Reviews: Comics, physics, and a game

[roadrunnertwice]

Ryan Estrada and Diana Nock — Poorcraft: Wish You Were Here (comics)

June 22

An educational comic about how to travel the world on the cheap (-er / -ish).

Cool material, and Estrada definitely has the requisite bona-fides. (Wasn't he running a shoestring cartoonist commune in Mexico for a year or two? I feel like I remember that from ages ago.)

Eleanor Davis — Tomorrow (part 1) (comics)

June somethingth

The first part of a graphic novel, which Davis is serializing as PDFs on Gumroad. This chapter is all set-up for... I'm not sure what. But it's good. Economical and self-assured storytelling, sketching out who these people are and what they want. Humane and deftly observed.

Ben Fleuter — The Sword Interval vol. 1 (comics)

June 27

The more I think about this setting, the less sense it makes — it's sort of like shared-world superhero comics, where there's just no WAY the world would look anything like this one after decades of constant super-battles. But it's a fun monster-slaying romp anyway! Well-staged and well-cartooned fights, good monster and character design. (Fleuter's other comic, Derelict, takes place in a much more cohesive world, but it's also on indefinite hiatus, alas. And it's much more of a persistent downer.)

Anyway, looks like this one is still running online, so I added it to my reader.

Chad Orzel — How to Teach Physics to Your Dog

July 14

I read Orzel's book about relativity a while back, and after I finished Hawking's Brief History of Time I remembered I'd always meant to go back and read the one about quantum mechanics.

This was pretty great. Again, it's way less ambitious than what Hawking was doing, but I think it does a better job of hammering home a real understanding of some really unintuitive and bizarre material. Quantum mechanics and relativity are concepts that make my brain feel like its fingers are greased, and I don't think I'm alone in this, but after reading these, I feel like I understand the cores of them, at least.

(In a way, I think Hawking was at a disadvantage just because of how brilliant he was; I suspect this stuff is harder for Orzel, so he has better judgment about how to get it across to people who find it really difficult.)

Bonus Level: Sundered

July somethingth

This was billed as a metroidvania with roguelike elements, and I was drawn to it by the cool art style.

Initially, the PS4 release was so foully bugged that I regretted paying money for it at all. I almost can't believe anyone would willingly release a game in that condition. But they eventually put out a patch that fixed the awful crashes and slowdown and cleaned up the worst of the load times, so now I can actually consider it on its merits.

And those merits are pretty mixed. Basically, this game is grindy as fuck, and the combat feels sloppy and un-technical (the enemy attacks are so cheap that they're basically noninteractive; it's just a question of whether your damage/armor/recovery/dodge numbers will let you prevail or not, or alternately whether you'll fuck up a heal trigger), and those things combine to waste a whole lot of your time. It was satisfying at times despite that — the environment and character design was cool, the voice work was good, the bosses were impressive and challenging (that Dominion fight, fuck) — but I don't really feel the urge to replay it for the other upgrade/story path.

I ended up siding with the cultists and elder gods, because A: within the text, the military dudes seemed like a bunch of colonialist fuckwads, and B: outside the text, Lovecraft can fuck right off. I guess that was sort of the "bad" ending, but IMO the surface world had it coming.

Dead Cells is coming out soon, and it looks like maybe a more technical/less random take on some of these same design ideas, so I'm excited to try that.