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.

I've still got a backlog of 2023 reviews to write, so for the next little while I'm gonna end up breaking the boundary and posting a mix of stuff from this year and last year.

( Three book reviews and two video games )

Review of the level “Starlight Station”, in the Advanced Lounge of the Strawberry Jam mod for the game Celeste:

It’s good shit man

• Smallest possible tweak to single base game mechanic, introduced clearly and straightforwardly, but it opens up a surprisingly large space of new routing possibilities.
• Complex interactions, but very legible points of player leverage! And some occasional delightful surprises in sections that seem opaque at first read.
• Dangerous but inviting and fascinating environment, illustrated with careful restraint.
• Absolutely exhilarating quantities of YEET.
• Good-ass strawberry rooms that make you feel like a genius.
• Difficulty happens to be at a very precise sweet spot for my personal development as a player. It requires reverse hyper/wave/super tech (which I only just learnt) within long chains of precise actions, but it's well signposted and paces the setups a little more generously for the nastier moves.

This whole level is like being told a superb joke, and then they hand you the microphone right as you realize what the punchline has to be.

anyway yeah I've been playing Strawberry Jam. And if you've played at least like, most of the B-sides of Celeste (and happen to have it on PC), then you really should check it out too. Even if you're "not hardcore!" The Beginner Lounge is mostly at an A-side difficulty level, and has some incredible sights, sounds, and ideas — the first three or four levels I played in it made me laugh out loud in delight.

And if you haven't played Celeste up through the B-sides, listen: it is the purest, most carefully polished, most functionally beautiful video game I know, wrapped in a heartfelt and true story that reveals more every time you think back on it. It can teach you new things about difficulty, new things about your perception of reality, and new things about yourself. It's a rare work of art, and some of the best time I've ever spent behind a controller.

Calvin Kasulke — Several People are Typing

July 10

A surrealist epistolary novel written as Slack transcripts (which is one of those concepts where you’re like ah yup, someone was gonna do that eventually). Anyway, Brenna and Chase recommended this and I quite liked it! Hilarious and cute and incredibly disorienting.

Random fact that Ruth tipped me off to (because she is low-key an internet supersleuth): apparently Kasulke is besties with Isaac Feldman, whose novel Breath of the Sun I quite enjoyed a couple years back.

Bryan Washington — Memorial

Aug. 25

I hadn't heard of this or anything, but Ruth had it checked out from the library while we were on vacation, and it sounded interesting.

It was! I was wary at first, because A: Benson (who narrates the first section) showed signs of being some kinda Joyless Literature Man and I ain't got time for that, and B: the plot that was shaping up would not exist if any of the main characters were capable of having ONE (1) fucking conversation with another human. I stopped sweating so much about item A once we had a scene or two of Benson working at the daycare and it became clear that he really loves and cares about both his co-worker Ximena and all of the kids there. And item B was ultimately kinda the point of the whole book, rather than a classical Dumbass Plot.

Anyway, this is a story about two guys in a relationship that is Bad. Like, The Mountain Goats' Tallahassee caliber Bad. Both of them come from homes where the relationships were Bad. (One of them has also sustained massive psychic damage from contracting HIV and having his family react to that in really bullshit ways, but tbh that might not even be his biggest problem.) I think the main question of the book comes down to: if you become aware that you just suck at being a person, and you do not want to continue doing so, where do you fucking start?

And the story's argument, or its best guess, at least, is that you start with the act of nurturing and care. Knowing why won't help, and knowing how won't help; you have to invite something into your life that you can stand to nurture without succumbing to your self-negating drive to destroy, perform the hard work of nurturing day-in and day-out, and then find a way to apply those strengthened better impulses to the people you're actually vulnerable to and need something from.

Which is definitely something to chew on, and might not be wrong. And I felt very fondly toward both these awful guys by the end. I don't know how I feel about the conclusion that they need to get back/stay together; tbh that doesn't seem necessary for their growth or their happiness, and you can go forward with love for someone without staying in a relationship with them, ask anyone who knows. But never mind. Good book.

(Note to self about an internal taxonomy that might or might not result in a post some years from now: novels by authors whose natural format is the short story.)

Return of the Thief (re-read)

Aug. 18

Still fuckin slaps.

Martha Wells — Network Effect (re-read)

May 25

Still rad.

Bonus Level: CrossCode: A New Home

April 19

CrossCode was fantastic, and this epilogue DLC is more of the same, so go for it! New quests, new biome, new final dungeon, and resolves some story loose ends.

...Some somewhat wild loose ends, which I took a while to chew on! I think one answer I've come to about [why a particular character is sympathetic despite all the reasons they shouldn't be] comes down to: Evotars really aren't their source. Not just because of their different experiences starting at the branch point, but... they just never were to start with. They aren't true "copies," it's a messy and nondeterministic statistical process with a lot of randomness and shear built-in. And then also maybe something about "power corrupts," idk.

Got a handful of reviews sitting in the bin, so let's do a bookpost!

( Seven game/comic/book reviews )

Only another three or four things in the 2021 booklog after this! Well, like I said before, it was a bit of a slim year for reading.

Ann Leckie — Provenance (re-read)

Aug 2

This book is still great, and in fact it might be better on re-read, now that I know not to expect it to resemble the Imperial Radch series in the slightest.

Structurally, I think this book is more or less a farce! It just maybe takes a minute to catch on to that, because it’s a farce with a deeply strange sense of humor.

I read this on my phone while we were acclimatizing in Mammoth, it looks like.

Ann Leckie — Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy (re-reads)

Aug ??, Aug 29, Sept 6

Then I launched directly into an Imperial Radch re-read, because why in the world not.

David Graeber — Debt: The First 5000 Years

Oct. 1

God I miss knowing David Graeber is out there.

This book was a lot to take in, significantly more daunting than Bullshit Jobs. But although it was slow going at times, I found it really enjoyable and thought-provoking.

Martha Wells — Fugitive Telemetry (re-read)

Oct 3

Sure I’ll re-read a book I already read this year. Why not!!

You’ll be pleased to know this is still good.

Bonus Level — Inscryption

Nov 9

This game's great! Everyone has probably already told you this. A bunch of the fun is in the wild twists it makes, so I'll try and make my comments somewhat cryptic.

• Somehow I whiffed the neon-vision puzzle in Act 1 by being too good at the Act 1 card game. 🤣 I didn't need to invoke the triggering condition until the final boss, and if you do that it skips the post-battle restore and jumps straight to the end of the run (although it does something cool to your memorial card). I did like two more fruitless runs after that, and had to ask Isaac for a hint! Anyway, if you're at a dead-end and there's an in-game tool that you've been avoiding using, try using it in a couple runs before the last boss fight.
• Re: events around the ending, and some of the surrounding lore that came out of the postgame ARG: I was originally a bit hung up on the implausibility of the Karnoffel Code (a ~48-element permutation) containing something THAT complex and autonomous, and also couldn't make sense of the protagonist's reactions after being exposed to it. But after thinking about it some more, I've decided it doesn't contain anything at all; it's just a completely arbitrary symbol. Like a name. The name of something very bad, which knows when its true name is being spoken and is able to influence any system that speaks or perceives it. 💀

• Apparently the dev is releasing an infinite roguelike version of Act 1 as an alternate game mode (with expanded mechanics and a difficulty-ratcheting ascension system like in Slay the Spire), because Act 1 has the most thoroughly fleshed-out gameplay loop and there's a chunk of the audience who wanted to keep improving their runs instead of being pushed into the story-focused late-game.

  I find this hilarious. I mean, it's great: Act 1 works very well as a game and it'll be cool to let the mechanics breathe like that, I'll totally play this. But literally this is happening because a bunch of the fans think Leshy was right and are insisting that the developer should allow his plan to succeed! Mullins couldn't have designed such a perfect extension of the game's lore if he'd tried to on purpose.

Ben Hatke — Zita the Spacegirl (comics)

Dec 20

I finally read my ex-library copy of this before sending it to my nephew as part of his Christmas present. (The other part was Hilda and the Troll.)

This is a great kids’ comic! Something like fifteen plus years ago I read a bunch of the wordless Zita one-shots Hatke used to post on the Flight forums; I remember them having excellent cartooning, and this had excellent cartooning too. Cute art, good critter designs, clear and strong action and acting, good stuff.

This reminded me of, like, a very B-side Henson Company joint from the late ’80s. I will not expand or clarify that.

Nephew reportedly liked it too. :]

Bonus Level: Celeste: Farewell

Dec. 9

Farewell is a free DLC for Celeste, which they dropped as a surprise a couple years ago. (The game has had many mechanical updates and tweaks, but this was the only new content it ever got.) It's very very good, if you're willing to struggle.

It adds to the story, but only a tiny bit — the whole thing takes place in a dream, where Madeline does some Symbolically Authentic Mountaineering to work through some grief and guilt. (Granny [the old woman who lives on the mountain, not her personal grandmother] eventually died, and Madeline Got Anxiety too severely to make it to the funeral.) At the end, she wakes up and has a video call with Theo, who found an old photograph showing that his granddad (the famous photographer) once hung out with Granny on the mountain when they were both like twenty. It's cute, it fits with everything we know about these characters, and it's wholly nonessential.

This expansion is just a little less than a whole extra game's worth of new content and new mechanics, and it is flat-out the hardest video game I've ever beaten. 😧 After finishing it, I started burning through the C-sides; I bounced off them before because they were too daunting, but now they've been downgraded to nice little post-Farewell cool-down exercises.

But while it ends up at well above C-side difficulty, it gets there gradually, and I think it fills out a bit of a difficulty chasm that the game used to have — the jump from Core-B to Anything-C was so severe, and now you can get past some of that in a setting where there's a little bit of dialogue and interaction and new mechanics to lure you onward. Like with many of the best video games, much of Celeste's quality lies in how carefully it teaches things to the player, and there's now a genuine on-ramp to the outrageous level of play that the speedrunners have been developing all these years. (Like, oh my god, it teaches and requires the Wavedash, an emergent movement tech so busted that I can hardly even believe it's always been embedded in the game rules.)

Really what Farewell adds up to is a celebration of just how unbelievably solid the base game was. The core mechanics were so good, and the balance and challenge were so satisfying, and it's a delight to have an excuse to go back to it and really push myself to my limits and beyond.

Also, I honestly feel like Farewell forced me to learn new fundamental things about how to approach an impossible physical and intellectual challenge. (For example: I knew about "chunking" being a critical part of human perception and memory, but I hadn't quite put together the effect it has on perception of time — if you can consolidate a chain of actions into a "chunk," it clears a little moat of extra time around it! You can do all kinds of little adjustments and corrections before and after the chunk, even though you know there wasn't previously enough time for any of that! It makes sense when you think about it, but the screens in this game were laid out in a way that let me watch it happen in real-time, which felt absolutely bananas... and gave me a new bone-deep faith that I can clear little moats for myself like that in any effort where I can consolidate a chunk. That might actually qualify as "life-changing.")

Also also, at some point after Farewell came out (in 1.4.0 maybe?), Maddie Thorson patched the splash screen with her new name and new company name, and I think that's cool. 🏳️‍⚧️