Bookpost 22

Index

Diaspora, Greg Egan

Greg Egan loves Big Ideas and theoretical physics and wants to tell everyone about it. He’s very much off doing his own thing with this book, and your response will be according to how willing you are to listen to a man describe theoretical physics.

This is a positive, on the whole. Egan’s a solid prose stylist and very good with pacing; the book flows well and is an easy breezy read if you let the physics just kinda wash over you. Short chapters and frequent section breaks means you won’t be stuck with a single topic for long, which makes the frequent conversations devoted to discussing the Conundrum du Jour a lot easier to handle. Push through a few pages more and you’ll get a reset and some space to catch your breath, or at least move on to a different topic. Some of the character moments, especially early on, are very well crafted.

I felt like the plot was lost around the time they found Swift 2/3  or so through the book), and towards the end my response was just nodding along “all right, Greg, cool, I don’t understand it but I’m glad it’s working out for you” - one of the eternal hazards with Big Idea sci fi is the ideas can get too big for the audience to meaningfully care about them. Even so, “the author is really into theoretical physics” is hardly the worst flaw a book can have.

Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown, Mike Mignola

Mignola can do more in 4 pages than most authors can do in 400, and the decades he’s spent honing his craft are evident on each and every panel of this book. He’s tapping into the old magic with this one, and in doing so makes a series of hauntings, just-so stories, reversals of fortune and other folk motifs feel so much realer and stronger than any grand architecture can.

My favorite of the collection is a pair of stories about the creation of the world - one version provided by a saint, the other by the raven. Those pieces are familiar - a garden of paradise, a great dragon, the dark things of the world before, the spirits of the earth - but presented in such a way that if I close one eye I could see it existing as some forgotten lore of a real people somewhere in history. If I close the other eye it is clearly a construct, the pieces arranged to reflect the shape of the age of its making, but that makes it a construct in the same way the stories providing the pieces were constructed. Mignola is very deliberately in conversation with both old myths and the modern world when he writes that mankind did not start in paradise, but as one beast among many that the gods found when they went out into the world beyond the Garden.

It's just plain damn good.

Grunts, Mary Gentle

DNF pg. 1/4XX

Another 1-page DNF, this time for switching tenses between the first two sentences and following with a full page of clunky, stilted description. I could see it was going into straightforward Tolkienian/D&D parody right away, and that’s rarely a place I want to be.

Journey to the West, trans. Julia Lovell

At last: a text with the courage to ask “what if a monkey had a big stick?”

Not content with answering the most pressing comedic question of our age, the book includes not one but TWO other jokes:

1. “Bureaucracy is silly”
2. “Man this Tripitaka guy is a nerd and kind of a loser”

It’s a joy to read. Those jokes have survived across centuries and cultures because they work. What if a monkey had a big stick? Wouldn’t it be funny if so-and-so got their ass kicked by a monkey with a big stick? And wouldn’t it also be funny if someone could turn the tables on the monkey, just to shake things up?

I do it a disservice, but man does that monkey love hitting dudes with a big stick and I love reading about it.

Lovell’s translation is an abridged version of about 1/4 of the full work, which is just the right size for me. I do think I probably would have gotten bored if it ran longer and I didn’t break it up with something in the middle - even really good jokes will run out of steam eventually - but that’s minimally important. It’s the epitome of the episodic picaresque, you can come and go as you please and there’s plenty of things you can and should loot for ideas.

Other highlights include:

• Lovell translating titles of the heavenly bureaucracy as if they were modern corporate positions (Office of Immortal Resources, etc)
• The deft explanation of why a superpowered character can’t immediately solve the story (Monkey could finish the journey in an instant but Tripitaka’s the one who has to make it, and he not only has no powers but the others can’t help him cheat.)
• Granting the reader immunity to any discussion of if Goku can beat someone in a fight, because Sun Wukong’s power scaling is according to the law of comedy - the winner depends on how funny it is for the other guy to lose.
• The Buddha telling his disciples “I’ll be right back, make sure no one slacks on their yoga while I’m out”, which is possibly my favorite gag in the book.

Sight Tremendous and Abhorred, Ognyen Plamen

Found this one because I follow the cover artist Goran on bluesky and he’d been sharing it around. Thought “what the hell, it’s free”.

Good move. A perfectly-proportioned cyberpunk shoot-em-up that plays the hits at a breakneck pace. Mercenary takes job, job goes south, add a few hyperviolent complicating factors and you got a stew going. It’d make a solid movie, a kickass couple episodes of Stand Alone Complex, and is all around just a fun time.

Plague of Pythons, Frederick Pohl

You know how there’s a type of sci-fi that just takes one major world-state change and runs with it to the logical end? It’s one of those. For the last two years, the world has been stricken by an epidemic of demonic possessions; at any moment, anyone might fall under the sway of an external power and go on a rampage, and Pohl’s going to do a whole lot of exploring what that’s meant for the world.

There were multiple points in the story where I thought that maybe the plot would fall into a more predictable rhythm, and each time it got yanked in a different direction just to prove that genre expectations will not save anyone. It’s refreshingly misanthropic about it, and the rug pulls never felt like a cheap gotcha.

I will warn prospective readers that it does open with the main character Chandler on trial for the sexual assault of a teenager while under possession: that said, I thought Pohl handled it with a fairly even and matter-of-fact hand. I’ve read much much worse.

The book’s only 111 pages and is freely available on Standard Ebooks.

The Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith

DNF @ Nephi 1 Chap 2

I wanted to give it a fair(er) shot for public domain research purposes, but was handily defeated by the pseudo-Elizabethan word salad. Mark Twain wasn’t kidding when he said it was written chloroform, and I was reading the 1981 version with 150 years worth of edits.

It’s got that Ender’s Shadow smell about it from the beginning, desperately attempting to reassure the reader with “the main character was definitely there and he was super-important the entire time, you guys”. Knock it off, man, Vergil barely gets a pass on that and you definitely ain’t Vergil with this prose.

This is what no sex drugs and rock & roll does to a motherfucker, which is a very interesting contrast with Crowley who was nothing but sex drugs and rock & roll. I don’t know if they’d balance out into homeostatic equilibrium or cause antimatter annihilation if you combined them.

Legacy, James Schmitz

This one’s a hidden gem, don’t let the generic name put you off. Space opera adventure with a female lead from 1962, freely available on Project Gutenberg (no renewal).

I was repeatedly impressed with how well the book treats its main character, Trigger Ardee. There’s still some early-60s misogynistic background radiation throughout the book (mostly in men calling her “doll” or “girl”, and one unfortunate scene that pulls the “no you see her rejecting him means she likes him” bullshit), but I gave the book a lot more grace than most of its contemporaries would get for all the times it made the right choice. More than plenty of modern books.

Trigger’s competent and driven, but she’s also 24. When her plans go awry or she messes up, it's because she got blindsided by something outside her awareness, rather than her inexplicably making stupid choices. She takes a step back to assess high-emotion situations before she snaps to an assumption. She’s allowed by the narrative to get overwhelmed, cry a bit in frustration, and then push on to do what needs to be done of her own volition. And we’re not going to dwell on it like it’s some fundamental component of her character she needs to overcome, she’s just having a shitty day.

Probably the most impressive to me was a scene where Trigger is headed to a swanky dinner party with the local contingent of zillionaire wackos. While she’s prepping she has a conversation with herself whether or not she should wear the plain dress (fancy by her standards, distractingly low-class by the host’s) or the extremely risque one (effectively a couple vines and some tactically-placed fig leaves), and has a moment of basically “There’s no way I could pull this off… wait, hold on… can I pull this off? I think I can pull this off.”

And then the narration doesn’t ogle her for making that choice. It’s quite matter-of-fact about the entire thing and the following scene is focused on intelligence gathering at the dinner, to the point that you could easily forget that she’s wearing a couple vines and a few tactically-placed fig leaves.

The main issue with the book is a structural one; a whole lot of the story is people expositing things that happened off screen. Some of this is to be expected, since we’re with Trigger as the POV the whole way through and the story doesn’t contrive ways for her to be present at every major event (which is appreciated). But the plot is also a good deal more complex than a normal space opera adventure, and several major events did happen to Trigger but have been wiped from her memory thanks to Psychic Chicanery, so it’s in a weird middle space where it’d probably need to be a lot longer or a lot more formally experimental to make it all gel together without the exposition dumps. And it does feel kinda bad that Trigger doesn’t have more to do, because things are great when she’s an active agent in the plot.

Setting-eise, it’s interesting (to me) how four years before Star Trek the only piece of the genre that’s really missing is the rubber forehead aliens: you’ve got the postwar liberal space federation that’s superficially pretty nice but has plenty of internal conflict and skeletons in the closet both present and potential (the use and abuse of psychic powers are all over this book).

Trigger also pilots a mech suit at one point and that’s sick as hell.
 

Dan Plays Games 12

Index

Gravity Circuit

Some games, you just know from the bleeps and bloops on the main menu: Gravity Circuit has some immaculate bleeps and bloops, and it lives up to that promise in being the best damn Megaman clone it can be. 

Rather than a blaster you have fists and a grappling hook; on top of that you have four special move slots and three upgrade slots to plug in with everything you can unlock from beating bosses and rescuing civilians scattered in each level. I found a loadout that worked for me fairly early on and so didn’t do a whole lot of experimenting, but I can only imagine that the speedrun tech available with all these upgrades has got to be insane.

Not without some issues, the most prominent for me being how stingy the game is with health upgrades (good luck finding the fucking things) and an real bummer of an ice level.

Lost Wiki Kozlovka

A one-sitting (I came in at just over 2 hours) database deduction game about a mystery in a small eastern European town. It's the shortest and simplest of this type of game I’ve played so far, and the way progress is gated makes it fairly easy to brute force solutions (you’re slotting words into blanks in an existing text, so there are a lot of context clues.), but it was enjoyable and it’s a prime example of one of the side-benefits of this type of game: basically anyone can make one on a budget of nothing. This one had one programmer, one other person helping out with the writing, and a bunch of stock assets. Love to see it. Worse ways to spend five bucks, a bag of peanut m&ms from the vending machine at work is fuckin’ three.

Look Outside

Another all-timer for the “RPG Maker Games For Freaks (Positive)” hall of fame. It’s a very different game from LISA or OFF or Fear and Hunger, but if you’ve enjoyed any of those - or just have an inner fucked up little guy who needs some enrichment - I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The premise is that an unknown entity just called “The Visitor” is passing through through the solar system and turning everyone who looks outside into a monster. You need to survive for 15 days. Maybe you find another way through, maybe you don’t. This undersells the experience, as the music and art are phenomenal all around. Especially the latter, it’s got easily some of the grottiest, grossest, and technically impressive pixel art I’ve ever seen. Nearly every monster you encounter is unique, every NPC is distinct in appearance and personality, there is always something new and horrible just around the next corner. You could convert this premise into a DG / CoC / Liminal Horror campaign easy breezy.

Thematically, Look Outside is a very post-Covid game, not just because of how you’re locked in a building and can’t go outside, but in how banding together with other residents and taking care of each other keeps you in better shape than if you try to tough it alone. Your primary form of health recovery is sharing a meal with your party members. Things like hygiene, sociability, calm and morale are hidden background stats. Brushing your teeth and taking showers are important for long-term success, and your party members are often recruited by making choices that go against the grain. Offering kindness to strangers helps you survive the apocalypse.

There are maybe some comparisons to be made to Undertale’s pacifist run, but I think Look Outside does a better job of accomplishing the same themes by treating the nonviolent encounter as the default when dealing with NPCs. There are still a lot of monsters that will just rush to kill you, but for everyone else you start with dialogue and it won’t turn into combat unless someone escalates the situation. An (Attack) option sits at the bottom of your list of dialogue choices for every NPC in the game, putting the onus on the player for acts of random violence. That sits a lot better for me than "this fish-woman recently attempted to murder you, a child who has been attempting to nonviolently go home, why don't you go over to her house for spaghetti dinner?"

The Message from Deep Space

June, 1973: you and three other scientists have been gathered in secret to decode the radio signals transmitted by a crashed alien probe. Naturally, this is pandering directly to me.

The basic structure is simple: probe sends a message, you send back the correct response, it sends the next message. This is another one of those “you are looking at a screen on your actual screen” games, so most of the gameplay is in your head / notebook.

You start just by repeating the Hydrogen Line back at the probe, then mirroring modifications it makes, then completing sequences, and before you know it you’re breaking out algebra.

The main challenge so far (I’ve completed ~170 puzzles out of over 800) is figuring out the syntax of the messages - a task made more challenging by also having to also format your clunky in-game computer display in a way to make it make sense visually (not helped by the aliens using two space functions as a line break and your in-game computer doesn’t split them into two different symbols with two different formatting options, though I eventually found a solution I liked). It can be a struggle sometimes, but there are enough people playing that you can usually just plug the puzzle # into the steam discussions and find a thread with some clues. Always nice to see a community considerate enough to default to a nudge in the right direction, rather than outright telling you.

Cursed Words

A game ostensibly about assembling words from a 5x5 grid of scrabble tiles, which swiftly proceeds to go entirely off the rails with multiple intersecting systems of wildcard tiles and perks to abuse the Balatro-style scoring system. Breaking the game is the intent, and it feels great when you’re able to pull it off, but there are a fairly constrained number of mechanics to make a build around and while you can cross-pollinate those strategies in some fun ways your strategy for a given character isn’t likely to change all that much as you progress through the difficulty levels: certain combos of stickers and stamps can just repeatedly wipe the floor with little trouble. But I’m not entirely sure that’s a bad thing, since it does allow you to breeze through a character’s unlocks in fairly short order once you get the hang of them and that gives you something of an achievable end goal. 

The other major complaint is that sometimes I really I can't figure out what the fuck is up with the dictionary it uses. I’ve scored points off a variant spelling of a Persian loanword (“qameez”), how is “Gaulish” not in the dictionary? 

Time Break Chronicles

“What if Final Fantasy VI was a roguelike?” is the name of the game, though I’ve stuck with the campaign and haven’t actually touched the roguelike mode yet.

It’s a simple setup: you run a team of 6 (out of ~100 potential party members) through FTL-style node maps, gradually recruiting new allies and gathering metaprogression gribblies to build up your home base. Most of the game is combat, which is fine because the combat is fun (and has a speed control: if I couldn’t bump it up to 4x or more I wouldn’t have stuck with it). The number of status effects a given character can have on them at one time can get overwhelming, but with a bit of smart playing you can power through fights and not have to worry too much about what exactly is affecting who. 

The game is still technically in early access and the campaign isn’t fully completed, but its one of those games where there’s more than enough content to keep you invested for a long while and get plenty of enjoyment out of it.

**

Gameable Material Section

The Apartment Complex

A high-end hotel at the turn of the last century, now an increasingly-decrepit apartment building. Four floors, (or three floors plus ground, for metric architects), plus basement and roof. Your apartment is on the top floor, and most of your avenues to anywhere else need to be unblocked (through means found elsewhere in the building - so as not to spoil the game, add your own)

• The 3rd floor main stairwell is locked.
• The west half of the 2nd floor hallway is blocked off
• 1st floor access is locked from the other side
• Ground floor access is locked behind puzzle items
• The west half of the ground floor is also blocked off 
• Basement access is locked and requires a key 
• The elevator is out of service and needs repaired

Figure out where the keys / secret passages are located and you have half the dungeon built already.

Even More Short Reviews of Delta Green Actual Plays

 Part 1, Part 2

This will likely be the last one of these for a while: got thoroughly burnt out on the whole thing as I was drafting it, and I’ve stopped listening to all of these in the months since I started compiling the post. At some point I’ll probably resume one or two, but who knows: my podcast listening has taken a hit across the board thanks to changes at work eating up my attention for much of the year so far.

Black Flare

I find this one complicated to recommend: It’s well-put together, the Handler knows their stuff, and the idea of having players new to Delta Green as an RPG playing characters new to Delta Green the organization is appealing. I don’t think it works in practice, though: the opening opera is too open-ended and slow-paced for players new to this sort of investigation (especially when they have a tendency to treat the investigation like D&D characters grilling a shopkeeper) and that makes for bad radio in spite of the generally high quality of all the individual components.

The anomaly in season 1 was too vague and hands-off to be an interesting threat. There’s an episode that’s nearly entirely devoted to the tedium of muddling through some difficult-to-visualize spatial fuckery effects, which never gelled together as something spooky. 

 (I think the spookum was a lloighor, so my bias is on active and on the field already) 

There’s a really good interstitial episode (the cell meets their handler on a freighter ship in the aftermath of a battle with Deep Ones) but then the first five and a half episodes of Season 2 are a red herring with enough feet dragging that it felt more of “oh fucking finally” when we finally got to the real hazard instead of a satisfying build up to it. The action was great when things finally started popping off, but the path to get there was frustrating.

Another issue, which is very much down to personal preference even more than the last, is that I really don’t like how Hollis’ player runs the character; Hollis acts as a sort of continual obstruction to the others, vaguely dancing around questions and being purposefully unhelpful with a blunt “It’s need to know and you don’t need to know”. I can’t tell how intentionally frustrating they’re supposed to be - it’s not an unreasonable part to play in the story - but I think it compounds the bad radio problem by impeding the other PCs from being active investigators and pushing them towards passivity, which doesn’t play well with the already slow pace. 

Hand on the Door

Not as goofy as PTBP, but probably the closest to it tone-wise out of everything I’ve listened to, and I think it does a decent job of threading the needle. It’s absurd, but not so absurd that it negates its own stakes with that absurdity. That said, it does have a tendency to meander and it’s another slow burn investigation despite the threat being something that should have everyone freaking the fuck out. There’s no reason for the PCs to know that the guy they’re investigating is messing with shoggoth biomatter, but the characters knew by the time I stopped listening that the perp has figured out how to refold proteins through unnatural means and the players should probably be leaning into the entirely reasonable panic of “Jesus Christ someone could make a transmissible prion disease with this shit”.

Chaos Springs Eternal

Civilian PCs in a weird little Louisiana town stumbling into the supernatural. More CoC than DG, to the point where I wouldn’t really call it a DG actual play. 10-15 minutes of non-game talk at the beginning of each episode, which is too much for me to sit through without skipping but might not be for other folks. It’s a slow burn and I was with it for a while, but fell off when they got to the helpful magical ghoul character. I like a helpful magical ghoul character from time to time but this one felt too Call of Cthulhu for me, if that makes sense. Not enough of the DG razzle and / or dazzle.

This Line Isn’t Secure

A dedicated Impossible Landscapes run. Very much on the audio drama side of the spectrum, and very good at it. Players and handler work together like a well-oiled machine. Editing / effects / sound quality are extremely good, deft balance of horror vs humor and how the absurd surreality of Carcosa lends itself to both. I feel better about the character arcs than in something like Redacted Reports because we know how this ends, there's not going to be any tail end that stretches out past the climax. Definitely want to return to this one, and I give it a very high recommendation.

Delta Pink

Someone affiliated with the show left a comment on one of my older roundup posts asking if I might do a review: Unfortunately, it didn’t really pan out.

After listening to Session 0 and most of episode 1 I feel like Delta Pink, like Get in the Trunk, is goofy in a way that doesn’t really land for me. The group behind this AP typically plays Shadowrun, and that influence shows like the proverbial and thematically appropriate pink mohawk. They’re still playing Shadowrun characters here in Delta Green; goofy stereotypes unmoored from reality. Factor that as you will into whether or not you want to check it out.

Stories and Lies: God’s Teeth

It’s unfair to compare anyone running God’s Teeth to the original AP, but it’s also unavoidable. 

Go Forth opens like a hammer to the face. Here’s the mission; do it now. You’re immediately in the shit and on the back foot, scrambling for purchase when all your options are bad and you have no time and no resources. I think it’s the most powerful opener in RPGs by a country mile, with Deep Carbon Observatory coming in second.

So I feel like Stories and Lies is doing a disservice to the module by portraying Clove as stable and put-together and having the agent who read the folder beat around the bush during the briefing. The urgency that makes the opening work has been lost and at that point I don’t know why the module was chosen.

 

RPPR: The Labor of Dogs

The only one of these I am actively listening to at time of writing: this one's an all-timer. Not just the name (which is an all-timee in and of itself), but in just how good the component missions are - I think we're done with 3/5 at this point, and each one has been a very distinctly 2020s flavor of awful and weird. Like I would almost call it cringe horror? It's leaning into the ripped-from-the-headlines reality of "sorry, the villains here are evil and stupid and their vapidity is matched only by their temporal power and they will combine the two into lethal danger for everyone around them in an attempt to squeeze a bit of profit they don't need from a source they don't understand." That's the good shit. The real danger isn't Cthulhu, it's some C-suite trying to exploit Cthulhu in stupid ways.

Final Notes

Most of this post is just a simple divergence between what I want to listen to and what people want to make. So it goes, no harm no foul. My perspective is skewed six ways to Sunday on this matter so everything I’ve said so far should be taken with a sizable grain of salt. I don’t know. I feel kinda bad about being down on nearly all of them. Ah well. There will always be more, and maybe I'll come around to one or two when I'm in a better state for what they're offering.
 

A response to Dead Letters' review of Unicorn Meat

"The Unicorn in Captivity" from the Rochefoucould Unicorn Tapestries

Sam Sorensen (plus Misha and Walid) did a review of Unicorn Meat over on the Dead Letters podcast earlier this week and I think it touched on some important points and quite a few bits worthy of response, so I’m breaking the prime directive and writing up a response.

(And just to defuse any worries that any beef is involved here, Sam directly encouraged me to write the response up like this instead of just letting it go as DMs.)

This will, of course, make very little sense if you haven’t read Unicorn Meat or listened to the episode, since I’ll be responding to specific critiques in the latter with stuff from the former. 

**

Re: Bullet Points
Sorry, Sam; you’ll have to pry them from the cold and vicelike grip of my mummified corpse.

Joke aside, I do have a reason for why I gravitate towards that style of information presentation: that’s how I take my notes, and that’s what I convert an adventure into before I run it. Writing the adventure in bullet points saves me from having to translate it into full prose for the book and it saves me from having to translate it out when I want to run it. Practicality and convenience carries the day.

 

Re: UM feels like it never had an outline
It technically did, but only in as much as what chapters came after which. Practically speaking it didn't have an outline, because I generally treat outlines and first drafts as synonymous.

Re: Best adventure ever
Aw shucks, Misha, appreciate it!

 

Re: Formatting and Layout
I've grown rather fond of how rough and ugly UM is, but Dead Letters is correct in calling out the weird placements of things like the page of legends and the list of things that aren’t in the module: those were added to fill space so that each chapter would start with the header and art on the left-hand page. In retrospect I should have just added more stuff to the preceding chapter, but so it goes.

 

Re: The scenario hooks
Those definitely needed more polish, no disagreement there. Depending on your game you could probably run the opening of God’s Teeth as-is and then segue towards the farm.

(Fun fact: I didn’t listen to that AP until a couple years after UM was published) 

 

Re: Information Pacing & Spacing
This is another point where I know that I could definitely have done it cleaner, but I do have a reason for why the book is structured the way it is: I wanted the module to converge on the inevitable from the outside inwards.

Chapter 1 is the outer corona: scenario hooks, timeline, guidance, and White-Eyes; it sets the  stage with the most general and gamey layer of the onion. 

Chapter 2 is an overview of the carvergirls and the tables for generating them. It draws the players in, gives them opportunities to build out their characters and their characters’ connections. What does that memory mean? What did White-Eyes or her Buchas do that made you go “she needs to die”? Does your name mean anything?

The remaining chapters go Farm, Swamp, Factory, Caves. It’s a descent. I wanted the gravitational pull of the factory and the caves below to extend into the text. You can bum around in town or muck through the swamp for a while, but eventually, you need to descend. Bethlehem ain't gonna slouch towards itself.

White-Eyes’ character writeup is 70 pages before she shows up in person because I wanted her to be present in the GM’s mind (and through them, the players) from the beginning.

Re: The Tower’s split description
The Tower gets written up 10 pages after it’s introduced because it’s inaccessible when players first encounter it: you have to force your way into it, and players probably aren't going to do that without exploring the rest of the town. But it’s impossible to explore the town without seeing the tower, so you get the external description first and then the internal one later.

Re: The Dorms not being on the map
Whoever said they’re on the map & just not labeled is correct, that is the case. Same with the factory. A minor hiccup that got lost in the mess of putting it together.

Fun fact: the description I gave Gus was that the maps looks like the shitty coloring page on the back of a children’s menu from a rural diner (I think he did a great job)

Re: None of the named NPCs are are given age grades or have locations listed
Both of these I thought were easy enough to glean from context: as faction leaders and other noteworthies they’re going to be old and experienced enough that no one else has taken the position, so I didn’t feel like it was worth enumerating.

As for locations this critique confuses me; everyone but Pugs and Birdie are opposite their location on the same spread (and Pugs and Birdie next to each other so no location gets in the way).

If I can make something a 2 page spread, it’s gonna be a 2 page spread.

Re: Termagant Street Dumpling Company
Not a Warhammer reference, actually: I was referencing the thing the tyranid unit is named after, which is the vaguely-defined entity dreamt up for The Song of Roland as a “pagan god” worshiped by Muslims (Baphomet is actually the same deal); less than ideal as a street name in that light, but streets can get named after all sorts of things.

If people don’t recognize it, it’s just a cromulent word; if people do recognize it, if they’re a freakazoid like me maybe they’ll think “huh, I wonder if this street was unflatteringly named after the people who lived here? And why’s there a dumpling company there now?” There can be, if one wants, an entire implied little history of an ethnic neighborhood in some corner of the Commonwealth extrapolated from a logo on a shirt.

I do think it’s odd that this was the reference that got time devoted to it, when you can get a 666 HOT SOUP tattoo from Stitches; if I was going to make a Warhammer reference it’d probably be something about enemies hiding in metal boxes (The cowards! The fools!!).

Re: Disconnect between art and textual descriptions
The discrepancy is there, but it's there because I wasn’t terribly fussed about exacting accuracy: I gave Rowan a loose description for each piece and left the rest in his hands, because I knew he’d get the vibes right.

Re: The Machine 
The physical description of the machine itself is obtuse, but the hosts treat it like the passage to the caves isn’t signposted at all and that’s objectively not true:

• The vibes are especially rancid and given the first bullet point = “yes, this is important”
• There are footprints leading to one of the hatches =  “someone went inside the Machine”
• There are no footprints leading out of the Machine = “they didn’t come out of the Machine”
• There are teeth on the inside of the chamber = “it can probably bite” 
• There’s fresh blood around the hatch with the footprints =  “whoever went inside did so recently, and they fed the Machine to do it”
• White-Eyes was previously in the factory and is no longer there = “White-Eyes is the one who went into the Machine.”

If all those signposts still aren’t enough, there are four Buchas in the back who worked on the killing floor (that’s why they’re the Buchas, after all) who can tell the PCs whatever clue they’re not picking up (ex: Bucha 1: “I saw it take Scrungle’s arm off last summer.” Bucha 2: “Yeah because she reached in to grab her bracelet when it was still hungry.”)

Not to mention that the players, if they’re carvergirls could just ask the GM “what do I know about the Machine?”

Also, Sam describes entering the Machine as if losing a limb is a guarantee. Quote the book:

“Entering a chamber without damaging the flesh within first (via fire, tanning fluid, cleaning supplies, etc.) or providing a sizable meal (6 units of meat or a person) triggers a chewing reflex. Save vs DEX to escape with a mangled limb or die.”

I should have added some kind of sound effect to indicate hungry vs satiated states, but the rest is a straightforward trap. Don’t go into the giant mouth without fucking it up first.

 

Re: The swamp
Yeah, probably should have added something about being able to find a guide to a specific location, but that’s not a particularly difficult thing to implement in the moment.

Re: The load bearing clue (and a lot else) is something players can miss
Unicorn Meat is designed around not having a full picture and not being able to get everything. All the locks have a key and some clues out there in the world, but they’re not going to be handed out to the players willy-nilly. Happenstance and random chance can and will drastically shift how a run through it will shake out, and yes, it is on the GM to go “all right, they’re hanging out around the Big House a lot, I’ll give them a nudge towards the kirin-horn sword via Birdie” or “well, Noodle doesn’t have a clue written down for this part, but I’ll give them one anyway. I can’t plot and prep for every single possibility; what I can do is spread the clues out enough that the players will find at least one of them, or be in circumstances where they can be directed towards one.

 

Re: The Noodle doll should be given to the players earlier
Yeah, it would be cool to do as suggested and hand it off early and give each location and character a description. This is also an extremely easy fix: if you think it should go earlier, put it earlier.

Re: Random things that have no payoff
The random details with no payoff are there because that’s how reality works and that’s how stories I like work: Bilbo finds a talking wallet in a troll’s pocket. Jonas tells Severian a story about magic beans that he never gets to finish. Ripley hails Antarctic Traffic Control. There was an age before the Elden Ring. SCP-173 was moved to Site-19 in 1993. Luke Skywalker asks “You fought in the Clone Wars?”.

The page of legends is another interstitial buffer page in the wrong place, but it is what it says on the tin: they’re stories carvers tell each other. If the reader wants to make them deliver a payoff they’re free to do so, or they can ignore them, or they can just enjoy thinking about them for a minute or two. The part of Unicorn Meat that needs to deliver is White-Eyes’ story and the carver’s ultimate fate.

One of the hosts says “Don’t tantalize me with good ideas” - if I don’t give the reader stuff to inspire them to engage with their own imagination beyond what I’ve written, I consider that a failure. It is my job to tantalize with good ideas.

Now in fairness to the critique, there are a good number of things that weren’t connected as well as they should have been: the Nightwatch Tree, several of the swamp special locations, some of the signposts for things like the Kirin-horn sword and the like. That all needed a second pass for better connectivity.

Re: Worthwhile additions of things not featured in this module
Page 66 really got the hosts’ collective goat, in a way that I thought was both kind of inexplicable in general and inexplicably venomous. The placement is wonky (it’s one of those buffer pages padding for left hand chapter starts) no pushback from me on that part, but the level of offense they take to it is weird. And I, in principle, agree with them on the point of “games that introduce things that could be interesting and then do nothing with them are lame”

The criticism that the cool ideas on the list would make the module better if they were meaningfully included, that’s fair; several of them could have easily been added without bloating and could have replaced or buffed up lackluster elements that did make it in. But the stuff on that page isn’t in the module because it isn’t in the module, and I said so right in the header. I wasn’t leading anyone on by promising something and not delivering. Nothing on that page existed in my version of Unicorn Meat at the time I was writing it - maybe it should have, but it wasn’t - but everything listed there could exist in someone else’s version of Unicorn Meat and maybe they didn’t know it until they got a push in that direction. 

Eclipse Phase is my go-to example for the principle Sam is getting at: there are multiple major parts of EP’s setting (the Factors, the Iktomi, the ETI being the 3 most prominent) that are set up as major mysteries that matter a whole lot to the setting as the whole, but are given 0 material or meaningful answers. You could cut them and lose nothing but an annoyance. It’s worse even than Call of Cthulhu’s handwavy and vague monster writeups. 

The difference between EP and Unicorn Meat, though, is that I explicitly don’t try to pin anything in the adventure to the stuff on page 66. It doesn’t exist in the module as-written. It's all non-canon… but I also think canon is a suggestion that doesn’t go any further than what’s on the page. If someone says “man it’d be cool if like, Rochefoucauld was selling unicorn meat to the moon beasts, what if a galleon of Leng shows up at the end”, I say “Fuck yeah that’s cool! You should do that!”

That doesn’t mean I’m going to include Leng-men showing up in a flying boat as part of the adventure, even if I might use it at the table when I run it. That’s not really that onerous of an edit to make, and it’s a fair sight easier to throw in some unexplained lights in the sky when the PCs get to sleep, or to replace an encounter with Brother Bones and imply that he’s Satan. 

All this is just a really good display of a fundamental disconnect between how Sam and I play and conceive of games, and something that I think needs addressed with how Dead Letters approaches critique. I’m going to call it Gundam Style vs Lego Style.

Gundam Style = You have your model, you have your directions, and while there’s some room to modify the model there are pretty firm limits to what you can do unless you really want to roll up your sleeves and get deep into kitbashing. You’re going to end up with something cool, but it is by and large going to be what the maker intended.

Lego Style = You have your model, you have your directions, and you are beholden to neither. You can dump all those pieces in a big old bin, toss out the booklet, and just throw stuff together according to your own foppery and whim. You’re going to end up with something cool, but even if you follow the directions at first eventually you’re going to make something that the creator didn’t intend, and they wanted you to do that. 

Now, I’m not going to try and persuade Sam that Lego Style is better, because I don’t think either of them is. He’s entitled to his own artistic preferences, and I like a nice Gundam from time to time. But I am going to say that when the other hosts asked “Are we hypocrites?”, my answer is “yeah, you kinda are.”

This is fine. Everyone’s a hypocrite about something, usually several things, I’m no exception there. A little hypocrisy about things that don’t matter is part and parcel for the human experience. The hosts have strong opinions about design and they’re “advocating for a certain way of doing things”, and I certainly have the same; but that can reach a point where it’s no longer productive and flips over into bad faith, and I think this section of the review hit that point. 

It’d be silly to criticize Jackson Pollock for not being photorealistic, in the same way that it’d be silly to criticize a toddler for not being Jackson Pollock. Criteria by which art is judged are situation-dependent, and the critic has to be able to give some amount of leeway to that. I might get frustrated by all the worldbuilding gaffes and iffy relationship dynamics and very narrow view of what fantasy can be in the romantasy books my partner reads, and I can drum up convincing arguments for why those things are bad, but I gotta step back and go “well, I don’t like it, but it’s also not operating in a space where my complaints are fully relevant”. Because if I don’t step back and let it be on its own terms, I’m just being an insufferable jackass and my partner has been entirely in the right to call me out on that when it happens.

One of the first things I say in Unicorn Meat is:

“Change or remove whatever you need to in order for people to be comfortable at the table and enjoy their time playing.” 

That doesn’t stop just with the content warning, that applies to everything. If the reader doesn’t like something, I want them to change it. If they want to add something that’s not there, I want them to add it. If they don’t care about this that or the other thing, I want them to ignore it. I don’t give a shit about how it’s played; the fact that it’s played at all and people are having a good time is enough. I brought my toys to the sandbox for other people to play with and I wouldn’t be here blogging if I hadn’t found a community of people who just made shit up for games and didn’t worry over making everything fit perfectly. 

So I think Dead Letters lasering in on this single page as Unicorn Meat’s greatest sin is aimed, in the name of “advocating for a certain way of doing things”, directly towards insufferable jackass territory. The hosts went and stuck to their criteria in a situation where it was less relevant or even not relevant at all, and calling Lego Style deficient because it’s not Gundam Style isn’t useful critique. It’s just dogmatism, and it makes the show really hard to get through: I don’t think I’m going to listen to another episode, independent of the hosts’ opinions of UM. The value of the critique - which was quite high when it was pointing out the problems with UM compared to other Lego style works - was only worth the cost of the rest of the experience because I had skin in the game. I don't really want to listen to them tear into someone else's work.

Re: “It’s like Appendix N but worse”
The list on page 66 is not a curated list of inspirational material, so it's not really an Appendix N; secondly, this statement completely misses the purpose of Appendix N. It’s not homework. Running and enjoying a game without being intimately familiar with its inspirational antecedents is the default experience. Providing a curated list is an option available to readers if they want a glimpse into the headspace that made the sausage.

(I don’t know, would Sam also take issue with the existence of Appendix M-DAN?)

Prime example, I’m fairly certain none of the Dead Letters guys have played LISA the Painful/Joyful, because someone would have brought it up given that it’s the ur-text for Unicorn Meat and the module wouldn’t exist without it. That 666 HOT SOUP tattoo is a reference to a song that plays when you’re fighting a guy named “Gary the Hot Soup” and that part doesn’t matter; the chaotic-manic aggressively grating off-kilter fuckery elicited by the song is what matters, but it only matters in as much as “this is what Dan had going through his head when he was writing the book.” And this post for that matter.

(Honestly, I should dig up that UM playlist I wrote up a while back and never finished.)

(The final confrontation with White-Eyes, in my head, gets you the one-two whammy of “The End is Nigh” and a specific remix of “All American Badass”.) 

Re: Caves and traversal time
The caves are supposed to be flux space (“Progress is slow: 1d4 hours moving between points”), the room writeups are the sections worth noting. Should have been more clear on that.

Re: Stitches and White-Eyes’ relationship
Yep, gay. The main clue is for eagle-eyed players to catch that there are sci-fi paperbacks in the med hut and White-Eyes’ room, but nowhere else on the farm. Players with a decent eye for such things can also be able pick it up from Stitches’ appearance in the final confrontation (White-Eyes and Stitches being the carvers alienated furthest from the rest of the farm; putting them together when they’ve been isolated otherwise should trip some bells), but if the players don’t pick up on that they’ll at least be able to figure out that they’re collaborators. 

Re: Theotokos
Sam calls this an obsession of mine, which I think is unfair. One blogpost and an adventure module is a preoccupation: it’s what I’m about to write that upgrades it to obsession.

Herod the Great dies in 4 BC., splitting the kingdom of Judea into the Herodian Tetrarchy. Taking advantage of the upheaval, a bandit named Judas son of Ezekias raids the town of Sepphoris, making off with loot and weapons from its treasury and garrison and kicking off one of the endless little brushfire rebellions of the time and place. He’s a thorn in the Tetrarchy’s side until 6 AD, when Herod Archelaus is expelled from power and the Tetrachy’s territory is converted into the Roman province of Judea, now under the jurisdiction of the newly-appointed legate of Syria, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius.

Quirinius orders a census, as one does when there are taxes to collect. Judas and his men continue their banditry/revolt with renewed vigor, striking again at Sepphoris and the surrounding countryside. Quirinius sends troops to stamp out the revolt, and they do so. First death, then taxes: the Roman way.

For purposes of narrative pacing, this is the part where I mention that Judas son of Ezekias is better known to history as Judas of Galilee. Sepphoris sits less than 4 miles from Nazareth, and in at least a few apocryphal traditions it’s considered the birthplace and hometown of Mary.

You can see where I’m going with this.

To make it abundantly clear, I’m not planting my flag on this particular hill because I want to pull a Behold the Man. The reverse of that, actually. If Jesus’ biological father was a Roman soldier (or one of Judas’ bandits) - whether by direct violence, coercion, or Mary acting in self-preservation - think about what that means for the rest of the narrative.  If Jesus was sired by assault, what does that say about Mary and Joseph? Strip out all the miracles and reduce it to if > then: Mary didn’t seek out an abortion. Joseph didn’t divorce her and raised the child as his own. Jesus ended up a wandering apocalyptic preacher, yes, but one whose ethical teachings are preoccupied with the treatment of the poor and marginalized.

And if you’re me, someone who grew up Catholic (not tradcath, but definitely above-average cath levels) and left because (among many other things) the only thing the Catholic Church loves more than Mary is denying that she was a human being who lived and existed within time and space (let the woman buy a jar of wine and have a nice night in with her husband, for fuck’s sake), this radical restructuring of a foundational text into something that subverts two millennia of accumulated dogmatic bullshit and is extremely relevant to the current social climate and is relevant to my own lived experience (as I’ve said before, I spent six months living in the woods where the bulk of my human contact was with a dozen or so sex offenders every work day)... that’s the sort of thing that easily becomes a creative axis mundi. Strip out all the miracles and all the dogma and remove God from the equation and you are still left with a story that has happened to real people somewhere in time and space. If not these particular people, it has happened to others. Making a myth of it, and returning to that well over and over again to explore the questions it offers, is a way for me to square what it means to exist in a world where this shit happens. Rome comes with death and then with taxes, and we’ve been trapped in that world since we began. Gods don’t exist, and that’s what makes them useful: They give faces and names to the things that have none, playing out a story we can use as a mirror to the world.

Anyway, bringing it all back around to Unicorn Meat: White-Eyes is 100% using her son as an instrument of her revenge, but she still loves him. The PCs arrive at the Bottom of the Pit just in time to see her holding him, drawing out the moment because it will be the last and only time she will ever be able to. That’s why there’s the time-displacement effect there: it’s a contrivance so that the PCs will always arrive just at the critical moment. Her assaulter is never named, and appears only as a skull at the bottom of a chamberpot: he gets what he’s owed, and he doesn’t matter in this equation.

(Also you should watch Justin Sledge's video on this topic, he does a much better job than I at laying out the context.)

Re: Disappointment that the bottomless pit has a bottom
Quote the description of the Bottom of the Pit:

“An awe-inspiring Brobdignagian form stirs underneath, obscured by placental tissue.”

Whenever you think you’re at the bottom of the barrel, there’s always another barrel just below it.

Re: The Theocarnequs
Reverse-EVA was not intended (or at least, I don’t remember intending it), but it is on-point and a generally accurate description. If Shinji had been marinating in a cocktail of unicorn blood for months as the preliminary spiritual refinement needed for apotheosis.

Re: Dark Unicorn Trinitarianism 
Can’t remember if it was intentional or not, but it’s certainly applicable. 

Re: No lore for the Beast Below
With the space I had available, there’s nothing I could have written that would have added any value. It is very old, very powerful, very far away, and very bad news. Anything further would be overdoing it. That may indeed be a cliche, but I’d rather evoke that cliche than the dreaded sin of Lovecraft pastriches and overdo it while still saying nothing.

 

Re: “It’s almost cool but it isn’t actually. It’s gesturing towards such cool ideas but, like, does not actually connect them”

I kid, I kid. But I really do talk with my hands a lot, my friends poke fun of me for it.

I don’t connect the elements explicitly in many place, because I think implicit connections are fun. That's part of the game of me. I’ve written how many thousands of words of unhinged Elden Ring theoryposting? Valeria called UM “VaatiVidya bait” and that's the one of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten about anything.  I like giving readers that moment of “holy shit is this evil unicorn trinitarianism!?”, because even if it isn’t, I at least got them engaged.

Re: The Finale
Sam’s critique of the finale glosses over a critical part of the encounter: the first thing White-Eyes does is give the PCs the option to just turn around and leave. It’s meant to be a choice players struggle through. If I’ve done my job right, it should be something that the PCs (or better yet, the players) have to struggle through. By the end of the adventure they should have seen and experienced enough horrors that they’ll at least consider taking White-Eyes’ offer and letting the world burn.

(I remember getting tagged by a woman on Twitter (can’t remember her name or dig up the post, now, apologies) who said that her players were divided so strongly on this point that they actually argued it out at the table.)

In its unmodified form, there’s nothing remotely close to a happy ending in Unicorn Meat unless the players manage to dumb-luck their way into finding one specific chunk of rock in the swamp and get it to the right person. That’s the point I’ve been hammering home the entire module: there is nothing good at Sunny Smiles Unicorn Farm. 

But by that same token, if someone wants to change that ending I encourage them to do it: friend of the blog Michael Kennedy was one of my playtest DMs, and he included an entire subsection of the adventure where the PCs went into White-Eyes’ subconscious dreamscape and were able to get Stitches to break through to her that way. It fit in with the tone and vibe of that campaign better than the ending I wrote in the module, and that’s cool!

**

And there we have it. I still technically have twenty-some minutes left in the episode, but like I said up above it's gotten pretty hard to listen to and the returns have diminished. I think the hosts made a lot of good points about nuts and bolts (stuff that will definitely make it in to future adventures should I ever write another), but fell off sharply when they moved beyond that. Still, I'm glad they did the episode and hope the show does well. No harm no foul.

 

Update: Sam left a response to the response over on bluesky, in case you want to read that as well

A Failed Review of the Ultimate Alien Anthology

 

 

"Boots off the counter, sir!"

I have, by hook and by crook, come into possession of another copy of the Star Wars Ultimate Alien Anthology (the first RPG book I ever owned, and then sold). For old times’ sake I wanted to give it a read and write something about it for the blog; it’s legitimately terrible. I say that with some amount of affection but that doesn’t stop it from being bad on just about every criteria you can judge it on. 13-year-old me didn’t care, of course, I barely knew what TTRPGs were when I got this as a birthday gift. 

I’d considered for a moment doing a Marsworms-style alien-by-alien review series, but abandoned that very quickly when the double whammy of Star Wars’ bedrock dependency on “stock-character-as-species” combined with a book that is trying to convert all that into RPG material without the page space or editorial leeway to expand on anything would result in a review where most of the entries would be “they’re just a type of guy and there is fundamentally nothing interesting or engaging about them.”

Then I considered taking advantage of that type-of-guy-ness and reverse engineering all those aliens to Mothership NPCs, but that fell prey to a similar issue; Star Wars aliens are already stock characters, so translating them into stock characters is redundant. I could do it, and probably pretty easily, but I don’t think the end result would be all that interesting.

Then I was was spurred by an aside of Austin Walker’s in A More Civilized Age, where he talks about how Star Wars is historically and presently disinterested in portraying culture. That aside lives rent-free in my head, because I suffer from a particular kind of cognitive dissonance where the cantina scene in A New Hope is simultaneously my canonical conceptualization of What Sci-Fi Is and one of the most egregious examples of what I hate in the genre. But it got me thinking - if I were to compile the scraps of Star Wars cultural world building that exist (for example, in this book), could I remix them into a single actually interesting fictional culture (or group of neighboring cultures)? Even if I couldn’t, what patterns would I find in the corpus? It would be an interesting look (well, for a given value of interesting) as to what gets classified as the Other in Star Wars when one strips out “stock-character-as-species” from the equation.

Well, that fell apart swiftly as well, for similar reasons: there’s only the barest crumbs of material to build with in this book, which means that any sort of transformative synthesis is more work than it’s worth. Source material that doesn’t support that sort of reading filtered through a book that doesn’t have the space to do it justice even if it did. Everyone knows Star Wars doesn’t give a shit about this sort of stuff, Austin was stating a truism that we all, to some degree, already know. But man, it really sinks in when you try to read a Star Wars book and you’re specifically focusing on those details. It’s like watching the rubber pseudoflesh rot off the animatronic.

So, in lieu of all that, I’m just going to do a regular-ass ol’ review of a book from over 20 years ago that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.

The Regular-Ass Review Portion

The UAA was published as part of the Star Wars Saga Edition RPG, being the adaptation of D&D 3.X. It was released between Episodes 2 and 3, and so doesn’t include aliens from Revenge of the Sith, Clone Wars, or the tail end of the old EU books. Still, it includes over 200 species from the films, novels, some games, and some ported over from the WEG RPG. Not all of them are created equal.

**

What in the actual hell is Kit Fisto doing on the cover. What is this stance? Who approved this? 

**

I’ll give the book credit for having art for all 183 aliens, split into lineups of 4-5 species at a time. I appreciate that the artists have distinct enough styles that, if you showed any two lineups side-by-side it’d be clear that they were made by different people without being particularly distracting. They don’t get a lot of room to play around, all the poses are pretty stiff, and many of the designs are aggressively mid even by rubber mask alien standards, but still.

**

Layout is what you’d expect for the era: two column with small text and standardized templates for each species: overview, personality, physical description, homeworld, language, example names, age grades, adventurers, species traits, and commoner stats. Then there are some prestige classes and feats at the end.

Age and commoner stats are 3.X-isms I am exceptionally glad people stopped wasting page space on. Like at the very least if you're going to have all this cruft, have the decency to use standardized keywords like MtG.

**

Overviews are very inconsistent in terms of length, with some species getting over half a page and some getting barely a paragraph despite the book being long enough (223 pages) that you could conceivably dedicate an entire page to each if you were smart about your spacing and cut out the cruft.

**

If there is a recurring theme to be had in the species overviews, it’s that first contact scenarios tend to go absolutely belly-up in Star Wars. Everyone’s getting conquered by their neighbors, or destabilized by rapid technological advancement via contact with the greater galaxy, or exploited by offworld economic forces, or enslaved by the Empire, so on and so on. It’s the antithesis of Star Trek and its Prime Directive, not only in content but in how much focus is given to it. This all comes with the territory of Star Wars as a Wagnerian Western, no surprise there, and I point it out primarily for how good it serves as a teaching example of how narrative focus and bias can elide or silence themes that are explicitly in the text.

**

In a turn of opinion that would likely shock and appall 13-year-old me, rereading this book has brought me round to the idea that Star Wars shouldn’t have aliens at all. Or at least you would lose nothing with an all-human cast. 

**

It's an odd experience to go through this and see everyone put on the same level of importance vis-a-vis their positioning in the galaxy: extras in the movies, big players in the novels, weirdos from comics no one remembers and some more weirdos from WEG modules are all treated with more or less the same amount of attention, to the point where if this book was the only exposure someone had to Star Wars, they'd probably be disappointed in how many entries are one-offs in the actual franchise.

**

Playing as the Yuuzhan Vong get an entire appendix (entire = 3 pages); I still remember being shock-and-awed by feelings of "oh shit there's this huuuuuuge thing going on after Return of the Jedi!", because when you're 13 getting that info from secondhand sources like this or the Essential Guides series it sounds so, so much cooler than the actual content. Got a real oral history type thing going on, severed from the EU novels.

Anyway, the YV are what happens when you have a potentially good setup and then coward out: they should have been fucked up modular fleshbeast chimeras bearing no resemblance to anything else in the franchise, and that version of them absolutely should have shown up out of nowhere during the Takodana battle in Force Awakens. 

 ** 

Instead of the usual shotgun-commentary on the aliens themselves since there are so many of them, I'm just going to do 12 that I like (from this book specifically) in no particular order. You could get a solid fantasy setting out of these ones, I think.

Ithorian - Fucking iconic. Instantly recognizable silhouette, they live in giant floating cities above the planetwide jungle they worship as a god. If Ithorians aren’t in your top tier we cannot be friends. 

Caamasi - They have a one-note deal as the super-nice empath guys who are friends to everyone (and are predictably fucked over by the Empire), but to the point of other species using their name just to denote far-away friends, and this one works for me. The empath thing is sufficient justification for Star Wars: yeah, if you can feel other people's negative emotions you're going to try and avoid being a jerk.

Togruta - Canonically (according to this book), Ahsoka (who did not exist at the time it was written) has echolocation, eats live alien rats by snapping their necks with her teeth, and has to deal with microaggressions insinuating that she is venomous. Stop being cowards, Disney! Let Ahsoka eat alien rats! Anyway, striking design, the rat thing is a fun bit of weird, there's some broad motions at a collectivist society and having to avoid major predators on their homeworld, which are not developed but are at least something.

Kel Dor - Yes, they look like a shriveled ballsack with a gas mask; No, I do not care. I’m with Filoni on this one, Plo Koon is sick. Picked Kel Dor as my PC in Jedi Academy. Sure, they don't have a whole lot going for them from a lore perspective but they are cool fucked-up guys in space and sometimes that's enough. Also apparently they're related to the Tognath from the Disney films i.e. those two cool motherfuckers that Saw has in his crew.

Jawa - They deserve better. They’re weird little guys who love garbage, they should have some incredible goblinmode fits, not just uniform brown robes. Obvious squandered potential. Gimme the garbage goblins. Star Wars is nearly 50 years old, and the idea of having the signature Weird Little Technically Savvy Guy alien pop out of a maintenance hatch and go “No can do, bossman, the flim-flam’s been shmeckledorfed” is still fully beyond the series’ imaginary. What are we even doing.

T'surr - Deepest of the deep cuts, these guys first appeared in some kid-focused books published by Scholastic which I had never heard of before looking up where they first appeared right at this moment. They're big fucked up blue bad guys and you know what, why not. Fucked up space orcs. The color and the being huge give me vibes of the Koloss (though they would not come later and this is me projecting into the past like it's fucking New Sun), which are one of Sanderson's creations that I really like.

Arcona - These guys actually have enough material to qualify a basic fantasy culture: communities of large extended families, men acting as primary domestics, group decision making, common use of noisms in even casual speech, and a society that was nearly destroyed by the introduction of highly addictive drugs by outside forces looking to economically exploit them (a la opium in China) - there's stuff here to work with, and they're not Just One Thing. Welcome surprise, I wouldn't have put them on the shortlist before now.

Hutt - As far as giant space slugs go, not a great design compared to the wild shit that earth slugs can get up to. As far as coding, not the greatest. But they do have a lot of interesting parts: an ancient space empire that's not a particularly great place to live but has remained functional for longer than anyone else, mafia-style inter-clan politics, profiting off of the dysfunction of their neighbors. Yeah they're "what if the idea of a drug lord was also a slug", but they're closer to the drug lords in House of the Scorpion - they're so well-established and so entrenched that they can operate in the open and no one else can do anything about it. Good antagonist fuel.

Noghri - God, could you imagine if Leia rolled up in Force Awakens with a couple of Noghri bodyguards? People would lose their shit. And for good reason, Noghri are cool. They have a good gimmick (planet was fucked by space battle during the war, Empire rolled in and basically extorted service for ecological aid that never came), they give Leia something cool to interact with that's specific to her, you can easily get some good comedy out of them (they are serious little guys, good to play off of), they're all-around solid. 

Ortolan - Apparently, Max Rebo is supposed to be playing the organ with his feet, but you can’t see it because of how he’s positioned. Anyway, a fat little blue alien elephant guy is a fun muppet alien and you gotta have one good muppet in the crew.

Duros - I love that they’re just Gray-ass Grays. They have a very vintage 70s sort of vibe, inherited from back when Star Wars drew from sources that weren’t Star Wars - “here are the Grays, they were one of the first species to start exploring the galaxy and they absolutely obliterated the environment of their homeworld so nowadays it’s basically just a giant radioactive dump.”

** 

So there we go. Not a good book, Star Wars is fucking weird, sometimes you have to go through four drafts before something clicks. I'll save the one-by-one reviews for a better book.

The Expedition 33 Review Post

Belsprout

I am going to spoil the shit out of this game. There's your warning.

**

Expedition 33 opens with a moment of sublime cosmic horror.

Across the sea from the city of Lumiere, there is a Monolith. On the Monolith's face there is a golden number, radiant. At its base, an enormous woman made of stone sits with her head bowed and her arms wrapped around her knees. Thus the horizon remains until sunset of the gommage day, when the Paintress rises from her seat, wipes away the number, and everyone of that age in Lumiere vaporizes in a cloud of flower petals. 

A new number is painted, one lower than the last, and the Painter's returns to stillness. Lumiere sends out an expedition the next morning, in desperate hope that they might be able to cross the sea and the shattered continent beyond and stop this.

All of them have failed. This year is Expedition 33, but it’s not the 33rd Expedition: the numbers count down to match the monolith - no one older than 33 is still alive in Lumiere. The gommage spares no one. No one has a fucking clue why it happens.

Within the first few minutes of the game, as main character Gustav is walking his ex-girlfriend Sophie to the harbor for her own funeral, you have a conversation with an NPC about preparations for the “Final Generation”, when there will be no more adults at all. It's that sort of game. It's a game about art, and death, and grief, and the end of the world, and the arbitrary, unknowable horror of a universe that will inevitably kill you for no fucking reason and how all you can do is fling yourself in desperate hope into the void that is the future and it is a video game about wanting to stab God in the fucking face. Who knows if it will do any good,  but you’re tired and sick and that bastard has killed everyone you have ever loved and they’ll kill you too and you just have to hope that you can get in knife range.

It's so fucking good.

Mechanically, graphically, narratively, musically, certified banger on every single front and this is grading it against a year packed with incredible releases. Do you like JRPGs at all? Go play it. Took me 42 hours, sidequests included, and I saw most but not all of it. Good size, leaves you satisfied but not exhausted.

**

I can’t be, and refuse to be, the only one who sees the parallels between Marika and the Paintress. I can’t say if there was intention behind the similarities but damn is it close: goddess with golden hair and a fucked-up stone body breaks the fucking universe in grief after the death of her son.

**

 
Naming a favorite track is impossible, so I will have to just shout out the funky fresh bassline in Rain from the Ground. The feeling when it transitions into the electronica during a perfect parry sequence is absolute peak.

**

I lied. My favorite track is Paintress. Wait, no, Visages. God there are so many bangers on this soundtrack, it’s nothing but bangers.

**

Lune was my party lead from go - you can settle into some excellent bread-and-butter 1-2-3 combos with her. And she’s just a cool character. But also because she doesn’t make any noise when she sprints.

**

Monaco teaches us all a valuable lesson: Blue Mage “get powers from monsters” is a good mechanic, and it should be featured in more places.

**

The dialogue in the game is excellent across the board - naturalistic in ways that many comparable games aren’t.  It doesn’t feel stilted or performative, and the comedy swings way above its weight class when it wants to. Verso and Monoco in particular have some fantastic banter. 

**

Esquie is a perfect marshmallow friend, Sciel is everyone's favorite bi icon, Renoir is one of the most menacing motherfuckers to grace a screen in a good long while. 

**

I love how weird everything is. Set design, monster design, the landscape itself. They use “the world is a painting” to fantastic effect. Yeah! It should be weird and surreal! It’s a magic painting! Just have some big abstract-art headed bronze colossus wading through the ocean and name it "Sprong"!

**

Gestrals - the model maquettes with paintbrush hair - are such a good type of goblin. They love fighting, but not out of anything as petty as malice or greed or ideology; they just want a good tussle. No harm no foul if they die, they’ll just be reborn at the sacred river.

It’s hilarious, until it also becomes deeply sad as you find out that resurrected gestrals don’t retain continuity with their previous selves; they’re similar, but not the same. And the damage done to the Canvas has backed up the resurrection line, where there aren’t enough adult gestrals to look after the newly-resurrected one.

**

I loved how each character had a dedicated combat gimmick but shared in the same skill unlocks - the amount of build variety you can pull off is probably the greatest I have ever seen in an RPG. You can break the game entirely and wipe endgame bosses before they even get a turn in, if you want to.

To elaborate there: everyone has three slots they can equip primary skills in, which give them a stat boost as well. If they go through four fights with a skill equipped, that allows every character to add that skill (with no stat boost) to their list of secondary skills (the only cap here being your number of skill points). Everyone is able to use every skill, and the key is finding the build that works with their core combat gimmick.

**

I’ll admit, I was taken by surprise when Gustav gets merc’d at the end of Act 1. They got me, and I thought “yeah, okay, it’s that kind of game, I see what you’re doing.”

And then they hit me with that trick again with the end of Act 2 and just kill everyone.

**

As for the endings, I picked Maelle’s first, then went back and did Verso’s. The latter I find more narratively fulfilling but morally monstrous, the former a hollow victory. I appreciate that there’s no good ending, but there’s the feeling that there could have been one. Maybe, if Gustav were alive, he could have brokered peace with Real!Renoir or Real!Clea. 

Verso’s ending sees him committing genocide; Maelle’s sees her losing herself in a sea of puppets. Neither of them - or any of the other Dessandres, really - see the inhabitants of the Canvas as people. 

I normally don’t like narratives where characters meet their creators. They either turn into farce or tread a repetitive existential crisis. No need to relitigate it when Conan figured out in Queen of the Black Coast: “If life is an illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me.”

Here, I feel better. Because the encounter with the gods leaves the very clear lesson that they will destroy you as collateral in their own squabbles. Even the ones that seem to care about you. The game ends on the same note as it begins: raw cosmic horror. The gods will kill you en masse for arbitrary reasons you have no context for - and once we get the context that your lives are all collateral damage in their squabbles amongst themselves, it just makes it all worse because the you’re not just dying for unavoidable and pointless reasons, you’re dying for petty and stupid and selfish and completely avoidable reasons.

I’m convinced that the party was well and properly dead after Act 2: Maelle didn’t resurrect anyone, she just made puppets based on her own memories. The wave at the end of the Verso ending is Maelle trying to assuage her own guilt with a mirage of her dead friends going “it’s okay, we understand”. 

The game starts with the characters going "fuck the gods", and ends with the player going "man, fuck the gods."

**

There is so much to say about this game and it’s been a couple months, so it is extremely difficult to focus and summarize my thoughts. All the same, game good.

Dan Plays Games 8

In a semi-concerted effort to play and finish games I own rather than buying new ones, several games on this list will be those I’ve played before but haven't touched in many years.

Elden Ring: Nightreign

I played two rounds and then refunded it. Turns out when you take all the parts I like out of Elden Ring, I don't like the end result. So I bought Expedition 33 instead.

Expedition 33

Game fucking good. It deserves its own post.

Odallus: The Dark Call 

I played less than an hour of this back in 2015. It’s one of those early indie games that went extremely hard on the retro influence (in this case, pre-Symphony Castlevania), and that works in its favor for the aesthetics. Unfortunately, its dedication to period accuracy means that it has several design choices that are absolute bullshit.

You have a limited number of lives: fine. You can buy more at merchants, but like with every other item the price increases every time you buy it. Okay, fine. If you lose all your lives you have to restart the level. Okay, fine.

But when you die and get kicked back to a checkpoint,  all the sub weapons and lives you used remain used and the price increase remains in effect. You’re kicked back in space but not in time. 

Maybe the game would be too easy if this wasn’t a factor - it’s not particularly complicated or long once you come to grips with the movement (which doesn’t feel great, but intentionally so) - but as it stands I feel little desire to finish it despite how short it is. With achievement percentages at 50% just for beating the first level, it seems I am part of the majority on this point.

One Finger Death Punch

Another one from 2015ish. The tutorial narrator voice has aged particularly poorly (I get that they were going for “bad dub of an old kung fu movie”, or at least I hope they were, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good to begin with), but the gameplay is an immaculate encapsulation of ye olde Newgrounds stick fighting animations. Feels good sometimes to winnow down the cognitive load to two buttons and flow state.

Rift of the Necrodancer (revisit)

Returning here, now that I've completed the story mode, with a comment to say that I do not know why there was a story mode. Just having the mini games of characters doing stuff would have been sufficient.

Binding of Isaac: Repentance

BoI is my most-played video game that isn’t TF2, at least in terms of games that I have stats for. I fell off years ago when I updated to Afterbirth+ and found that it had become extremely unfun to play thanks to item bloat and successive waves of Edmund’s favorite hobby, nerfing anything that is remotely fun into the ground (instead of giving people more options to play the game on their own terms. Heaven forbid a game have opt-in extra difficulty modes.)

But I had never gotten Repentance, and got it in my head that I should return to the old stomping grounds as I continue on through Hell Summer of Hell Year. Started a new save slot and everything.

And starting over from scratch feels good! The old monster is still under there and getting a Pyromaniac + Kamikaze run feels fucking good. Getting Brimstone feels fucking good.

It’s only after putting a couple dozen more hours into it that the feeling of “man, this ain’t quite right” starts to creep in. There’s been a lot of little things tweaked in the years since I played BoI regularly, and on the whole I don’t like them in ways I can’t really put my finger on because I don’t know the extent of the damage. Several issues I had with Afterbirth+ are still present (paucity of damage up items, a bloated boss item pool weighted towards items that are either useless or just feel like a mediocre reward, outrageously nerfed Devil Room chances) and several more seem to have emerged just for Repentance (inflating drop percentages, even more good items reduced to mediocrity, decreasing soul heart drop rate.)

And don’t get me started on how the External Item Descriptions mod is absolutely necessary to play. It’s bonkers we’ve gone over a decade missing the basic feature of “telling players what the fuck an item does”. This has always been Edmund’s other big design issue - I remember the shitshow with the Lost and the “no patch notes for updates” era. He's a good designer at base but once the game is in the wild I think he just kinda barrels over people who have a different way of having fun. It's always been a relaxation game for me, where you occasionally become obscenely overpowered. Making it harder lessens both of those things. Maybe a mod to undo the nerfs will help.

Is it still fun? Yeah! But it feels like it's fun in spite of itself, nowadays. 

Date Everything

While my experience with the genre is limited, it’s my understanding that dating sims are predicated on the premise of choosing a character you like and focusing in on their specific story route, which precludes you from those of other characters.

Date Everything does not adhere to this structure: while everyone has a specific plot, these are extremely short (maybe 5-7 conversations, and I've run into several that can be wrapped up in 1 or 2) and pretty shallow, narratively speaking. When you finish their story, there’s basically nothing else to do with the character besides one final short scene.

This would be okay were it not for the fact that the game forces you to engage with all of the characters. “(You Must) Date Everything”, not “(You Can) Date Everything”. 

The only way to skip anyone is if you take the content warning opt-out, which you can only take for certain characters and which you can only activate during the first conversation with them. If you ever think “oh that doesn't sound so bad / I can handle this” and then change your mind, you’re fucked; you are locked into their storyline unless you reload a save. If someone doesn’t have a warning but is still just kind of a cunt you’d rather not deal with, you’re just stuck with them for days until you can piss them off enough to get a Hate ending.

This leads to a paradoxical and self-defeating gameplay loop where you are disincentivized from interacting with the characters you like. In a fucking dating sim! Talk to them too much and you burn through their plot and are stuck with the characters you don’t like or actively hate. Even I know that shit is whack!

The game desperately, desperately needs a “fuck you, get out of my house” option. Not just because the Content Aware warning system is inadequate, but because sometimes players just don’t like talking to certain characters for reasons entirely unconnected to serious topics! Let me skip Timony Timepiece! It should not take this long to get this shitty submissive twink catboy out of my god-damn house!

You can just be rude to people and sandbag everything they say, but it’s still going to take multiple days to get a Hate ending for most of them.

I appreciate the inclusion of content warnings, but they’re basically useless in the game by being vaguely worded and given without any context to help you make an informed decision (so like most content warnings).  I’m not fucking psychic, I can’t tell what warnings are under / over / accurately stated without more info, and if I get more info it’s too late! There are characters who absolutely need a warning and don’t get one (the fact that this game launched with no warning on Errol is baffling) and those who get one but probably don’t (Deenah is, at worst, mildly weird.) I ended up taking most of them not because of the content, but because the characters are immediately gigantic assholes that I don't want to deal with. (Special shout-out to Sophia, who is both content I don't want to engage with AND an enormous asshole. She's the domme who subscribes to the "start throwing insults around before establishing boundaries" school of BDSM. You literally don't even get to choose a single line of dialogue (let alone get to the content warning) before she starts growling about how you're a worthless piece of shit. Get the fuck outta my house and remind yourself what 'safe, sane, and consensual' means, you clown.)

The game is at its best when you’re wandering around discovering kooky new characters. The writing is generally pretty good, got some great jokes in there, character designs are cool. Sometimes you get in a flow state and juggling all those characters doesn't seem like that big of an ask. But sometimes the illusion breaks and the connective tissue starts showing and you remember that 100 characters is a lot less fun when you have to do all 100 plots to finish the damn game, especially when you've met a good number of characters that you'll get you fill of (positive and negative) in one meeting. 

(Also: the mouse and keyboard controls are outrageously bad. You can use arrow keys to select options in the main menu, but not dialogue options. And there’s no key rebinding!)

(Also also: I know it's 110% unintentional, but I am incredibly amused by the fact that the character voiced by Matt Mercer is a bad DM.)

Yes, there will be a tierlist eventually.

Dan Plays Games 7

Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

I'm trying to get better at actually finishing games I own instead of just buying new ones. I am not very successful thus far.

 

Pyrene

My feelings are complicated on this one. On the whole, the game is fun; I like the aesthetics and its roots in Basque folklore, but something in the roguelite gameplay loop and the difficulty curve is a little borked.

Every area has a spread of cards - enemies, items, yourself - and you move yourself around defeating enemies until you clear the area, repeat across 3-5 biomes. New characters are unlocked as you progress through the story, new items and abilities are unlocked by upgrading buildings in the village or completing “do X thing Y times” objectives. So far so good. You can make some disgustingly overpowered builds, which is always a plus.

The issue I kept running into was that the story locks your progress behind character-specific runs - you unlock a new character, and then have to complete a run as them to progress. Using anyone else will only get you more upgrade materials for the village. This shakes out with you spending more time playing as characters you don’t like / are having trouble with rather than characters you do, though there are thankfully a lot of difficulty adjustments that you can toggle on and off as you see fit.

If you're playing it as a normal roguelite with the normal cycle of “do run, return home, upgrade, go back out”, you’ll run out of things to upgrade long before you reach the end of the story thanks to playing and losing as characters you don't like; the last village upgrades are locked behind beating said story (and are postgame challenge stuff anyway), so the back half / third of the game just doesn’t really have any meaningful metaprogression unless you’ve been moving through the story faster than you can unlock things.

But then again, I really liked the last character in the story mode so I can't even say that it ended on a bad note. It's got flaws, but I still hit credits on it and enjoyed my time with it. Not being a forever game with endless depth is okay.

Pokerogue

This is a dangerous game if you have an addictive personality. The gameplay loop is that tight.

It's a basic framework: you draft a team, and then try and survive 200 waves of increasing difficulty It's simple superficially, but in shifting Pokemon to a roguelite gameplay structure, all of the weird gribbly background stuff that only matters to competitive players suddenly becomes both important and fun. It’s downright miraculous, and it’s such a dead fucking simple change.

When you catch or hatch a pokemon for the first time, its lowest evolution is made available as a starter. For every duplicate you catch or hatch, any new natures, abilities, IVs or egg moves are added to the gestalt. Using / catching / hatching a ‘mon gets you candies that you can use to unlock passive abilities (in addition to the normal ability), reduce point costs (you have a budget of 10 points for your starting party) or buy eggs (which have better odds of getting you a shiny or a rare egg move)

And then you can pick and choose what you want to start with.

Bolded for emphasis. In a normal Pokemon game making a specific build is an exercise in psychopathic tedium and monster eugenics, and it doesn’t matter whatsoever unless you are playing competitively. This bypasses all of that and lets you unlock new options just by engaging with the basic premise; after so long, there is finally a game where catching them all is actually a fun part of the gameplay loop. Even the egg gacha mechanics are fun, because you will regularly be surprised with a helpful egg move, a new shiny, or a hidden ability that you can then start building around; You're always making progress on something. (Again, part of the addiction loop. But it is still very satisfying.)

My one major issue is that the first two areas are always the same, and tend to get pretty boring even when you have a solid fighting type to clean house. The secondary issue is that once you start getting a team settled down, the grind becomes a lot more apparent. But when you're on a good run, man does it feel good to put on a podcast and grind out a couple dozen waves.

 (I have a Houndour with some truly obscene type coverage via egg moves, I love my walking nuke hellhound son.)

Spiritfarer (Revisit; original review 2023)

I started up a fresh Spiritfarer save after our cat Peaches died back in March (three cats in three years, folks. It’s been bad) and have been chipping away at it since then. It was the game I needed. Probably needed it anyway just considering the state of the world. Death has been on my mind a lot, of late.

In a media landscape that is so obsessed with death and so gleeful in its depictions of doling it out, Spiritfarer stands out as an anomaly. There are lots of good depictions of mythic Death out there, but very few of the part that comes before. The dying part, the winding down, the knowing and the dreadful waiting. Pratchett’s witches get it, no surprise there, but it’s a pretty barren landscape elsewise.

And then Spiritfarer sails in, with its music and its animation and its color and its warmth and joy and brushes with the transcendent, and it gives you the job of preparing spirits for their final departure. It invokes what is probably one of the oldest and strongest fantasies in humanity: the good death. Of going out with dignity, without regret, with all affairs in order, in the company of loved ones.

Very, very few people get that luxury. Have ever gotten that luxury. Most of humanity has died in pain, in terror, alone, without warning. If you’re lucky, you get to say goodbye.

And then Spiritfarer sails in and says “Maybe it doesn’t have to be like that”, and the effect is something like a glimpse of the elves on their way to the Grey Havens.

The gameplay loop is smoother the second time through, when I know what I’m doing, though I am reaching the point where many of the issues that got me to stop cropped up. Let’s see if I can play smarter. The biggest issue so far is if you drop the loop: Say you forgot something (easy to do in this game). You missed a passenger for a while, or you kept one around longer than you needed to. It’s entirely possible to get yourself trapped in a resource bottleneck where your only way to progress is through this One Specific Thing, and you’re stuck essentially going in circles until you accomplish the One Specific Thing and the game opens back up a bit. I started feeling it this run through around the same point as I did the first time; things can really start to fizzle out around the 50% mark. I’m going to push through, because I do want to see this through to the end, but it is a pretty sizable flaw in an otherwise flawless experience. The defect in the Claw of the Conciliator.

I wouldn’t blame anyone for dropping the game in frustration after hitting one of those scenarios. But beyond that, I think Spiritfarer is one of those very rare works of art where the world is better - if only by a small amount -  for its existence. 

Path of Achra (Revisit)

Got back into this for a while. I’ve come to appreciate how, since the main gameplay loop is just “attempt to get to the end, and then do it again but slightly harder” nearly all of the achievements are based around getting to the end of the game with one of the 80-some prestige classes - it’s a small but welcome encouragement to vary up how you play the game. Makes it something of a puzzle, even: can you make a build that fulfills X requirements that can survive a run? This can cause frustration when you have a great build that still ends up getting absolutely bodied right at the end, but them’s the breaks.

The dev is working on a tactics rpg set in the same world, which I am very excited for. The guy knows the best lore is to just say cryptic, cool-sounding shit and let people’s imagination do the rest. More of that is always welcome.

Sorry We’re Closed (Addendum)

Serves me right for giving it a writeup when I was still very early on in the game.

You know how I said that it’s doing some very interesting things with the themes of love and how it changes people? About that: Sorry, We’re Closed operates on fairy-tale morality and logic. You are going to be given binary dialog choices (of the sort where the choice you make and what the character actually says are entirely different things) with no room given for nuance, circumstance, or anything remotely resembling how people would react to these things in the real world. I didn’t realize this until I was already getting frustrated with the story: Yes, game, I am agreeing with you that love can be a profound driver of personal change and growth: no, I don’t think that love is going to save the character who feeds people into an industrial meat grinder in front of a live studio audience.

Under fairy-tale logic, with everything and everyone heightened to an operatic dreamscape where nothing and no one is actually real, maybe it works. I don’t know. You have a woman who was dumped three years ago and still has a framed photo of her ex on the wall, being stalked/cursed by a demon that feeds people (that it kidnaps and attempts to force into romantic relationships in order to fill the hole left behind from the absence of God) into an industrial meat grinder, and everyone else in the side stories is heightened levels of dysfunctional - and your choices are only ever “yes this is fine, carry on” and “I am going to destroy this person’s life.” There’s never an option to put your foot down and say “I think you can make it work, but you two need to sit down and sort your shit out and I am not qualified to help you”.

It’s one of those cases where I would rather not have any narrative choice at all, rather than be forced into choices that I don’t want to take.

If I decide to continue with this, I will probably have further addenda.

Ender Magnolia

Like its predecessor, Ender Magnolia is a dang solid Metroidvania. Looks good, sounds good, plays good, I 100%ed it (admittedly, this wasn’t very hard) and I never 100% games. It’s not going to win any awards for breaking new ground and revolutionizing the genre, but there’s nothing wrong with playing the hits sometimes. 

Time Wasters

Fun little bullet heaven game where you zip around in a little spaceship. Good if you want something that doesn’t require a lot of brain power to play. You’ll get more bang for your buck from Vampire Survivors, but I don’t think anything actually does so that’s not much of a mark against it. You'll probably run out of steam relatively quickly, but it's fun for as long as it keeps your interest.

ENA: Dream BBQ

The natural evolution of the series is here: a new ENA video, but interactive. Does it make a shit-lick of sense? Maybe. Do I care that I don’t understand it? Also no. It’s free and it captures one specific Vibe that is just otherwise impossible to capture. Dream logic is damn hard to properly invoke and even harder to sustain, so keeping it going for an hour and a half (give or take) of playtime (this is the first episode of ???) is an achievement. If you enjoy ENA, this is more ENA.

Also, since Mike had asked me on discord if I had any utterly deranged lore ramblings about ENA to tide folks over until Nightreign, here’s what I’ve got: I’m sticking with a theory that this is some sort of hyper-immersive VR (to use Orion’s Arm terminology, a virch) setup that is slowly decaying due to unknowable outside circumstances, and none of the inhabitants truly realize it. Some of them clearly know that something has gone wrong, but I don’t think they know why. Environments / regions are going offline, people are losing their identities / selfs and becoming NPC-like subroutines, so on and so forth. ENA herself, I think, is a user who has somehow managed to accumulate or create a gestalt personality (we’ve seen at least three of them: Red/Yellow, Blue, and Grey) that’s taken on its own life outside of and potentially suppressing the original.

Gods vs Horrors (Release build)

Same as it was in the demo, now with more gods and relics and a lightweight unlock system. Still love the design of the pantheons - each is visually distinct (since all art is black, white, and one primary color) and each has a dedicated playstyle that you can build around / hybridize. It feels fantastic to fall into a disgustingly overpowered build. All that is good.

The bad is that the game absolutely needs some rebalancing and some more content. While I've been able to clear the 10 tiers for the first boss, the difficulty dramatically spikes on the second and third bosses way outpace any benefit the progression might be able to give you. Like with Pyrene, the pace of unlocks is out of whack with the difficulty (even factoring in the occasional disgustingly overpowered build), so you will end up unlocking stuff well before you have reached the endgame (or even the midgame, honestly) - to this day, I don't think anyone has beaten Binding of Isaac for how to pace roguelite progression.

Really hoping this one gets more support later on down the road. All the pieces are there, they just need more time in the oven.

 

Slay the Princess: The Pristine Cut

I'd played this last year, but I completely forgot to add it to a roundup for reasons I cannot begin to fathom (spoilers, it's ADHD), so here is a long-overdue review of the game as I return to play through all the new material that got added since I last touched it.

**

There is a point in Slay the Princess where the clever twists on the visual novel format and the joy of Jonathan Sims talking to himself fade into the background for a moment, and the only way to describe the experience is 'transcendent'.  It's an encounter with La Revacholiere. No other way, no better way to describe it. You'll know when you get there.

And it's not a one-off, either. You'll find that place again. Don't play too much of it at once. Let those moments live somewhere in your soul and return when you feel the pull again.

 

Promise Mascot Agency

It's an open world mascot management sim yakuza crime drama made by the people behind Paradise Killer and it is a certified banger. A great game for weird people. I fell in love with it instantly, in a way that's honestly hard to quantify. Saying "I like the vibes" is a disservice, because vibes are vague feelings about aesthetics: the vibes are immaculate, but hand in hand with the vibes it's just fucking fun. It feels good to play. It feels good to drive your truck around a run-down backwater town and talk to people. It feels good watching the agency expand and the numbers go up. 

The pitch is that you're playing as Michi, "the Janitor". You fucked up and lost the family 12 billion yen. So the boss lady exiles you to a shitty depressed town in the middle of nowhere to take over a failing mascot agency operating out of a roach-infested love motel. Your partner in business / crime is a mascot (who are actual beings, not humans in suits) named Pinkie☆ (the star is part of her name) who is a giant severed finger with a face on it and has had it up to here with just about everything and is disappointed that you didn't need her to go bury a body in the woods. You need to make a shitload of money and clean up this run down town.

Two little things that stuck out to me: one is possibly the only funny version of "ha ha, the goofy cartoon animal is obsessed with porn" (because he immediately follows it with "I'm an advocate for responsible usage and want to start a streaming service where everyone is paid fairly for their work"), the other is the exchange teacher from London whose voice actress I would bet dollars to donuts had done the same at some point (which I think is very cool. Loads of media overlook the complexities and texture of how people speak so I always like shouting it out when there's a case of "folks cared about this". Like how the Chow family in Sinners all have southern Delta accents like the rest of the cast and that establishes that they're second or third generation immigrants without ever saying it directly.)

Anyway: game fucking good, it's on sale at the moment and even if it wasn't it's 20 bucks and that is absolute highway robbery for the quality you'll be getting.