Short lil book and game post

Oh hey, it's been a minute since I posted anything. Well! Here's the half-handful of reviews I had sitting in the hopper. I'm recovering from a cold and feeling somewhat faded/unreal, so I don't have too much else to say right now.

Adrian Tchaikovsky — Children of Time

July 30

I read this in a single day on my phone in a series of airports, planes, and busses, en route to Mammoth Lakes so we could start acclimating to elevation for the John Muir Trail.

I really enjoyed it! Good thinky SF about intelligent spiders trying to keep a civilization up and running. And I kept thinking about it for a long time after finishing.

I was reading Graeber's Debt at the same time as this, and it definitely called my attention to the fact that the somewhat-egalitarian society the spiders have finally come to around the final acts of the book is only possible via free labor from the ants. The characters talk about it like biotechnology or computerization or robotics rather than slavery, and the ants themselves don't appear to have much in the way of a sense of self, but the setup definitely reminded me of Graeber's depictions of ancient Greece and Rome. Not really sure what to do with that, just something I noticed and pondered on.

Content warning: SO MANY SPIDERS, OMG

Bonus Level: Get in the Car, Loser

Oct. somethingth

This was fantastic. I'd had an eye on it in development, just because I was very intrigued when Christine Love said she was building a playable thesis on why FFXIII's Battle System Was Good, Actually.

Mechanically, it lived up to my expectations and then some — the battling was fun and tricky, and I think it had several genuinely novel and cool ideas for how to streamline various elements of an RPG. (The lane-change thing! Burning outdated items to upgrade new ones! The item stories!) The visuals and audio were also really cool and enjoyable.

Story-wise, this honestly hit much harder than I expected it to. I feel like most of us are generally in the mood these days for a story about a trans girl and her friends fighting nazis, but also I was a little wary — like, I feel it's easy for self-consciously on-the-nose media to be slight and flimsy in certain ways. But this felt honest and raw while still being of-the-current-moment, and it even did some formally interesting stuff (like, the whole chapter where Sam's just stuck in her own shitty thoughts was done in a really cool and tense way).

Anyway, this is actually free, weirdly. There's one DLC out right now, which goes for $10 and doesn't feel like $10 of content at all, but I bought it and am perfectly fine with that — the way I read it is, the main game is a bargain at $10 and you just post-pay if you liked it.

Bonus Level: The Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

Dec 20

This is DLC for one of my favorite games of the last year, and it truly rules. I was really skeptical that there was room for something like this in that universe — the main game was so complete and coherent! Where were they even going to shoehorn more lore in?? But it works really well — better than well, it even manages to improve the coherency of the main storyline. (Via... not really a retcon, more just some added context and a valid answer to a particular question that the Nomai eventually concluded was unknowable.)

Mechanically speaking, this adds one very large additional environment to the solar system... plus something sort of else. I feel like I ran into some slightly more frustrating roadblocks in this than I did in the main game; definitely had to look up a nudge for one puzzle in the tower. I'll just chalk that up to it being a more claustrophobic environment — in the main game I could always just blast off to some other corner of the universe if I got annoyed at something, while here I'd eventually hit a point where I just couldn't get around whatever I was blocked on. If you're thinking of playing the game for the first time, I think I'd recommend just buying the DLC before you start and exploring it in parallel with everything else; you'll want to avoid doing the final Echoes segment (you'll know when you're coming up against it, believe me) until you're pretty sure you've sorted out what was going on with the Ash Twin Project, but otherwise it should weave in pretty well, and having more stuff to explore elsewhere will give you some buffer against the more frustrating puzzles.

Also, fair warning, this has some spookier content than the base game and also includes some stealth/evasion challenges.