Here be dragons.

Nimona feels too real. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the wall is mentioned almost at the beginning, and you can guess that this is more of a contemporary story than it seems at first. Well, at first it seems like a mix of near future and medieval, but you know what I mean. It is also a personal story of a couple of misfits. I was expecting to write something like “and the book is better that the movie because of this and that”, but that is not the case. Some things have been moved around, the adaptation loses in some areas but gains in others. So I can’t recommend one over the other, but I can recommend both.

Remember Dragon Age? Do you think we will get another one? Too sad? Okay.

• Redemption is only interesting as a live-action adaptation. Not bad, but just unremarkable.
• Dawn of the Seeker is so dull, I’m sure it was done on purpose.
• The first season of Absolution is pretty great. It’s colorful, there’s action and comedy, but it’s also dark in some places. Dragon Age by and large never goes completely grim dark, but it doesn’t shy away from heavy themes.

It’s hard not to be cynical about movies like The Sea Beast and Strange World, or even Nimona. They all tend to ignore the systemic nature of the problems, offer simple solutions that will not work, and overall do not stray far from the status quo. But there has been a slow shift toward something resembling an actual stance. And they are all still quite entertaining, with at least a clear improvement in the area of representation.

I also decided to finish Into the Badlands. I can’t vouch for the whole thing (I stopped, what, 5 years ago), but the last half of the last season and the show as a whole wasn’t bad, wasn’t bad at all. It’s a dark, post-apocalyptic story where everyone’s kind of bad and yada yada yada. But there’s still a lot of good stuff: complex and diverse characters, the story makes sense if you squint a bit and/or ignore the parts you don’t like, it looks good in a bleak sort of way, and of course the thing it was sold on, the fighting is great.

It seems that “dungeon crawler” has become more of a theme. Are you in a dungeon most of the time? Dungeon crawler! But it was a subgenre at one point. And one I barely touched, so I decided to correct that. Of all the options, I started with something modern, with quality of life improvements and all that.

Operencia: The Stolen Sun is somewhere between high fantasy and fairy tale. It is also somewhere between epic – as the title suggests, the sun is stolen – and small and cozy. The maps are not too big, but can feel grand, you’re never dealing with big numbers, the puzzles have a storybook feel to them. Overall, it is like a good tabletop RPG campaign, one that would not challenge you, but would entertain you nonetheless.

I would call Soul Searching a walking simulator with light survival elements, but you are on a boat most of the time, so it is a sailing simulator with light survival elements. There is not much to add, just to mention that there are heavy themes, the name does not lie.

Skye is a pleasant, very painterly and completely free arcade flight game. Except for a few races that can be challenging, everything is quite relaxing.

The Tartarus Key is not particularly scary – it is not a survival horror, there are no monsters, hardly any jump scares, and no existential stuff either – more atmospheric. A haunted house attraction, more or less. Puzzles are all contained, escape room style, so you always know that you can solve them. Good characters, not a bad story.

Iron Lung is brilliance in minimalism. You basically stare at three numbers (X, Y, angle) and four buttons (2 for angle and 2 for movement) all the time, but the pressure (pun intended) of being in a barely holding metal apparatus in the depths of an alien ocean is palpable. It is also quite short.

Signalis is an interesting example of two things. First, it takes gameplay from old survival horror games and uses it with very little modernization. This means that if you want that kind of thing (I apparently did), it’s great, but if you don’t want to deal with very limited inventory, respawning enemies, and a lack of clear direction, there’s not much to mitigate that. There is some mitigation, on the level of, say, the Resident Evil 1 remake, but that’s about it (the map is good, for example, but is also missing for a chunk of the game). Second, it is clearly influenced by a lot of things – movies, books, games – that are, to put it politely, problematic. But unless I missed something, which is possible, it doesn’t bring bad elements from those inspirations.

Wretched Depths is a free little fishing game with Twin Peaks-style weirdness and some eldritch horror. You catch fish with your upgradeable fishing rod and lure, and some strange things out of the corner of your eye.

Afterdream was not bad, but disappointing. Gameplay is okay, just a simple point and click. The addition of a camera was kind of meh. The biggest flaw is the story. Some time ago, I played the first Distraint, which was made by the same person, at least it had something to say.