… just fell in love with it again.

Some combination of the atmosphere, narrative, music and definitely absolutely the amazing voice over just sold it to me every single time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWALcEDTL8U

It is one of the best game trailers I’ve ever seen in my life.

And it’s a really good game as well, though initially a bit disappointing.

I hadn’t realised that the game itself isn’t voiced and that was the part of the trailer that really got its hooks in me.

But the atmosphere is fantastic.

You’re an android who escaped its masters and somehow made it to a space station and tries survive. Which isn’t easy because your body has a built-in decay mechanism (to prevent exactly what you’ve done) and you’re also being followed by a bounty hunter your owners hired.

So you do small jobs around the place, build up a reputation and try to stay ahead of the the inevitable doom that’s slowly approaching.

Each cycle you roll some dice (the number can vary) and each die lets you do something: a job, investigation, trying to break into something etc.

The activities have different difficulties that can are modified by your own skills. You need to slot in a die and that number will also modify a likelihood of you succeeding at it.

So an easy job that you’re skilled for might only need a low number whereas a difficult one might carry a significant risk even if you’re putting in a die with six on it.

I’ve long been interested in randomness and how it interacts with game systems and I’ve always been on the side of things being more deterministic and predictable.

Citizen Sleeper has a really smart system because there is an inherent randomness (which numbers your dice pool will have each cycle), but then you can use those numbers however you want and that gives you a lot of control.

I’ve heard about this and it sounded great in theory.

And it works amazingly well in practice too. I’m typically not into these sorts of systemic games but I had tremendous fun here. They really strike the perfect balance between maintaining your agency and keeping you on edge.

So that alone would make for a great game, but the characters you meet, their writing and design, the narrative absolutely elevates it. I ended up really invested in everyone’s story and there’s a huge amount you can do.

I’ve heard the narrative design compared to Disco Elysium and while very different, I think that’s a fair comparison.

There’s a sequel in the works and I’m really excited about that.

Still wish it had the voice over though.

Eliza

Eliza was a huge unknown for me. It’s made by the Zachtronics studio, which is much better know for their programming puzzle games (Space Chem, Opus Magnum, etc.).

Whereas Eliza is a visual novel featuring an AI therapist.

Right now, the set-up is extremely simple to describe but when I played it I didn’t have the vocabulary necessary.

Imagine one of the newfangled AI/LLM chatbots instructed to play a therapist, hooked up to a voice recognition software (so it can take input from the patient in real time) and (and this is the really interesting bit) paired with a person who doesn’t have any special training but they’ll be the body, face and voice of the AI to offer a more genuine-seeming human connection.

Your character is one of the original programmers building Eliza (the therapist AI) who, for reasons initially left unsaid, takes one of these stand-in therapist jobs.

And yeah this is all done in a visual novel style with lovely graphics, good writing and extremely well-observed narrative that keeps you on toes.

It regularly did things that I really didn’t expect. It’s hard to give examples without spoiling them, but Eliza definitely has things to say about the modern AI bots (which is amazing given it came out over three years before ChatGPT), reverse centaurs (how automation interacts with human workers), privacy and a lot of other social issues that are relevant today.

It is also really powerful in what it doesn’t show. There are patients you lose to follow-up and you’ve no idea what happened to them.

The visual style threw me off a little. I mean the game looks good, but when there are two characters on the screen, they talk to each other, but look at you rather than one another (i.e. into the "camera").

This just feels unnatural — they should be looking at each other when they talk, not in a direction where there’s nothing there.

I’ve felt the same thing with A Summer’s End and I don’t understand how this isn’t something that people notice right away as not working. It’s basically breaking the fourth wall and reminding you these are video game characters looking at the player.

But other than that, Eliza is just a really solid game in pretty much every aspect. If you’ve been put off by visual novels, you may want to give this one a try instead.

(Steam page)

Contra

I don’t know what prompted this. Contra (the original one) was a game I played at my cousins' console like… thirty years ago?

And with the Steam Deck (which is a really rad setup for a regular old platformer action) I just felt like giving it a go.

As it happens, there is the Contra Anniversary Collection available on Steam and it has the original Contra too. I’ve played it for maybe two or three weeks.

And yep, it’s pretty much just like I remembered it. I had fun, but just like with a lot of platformers — especially the older ones but even many of the modern ones — the jumping just doesn’t really feel right.

Plus it’s a game I’d have to spend a lot of time mastering and I just didn’t feel like investing the time and effort in.

Had fun with it, sated my weird pang of nostalgia, moved on.

(Steam page)

Telling Lies

Well. Sigh.

I loved Her Story when it came out and I was really looking forward to the follow-up games.

It’s a really similar setup where you have an arcane system and you search for videos by entering a word that someone on the video said.

This time, they’re taken from video conversations that a spy agency recorded without their knowledge or consent. And the cast of characters is much wider. Some activists, a (former?) special agent of some kind and his family. A companion for hire?

I’ve played it for a good part of a day once when I was sick and confined to bed and got really hooked up on it.

And then never booted it up again.

I like the characters, I’m intrigued by the mystery and would very much like to figure it out. The "guess the words, uncover more videos, build an understanding" mechanic works great.

But. The game goes way too far with trying to present a real world interface in a way that’s (a) actually unrealistic and (b) makes the game nigh fucking unplayable.

The first issue is: when the database shows you videos that match your search words, it starts playing from the point when the word was said. That makes sense and is fine.

But if you want to watch the whole recording (which you do!) you can’t click to the beginning or anywhere in the video! You can only rewind it.

It’s almost as if this was playing an actual video tape (but your in-game character does watch this on a computer!).

And the rewind speed is extremely slow. Slower than you think. Unbearably slow. You spend an inordinate amount of time just sitting there rewinding videos.

Oh and you’d better explicitly bookmark the start of the vid for later viewing because otherwise, it’s the painstakingly slow rewind time again!

And second: the two sides of the conversation are recorded and stored separately. So every time you find a video, you only see and hear what one side is saying, the rest is dead air (and watching the character on the screen listen to something you can’t hear).

Which, again. This is a great idea. You need to pay attention and try to figure out how to get the corresponding part. Try to think of words that the person on the other side might have said.

And it works wonderfully.

Except for this: even when you have both videos, there’s no way to play them side by side. Meaning if you want to hear the full say nine minute conversation, you’ll need to play both 9 minutes one after another and sit through (or fast forward and then slow rewind and ultimately waste more time) and end up listening to nine minutes of broken up conversations and nine minutes of silence.

Which, again. Within the game world, this happens on a computer and even if they hadn’t made a specialised software, you should at the very least be able to just open both videos manually and play them side by side yourself for fuck’s sake.

Absolutely ridiculous.

Rarely have I seen a game so explicitly built around wasting the player’s time.

I’ve simply not had the will/nerve/energy/patience to play it up again despite being really into it.

And I’ve just given up. At some point, I’d like to look up the whole thing on youtube and at least enjoy the story and acting, but the game itself is basically impossible to play.

(Steam page)

Thumper

I’ve heard so much about this game. Wasn’t sure I was going to ever try it, but then I saw it at a deep discount and figured why not.

It’s a rhythm game from hell. I’ve mainly been familiar with the likes of Rocksmith and Frets on Fire — where you play in rhythm to existing classic songs. And I love that genre, but never invested into the peripherals and felt too uncomfortable playing them on the keyboard.

So the idea of a game that’s explicitly designed around a controller (or keyboard) sounded great.

The fact that you’re playing a metallic beetle in a bespoke hellish ambiance a little less so.

But actually playing it, I got hooked instantly.

The game works fantastic on the Steam Deck and looks and feels amazing when you actually play it.

It is deeply anxiety inducing though. Your heart will pump and it has a very clangy violent feel to it. It’s also quite challenging (but then my reaction time and sense of rhythm is quite poor) but when you get in the zone and actually hit the mark perfectly for a few seconds, it feels fantastic.

And you have this desire to come back to the previous levels at some point and master them just to get the feeling a perfect playthrough. I haven’t actually done that yet, but it is there and keeps me going through the gaffes.

Haven’t played it much because another game came in that completely took over all my gaming time but I very much want to return to it.

(website)

Baldur’s Gate III

Speak of the devil.

I wasn’t actually paying a lot of attention to BG3. Loved the previous Baldur’s Gates — they were some of the earliest RPGs I’ve played and while they can’t hold the candle to the original Fallouts or Planescape: Torment, they were both great not to mention cornerstones of the gaming history.

But BG 3 is done by Larian and I… really didn’t go on well with Divinity: Original Sin. I’ve sunk a good chunk of time into it and really wanted to like it, but the world design, writing and sense of humour were really off-putting to me for some reason.

So basically, I expected more of the same in a different setting and just expecting to not enjoy it at all.

Now, I don’t know what happened — especially since all of the classic Divinity gameplay elements are there.

But this game looks and feels so absolutely great where Divinity just left me nonplussed.

I’m very much enjoying the writing here, the world feels great to explore, the mysteries you encounter, the characters you meet. It’s all just as good as everyone was raving about.

Even the combat isn’t terrible and that’s something coming from yours truly.

Plus massive props for diving straight into the interesting aspects of the Forgotten Realms' setting. Where the first BG1 does the most clichéd fantasy journey you can imagine, BG3 starts with you escaping a crashed mindflayer ship after just having been infected with a parasite that’s supposed to you into a mini-Cthulhu within a few hours.

And it builds thins up from there! Meeting Githianki? Prologue. A priestes of Shar? Ditto. Tieflings? A whole band of 'em stuck in a druid grove. And the druids themselves are far from benign or boring.

In no time you’re deep within a goblin camp (and talking to everyone rather than going on a murdering spree — though you’re very much welcome to do that too — this is an RPG after all), meeting devils and oh yeah exploring the fucking Underdark all in the first act.

What I’m trying to say is: there was a way I expected this to go (the slow somewhat boring classic fantasy RPG quest way) and instead they took all the actually intriguing stuff that the D&D franchise grew over the the decades and just put it all in and somehow managed for things to work together and stay coherent. It is very Planescapey in that sense.

So you’re on this wild ride where you’ve no idea what happens next but it feels awesome.

It’s a huge game but unlike Elden Ring, I have a sense of where I am and what I to do next even if I haven’t touched it for six weeks.

Now, at its core it’s still a traditional RPG with crafting, a trillion tonnes of garbage you’ll be dumping into your inventory and all the other nonsense. But it is an extremely well polished version thereof and I’m finding that these things bother me less here than in most other games.

It’s not (so far?) on the level of Planescape Torment or Disco Elysium, but it definitely far exceeds your typical RPGs by a massive margin.

(website)

Done With

Contra
Hades
- Haven’t played it since last year
- But will definitely try Hades 2 (quite possibly on Steam Deck)
Spelunky 1
- Same, haven’t played either since last year
Telling Lies

Since Baldur’s Gate 3 will likely eat into a lot of my play time this year, I plan — once again — to focus on playing smaller games this year. Preferably ones I can play on the Steam Deck.

I’d love to try Demon’s Souls and Cyberpunk 2077 at some point, but it’s highly unlikely this year. If I go for another big game this year, it would be Mass Effect 5, except that’s looking highly unlikely to come out in 2024.

Baldur’s gate III

Obviously. I’m really intrigued by the game and I’ve heard that a basically all the plot lines lead to the city of Baldur’s Gate itself which is in the third act. So there’s lots of narrative pay-offs there.

Yes please.

(website)

Thumper

Similarly, I consider this very much a game in progress for now. Want to play more.

(website)

Scarlet Hollow (new episodes)

There should definitely be at least one more episode coming in 2024 and I’m here for it. Really love the series.

(steam page)

Anything by Christine Love

I don’t know whether she’s got plans to release anything new (if she does, it would likely be a new DLC for Get in the Car, Loser! rather than a brand new game) but any new game she makes I want to play.

(website)

I was a Teenage Excolonist

Leftover from the last year. Still sounds intriguing, still want to give it a go.

(website)

Slay the Princess

A "side project" by Black Tabby Games — the makers of Scarlet Hollow. The setup sounds fascinating: you get sent down into the cellar to kill a princess that’s imprisoned there before she does something horrible.

And she’s… somehow now what she seems?

(website)

Stop Burying Me Alive, Beautiful

I’m getting similar vibes as Slay the Princess from this one.

You find yourself being buried alive by your girlfriend. Because she thinks you’re dead so why on earth are you complaining?

I mean, I’ve no idea whether it’s any good, but the setup is quite intriguing.

(website)

Colony Ship

This is the second game by Iron Tower Studio who made Age of Decadence (my review). I’ve really enjoyed AoD and I knew this game was in development, but I was really surprised to see it’s actually out now.

I’d need to be in the right mood for this (I’m expecting difficult combat and lack of polish but great writing and world building), but I’m still on a lookout for that elusive Fallout 1&2 vibe (that the actual Fallout sequels completely failed at) and this might be reasonably close.

(website)

The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin

2023-11-23T21:37:06+00:00

Tags: book, review

5/5 star

The City We Became is a Lovecraftian antiracist (and therefore anti-Lovecraft) urban fantasy about the city of New York becoming alive.

The birthing process is never easy, but in this case it’s particularly fraught. The city’s main avatar is in deep recovery and five people awaken representing each of its boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island.

They need to survive, learn what the hell is going on, meet and actually agree on doing what needs to be done. Learn to trust one another, cooperate, help each other.

Facing an onslaught of Lovecraftian horrors, but with a twist. Instead of using black as the colour of the otherworldly evil, it is white and with one exception, all the avatars are people of colour. People of different backgrounds, lives, priorities and sexuality. Far from being their ally, the police is controlled by the enemy and concepts such as gentrification will walk around, sporting tentacles.

The subtext is right there on the surface, but here, in this book, in this time, that feels right.

This is a love song to all the cities, well aware of their issues. And as best as someone who’s only observed its vibe through television and writing can judge, it offers a fantastic personification of the Greatest City In The World and all its contrasts.

The story goes places I didn’t expect, surprising me along the way. And even when I thought I had the final twist figured out — it showed me that I was right but also very (delightfully!!) wrong. The ending brought me tears of joy, shouting "yes yes YES!", pumping fists.

Easily my 2023 favourite.

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

The Skeptics' Guide to the Future by Steven Novella

2023-10-01T13:34:04+00:00

Tags: book, review

4/5 stars

This is a book about futurism, a genre that always seems to find me, but I never seek out specifically. I am deeply interested in science and technology, but I don’t tend to find people speculating or trying to seriously predict things that interesting.

It’s so easy to get swept up with your own ideas and biases, miss crucial aspects that will render the prediction irrelevant even if technically accurate or not putting the technology in a societal context.

So what I really liked most about this book is that it addressed this exact thing head-on. They highlighted the common futuristic pitfalls and tried to steer clear of them or being explicit when they were doing far-out speculations versus a sensible interpretation of the current technological progress and pace.

The topics cover space travel, various biology and medical advances, artificial intelligence, robotics, material science, fusion, space elevators and more.

The final section goes over the technologies that form the staple of science fiction — faster-than-light travel, time travel, teleportation, lightsabers etc.

The book is explicitly cautious around commonly-made extrapolations that simply don’t have the evidence to bear out (and provides many examples of this folly from the past) about things that simply won’t ever happen unless we discover new laws of physics or elements and/or combinations thereof. And puts the likelihood of that in the right context.

Whenever they touched upon an area where I had some deeper knowledge, I haven’t found any glaring issues — more simplifications that weren’t technically correct, but were probably right in the context of the book and didn’t change the final outcome anyway. That makes me think that the rest of their research is similarly solid although the authors are not expects in most of the areas they’ve researched.

Overall, it is a great and easy-to-read overview of where we are right now, what’s likely to expect in the relatively near future and what might come in the longer term.

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

What If? 2 by Randall Munroe

2023-05-18T17:56:43+00:00

Tags: book, review

4/5 stars

Just like in the first book, What If? 2 takes funny, clever and sometimes absolutely ridiculous questions and tries to answer them as accurately as possible from a scientific point of view. With humour. And references.

It is a delight to read and while I’m not sure I’ve learned anything useful, I’ve definitely learned a lot.

Mainly how much blood one can drink before they inevitably start to vomit.

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow

2023-05-17T15:31:27+00:00

Tags: book, review

5/5 stars

Red Team Blues is a short but fantastic ride from start to finish. Marty Hench, a 67 year old accountant who specialises in uncovering Silicon Valley fraud and financial shenanigans gets one last job before retiring. A job that will let him retire.

It seems easy enough at first: find who stole cryptographic keys that would compromise a massive cryptocurrency network. But then bad stuff happens, more people get involved and in the end it’s about far more that the mere $1bn of value in the network.

The book is pure plot, never a dull moment. It carries a high risk of pulling you in and not letting you stop until you’ve finished.

In a bit of a departure from Cory’s regular work, it’s less focused on the actual tech (though there’s still plenty at the core) and more on the human aspect and the investigation. I found that worked really well here.

I’ve had lots of fun and while there’s nothing earth-shattering in it, the book’s an excellent read and I’m happy there are more books (prequels) planned. And it stayed in my mind for weeks afterwards.

Wil Wheaton reads the audiobook and as always, does an amazing job of it.

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

Games Played in 2022

2023-04-13T19:31:35+00:00

Tags: video-game, retrospective

Playing video games in 2022 has been really erratic. We’ve had an infant and everything became unpredictable. There were times I could play for a few hours at a time. And then no games for a couple of months.

Elden Ring

I was quite excited about this. I’ve always had a hard time to get into "true" open world games (such as Skyrim, Morrowind, Oblivion). They sounded fascinating, but I’ve never lasted more than a few hours. I couldn’t get on with the systems and combat.

I also always felt a bit lost. Unsure what to do, where to go, worried I’d waste time just randomly wandering around.

Elden Ring seemed perfect. I really get on well with the world-building, aesthetics, equipment and character development of Dark Souls and Bloodborne (plus, they’re some of the very few combat systems in games I genuinely enjoy). But I also couldn’t imagine how it’ll all work.

Both Dark Souls and Bloodborne have a really tightly designed and packed world. All the areas are connected, everything works together. Would it work just as well in a big place where you’re free to wander wherever you’d like?

But Elden Ring is indeed great. The systems work really well and you get the fabled freedom to explore, take on things that strike your fancy and all that.

It definitely all feels less tightly integrated than the other soulsborne games, but it still works. I’ve had loads of fun exploring in the game. Riding around on horseback is fantastic and yeah, just really fun.

The ability to go somewhere you’re clearly not ready for yet, evading danger, picking cool stuff on the way and getting some nice money/items/experience boost that way is something I love doing in RPGs and rarely get to.

Elden ring has that in spades.

It is also much more legible and accessible than its predecessors were. It has an actual map and you have a better idea of where to go and what to do (though it still absolutely doesn’t hold your hand). And much less dark (though it’s not all sunshine and roses).

But the game is hugely, impossibly large. After spending over eighty hours in it, I’m seemingly about halfway through. And that’s just too much.

I’m not sure I’d be able to dedicate the time this game needs in the best of times. With a baby and life that generally leaves me quite drained in the evening it’s not going to work.

You need energy to play this game. And also some sort of regularity. I was only able log in every few weeks and even with my copious notes, I spent so much time just catching up on where I was and what I had planned to do.

It does have some flaws too. Some of the dungeons are very similar to one another, bosses are reused with minor modifications. And I feel bad to just rush through the story because:

I’d be missing so much
I doubt I’d ever return to this game for additional hundreds of hours again

So towards the end of the year, I gave myself a permission to just let it go. I might return at some point (every time I played it I genuinely had fun), but I might not (everytime I wanted to play something, I felt I couldn’t play anything else, but also dreading booting Elden Ring up).

(website)

Life is Strange: Remaster

I’m not sure the original Life is Strange needed a remaster. The original game came out in 2015 and I don’t think it aged that badly.

But I’ve been meaning to replay it and Before the Storm in the story order (i.e. BtS firs and then LiS proper as opposed to the order they were released in). And this remaster happened as part of Life is Strange: True Colors release so… sure… let’s play the touched-up version.

I don’t think that much has changed, really. It wasn’t particularly more amazing visually or anything.

But I had fun with it. Max and Chloe is the best time.

It did show its age though. The controls are clumsier here than in the latter games. Some of the writing feels a bit off, the voice over is more miss than hit for a few characters. The dream sequence in the final episode was always just terrible and it still is.

But I got to spend quality time with Max and Chloe and that was still awesome.

More than anything though, it’s really interesting going back to the original game and seeing what evolved out of it. With 3-5 games (depending on what you’re counting), the "Life is Strange" formula is clearer and broader than what this particular game did. But it did set off a trend that’s been used successfully in the years since.

(website)

Clicker Heroes

This was a really unexpected comeback.

I’d played this game about 12 years ago and stopped when the grind got real.

Recently, I was thinking about picking up a game like Clicker Heroes — that I could leave running in the background on my tablet and click around when I felt like it and had a bit of time. Low effort pick up and drop back again.

Tried a couple idle/clicker games, they didn’t stick and so I’ve tried Clicker Heroes again.

And (for what it is), it’s really fun. Not something you want to dedicate a lot of attention, but just setting things up and having the numbers grow exponentially is great.

What I hadn’t appreciated before is the insight this gives you into the differences between linear and exponential growth. One you rarely see elsewhere.

The whole arc of the game changes significantly as you progress through and there’s always something else you want to see which keeps you playing and forces you to change your play styles over time.

By now, I think I saw almost everything there is to see there though (meaning: I was on my second 1M+ HZE transcension, unlocked three of the five Scout heroes, joined a clan for a while, went through several special events and the only substantial achievement missing was Leeroy Jenkins).

So by March 2023 I’ve had my fill and gave it a rest, but it is genuinely more fun than I expected.

(website)

Knights of San Francisco

Wow, this is such a lovely little short thing.

Think of the "gamebook" or "choose your adventure" books. Where you read a section, make a choice and it’ll tell you which page to turn for the next piece of the story.

Knights is the best translation of that idea into a video game that I’ve seen. I’m always surprised these games are relatively few and far between. There’s a few gamebook ports (most famously, Sorcery!) but little else (alternatively: I’ve just never really delved into the Twine games and interactive fiction where almost all of these games exist).

Knights is an original story and game designed specifically for the platform (iOS and Android).

As such, the combat system, map and everything else works perfectly. It looks great too — clear and beautiful while preserving the look-and-feel of the gamebooks.

The story is set in a post-apocalyptic (or possibly just decayed) fantasy San Francisco. And the protagonist is a necromancer. When you kill someone, you can raise them from the dead and have them join your party.

It’s a really cool game, with a simple but good story and a world where your particular magical ability is surprisingly well integrated into the setting. This is something that I see very rarely and value a lot.

I’ve learned about it thanks to The Buried Treasure blog.

(website)

Butterfly Soup 2

The first Butterfly Soup is one of my favourites. The perfect comfort game. Funny, short, beautiful, wonderful.

Just like Butterfly Soup, the sequel is a visual novel that takes roughly four hours to play. It’s about four gay Asian girls playing baseball and going through their lives in California while attending high school.

I loved the original as well as this one so much.

It gets a bit more heavy and serious in places and I feel it’s a little more polished too. Especially Min-seo grew a bit more mature, but also had to confront some of her internalised prejudice. And Noelle’s visit to her family in Taiwan, I mean… I can only imagine what she was feeling but fuuuuuck.

But it is absolutely still Butterfly Soup.

The game starts right where the first one ended (not the epilogue, just the main story at the high school) and I think the best way to think about it is as a second part to the story introduced in the first game.

It is an absolutely amazing piece and I’ll almost certainly play this (along with the first part) again.

(website)

Scarlet Hollow

Another Buried Treasure.

And goodness what a treasure it is.

Scarlet Hollow is a horror visual novel, but most of the time it’s about feeling a little unsettled by what’s going on rather than full-on terror (though horrible things can and do happen in every episode).

You travel to a remote city where your estranged aunt has died. Your cousin invited you to the funeral that’s in seven days. You live in a derelict house and meet the locals in Scarlet Hollow — the nearby town.

It’s a mining city and your cousin Tabitha is the owner of the mines. The city has a storied history and things start to get weird fast.

Scarlet Hollow is a wonderful game, light-hearted and genuine, funny and sweet, but also absolutely dark and heavy. Especially the latest episode that came out (number four out of seven) gets pretty fucking rough though #3 was no slouch either.

It’s quite unlike most visual novels so if you’ve been put off by the genre, do give this one a go nonetheless. It’s brilliantly written, super replayable, with real huge consequences to your actions that persist across episodes and completely change the situation.

In many ways, it’s actually pretty close to a bare-bones RPG in a visual-novel format. Not quite there, but yeah just super fascinating.

I’m eagerly awaiting the last three episodes.

(website)

Heaven Will Be Mine

I’ve been reading about Heaven Will Be Mine for a long time, to the point of having it installed on my tablet (and therefore super easy to pick up) and still not touched it for about two years.

Well not anymore.

It’s a genuinely strange sci-fi visual novel where you play a pilot of a huge combat ship. The ships are like the extensions of the pilots' bodies — there’s connection that goes beyond a machine and its user.

The Solar System has suffered an existential threat that was never made clear, but it got averted — mainly thanks to these ships and their pilots. Right now, three factions with vastly differing views of where to take humanity and further exploration are at conflict with each other.

Despite being on the opposing sides, the pilots are lonely and isolated and have more in common with themselves than the rest of the humanity. So they fight when ordered, but also talk and visit each other’s ships (and more).

The whole setting is quite text-heavy. There’s a lot of exposition there that’s part sci-fi and part… philosophy that has physical effects? For example the gravitational pull is both a function of mass but also of culture and their effects are intertwined.

This mix is kind of hard to read and understand — especially when you’re a sleep-deprived parent dealing with the after effects of an MS attack combined with corticosteroid IV whose ability to focus is tenuous at best (I played it at weird time okay?).

I’ve really enjoyed it, but the descriptions made about as much sense to me as Deepak Chopra. I think Heaven Will Be Mine has much more substance though, I just was too tired to appreciate it fully.

I’ve finished one playthrough and really liked it all the way to the end.

Wanted to give it another go with a different character, but I never got around to it.

(website)

Done With

Rather than feeling guilty and thinking I’ll get back to them, I’m letting these games go:

Elden Ring
Heaven Will Be Mine
Geneforge 1
Clicker Heroes

Not Quite Done With Yet

Spelunky

I’ve got a Steam Deck in December and while setting it up, I’ve played a few Spelunky runs. It’s still a fantastic game that I’m now incredibly rusty with.

Honestly it’s amazing how well together the game is put. Also a little sad that I prefer it to Spelunky 2, but oh well.

I suspect with the super easy way to pick up, I might play more throughout the year.

No recording, no dailies or anything, just 15 minutes of fun.

Hades

Haven’t played it for the entire year, thinking I won’t ever get to it and then… played a few runs in December. And I think I’ll definitely play a few more when the mood strikes.

I don’t have any big games lined up now (freed from the clutches of Elden Ring and Geneforge 1) and while each run takes quite a lot of time (around 40-60 minutes now that I’m able to get quite far), it’s an awesome experience and a world and characters I want to return to.

(website)

There’s a couple of games that I definitely want to get to. And then a bunch that I’ve been thinking about and will probably fire up at some point unless something huge comes out that will take all my remaining gaming time away.

I mean, Mass Effect 5 isn’t going to come out for another couple of years.

Scarlet Hollow (new episodes)

This game took me completely by surprise and didn’t let me go. With more episodes scheduled in 2023, I’ll definitely come back.

Get in the Car, Loser! The Fate of Another World

If Christine Love makes a game, I’ll play it. That’s the rules.

And she has just released a DLC to Get in the Car, Loser! The systems in that game spoke to me a little less than her previous works, but it’s still a wonderful piece of writing, humour and character building.

Of course I’ll play the DLC.

Neo Cab

Cyberpunk VN? Self-driving cars and you being one of the last human cabbies left? Works on the Steam Deck? Yes please!

Vessels

Another Buried Treasure thing that really got me interested so I’d love to give it a go.

I loved the time loops in Minit and Outer Wilds and have a soft spot for them in books and TV (stargate anyone?).

So yeah, this sounds fascinating and also have a pretty intriguing setup on top of that — you having a total amnesia, possibly being possessed by an alien or something and being thrown out of an airlock at the end of each loop.

Definitely intrigued.

Citizen Sleeper

I love the trailer and the atmosphere of this.

Not sure I’ll love the actual gameplay (heard mixed reactions), but deffo want to experience it for myself.

I Was A Teenage Excolonist

Cute-looking choice-based VN-like sci-fi RPG. Sign me up!

Demon’s Souls Remake

I’ve never played the original Demon’s Souls, but it’s the soulslike that kicked of Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Elden Ring.

I want to give it a go, but I generally need some break between soulslikes. They’re quite intense and demanding. And based on my experience with Elden Ring I’m not going to rush into it.

That said, the main game seems to take around 30 hours which is much more acceptable (though it’ll be like 50 for me, then).

The Biggest Ideas in the Universe by Sean Carroll

2023-02-02T22:18:26+00:00

Tags: book, review

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

5/5 stars

I find cosmology and quantum mechanics absolutely fascinating, but the books on the subject always had this problem: the ones targeted at the general audience always resort to flawed analogies and end up misleading you. And the rest is a scientific literature that requires a degree to be understood.

Nothing in between.

Nothing that is, until The Biggest Ideas came along.

The premise is simple: we’ll show you the equations, we’ll give you enough maths background to understand them and use them to illustrate the real concepts while still targeting a general-level audience.

You’ll need to sit down and think, but there’s no homework, no drudgery, no exams here. Just a desire to show you what’s really going on.

This book is the first part of a trilogy, covering the classical (i.e. non-quantum) physics. From Newton to Einstein’s General Relativity and black holes.

It is a dizzying, but glorious ride. It touches not only some of the most fundamental aspects of physics, but it’s peppered with fascinating historical anecdotes and goes into the philosophy of physics as well.

A lot of emphasis is put on the "spherical cow philosophy" — which gets its name from a joke but underlies a real and extremely successful approach to describing systems: start with the bare minimum you need, ignoring everything else (friction, gravity etc.) and come up with the equations.

More often than not, you can add all that stuff later to make it precise, but that initial model will be surprisingly precise, insightful and reliable. You can get a lot done this way.

I love that it dives into the special relativity without any fanfare. And indeed, the explanations put forward are much clearer than any I’ve read in the past. I mean, once you understand the equation for calculating the proper (i.e. measured by the observer) time in Minkowski space, everything else follows. Including that the universe has a speed limit.

I’ve not internalised the lessons fully yet, but I have a much better framework to think in and I can run though the equations again to solidify them better later on.

This is amazing.

The general relativity bits were much trickier. Touching matrices and geometry (my two weakest areas) and having been read in the late evening, exhausted after putting our one-year-old to sleep, I got much less out of them. But the insight of how to determine a curvature without embedding it in higher dimensions and the rough steps getting to the Einstein’s field equations from that — they resonated and stuck around.

And I’m much clearer on the principle of equivalence and why it’s such a huge deal.

Crucially, I now know all the mathematics involved in deriving the equations of general relativity and they’re not that much complex than the maths I know or used to know. So with some work, I’m confident I can get there.

So yes, if you’re not a-priori scared of equations and you’ve always wanted to understand what relativity was all about but couldn’t quite find the time to get a physics PhD, this is an excellent book.

The very last sentence in The Biggest Ideas reads: "Good times."

And that sums it up perfectly.

It by Stephen King

2022-10-06T08:01:52+00:00

Tags: book, review

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

5/5 stars

We have a long history together, It and I. Released only a few months after I was born, It was there in the background for much of my life.

I’ve seen Part 1 of the 1990 movie version when I was around 10 years old and it messed me up for months. Literal, actual months. I was terrified of going out when it rained, gave storm drains wide berths and even the bathroom sink was frightening.

I have in fact, swore off the entire genre of horror completely — and seeing It was a big part of that. But like I said: it was there, always present. A story unfinished. A challenge unmet.

Ten years ago, I saw it in a bookshop, bought it on a whim and then let it lie on my shelf. Waiting, never opened, but never forgotten.

Until now.

The town of Derry in Maine, US is being shocked by disappearances and murders of children. Seven kids realise that things are even more sinister than they seem on the surface and come together to stop it against the background of bullying and sheer adult indifference. All they know is that whoever’s behind this is capable of embodying the most terrifying nightmares and has a penchant for the image of a clown holding a bunch of colourful balloons.

Twenty seven years later, they’re all called back to finish the job once and for all.

The book follows both timelines and it’s really clever about connecting them, keeping you on edge and always intrigued. The information trickles out as needed for the biggest impact. No long expositions, no monologuing or excessive wrapping-up.

It is absolutely without a question a true, proper horror story. The things that happen there span the "mundane" human evil and the cosmic almost incomprehensible vastness. I’m not an expert of the genre, but It does evoke some Lovecraftian moments and themes. However, they’re not an attempt to imitate or ride the tentacular incomprehensibleness wave like so many Lovecraft-inspired works seem to.

Indeed, the most horrific things that were happening in the book were done by other human beings. A lot of the time, the main antagonist felt more like a force of nature. Something that’s always been there and always will be. It’s hard to truly remain angry at an earthquake.

The people though, are another case entirely.

Surprisingly, I kept getting strong fairy tale vibes as well. One definitely meant for adults, but it had a lot of the same themes, ideas and plot progressions. I’m a sucker for adult fairy tales so this was unexpected but very much welcome.

It is a long book, but it uses the time responsibly to build up the place and characters. You get a wonderful sense of Derry’s atmosphere and the people feel absolutely real. Warped, perhaps, by what’s happening there — but very much alive.

And as I was reading it, I kept being amazed by Stephen King’s craft. The world building, plot, pacing, the use of language. It all felt a level above of what I normally read (and I don’t think all the other authors are poor writers!).

Nothing there is just to serve the plot. The characters don’t momentarily turn stupid just for a cheap blood spurt. Indeed, despite clearly being very much children, they were clever and brave and resourceful.

I was hanging on every word and enjoyed the whole thing all the way through to the end.

But it is horror. Sometimes brutal, sometimes disgusting, sometimes just plain old weird and sometimes… well, the list of trigger warnings would be longer than many short stories.

I feel though, that it wields its power responsibly. You know that when something happens, King didn’t do it out of a base desire to evoke a cheap emotion in you. That there’s a purpose there. That it all fits together to build something grand.

Thankfully, while being really powerful, I was not scared. Not once did I go out in the rain and feel a pang of fear passing a storm drain or walking out in the dark. Haven’t had any nightmares.

I wouldn’t have been able to get far with it otherwise. To this day I still can’t handle horror films, but for some reason, apparently, I can handle them in a written form. I’ve actually looked up a scene from the 1990 film on youtube today — wondering how they compared (the one where young Bevy goes to the bathroom and hears voices). And I was deeply shaken up. But reading it in the book was okay.

If you’re as squeamish and easily scared as I am, and reading can trigger that too, this is not a book for you. Otherwise, it is a work of beauty well worth your time.

And for me, it opened up a whole new genre.

The Godfather by Mario Puzo

2022-08-30T14:23:33+00:00

Tags: book, review

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

4/5 stars

I first read The Godfather when I was sixteen and it made a tremendous impact on me. It was one of my all-time favourites. Twenty years later, I felt it was a time to see how well it held up.

The book follows a powerful Italian mafia family in New York mostly set in around the 1940s and 50s. It features an ensemble of characters from the Don Vito Corleone and his right-hand-man Tom Hagen to his sons, captains of the troops and a score of other people who they come across.

It starts really strong: short vignettes of people in all manners of dire straits they can’t solve themselves. The police or the government won’t help. They’ve all got one thing in common: The Godfather, Don Corleone himself. Who, as is the Sicilian tradition, cannot deny a request at his daughter’s wedding.

At the wedding we meet the family, the full cast of characters and get our first glimpse into Don. Not a cold-hearted murderer, but a kindly man who will always help those in need and all he asks is a promise of a favour at some point in the future.

The story keeps on going and it’s one of those books that is really hard to put down. Things change rapidly and while it jumps from character to character, it keeps a great pace throughout. And the people in it feel very human. Real and believable.

I also love the way it introduces a completely new culture to you. A lot of the main characters are the first or second-generation Italian immigrants, and there is a very strong-knit culture that’s a blend of American exceptionalism and personal freedom blended with the traditional Sicilian values and topped with the mafia’s code of conduct.

But the book is also deeply problematic in many, many aspects.

I know historical revisionism in a work of fiction is a fraught endeavour at best, and the actions and thoughts expressed by characters therein don’t necessarily reflect those of the author.

However, I struggle to excuse the pervasive sexism, racism and xenophobia here as merely belonging to their characters and their time. The line between the author, narrator and a character is often blurred as to be non-existent.

The narration happily jumps from a quite neutral-sounding description to a brazen judgement in the same paragraph. A judgement never aimed at the men of the family.

Don Corleone’s wife’s culture is literally called primitive (but the Don, coming from the same culture is nothing but). There’s a whole subplot involving a woman who’s only defining feature is that she’s got a large vagina. Nothing else is shown — indeed, there is also a man who’s got a large penis, but his character is fully realised.

The book is full of point-of-view scenes of even minor or one-time characters, but these are almost never afforded to women. And when there is the odd woman with a shred of individualism, she always ends up completely submitting herself and being deferential to a man.

But the most pernicious aspect is the brazen apologia permeating the novel.

The individualism and personal freedom trumps absolutely everything there. Whoever stands in your way needs to be removed and a man of ambition of course needs to seek absolute power above anything else. It tries to convince you that a brutal dictatorship is very much the best way to live.

"Like many business men of genius [Don Vito Corleone] learned that free competition was wasteful, monopoly efficient."

This, of course, is not a thing that would easily go down with people so the book tries really hard to make it seem anything other than what it actually is. The Don is shown as a person of infinite patience and passion and care. Rather than the power-hungry psychopathic murderer he is.

As you’d expect in a book about the mafia, people are killed here. And in every one of these cases, it’s because the person was in the way and didn’t clear out when told (or was "politely asked").

The killing was always strictly business. No emotions. Once it became clear the person will not accept the Don’s offer, their personality and reasons and anything else became completely irrelevant. They were an obstacle that needed to be removed. That’s how the Don operates, as has been explicitly shown throughout the entire book.

And that would all be fine (in the context of a novel about a crime family)!

But. Every time someone was to be murdered, the book dedicated a page or two to the victim. Not to humanise them. The only purpose for that section was to convince the reader that this had been a terrible person and killing them wasn’t so bad. Maybe they should have been tried and convicted, but really, in the presence of a corrupt and inept government, this was justice.

The victim would turn out to be a child-abusing paedophile, or a power-hungry corrupt policeman brutalising their neighbourhood. To my recollection, the Corleone family hadn’t killed a single innocent person.

And what the book doesn’t show is extremely telling. There’s no visible harm on the society caused by the mafia’s corrupting the politicians, unions, judges. No impact on the victims' families. No small businessman getting caught on the wrong side. No one got caught in the crossfire. No effects of the drug trade they enabled (after all, it was pushed to the poor coloured parts of the city so no real harm was done).

It tries really hard to convince you that despite what they’ve done, these are not terrible people. Not really. They’re good-natured folk who do what must be done in a world that hates everyone. In a world where only the powerful are safe and free, you must gain power.

Of course, even in the fiction the mafia’s actions are no better than that of the government they so fiercely oppose. They’re much worse in fact. But the book clearly has an ideological bent. As if it is seeking approval of the people involved with the mafia above everyone else. As if it’s hoping that the real dons and capo regimes will read it and think "Exactly! This guy gets us!"

And I find this — the overt, desperate attempt to make these crooks and their actions justifiable and justified — and even trying to convince you that this is a better way of living — deeply problematic. And extremely worrying that I hadn’t seen through it previously.

It’s like those disaster novels pushing the narrative that the only way to survive is to eat your neighbour before he eats you.

And yet it is still a fantastic novel to read, one with a tremendous impact on the culture for decades to come.

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

2022-08-05T19:01:38+00:00

Tags: book, review

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

5/5 stars

How to be an Antiracist is a fantastic, clear, extremely well laid-out book on bigotry and how to fight it.

Each chapter begins with couple of terms it defines (e.g. "racist policy" and "antiracist policy") and then delves into the examples, cases, research, quotes from all sides, historical context and personal anecdotes.

It builds up the picture of what a racist world looks like, how it affects people and then contrasts it with what antiracist behaivour, policies and world would be like.

For example, one of the earlier chapters deals with the racist and antiracist policies. It lays out details and harms of the segregationist policy ("other races are bad and should stay away") followed up with the assimilationist approach ("don’t see colour, don’t say racism") and highlights how both are racist.

This was something I was beginning to appreciate lately, but it’s nonobvious for a lot of people. And I definitely have the assimilationist tendencies. By trying to integrate Black (or whoever) people into the white culture and way of living, what these policies do is claim that their existing behaviour, the existing culture, their existing way of living — is bad. Inferior. Something to be driven out — not by driving the people out (by segregating them), but by erasing their culture and have them adopt the mainstream one.

It shifts the narrative from "Black people are bad" to "Black culture is bad".

Plus, erasing the notion of race, removing it and the colour from the language prevents people from speaking up against racism, thus perpetuating it.

The author shows plenty of examples from his own life where he experienced racism himself and how it affected him. But also, more powerfully, where he himself held racist views and behaviours and how he changed his mind.

The majority of the people living in a racist society will end up being racist. Even the people discriminated against. This is something that is clear as soon as you try to think about it clearly and very much visible everywhere. But it is nonetheless an idea that’s not commonly held.

Black people can be and often are racist. Against Black people. Women can be and often are sexist — against women.

The book paints a convincing picture (which is borne out by the evidence) that races as a concept were manufactured in order to gain support for colonialism and slavery — both extremely lucrative endeavours (unless you’re the one being enslaved or colonised of course).

It goes into great detail of how we ascribe the behaviour of individuals to entire groups and how that’s blatantly incorrect as well as damaging.

"Behavior is something humans do, not races do", Ibram says and I concur.

While the first half of the book focuses on the notion of race itself, the second half expands the notion to all bigotry and shows how classism, sexism, xenophobia and homophobia are all just different sides of the same power-hungry controlling coin. And how when they combine, their impact multiplies.

In the fight to make the world a better place, they can’t be treated as separate, independent aspects.

"To truly be anti-racist is to be a feminist. To truly be a feminist is to be an anti-racist."

This is something I’ve started noticing myself, seeing the similarities between the race discussions and scaremongering, having seen the exact same arguments and attitudes when learning about the treatment of women and homosexuals. And seeing the same happening in the recent manufacturing of the transgender panic.

And of course learning how the suffragette movement was powered by Black women who were then left behind by the white ones. How sexism and homophobia is rampant everywhere — including Black people. And how being Black and gay or Black and a woman puts you at the bottom of the bottom.

It was heartening to see this "unification of bigotry" put forth so clearly. I think it is a thing that’s often overlooked and extremely important to point out. I expected this book would only focus on the matters of race, but it is so much greater for not going beyond.

"Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists. If we don’t, then WE are blamed for our own assaults. Our own deaths."

This book is written by a Black American and a lot of the topics discussed are done so through that lens. However, the lessons reach much farther than that and they’re applicable to every group and every society even if the details are a little different.

If you are interested in the matter of race or any other bigotry, this books is an excellent starting point.

One side note about the audiobook: it is read by the author and while he narrates well, his diction felt a little off to me. Sometimes it sounded like he ended a sentence prematurely or put pauses that were either too long or too short. I found this a little distracting at first, but the content quickly won me over and the audiobook is a great way to experience this work.

The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa

2022-07-06T21:02:29+00:00

Tags: book, review

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

4/5 stars

Ooh, what a fascinating book this one. If you read the blurb you might think this is a sci-fi/fantasy mystery novel. It is not and expecting that might disappoint.

It is a slice of life story following one woman (who’s never given a name) living on an island where occasionally, the ruling power declare that something is harmful to the society and will disappear. And for the most part, people stop to notice the object and forget. Those who don’t become the target of the eponymous police.

The book tells a story of the woman, her long-time family friend (referred to as the Old Man) and "R" — her editor. R remembers.

The protagonist is a novelist and we get a glimpse of the story she’s writing. Seemingly completely disconnected from what’s going on at first, but as these things often go, connections will become clearer as time goes on.

I found the focus on memories, what they mean and what happens when they’re lost absolutely fascinating. And this book takes that seriously. There are times when as a reader I forgot (heh!) that an object had disappeared earlier in the story only to be reminded of it by its in-your-face absence later on.

There’s a lot you can read into there: authoritarianism, police state, dismantling of human rights. I don’t know how much of that is intended, but the book (written 28 years ago) is very much open to interpretation.

This is the first book I’ve read from a Japanese writer as well as one set in Japan. I can’t tell how representative it is of the wider Japanese literature, but it feels special and something that would stand out even in that space.

The way it’s written, very little tells you about the place or even time it’s set in. There’s a mention of a "tatami" and when a character learns to type on a typewriter, they start with "a", "i", "u", "e" "o" and "ka", "ki", "ku", "ke", "ko". Those were the only two things that unambiguously placed the story in Japan to me.

None of the characters have a proper name. And while there are no phones or computers, the reader never learns whether that’s because the story is set at a time before them — or whether they’ve been disappeared before the book started.

It is a fascinating story that makes you think for days after it’s finished. It flows really easily and as the it picks up the pace, it’s hard to put down. It’s never truly horrific (though a disappearance of one particular item really shocked me and it was painful to deal with) but there is horror implied and weirdly accentuated by people’s lack of reaction to it as their memories fade away.

I had no idea where it was going, but I’ve very much enjoyed the ride.

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

2022-05-25T20:14:23+00:00

Tags: book, review

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

5/5 stars

This is a book that seemingly everyone in my circle either read and really liked or plans to read.

There are two factions fighting a war across time. Each keeps sending their agents to make changes that tip the scale to their side and undo the work of the enemy agents.

Which is all well and good and stalematey until the best agent on one side (codename: Blue) sends a letter to the her counterpart (codename: Red). And a correspondence develops. And with it, a relationship.

The book is quite short with each chapter (also generally quite short) describing one of the agents mission up to the point where it ends and they discover and read the next letter. The next chapter follows the other agent.

It’s an extremely simple concept, but it feels fresh and it works really well. The letters are amazing. As soon as the first one popped up, full of braziness, taunting, snark, I was hooked completely.

The prose between the letters is mainly about mood setting. Don’t expect any deep technology dives. It’s more flowery and a little vague on purpose. You’ll get the feel for the world and the mission.

It reminds me a little of the City novel by Clifford D. Simak. In the prose, the vagueness, the mystery. The contrasts between what’s happening and what’s written. The fact that the book could have been written in any decade/any century.

But it all comes down to the correspondence here. The book is written by two authors (Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone) and each wrote one of the agents. This gives each character their own glorious personality. Blue’s cockyness and teasing. In contrast with Red’s uncertain, clumsy responses.

In the last five years or so, I’ve been sending written letters (as no other form communication is possible) and a lot of Red’s self-consciousness and awkwardness hit’s really close.

The entire book is a delightfully wild ride. Perfectly paced and well-suited to be consumed in one sitting. I’ve enjoyed it thoroughly from the beginning all the way to the end without a single complaint.

I absolutely recommend picking up the audiobook version if you can. The two narrators make the Red and Blue’s personalities come alive.

The Third MS Attack

2022-05-03T20:15:39+00:00

Tags: personal, health

Obligatory Disclaimers

This post discusses medical stuff. I’m not a doctor and I’m not your doctor. Nothing here is meant to be either giving or asking for medical advice.

I find reading about other people’s accounts of their weird medical experiences fascinating. Maybe this will be interesting to you.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Recap

Multiple sclerosis is a chronic (i.e. you live with it) disease that causes your immune system to attack your nervous system. This can cause a host of neurological symptoms (vertigo, difficulty walking, tingling, reduced eyesight, mood and speech issues, etc. etc. etc.) and it gets worse over time as the damage to the brain and spine accumulates.

I have it.

The Third Attack

For a lot of people (including yours truly), MS operates in two stages. Most of the time, you’re in your day-to-day baseline that’s stable. Occasionally, it’s interrupted by a significant worsening of symptoms (and/or an appearance of new ones) that lasts several weeks. This is called an attack or relapse.

You can read the account of my last attack here.

In the early April, a new one started and as of right now, it’s still ongoing. It is different enough that for a few days I hadn’t even realised it was an attack.

My left leg started to feel a little weird. It felt numb, with tingling, occasionally pins and needles. And just… wrong, somehow. At first, I thought it may have been just cold or the leg went asleep or something, but it persisted no matter what I did (walked around, increased the temperature in the room, took a shower, etc.).

It also seemed like it’s spreading. I don’t know when I’ve noticed it first, but it didn’t affect my lower back, belly and private parts right away. I’ve also realised that the skin was getting quite sensitive.

The weirdest thing though was that the altered sense of temperature. Anything that was cold started to feel warm. I’ve first noticed that on the loo as the toilet seat (which is generally slightly cooler than one’s body unless you’ve got those fancy heated ones) felt warm on the left side while the right side had the normal slightly cool feeling.

So next time in the shower, I aimed a stream of cold on it. It was absolutely bizarre! I cranked it to the coldest temperature (something I can’t stand normally), and all I felt in the leg was this strange, but definitely warm and completely bearable feeling.

I’ve also noted the opposite. When taking a bath (I take mine one notch down from unbearably hot) the left leg just felt slightly cold as if it weren’t near the boiling point.

That was the final straw that convinced me this was probably an MS attack and either way I needed to do something about it.

Similar to MS itself, there’s no easy test to determine whether something is or isn’t an attack. You need to exclude any of the other potential explanations (ongoing infection, injury, pinched nerve) and see what remains. The symptoms should also persist (which they absolutely do).

So it was pretty clear-cut in this case. Plus, these particular symptoms are pretty much typical for MS and there’s a been few more things happening at the same time very much in correlation:

The right-hand side of my body (right arm and leg) is weaker now than it should be. Something found in the neurological exam, but also something I definitely feel. It’s harder for me to type and I make more mistakes. Playing the guitar is more difficult too — especially anything that involves more complex movements of the right hand.

And when walking, my right leg feels heavier and I tend to drag it behind when I don’t focus on walking right.

So they gave me the standard three-day IV session of solu-medrol which knocked me out good, but should calm the immune system down. I was extremely fatigued afterwards (sleeping 14+ hours and exhausted the rest of the day) and also noticeably slower in my thinking.

Really bizarre experience when you’re aware you’re making absolutely stupid mistakes and having trouble understanding things that you know you were capable of dealing with before but now you just can’t.

Thankfully, that only lasted a few days during Easter as it was related to the IV medication rather than the attack itself.

Current Status

The attack is still ongoing. My right leg and hand are still weaker and clumsier than before. I feel it’s a little better but it’s hard to judge.

The left leg still feels as if it were asleep a lot of the time. And the weird temperature sensations are still there too.

I’m still a little more tired than I would be normally.

But I’m able to function and while none of this feels great, it’ll pass and I’ve mostly returned back to my normal life. For safety reasons, I’m not driving the car or climbing. I’m also avoiding exerting my body too much. I’m doing less strenuous exercises and trying to avoid stress.

Which is really easy to do as we’re not in the middle of a pandemic while a nearby country roleplays 1938 Germany.

Anyway, now I just need to wait for it to slowly (over the next few weeks) subside.

What Next

In my previous post, I’ve mentioned (hoped, really) that the two attacks established a baseline of around six years. Well, this next one happened a little over two years after so… yay.

This, combined with the actual neurological observations suggest that it may be time to switch to a different (stronger) medication.

There’s a tradeoff there, but we’ll see how it all goes.

For now, I’ll have a couple of MRI exams scheduled (one for the brain and another one for the entire spinal cord) and I’ll see my neuro for a follow-up in a couple of weeks.

Update from 10th October, 2022

It’s been several months and while it’s not wrapped up completely, enough has happened to warrant an update.

Still On

Unfortunately, the attack is still seemingly ongoing. I’m still experiencing all the issues with the left-hand side of my body (left leg feeling numb, different temperature perception, touch sensitivity, etc.). The right-hand side seems to do better but not completely back to normal.

Apparently, (and I didn’t know this) the attacks can last anywhere from a few days to several months. This one was categorised as somewhat heavy given the scope of the "damage" and its duration.

So things may get better still (that’s the expected pattern).

But it’s also possible that the attack is in fact over and what I’m experiencing is the result to the spinal chord damage done by the immune system. Really hard to tell now since this is still within the standard range of attack durations.

I can live with it. I can drive, walk, climb, all the things. But it feels really unpleasant. Always there in the background. I’ve been able to tolerate and work around it, but not get used to it or ignore it.

Tests

I’ve had a second IV of solu-medrol after the first one to see if it improves things, but at that point it was a crapshoot. This therapy works best when applied right away. I had some delay and the second dose was right at the end of the theoretical effectiveness.

The MRI was really cool in that it showed a new lesion in the spine right at the place you’d expect one to explain the symptoms I was experiencing. Upon seeing it, my neurologist apologised because she was happy since this had pretty much confirmed everything. But I felt the same way. Always good to get an objective validation.

More Tests

So all this helped us plot the course. Given the amount of time between these attacks and the severity of this one, it’s time to switch to a different medication.

There were several options — they all do pretty much the same thing but they’re applied differently and the underlying mechanism might be different.

We picked up Ocrelizumab (Ocrevus) as it’s an IV infusion every six months. The other options were either an injection every month or tablet every day. I was ready to try something that’s not a shot and I’d rather get it all done twice a year than pop a pill daily.

The guidelines for getting the treatment required a bunch of medical tests as a prerequisite. So in the span of five weeks in the summer I had:

An x-ray of the chest
Full dental examination
Full dermatological examination (looking at all my birth marks etc.)
An ultrasound of my abdomen
EKG
Ear, throat and nose checked up

The primary goal was to detect any active infections or possible malignancies (cancer). Since Ocrevus works by suppressing portions of the immune system, anything dormant might pop out and cause real trouble. The all came back clean, but it was a little tiring and nerve-racking.

Ocrevus

That’s because the way Ocrelizumab (a monoclonal antibody) works is by completely eliminating your B lymphocytes. These are implicated in the immune response that attacks the myelin in the neurons (aka the mechanism in which MS operates) and so by killing them off, there’s basically no one to do the attacking.

As a really interesting side note, Ocrelizumab has been approved in March 2017 and it’s the first FDA-approved drug for the Primary Progressive MS. Which is HUGE. Primary Progressive is basically where you don’t have attacks, instead you just steadily get worse and worse. And none of the standard (or any other, really) treatments were effective. Until now.

Every medication comes with a trade-off. This one is: you slow the progression of your MS (fewer attacks, fewer damage), but it’s an immunosuppressive drug, meaning you become more susceptible to infections and they can be more severe. Oh and vaccines will become less effective (but even more important).

This is not an easy choice to make. When they’re a bit older, our baby will be bringing all the diseases back from the kindergarten and school. Plus we’re well into the third year of this global pandemic which will probably never go away.

But I felt I’ve actually learned a lot of important lessons on protecting myself from infection during said pandemic (masking in enclosed public spaces, carrying a hand sanitiser everywhere, not feeling bad or embarrassed being the only masked up person on the bus etc.) that should serve me well here.

So Sunday 18th September was my last Rebif (interferon beta) injection.

And on Monday 26th September, I had my first half of the first dose. They split the first dose into two infusions separated by 14 days. It’s potent stuff and they want to monitor you throughout the IV as well as see how you react the few days after.

Before the main dish, I got served an appetiser of paracetamol, some anti-histamine (which made me really sleepy) and another smaller dose of solu-medrol for good measure.

Throughout the infusion, they measured my heart rate and blood pressure every 30 minutes or so. Other than the sleepiness, I hadn’t felt anything. However, my heart rate did drop below 50 at some point (my normal resting rate is around 65 bpm). But they just asked me to drink some coke or coffee, that got it up to 55 bpm and everyone was happy.

In the next few days, I felt a little tired but otherwise okay. I was advised to avoid anything that could cause an infection, brush teeth after every meal and don’t do anything that would cause an injury.

So e.g. climbing is out for the next month or so. Oh well.

Complications

Unfortunately, the whole "I know how to protect myself" idea fell apart in less than a week.

On Thursday my wife felt a bit poorly, got really sick on Friday and tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 (aka COVID-19) antibodies on Saturday. That same Saturday, our baby got a fever, runny nose and coughs and while I was still testing negative by Sunday, I’ve had an elevated temperature and this pretty unpleasant cough myself.

Monday, I got a positive test, called my MS neurologist, got prescribed antivirals and hopefully that’s it.

I worried Ocrevus will make it much worse, but thankfully that doesn’t seem to be the case with this particular combination and it hasn’t taken the full effect yet. The B cells should be depleted within two weeks after the second infusion.

The progression so far has been relatively mild — it feels like a really unpleasant cold but with manageable temperature (38.4°C has been the max so far — which isn’t great but I’m pretty much used to those temps). Really bad cough and congested nose and throat, but I’m hoping that’s as bad as it’ll get.

We’ll see in the next few days.

Next Up

The second half of the Ocrevus infusion is scheduled for Monday 17th October, but given covid this will probably be postponed by a week or so.

Overall, while a little drawn out and off to a rocky start, I’m excited about this. Not having Interferon-induced flu-like symptoms (fever, muscle ache, etc.) three times a week feels kind of both liberating and something I got used to really quickly.

After eight years of shots and their after-effects I was definitely ready for something else. Some of the consolidation is nice: with this I was able to stop taking paracetamol or ibuprofen three times a week too (if I don’t, I wake up with massive chills and fever and my sleep gets severely disrupted) which is something I’m sure my stomach and liver will be thankful for.

And I can stop using an ointment to regenerate the damage the interferon was doing to the injection sites on and below the skin surface.

It’s only been a couple of weeks and I mostly don’t notice but every now and then I realise "holy crap, I’d be feeling absolutely rotten today if I still was on interferons" or "huh, I guess I don’t need to take the syringe out of the fridge and warm it up".

Indeed, our fridge has more space now \o/.

This will also greatly simplify my travelling if that ever resumes (I’m hopeful for 2023). Things I no longer need to carry and explain to the border scan people: injections, a box with a large biohazard sign on it (where the used up needles go — you can’t just throw them in the bin), liquid cooling pads (the medication had to stay at low temperatures). All this in the cabin baggage because the meds are really sensitive to the outside temperature.

So it also saves space and weight.

And I mean, all our vacations in the last 8 years were planned with the understanding that I’ll be out of it half the time. That I won’t be able to hike or drive, or do much at all half the time there.

I’ve switched my exercise schedule to daily instead of Tue,Thu,Sat+Sun like before.

I won’t feel bad or too tired when I do talk to people or have to run errands or whatever on Monday, Wednesday or Friday.

And (and this is a big if but a boy can dream), maybe, just maybe my depression was primarily caused by the interferon treatment (it’s a common side effect) so with a little self care and consideration I might be able to do what so many people in my situation can’t: drop the meds and yet feel normal.

But that’s a huge question mark because while depression is a common side effect of Interferon Beta, it is also a common side effect of… Multiple Sclerosis. And it’s also possible that it’s caused by something completely unrelated — or a combination of all these factors.

Who knows. I might try to lower the dosage in a few months once things settle and see what happens.

Update from 4th September, 2024

Given how many things were left open in the first update, I wanted to give another one and just never got around to it.

The new job is keeping me really busy and so does our not-so-little one (who’s going to be three years old in October).

In the last update, I’d expressed hope that the attack was still ongoing and therefore things would yet improve. That was a decidedly mixed bag.

My right-hand side of the body has mostly recovered. I no longer drag my leg behind me while walking and the weakness is mostly gone too.

I feel my right hand is even clumsier than before, but it’s hard to know that objectively. It definitely feels that way.

My left-hand side is basically completely unchanged. The grip of my left hand is actually weaker than my right hand now (I’m left-handed so that shouldn’t be).

This is a combination of two things: first, my right hand got stronger thanks to climbing — the grip strength of both was almost identical before the attack. And the left hand got weaker after the attack.

So now my right hand is stronger while my left hand is more … dexterous (badum-tish).

But the biggest issue is the left leg.

It still feels numb, tingly, sensitive and as if permanently asleep. It still doesn’t process feelings such as temperature correctly. So when I’m taking a hot bath, it feels as if the water is lukewarm rather than hot.

And that really affects my ability to relax. And as far as I can tell, there’s really nothing I can do there. So now I carry a permanent reminder of the disease and the damage it’s done.

I’ve learned to live with it (it’s still such a tiny problem in the grand scheme of things) but it’s there and it isn’t fun.

Ocrevus (the new medication) is absolutely fantastic. I’ve had several infusions and the fact I’m no longer taking injections that make me feel like shit is absolutely ground breaking.

I don’t know how I would handle everything that’s going on now with that additional burden. I don’t even know how I did handle everything back in the Interferon Beta days.

I am protecting myself much more than the regular person. Masking basically from early Autumn to late Spring. Always having a hand-sanitiser ready, washing hands thoroughly.

So far, I haven’t been more sick than previously or more sick than the rest of my family.

But as mentioned before, there’s no way to protect myself with a little child socialising and having regular toddler activities. And especially now when they started the kindergarten.

We’ve also all just recovered from another (second) infection of COVID-19. And this fucking shit just hits hard. I’m happy for everyone who’s either completely asymptomatic or has mild symptoms. But it knocked me out cold. I was barely able to get out of the bed and that’s with having had four vaccine doses, one direct shot of antibodies and one prior infection.

But the virus mutates and my body no longer generates lasting post-infection memory. And the vaccines are essentially ineffective so there’s little sense in me taking them.

I’d also expressed hope that getting off Interferon could mean possibly getting off my depression/anxiety medication.

And I have indeed been stable on the lowest dose for a very long time. So we’ve tried it. And at first, it actually seemed like it was working!

I did sleep a bit worse (the meds help with insomnia too — which I struggled with as well), but very much manageable with the right sleep hygiene and a toddler who leaves you utterly exhausted.

But then, a few difficult things arose and my anxiety levels shot through the roof. The depression was kept at bay, but I was spiralling out, plagued by intrusive thoughts and endlessly replaying imagined conversations in my mind and it took a massive toll on my well-being.

So I’m back on my meds, sleeping like a baby and the anxiety is mostly kept in check. It still spikes up, but when it does, I’m able to deal with it better and it doesn’t leave me a wreck for weeks on end.

Though that is something I feel I need to work on more. Still no fun when it happens and in my life, there are enough triggers that just hoping nothing bad happens is wishful thinking.

So yeah, not the greatest news, but life goes on, things are mostly stable again and I’ve got plans to address what’s not.

Oh, and no new attacks so far! Hoping that will last for a really long time.

From Hell by Alan Moore

2022-02-19T16:16:53+00:00

Tags: comic-book, review

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

2/5 stars

For some reason, I thought From Hell was something either related to or similar to the Swamp Thing. A big honking monster (possibly from the eponymous hell) doing stuff. I had no idea what I was getting into here other than it being an Alan Moore book and by all accounts a really really good one.

In other words, I had no idea this was a Jack the Ripper story and the title is a reference to one of the famous letters the murderer allegedly sent. The only thing I knew about the story was the name and that some prostitutes were murdered.

The place Whitechapel had no meaning to me, nor its connection to the crimes. The names "Leather Apron", George Lusk, Donald Swanson, Mary Jane Kelly or any of the other people implicated after the fact (William Gull, Walter Sickert) rang no bells either.

Flouting my ignorance further, I know next to nothing about Freemasonry, any of the lore, conspiracies or how it could possibly relate to the above.

So while reading it, I was deeply confused by all the names, places, events and characters from the beginning pretty much to the end.

This book aims to be a comprehensive and consistent (but not true!) telling of the events and a lot of research has gone into making it. Sadly, that made it really complex and I kept forgetting who everyone was and what they did and what happened to them.

It is a story of conspiracies and politics with grim people I struggled to empathise with.

Finishing the book took me a long time (which made all the complexity even more difficult) and it was honestly a bit of a slog. Surprisingly, the ending has intrigued me greatly as has the appendix. It documented Alan Moore’s thinking and view of the whole case and its constant retelling and investigation and went through all the claims made in the book pointing out which are a documented fact, which are plausible connections and which are pure fiction.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t bring myself to care about any of it.

The book reminds me a bit of Mists of Avalon which I loved as a different take on the Arthurian legend. Except there, I knew about the story, was familiar with the broad events and characters and really fell in love with Bradley’s interpretation.

Intellectually, I think From Hell is a fantastic and really well researched book. But it didn’t work for me.

Games Played in 2021

2022-01-20T21:28:20+00:00

Tags: video-game, retrospective

You could call 2021 the Year of Mass Effect, but I ended up playing a good chunk of other games too. This dropped sharply in the fourth quarter due to us having a baby, but I still found the occasional half-hour.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

Started in December 2020, I’ve finished the game in early 2021. I’ve really enjoyed it despite some unpleasantness. It is a genuinely good game and I’m quite sad at the negative reception it got.

Having had the ability to compare it to the original trilogy now, it’s absolutely out there with them. Brings in a lot of improvements while retaining a lot of the issues the previous games had.

(website, review)

Mass Effect 1: Legendary Edition

This remastered version includes all the DLCs which I’ve never played before.

It’s a fantastic game still. The world design, overall plot, characters — that all holds up tremendously.

But the gameplay itself is quite janky, mako is pretty bad and there’s a lot of uninteresting filler with the good bits spread out.

That’s something that’s plagued the series ever since, but it’s most striking when you play the game now. The DLCs helped by adding more meaningful content, but the game could still have been 60% shorter and be much better for it.

(website, review)

Mass Effect 2: Legendary Edition

The second episode feels like the most disappointing one, but I think it’s only because it follows up Mass Effect 1 which set the bar and expectations so high!

It removes Mako, but puts a ton of other systems in that are, frankly, even more bothersome. Fuel between the star systems, weapons ammo, the mining minigame. And the story is much more incongruent. The whole "working for the Cerberos" thing doesn’t make any sense (which everyone points out to you in that game and the next one) and the final boss is a big robot baby made out of humans for some reason. Oh and UGH that Gavin Archer DLC is disgusting.

It’s a whole lot of nonsense. But: the game’s got a lot of interesting content (the missions, companions, locations).

Still, while I feel the first game was a flawed masterpiece, the second one was a run-of-the-mill 7/10 made to feel worse by how much they messed up the first game’s premise.

(website, review)

Mass Effect 3: Legendary Edition

This is "just" an evolution of ME2, clearly following in its footsteps rather than trying to go back to ME1 or do something new. It feels like it’s trying to appease the players who felt betrayed by the second game, but it’s not delivering anything actually meaningful on that front.

It’s an incremental improvement over ME2 with it’s own story beat howlers (Kai Leng, the ending) but with great companion action, good side quests and interesting locations. Lot’s of good wrapping up of the themes and stories set up in the previous games. Some pretty excellent DLCs I felt, too.

On the ending: yeah it’s bad in the same way that Battlestar: Galactica’s ending was bad: it basically introduced a brand new party into the conflict, mixed it with some pseudo-religious mumbo jumbo and left it at that.

However, unlike BSG, it didn’t tie the plot into the best song ever made which made the ending strictly worse. But even then, I felt the public outcry and demands that they change it were so over the top. Most games have bad endings — which… yes it sucks and devs should do better. But here, it’s not that surprising or unexpected given the direction the sequels went long before the ME3 endgame.

And re-playing it now, I mean: it’s not good, but it’s okay. I felt satisfied, not angry. I guess partly it’s the lowered expectations and partly the fact that the DLCs helped wrap some of the things up and let you say goodbye to your crew. Apparently, they’ve also added extra cutscenes to it? I can’t tell, but given the low bar videogame endings set, it was actually fine.

And a lot of the other threads (Reaper origin, Geth origin, Genophage) and the character arcs all resolved quite nicely.

I’ve also just re-read my Adromeda post (which was written before I replayed the ME trilogy). And my thoughts and feelings on the trilogy (based on memories of years ago) were quite spot on with how I feel about it now having replayed it.

(website)

Side note: My Dream Mass Effect

This is a bit of a tangent, but here’s what an ideal Mass Effect game would be for me:

World that you can explore. The Mako / Nomad is a great idea with a terrible implementation. The thing that made it suck in ME 1 was the worlds were mostly empty and boring to drive around, there were too many of them and that the vehicle was an absolute nightmare to control.

But the solution is not to scrap that part entirely. It is to improve the physics / controls / feel of the driving and make fewer places that are interesting to explore. And make it clear which hills, inclinations and surfaces the car can go up with and which it won’t at a glance. Both games will happily let you spend 10 minutes slowly inching up the hill only to find out that the latest meter is simply impossible to cross.

Andromeda almost got this right. I think their worlds were too big with too many "chase the icons" nonsense. But they were interesting areas to drive around. Especially with some of the planet-changing actions you could do there.

There is a happy middle ground where the vehicle is fun to control, you never get stuck and there worlds are fun to explore without being overwhelming.

Next, the combat should feel like actual futuristic science fiction. Mass Effect 1 achieved this with its weapons that didn’t have any ammo which was promptly dropped in the future games with a completely nonsensical in-game justification.

You don’t need to bring that back necessarily, but make it more interesting than just another samey third-person cover shooter.

Keep the interesting aliens, focus on character development and kissability. That’s what kept us all playing whether we’re willing to admit it or not.

And related to this, keep the universe and it’s history, politics, societies and structures interesting. In ME 1, I’ve gobbled up every Codex entry. In ME 2, 3 and Andromeda I felt very little interest to read them. The contents and ideas behind them were much less interesting. And the extremely flimsy justifications for things like introducing ammo made me feel like the designers didn’t care so why should I.

I am of course under no illusion that the New Mass Effect will hit any of these, but it would be fantastic if it did.

Or better yet, someone make a brand new game that does this. I’ve enjoyed it but we seem to have too many sequels and remasters these days.

Geneforge 1 Remaster

I’ve played it a bunch but didn’t finish. I was waiting for a long time for the Geneforge remaster, because its world and magic is so fascinating to me.

But I rarely finish the Spiderweb games in one session. They are MASSIVE.

The world design — especially its magic — is absolutely fantastic. I’ve been enjoying it a lot. But I’m not a huge fan of the combat and there’s quite a lot of it there.

Still, it’s a great game that I plan to return to and finish at some point.

(website)

Disco Elysium: Director’s Cut

I had been thinking of replaying Disco Elysium — one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played — ever since I’ve played it for the first time. Fantastic writing and world design, absolutely innovative in the ways I care about — no combat and puzzles, very light on the inventory tetris, a really sensible scope and length, a lot of effort put into text-adventure style problem resolution.

The Director’s Cut brings in a full voice over, turning this already excellent game into one that’s pretty much perfect.

(website, review)

Bloodborne NG++ with the Wake Up ending

A.K.A get the final achievement.

I did it! Played just the core game, more or less ran through the whole thing, not stopping for anything or taking a lot of time.

And yep! Bloodborne is the second game I’ve ever got all the achievements for (the first one being Spelunky).

Bloodborne is still an absolutely fantastic game. I had loads of fun playing it.

(website, review)

Slay The Spire

This was an unexpected one. I didn’t feel like playing a roguelikeish card game at all, but I did want to play something on the tablet and Magic: The Gathering: Arena came out.

Having played a ton of Magic (in its original physical form) ages ago, I still knew the rules and thought this would be a fun thing to do. But the network connectivity and especially the complete lack of meaningful single-player experience killed it for me.

It did prove that card games would be fantastic on the tablet though, and a friend just mentioned Slay The Spire so I gave it a go. And it’s fantastic.

It’s clearly taken an inspiration from Magic, but it’s a single-player deck-building game: you start with the same deck of cards, but the encounters and cards are different every time and you build your deck along the way.

The rules are much simpler and the overall experience is definitely improved by the computer keeping track of everything. And it allows for interesting effects that are hard or tedious to do in a physical world (such as: every time a card gets played, put two copies of it into the graveyard).

And it’s a lot of fun. Each run takes about 25-30 minutes, there’s enough variability and challenge while not being overwhelming. And you get to do crazy shit because things don’t need to be perfectly balanced.

I’ve had a successful run with all three starting characters and then mostly stopped, but I think I’ll still pick it up occasionally.

(website)

Get In The Car, Loser!

All the previous year-end review posts had something along the lines of: "If Christine Love releases a new game, I’ll play that".

Well, she did!

Aaaand… I mostly loved it!

It’s a cross between a visual novel and JRPG. Which pretty much sums up my feelings about it.

The writing, the world design, music, visuals: they’re all absolutely superb. This is Christine Love doing what I well… love her do. It’s funny, clever, charming, rough in places, super dark in other places. Great stuff.

The timer-based JRPG combat though… I’m not a huge fan of. But then, I’m not a huge fan of JRPGs and their combat in general. Put in that context, it’s pretty decent actually. But still not my cup of tea.

Plus, the combat kind of interrupts the conversation, Arity-style. Or maybe put more charitably, the game is improved by the story bits interrupting the combat.

I was there for the writing though. So every time a combat scene came up, I was like "ugh, let’s get this over with so we can get back to the juicy talk".

(website)

Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

This is a DLC to the absolutely wonderful Outer Wilds. I was really looking forward to it, but it didn’t sit well with me.

Just like the original Outer Wilds, the game is gorgeous, with beautiful locations, wonderful music and just a fantastic feel.

But, it is way more puzzly — to the point where I’d have to follow a guide all the time. It’s all in a single location with a singular purpose and there’s no translator.

That means you’ve basically got a single thing to do and there’s not a lot of just pure exploration. In the original game, if you got stuck or just wanted to do something else, you’d fly off onto another planet and just have fun! And you’d still make progress by translating a bit of alien text and possibly discovering a clue to something you’ve been racking your brains about.

And yes, it was sometimes puzzly and sometimes hard to control.

But Echoes of the Eye is basically all puzzles with (at least to me) much more difficult flying and manoeuvring challenges. With the second half of the game featuring jump scares, low-visibility and just a lot of things I absolutely don’t like to engage with at the best of times.

Trying to play this while our newborn and their mother were asleep and I needed to unwind a little before heading to bed myself was just not conducive.

I’ve watched someone do a full playthrough and I really like the story. And the way they managed to fit a whole new area into such a tightly-packed universe is amazing.

But this would not be my cup of tea even without a newborn at home.

(website)

Baba Is You

This is a straight-up puzzle game — which made me immediately disinclined to try it. But I’ve heard everyone being amazed at how fantastic and clever it is and I’ve been looking for a game that I could play with my spouse.

They’ve never really played games and so they struggle with basic stuff such as mouse look, the controller, WASD etc.

But Baba Is You is visually easy to understand, the controls are pretty much as easy as can be (just the four-directional movement) and since it’s a puzzle we could think about it together, swapping the controller periodically.

And this worked great for a while!

I’m generally not a huge fan of this sort of simple pixelated look, but when we started playing I fell in love with it. The game is gorgeous. And it’s got wonderful music too.

Baba Is You’s got an absolutely wonderful central idea. The puzzles are really fun and you get to run into absolutely amazing situations.

But eventually, we ran into what happens with pretty much every puzzle game: it gets too complex, the solution space too with with too many things to consider and at that point we checked out.

We’ve tried a few other puzzles but we basically hit a wall where we’d either have to look them all up or just spend days racking our brains. Neither of which is fun.

But if you’re into puzzles, Baba Is You is a really unique, clever and wonderful one!

(website)

Minit

Speaking of simplistic graphics whose screenshots put me off, but grew on me, Minit is wonderful.

It’s a time loop game where you reset after 60 seconds. That seems insane, but it works really well!

Minit is a short game, took me about four hours to finish. It hooked me up instantly. The situation is really well communicated and actually explained within the game. It’s a fantastic world to explore and somehow, amazingly, they’ve managed for the short time limit to not feel stressful or urgent.

There are puzzles there but they’re generally not too complex because guess what: you’ve got less than a minute to solve them.

Fantastic little thing, this. Thoroughly recommended.

(website)

Life is Strange: True Colors (and the Wavelengths DLC)

I genuinely didn’t know what to expect here and tried to temper my excitement. But it is a Life is Strange game through and through and I’ve had an absolute blast.

Loved the town of Haven Springs, loved the characters, the game mechanics received another bit of polish and game design compared to the previous installments, making it that little extra bit nicer to play.

It’s awesome.

I’ve played the Wavelengths DLC about six weeks later, which is about Steph (the friend of the main protagonist). It’s much shorter and it all happens in the music record store. It is also excellent.

(website, review)

Hades

I genuinely thought True Colors was going to be my game of the year. But then, in the last week of December, I started playing Hades.

Oh my god I love this game.

It’s by Supergiant whose writing, music, sound design, visuals and voice over coaxed into playing two combat-heavy action RPGs (normally so not my style). So I was well primed to give this one a go, but also hesitant.

Both Bastion and Transistor were your regular linear experiences. You knew where you stood with them and roughly how long it would take you to complete them.

But Hades is roguelite, meaning it can potentially take a much longer time and it could get really repetitive with periods of no sense of progres.

Except, this was still made by Supergiant Games. So it’s full of absolutely wonderful writing and the time between runs is always different, with something new to learn, someone new to talk to, something new to do.

And the combat is actually really good (which you won’t hear me say very often).

On top of all that, Hades does this amazing thing that I’ve never seen any other roguelike/roguelite/roguelikelike do before: normally, the power of roguelikes is that when you inevitably lose your run, you’re excited to start another one and keep playing. That losing doesn’t deter you.

But you still don’t want to lose! Here, the section between the runs is also full of great treats (mostly in form of chats with the other inhabitants of Hades’s court) and they’re so well done and varied that I’m looking forward to losing the run so I can go back there. And when that happens, I’m looking forward to getting back into the fray as well.

Especially contrasted with Get in the Car, Loser!, the combat and non-combat sections are wonderfully balanced here and they lift one another up.

Hades is just an absolute gem on every front. So far (just had my first ever victory) I honestly don’t have anything bad to say about it.

Absolute game of the year and I expect having more fun with it in 2022.

(website)

Done With

Here are some games I wanted to return to but either didn’t or did and realised that I’m actually done with them:

Spelunky 2

This was unexpected. I just never felt the urge to go back and play more.

I don’t even know why. I really liked the game, but just never actually felt like playing it.

Divinity: Original Sin

I’d played a bit of this a few years back, but it didn’t quite sit well with me. Kept hearing how fantastic the game was and how Divinity: Original Sin 2 was even better (and wanted to give that a go). And how the studio’s making Baldur’s Gate 3 now.

So I’ve wanted to give it one more good go.

And… it’s not bad, but it just feels off to me.

Everyone’s raving about the amazing combat system where every effect interacts with every other effect. And yeah, that’s cool I guess, but it didn’t really feel that great to play to me.

And I can’t get past the writing and sense of humour. All the jokes fall flat and this faux half-serious medieval patter just really doesn’t work on me.

So I’ve stopped playing and don’t expect to pick up the sequel either.

Unfortunately, that suggests I probably won’t enjoy Baldur’s Gate 3 from these folks either :-(.

Cultist Simulator

I had a lot of fun that one week in like 2018 when I played a ton of this on a vacation and always wanted to go back.

After having finally done so, I’ve realised I’m done with the game.

Love the atmosphere, the visuals, the weird table-topy look and feel. The writing.

But realising all that needs to happen in order to win at the game, the charmful mundanity of starting an eldritch cult flipped into a busywork that would have to go on for far too long.

Also, for some reason playing the game tanked the performance all the other apps running on my computer — including the text editor with all my notes. And you can’t really play this game without taking notes.

Still, this was a lot of fun while it lasted.

Stardew Valley

I’ve spent a lot of wonderful time there and expected to do much more, but I guess similarly to the Cultist Simulator, once I got to the point where I realised what the end-game or at least parts of it I wanted to achieve would be like, I found that I’d had enough.

Both of these might have another life in them on a 12-hour flight (if those ever become a thing again) or when I’m that exact kind of sick where I feel too bad to watch TV or read, not too sick to be unable to look at a screen at all and just need a semi-active but cognitively light distraction.

Slay the Spire will probably join their ranks too.

Judging by the last few months, I suspect the amount of time I’ll be able to play games is going to be really small but hopefully non-zero.

I’d love to play the Life is Strange remaster which is expected to come out in February. I’m still in a place where I feel the need for some familiarity because so much else is weird and dark and uncertain.

Similarly, following my love of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, I want to give Elden Ring a go.

After that, it’s anyone’s guess. I’ll probably prioritise smaller games (just started Heaven Will be Mine in fact), but I’d also like to wrap-up Geneforge if the time and mood is right.

And if Christine Love puts out another DLC for Get in the Car, Loser! I’ll definitely try to squeeze that in too.

Dose Response is coming to Steam

2021-11-07T20:34:01+00:00

Tags: gamedev, project, update

I’m delighted to announce that Dose Response is coming to Steam!

Compared to the currently-available 1.0 version, the new release will feature Actual Graphics™, music & sound effects, improved UI and a full mouse support.

I don’t know when the game will be released. I’d love to do it this year, but between work, personal life and having a one-month-old baby, it is completely up in the air.

The initial release will be on Windows and Linux. I’d love to do a MacOS release as well, but between Apple’s developer license fees and code signing requirements, that’s something I’ll investigate later. The sales of the game will also play a role in the decision.

You can go to the Dose Response Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1750910/Dose_Response/

By adding the game to your wishlist, you’ll be notified when it’s out ;-).

Life is Strange 3: True Colors

2021-09-27T21:36:27+00:00

Tags: video-game, review

I was quite curious where the third (or fourth) Life is Strange game would go given the differences between the first two games. The first one being a high-school drama where your protagonist has time rewind powers. The second one being a desperate trip across the US where the protagonist’s brother has the power to make a huge mess (via telekinesis and otherwise).

While I have enjoyed the second game in the series, I was delighted to see True Colors return to a fixed location in a small American town where you stay for a while and get to know people.

The town is called Haven Springs and it is where Alex Chen arrives after having bounced around the foster homes to meet her long-lost brother Gabe and hopefully start a new, normal life.

Alex is introverted, clearly traumatised by her past and slow to trust. But she really wants things to work out. To start over. And things do kick off well. Gabe is awesome, so’s his girlfriend and her son. Everyone seems really nice and welcoming.

The arrival to Haven Springs is wonderfully done. I wasn’t sure how I’ll like Gabe, but the ease with which he managed to both move past and respect Alex’s awkwardness (which I myself felt keenly) was absolutely charming. It was the awkwardness that made me relate to Alex so strongly.

If anything, people there are too friendly, dispersing hugs, handshakes and touches left and right. The controller vibrates when someone touches Alex without her expecting it and that somehow manages to evoke the exact feeling I get when that happens to me.

Apart from the frightening and completely tone-deaf joke by the local (white) police officer (for which he actually apologises — without fully grasping the gravity of the situation though), Alex’s welcome is idyllic and this place looks like it might in fact become her home.

She has got a secret though. Alex can feel other people’s emotions. When someone’s sad, angry or scared, she feels it too. It can overwhelm her and she can lose control of herself and do things she will later regret.

But as you learn to control it, you will recognise the emotions and discover something new about the person. Later on, you’ll be able to literally see the world the way they see it and help them out. Or not.

It’s no time rewind, but it is way cooler than I expected from the game’s marketing.

Unfortunately, just like every other Life is Strange game, this one has a horrific tragedy at its core as well. As with every Life is Strange game, I think it would be able to stand on its own without it.

But its there and it drives the plot forward.

You get to investigate things with the tag-team composed of Steph Gingrich and Ryan Lucan, both potential love interests and both just delightful people to be around.

I love them both dearly but Steph especially is just absolutely delightful. It’s been a while since I’ve seen her last (in Life is Strange: Before the Storm) and I didn’t know what to expect, but she’s been the highlight of the whole game for me.

Figure 1. I’ve never fashioned a harness out of a rope but the shape and knots all actually look like this might be the real deal. Still wouldn’t want to fall tho.

The main plot gets intertwined with a few events to brighten up the mood and show the city in a different light: the Spring Festival and a subsequent LARP organised by the aforementioned Steph who besides being a DJ and a music nerd is into all things RPG.

Especially the LARP was something I was quite apprehensive about (always suspicious of games within games and all that), but it worked great. Wasn’t too long or too over-the-top and surprisingly, it really fit the mood.

Things are quite heavily foreshadowed here, but I’ve always missed them and only realised it in the retrospect. Reading other reviews, more observant people found them completely on the nose so who knows! True Colors may go down better better if you don’t notice things.

All my general annoyances with the previous Life is Strange games are basically not here. The UI works really well for the most part, there are no annoying puzzles and very few minigames (one you can skip and another one is the combat part of the LARP and not actually that bad).

Figure 2. YES PLEASE. Thank you!

While the story design and writing overall might not have changed significantly, in terms of the actual experience of playing the game, every new one gets better. There are fewer and fewer frustrations, allowing greater focus on what matters: exploring the area, talking to people and enjoying the story.

I loved spending time in Haven Springs and with everyone who lived there. The game is absolutely beautiful and the town full of character.

Figure 3. Sitting around is still fun here too.

I’ve enjoyed it tremendously. More than Life is Strange 2 (though I respect what they tried to do there). True Colors might be on par with Tell Me Why, but Max & Chloe will always have a real soft spot in my heart.

Mass Effect 2: Remaster

2021-09-18T12:54:51+00:00

Tags: video-game, review

Mass Effect 2 is a complicated game. Improved in may ways over the first one, but also made massive steps back where it hurt. Unfortunately, the issues are of the kind the remaster can’t fix.

I’ve had fun and it’s a good game but it’s nowhere near the absolute awe that Mass Effect 1 instilled in me and I’ve felt a lot of frustration and disappointment.

Spoilers ahead.

B-rated sci-fi

The overarching feeling I got from the first Mass Effect was that of a really well-made science fiction. Excellent world building, great writing, awesome mysteries to uncover, fantastic characters. And all that wrapped in a world and UI that felt like the future. The game itself was janky, but it transported you into a real place.

Mass Effect 2 abandoned all that for a B-rated movie experience.

It’s coasting on the fantastic set up of the first game, but it’s phoning it in and a lot of the changes they made are absolutely for the worse.

If the first game is comparable to Firefly or the season 1 of Battlestar Galactica, then the sequel is Farscape.

Inconsistent Looks

Instead of sleek futuristic shapes in shades of blue of almost Matrix-like atmosphere, the game’s colour palette is all over the place. Green and brown and orange are great colours. Just not these particular shades in these particular combinations.

It looks ugly. The menu’s ugly. The loading screens show a CD image that’s actually pixelated. It doesn’t feel like the future at all.

Figure 1. Hey, remember the frogger minigame from the first game?

Changing the look isn’t a bad move a priori. The game went for a different atmosphere and it makes a perfect sense to reflect that. But that’s not what’s happening here — there’s no consistency, no atmosphere, just "let’s slap something sci-fi looking together".

Figure 2. Nothing says space opera like a washed-out brown smeared all over your screen.

And speaking of the looks: every time you get an achievement on the PlayStation, the console takes a screenshot. Normally, these screenshots capture the most amazing scenes — you defeating a boss or progressing a story and they’re always a joy to look at.

Here, the achievement is awarded while the game is loading a new scene which means that what is supposed to be a commemorative array of cool shots is just… pictures of really ugly loading screens.

Figure 3. Congratulations! Here’s the picture you’ve seen hundreds of times to remember your heroic moment by.

The Ammo Let-Down

This is honestly the most annoying bit about the entire game for me. They made all the weapons more annoying to use.

In the original game, there was no ammo. It’s the future, there’s no need for ammo. Each weapon has got an infinity amount of rounds it can fire. The downside is that the weapons overheat so you can’t fire indefinitely. You need to shoot in bursts and then let it cool down a little.

So it’s a trade-off, maybe one that’s less familiar to the shooter players, but one that (and I keep harping on this) feels futuristic. The world evolves. New tech is developed.

Here, all that is undone. There’s of course an in-game explanation, but it still doesn’t make a lick of sense within the world.

Figure 4. I feel sorry for the writer who had to come up with this nonsense.

First, there’s not a single weapon of the old design that survived? Within the span of two years every single weapon with infinite ammo got replaced by one that needs ammunition (I mean, "thermal clips" — but they actually call it ammo in the game too).

Across all the planets, systems, races. And it’s not that the "infinite ammo but pretty bad cooldown if you shoot for too long" system is objectively worse. It’s not! Even if it weren’t the perfect usecase for every occasion, surely there are some areas where you would absolutely want to keep this.

And, frustratingly: the in-game explanation is actually perfectly compatible with the old system! The way this should have worked is: weapons overheat so we’ve added thermal clips that let you cool them down quickly and keep shooting. In that world, they could keep the old system and then let you "reload" to get back in the fray sooner. Best of both worlds.

But no. Once you run out of "ammo", the weapon will not shoot.

And in terms of the gameplay it just feels worse. While being quite generous with the thermal clips, but there were still many occasions where I just ran out. And that just never feels good.

The worst thing is, I think they did it to either make the game feel more familiar to the mainstream shooter players or to make multiplayer more balanced.

Which is just such a massive middle finger to the people who only care to play this frankly still mediocre cover shooter alone and on their own terms. Mass Effect has and always will be a single-player experience first.

Combat System Improvements

Other than the ammo issue, the combat system is better. Getting in and out of cover is easier, you can actually vault over stuff and sprinting feels much better.

The areas you fight it are much more diverse — no longer just the same five layouts stamped throughout all the planets.

Figure 5. Welcome to this new world! Full of beauty, life and things to shoot at!

And you’ve got access to heavy weapons each of which has got its own special effect. Especially the Collector Particle Beam just obliterates minor enemies and is fantastic against bosses.

But despite all that, I’ve enjoyed the combat section even less than in the first game. The introduction of ammo soured it so much.

Atmosphere and Plot

The intro sequence, where Normandy gets attacked and Shepard dies… that worked great. I was hooked, I felt the sadness. But it took a dive after that.

It’s immediately clear that they wanted to go for a more rough and gritty feeling. One that’s morally ambiguous, where you need to make tough choices.

Sadly, it fell flat on its arse.

The game’s trying too hard, causing dissonance and incongruity everywhere. There is absolutely no reason for you to work for Cerberus. There’s frankly, no reason for anyone on the ship to work for Cerberus. And yet they all do.

Figure 6. I balk at the death penalty still being a thing, but yep I can see why this could look super bad indeed. Because it is.

The old friends you meet are all like: "you’re working for Cerberus? What the fuck?" And at best you’re like "I don’t work for them — they work for me and actually they’re not all bad" only to find that you do work for them. And just like in Mass Effect 1 and 3 they’re as bad as you and everyone else thought.

I’m playing Mass Effect 3 now and everyone there’s like "what the hell were you thinking working for Cerberus?" and your only response is pretty much just: "yeah.. I know :/".

Except, it never made any sense to anyone. Not to the players, not to the companions, not to the other characters, frankly: not to Shepard. The only reason we all went along with it is that the game designers forced it on us. There is no satisfactory in-universe justification for any of this. Just someone wanting to be edgy or whatever.

Figure 7. I do! I stopped a lot of these acts myself! They’re a totally different shady faceless organisation now!

The ending is pretty iffy too. Less bad than I remember, but um… "The Reapers are abducting people to turn them into a giant human baby that’s also a reaper because they’re cosmically unfathomable machines" just doesn’t work that great as a climax.

The first Mass Effect was quite wordy and full of lore, tech descriptions, background on the alien races, their history and what they’re like.

This game has got a lot more words in it. More codex entries, more planet descriptions, more "lore". But I barely read any of it.

The ammo and Cerberus thing showed the creators' hand: they don’t care about making the world make sense or be consistent. So why should I waste my time meeting them half-way?

Galaxy and Space Sections

You do three things in any Mass Effect game:

Chat
Shoot
Explore

The space exploration bit has received a huge overhaul. First, there’s no driving on the planets' surface. The Mako is gone and in its place you scan planets for resources and things of interest.

Now, there’s a tonne of legitimate criticism one can lob at the whole Mako situation. But rather than fixing it, they made things worse. You don’t even land on the planets, you just scan from the orbit using this really tedious process and clunky UI. There’s nothing enjoyable in it.

I quite liked the driving around. Yes, the vehicle physics was quite bad and it got annoying pretty quickly. But you got the sense of each world. It contributed to the feeling of this being a real space you’re exploring.

Clicking on a planet, holding a button to see some lines pop up and firing a probe? No sense of the place at all. No sense of the differences between the worlds. Just a chore to do in order to progress with the game.

And of course, they’ve added two more consumable resources just to make things more frustrating. You’ve got a limited amount of probes so whilst you’re doing this "exploration", you need to get out to buy some more probes.

And travelling between the stellar systems within a single cluster consumes fuel and takes time while again, providing no value whatsoever. Just another chore to do. To… I don’t know… make the game last longer?

The Characters

Ignoring the "why the fuck are you working for Cerberus" thing that everyone rightfully brings up, the character writing and moments are awesome.

Figure 8. I.. um… okay yeh fair.

You get a pretty wide roster of companions — much bigger than in the first game. And you get even more with all the DLCs included. And it’s fantastic, for the most part (Jack being the notable WTH is this person doing here exception).

The characters have more to say and making rounds after each mission is a joy. Although, you still don’t get a good indication for when they’re ready to talk to you and the frequent "Can it wait a bit? I’m in the middle of some calibrations." gets tiresome.

Figure 9. Got to work on improving your communication skills mate.

But just like the first game — even better actually — the cinematics of the whole thing are awesome. When you talk to someone, they will play a little animation standing from the chair and facing you. It really adds to the immersion and the film feel.

Unfortunately, a lot of the companions from the first game are missing. Ashley won’t talk to you (because you’re working for Cerberus, duh) and everyone has spread out doing their own thing.

Figure 10. Ashley saying it like it is for once. Compared to ME 1 where her views are quite aligned with Cerberus, actually.

You will eventually get some of them back and plus a bunch of new people. But I feel all three games really should have kept Tali, Wrex, Garrus and Liara on board.

At its heart, the entire Mass Effect trilogy hits a lot of the same buttons that the Sci-Fi TV shows do. Your Fireflys, Star Treks and yes, Farscapes. And it is important to keep the main cast. Obviously things change here and there, but you don’t uproot the whole thing season to season.

Summary

Compared to the flawed but brilliant masterpiece that was the first game, Mass Effect 2 just feels worse. Despite all the gameplay improvements, it left me feeling frustrated for most of the time I’ve played it. One step forward two steps back.

The characters' writing and missions are the high point, the failed attempt at turning it into a proper shooter and the try-hard edginess are the low.

I’ve been ragging on the game for most of this post, because I love the Mass Effect universe and it had a potential to be something great.

But I’ve still had a lot of fun.

P.S.

This was the first time I’ve played any of the DLCs and while most of them were excellent, I was absolutely horrified by the Overlord one. This post by M. Wesley Alvey explains why:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7emky/mass-effect-2-overlord-should-have-stayed-in-2010

The whole portrayal of autistic people and how the abuser got with basically no consequences (all he lost was his test subject — assuming Shepard showed a modicum of compassion) is absolutely gross even for the wannabe edgy writers.

There’s nothing subtle in it, nothing blown out of proportion. It is just absolutely disgustingly flabbergastingly bad.

Figure 11. It’s not your radical ideas you need to apologise for you fucking torturous criminal (and all this was sanctioned by the reformed head of the not-really-the-bad-guys Cerberus of course).

Mass Effect, a game that prides on giving you a renegade option to just shoot someone speaks volumes by denying it here. Honestly, shooting Gavin Archer should be the paragon trigger.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J. K. Rowling

2021-09-13T22:20:56+00:00

Tags: book, review

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

5/5 stars

Turns out, I’ve never written the review for one of my favourite books of all time. Having just decided to read it in French this time, here’s the long overdue collection of thoughts.

I will discuss the book itself (the first one of the series), the French version and finally, assorted thoughts about the books' wider impacts and Rowling’s later sentiments that sour the whole thing.

The Book

Harry Potter is an eleven-year-old orphan living with his aunt, uncle and cousin all of whom neglect and abuse him. When weird things start happening, Harry learns that he is a wizard who was accepted to a magical boarding school. He finds actual friends (and some enemies) there, goes through a school year that’s both magical and mundane and learns what happened to his parents and why everyone in the wizarding world knows his name.

The book is absolutely beautifully put together. On what must have been around a tenth re-read, the beginning feels to drag a bit, but once in Hogwarts, the book was as charming and powerful now in my mid thirties as it was when I was 15 or so.

It paints a world that is colourful and detailed enough to feel believable, full of wonderful characters, great mysteries, solid plot, jokes and a lot of wonderful moments — happy and sad. It’s by no means perfect, but it’s really well put together.

I laughed and I cried despite knowing the whole thing by heart.

In addition to all that, it is just really well written. I’ve often read books with amazing ideas whose writing just wasn’t there. They’re still great, but something’s off — either the pacing, odd word choices, plot structure or whatever.

Not here. The prose, dialogues and poetry are all brilliant. It’s just a joy to read. Rowling absolutely has a way with words and as her later books showed, she is a great writer who managed to transcend her "childhood book author" framing.

One of the rare, unexpected delights are all the proper names. Of people, things, places. All the Hogwarts houses, "Hogwarts" itself, the teachers, everything. They’ve got the punch, the shape and feeling. Harry Potter rides the onomatopoeia wave flawlessly.

There are genuine points of criticism one can level at the whole series, but to dismiss the books out of the gate as some critics have done is just completely missing the mark.

The audiobook is narrated by Stephen Fry and made brilliant as a result. It is a joy to listen to his voice and it just elevates the book to another level. If you can, do read the Stephen Fry audiobook.

The French Version

Speaking of words and audiobooks. The reason for this re-read of 2021 is wanting to see if I can improve my (passive) French a little. After having done four years of French at high school, I’ve always felt I should actually learn the thing.

So I’ve picked up the French audiobook and started reading it. You will be surprised in no way whatsoever that it didn’t quite work. I picked up a word here and there, but I was lost more often than I was following.

Switching to reading a chapter in English followed by the same chapter in French was much better though my current French level is clearly not really up for the task yet.

Going back to Rowling’s choice of words and sounds: the localisation was actually quite decent. Slytherin became Serpentard, Hufflepuff is Poufsouffle, etc. which sounds great. Fits the French feeling but still packs the same punch.

But some of the other translations felt a bit weird to me — most noticeably Severus Snape being called Severus Rogue. But nothing really bad that would take me out of it.

The actual experience of reading it in French was… a not an immediate win. I need to pay a lot of conscious attention. I think it was useful — I got the language into my ears a little, definitely picked up some new words and phrases, but not as many as I’d hoped. I don’t suddenly understand French, nor am I confident enough to read the next book all alone.

Since I’ve read this as an audiobook, I need to reiterate how stellar Stephen Fry’s reading is. Bernard Giraudeau who did the French narration is not terrible, but Fry’s just on another level.

Some of the voices and sounds the narrator does (e.g. giving Ron a lisp) make the book harder to listen to.

The book’s production makes things even worse. There’s a scene with centaurs about two thirds into the book. And every time a centaur spoke, they first made a horse noise like neighing, snorting etc. Now famously, centaurs have human heads with human speech and wouldn’t generally be expected to make such noises. Nor does the source book give any indication that they do. They are perfectly capable of human speech.

This may sound like a small thing, but I found it incredibly distracting.

The Author

Harry Potter will forever have a special place in my heard. In addition to me just loving the story and the characters, it is the first book I’ve read in English. And it transcended my understanding of the language from where I could read individual words but not much else to actually feeling it. Knowing phrases and sentence structures. It was the first steps towards it feeling somewhat akin to a native tongue. To me being able to think in English. To using it directly rather than translating things to my native language as an intermediary.

It has also influenced my outlook in life. "It is our choices far more than our abilities that show what we truly are", for example still resonates deeply.

And while again, there are things one can criticise, overall this is a book with a really healthy outlook on life.

So it was deeply, frustratingly, incredibly disappointing that the author’s own choices did not live up to what she set up in the book.

J. K. Rowling’s anti-trans (or more accurately: pro pureblood woman) crusade has been a huge shock to me. One of the final nails in the coffin of what has been a really crummy year.

Misunderstanding or feeling threatened by trans people is a sentiment that a lot of people (men and women) share. But it’s so much more harmful when it’s coming out from someone with such a huge following, influence and money and ready to put it all to use to solve the problem. Someone who literally shaped the minds of millions of children and young adults. Someone who in many other aspects seems to be quite a decent human being despite becoming filthy rich.

Someone who’s stood up against injustice in her books and in real life.

Someone who’s pretended to be a man to see how the publishing apparatus reacts to men differently than to women. Of course, using a secret pseudonym is absolutely not the same thing as being transgender, but fucking come on!

I can’t claim this has ruined Harry Potter for me. I love those books. Still do so fucking much. But it has ruined JKR for me.

Kill your heroes indeed.

Mass Effect 1: Remaster

2021-06-26T09:06:34+00:00

Tags: video-game, review

Mass Effect came out some 13 years ago and until now, I’ve only played it once back then. It wasn’t the best game I’ve ever played, but for about the week after I’ve finished it, I felt it was.

I’ve had wonderful memories of the game and I didn’t want to see them tarnished.

But it was also a game I was frequently comparing others (include the later ones in the series) to. So when the Legendary Edition came out, it was the perfect opportunity to see how that comparison really held up as well as experience the whole trilogy in one go. I’ve also never played any of the DLCs and they’re all included in the Legendary Edition.

This post will veer into the spoiler territory so if haven’t played Mass Effect yet, you can just leave with this:

Mass Effect has janky controls and it is dated in many areas (especially around the UI and combat), but it is a fantastic space opera in a wonderfully designed world with great characters. If you can handle the looks and gameplay, it’s well worth it.

First things first, it’s really fun to play it again actually knowing all the mysteries. You can discern some of the Shepard’s visions, know what the Reapers and Protheans and Keepers are all about. The purpose of the Citadel. It’s awesome.

You can also prioritise your missions properly and get Liara on the team (and therefore have the full squad) as soon as you leave the Citadel.

The freedom to visit significant places and events based on player’s discretion provides a lot of replay value in games. One of the things that made me go back to the original Fallout games or Dark Souls again (even though they are all massive) is the ability to do them in the right order. Where "right" meant important to me: whether it’s a companion I wanted from the get-go, an item, location, event, or anything else.

The game’s atmosphere, characters and the main story design — all of those are fantastic and absolutely hold up. Mass Effect 1 is an amazing sci-fi experience, the world feels real and I loved reading all the codex entries (which wasn’t true for any of the later games).

It felt like a real future. The doors opened automatically, but unlike in the real world, they worked perfectly. Never too slow, never in the way, as if they weren’t even there.

Similarly, the weapons don’t need any ammunition. They shoot energy and they never run out. The downside (a game mechanics conceit) is that they heat up and you need to give the shooting a break to cool down.

But it’s still amazing. You don’t need to bother with any ammo loot, you’ll never run out in the middle of combat. Really feels like the future.

Even the UI actually looked really slick and futuristic.

And the music is fantastic.

So yes, the things that stayed in my memory — the good things — remained good. As for the rest, well…

The controls are properly clunky. Everything from the inventory handling to the interactive prompts, switching weapons, the "open-the-lock" puzzles, the combat system — none of that feels particularly great.

Most of the off-world mission areas are built out of the same handful (literally like four or five) templates and they’re just filled with different enemies, furniture or crates.

All of this is annoying. It’s less annoying than if this was a shooter first and a sci-fi RPG second, but still.

And while we’re piling on the criticism: you ride a lot of elevators here and they’re sloooow (even though they were apparently sped-up from the original). The travel map doesn’t show you which sectors or planets you’ve explored already (I had to keep a separate checklist outside of the game). Similarly, you don’t know when your squad mates have new conversation options so a lot of the game is spent running around your ship chatting folks up only to rehash old conversations or have them tell you they’re busy.

The Mako (the vehicle you use to travel on a planet surface) is of course the stuff of legends and completely absent from the rest of the trilogy.

They’ve apparently made it faster and less bouncy in the remaster, but it still drives quite poorly and you end up with a lot of frustration trying to cross a mountain range to get to the next objective. Still, it’s a shame they scrapped it. Mass Effect: Andromeda fixed a lot of the issues and zipping around the planets is neat if done right.

The male gaze is pretty strong here and the face animations ride the Uncanny Valley hard. Especially Ashley Williams’s eyes are sometimes horrifying.

The first time around, I played as the male Sheperd, so I really wanted to play as the female one now. First, because I’ve started to enjoy protagonists and cast who don’t look like me and second, because of all the praise I’ve heard about Jennifer Hale’s voice performance.

Due to the confusing UI, I didn’t customise my character at all and ended with the defaults for everything (looks, background, speciality, etc.) and noticed it all too late to go back.

And I don’t like the default female Shepard look that much. I’ve played with the default male one with no issues, but admittedly: that was thirteen years ago and he’s just a Dude Duderston with a buzz cut. Can’t go terribly wrong there.

Still she’s a bad-arse lady who grew on to me and you get a pretty legitimate reason to change her appearance in the second game so I might do that.

The actual voice performance is great, but it’s been so long that I’m unable to make any comparisons to the male one.

And on the writing side of things, I’m not keen with the military outlook that pervades the whole game. I get why it’s there, but it also means that your character will commit between one and two total genocides without blinking an eye.

Some of the writing that wraps up a mission (which generally just appears as a message box with a couple of paragraphs) is a little underwhelming as well — like most of the side missions themselves.

This is perfectly fine in text-heavy games like the original Fallouts, Planescape: Torment or say Age of Decadence. But given how cinematic Mass Effect is, ending a mission with a text box just feels lazy and out of place.

But even with all these issues, Mass Effect is absolutely a game worth playing.

This is a game that is very much about "the friends we made along the way" and all the companions are fantastic. Even Ashley Williams (whom I now saved to change things up) isn’t as bad as I remembered (though definitely not my fav).

But the overall story and the mysteries you encounter are still awesome.

Replaying it, I’ve noticed a few really neat things as well.

One of the first optional quests you get on the Citadel is to scan 20 Keepers. This is awesome because it naturally drives you to explore all the nooks and crannies and make sure you don’t miss any other important stuff.

But it also lets you pay more attention to the creatures and all the mysteries surrounding them. Which then provides for a much better pay off towards the end of the game.

And yet, it’s still a completely optional quest that feels like you’ve stumbled into it by accident, getting you care more than if the game actually made you do it.

I’ve really enjoyed the game’s ending too. So many other games either drag on far too long or just are either poorly written towards the end. Mass Effect’s one is just the right length and it just lands really well.

It is the ending along with a huge helping of the credits music that made me feel like this was the best game I’d ever played after finishing it. It’s not true on reflection, but the feeling persisted for a few days before objectivity set in.

The music is really good overall and I want to highlight the visual work as well. While even the remaster looks dated, Mass Effect was the first game that felt like a movie.

They literally have a setting called "Movie Grain" (on by default) which is basically a filter that makes the game look grainier, but in a way that looks like film.

It’s really weird — you literally get worse visual quality, but it feels better. And they’ve done a lot of good work with the camera. Every time you talk to someone, their actions and the camera makes it all feel like a movie rather than a game.

In a similar vein, when you’re landing on a planet, the camera is very reminiscent of the likes of Firefly and Battlestar Galactica: it looks at the sky, trying to track the ship flying past. Once the ship drops the payload (the Mako vehicle with you inside), the camera focuses on that — but crucially, none of this is a perfect tracking. It’s as if someone literally held the camera and then tried to focus first on the ship and then on the drop. The movement falls behind.

This along with the all the crew conversations within the ship was giving me a really strong Firefly vibe and it still works great.

The last thing I wanted to mention is not really to do with the game itself, but rather, my memory of it. I am well aware of how malleable and unreliable human memory is, but experiencing it first-hand is still absolutely bizarre.

I haven’t really made anything up as such, but it turns out all three games got kind of mixed in despite being years apart and having clear thematic differences.

What I thought was the Normandy’s layout is really a mix of all three games.

The commander’s room I so clearly remember is actually closest to the one in Mass Effect 2. So is having EDI and their relationship with Joker as well as the dynamic engineering duo at the lower decks. Oh and dating Tali. I thought all that was in the first game and was really surprised to not see it there.

I was waiting for the reveal that the Citadel’s Keepers are genetically engineered Proteans, but that also didn’t happen. The Proteans were turned into the Collectors in the second game and similarly, Udina’s betrayal only happened in the third.

Memory, amirite?

A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow

2021-06-09T21:09:29+00:00

Tags: book, review

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

5/5 stars

Oh my goodness, this was such an awesome surprise. I’ve heard of it on Cory Doctorow’s book tour last year, put it on the list, not knowing what to expect. A year later I finally picked up and couldn’t be happier.

A Song Below Water has two protagonists: sisters Effie and Tavia. Tavia is a siren (the controlling-people-with-voice kind), her family forcing her to hide her identity. Effie is not — she’s lost her parents and was adopted by Tavia’s family.

Set in the modern-day Portland, the world is occupied by sprites, gargoyles, Elocos and yes, sirens: always feared and also always targets of violence that somehow never gets accounted for.

Part high school drama, part mystery and part the horror of being a Black woman in America the book is beautiful, super engaging and making you want to scream. Sometimes with joy, other times… not. I was hooked immediately and stayed all the way through to the wonderful ending.

The chapters alternate Tavia and Effie’s points of view showing the care and support they have for each other as well the struggles they’re both going through. They’re both amazing and so human.

I’m going to stop writing because discovering the world and its events is a huge part of this book that I don’t want to just lay bare. If you’re up for a modern, well-plotted and equally well-written fantasy — or just want to change things up and read something with Black protagonists that shows the rest of the world how to leave the Bechdel test in the dust — this is the book to pick up.

How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow

2021-05-26T19:11:09+00:00

Tags: book, review

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

4/5 stars

The title of this book says it all. It is Cory Doctorow’s thesis on what to do about the ever-present surveillance from countries, companies, websites, mobile apps, fridges and everything else that’s connected to the internet.

If you’ve been following Cory’s writing, you won’t find a lot of surprises here.

The main idea behind this book is: surveillance capitalism is the product of monopolies and the power that the current tech giants hold is the result of them being allowed to grow by buying out competitors and dominating the markets through monopoly tactics.

Tactics that used to be illegal, but have become possible through deregulation and defanging of the agencies that were responsible for blocking or unwinding merges.

Doctorow argues that rather than tech being a think unlike anything that ever came before, a more parsimonious explanation exists: monopolies are problematic because they concentrate power. And the monopolies then use this power to grow even more powerful — to the detriment of all of us.

That there isn’t anything particularly new here and that monopolies are just unchecked capitalism in action. Why wouldn’t a company do everything in its power to assert market dominance through any means necessary when the share holders benefit and the breaks are not engaging, this a perfectly natural outcome.

One that has happened throughout history which is why the anti-monopoly regulations were put in in the first place. Not just because monopolies can raise consumer prices.

It is a good book and an argument I am absolutely sympathetic to. There may be more at play here, but the main logic: "when you allow monopolies, you get monopolies who then behave with unchecked power" and that this might be the first thing we should focus on solving; that makes perfect sense to me.

The book is positioned as being against the thesis of Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Having not read it, I don’t know whether its ideas are presented and argued against fairly here.

But the anti-monopoly Occam’s razor is strong even if it’s not the whole story. It is well presented and well argued and I’ve enjoyed reading the book.

When Stars Are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed

2021-04-03T15:30:31+00:00

Tags: comic-book, review

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

5/5 stars

“No one chooses to be a refugee, to leave their home, country and family.”

Omar and Hassan are two brothers who had to flee their home, destroyed by an unending civil war and ended up in a refugee camp in Kenya, waiting for their mother to find them. These camps are supposed to be temporary, but they’d arrived 7 years ago.

When Stars Are Scattered is a wonderful story. One of hope and despair, frustrations and joy, conflicting responsibilities and the ever-present waiting for something to change. For their mother to show up. For the war to end. For being selected for relocation. For the next food rations.

This could have been a really grim book (and such stories do indeed need telling), but chose not to be. Instead of a hyper-realistic depiction of all the horrors, it focuses on the human side. The games, the school, the chores and schedule. The neighbours. And that even in such an inhospitable environment, there is time and place for love, care, helping one another, art and everything else human beings do.

But the suffering is always there, implicit in the whole situations as well as explicit within the camps.

The comic book is beautifully drawn — in a simple but wonderful style. Particularly the faces make the characters come alive and make you believe what they’re feeling.

I’ve read it in a single sitting and I was on the verge of tears the whole time reading it. Fell in love with the boys instantly and really cared for all the people there. A lot of the public discourse around refugees and foreigners focuses on the negatives and attempts to dehumanise them — often intentionally. This is a wonderful antidote — a book full of actual people, living their lives and striving for a better tomorrow just like everyone else.

Bleach by Tite Kubo

2021-03-21T18:25:40+00:00

Tags: comic-book, review, manga

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

4/5 stars

Kurosaki Ichigo is a fifteen-year-old boy who can see ghosts. He meets Kuchiki Rukia, a "Soul Reaper" trying to protect Ichigo’s family against a "Hollow" (an undead monster attacking the living). Things don’t go according to the plan and Rukia ends up having to transfer some of her powers to Ichigo who saves the day and becomes a Soul Reaper himself. Reluctantly, he begins to protect his town while trying to keep up with his education and social life. But the hollows keep coming and the stakes keep getting higher.

Bleach is a fantastic manga. It is also the first (and so far only the one) I’ve ever read, so keep that in mind. It’s got cool samurai-like sword fights, action-packed story that keeps pushing forward, placed in an intriguing world full of history, mystery and awesome characters.

Ichigo is the protagonist, but the Bleach cast is staggering. It is the thing I would normally be completely lost in, but the books do a great job introducing them and their differences so gradually that it never became a problem.

And they’re all great, with their backstories, fighting styles and abilities. I got hooked instantly and stayed hooked throughout its staggering 74 volumes. Tito Kube has managed to build and draw a world that stayed with me and kept me coming back, desperate for more.

Unfortunately, Bleach suffers from an affliction common to long-running series: upping up the stakes, inventing more and more grave threats and dealing with them by even more fantastic powers. The heroes fight godlike creatures somewhere around the half of the series and literal gods will have appeared before the whole story ends.

Over time, things become harder to follow and the reader loses a sense of scale. Is this fantastic power going to be enough to withstand that fantastic threat? Who knows!

Tite Kubo has managed to tone things down back to a manageable level in one of the later arcs, but then let everything blow completely out of proportion again at the very last one.

The other thing that bothered me throughout was the rather blatant cheesecake aspect. A large proportion of the female protagonists feature humongous breasts and the male gaze is in full force.

I quite enjoy a bit (or indeed a lot) of sexiness, but for the most part, Bleach does it in an over-the-top crass manner. That said, I’ve only now learned that the target audience for this manga is teenage boys. I don’t think that makes it right, but I get it I guess.

An aside about the anime based on Bleach: I have seen it a couple of times prior to reading the manga and it is the most faithful translation of a "book" into a "movie" that I’ve ever seen. The anime follows the plot perfectly, the characters give off the same vibe and the two works really feel like two sides of the same coin.

I have had a blast with Bleach. It has a special place in my heart.

Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow

2021-02-23T21:04:32+00:00

Tags: book, review

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

5/5 stars

Masha is a security contractor who helps to enable mass surveillance and data processing on behalf of authoritarian governments across the world. To quell her consciousness, she engages in heavy compartmentalisation and secretly helping the protesters to improve their operational security. Knowing full well this will not make much of a difference, waiting for the inevitable collision of her two lives.

Upon returning home to California, she discovers that the tools she helped develop are being used by the police to target her friends.

I was a bit uneasy about Attack Surface despite having loved everything else Cory Doctorow has written, because Masha was not exactly the good gal in the first two books (Little Brother and Homeland).

But I was hooked from the first paragraph. She doesn’t start to be likeable, but she is a multi-faceted human being with understandable and even relatable motivations.

Even with the technology infodumps Doctorow is famous for, the book is absolutely engaging and it’s got a great character arc (I wasn’t sure which way Masha would end up going until the end). It is funny, serious, deep, dark, political and human.

The human side especially is something I wasn’t expecting, but there are genuine intense tearful moments there.

Amber Benson reads the Audiobook is read by who is just completely amazing. She sells Masha’s cynical voice perfectly and while some of the accents and male voices are less stellar, the book is so much better with her narration.

I found myself taking breaks towards the end not because it lost steam (it didn’t!) but because I didn’t want it to be over.

Attack surface is a third book in the Little Brother series, but it features a different protagonist and while events and previous characters do appear, the protagonist here is different and the story sufficiently standalone that you can jump right into it.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

2021-02-01T21:17:16+00:00

Tags: video-game, review

It is impossible for me to write about Andromeda without expanding on the Mass Effect trilogy. But since this is technically a review for Andromeda, that’s where all the screenshots come from.

Mass Effect Trilogy

2007 was a time I’ve been seriously feeling a drought of good RPGs. Diablo-likes and Bethesda-likes were not for me (and even if they were, Fallout 3 was not out for another year), neither were jRPGs.

It would be two more years before Dragon Age: Origins would come out and Kickstarter wasn’t even on anyone’s radar then — not for massive, ambitious projects like Wasteland 2.

I had just finished watching Firefly for the first time (and been absolutely floored).

Mass Effect was not something I was particularly excited about. A sci-fi RPG? Yes, absolutely. A shooter-based one? Um… no. But everyone was singing its praises and my goodness were they right.

Though the first mission (kill some robots on Mars) wasn’t exactly amazing, once you’ve reached the Citadel, things really picked up. The first Mass Effect felt like real genuine sci-fi world in ways that few other games did — and that includes the subsequent games in the series. Intriguing aliens, fascinating technology, mysteries I actually wanted to dive into. I’ve read the Codex entries religiously (which, again, is quite rare for yours truly and petered out in the subsequent games).

I knew even then that you can’t use quantum entanglement for FTL communication, and that all the races were weirdly humanoid and being up for some hot steamy fun with a bunch of hairless apes was a tad on the wishful thinking side. But it combined the best bits of Star Wars and Star Trek in a way that was familiar, coherent and fresh at the same time. You got a fantastic world to explore, rich fascinating history, mysteries to solve and awesome characters to spend time with.

Beyond the exploration, side quests, companion missions and everything else that you do in a great RPG, there was a strong coherent plot tying it all together. A plot with (and I keep harping on this because it’s so rare) an excellent ending. Amazing setting. Shit, they even have an explanation for the Fermi Paradox. I loved all the companions. They were all absolutely fascinating, always a delight to talk to. And Tali is of course <3<3<3. Mass Effect started strong and got excellent. The boss fight battle was crappy and frustrating, but everything else (the Protheans, the Keepers, the Citadel, the Reapers, the endgame fucking music).

Even besides the world, Mass Effect felt like real sci-fi. The main menu, the sounds, the whole UI all felt like it really came from the future rather than having been designed as an afterthought. I was amazed by how much the doors on the Citadel felt like being in the future. Unlike the automatic doors of our current time, you never had to change your speed (or worse: stop and wave at the sensor), never had to push a button and they only opened when you actually intended to walk through.

Your guns didn’t need ammo — this is the future, you see, and all the weapons are energy-based and so you’re never out of bullets. You can shoot infinity times, but the weapons heat up so if you fire too fast, it’ll overheat and need to cool for a bit. Which is annoying, but much less so than having to collect munition and risking running out in the middle of a battle. Future!

I do wonder how much are all these things a result of selective memory, but that’s the impression Mass Effect left me with. The other two games were a disappointment in all these regards.

Now, the first game did have its issues. All the planet bases looking the same. Door locks being protected by a circular frogger-like puzzle (thank goodness door lock minigames are mostly a thing of the past). Endless, incredibly fiddly driving around in the Mako. Don’t get me wrong, that had a lot of potential, but the planets were barren and you’ve spent a lot of the time trying to figure out whether this particular slope was too steep to drive on. And of course the combat was frustrating and boring, but that’s the case for most games.

But despite those, it left a really lasting (it’s 13 years later and I’m gushing over it still) impression.

Mass Effect 2 & 3? Not so much.

The UI reverted to being an afterthought. The combat? They brought back ammo! The one thing the combat had going for it. The one thing that elevated your typical assortment of handgun, shotgun, assault rifle and sniper rifle lack of imagination into the realm of the future was scrapped. Of course, this wasn’t the boring real-world ammo. This was the Future Ammo a.k.a. “the weapons kept overheating so we’ve introduced batteries that you can swap in and out and keep shooting so long as you’ve got 'em”.

The end result is the same — you’re back to having a limited amount of shots before you need to scamper off and pick some more up. I suspect this was because they tried to position the games for a competitive multiplayer play. In the end, it made the already boring and frustrating combat even worse. But it’s been lauded by the critics as way better than the first game so what do I know. The codex entries became much less interesting and I found myself leaving them for later and then never reading them at all.

Mass Effect 3’s biggest legacy is probably that of its controversial ending and the players' response to it. I mean a full-on fan outrage, demanding Bioware take it back, pretend it never happened and then release the actual good ending. Advertising and trade regulators had to look at the endings and rule whether the game’s ad copies were deceitful. Good fucking grief.

The whole thing was absolutely ridiculous and blown out of proportion by people who take games way too seriously. And I’m saying this as someone who (as evidenced on this blog) takes games, TV shows and books way too seriously. That said, the ending was absolutely not great. I’d say about as bad as Battlestar Galactica’s, except BSG has managed to thread one of the best songs ever made throughout half of the show, delivering an emotional payout that almost overshadowed the actual nonsense of a plot resolution. Thinking about the music there, I still get the shivers. Mass Effect had nothing like that.

But (and this does not get mentioned enough): most game endings are shit. Yes, this was a conclusion of an epic journey five years in the making and the players deserved better, but still.

And more importantly, it wasn’t just the ME 3 ending that was crap. The disgruntled people would have you believe that the entire trilogy was absolutely wonderful right until the final fifteen minutes where it all went down the toilet. That is absolutely not the case. Mass Effect 2’s plot had you working for a criminal fascist conspiracist because… reasons? With companions that either have no reason to work with you or for the boss. Facing antagonists that made no sense, with plot-induced breaks from the rules established by the game.

And let’s not forget: it ended with you fighting a giant human baby made of parts of kidnapped humans. Because I guess the antagonists were kinda dicks? Oh yeah also: your character was literally resurrected from the dead after which no one got resurrected from the dead ever again.

ME2’s main plot was dummmmmm.

But, the game itself was fun, it coasted on the excellence that the original set up and the things that you’ve spent most of your time doing — companion quests and exploration — were still awesome. Some of your decisions you made in the first game carried over got a wonderful payout here.

And Mass Effect 3 was pretty much the same deal. I’ve still really enjoyed both games and was left wanting for more. But they weren’t the pinnacles of story telling they were drummed up to be in the efforts to get the ending changed.

Andromeda

Which is why I’m really puzzled by the reception that Andromeda got.

Yes, it sets up a rule for fixing a broken helmet on a planet with an unbreathable atmosphere which it abandons two hours later because the plot demands it. Yes, the antagonists are initially set up as just plain old boring evils (and when you learn more much later on, they’re still not particularly interesting). And indeed the UI and the controls are a step down and very much feel like an afterthought. It looks like one of those poorly made "futuristic" Winamp skins. The game is glitchy, finicky, the initial writing is all over the place (but it does get better) and the sound direction is a bit of a mess.

So yes you can tell I’m actually setting up a huge "but it’s actually good" argument here.

But while we’re ragging on the game: a lot of the interaction with characters (someone gives you a quest, sends you some info, etc.) happens via email. Now, the year is 2021 and I can read email anywhere I am because I can access it via a small device I carry in my pocket. And I’ve got it on a good authority that there are billions of people who can do the same and, crucially, things were not that different in 2017 when the game came out. Which is why it’s puzzling that when you land on the central hub of all the new civilisation in Andromeda — a place that hosts the self-aware AI that you’ve got a constant techno-psychic link with — you cannot find an email terminal anywhere. Not in your pocket, not on the omnitool on your arm, not in the public places, not in your room, not in the server room hosting the aforementioned AI. You wanna read an email? You’ve got to go back to your ship. And every time you do that, the game plays an animation where you leave the space station and go into space so you can read the email and then play another (unskippable, of course) animation to land back on the hub. I guess people in the future took disconnecting super seriously, but also really inconsistently.

So yes, on reflection I understand why people bounced off it. But it was actually pretty good! Not 10 out of 10 (which if we’re being honest none of the Mass Effect games really deserved), but a really solid 7/10.

The companions are fantastic, the places you get to explore are wonderful, even the overarching plot is quite decent, actually. I’ve definitely enjoyed uncovering the mysteries, solving all the little quests, spending quality time with the crew, and every now and then, even the shooty bits. Just like its predecessors, the Andromeda is in this weird position of great character interaction and mostly uninteresting combat. The music (especially the main menu one) is fantastic. Pretty much all the character skills are combat related so the choice is not between different ways to solve a problem, but between different means of killing the enemies which is emphatically not my thing. But we got back the driving around the planet and this was much more interesting and much less frustrating than in the first Mass Effect. Although, it was still rather fiddly and could have used more polish.

The lack of polish is a strong theme throughout the game’s many systems. The writing could use a touch-up, the UI is in sore need of one and a lot of the other areas felt like they had the necessities in place but they weren’t quite where they should be. With maybe a year of focused attention, the game could easily have risen to the heights of the first one and achieve the critical and player acclaim it desired.

But honestly, it felt so great spending time with all the Mass Effect species again. This game coasts on the Mass Effect universe just like all the other ones do. But it’s still a really wonderful place they’ve managed to put together and cast it in a bit of a different light here. Fewer restrictions on AI research, more opportunities for the Krogan to grow, a new friendly but really wary race to get to know.

There’s a bunch of loose ends that were clearly meant to be explored more in the subsequent games. We won’t know who the Remnant builders are. We won’t learn what happened to that machine buried under Voeld. We won’t understand the Scourge, its causes and any connection to the Remnant or the changes on the golden worlds. Think of all the unresolved stuff that we’d be left with if Mass Effect 2 & 3 never happened. And I’m genuinely saddened by that.

But, the game had a really solid resolution, an ending that didn’t have a huge bang but also (crucially!) didn’t drag on for too long, didn’t have a bad boss fight at the end of it and wrapped the whole thing up quite nicely.

Mass Effect: Andromeda is definitely a mixed bag, but one that I’ve enjoyed throughout and look back on with fondness.

2021 in RoguelikeDev

2021-01-31T18:55:19+00:00

Tags: gamedev, project, update

The r/roguelikedev subreddit community hosts a yearly January event where authors talk about the last year in development and look ahead. This is my post (originally on Reddit).

Dose Response

Dose Response is an open world roguelike where you’re an addict. You’re wandering around, desperately looking for the next fix, having to avoid the dangers surrounding you.

It’s an abstract game — no needles or guns, the monsters are concepts rather than orcs or trolls. The focus is more on the loop of compulsion and the alternating of feeling great and the fall that follows.

It is also supposed to be a relatively short and simple game. One where you don’t have a tonne of things to learn. There’s few items, a handful of monsters, no levelling and no spells. Something that a "normal player" would be able to play (and win if they’re careful) while still being challenging and true to the roguelike feel.

2020 Retrospective

I had planned to double down on Dose Response development and release it on Steam. But the last 15 months or so have been incredibly difficult for me. Crises came in different forms, from many angles, one after another. It took a huge amount of effort and energy to remain safe and (mostly) sound.

Things are better now, but I was able to do a small fraction of what I planned.

I’ve wanted to add graphical tiles to the game for a long time, but I really worried about being able to keep the feel of the game, maintain the abstract nature of it.

Then I came across this free Bountiful Bits tileset by VEXED and I loved it instantly. Put it in the game, loved the look and asked the author if they were willing to create the tiles that were missing (characters, monsters, food, doses).

And we came up with a great agreement. The work was in a range I was happy to pay for something that will unlikely reach any real profit, they’re licensed under CC0 which means I can keep the game fully open source and VEXED can have them in their open portfolio.

VEXED has been fantastic to work with — they took on my deeply vague requests and created something with the exact look and feel I wanted.

Screenshots

Companion NPC with tiles:

Same screenshot with ASCII graphics:

A fully uncovered game map:

Same with ASCII graphics:

The only other significant thing I’ve done was replace my ad-hoc text-based UI code with a Rust-native library called egui. It’s a pretty young project, but it’s got actual widgets, can do layouts, is renderer agnostic and therefore let me do a lot of things I’ve been putting off.

Main menu:

Settings:

Oh, and I finally also got a laptop from Apple a year ago and thus managed to fix issues on that platform. Since then, Apple has switched their lineup to a completely new CPU architecture so who knows if it’ll still work there. I’m not buying a mac every year.

2021 Outlook

There’s a handful of things that I’d like to do before I feel I’m satisfied with the game:

Finish up the menu and GUI work
- Add the graphical tiles to the Help pages, inventory, etc.
  - Right now, the GUI only shows the ASCII version of everything
- Implement the Challenge settings to make the game easier/harder to play
- Add a colour-blind and/or greyscale mode
Add (optional) sounds and some ambient music
Improve the world generation
- I like what the current naïve worldgen produces
- But I’d like to make the exploration more varied and interesting
Better mouse support
- You can fully control the game with a mouse but it’s awkward
- I’d like to make it feel better without compromising on the "roguelikeness"
Start posting regular gameplay videos and updates

None of these are massive, but they’ll take time and energy which is in short supply still.

And the biggie: release on Steam.

Even without updating the gameplay, I want to finish up the graphics, sound & controls work before I’m comfortable putting it on Steam, though.

Links

Website | Trailer | itch.io | Source | Play Online

The version on the website/itch doesn’t have the new changes. I need to read up on Steam’s (and other stores') policies to see how much is allowed on other sites with possibly different payment strategies (Dose Response on Itch is pay what you want). I might end up keeping the ASCII-only version as is and make the new version with graphics etc. have a set price.

How to Argue With a Racist by Adam Rutherford

2021-01-16T12:36:32+00:00

Tags: book, review, science

This review was originally posted at Goodreads and imported here later on with next to no spell/grammar checking.

5/5 stars

How to Argue With a Racist is an excellent book about the history, biology, sociology and genetics of human race. It does not cover the psychology of deeply held ideas or how to change minds, which makes the title a bit of a misnomer.

It will explain where the science stands on a lot of commonly held beliefs and debunk common racist talking points. But as the saying goes, you can’t reason someone out of a position they hadn’t reasoned themselves into.

Despite being (intentionally) quite short, it covers a wide range of topics: from the history of genetics, genealogy and their connection to colonialism and oppression, to the seeming domination of certain races in sports and the underlying biology (and lack thereof).

Rutherford convincingly argues genetics show no clear delineation of the commonly-used human races. For example, the African population that’s conveniently lumped together under the "black" moniker has far greater genetic diversity than all the rest of the world combined. Every trait commonly attributed to a certain group can be found elsewhere and the human populations have mixed much more than people think and that modern racists would have us believe.

But he does argue that race exists. It is, however, a social construct. One that historically arose from conquest and exploitation and it is still used for those purposes today.

He explains the current and likely fundamental limitations of the DNA-based ancestry testing and how they are being used and vastly misinterpreted in white supremacy forums. And how, even when used for less nefarious purposes, they paint a really misleading and incomplete picture.

When getting to sport performance, the book completely demolishes the "Black people are the best sprinters because they had to run in the planes of Africa" or that the African-American success is somehow linked to a selection during slavery.

There are genes associated with physical performance, but their numbers are vast and our understanding of their function is tiny. Even for seemingly clear and simple traits such as the eye colour the genetic story is much more complicated than I thought.

When it comes to things such as height, sport performance or intelligence, we’ve discovered hundreds or thousands of genes that are correlated somehow, but their exact contribution and how they interact is unknown.

And even then, while certain innate physical abilities definitely play a role and may be necessary for the absolute peak performance, they’re far from the whole story and they’re spread out through the entire human population.

Access to training facilities, coaches, resources, education, support, role models, culture — all these play a massive role in success. When you examine the "sport success depends on race" hypothesis with a just tiny bit of critical thought it crumbles. If people of recent African origin are so inherently physically superior in sprinting or long-distance running, why aren’t they dominating speed skating, sprint cycling and my favourite: climbing. All the "out of Africa" explanations should map equally well to climbing. Or, why aren’t South Americans dominating the Olympic sprinting alongside their North American neighbours? The slavery of Africans was just as vibrant there.

It just doesn’t add up, but this sort of lazy thinking is as common as it is inadequate.

"It seems absurd to say it, but the pivotal element in being able to swim is learning to swim. Rather than contesting some imaginary biological sinking factor."

Adam Rutherford draws into his scientific background in evolutionary genetics and his decades in science communication to put together a fantastic resource on human race. One of the few scientific books I would recommend to absolutely everyone.

Games Played in 2020

2021-01-04T21:24:41+00:00

Tags: video-game, retrospective

I’ve played lots of games in 2020. In part because I couldn’t do a lot other activities such as climbing, seeing people, etc. In part because of the deep desire to return to the familiar while the world was figuratively and literally on fire.

It’s not that I’ve had more time due to the lockdowns or whatnot. If anything, I’ve been working longer and harder this year. But I didn’t have the energy or the mental capability to do much else. And so after work, I just picked up a game instead.

Not necessarily the healthiest option, definitely not the most productive one, but it got me through.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order

I was hoping against hope that this would be a great game. I’ve been dreaming about a soulslike game with lightsabers for a long time.

Sadly, the combat was chaotic, the writing and storytelling weak and the main character bland.

It highlighted how fantastic FromSoft are at what they do and that you can’t just drop Souls mechanics into a game and make it magically feel good.

(website, review)

Stardew Valley

I’ve played a little bit of Stardew Valley, but I just don’t feel the urge to play more. I think part of it is that in order to get the characters to like you more you need to keep giving them gifts and figure out what they do and don’t like. And the farming itself seems to be similarly complex.

Which cheapens the wholesomeness somewhat. I don’t want to keep detailed records of who likes what gift or which seeds are the most profitable. Or read a forum and follow a guide that someone optimised to death.

But not interacting with these systems feels like missing out on a tonne of stuff. I’ve attended a couple of festivals in the game and no one wanted to e.g. dance with me. So yea I can shut in and just focus on farming, but that’s not the life I want my character to live.

Still, it’s a beautiful, lovely game and I’d like to return to it.

(website)

Love Is Strange

This is a visual novel inspired by Life is Strange. You play as Max and your photography class teacher asked all of you to pick a partner and do a project together.

You can choose Chloe, Kate, Rachel or Victoria. There’s no time rewind, no horrific shit, you just spend a week together, getting to know one another better and taking the best picture you can to win the contest.

Each playthrough is maybe about an hour long and I did one with each of the characters. It was delightful and really relaxing that Life is Strange could not be.

Some of the faces looked a bit iffy, but overall the graphics were lovely and I really enjoyed the writing.

Wish Dontnod would make a game that didn’t have a tragedy at its core. I really really do.

(website)

Doki Doki Literature Club

I kept hearing about this one — how it’s not what it seems and how it’s really good and really smart.

It looks like a super trashy dating sim that I would never have picked up on my own. And indeed the game feels like a massive cliché, but soon something starts to feel off and when it picks up… yeah.

Discussing the details is difficult, because it’s all a massive spoiler directory. But you should know that if you’re faint of heart or a person who appreciates content warnings, please do seek them out even though they’ll spoil things.

I loved the game, but a few scenes were really difficult for me to handle. It was absolutely worth it, but yea it’s not a light carefree game.

Definitely really smart. Certain bits give me strong Undertale vibes.

(website)

Bloodborne NG+

It’s strange to think of Bloodborne as my comfort game, but it is. Yes, it is tense, unforgiving, with a challenging combat. But once you’ve played it once and know what’s going on, it feels like returning to the place of your childhood.

So yes, when I was at my lowest, I played Bloodborne and it was great.

(website, review)

Ladykiller In a Bind

My other comfort game is this strange but absolutely hilarious, beautifully drawn and perfectly written crossdressing lesbian cruise misadventure.

I haven’t played it much this year, but when I was feeling a bit sick and tired and sad, I gave it a spin for a few hours and felt much better.

(website (NSFW))

Final Fantasy VII Remake

I’ve always wanted to play jRPGs and never got very far with them. I was hoping this remake of FFVII would finally stick and… it did!

It was beautiful and weird and overall more frustrating than fun. But: I’ve definitely enjoyed it and I don’t regret playing it at all. I finally get all the Cloud and Tifa and Barret references and fan art.

Wish I knew it didn’t cover the full scope of the original Final Fantasy VII, though.

(website, review)

Tell Me Why

This is the third Life is Strange game as far as I’m concerned. I’ve had a great time playing it. Loved Aly, Tyler and Michael so much.

Though again, Dontnod how about making a game that doesn’t have a horrific tragedy in it.

Side note: I’ve followed Alyson’s lead and finally got myself a telescope.

(website, review)

Arity

Lovely short RPG with great characters and a great endgame (how often does that happen!!).

Took maybe a couple hours to finish, had a simple but intriguing combat I was actually willing to engage with. Cool story, great ending, everything distilled into those couple of hours, no cruft.

I’d love to play more games like that.

(website, review)

One Night Stand

Excellent music, fantastic graphics, I really enjoyed the writing. Short, wonderful game.

It delves straight into the awkwardness of the situation, the intimacy combined with a lack of closeness and the boundaries one needs to be mindful of.

(website, review)

Spelunky 2

I’ve played it a bunch, but not as much as I expected to. It definitely didn’t get me obsessed to the level the first game did. Which isn’t bad, my relationship with Spelunky did skirt the unhealthiness line occasionally.

It’s a great game, I think I’ll definitely play a lot more of it. But it is much more difficult and I’ve got less drive to play it. Also, fuck the moles.

(website)

A Summer’s End

A wonderful visual novel with a unique look and great setting that’s undermined by the writing somewhat. Still, I’ve been glad to have played it.

The combination of Western and Asian cultures, the uncertainties about the handover, the difficult relationship with the parents… it’s got really powerful themes.

(website, review)

Paradise Killer

Absolutely mental game. Great music, great visuals, bonkers setting and characters. Really, really special.

You’re an immortal detective called in from her eternal prison to solve a murder most foul. The island is controlled by cultists trying to revive the old gods. But, you’re one of the cultists and just want to resolve the crime so you can all get back to living the life and sacrificing the "citizens" kidnapped to worship the gods.

(website, review)

Butterfly Soup

My favourite game of the year. I love the writing, the humour, the characters.

A visual novel of four wonderfully unique American girls, who share two things: being Asian and gay. It is hilarious, smart, surprising, wonderful.

I expect to be playing this many more times.

(website, review)

Mass Effect: Andromeda

I hadn’t planned to play it at all based on the game’s negative reception. But lately, I’ve heard a multitude of "Andromeda was quite good, actually" voices and decided to give it a go.

It’s massive, I’ve not finished it yet but I’ve played a lot of it.

And it’s definitely got a lot of bugs, technical issues and writing problems. If I played it when it came out, expecting more of Mass Effect (though that series got steadily worse too), I’d have been bitterly disappointed.

But underneath all the issues and all the jank, there is a really good game there. Characters I like, good mysteries, learning about a new world, the Mass Effect races you know and love.

The perfect 7/10 game I think. With a potential to have been so much more than it actually is.

(website)

In store for 2021

Finish Mass Effect: Andromeda
More Spelunky 2
Vampire The Masquerade 2
Nighthawks
Geneforge 1 Remastered
- Spiderweb Software make really solid classic RPGs
- I was always intrigued by the Geneforge world, but only played the last game in the series
- I was waiting for the remaster (supported them on Kickstarter) and it should come out in 2021
Queen’s Wish
- The latest Spiderweb Software game
- New setting and systems
- Tries to streamline the classic RPG formula in interesting ways
Demon’s Souls Remake on PS5
- My PS5 will arrive sometime in February and this is the game I’ll probably play first there
- Predecessor to Dark Souls

Also, almost certainly more visual novels.

If the time & mood is right, I’d like to do a NG++ Bloodborne playthrough to pick up the one remaining achievement (the waking up ending).

Despite last year’s expectations, I will almost certainly not play Cyberpunk 2077 after all. The release has been massively rushed out, it’s apparently super buggy (despite (or because of?) breaking the "no crunch" promise) and they willfully mislead the PS4 and Xbox One players.

I might possibly pick it up a couple years later assuming they’ve fixed it up. Although I’m deeply disappointed with the way CD Project handled the last several months, so I might not out of principle.

Finally, I’d like to give Divinity: Original Sin and Skyrim another chance, but who knows.

Paradise Killer

2020-12-30T12:10:08+00:00

Tags: video-game, review

Paradise Killer is a gorgeous-looking exploration game set on a mad cultist island. You control Lady Love Dies, an investigator tasked with solving the murder of all the island’s council members.

The island is meant to the perfect place for its inhabitants (other than the thousands of people abducted, forced to worship and ultimately sacrificed, of course) to live, pursue their interests and wake up the old gods.

Every island so far (including this one) has failed and you’re brought in during the move to the new one, because the council (who dream up the new island and bring it into the existence) were killed.

This is not your typical fantasy setting. It’s not a classical Lovecraftian horror either. You are the ruling class, waking up the gods is the right thing to do and there’s few tentacles around.

The characters include a living red skeleton (Sam Day Break), a hot Scottish doctor with prosthetic arms (Doctor Doom Jazz, officially the best name ever invented) and last but not least, a beauty idol with a goat head (Crimson Acid).

I’ve heard Paradise Killer described as a detective game, but that’s not really accurate in my experience. Yes, you are tasked with solving crimes, you interrogate the citisens, question their alibis, look for inconsistencies and gather the evidence. At the end, you participate in a trial to find who’s guilty.

But, what you do in practice is explore every nook an cranny of the island, get into hidden or locked-away locations and make sure you haven’t missed a crucial piece of data somewhere.

And it should be played that way. Approaching it as a detective, one would want prioritise interrogating the crime scene, interviewing all the suspects, pointing out inconsistencies, etc. They’re all located in different places and the fast-travel system is rather costly early in the game, resulting in a frustrating experience.

If instead you decide to walk everywhere (guided by the cases) and prioritise finding clues and information spread all throughout the island and talk to people as you come across them, you will build a much better picture in your head and you will not miss any crucial evidence. By the time you do need to talk back and forth, you’ll have amassed enough of the island’s currency to hop where you need to go.

Gameplay tip: use the foot baths as soon as you can, buy a drink from every vending machine you come across and prioritise getting the Starlink upgrades. These will all be really helpful to you throughout.

The game is has got a strong atmosphere. It’s mad, but in a good way. Learning about the rituals, the history, the inhabitants — it showcases the best Cosmic Horror while simultaneously managing to make it feel mundane. This isn’t a lone detective trying to uncover a cultist plot. The plot has succeeded centuries ago. The cultists have found a place for them to live, contacted the old gods and built a functioning society. Everyone’s already incredibly powerful and basically immortal. Other than demons possessing the inhabitants and corrupting the island, this is a cultist paradise.

And yet even the immortal godlike beings are prone to conspiracies, hatred, jealousy, rumours, betrayal, ambition and most of all hubris.

Despite being largely static, Paradise Killer manages to build a powerful sense of place. This island exists, people lived and keep living on it. Locations have their distinct feel and purpose, from the high-rise industrial complexes and the small houses of the working class to the lush apartments occupied the members of the Syndicate.

This goes all the way into their language and customs. How you say good bye to someone depends on that person’s birth sign. You would part Grand Marshal Akiko with “May your night be bright” (she was born under the sign of the New Night). Lady Love Dies (born under the sign of Kiss Me To The Moon) is always told “May you reach the Moon”.

Rarely have I experienced a world where everything worked to build a common sense of culture and made it alive.

Visually, the game is set in a 3D environment with items and characters being rendered as 2D sprites always facing you — a look I’ve last seen in Might and Magic VIII. It feels a bit strange, but it works fine.

I do have a few minor quibbles, though.

The voice acting is superb, but only a limited number of lines is recorded. This is common enough, but it’s made worse here by the fact that what’s voiced is not what a character says, but rather the general idea or feeling of the sentence,

So for example, alongside a dialogue like this:

Love Dies: “Who do you think killed the council?”
Akiko: “The suspect I’ve got imprisoned right here!”
Love Dies: “Can you think of anyone who might benefit?”
Akiko: “Why? We’ve got the evidence tying Henry to the murders.”

What you’ll actually hear (driven by Love Dies’s investigative attitude and Akiko’s dislike of poking into an open-and-shut case) is:

Love Dies: “I am the investigator.”
Akiko: “I’ll kill you!”
Love Dies: “The Investigator is here.”
Akiko: “I’ll kill you!”

More often than not, this makes the dialogues feel incongruous despite the consistently excellent writing.

Secondly, the items you can pick up in the world (Blood Crystals, mementos, pieces of evidence) have this strange pixelated look to them. I think that’s intentional so they’re easier to see at a glance, but it just feels weird.

And… that’s it! Nothing else to complain about.

Paradise Killer is a fantastic game, with a unique look, intriguing multi-faceted mystery, absolutely brilliant character design and an amazing atmosphere.