review – Dayten Rose

I played Your Only Move Is HUSTLE

April 30, 2023 April 30, 2023 / review, supernormal

Haven’t had much visual media lately so, here ya go.

This is Your Only Move Is HUSTLE. (Affectionately “Yomi Hustle,” but developer Ivy Sly changed it due to a copyright conflict with another fighting game just called Yomi.) It’s really visually confusing, and I’ll get to that, but this is one of those newer games so I want to explain it a little before getting into why I’ve played SO MUCH of it lately.

Yomi Hustle is a fighting game obvi, but it’s turn-based rather than real time. So after every couple milliseconds it pauses and gives both players their options. Other than that it’s standard, two stick people reducing each other’s health bars to 0.

That wasn’t as confusing as I thought. Let’s get into it!

I’ve played some fighting games — enough to know the lingo, but not enough to use it correctly. Not enough to Google things like “frame data” and “Sol Badguy true combo.” But enough that I can parse the frankly ACADEMIC quantity of data Yomi Hustle presents you with. For everything about the genre this game simplifies, it doesn’t mince a lot of the complexities that make fighting game players some of the most fearsome folk in the biz. But what it does give you is time between each move to figure things out.
That also means it emphasizes some of the more cerebral aspects of the genre — reading and prediction, pushing your luck versus playing for tempo — rather than response time and dexterity. Some players who have developed those skills will probably be turned off by this, and that’s okay! I don’t think Yomi Hustle’s spice blend is superior or anything. But it separates out what I like most about fighting games, and in that way it’s been way more accessible to me than something like Guilty Gear.
Okayokayokay, so the best part, and what explains the gif you see before you: the true genius of Yomi Hustle is that, after each match, you get a replay in real time. That is, you can see how the fight plays out without all the pauses to figure out what it is you want to do. And it makes you look… well, see the gif. It makes you look really cool. A game might take 20 minutes, but that all gets condensed into a 15 second, frenetic brawl. I got ample time to consider each move, but when it’s all strung together I still feel like I’m good at fighting games.
This feature has a roundabout positive effect on the community from what little I’ve seen. No one seems too put out by losing, because win or lose what results is visually graceful. You get rewarded for winning or losing with a sick, choreographed anime battle. I played with someone online. After a tense match, I launched myself into the air to try and build space and plan my final strike. Using the Cowboy’s teleport ability, they zipped up alongside me and unceremoniously sliced me out of the sky. We both immediately went into the chat like “YOOOO.” Like, how can you be mad?

I ended up in the Wikipedia references for “Fun” today (because I am a weekend warrior) and found a bizarre computer science (?) panel discussion on the systemitization of fun. Probably will talk about that soon. But one of the really fascinating points it makes is that, when trying to translate an irl experience into a virtual experience — in their case a Christmas cracker — it’s ineffective to just, for example, play a video of someone popping a Christmas cracker. You have to deconstruct the real thing into what makes it fun, then reconstruct it in the new medium. E.g., a Christmas cracker is “cheap and cheerful,” so the digital version should have a “simple page/graphics.”

Did I just trick myself into calling Yomi Hustle a “deconstruction of the fighting game genre”? Whatever, I’ll hard commit. It deconstructs fighting games, strips away what about them is manual, and synthesizes what’s strategic and — this is key — visually cool as hell. Looking competent is one of the great modes of fun, in my opinion. This game makes it really easy to look super duper competent, win or lose. It reminds me of another game I haven’t gotten to play, Hi-Fi Rush, which I’ve heard uses a very forgiving rhythm system to makes you feel on-beat even if you’re way off.

Will I ever get good at fighting games playing Yomi Hustle? No. But unless I want to rewrite sections of my brain, it’ll let me feel cool. Which is good enough for me.

I watched Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

April 1, 2023 April 1, 2023 / review

When Iron Man and Avengers came out, I wasn’t a comic book person. I liked Batman when Dawn of Justice came out, but that movie was super bad. This is the first movie in a long time that I’m “meant to” love. Stakes are high! And… they were fulfilled! I liked it a lot!

Plenty of reviews praise the film’s refusal to take itself too seriously, keeping its premise light while and its character arcs clean. Even reviewers completely unaffiliated with D&D liked it, which makes me really happy!
As someone very affiliated with D&D (hobbily, not professionally), that this movie honored the spirit of the game completely floored me. In sort of vapid ways — monsters we recognize, magic spells we recognize, situations we recognize — but in profound ways, too. If Honor Among Thieves has a core theme, it’s that failure is a part of progress. If it has a core loop, it’s the heroes formulating a ludicrous plan, that plan failing ludicrously, and the heroes riding that failure upward. Maybe, eventually, to success. This is the heart of D&D. Honor Among Thieves’ plans are more contrived and better produced, but their goofiness is instantly recognizable.
Corrollary to this, I love the idea that this movie could make new players into better Dungeon Masters. Failure moves the story forward rather than stalling it. Each action/reaction puts the characters in a new situation with new decisions to make. Now, this isn’t solely the claim of TTRPGs: Indiana Jones, really any great adventure story, does the same. But it’s cool to see an honest-to-goodness D&D adventuring party go through an honest-to-goodness adventure.
I absolutely did not show up to see a rules-accurate rendition. From what I’ve seen, no one else did either. Knowing the D&D community, that’s really refreshing! Something I thought was interesting, though, is that druids can’t turn into owlbears or wild shape more than twice at a time. The action economy makes one-versus-many brawls basically fruitless. Attunement is automatic. Spells, in general, don’t work that way. That the movie ignores these rules is fine — good, even — but it begs the question: if these rules are unintuitive, un-cinematic… then why are they written that way? I’ll probably introduce some house rules inspried by the movie.
The writing’s actually funny?? And like… kind of restrained? Characters recall previously spoken dialogue without needing a ghostly voice to echo it in their subconscious? That alone knocked me over.
I know I always save this bullet for last, but yay Chris Pine yay Sophia Lillis yay Justice Smith. Whatever your mileage on Hugh Grant, he’s very good at playing a sleazeball.
Oh, one last bullet actually. The names are so silly, in the legendary lineage of high fantasy silliness. I don’t know that I remembered even half of the cast. I know I didn’t know Chris Pines’ character’s — which is Edgin, by the way. Love “Forge” for a conman, though.

I watched The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

March 14, 2023 March 14, 2023 / review

I watched this movie over two days and two monitors, so it’s not my most lucid or well-attended viewing experience. Good movie though!

You know, I say “good movie,” but not for someone who’s put off by some truly despicable language. Just a blanket content warning here.
I’ve never watched a movie exactly like this, in which narration from the book the movie’s adapted from intercedes between acts. Probably I would mind, except that the writing was rock solid. A great advertisement for said book. My favorite line: “He read auguries in the snarled intestines of chickens, or the blow of cat hair released to the wind. And the omens promised bad luck, which moated and dungeoned him.”
Speaking of lucidity, I wasn’t generally all there in 2007 on account of being like eight years old. The cast of this movie really surprised me! I don’t know if this was the it-crowd of 2000s mid-budget things, but it was a strong showing. I actually like Brad Pitt quite a lot, plus Sam Rockwell and Garret Dillahunt (who was very busy that year). Casey Affleck was a highlight, particularly as the character of Bob Ford. Paul Schneider was (intentionally?) creepy. Plus the Zooey Deschanel jump scare at the end rocked me, I had to triple check that it was actually her.
It lasted like 30 minutes too long. I mean, I suppose the film was bound by the real events it represented, but I think the story could’ve been a little less literal. It did such a good job of making me hate Bob Ford that I felt cheated when they tried to let him win me back.

I watched Scream VI

March 11, 2023 March 11, 2023 / review, supernormal

Sort of like the Pentiment review, I’ll acknowledge up front that we’re well in the spoiler window for this movie that came out literally yesterday. I plan on avoiding spoilers, but I’m not going to try too hard — no specifics, but broad strokes. For my spoiler-free moviegoing opinion… it was fun! I had a good time!

What follows is my “guy with a Substack” opinion. And I’m not going to do it in a numbered list, because I mostly just have one point I want to explore.

My difficulty is this: I enjoy criticism, but I don’t love being critical about things. Generally, I’d rather love more things than less things. Or rather, I am very often the guy in the group chat who says things like “the writing was so bad,” or “how did all of the relevant characters get to the climactic location so fast,” or “why does everyone call him a trickster god if in every single action sequence he just punches around until some plot twists happen and we learn that he never had anything up his sleeve to begin with.” I don’t love being that person. But I do think it’s important to be thoughtful about media — it’s the best compliment you can give!

Point is, I won’t pick a star rating or anything like that. I pretty much liked Bilge Ebiri’s review for Vulture and Monica Castillo’s for Roger Ebert if you’re looking for someone to show their work. Really great set pieces. Those who like watching people throw things at Ghostface will have a good time.

Here’s the big thorn in my side though: every single reviewer is taking it on trust that this is even a slasher movie. And like… Did we watch the same movie? I’m not trying to be pretentious here, Scream VI is a completely serviceable action movie. But it’s an action movie! Slashers are a subset of horror, and horror kind of has to be subversive. Nothing in Scream VI was uncomfortable, because it wasn’t actually doing anything. Instead, it did what all “too big to fail” franchises do: it made itself about found family. Because family is the most universal, inoffensive, nothing-at-all theme for a movie to be about. You all put your hands in before the climax, “Go team!,” you fight, you win, you fade out on “Red Right Hand.”

I’m not exaggerating — the crew has this whole “core four” chant. It’s kind of cute? But it turns the movie into a feel good triumph of friendship over adversity rather than something dangerous. Every character that you badly want to live, lives. Nothing surprising happens. At all. Like John McClane picking the glass out of his feet and trotting along to the next gunfight, a stab wound in a Scream movie is an inconvenience that barely survives the cutaway.

(For what it’s worth, I haven’t seen any of the original Scream sequels. These movies do tend to think about the bonds between characters more than your average slasher.)

Friday the 13th, for example: that the characters have pre-existing relationships is mostly incidental. When bodies start dropping, none of that matters beyond an “I should go look for her.” A Nightmare on Elm Street shows people really worrying about each other, but that doesn’t stop what’s coming. In Scream VI — and maybe Scream V? I can’t remember — worry is a balm, the ultimate painkiller, antiseptic, and suture all rolled into one. If only you, the audience, believes it, your favorite character will rise from certain death.

One point about slashers made by Carol J. Clover (whose work I talked about in the Psycho/Friday the 13th post), which I really loved, is that sequels are more like retellings. No matter what entry you watch — or even which franchise — you can expect most of the same archetypes, situations, and themes. They’re like campfire stories in that way. Scream VI isn’t like that. It trades the Final Girl for the Final Four; the dumb horniness for the chaste brushing of hands; the tooth-and-nail survival for the quippy fight scene; the incompetent male hanger-on for the himbo savior.

So what does that make this movie? A bloodier-than-average Avengers or Fast and the Furious thing — way more fun than either of those, actually. And for the record, fun is more than enough to justify a movie ticket in my view.

Oh, and the subway scene. That ruled.

And while I’m down here in the grab bag, a two other thoughts. And these WILL be a numbered list!

Shame on the New Yorkers reviewing this movie like “oh, New York is portrayed unrealistically” and, “out-of-towners might notice a few missing major landmarks.” New York is a fake city. Saying your movie is set in NYC is the equivalent of saying “don’t think about it too hard, it’s a city OK?” No one cares except for New Yorkers — just like if a movie is ever set in Kansas City I’ll be bummed if it’s filmed in Vancouver, but I think I might have to keep dreaming on that one.
Jenna Ortega is a universal treasure. And Mason Gooding! What a great cast!

I watched Psycho and Friday the 13th

March 8, 2023 March 8, 2023 / review, supernormal

Like I said, I’m on a slasher kick right now. I didn’t plan it to align with the release of Scream VI, and while I do plan to see it, I don’t want to rush around in the name of relevance or whatever. In return, I’ll do a two for one. First up, Psycho.

So a lot of sources, especially academic sources, trace Psycho as the major influence on the slasher genre, presaging the Golden Age of slashers — between Halloween (1978) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Which, by the way, you can track a similar life cycle for other genre Golden Ages: the Western started with your traditional upstanding white-hat stuff, but as the public lost interest directors got more experimental. The Searchers (1956) is considered the best Western, but it’s thought of for its more psychological elements. Spaghetti Westerns came the decade after, like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), which is actually the best Western.
Oh, yeah, so Psycho. It’s funny — I don’t have a ton of evidence for this, but I feel like Psycho had a lot of reverse whodunnit DNA. The psychoanalyst literally does a parlor room scene at the end. Could you trace some lineage from mystery, to thriller, to slasher? Would that lineage include The Bat, which like Psycho had some of the earliest spoiler warnings?
Carol J. Clover named the “Final Girl” archetype, and she points out that out of the Final Girl comes pretty much every difference between Psycho and more straight up slashers. I liked the clever planning in Psycho, but it was pretty distributed between leads. Slashers are partially defined by the ineptitude of everyone but the Final Girl.

And Friday the 13th!

Less to say about this one. It was a tough watch. The snake that gets killed early on is real — which, bummer, I watched Friday the 13th instead of Halloween because I heard a dog dies in Halloween, but the real life dog is A-OK. And, you know, it’s not a very sensitive movie. Just a disclaimer, I guess.
It didn’t have a lot of plot. That’s not a knock on it, it’s sort of what I expected, but I didn’t expect the degree to which it’s just disconnected killings. More modern slashers, I feel like, try much harder to tie things together. Not to talk out of class or anything, but from some interviews I’ve read I feel like the director, Sean Cunningham, was really just pulling stuff out of his ass. Which worked, all things considered.
Carol J. Clover also pointed out how genre is similar to folklore, with “free exchange of themes” and “archetypal characters.” Sequels are “better taken as remakes than sequels.” I thought that was neat! All of Clover’s slasher scholarship is extremely neat! (Also, jumping back to Psycho, I’m interested in the interaction between an auteur “artwork” versus a folkloric genre. That, I think is the big big difference between Psycho and the slasher.)
One unmitigated positive: the score. Particularly the “ki ki ki, ma ma ma.” When I learned (just moments ago) that it’s from the syllables “kill her, mommy,” my heart sank because of how unimaginably dumb that is. Then it soared again, tetherball-like, because it’s actually extremely good. Ah, the human condition.

What I had fun with this week

March 3, 2023 March 3, 2023 / review

The cast of Psych in a matte green interrogation room for a promo image. — I long for those halcyon days when promos were shot like this.

One thing I would recommend about a daily blog: you get a much better sense of your creative life. I’ve sort of been running myself ragged these last couple of weeks, which I noticed because I haven’t added to my collection since the February 24. That means I’ve still been producing writing, but haven’t fed myself in any meaningful way, or doing the kinds of things that keep me grounded in reality. Which usually happens when I write for the future rather than for me right now.

Anyway, I’ve still found plenty of time for fun. Here’s what I’ve enjoyed this week:

There Will Be Blood. Chronologically I think it’s the first thing I watched this week, and I’ve been meaning to for a while. As for how much I enjoyed it… well I certainly respect and appreciate the movie a lot, but I found it extremely boring. Very high highs (“I drink your milkshake” and “I’m going to cut your throat”), but surprisingly little writing. I almost bailed waiting for the first line of dialogue. Stuck with it, enjoyed it, enjoy that it’s very much a slow descent. Were I a film scholar rather than primarily a writer, I think I’d be smitten. Daniel Day-Lewis was great, of course. Don’t think I’ll write more about it, though, which is why I’m writing about it here. (Oh, only one more thought — it’s a great story about gender!)
Psycho, in preparation for my upcoming Supernormal post. Found it a really interesting watch, and so I expect I’ll definitely write more soon.
Psych (no relation). Emma started watching it appropos of nothing, which tickled me to no end, because I used to watch ever episode of Psych many, many times over. Still holds up. Love a good detective thing.
Poker Face. Speaking of good detective things, we watched the first two episodes and I’m loving it so far! I went in expecting it to be nothing like Knives Out, which was the correct expectation. What struck me most so far is how it reflects waned attitudes towards the police, whereas most whodunnits are very cozy with police.
Geek Out, a very lightweight dorky trivia game. My favorite kind of party game is just good conversation. I also love watching people be good at things. Geek Out is fun because it switches between “who can name the most x” and “how many x can this one person name.”
Idk if it’s kitschy to mention my own stuff, but I had a lot of fun writing my blog post on whether movies will become games.
Learned my favorite coffee shop has decaf espresso, so I’ve enjoyed plenty of long(ish) walks with mochas.
Cooking: lemon chicken orzo, crab fried rice, and I messed around with North African flavor profiles for the first time to great effect.

I watched Cocaine Bear

February 27, 2023 February 27, 2023 / review

A bear with a bloody face roaring. — Photo via Vulture

I’m not usually this on top of trendy movies, and for that matter I don’t know if Cocaine Bear is actually trendy. Judging by the turnout at the theater (including one guy who showed up in a bear costume) and the memability of the movie’s premise, I’ll assume that it’s at least known about. No spoilers ahead.

At ~$30 million, Cocaine Bear sits in the mid-budget category — just above Everything Everywhere All at Once and just below Knives Out. There’s a really persuasive argument by REKRAP (and elsewhere) that the demise of mid-budget cinema is bad for movies as a whole. Mid-budget movies can’t afford top-of-the-line spectacle, but good ones make up for it by getting very creative with the resources at their disposal. $30 million is still a ton of movie. We’re not talking about short films here. But in filmmaking, it’s at the sweet spot of affording great talent (but not idols) and creating great effects (without an overwhelm of CGI). Some examples without adjusting for inflation: No Country for Old Men, Blade Runner, Hero.
It’s a lot of fun. Like, you’d have to be Grape Nuts level boring to make this movie and make it boring. Cocaine Bear does a lot of “goofy suffering” humor, and it’s not for squeamish moviegoers. I probably would have switched it off if I was watching it at home. But my friends and I ate a bunch of barbecue, then saw it in theaters with popcorn and beer. Made for a solid night.
What Cocaine Bear doesn’t do as well, in my opinion, is capture the magic of goofy horror movies. Slashers — and not to sound like a broken record with my No Country take, but I think Cocaine Bear is uncontroversially a slasher, or at least a splatter thing — succeed when they marry the over-the-top and the self-serious. Scream works as parody because of the year it came out (at the end of the Golden Age of slashers), but also because it’s just good horror. Plus it does something new by adding a whodunnit element. I can’t explain exactly what I mean, but Cocaine Bear feels like a two hour punchline. It’s a fun watch, but I’m not sure it has many opinions about what a horror movie should be.
One stance the movie does take, which is very refreshing, is that it’s not fun to gut characters in the middle of their plotlines. For the kind of movie it is, it uses death pretty judiciously. Ditto, the bear is treated more like an animal than like Jason Voorhees, which I love.

Quick aside, but there’s a language for animals in movies that I think is developing, to the benefit of cinema as a whole. I’m thinking of The Banshees of Inishiren, which prominently features a dog, but finds many ways to tell you that the dog will be okay. That said, if you’re considering watching the movie and are sensitive to animal plotlines, still check Does the Dog Die.

I watched Hero

February 22, 2023 February 27, 2023 / review

Hero is the first wuxia movie I’ve watched, though I definitely am going to watch more. I’m not especially canny in Chinese history and culture, and I’ll read lots more if I decide to write anything at length about the genre (which I definitely will). Still, here’s my impressions:

Holy crap, what a pretty movie! The fight between Snow and Moon was especially gorgeous, as the leaves changed from yellow to bloodred over the course of the fight. Every action scene prioritized spectacle, which I like, especiallly since the spectacle in question was grace and motion rather than wanton gore. (Not that gore can’t also be fun, but I don’t think that would have flown in this particular movie.)
Not knowing how a Chinese audience would approach this movie, I pretty much assumed that the king would be a vicious monster whose death could be portrayed as ultimately good. Only about halfway through did I realize that this wasn’t a story about facing off against Sauron, but one about facing off with George Washington.
The use of color in the Rashomon-inspired narrative “versions” tickled my brain. There’s the red version of the story, the blue version, the white version, the green version. How these blended with the natural landscapes was super chef’s kiss.
My biggest takeaway: nothing in this movie tries to be realistic. There’s a whole swordfight that takes place across the surface of a lake. “Wire fu” describes the use of ceiling wires to let actors fly across the battlefield — and I am taking a leap of faith it’s is a harmless portmanteau and not a harmful foreignism, pls let me know if I’m wrong. In any case, people perform completely unapproachable feats. What struck me was the lack of explanation needed beyond “they’re very good at martial arts.” Qinggong and neili are the terms of art I’m seeing used to describe this assumption that, if an action hero trains long enough, they can basically fly around and slash gazillions of arrows out of the sky. Western tastes also include the unrealistic, but usually it’s in the form of a) technology (the “cheerfully amoral celebration of Western military hardware“) and b) extreme pain tolerance. Genius fills the role that qi fills in a wuxia flick. Though cowboy movies display some pretty remarkable aim, too.
“A warrior’s ultimate act is to lay down his sword.” Great line.

I watched Blade Runner

February 11, 2023 February 12, 2023 / review

Unlike the movies I’ve talked about in the past, I’ve seen Blade Runner before. Actually, I studied it pretty extensively for a college essay.

But a) it’s been a while and b) this time I enjoyed what I’d consider the ideal Blade Runner viewing experience, which is to say that I had it on in the backround while attending to other things.

I’m actually not kidding. Someone described Blade Runner as the ultimate “vibe movie,” and I agree. The movie rewards careful viewing by showing its age. Roger Ebert described The Searchers as a film within a film: a stern, moving character study framed around a frivolous damsel-in-distress thing. I sort of feel the same way about Blade Runner. And just to be really clear what I mean, Deckard forcing himself on Rachel wigs me out. How you want to interpret that scene depends a lot how much credit you give the emotional complexity of the movie. And anyway, I won’t pretend to be the critic you need to hear about all this from. (Here’s a more thorough read on the topic, if you’re interested. And another.) This is all to say, Blade Runner doesn’t always align with modern sensibilities. Its aesthetic appeal, though, is flawless. Just glancing at the screen now and again, there’s hardly a shot that doesn’t evoke the feeling of the movie as a whole.
One scene I did fully steep in: the “tears in rain” monologue, obviously. On the screen, it scans perfectly. But it’s also fractal, it rewards you the deeper you look into it. It has its own Wikipedia page, this monologue. Writer David Peoples — and I think this is true of Ridley Scott as well — had some trouble killing his darlings. The original monologue waxed Victorian. “I’ve been Offworld and back… frontiers!” “I’ve seen it, felt it…!” Rutger Hauer called it “opera talk.” So, he went rogue. His rewrite brought the film crew to tears.
For this and for every other reason, Rutger Hauer is the best part of this movie. He does a sort of… gazelle run thing during the chase scene at the movie’s climax? Rules.
Oh, except the dove thing is silly.
Gaff is such a weirdo! Deckard does up his boots one lace at a time, he grumbles, he tries to get out of the rain. Gaff is like pop punk Willy Wonka. If you told me Jared Leto had only seen one movie, I’d guess Blade Runner, and I’d guess he only saw the parts where Gaff was on the screen. (“It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again who does?” To his credit, that’s actually a raw line.)

I started playing Pentiment

February 4, 2023 February 12, 2023 / review

A screenshot from Pentiment in which a man in medieval artist's clothes and a red hat looks up at a jester. Numerous other figures in jester clothing climb around the sailing ship.

This one I’m actually pretty close to the curve on! It only came out in December of last year, and while it’s sort of already run its course, I’m sure there’s still plenty of people working their with through it. I’ll talk about what I like so far — I just finished the first chapter — without mentioning specific scenes. Spoilers, though (hehehe…).

Pentiment is, to quote Justin McElroy, “books-level boring.” For whatever reason though, in the last couple of years I’ve stopped enjoying games that try to be everything, and started enjoying them much more when they try to be one thing. If a game has an expansive open world, Gordian skill tree, hours of recorded dialogue, minigames (I’m looking at you, Gwent) — then uh-uh. I just don’t have the time to lose myself in a game world. I struggle enough to lose myself in this one. On the other hand, if a game leans into some really tight mechanics, that’s perfect. If a game has hardly any mechanics and lots of top-notch writing, I can get into that as well. Pentiment is in the latter camp.
Another thing I’m glad we’ve sort of moved past in games: the idea that players need a strawman to paint their own identity onto. Andreas Maler, the main character in Pentiment, but also Aloy and Kratos and Isaac Clarke (old game but still). Games are just so much more enjoyable when I can center my experience around an actual character. I mean, where did the strawman thing even come from? I’ve only read one book in the second person (If on a winter’s night a traveler), and it was more interesting than good.
Its art style is gorgeous. I’m not an illuminator, but it feels very well-researched, too.
I played Citizen Sleeper last year because I had heard it was kind. Lots of games — lots of fiction — delight in making you suffer. That’s because good art is supposed to make you feel something, and the easiest thing to make a person feel is suffering. Much harder to let someone face suffering but choose hope. (Remember my Anna Laura Art print?) In a video game, where a sheet of glass literally separates you from the experience of the secondary world, writers have their work cut out for them. Pentiment is another one where, though it’s much tougher than Citizen Sleeper, I’ve never felt that anything in the game was meant to punish me for playing it. Mistakes are framed as moments, which ultimately get lost in bigger and bigger pictures.
The babies of Pentiment are the cutest ever writ upon the page.

I’m having an extremely good time, but I also realized it might take a while to finish. I’ll try and update when I’m done, but I wanted to share my early thoughts!