Nine Sols comes up often on lists of games for fans of Hollow Knight and Silksong to check out. It is indeed the same style of game (“Metroidvania”), and also shares an emphasis on combat and boss fights. Where it differs most is the mechanic of parrying. Whenever an enemy attacks, you can press a button to block it, and if you time it correctly, you charge up qi (essentially mana) that you can then use to counterattack. Mastering the rhythms of the boss fights is definitely fun and satisfying.
I’ve never read this classic before, but I am of course aware of the iconic Frankenstein monster that has become part of horror and Halloween culture. I was slightly surprised by just how different Shelley’s original work is from the ideas that it spawned. For one, we never actually see a scene of the monster being created. In fact, the narrative focusses much more on the interiority of characters than on showing events as they happen.
After reading Far and Away, I wanted to get another dose of Andrew Solomon, and decided to revisit this documentary film based on his book Far from the Tree.
A theme of the book and film is the acceptance of what we usually call disability. Solomon argues that the line between disability and identity is blurry. He came of age in a world that still saw homosexuality as a disease, and during his lifetime, he’s seen attitudes change to the point where he can live openly as a gay man. In particular, his parents had a hard time with his coming out, but eventually came to accept him, and this is the experience that he wanted to document in the book: that of parents coming to terms with the ways that their children diverge from expectations.
Why wait a full ten years in between lists like this? Much excellent music was released in the first five years of this decade. I won’t do a complete ranked list, but will talk about a handful of my favourites.
Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree and The Noonday Demon are in my pantheon of best non-fiction books. He treats his subjects with such openness and curiosity, and writes in such a calm, soothing style, that I would want to read anything he publishes, no matter the topic.
Far and Away is a collection of articles from over the course of his career, all centred around his reporting on places that are foreign to him. Early in his career, he filled the niche of writing about artists living in countries undergoing social change, like Russia and China. Much of history is captured in art, and it’s fascinating to see how artists react to history as it’s happening.
Between my viewing of seasons 2 and 3 of this Apple TV show, I managed to read the entire series of Isaac Asimov’s novels. I think that my experience with the books became a double-edged sword, because the constant comparison that my brain couldn’t help making was, on the one hand, entertaining for me, but on the other hand, highlighted some of the weaknesses of the show.
It was fun for me to pick out plot points and ideas as I watched, and to try to remember how it played out in the books. The show deviates a lot from the novels, so some of the references amount to simple name-dropping of a character who plays a completely different role in the story.
My wife has been travelling for the past couple of weeks so I decided to have myself a little film festival for martial arts movies, a genre that she’s not really into. (Horror would have been another candidate but I like to save that for spooky season.)
I was a big fan of the 90’s era of martial arts movies starring Jackie Chan and Jet Li, but I haven’t really followed the genre since then. I think that filmmakers have tried to move on from the relatively family-friendly style of those days, where fights were almost like dances, into more realistic (read: bloody) combat. I admit that I’m a bit squeamish about this, and do still prefer fight scenes that I can enjoy without squirming the whole time.
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.
