#cinema

Planet of Lana is lovely. A relatively straightforward puzzle platformer, with a simple story told without actual words (in Simlish, if you will). Calling it Nausicaä-like is a stretch, but I will do so anyway.

While I admit that Signs of the Sojourner is not really my thing – I don’t like card games – I think the way it depicts conversations is very clever. You have to make a path out of cards, simple as that. Well, they are called cards, but they behave more like dominoes, where a one pip side of a piece can be connected to a one pip side of another piece, but not two pips, three pips, etc. I don’t want to spoil how that mechanic evolves, but if I mention that it’s a conversation, there are people who are not on your wavelength, you can get tired, etc., you can probably guess.

The story of The Invincible, as they never tire of reminding you, is based on a novel by Stanisław Lem, so it is pretty straightforward: it is the era of science fiction that was more about ideas than plot twists. As far as I can tell, the game takes some liberties – it invents another spaceship where the player character comes from – but the core is there.

I would not call Dolphin Spirit: Ocean Mission an educational game, it is a fantasy. Literally, because there are some magical elements, and figuratively, because you can oh so easily clean and fix the environment. I don’t want to criticize it too much, it’s still a pretty good game, but don’t expect a serious depiction of problems that the world is actually facing.

Suzume is pretty great. My only gripe is that it’s kinda a love story between a high school girl and a college student, which is yikes, but only kinda, as it doesn’t go anywhere near “there”, so it’s a little yikes. Other than that, it is funny and sad, beautiful and great sounding.

I can’t really recommend Star Trek: Picard. If you liked The Next Generation, yes, there is a lot there (and bits from other shows and movies). But it is not a good Star Trek. And if you didn’t like it, well, depending on why, you can enjoy some of it, but it’s still not a good show. In the end, I didn’t hate it or anything, but, yeah, I would have stopped very early if I hadn’t been like “Hey, it’s TNG!”

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.

Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is awesome! All the main characters are people of color, voiced by actors of color (fuck Avatar, btw). The only romance in the show is between two gay boys. How rare is that?! It is also just a very fun cartoon in itself, with great animation, an amazing soundtrack, goofy characters, and, maybe a bit simplistic, but overall good message. It got all the important parts right, for sure!

In contrast to its sequel, I have even less to say about the first Quake. But I finished it and all the official mission packs, including the new ones from MachineGames.

Point of Mew is a little silly free game about a cat that helps its human. No, really helps. Sure, there is some destruction along the way, but who cares! Ahem.

I played Chasm: The Rift back in the day, but never finished it (probably got stuck in one of the maze-like levels). It was a sort of an answer to Quake. It has a similar hodgepodge of levels and enemies, tied together by a more coherent story, puzzle bosses that were dropped in Q2 and even enemy dismemberment and some destructible environmental elements. On the other hand, it has flat, Doom I/II-like levels. Is it worth checking out? As a piece of first-person shooter history, sure.

Zombie Hill Race seems very similar to Earn to Die games, to the point of confusion. Drive a little, earn some money, upgrade your car, drive a little more, repeat. Turn your brain off kind of game.

While Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom shake up the open-world formula, Horizon: Zero Dawn proves that if you have a good checklist, icons-on-a-map, classic-style open-world game, I probably still like it.

And to call it just classic is unfair: it aptly borrows some gameplay from the Monster Hunter games, and while the story isn’t entirely unique, it has plenty of its own takes on post-apocalyptic genre tropes. Is it Nausicaä-like? Without a doubt!

But the game is not without its flaws: unfortunately, it borrows very heavily from indigenous cultures. I’m not the best person to go into the details, but there are plenty of articles about it. It is doubly unfortunate, because it does good representation too.

Speaking of which, I finished reading the Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind books and rewatched the movie. The difference between the two is quite significant: sort of like between the pilot for the TV show, with an early version of a script and a different take on the characters, maybe even different actors, and said TV show.

The whole thing is kind of huge – and maybe this is my only complaint about the books, that some of the storylines are a bit complex, and some stuff can be cut down without much loss – so I just want to mention two things that I particularly liked.

First, while Nausicaä is a very proactive character, she also inspires other people, but not through words, but through actions and just being. I am not sure how intentional this was, but this is what I get from sociology: this is what changes people’s minds, not arguments or debates, but the existence of people with different opinions.

Second, is it’s take on nature. There are a lot of people who use words like “fix,” “repair,” and the like in relation to climate change. But that attitude is what got us into this mess in the first place! We must learn to be part of nature, not above it. Including the things we have already broken, they are already part of it too. Pretty big topic to go into right now, but yeah, people should read the Nausicaä books carefully.

The completionist in me forced me to finish the original Twin Peaks. By social osmosis, I knew it was weird. Now I know that it is weird. There’s some cool stuff, a lot of bad stuff, overall kind of pointless, both as a show and as a story. In other words, I have no desire to see a movie or a third season. The completionist in me is fine with that.

I can’t really say that Fuel is a good game and I recommend it. It is mediocre or decent, depending on how generous you are. So I’ll just explain why I finished it and enjoyed it.

I like games where you travel. Fuel has a huge map, one of, if not the biggest one. I just did races – there are some cool ones, but a lot of them are just a chore – so I could uncover collectibles, and then I would drive around while listening to a podcast or a video.

This other part is debatable, but from this game I get vibes of what I call quiet apocalypse. The first paragraph of the plot of Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō on Wikipedia explains it very well, and it is easy to see why something like this can actually be not terrifying, but comforting. It is also the least spoiler-y example I can think of. No, Fuel is not Nausicaä-like :)

I also finished Sudocats. The developers found their thing (their company is called Devcats), very subtle), it’s not a bad thing, but there is not much beyond that. Also, in this game I just switched to working with numbers instead of cats, you know.