Sure, why not, let's bookpost.

Wren Hyde — Beneath a Burning Sky (zine)

Feb 27

A friend we know from Ruth's shapenote singing community wrote a zine about going on long bike tours. It's good! Wren generally puts a lot of energy into thinking about things like the practical exercise of freedom and the purpose of risking yourself on an adventure, and I always value the sense of being gently shaken out of autopilot that I get from talking to (or reading) them.

I don't know of anywhere a random person could obtain this from, but it's worth picking up if you happen to see it around.

Ken Liu — Laozi’s Dao De Jing: A New Translation for a Transformative Time

Mar. 30

(For now I’m putting Liu as the author here rather than Laozi, but I might reconsider at some point. He has a lot of commentary in his own voice interspersed throughout the book (on the Dao, on other Daoist writers, on the theory and practice of translation), so it’s not attempting to be an invisible translation.)

I picked this up because the ebook was on steep sale. My only real prior familiarity with this text was indirect, through the prints it leaves on the surrounding world, and those prints are ambiguous and elusive. Well... the text is also ambiguous and elusive. Even more so than I was expecting, and that’s saying something! Having carefully read it, I do not feel equipped to tell you what I think Daoism is about. Ask me in some later year, maybe.

I’m glad I read this and I expect to return to it. It’s deliberately aggravating and provocative, but in a gentle way. I really had no idea what to think of it right after finishing, but there are one or two ideas in there that have yielded a bit more as I mull them over in the background. (In particular, some paradoxes about the entire concept of “leading.”)

J.-C. Mézières, P. Christin, E. Tranlé — Valerian and Laureline: The Empire of a Thousand Planets and The Land Without Stars (comics)

Apr. 14

This long-running French sci-fi comic series came up in a conversation about The Fifth Element; I hadn't really heard of it, but it's apparently widely influential. The library had a bunch of it, so I checked out a couple volumes.

The art and the environment design in these is fabulous. But I found the stories a bit tedious and slight, and the cartooning (as distinct from the superb draftsmanship and composition) wasn't to my taste, so I don't expect to read much more of it.

This is that style of comic where the panels are lushly and meticulously detailed, but there aren't enough of them to properly control the narrative flow, and so they compensate by cramming a goddamn paragraph of captions above every other panel. My personal name for this phenomenon is "That Prince Valiant Thing," in honor of a baffling Sunday newspaper strip from my childhood that always seemed to have like one panel of dudes staring into space and a half-page of turgid narration in which absolutely nothing ever happened. I'm sure there's people who like this (or at least are better able to tolerate it), but I personally feel that it misses the point of the medium.

Tamsyn Muir — Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower

Apr. 10

I loved this gory inverted fairy tale about a self-made monster.

This novella has an extremely good Shape, and I wish I could define that better for you. I've had an ongoing background ponder running for years about what exactly the novella as a form is good for, and my current (tentative) thinking is that it's either for episodic stories, or for stories where you're trying to draw a very particular geometric structure with the plot (which requires more elbow room than a short, but which will have less success in a longer novel because it's harder for the reader to hold the whole of the shape in their head at once). The failure states for the novella are, of course, "short story that wasn't cut enough" and "novel with insufficient development."

Ah right, since I've got all the reviews (but one) posted, may as well do the wrap-up:

• 9 fiction:
  • 2 by men
  • 7 by women
  • 2 re-reads, 7 new
• 16 comics:
  • 8 by men
  • 7 by women
  • 1 by non-binaries
• 5 video games with significant narratives

Not exactly a red-letter reading year! But, some slightly interesting trends:

• Significantly more comics than in the prior five years.
• Prose fiction is down from 2023, but oddly, the amount of novels I read for the first time is stable (and up from prior years).

I’ve continued to lean into my shmup era lately, focusing mostly on Touhou 10 and Blue Revolver: Double Action (a brand new remaster of an acclaimed 2016 game).

I started playing Blue Revolver some time after making that last post, and it is a proper jewel of a game. Actually: it’s the very next shmup I would recommend to a newcomer after ZeroRanger. ZR taught me why I should care about shmups, and BR:DA is in the process of teaching me how to care about shmups.

I learned about this game from an enthusiastic video about it from a youtuber called Electric Underground. I thought his analysis was onto something really interesting; the nutshell version goes something like:

• The complex act of balancing scoring systems against survival is where most of the depth emerges in a shoot-and-dodge game. To serious shmup genre heads, the real game begins when you start playing for score.
• BUT: scoring mechanics and the scoring metagame are traditionally opaque, and hard to grasp without an external community.
• Therefore, the next design frontier for shmups is to integrate the metagame with the core game — transparently expose the full depths of the scoring systems, and build on-ramps to score-play through all the rest of the systems, so that new players find themselves beginning to play for score long before they even get competent at playing for survival. Shmups may never be appropriate for anyone but sickos, but that’s how to recruit and train new sickos (e.g. yours truly).

( Extensive mechanical exegesis, you know you love it )

Bonus Level: A Hand With Many Fingers

July 6, 2024

A short and satisfying card-catalogue-em-up about a real-world CIA conspiracy. Only takes a couple hours to play. I think the gameplay is fundamentally the same concept as Her Story, except walking around to fetch print fragments from file boxes instead of driving a search box to find video fragments in a computer.

Meredeth Gran — Octopus Pie Eternal (comics)

July 15

Read it online

A SECOND unexpected Octopus Pie epilogue, also dropped all in one go!!! God, we’re too lucky. Anyway, this was funny, touching, and at times hair-raising. Outlandishly good shit.

Rosemary Valero-O’Connell — Don’t Go Without Me (comics)

Aug. 2

If you can obtain this book, do so. Three short stories with exquisite pacing, expressive environment design, precise character work, and prophetic narrative voice.

Every once in a while there’s a book where you put it down and just say: “Damn! Comics!!!!!”

(The middle story in this collection, “What is Left,” was previously published as a standalone, which I might have previously reviewed.)

Martha Wells — System Collapse (Murderbot 7) (re-read))

July 23

This is still good, but I reviewed it just recently.

Bonus Level: Sylvie RPG: 7 Elf Apocalypse

Aug 3

First thing I said when I heard about this game was “wow, I bet I’m gonna learn a bunch of new shit about the theory of bump combat.” Reader, my gift of prophesy remains unmatched. Also I think I'm a Sylvie fan now.

Play this! It's free and fun and interesting. And kind of hard. And extremely silly.

Anyway, the thing about "bump combat" is that it requires some form of asymmetry. Early Ys did wonky things with hitbox centering that I found more intriguing than satisfying. Sylvie cracked the code more thoroughly: only the player deals mêlée damage on contact, and enemies use telegraphed projectiles instead. This works great! It doesn't serve the same goals as Ys had, because it actually clamps down on momentum quite a bit — instead of efficiently bulldozing, you're trying to dodge, parry, and riposte to protect your scarce HP. It really amplifies the flavor of being the one two-fisted meathead going up against a world of ethereal elves and fairies!

The cramped arenas and the asymmetric threats make maneuvers very challenging, but the resulting combat feels very fair and highly tuned. Bonus points for a highly abstract but very clever and effective "active defense" mechanic.

Bonus Level: 13 Sentinels (re-play)

July 28

DAMN this game is still so good. I was sick with covid and wanted to just re-experience something nice (ideally on Switch so I had the option to play horizontally on the couch lol), so I fired it up and blazed through it in four or five days.

Although the first-time experience of the story's twists and turns is unparalleled, I think it also really rewards a re-read! It was fun to look for early clues of things I knew were coming, and actually it still took a lot of mental work to establish the ordering and causation of certain events, even with all my pre-loaded context.

Also, you know that semi-endless sequence of postgame battle missions with the unfair difficulty level? Well, I played an amount of them that I am unwilling to admit to, and I'm here to report that it eventually hits a degenerate state. Remember how some kaiju units get "ceramic armor" that rejects all sub-300-HP hits, and it disables your best damage sources? Well, you can upgrade your G1s enough that their demolisher blade crosses that 300-per-hit mark (this happens earlier than you'd think, if you're taking their limiters off), and the game's basically solved. You just send two gorillas sprinting around the map with angle grinders, and have one or two other teens hang back at the terminal with a shield matrix and some area weapons for the riff-raff. Maybe if you get bored you can have Fuyusaka stick some guys in the microwave.

Another batch of reviews. And!! Finally!!!! The last crumbs of the 2023 backlog! 🙌🏼

Bonus Level: Cosmo D — Tales from Off Peak City, vol. 1

Nov. 11, 2023

Hahaha oh my god this ruled.

This is a berserk free-jazz shitpost of a game. It's a first-person walk n talk with charmingly gross graphics, some really nice uses of dynamic musical soundscapes (important objects mutate the music when you approach!), an intricate pizza-making minigame, and a surreal story about androids and mind control. I named my character "Yonkers."

Anyway, watch the trailer — this game is exactly what it looks like (positive).

Martha Wells — Witch King (reread)

Jan. 2, 2024

I just recently reviewed this, so nothing new to say.

Martha Wells — System Collapse (Murderbot #7)

Nov. 22, 2023

This was great.

Plot-wise, it directly follows Network Effect, with everyone still figuring out how to extricate themselves from the planet and ART's crew working together with the Preservation gang.

Character-wise, this is maybe low-key the big one! The climax is such a big turning point in Murderbot's sense of self and conception of agency!

This is maybe an esoteric way to say this, but I feel like this is the Finder: Talisman of the Murderbot series. If you know, you know.

Ada Hoffman — The Outside

Feb. 23, 2024

This was decent, and had an intriguing spacefaring take on Lovecraftian cosmic horror. I liked it enough to finish it, but probably not enough to read the following books in the series.

qntm — Ra

June 17, 2024

Readable online.

This was really good! And had an incredibly pessimistic (but very satisfying) ending.

It starts off as a meandering and curious exploration of a world that very much resembles our own, except that magic is a real branch of physical science that was discovered in 1972. And then it Fucking Goes Places. Gonzo hard SF with a dizzying scope.

Bonus Level: Anthology of the Killer

Jul 14, 2024

This rules. It's a compilation of nine short comedy/horror walk-and-talk games, about a zine-writing gal trying to get by in the city (and having to constantly evade serial killers). The art is delightfully rough and scrappy. The camera behavior is comically bad, possibly on purpose. The writing is brilliant and hilarious and surreal. This is a game where an antagonist says:

I realized that we needed to go back, to rejoin that sacred continuity of force, severed from us by revolutionary turmoil.

Back to violence sanctified by myth, when one could be a Gilles de Rais upon a holy quest instead of just some asshole strangling kids in the parking lot behind the Stop 'n' Go.

And where, under totally unrelated circumstances, the protagonist/narrators say:

"A tasteful plaque acknowledges tax-deductible charity donations from the Zacklerz, of opioid industry fame. Wait, that can't be right. Zacklerz?"

"They changed their name to seem relatable to younger juries."

The first two games are a little rougher than the others; in my opinion, Drool of the Killer is where it really started firing on all cylinders.

Most of the games take a single sitting, maybe 30-40m; my routine was to play one in the evening as I was winding down for the night. (The last one is longer, but it lets you resume from the act breaks.)

Ann Leckie — The Raven Tower (re-read)

July 31, 2023

Hey guess what, read the fuckin Raven Tower. This must be the third or fourth time I've read it and it's 100% as good every time. My favorite Hamlet riff combined with the triumph of the World's Strongest Spinny Rock.

Graydon Saunders — Under One Banner (re-read)

Aug. 5, 2023

Hey guess what, the Commonweal series is still some extremely good strange fantasy. This is the one about a scholar who built their personality around doing fiddly stuff with material science, but is coming to realize their true calling is maybe in horrible violence instead.

Graydon Saunders — A Mist of Grit and Splinters (re-read)

Aug. 21, 2023

Once I re-read book 4, I kind of just rolled into book 5.

Martha Wells — Between Worlds: The Collected Ile-Rien and Cineth Stories

May 10, 2024

I think only a couple of you have read the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy, but anyway, Ile-Rien was also the setting of two of Wells' earlier books, and Cineth is the other main setting in that final trilogy.

The thing about Ile-Rien as a setting is that it's kind of inconsistent and busted, and the stories set there work in spite of it, not because of it. There's reliable scholastic magic that operates as basically a branch of physical science, but then there's also literally the Fae... and then there's also real-world technology based on physical science (gaslight, gunpowder, steam engines and steel railways and ocean liners), but it doesn't cross-breed at all with the equally scientific scholastic magic. And then there's distinctly Christian-flavored religion in the background in various places (largely ignored by the main characters and doctrine wholly unclear), but if there's no Judaism and no Rome in the setting, then why's it shaped that way? Etc. etc.

Ile-Rien is a hodgepodge, is what I'm getting at. My read is that she had things she wanted her characters to do, and spaces she wanted them to move through, and she threw stock elements into the setting as needed to enable that. Fair enough!

Cineth, on the other hand, feels solid. I fucking love Cineth. Everything in that setting (the lifestyles, the technologies, the family structures, the gods and magic, the cultural conflicts) feels much more organically intertwined, standing toe-to-toe with the settings of Wells' later works. So, I see the trilogy as sort of the key bridge work between her early and later novels, and it's kind of funnily symbolic of that when Tremaine from Rien decides to stay in Cineth at the end.

Wow, what a massive digression that was! Anyway, this is a collection of short stories about existing characters from Wells' novels — one story for Kade Carrion, one for Nicholas Valiarde and Reynard Moraine, and four for the boys from Cineth.

As I might have mentioned before, I think the novel is Wells' natural format; her short stories aren't especially notable on their own, but they can work really well when she's using them to add more depth to characters she's already rounded out at novel-length elsewhere. Which is exactly what's on offer here, in the four Cineth stories. Actually, that one about what originally happened to Ilias is kind of haunting me; I thought that story was great, mostly for the way it refused to dress up an unforgivable crime with any tidy answers or closure.

(The Kade and Nicholas/Reynard stories are more just about dusting those characters off and taking them out for a short romp; fun enough, but they won't stick in my memory.)

So tl;dr, read this collection if you like those wizard-huntin' boys from the Fall trilogy, who are basically my faves. 👍🏼

Bonus Level: 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

Dec. 7, 2023

Wow wow WOW.

This was SO GOOD. It starts off as an adventure story about time travel, giant robots, and an invasion of mechanical monsters, then immediately mutates into something much weirder and much MORE. One of the twistiest and most gripping science fiction stories I've experienced in ages.

The game is basically a tactical RPG, but in a "deconstructed" format — a charcuterie board instead of the usual deli sandwich. You're given a sequence of combat missions and a carousel of thirteen storylines, and you can order them somewhat freely. If you keep progressing on a single track, you'll eventually hit a sync lock, which only releases after you progress further on some other track. Most of the locks are staggered, though, so while you're always hungry to see what happens next on some thread you're blocked on, there's always multiple exciting things you could be doing.

The audio and visuals are, similarly, SO GOOD. I bought the soundtrack and have been listening to it on the regular ever since, and I absolutely loved all the 2D character art.

God, now I just want to replay it.

A Digression on the Gameplay Genre of the Walk n Talk

You might have seen me using the non-standard term "walk n talk" lately w/r/t certain video games. This is distinct from the meaning of that term in Sorkin-formula television — I'm referring to gameplay where the primary player action is walking through an environment and talking to NPCs. 13 Sentinels was the game that provoked me to start doing this, because a bunch of reviews I saw kept referring to the story segments as having the "visual novel" or "adventure game" nature, and neither of those is correct! Really the game is just a normal tactical JRPG, but its deconstructionist separation of the modes reveals something funny.

A JRPG combines the following elements of gameplay:

• Combat (or some system of contest standing in for it).
• Some system of increasing character abilities.
• Exploration and dialogue.

What do you call it when you need to refer to the third gameplay element independently? "The rest of the RPG" doesn't really satisfy, and also I think some reviewers were thrown off by the side-scrolling view in 13 Sentinels' story sections (as opposed to the top-down or over-the-shoulder views more common in RPGs). Also, just using a non-name description like "exploration and dialogue" can feel muddy, because there are other very different gameplay elements from other genres that those words could be describing.

(Sidenote: I'm giving short shrift to "western computer RPGs" in my analysis here, because I haven't played as many of those and because they're still RPGs and share the same primary gameplay elements. Anyway, compared to a JRPG they massively ramp up the character growth systems and the combat complexity, and trade an increase of player agency in the story for a decrease in total story coherency and narrative momentum; my argument below still basically applies.)

Contrast the list above with those other genre names; adventure game gameplay is:

• Inventory-based puzzles.
• Puzzle exploration and puzzle dialogue.

By which I mean: in addition to their narrative content, the dialogue and exploration and narration of an adventure game must significantly serve the needs of the puzzle gameplay, such that even portions of dialogue or scenery that have no bearing on any specific puzzle are still approached by the player in the investigative and ruminative mode appropriate to puzzle content. The gameplay of reading and gameplay of space is palpably different from an RPG; RPG-like dialogue and exploration tend to only have very lightweight puzzle elements, and this affects the way you approach reading them.

In turn, visual novel gameplay is:

• Dialogue (and lush art).

Specifically, visual novels have no exploration component, and the player is not in direct dialogue with an environment. You often have no control over your avatar's location, and when you do it's limited to selecting from a menu. However, meaningful dialogue choices and branching paths are much more common, and that affects the gameplay of reading in its own way; JRPG dialogue spends more of its time on rails. (This is the main point where primarily considering CRPGs would change the analysis, btw.)

Finally, consider the "walking simulator:"

• Exploration (and narration and cutscenes).

In other words, the player is in direct dialogue only with the environment, and your connections to other characters are indirect. In games like Tacoma and Edith Finch, the player is an archaeologist-voyeur; instead of enacting character relationships in the present time of gameplay, you examine a story in the past through the shape it has imprinted onto the environment. In Firewatch, you actually do converse and enact a relationship with another character, but she is notably separate from the environment, a fellow investigator of the environment's story.

Anyway, into the implied gap here, I hereby drop the term "walk n talk" — a style of gameplay where you explore an environment and converse with characters, seeking to reveal and experience a story but not to solve a significant mechanical puzzle (which, if it was a player goal, would distort the "gameplay of reading" enough to push it into a different gameplay genre entirely, probably that of the "adventure game"). It's notable as one of the primary gameplay threads of JRPGs, but there are also many games that only consist of walk n talk gameplay — OneShot (which is part of an even-more specific tradition of short non-combat RPGmaker games influenced by Yume Nikki), literally every game ever made with the "Bitsy" lineage of tools, Wide Ocean Big Jacket, A Night in the Woods, Kentucky Route Zero, the Anthology of the Killer games, some of the interactive episodes of Homestuck, and even weird free-jazz first-person soundscape experiences like Tales From Off-Peak City. Some of these are wildly distinct from the narrative genre conventions and concerns of the JRPG, but I assert that they all share a gameplay genre.

I have seen at least one other independent usage of this term in the wild, by a developer writing the blurb for their own WIP game. They certainly did not get the phrase from me, but they were using it to describe the exact same gameplay genre as me; I take that as a vote of confidence in the term's usefulness and clarity.

Ok, thanks for coming to my ted talk, bye.

Martha Wells — Witch King

June 1, 2023

Hands-down my favorite book of 2023. Possibly first of a series.

You already know I love Wells' fantasy novels. But I'm very gratified by all the people I know who got into her via Murderbot and went "whoa oops Witch King slaps even harder than Murderbot." I've been telling you!!!

Okay, so what you’ve got here is a setting with both angels and demons, but they’ve got ecology instead of theology. It’s queer as heck. Kaiisteron is a demon from what seems to be a different layer of reality where everything’s mildly amorphous and protean, but he lives in the “real” world by restoring a fixer-upper corpse to better-than-life condition; for plot-related reasons, he can’t go home again, nor can other demons come into the world the way he did anymore. His original body was a young woman, and he was expected to bear children into her tribe as part of the summoning bargain, which he saw as a totally normal and sensible thing for an enterprising lad to do with his homeboys.

He helped save the world at one point, but now everything seems to have gone slightly wrong again. The narration alternates two different time periods, so you’re trying to catch up with two different versions of many characters on the fly. The answer to every question is both simpler and more complicated than you expected. There may have been a single "good guy" in the whole story, but he didn't survive into the future, and all the neutral guys are left struggling to live up to his memory.

Fukken do yourself a favor and read Witch King.

Ann Leckie — Translation State

July 9, 2023

This was great. I'll probably re-read it sometime this year.

Right, so previously there was the Breq books (Ancillary Etcetera), where the world resolved around the Radch, its depressed boats and former boats, and their limitless psychosexual obsession with their empire's inventively self-sabotaging dictator. And then there was Provenance, where the world opened up a bit more and we got a deeply absurd little farce in a parochial backwater, with a dusting of treaty-destabilizing violation of the whole Presger scheme of species category for flavor.

Translation State is the next episode in what is turning out to be a continuing multi-species/multi-nation/multi-genre story about an interesting adjustment period in the history of the human/alien/Presger treaty. It's sort of an inverted twin of Provenance, and I can't quite justify that statement but I'm very sure about it vibes-wise.

If you liked the previous four books, hell yeah, this is for you. If you liked the Ancillary trilogy but couldn't get on Provenance's level (or just haven't gotten around to that book yet), go for it anyway; it's a third new thing, not another instance of one of the prior things. (And it occurs after the further-destabilizing events of Provenance, but I personally think reading in order is overrated anyway and you could totally get away with swapping em.)

And damn, you know what we finally get in this outing? Some light shed on the fucking Presger. Well — okay, I lie. Some light shed on the Presger translators, though. It implies a thorough explanation for what was going on with Dlique and Zeiat! It's super gross and disturbing on literally every level! It's a heartwarming coming-of-age story! Content warning for something that has a family resemblance to sexual assault but is actually a great deal worse!

Elizabeth Hand — Generation Loss (re-read)

July 15, 2023

This is still really good, and I wanna re-read the other Cass Neary books soon. Glad we get to have a woman character who sucks this hard.

There's a scene that I remember being seriously revulsed by on my first read, something that I thought killed any real sympathy for Cass beyond wanting to see how the plot shook out. Interestingly, I don't feel that way about it anymore; instead, I see it as the moment where she finally exits any conventional human morality, which she'd never been able to properly justify her existence under in the first place. In the later books, it also proves to be the moment that severs her from the tatters of her former life — from here on out, she's fully a tool of the thing reaching down from the storm cloud. She can't and won't right wrongs, but she's uniquely empowered to shred occult corruptions which can only be harmed by being observed, hence the series's persistent obsession with cameras and light.

Anyway, badass noir with intensely good pacing.

Hey whoa damn, I kind of forgot how to do a bookpost. But, let's do a bookpost.

Tamsyn Muir — Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth (re-reads)

Jan ?? and Jan 30

These are definitely written to be re-read, and I had a great time re-reading them.

Tamsyn Muir — Nona the Ninth

Feb 19

This series! Oh my god!! I love it. Grim, grisly, joyous, delightful, and sad.

A review which I lost the link to, from right around the time this came out, asserted that this series captures something crucial about how it feels to be alive right now. I agree.

Much like Harrow, Nona continues the story while overturning prior expectations around format and vibe. Much of the surviving cast of the last episode are present, but the POV character wasn't present for any of that, so there's a lot of decoding to be done about who's actually whom and what in the world happened to put them in their present condition. Great fun, IMO.

Somewhere around the third or fourth maddeningly tantalizing apocalypse dream/flashback episode, I decided that it's my book now and I can do as I please with it, and scanned forward to read all of the flashbacks in a row before reading another word of the main plot. I regret nothing.

Joe Sparrow — Cuckoo (comics)

Mar 28

I liked this a lot; it's suffused with a menacing dreamlike feeling that I was extremely down with. You'll probably guess where it's going immediately just based on the title, but it's more about the feeling of that gradual realization that you've gotten something fundamental wrong about your whole reality.

Well, and about Joe Sparrow's psychedelic bendy-limbed cartooning, which I adore.

Mara Bos — Rust Atomics and Locks: Low-Level Concurrency in Practice

Apr 5

Readable online.

This was a fantastic and informative read! Uh, if you're into that sort of thing!! That reminds me, I still need to buy a copy and bill it to my education budget at work.

Although Rust is center-stage in this (the author recently overhauled the implementation of a bunch of Rust's built-in concurrency primitives), much of the material about how low-level concurrency and memory ordering operations work are applicable in many languages. Notably, Rust pretty much shoplifted the entire C++ memory model, so that language's concerns are going to be almost identical.

Some months prior, I had run into some question about... I can't really even remember what, but atomic memory orderings came up and someone was like "pretty much the only intelligible explanation of this is this ~3hr Herb Sutter conference talk from 2012". I think maybe this book is the new default go-to for such questions.

Bonus Level: Sylvie Lime

Apr 16

Game is free on itch.io

Hey by the way, why in the world am I still prefixing video game reviews with "bonus level:" in my book posts? I was about to Stop Doing That because it stopped being funny like six years ago, but I felt a sudden pang of sadness in my heart. I guess it gets to stay?????

Anyway, this game is berserk and I loved it. I guess it's a metroidvania platformer. When you first fire it up, it feels like it's a joke about a game that is Badly Unwell; like the movement physics feel seriously heinous if you've touched any other video game recently, and a bunch of walls and floors seem to be having a problem with existence and have gone on strike.

Before I fired this up, I happened to read this review by Andi McClure, which was definitely instrumental in convincing me to stick it out. You can read that review too, I pretty much just agree with it in toto.

What I'll add is that the tools and items in this game are absolutely galaxy-brain, and you should really play this if you're interested in tool-centered level design at all. I'm sure any pro wrestling enthusiast could have told me this, but the folding chair is mind-bendingly powerful, and the tiny house shocked me to the core.

Also, I played on keyboard, and the control scheme meta-game is incredibly real. Actually I played on dvorak keyboard, which I'm assuming isn't notably harder or easier but I haven't done the comparative analysis. But anyway, if I remember right, every letter A through M (?) is reserved for activating some specific tool, every other letter transforms you into a lime, and space (and maybe one other key?) is jump. So your right hand stays on the arrow keys, and depending on what you're trying to navigate and how you've decided to approach it, you end up developing a repertoire of strange left-hand grips to keep jump/lime/some-tool/some-other-tool accessible by twitch reflex.

Bonus Level: GitCL: Fate of Another World DLC

May 6

An epilogue episode of Christine Love's Get in the Car, Loser, the antifascist road trip RPG with a twitch-reflex cooldown-juggling battle system.

Love has stated that she planned a trilogy of DLCs with the scheme of "comedy, tragedy, romance," and this one is the tragedy.

I liked this a lot! The first DLC was ok; it had one cool boss fight, a few strange battle items (which apparently break the entire game in a speedrun), and like two and a half really funny jokes, but it's entirely nonessential. This one is essential, if you liked the base game. It expands the world and its history, it expands the battle mechanics, it provides an ending for one of your core party members, and, thematically speaking, it left me with A Lot to Mull Over.

Right, here goes: the last didread post of 2022!

Bonus Level: Chicory

Oct 2

This cozy nonviolent Zelda-alike about cartoon animals with food names went WAY harder than I expected it to. It’s actually a fairly raw meditation on fame, societal expectations, self-expectations, the myth of the artist vs. the messy reality of the creative drive, professional jealousy and mentors who violate trust, early hyper-specialization and how it corrodes your sense of self into a brittle crust, and some other Real Live Shit.

Man, also, the (optional, and basically nonjudgmental) artistic challenges in this game kinda pushed me out of my comfort zone. Drawing is already hard and soul-bruising, and the primitive controls they give you to work with would preclude doing a “nice” job even if you draw a lot better than me! Good emotional strength-training. 😅

Anyway, this was a good game and a cool experience.

Tim Probert — Lightfall, Book One: The Girl and the Galudrian (comics)

Oct 4

A remarkably good kids’ fantasy adventure comic, in a very post-Amulet vein. The storytelling is solid, and the cartooning is really top-notch. Excellent uses of space and size to control time and intensity, and some really flexible, engaging, and expressive character work.

I got this for my nephew’s bday and read the whole thing before gift-wrapping it.

Bonus Level: Noise1

Dec. ?

(itch.io store page)

A weird experimental terminal-based stealth game, about two lovers trying to escape a nightmarish human(?) experimentation facility.

This was a nice concise experience (three or four half-hour sittings, maybe), and really cool from a design perspective. I'm honestly amazed at how well the core tenets of stealth action translated to a command-line interface.

Bonus Level: ZeroRanger

Dec. 21

This game is amazing! I was NOT expecting to get obsessed with an old-school vertically-scrolling shmup this year, but wow.

It's a labor of love from a tiny dev team, and it exudes an amazing amount of polish; the look, sound, and feel of it are all top-notch. And it's got a surprising amount of story and mystery to it! Even though it's structured like a stateless arcade game, there's a bunch of events, surprises, and changes that you only see once on a given save file.

It's hard but satisfying and fair. I played through to the true ending, and then got all the achievements in the shorter White Vanilla mode. Supposedly there's a third game mode under development, so once that drops I'll probably reset my save file and try and get good again.

Bonus Level: Ys I & II

Dec 28

These classic action RPGs are a matched set; act I ends on a cliffhanger and act II closes out the story. They've been remastered and re-released uncountable times, and I remember back in my video game message board days there were a couple people who considered the TurboCD version an underrated masterpiece. I'd never played em until now.

They're decent! I wouldn't recommend them to everyone; they hew to another era's measure of what's fair play, so it's easy to miss critical items, get pointlessly lost or stuck, or just find yourself underleveled for a boss with no recourse but to grind. They also seem to be a weird offshoot from the main trunk of action RPG evolution; there are some odd ideas in here that still feel new just because no one else went that way, and some of them work better than others. But I enjoyed them more than enough to finish them! I'd recommend them if you're a curious student of the action RPG form, or if you just want to play a cool old game and are fine with hitting a FAQ when you get stuck. The story is spare but perfectly serviceable, the atmosphere is cool, the pixel art in the current crop of remasters (vintage 2005) is lovely, and the mechanical oddities are genuinely really interesting.

The oddest bit of these games is the "bump system" combat, where instead of pressing a button to attack you just ram into the enemy. The hit resolution is asymmetric: if you hit the enemy square-on, you get hurt or trade damage, but if you hit them off-center, you're safe. I've never seen anything like this, and it's a really interesting and elegant idea! Much more fun than it seems at first. It's basically optimizing for keeping your momentum high while fighting a LOT of mooks with simple AI out in the field, and it does a really good job at that. I think Lilah was telling me a couple years back that CrossCode was one of the only games she'd seen that really seemed to have learnt about movement from Ys, and now I sort of see what she meant — it's totally about that sense of momentum in the field.

Unfortunately, its utility does NOT translate to large boss fights in enclosed rooms, and Ys I had some of the most boneheadedly frustrating boss fights I've ever met. In Ys II, the developers seem to have made the same diagnosis, because they give you some aimed fire magic that's rarely necessary out in the field and make almost all the bosses vulnerable to that and only that. This is a major improvement, but makes it so the bosses are effectively a different game than the field combat.