Jeppe Carlsen has designed two games which I thought were amazing: Limbo and Inside, and so I was keen to try Cocoon, his latest effort.
The game is a non-stop series of puzzles. You control a little bug-like thing, travelling through a 3D alien world with pleasant rounded shapes and pastel colours. To progress, you have to carry orbs and use them to activate switches. At first, this simply triggers equipment like elevators and bridges so that you can move through the levels, but later on, you can actually go into the orbs, and each of them contains a whole other world. Discovering how the puzzles interact across nested orbs is really satisfying.
I had a lot of fun with Cocoon, but I have to say that it doesn’t quite live up to Limbo and Inside. The two older games have such unique and immersive visual designs, both creepy and horrifying in their own ways, whereas Cocoon’s aesthetics feel kind of generic. It’s a small criticism against an otherwise great experience.
I discovered this fantasy series through Jeff Cannata, one of my favourite podcasters. He has released a YouTube “book club” series where he discusses the entirety of the 10-book Malazan saga, which made me interested in reading along. After Foundation, I was looking for another big series to dive into.
The novel takes place in the Malazan Empire, and we spend time with two main groups of characters: on the one hand, we have soldiers and mages who fight on behalf of the Empress, and on the other hand, we have the citizens of the city of Darujhistan, the next target of the empire’s conquests.
The series has a reputation for being confusing and difficult to get into, and I would have to agree. We often encounter scenarios that are already in progress, and the context is left unexplained until you read further and the pieces come together. Add to that the sheer number of characters, all with shifting loyalties and secret agendas, and it can be a head-scratching reading experience at times.
I made the mistake of watching the first couple of episodes of Widow’s Bay on my phone during a flight. Even on a small screen, I could tell that the cinematography was quite accomplished. Other than that, the show didn’t really click with me. I knew that it was billed as a horror-comedy but I found it neither scary nor funny.
Having said that, once I returned from my trip and started watching the show on a properly-sized television, I grew to really love it. The show is a spin on the haunted-small-town formula, also recently executed with resounding success by Midnight Mass. Where Widow’s Bay is unique is how it mixes sitcom-style comedy into the proceedings.
This game is a quirky spin on the tried-and-true Match 3 genre. Narratively and thematically, it’s a mish-mash of various concepts: your character has been unexpectedly inserted as the queen of the Titanium Court, doing battle against knights and catapults, all of which evokes a medieval setting; however, you meet characters who go to business school or teach karate, and the animations that appear during gameplay depict modern sports like golf and tennis. It’s all very bizarre.
I admire the originality and personality of the game, which leans into surrealism and comedy. However, the core gameplay is not really my cup of tea. While it does add a layer of resource management and strategic planning to the Match 3 formula—the tiles represent land types that generate materials with which you build units, and part of the key to success is positioning obstacles between you and enemy units—I ultimately tire very quickly of shuffling tiles around. Furthermore, I have to say that I’m not a fan of the aesthetics of the game, which uses a magenta and cyan colour palette reminiscent of CGA graphics back in the day (e.g. Alley Cat) . I’m sorry, but my eyes don’t like it.
I can’t quite place the circumstances around which I played the game Flashback: The Quest for Identity (1992) for the first time. Was it the same friend, Meek, who introduced me to it while we listened to Crash Test Dummies on the radio? Or maybe it was my uncle, whose apartment I sometimes stayed over at, and with whom I remember playing other games like Aces Of the Pacific and The Games: Winter Challenge.
Flashback is a side-scrolling platforming game, similar to Prince of Persia (which is another old favourite of mine), but more advanced in terms of graphics and animation. The protagonist, Conrad, travels through a variety of environments ranging from a jungle to a futuristic city to an alien planet, all rendered colourfully with pixel art. Conrad’s movements are life-like, especially when he jumps or rolls along the ground. As a kid, I was endlessly amused by Conrad’s bad-ass signature move of rolling past an enemy and ending in a crouched stance with pistol drawn and firing.
I loved Christopher Larkin’s scores for Hollow Knight and Silksong so much that I sought out his other work, which led me to this documentary film by Matthew Salleh. I’ll start by saying that Larkin’s score did not disappoint. It’s more ambient and understated than the epic tracks from the Hollow Knight games, but there are still moments of great uplift where the chord progressions layer in unexpected and satisfying ways. His music to me slots into the same space as another couple of my favourite contemporary composers, Philip Glass and Max Richter.
The film consists of chapters which each focus on a specific culture and its variation on the technique of barbecue, i.e. cooking something (usually meat) over or near a fire. We’re shown places and people from all over the world: Australia, the US, Mongolia, the Philippines, and many more. In between the shots of smoke and flames and glistening meat, there are talking head interviews and voiceovers by the practitioners of the art. What struck me is how often the film’s subjects say the same thing: that barbecue brings people together and creates a sense of community. Also, it’s implied that cooking with fire reaches into some primal and ancient part of humanity. It must have been the first cooking technique to have been invented, and it’s like an ancestral memory that everyone shares.
Recently, I went to see Crash Test Dummies play live at the Markham Village Music Festival. In my city, we have a diverse calendar of street festivals almost every weekend in the summer, featuring food trucks, children’s activities, and of course, musical performances. Typically, I expect unknown amateur musicians and/or classic rock cover bands to perform at these types of things, so imagine my surprise when I learned that Crash Test Dummies would be headlining. Apparently, one of the band members grew up around the Markham area—he shouted out his mom and a group of high school friends during the show—which might explain how a free local festival could book such a big act.
Perhaps I’m overestimating the band’s fame, but in my memory, they were quite popular in the 90’s when I was growing up, with several hits in heavy rotation on the radio and on MuchMusic. While it was a thrill to see them play for free, I also pitied them, in a “how the mighty have fallen” sort of way. But it’s really not fair for me to judge the highs and lows of their careers; at the end of the day, they’ve had their success, and more importantly, they seemed to genuinely appreciate their audience and played with energy and joy.
As I write this, I have achieved 100% completion on Hollow Knight: Silksong, having played it exclusively (apart from a few co-op sessions of It Takes Two with my wife) for about three months. Despite the high number of hours I’ve put in—which number I won’t say, as it’s sort of a badge of shame that indicates my relative lack of skill—I’m still itching to go back and repeat the final boss fight again.
Late Fame tells the story of a postal worker, Ed Saxberger, played by Willem Dafoe, who used to dabble in poetry when he was young. His writing career was limited, and he apparently only published one book before turning to a more ordinary life. One day, he meets a young man named Donovan, who has discovered his book, and hopes to pull Ed into his circle of quirky artists.
I enjoyed watching the film, which is well-acted and comforting. I’m used to seeing Dafoe in wilder, over-the-top roles, so it was nice to see him play a regular nice guy. The lifestyle of the characters, where they hang out in New York lounges and cafes, talking about writing, is one which I have dreamt of living. Being creative is something that I personally value, but have struggled with balancing it against the demands of “adulting.” The Dafoe character chose the responsible route as well, but the movie shows that there’ll always be an artistic side to him, waiting to express itself, and that’s a message that I find heartening.
I gave immense credit to the actors in this film, especially Jesse Plemons, whose character Teddy abducts the CEO of a pharmaceutical company (played by Emma Stone), believing that she’s an alien here to invade/destroy Earth. He’s scary and dangerous, but there are moments where you feel bad for him. He really is a victim of corporate greed, and his sadness and desperation shows through his performance. He has a right to be angry, and whenever he faces off against Stone’s CEO character, the tension is through the roof.
Having said that, I can’t say the film totally held my attention: structurally, it felt a bit repetitive, with the aforementioned face-off scenes occurring multiple times. In each one, Teddy accuses the CEO of her evil alien plot, and she tries to deny and deflect him, until he gets so pissed off that he explodes into violence. Again, these scenes are well-acted and emotionally effective, but I didn’t feel like the story was moving forward.
