Reviews: Cuttings and Tacoma

[roadrunnertwice]

Yuko Ota and Ananth Panagariya — Cuttings (comics/artbook)

May 29

(Since this book is from 2014, it lists Ananth Hirsh under his former name.)

Like with Offhand, I can't really recommend seeking this out unless you're already quite invested in the authors' work; read Our Cats are More Famous Than Us, Lucky Penny, or their ongoing comic Barbarous instead. Also much like Offhand, I like this and am glad to have a copy.

So I guess that's all the review this really needs, isn't it? But at any rate, it's a collection of fragments from dead, fallow, or still pending comics ideas these two have worked on. I'm still crossing my fingers that we'll see something cohesive in that weird beast-gods world Ota's been kicking around for a decade-plus, even though it does kind of have the aura of one of those intricate and expansive inner worlds that many writers nurture for eons and then ultimately put aside because they can't manage to melt it down into a mere story. (Sometimes because the world is too fundamentally incoherent and it simply can't be done, and sometimes because doing so would demand the destruction of the perfect inner vision, and they don't have the stomach for it. But then again, every once in a while someone pulls it off.)

One random bit that I cherish: the book includes this strip, which Ota drew in response to one of yrs truly's twitter goofs.

Bonus Level: Tacoma

May 31

The anticapitalism was coming from inside the house.

This was good, and it also had some interesting setting-specific solutions to some of the persistent problems of the depopulated site trash-pickup simulator genre.

If you remember my review of Gone Home, I had... ok, actually I'm not gonna bother to go back and read it 😅 but I THINK my biggest issues with the game were:

• The temporal dissonance of having Sam's audio records scattered throughout the house knocks you out of Katie's shoes. Her experience of the search is COMPLETELY UNRELATED to the player's experience of the search, because she only finds Sam's diary at the very end. (I could go on about this at length but I feel like if you give a damn about this genre you probably know what I'm talking about.)
• The arbitrary gating of the house regions was busted. It didn't make sense for that to even be possible in a real residence, and the extra mansion size necessary to make the paths work out made the house feel totally clownshoes instead of plain-old "too big," AND the fact that the trash and audio logs were spread across the gates in roughly chronological order made it look like the family was a nomadic encampment that repeatedly moved from room to room over the months, which is an unintentionally hilarious mental image.

Guess what, Tacoma does a way better job with this! At the time I played Gone Home, I thought the answer was going to be to curve harder toward a trash-focused story design. But instead they doubled down on the recorded drama, and focused on working up a setting where the recorded drama and railroading actually made diegetic sense. (But don't get me wrong, the trash here is pretty excellent.) The audio-and-wireframe-gesture logs are an artifact of the station's AR panopticon (complete with storage glitches and people wandering out of frame mid-conversation, which gives a really effective sense of not having been recorded for your benefit), the gating is corporate busybodies micromanaging your contract, and the awkwardness of the living spaces makes perfect sense in a rotating tin can parked out at one of the Earth/Moon Lagrange points.

TBH, I think this found-recordings style of storytelling is just fundamentally better-suited for highly technological settings. Creating a coherent recording at, e.g., a 1990s tech level just requires so much intention that it's always going to come out stilted. Remember those tape recorders in the hospital at the end of The Last of Us? Why the fuck was the doctor carrying around twelve fucking flash recorders and discarding one whenever she sat down? What possible universe does that make sense in??? IDK, I think about these things. Unfortunately.

At any rate, Tacoma is an impressive advancement for depopulated site trash-pickup simulators; I really like what they did here, and I connected with the story and characters a lot more than I did in Firewatch (the other recent walking simulator that pushed the genre forward a bit).

I also really like some of the setting-building stuff they did for the AIs. Remember how I got mad when Slow Way to a Long Angry Planet (sorry, my brain's been bunging up that title ever since I started reading it) under-thought its AIs and it made that whole plotline boring as fuck? This game is a good example of how thinking it through just an extra half-step or two can really improve everything. Stuff like the methods for training and evaluating AIs, and how old the highest-capability ones are, and that book about meditation you can find that was written by an AI, and the nature of the AI cores; it all builds a certain depth and interest in what it's like to be one of these AIs, and the whole climax and denouement wouldn't work at all without that textual depth. I mean, it's no Ancillary Justice, but it's solid. It works.

The pacing of revelations was pretty decent too; I figured out who my character was and who her friends were pretty early (lmao @ that plywood enclosure in her ship, so good), but the way some of the other technologies in the game intersected with each other (like the vat meat and the OTHER vat meat) only occurred to me pretty much just in time.

The setting is a fairly dire capitalist hell, complete with company scrip, and I keep thinking about parts of it. Like: if this much of the space infrastructure is devoted purely to conspicuous consumption, that means we've kept on AND ACCELERATED the shitty way we've been going... so, how bad is it by this point, down on Earth? And also like: so many of our futures still seem to be always Urras, never Annares.