A wicked cute Zelda-like that becomes so much more

GODDAMN have you played TUNIC!?

One of my favourite things in a game is when you get powerups in the form of knowledge. Fundamental knowledge about how this world works. Things that have always been there, if only you knew.

Stephen's Sausage Roll does it, Outer Wilds does it and TUNIC does it in spades.

If you like those kinds of puzzles and have any degree of nostalgia for flipping through game manuals, you should play TUNIC as soon as possible.

Play here!

This game will teach you how and why speedrunning is so fun! You complete a level of this and go.......... i bet i could do it faster. And that's where this game sings!

It constantly asks you to reach further and higher, striving for divinity and marvelling at the feats of those entire SECONDS faster than you.

It's flashy as hell, it feels amazing to play and will perform the magic trick of making you want to be better at something, and teaching you how to improve.

A perfect video game

I dont usually go for visual novels, or things like them. I'm a twitchy anxious gamer and I like to be hitting as many buttons as I can at any given time. BUT!!! Citizen Sleeper is so stylish, so well formatted for telling it's story that I never wanted to stop playing.

Dice rolls and decision making in games are ancient, but in this game you're limited on resources and time, taking actions with a pool of dice that are always too low in quality and quantity.The pressue of that is fantastic. Forcing difficult decisions every day, knowing that I'll piss someone off, or will miss my chance to outwit someone.

It's a perfect storytelling engine, and I've waited so long to publish this that Citizen Sleeper 2 is now out! I gotta play that video game.

sometimes you have to play a game about running around as a little dude and collecting doodads and whatsums.

Tinykin is 2022's premier doodads and whatsums game! It's exactly what you expect it to be. Run around a big level, flip a switch, open a door, use a sewing bobbin for a wheel, power a radio wth a battery. I don't remember if you actually do those things but thats the vibe.

This game is just a real good few hours of being a small guy in a big house. Can't beat that.

This is a game I mostly played with my housemate, passing the controller back and forth, hours on the couch. Watching at this strange story unfurl itself, freaking out when the things vibrates and the screen flickers.

This is a perfect "sunday game", a nebulous catergory I assign at will, to games that best suit a thoughtful morning, a notebook, and a cup of coffee. This is a Sunday Game, Outer Wilds is a Sunday Game, and when I have my next spare Sunday, I will finally play Return of the Obra Dinn.

I can't wait to see what Half Mermaid cooks up next, because Immortality is a fascinating object that I will be thinking about for a long time.

I've been a fan of Max Lavergne since... wait hang on. Okay I just checked my tumblr history, I've aparently been a fan of Max Lavergne (aka reallyreallyreallytrying.tumblr.com ) for 12 years! He's written some of my favourite short fiction at Infinite Gossip) and he's a sound guy that emailed me a epub of his book for a few quid because I didn't wanna give Amazon money.

Point being, Max has written a lot of stuff over the years and it's always been excellent. The Horse & The Rider is his most ambitious project yet, a novel length audio story, released weekly in perfect 20 minute chunks. We follow a mediocre newsreader who has fled town after inadvertantly pushing an old man into the path of an oncoming train and that's all I'll say on plot.

On top of his usual excellent writing, Max provides each moment with confident voice acting and light-touch foley that grounds every scene perfectly. It's dark, surreal and absolutely hilarious.

Find me refreshing my podcast feed several times every Tuesday, trying to catch the new ep as soon as possible.

Listen here!

For a guy that basically never does any creative writing it feels strange to say that this show is an inspiration, but what Ross Sutherland does with Imaginary Advice is turn everything into a game. Every story, every poem is born out of some weird constraint or obtuse set up rules that Ross sets himself, and the result is always stranger and more unpredicatble than almost any other fiction I run into.

I've had the pleasure of seeing Ross experiment with some early drafts on stage, and it's so clear that he loves painting himself into weird little corners and escaping his own traps.

The playfulness on display ir probably the thing that sticks with me, and I'd love to find the time to experiment with more contraints and creative games. So fuck it, this show is an inspiration.

It's good to hear smart guys talk about stuff, and Cameron and Michael at Ranged Touch are some of the best to do it. They're probably the most well researched of any media-crit podcasters I've listened to and they basically blow everyone else out the water.

I've only read one Stephen King book, and it's the one that had like the shortest episode on this show (shout out to The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon), so I know that these guys could truly yap about any old thing and I'd be into it; but the legacy and impact of someone like Stephen King mean that the research and method of this kind of show shines.

Look, it's just good to hear smart guys talk about stuff there aint nothing more to it than that! These two go deep and broad on one of the biggest literary stars of all time, and it's so worth it to listen from the beginning.

Sometimes you see a movie and you just smile the entire time. Sometimes that means you smile for 182 minutes straight.

I saw Nope twice in theatres and it was so, so worth it. A truly deep and strange and upsetting film for so many reasons. The thing I always come back to is the fear and unreality that trauma can instill within you. Things become muddy and strange and seem to echo forwards in time and crystalise, and this is barely visible to most people. But it is there.

PLUS, there's a big monster and it's beautiful and strange.

A perfect, horrific romp.

We watched this as part of a film club in discord and one friend's reaction nailed it for me.

"I didn't know you could do that."

There are some pieces of media that make you question things that you thought were rules about the world. HOUSE made me rethink what films could look like, what you were allowed to do with them. HOUSE makes every other film look limited and craven in it's decisions. HOUSE fucking rules and it WILL rewire your brain.

Occasionally (often) I will listen to a single album for months on end. This was one such album.

Weirdly, it took me a few listens to really get into it. I think some of the lyrics are clunky and overwrought, but if I squint, that clumsiness becomes this naive youthful expression of love and the weight of the big emotions on display. It's not a perfect album, but it does fill a lovely little niche that feels nostalgic despite its newness.

After a hundred or so listens, I picked this album up on cassette and played it on my half-broken Sharp SG-320e. The thing warbles and be belt drive is fucked so it sounds terrible, by which I mean it sounds amazing. This album was genuinely transformed, and it felt like a whole new thing from a whole different era. I highly recommend listening to extremely familiar music in new contexts. What an experience!

I revisted the early days of Metronomy recently, and realised that listening to Nights Out as a 13 year old was probably the thing that most influenced my taste in music today. Often abrasive and strange, it scrubbed my brain clean of any interest in comfortable, top-40, "good" music. It gave me a reputation for "not liking stuff because it's popular", a sentiment that I still hear to this day and still find deeply offensive.

Anyway, this isn't Nights Out, this is Small World. And you know what, Small World is comfortable and good! It's fun clappy singalong feelgood summertime jams! I can convince myself that it's still got the soul of the weird abrasive stuff i used to love, but maybe I just like havin' a good time in the sun.

It feels so good to be back.

One of the most ear-wormingest albums of all time. Several times a week my brain will surface "Dance bio, B. Mannilow" or "It's a weird premise for a show, but I like it" or "Sports Indirect" for no good reason. This album is full of cognito hazards and its fucking good from start to finish.

Trash and food.

Never not loving Alex G I'm afraid. He's just got the good stuff that I like.

He's probably one of the more impressive lyricists I can think of, largely because of how much he's able to say with extrememly simple and direct phrasing. The brevity and plainness of his songs is striking, when I occasionally scrutinise them.

Alex G always has a real range of sounds on his albums up from DSU and this is no exception. Enough variance and sonic flourish that elevate what could be fairly standard indie rock. He's just good!

John Darnielle's novels always have a knack of obfuscating their subject matter. Wolf in White Van feels small and sad and personal, and it is, but it spans farther than we're led to believe at first.

Universal Harvester plays the opposite trick, appearing to be a wide conspiracy, a mystery novel, that shrinks over time into a sad little drama about a single person's action. It's beautiful.

DEVIL HOUSE complicates things again by constantly changing scope and perspective, leaping around in time and place and narrative, all wrapped around a moment in a house. Until it isn't. Until it never was. Until what it means to tell a story is muddied and bruised.

This story is, at the end of the day, small an sad. But the journey is a long one, and the truth of it is always out of reach.

This is a book whose impact on me has been to vast for me to properly articulate.

From the first instant, this book is concerned with how to live and how to treat people. It spoke clearly into the world things that I had no way of expressing, things that felt simple and obvious the moment I heard them.

Ursula Le Guin has always had a knack for condensing ideas into the simplest terms, the barest actions; and this book is so full if these kinds of moments that it spills out beyond its narrative and feels more like a work of pure philosophy, pure parable. Every scene is so rich with meaning and intent and texture that I've found myself returning to them for reference and guidance.

A perfect story.

In the long, dull, work from home hours of 2022 I found great comfort it watching Lys' stream every day. It's an extremely hangoutable place, with a fantastic self-correcting energy. Not too saccharine, no "good vibes only" bullshit, just a very genuine person asking other people to be genuine with them. We owe eachother more places like this stream, and the real friendships that have developed here are no surprise.

Also, she's great at Tetris and funny as hell. Great stream.

Years ago. Like eight years ago, a friend recommeneded I try out climbing. "You'll love it, it's perfect for you." Naturally, I ignored this.

It's deeply frustrating to look back and know how many years I could have been having the time of my life with this hobby; regularly exercising for the first time ever, using new muscles, making new friends. But it's also deeply gratifying to have those things now. Time spent elsewhere is not wasted.

Move ya body, stretch ya limbs, rest and watch other people do the same. Go climbing today!

I was probably overdue a chess obsession. A nerdy kid with a superiority complex, I certainly should have been into chess before age 28, but I never got into it.

The will to learn something beyond the barest rules actually came from Chessboxing events. I'd been to a couple in previous years and they always seemed to be much more about the chess than the boxing, so I dug a little deeper in order to make those bits interesting too.

I'm no good at chess, and I find ranked chess EXTREMELY stressful, but a casual game between friends is good fun, and I'm glad I put a little time in to develop a genunine appreciation for it. One of these days I'll finish the playing-card-powered chess variant I've been cooking up for years. Watch out, chessworld!