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.

Luna’s Fishing Garden is a short, chill farming sim. You fish, plant, gather, and so on. There is no pressure whatsoever and that is great.

In the never-ending search for what I call a podcast game, I tried a few of these roguelite, movement-only games: I played and liked Vampire Survivors before, and now there are a lot of similar games out there. Army of Ruin is probably the most accessible, it doesn’t hide anything. There are a lot of things to do and I have done them all. No, really, I did everything and I have proof :)

For more tricky stuff, this spreadsheet was very helpful.

Remedium: Sentinels is just an okay one, kind of in a why not category.

The re-release of  Quake II is great. You get the original campaign, two mission packs (DLC of the time), an all new mission pack from MachineGames and a Nintendo 64 version.

If I remember correctly, while the N64 version is unique, the PlayStation version is a modified version of the original, so the fact that it is missing is okay. And it is avaliable as a mod on PC.

There are improvements from lighting to accessibility, gamepad support on PC and keyboard/mouse support on consoles, and also small changes to some levels and an AI, oddly enough. I don’t want this to sound like an ad, so here are the release notes.

I don’t think I can judge the game properly. The fact that I write “2” as “][” is an indication that I spent too much time playing solo and with friends. In a computer club! Do people even remember/know about those? I also recognize something like this right away.

But I still have it in me to point out its flaws. I even hinted at them in a previous post with a picture of two achievements:

The portrayal of women is kind of bad. While yes, technically you can play as a female character because the game will take your model from your multiplayer config, and, hey, for the time that was something, all the cutscenes will still show a story of a dude – three different dudes for three original campaigns. Other than that, you only have one female enemy, and she is depicted… as she is depicted.

The portrayal of prisoners of war is shallow at best. “At best” does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. What to expect from the company that used to write game stories in a glorified and sometimes actual .txt file. Also, while you can change skin color in multiplayer, everyone in the game is white. Or at least they all have the same skin color, it is hard to tell with Borg-like creatures.

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.

/i\ Slight spoiler for the story of Tears of the Kingdom and Skyward Sword.

I finally did it! I finally beat Picross S9! Oof.

So, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, huh? Some things still good, some things got better, some things got worse.

Looking at the gameplay as a whole, without going into too much detail, it falls into the “still good” category. Tweaks, additions, replacements are good, but some things got, if not worse, then maybe more annoying.

Story is an area that I feel is clearly worse than in  Breath of the Wild. Not only did we lose the simplicity and some, dare I say it, bold choices of the previous game, we just went back to the magical bullshit that is a dime a dozen in fantasy games.

Or, another way of looking at it, Skyward Sword did it better.

And Zelda is still out there somewhere, doing important things, I promise. It is no longer Nausicaä-like either.

When looking at changes from one game to the next, it is interesting to try to figure out if it was something the developers themselves saw as a flaw, or if they were listening to criticism. One area of particular interest is representation. I haven’t counted, but my general feeling is that there are more characters of color, even in species that used to be “monocolored,” like Gorons. They at least tried (not for me to judge if they were successful or not) to address the Gerudo situation. We may even have a gay character, gasp! But they keep hiring white voice actors to voice characters of color, so it’s still a mixed bag at best.

In the end, I can’t say that TotK is better than BotW, and there’s no reason to ever go back to it. And I can’t say it’s worse either, far from it. If I try to be objective, it’s a sequel, through and through, that I enjoyed very much because it’s a sequel to a game that I also enjoyed very much. But if I’m honest, I’m a little disappointed that we didn’t get at least one significant improvement in at least one area.

I don’t know what it is about most point-and-click games that makes them so repulsive to me, while The Case of the Golden Idol is so brain-ticklingly delightful. To say “moon logic” is unsatisfying: what is logical to me may be illogical to someone else. Anyway, I liked the deductive challenge of this game. The story is the least interesting part. On the one hand, this is understandable, since it should be simple and familiar enough to have as few logical leaps as possible to avoid said “moon logic”. On the other hand, I think it should have pushed more boundaries, so to speak, “dudes being dudes” is boring.

I also finished Zodiacats a small puzzle-ish game, just to relax.