Game Thoughts: June Random Plays
I have two general personal modes of operation: Input and Output.
When I'm in Output Mode I feel good. I make art, I go places, I talk to people. I learn stuff and try new things and have energy.
During Input Mode, on the other hand, I become a recluse consumed by doomscrolling and content ingestion, filter-feeding dopamine as I listlessly float from screen to screen.
Since my last 0dd company post in May my job has been sapping the life out of me, causing me to spiral deep into Input Mode. I spend my evenings listening to non-challenging scifi and playing whatever games are in the Steam family library.
Normally there's a little part of me -- a tiny Output Mode parasite -- that feeds on the scraps of media I'm inhaling to filter out inspiration for the next time I switch over. That feels absent right now, leaving me to pointlessly dig through games and books that might normally spark something.
While I'm not particularly keen to write a whole post on anything I've played recently, I think it's worth noting the things I've gone through, and which ones I've bounced off of in my current headspace. I may want to return and revisit some of them in the future.
Citizen Sleeper 2: (9 hours - complete)
Finally got around to this one! I don't feel like it did anything to significantly improve over the first, and I found the story a little less compelling this time around. The first game was very unique, and this one didn't get out from under that shadow. The ending was also pretty flat.
Still a good game with great character art, and still a great concept for a minimalist narrative RPG.
Yakuza: Like a Dragon (30 hours - incomplete)
I played Yakuza 0 a while back and found it pretty fun, though I didn't beat it. Like a Dragon is in the same universe with an all-new cast (with eventual crossover with the characters from Yakuza 0-6). Instead of brawling mechanics the game cheekily uses turn-based RPG mechanics while joking about it and making many references to Dragon Quest. "Like a Dragon" indeed.
The game takes a very long time to get into the "good stuff," and almost lost me before I got there. The initial story is several hours of yakuza melodrama without access to much in the way of mechanics -- after that, however, you get dropped into a new city and things get weird and fun. I think my favourite moment in the whole game was the first time my new party member -- homeless man who is your party's "wizard" (he even puts his hood up) -- "casts a spell" by throwing a bunch of crumbs at opponents who are then swarmed by pigeons. Brilliant.
I didn't finish the game because there were too many battles which got really repetitive and the story was starting to drag. Ended up watching the remainder of the story cutscenes on someone's youtube channel at 3x speed.
I did have a lot of fun with what I did play, and I managed to run a damn good candy business on the side.
Esoteric Ebb (20 minutes - incomplete)
"It's like Disco Elysium but less pretentious so you'll like it way more," I was told -- however the starting sequence of my several organs arguing with each other was too much like Disco Elysium. I had passed / failed like 20 skill checks before my character opened their eyes.
Dropped before I left the first room. It really just isn't my style of game.
I do wonder about this -- I like tabletop RPGs, but something about a videogame version of it rubs me the wrong way. I think it stems from the inherent difference between the emergent crowdsourced story and gameplay of a tabletop VS the illusion of this in games like Disco Elysium. If I'm playing a single-player game I want to know I'm getting the best possible experience during my single playthrough and not missing out on it due to some arbitrary dice roll that puts me on a different set of pre-written railroad tracks.
Final Fantasy VI: Pixel Remaster (2 hours - incomplete)
This is the one to play, I've been told, out of all the pixel Final Fantasies. I ended up bailing on V, and VI didn't manage to hold my attention. I did like the vibes -- the opening scene is great, Figaro castle scene was good, but that first dungeon just had me rolling my eyes -- the disconnect between the battles (here's some random bugs to fight) and the story in these older JRPGs just completely breaks my immersion. This sucks because I've been craving JRPGs for some reason, but they all annoy me in my current headspace.
Norco (6 hours - complete)
This one was good! I really enjoy text-heavy games when they're more linear, as I don't spend all my time wondering if I've fucked up the whole story due to a digital dice roll.
This is a super gritty point-and-click adventure with great visuals and world-building I can only describe as "Oilpunk". It got real weird at the end and I'm not sure I fully follow what happened, but I had a good time.
In Other Waters (30 minutes - incomplete)
The first game by the Citizen Sleeper gang. Very cool premise, very cool colour palette, but I bounced off of it like a forcefield.
Blue Prince (7 hours - complete enough)
This is a really great game. Not entirely my cup of tea, but just a great novel concept and execution.
Essentially a roguelite puzzle mashup where you travel through a house where the blueprints (ha) change every day. Each room you open you pick from 3 options and try to figure out how to get to the last room (and then figure out how to open the last room)
I think I got really lucky with my playthrough based on the things I've read online. I ended up lucking into the right combination of items to build a tool on day 13 or 14 that let me blow open some walls and find some seemingly important stuff; then it only took a few days more to get into room 46. I missed a lot before getting there, as I didn't end up figuring out much of the mystery, didn't get much of the storyline, and only found like half of the room types.
I'm done with it, however. I know there's a lot more but I got my credit scene. My experience with Tunic and Animal Well have shown me that I don't enjoy delving into these multifaceted extra-complex mystery depths that take whole communities to solve.
SANABI (1 hour so far)
I'm playing this, now. Fast paced grappling-hook platformer with absolutely gorgeous pixel art and animation. Story and character design has me hooked so far, though I'm not much of an action gamer so we shall see if I can keep up in the later parts of the game!
Story: Natural
"It isn't natural," says the man, his minted breath curling past curated crowns, carving clear crisp consonants capable of conveying complex concepts; utterly ubiquitous, yet unique to the singular species that shields its skin with sheet upon sheet of synthetic plastics and polyesters shipped by smoke-spewing ships across sea and sky, fabricated in factories by mute masses and machines for the sole sake of lining the sacred silk pockets which make trillionaires of billionaires of millionaires off the fools convinced they'll scale the same pyramids they slave beneath, each block a pyrrhic victory in the effort to ever increase the imaginary indices of "wealth" and "value" splayed across their personal pixelated prisons, ever clawing to crawl atop the crowd, ever climbing closer to the searing sun, ever fleeting further from the filth of flora and fauna, ever grasping for godhood as they forsake their forgotten past and fall so far from that first bite of forbidden fruit. What knows now man that he may name "natural"?
Nothing.
Story: The Table-Maker
A short story about a guy that used to love making tables (and still does)
- Read the rest -
Book Thoughts: Shroud
Having recently listened to two Tchaikovsky standalone sci-fi novels, I figured I may as well stay on course and picked up his Hugo-2026-nominated novel Shroud.
I think Tchaikovsky really excels at portraying alien perspectives and eliciting empathy towards weird consciousnesses. This was on display in his Children of Time series, and he flexes those muscles in this one with interesting radio-signal-based entities on a lightless and hopeless planet. Maybe it was his blatant painting as humans in the role of planet-stripping extraplanetary predators, but he really had me rooting for the home team.
It was a very engaging read and the author did a couple of clever things with the premise and setup; there was a lot of intent behind his decision to put two people in a single explorer pod, which added to the sense of claustrophobia initially and mirrored some of the multi-part-brain concepts at play later. I don't think there's anything here that was particularly mind-blowing, but the ideas were explored in creative and satisfying ways.
Good clean scifi fun, this one.
Book Thoughts: There is no Antimemetics Division
This was another random fun sci-fi audiobook purchase and it was a good time!
An SCP-inspired (inspired is strong here, the author wrote out a good chunk of this book as part of the SCP archives) about unknown cosmic-horror entities and memory.
Specifically about the antimemetics division of an international secret institution dedicated to safely containing cosmic horrors (and not-so-horrifying interesting entities). Antimemetics being, of course, the study of antimemes, which are things or ideas which cannot be remembered.
It was a very interesting read, and I enjoyed a lot of the speculative ideas surrounding the concept of an antimeme and the ways they were worked around. When the very nature of your work is to study things that you will naturally forget you need to get creative, and the author definitely did!
I wasn't the biggest fan of the second half of the story -- it all got a little too epic and cosmic-horror-y for my tastes. Overall, though, a fun lightweight sci-fi read with some neat and novel ideas!
Book Thoughts: By Night in Chile
After stumbling blindly through Roberto Bolano's "The Savage Detectives" I ran out and bought all the books by Bolano I could find. While I'm clearly not equipped with the literary capacity to fully grasp his works I really enjoyed something in his writing (or rather, in the translations of his writing,) and wanted to try some more.
The first thing I picked up was By Night in Chile which is a very short and initially baffling read narrated by a narcissistic priest / poet / literary critic on his deathbed. The story is delivered in a single exhausting paragraph that never lets up.
I definitely missed a lot here thematically on my initial read, but was still swept along by the braggadocios narration wherein our protagonist tells of his time drinking at the houses of wealthy artists, his rise to fame as a literary critic under a nom de plume, and his less successful but equally proud work in poetry.
After finishing the book and reading a couple short reviews to help it click, it is clear to me now that this is a story about omissions. The narrator tells a grandiose story about his life and importance and accomplishments while dancing around his guilt.
- Read the rest -
Game Thoughts: Final Fantasy 9
I have a very deep nostalgia for Final Fantasy titles -- specifically for 7-10 which I played as a teenager. These works made a fairly a large impact on my life and my artistic tastes.
I'm not normally one to replay long games, and have recently had trouble finding joy in traditional random-encounter JRPGs, but after recently opening a few packs of Final Fantasy Magic the Gathering cards and pulling a Vivi card, Final Fantasy 9 was calling.
I don't think I would have made it through the game without the Memoria mod, so I want to highlight how much that helped. Besides helping upscale and widescreen the graphics, it enabled a few cheats for some of the groan-inducing minigames (frogs, jump-rope), as well as options to change the awful card system to the Final Fantasy 8 game, make battles actually turn-based (battles pause when a character has a turn) and enable quick buttons to double the game speed and turn off battles temporarily. I shamelessly used all of these, and even switched on "9999 damage every hit" a handful of times when I needed to grind.
- Read the rest -
Book Thoughts: Service Model & Alien Clay
I forgot for a little bit there that listening to audiobooks could also just be done for fun. Not that I've not been having fun with Borges and "The Weird" short story collections, but I've been trying to challenge myself a little more than the usual sci-fi/fantasy fare.
Well after a few hellish months at work leading me to abandoning most of my hobbies and my morning stream I decided to take it a little easy and fall back to old habits and purchased some good old-fashioned sci-fi novels to keep me company on my walk.
I absolutely adored Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, though I found the subsequent books in the series felt a bit more like watching a fun sci-fi TV show rather than having the impact of the first title. Nothing wrong with that, so I picked up two books that had a slightly similar feel to them: Service Model and Alien Clay -- both one-shot novels by the author.
Service Model follows a totally-not-sentient valet robot through an apocalyptic wasteland. It's campy and funny and overall very enjoyable junk-food with a handful of memorable moments.
Alien Clay is Australian Prison Colonies X 1000 with exoplanet exploration, authoritarian regimes, and alternate biological evolution. It's sarcastic and anti-authoritarian while it digs through its ideas about modular biology and alternative evolution.
I like them both a lot as fun sci-fi romps, though admittedly both felt like the author was a little too on-the-nose with the political undertones (or I guess just normal tones?) of the two books. I am a great lover of le conte philosophique, but a little creative subtlety goes a long way.
I don't think I'd recommend these books to people the way I recommend Children of Time (I have given away about 5 copies of that to people, now) but they gave me the lightweight audio entertainment I was craving.
Book Thoughts: The Weird
Hungry for more audiobook short stories I came upon a monstrous collection of strange fiction curated by the Vandermeers: The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories.
Going into the 70-something hour collection I knew there would be many stories not to my taste -- cosmic horror and ghost stories, while appealing on a conceptual level, have never held much for me -- however with other names like China Mieville, Borges, and Kafka listed in the long directory of authors and over 100 strange stories to dig through, I was confident I'd discover some gems.
Here are said gems:
- Read the rest -
Book Thoughts: The Savage Detectives
Continuing my meandering literary exploration to scratch my new-found Borges-flavoured itch, I stumbled across a name as I perused a used book store: Roberto Bolano.
While I admit that jumping at a random latin-american-sounding name and hoping for some similarity to Borges is a fairly ignorant stretch, it paid off in this case. It turns out that Bolano is frequently compared to Borges -- though the book I picked up, "The Savage Detectives," is definitely an entirely unique flavour all its own.
- Read the rest -
