The World of Insufficient Light

A Thing Called Truth - Mag just had her life’s work stolen out from under her (and her marriage fell apart while she was working on it). Dorian watched her mom and brother die from a genetic disease that she may also have. They accidentally end up on a wacky road-trip together. This feels like it was intended to go for multiple volumes of them following Dorian’s brother’s travel wishlist and the ex-husband trying to track Mag down and maybe even some resolution to her life’s work getting stolen. Instead, it leans hard into the two of them falling in love and abruptly ends on that after one volume. Which isn’t bad, but there’s wasted potential here.

Black Cloak (volumes 1-2) – This is a delightful cross between fantasy and noir, with the hardboiled detective (who gets injured a lot) whose past comes back to her in the form of a murder linked directly into her personal history. Volume 1 wraps everything up well, it’s well-paced, the art is pretty, it’s genuinely good stuff. The second volume feels more like a sequel, jumping forward five years with a new mystery to solve; it links back to some things from the first volume and a lot of poor choices made in the interim; I don’t think it’s quite as strong but it’s still very good. This is solid and recommended.

Black Magick (volumes 1-3) – Another hardboiled magical detective, but this one is a modern day cop and secretly a witch, who’s being targeted by some sort of rival magical organization. (This is a world where wicca and pagan practices exist, but a small number of perpetually-reincarnated witches with real magical powers hide among them/society.) Good art, interesting story, some twists as it becomes clear who the antagonists are and what they want, BUT…it’s unfinished. And it’s not clear when and if it’ll ever be finished. I’d love to know what the demons really want and how Rowan is going to resolve the various conflicts in her life, but right now it’s just a frustrating cliffhanger.

Big Girls (volume 1) - A clever sci-fi story about some [technobabble] that causes some boys to grow up into kaiju but a smaller number of girls to just turn into giant women. So the “big girls” are used to defend the Preserve and the normal-sized humans against attacks. But plenty of people aren’t happy with the status quo and the sacrifices it entails, and maybe the “Jacks” aren’t as monstrous as they seem. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but it’s a decent story.

Bolero – The tale of a bisexual disaster and the various people in her orbit as she screws up her life. This was particular interesting after reading The Midnight Library, because it has the same premise: A woman makes bad choices and falls into depression, but is given the opportunity to explore alternate universe versions based on making different choices. And just like that book…it squanders the opportunity to make good use of that premise. She speedruns through a bunch of worlds where she and her ex-girlfriend are knights or astronauts and ends up in one where she basically continues where she left off and tries to build something else; and then tears that all down because she doesn’t understand communicating with her partners. But it’s okay, because somehow her soul is healed through magical goddess dreams. Or something. Honestly, the conclusion didn’t make much sense and it squandered my goodwill by wasting the premise.

Coffin Bound (volume 1) – Do you like Grant Morrison’s strung-together weirdness books? This is very much in that vein, as Izzy finds out that there’s a contract on her life so she opts to go out and erase all traces of herself before she dies. The assassin is the “Earth-Eater” who really should be off fighting the Doom Patrol; she’s accompanied by a dude with a crow’s skeleton in a cage instead of a head; they run into strippers who take off their skin and a cult who steal body parts for their own use. The world is a nonsensical dreamscape and everything is plot-distance apart. It’s all a valuable lesson about how you can never fully erase your impact on the world. There’s a second volume of this, but no, I’ve had enough.

Crave - The new “Crave” app has suddenly appeared on everyone’s phones on a college campus, and it apparently gives you helpful instructions for all sorts of things you might crave (which, in practice, leads to lots of people banging). Except, of course, it’s actually using all of your data to manipulate you and everyone around you and it’s a secret project by rich people for nefarious purposes. So, y’know, extremely realistic but told with lots of kinky illustrations to make it more palatable. Barely counts as “science fiction,” at this point. Genuinely solid complete story in a single volume.

Family Tree (volume 1) - A Jeff Lemire story where people turn into trees rather than animals. I had read the first issue of this in some other bundle and bounced off of it. I made it through the whole first volume this time, but I don’t particularly care where it’s going.

Golden Rage (volume 1) - What if the Golden Girls, only they were trapped on a survivalist island? And instead of being funny, they were murderously violent? Well, over five issues we manage to go from “Lord of the Flies” to “Friendship is Magic” with only a little bit of stabbing, some weird funeral rituals, and two clowns. This is an amusing concept (with the sort of premise that falls apart if you shake it gently) but the execution is lackluster and it needs more Betty White to hold my attention.

Hinges (volumes 1-3) - A fast read because the protagonist, Orio, is mostly silent. We watch her, a hinged living puppet, “awaken” in a clockwork city and be assigned an “Odd,” a strange animal companion that in her case is reminiscent of Stitch. She’s clearly an unusual type, and has to wrangle her way into being a “mender,” a job that she’s good at and is necessary but the system doesn’t want to assign her to. But that resolution lasts less than an issue and she ends up exiled from the city, meeting another exile and learning about “dismantelists” who want to take people apart and see how they work, and eventually returning to save the city from one. This was apparently originally a webcomic, and that makes a lot of sense given the weird pacing and changes in direction and tone. Reading this one page a week (or whatever the update schedule was) must have been excruciating. It’s very pretty and I’m glad the plot actually resolves everything it sets up; but this would have worked better as a tighter single volume.

I.D. – In a future where there’s space travel and colonies on other planets, a trio (an older writer, an ex-con, and a trans man) meet in a café to discuss the fact they’re all volunteering for an experiment to change their bodies via brain transplant. This is interrupted by a riot where a bunch of people around them are killed. Then we get the “science” of transplanting their brains (spider DNA and lasers). Then they hang out together some more. Then we fast-forward and the trans man has gone through with the switch, the ex-con has not, and they heard the writer died. They got to scatter the ashes of the trans man’s old body, and there’s a stinger that implies the writer did go through with the procedure successfully. I’m not sure quite why, but this feels like a Eurocomic to me. It’s all very “well, that happened” but makes no effort to actually tie together a narrative arc. (Or the plot holes, for that matter.) This feels like the author came up with a bunch of scenes that interested them (in a world they’d clearly given some thought to) but couldn’t actually put together a full story and instead we got this.

MOM: Mother of Madness – This is a vent-piece about a woman with emotion-based superpowers dealing with her deeply sexist workplace and the crushing realities of late-stage capitalism as a single mother. So she decides to use her powers to fight crime and stop a human-trafficking ring run by an evil billionaire! There are somewhat deeper statements about patriarchy and who benefits from it later in the book, but there is absolutely nothing subtle at any point. It’s a power fantasy, and I can’t fault that, even if I’m not the target audience.

Inkblot (volumes 1-2) – This is a case of world-builder’s disease disguised as a comic about a magic cat that gets accidentally summoned one day and goes gallivanting through the various parallel worlds ruled by the many siblings of a family of sorcerers. It’s a cool idea for a world setup (the family apparently discovered experience points and started killing monsters to get stronger; and had to spread out to different worlds once they ran out of things to kill), but there’s too little actual plot and too many characters, and the cat isn’t quite noteworthy or goofy enough to be the focal point. Also it annoyed me that it’s really unclear what the state of “Mother Earth” is during all of this, despite it appearing repeatedly. (The overall story gets a little more coherent in the second volume, but it’s also clearly intended to be a long ongoing that may or may not resolve anything.)

Lovesick – This was apparently written during a worst-parts-of-the-internet-fueled 2020 depression, and it shows. Domino is an internet performer who gets incels from her fanbase to volunteer for snuff films. And cannibalism, too! It’s torture-porn by and for traumatized people. Which has its place, I suppose, but I’m not recommending it.

Norroway (volumes 1-2) - A modernize, queer retelling of the folktale “The Black Bull of Norroway” mashed together with a few other folktale bits and giving most of the characters more depth and agency. (In both style and presentation I was reminded of Molly Knox Ostertag's The Witch Boy trilogy.) I haven’t been familiar with the original legend, but the lore they built around it is pretty impressive. Each volume manages to have a complete arc and this is one of the few comics from this bundle that I’d go out of my way to find more of (if they make it).

November (volumes 1-4) – Dee is approached by “Mister Mann” who offers her a job decoding a puzzle and broadcasting some numbers daily. Turns out that money doesn’t bring you happiness; the routine brings her misery until one day it changes and everything goes sideways. And her story is only one of many that are interwoven with each other on the night in November that things go sideways. This is by Matt Fraction, and while it might be a little too long and a little too fragmented, it does come together nicely.

Plutona – Middle school is hell, even when there are superheroes in the world. And superheroes like Plutona need to balance crimefighting with working a regular job and single parenthood...until a supervillian gets lucky and the middle-schoolers find her body in the woods. This was written by Jeff Lemire but was drawn by a competent artist; and it is dark. The initial tone does not telegraph where it’s going; and the shock (and relative suddenness) of the ending doesn’t actually help the story.

Rain - Another cute sci-fi/horror one-shot, following a young woman whose life is torn apart when crystal shards start raining and killing everyone in their path. Credit for having both a character arc and a reasonable explanation for what’s happening; though it very much follows a horror-movie arc in that regard.

SFSX (volume 1) - The Party has taken over and have imposed a fascist rain of “purity”, and it’s up to a small group of kinky queers to stop them. This is super-kinky wish-fulfillment disguised as politics; and while I can’t come down on anyone that hard for making it, it’s clear the author gets off on “striving against kinky torturers who pretend to be moral” even more than they get off on conventional kink—and that requires holes in the worldbuilding even the biggest dildo could fit through.

This also had the first 10 volumes of Saga, but I have physical copies of those. They’re very good. This had three volumes of Man-Eaters, but I read the first in a different bundle and thought it was a deeply confused polemic, which I didn’t like. I bounced off of Mirror and Fishflies. I may go back and give Paper Girls a try.

Overall: Black Cloak was particularly standout. November was interesting, as was Crave.

The crystals have lost their light and the elements have once again gone out of control. It’s up to four youths blessed by the crystals to restore balance to the world against the flood of darkness.

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Overall: This is much closer to the original NES game and in some ways a stronger port than the 3D remake was (though weaker in terms of story and characterization); honestly, they’re very different games. If you like the gameplay of the 2D era of Final Fantasy you might enjoy this more than the 3D remake.

Zidane and the theater troupe Tantalus are in Alexandria to perform the famous play, “I Want to Be Your Canary” and also kidnap Princess Garnet. This leads to war, adventures, black mages, found family, finding your roots but discovering they don’t define you, mental breakdowns, and plenty of moogles and chocobos. It’s a love letter to the Final Fantasy games that came before it.

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Overall: I loved this when it came out, but in retrospect it was hobbled by design decisions that were endemic at the time. If someone was playing through all of the FF games in order they’d get to this one and probably find the same joy I originally did, because it was a retrospective and a turning point in a lot of ways. The new Steam version is absolutely the way to play it; it loses nothing and adds convenience (and is prettier).

Irritatingly, Friday Afternoon Teas do offer steeping instructions for each tea on their website. These should really be printed on the packet, or failing that, included in the box on a card. Many of these teas wanted to be steeped at 185 degrees instead of boiling, and I had to look up individually which was which.

This box was blends nominally inspired by the show Our Flag Means Death. As with last time, I’ve ordered them from my favorite to my least favorite.

Stede’s Orange Marmalade - Black tea, orange peel, bergamot oil, natural vanilla flavoring, gold lustre dust. This one tastes good but smells amazing; Rebecca particularly liked it. (The lustre dust is entirely unnecessary.)

Queen of Hearts – Black tea, peppercorns, rose hip and rose petals. Black tea with a hint of rose and a tiny bit of pepper bite at the end. Nice.

Blackbeard’s Delicacies & Tealights – Black tea, sweet violet, natural vanilla flavoring, lustre dust. Probably a tie with the Queen of Hearts; the violet and vanilla are subtle but a nice addition to the tea.

Ooh, Daddy! - Black teas, cross sprinkles, spicy ginger, black peppercorn, butter rum flavoring. There’s a little bite from the ginger and pepper, but the butter rum just gets lost and the sprinkles continue to add nothing but ugly color.

I Could Be Family – Roasted green tea, cinnamon, allspice, clove, pineapple, allspice, vanilla, and blue sugar sprinkles. The smell is overwhelmed by “spicy cinnamon” and while the flavor is more subtle than you’d expect, most of the nuance is still lost to the spices. I don’t think the sprinkles are adding any value.

Moonglow – Heather flower, lemon myrtle, moon sprinkles, lavender, yarrow flower. Contains no tea, smells strongly like potpourri in the packet, but once steeped it’s…inoffensively lemon?

Stabbed By Jim - Green yaupon holly, yerba mate, annatto seed, orange peel, blood orange, shaved coconut, orange sprinkles, lime peel, natural coconut flavoring. (This one is noted on the website to be “hyper-caffeinated”, by which they mean 80 mg, twice the caffeine of the average black tea or still less than a weak cup of coffee.) The coconut and citrus contrast come through decently, but there are weird overtones and aftertastes that don’t really work for me.

Mexican Chocolate Mate (Bonus tea) – I think I just don’t like yerba mate? This mostly tastes like cinnamon tea, with that weird yerba mate aftertaste. The chocolate doesn’t particularly come through.

In general, I was unimpressed with the lustre dust (I don’t need sparkly bits in my tea) and I don’t think sprinkles actually added anything to any of these, even any real sweetness. But they’re good at making black tea blends, especially when they focus on one or two primary flavors.

This year I logged 42 games played, 29 of which were new and 13 of which were replays. I logged 534 hours of gameplay, even more than last year, which probably goes a ways towards explaining why I read less and watched less TV this year. (I also didn’t do anything new for Talking Time, though I added a bunch of update reviews of emulator handhelds.)

Everafter Falls, at 55 hours, was my most-played game; and the combined six games in the Cozy Farming Sim genre also won for most logged hours. Roots of Pacha, Fields of Mistria, and Littlewood also met or beat the 30-hour mark. Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake was the only other game to crack 30 hours, but I had 9 games total break the 20-hour mark.

I did have a pretty decent balance genre-wise, though, with classic rpgs, metroidvanias, 2D zeldalikes, action rpgs, gimmick rpgs, a few puzzle adventure games, some puzzle/casual games, a 4X game, and a dating sim. Of the new games, 25 were on Steam, 1 was on GOG Galaxy, and 3 were on the Switch. Of the replays, there were 6 SNES, 3 GBA, 1 GBC, 1 Android, and 2 Steam games.

In terms of handhelds, the logged playthroughs rotated through the Powkiddy V10, R36S, and Trimui Smart Pro; and by the end of the year I was trying to focus more on the Odin Pro and the Ampown MagicX. I also used the GB300 and Miyoo A30 for casual “ten minutes at a time” puzzle games and the like, mostly on the subway or before bed. My Android tablet, as usual, was mostly used for Gems of War but also a full replay of Gemcrafter: Puzzle Journey.

I’m changing the way I manage my backlog, because I’ve started to lose the distinction between games I “officially” added versus ones that I’m not expecting to fully play. There are 210 games listed on my backlog as of this writing, though only 43 of them are ones I expect to give the full time towards unless I really like them. As it stands, on paper I removed 9 games from my backlog but really I basically broke even on the year.

ARR played a lot of Geometry Dash on his tablet this year; also more Bloons TD6. He played lots of Detrarune on Steam (and also some Celeste and Element TD 2) and did a bunch of Pokemon and Zelda replays on the Switch. He noodled around with GameCube Zelda games on my Retroid Pocket 5 but didn’t go crazy with them. (He and I are collectively applying the 5-game rule to the Switch 2; we may more may not get one in 2026 depending on what comes out.)

Tentative plans for 2026 include: Finally clearing the last few GameCube games on my backlog using the Odin Pro; and replaying some DS games on the Ampown MagicX. I may try to do a grander backlog cull of console games or I may try and cull bundles of Steam games, depending on my mood.

I did a big wave of puzzles in the spring, then had a big gap in the summer, but then blasted through basically a puzzle a week in October and November. Not coincidentally, my TV-watching was much more concentrated to those times, also.

We did a whopping sixteen 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles: Toy Shop, 7 Evil Exes from Scott Pilgrim, The Best Places in America, I Love Gum, Breakfast Table, I Love Baking, Blue Ribbon County Fair, Toy Stamps, CTY 2024, I Love Music, Saturday Morning Cartoons, Make Mine Marvel, Blow Pops, Love Is Everywhere, Welcome Fall, NYC Street. We also did one 1,500-piece jigsaw puzzle: Home in the Ocean; and we did two 500-piece jigsaw puzzles: Inside the Museum: The Met, and Sewing Box. And I did the two 240-piece Pizza puzzles. (I also helped do one at in a convention games room, but I didn’t record the title.)

Call that 20 “real” jigsaw puzzles, which is a pretty high count. I’ve got five on the shelf and three more my dad is bringing over, so I suspect it’ll once again come in waves along with how big my TV backlog gets.

I only did 3 Paint-By-Stickers, one from Kaleidoscope Sticker Mosaics and 2 from Paint-by-Sticker Flowers. I kinda wish I could have brought those to choir rehearsals; they’re a great thing to occupy my hands and I still have plenty left to do.

So, these three games all came from a $5 “Build Your Own” Fanatical bundle; I was interested in Beloved Rapture and picked up the other two for the bundle minimum. (I was recently commenting to my son that I look for about $1/hour as the mark of good value for video games. This set averaged out impressively well.)

DUNGEONS OF CHAOS – A clunky and pixelated tile-based open-world dungeon exploration game, clearly trying to invoke an old-fashioned Ultima or D&D Gold Box experience. You ask NPCs about their NAME and JOB and fight a zillion tactical grid-based battles as you slowly gain levels, train skills, and find a million pieces of marginally-better equipment. It’s not trying to be pretty, and past the basic tutorial exposition it’s not going to hold your hand: Blunder into something out of your depth and you’re back to your last save. What does this skill do? What do these numbers on the weapons mean? Eh, you’ll figure it out. The plot is as bare-bones as you’d expect; the kingdom was overrun by evil forces and you’re novices sent to safety on a distant island who need to get strong enough to retake it. I appreciate the decent autobattle settings, but the mouse-and-keyboard interface combination is clunky and, more importantly, it’s banking on your nostalgia for an era of crpgs that never won me in the first place.

Transcendence Legacy – Voidswept – An RPGMaker game made a lot of stock assets, about two amnesiac heroes in a post-Catastrophe world where civilization is in tatters and monsters are everywhere. Credit for having multiple difficulty levels and a full set of achievements; and there’s some strategy built into battles because enemies have elemental and weapon weakpoints. (You can also build you party somewhat—every character can use every weapon and spell, and you have 6 characters with which to build a party of 4, so you can specialize them early on.) You can only save at save points, which double as your fast-travel points (which means you can go to town and restock from any of them). It’s about 4 hours long and ends with going to fight God; I’m reminded of many KEMCO games in that it’s a perfectly cromulent but forgettable jrpg experience.

Beloved Rapture – An RPGMaker-style indie game that is about two men finding love while saving the kingdom from an evil cult, but first everyone needs to get over their deep issues with their parents and the backdrop of war and colonialism. It started with the problematic quirk that McAfee thought it was a virus and I needed to jump through hoops to rectify that. (It also randomly crashed a few times; after some more patches came through it got more stable but it still has random glitches like incorrect text boxes and characters climbing next to ladders rather than up them. Nothing game-breaking, though.) The pixel art is particularly good. The retro sensibilities are so strong that the level of gore and profanity when a town was destroyed was genuinely shocking; though that got old in later chapters. It’s honestly a bit overwritten and the cutscenes get talky and repetitive…especially since they should have…cut…the number of ellipses for emphasis…by about three-quarters. Also, for the 20 hours of gameplay relatively little happens: You spend more than half of that time scouring the overworld and towns for sidequests and secrets. Since this is a game with a flat level curve, plenty of missables, and mostly non-respawning encounters, you really want to do everything (but carefully, since there’s also effectively limited healing). I very much approved of their approach to Easy mode, which just restores your HP/MP to full after every battle, essentially removing the limited resource economy. Generally fun, absolutely my money’s worth, but I doubt I’ll ever go back to it.

Meanwhile, these three games were from a different $9 “Build Your Own” Fanatical bundle:

Sunrise’s Order – A Stardew-like for all the people who hate the “dealing with villagers” part of farming sims. You decide to quit your job and move to a deserted island where Amazon will air-drop packages you order online and you can fulfill internet “contracts” with the items you grow, forage, or craft. It was made by a two-person team and it shows; the animations are very simple and the graphics are “early-aughts Flash game” quality. That said, it’s got a decent game loop and how to unlock things is fairly intuitive. The fishing minigame is a rhythm game, which I thought was a cute innovation. The quests system is a little janky; I got the “craft a hammer” quest twice and had some more advanced quests sitting on my main screen from way too early. What this really reveals, though, is that as much as I like the Stardew game loop, I do eventually need some plot and NPC interaction to keep it going. There’s only so much chasing Achievements before I’m like, “...this feels a little pointless.” I got to the point of needing chickens, which requires building a farm plot and then building a coop on it and also building a silo (all of which need tons of gathered resources and to be unlocked by doing enough contracts) and also buying the chickens and I was like, “Look, if Marnie isn’t going to show up at my door demanding eggs, I’m not sure why I’m bothering here.” Six hours for my $3 was totally worth it, but that’s plenty for me.

Maze Mice – ARR picked out this one since I was getting the other two and had some fun with it; but it turned out I liked it even more. It’s a fancy version of Pac-Man with instant pause (enemies only move when you do) and a huge variety of power-ups. And interestingly, the stages aren’t endless: After 10 minutes a boss appears, and if you beat that (via damage-dealing powerups and collecting enough orbs) the stage ends and you get an achievement. Even if you don’t beat it, collecting points is what unlocks new powerups, new mice and new stages. My one complaint would be that the later stages don’t unlock fast enough—you’re basically grinding on a couple of stages (which, admittedly, has its place as a style of game). I found that the most useful powerups were Love (slowly restores health), Anti-Cheat (damages enemies in walls, which as fantastic against ghosts), and Catnip (flat-out kills several enemies after each cooldown; also fantastic against late-stage high-health ghosts). In general, if you can get XP bonus abilities early you should, and as more powerups unlock you need to think about synergy between them because you can only hold 4 weapons and 4 items. I ended up conquering this, getting every unlock and finding a combination of power-ups that made me invincible in one ridiculous run on Endless Mode. So this also got me 10+ hours of entertainment.

8-Bit Adventures 2 – Not quite 8-bit; really more 16-bit and a fairly standard jrpg: Following the events of the first game, which I don’t think I ever played, the three heroes vanquished the Dust and the Computer was able to restore the world. But now one of the heroes has gone missing and, as a young orphan they rescued, you’re off to help save him. It hits a bunch of tropes fairly early, including a sewer level and a mandatory stealth sequence. I give them credit that the plot keeps moving and the grinding isn’t atrocious; and the battle options are pretty varied. That said, the plot never really grabbed me enough to justify the length of the game (again, I suspect playing the first game would have made a difference) so after three hours I decided to cull it.

That said, each of these were absolutely worth $3 for the amount of enjoyment I got out of them.

Overall: Beloved Rapture is a decent indie jrpg experience and Maze Mice is shockingly fun; those are the standouts here.

Harley Quinn (HBOMax, Season 4) – Harley is trying to be a hero as part of the Bat-family. Ivy is taking on the corporate world as the CEO of the Legion of Doom. Techbros and billionaires are particularly terrible people, but in general it sucks to be everybody. Is there anything standout as new? No. Is it still fun and entertaining? Yes.

Wednesday (Netflix, Season 2) – Wednesday returns to Nevermore to discover she’s become popular in the wake of her saving the school, which she hates. Pugsley, having inherited Fester’s electrical powers, becomes a regular and starts getting into his own trouble. They still have their big issues when they try to “have it both ways” with the classic Addams Family (who should never be in mortal peril and who only make sense in contrast to “normies”) and the reimagined Addams Family (marked by tragedy and secrets and engrossed in a society where they’re normal). The body-swap episode did show off how brilliant the lead actresses are, though.

Peacemaker (HBOMax, Season 2) – In a cosmic rewrite, they actually went back and edited the end of season 1 so that the Justice Gang (from the new Superman movie) show up instead of the Synderverse Justice League; continuity now includes everything James Gunn has had a hand in. But then again, Chris has inherited an extradimensional portal from his father and it leads to alternate realities, so who knows if we’ll see another Crisis eventually. In this story, Peacemaker discovers one of those alternate realities where his dad and brother and still alive and they’re all superheroes together, and realizes that he’d rather live there. Poor life choices ensue. (This ties in Lex Luthor and ends on a Planet Salvation cliffhanger that might get addressed in the next season or might show up in a movie. Who knows? I’m honestly annoyed at the horrible pacing of the last episode that barely wraps up the season, and doesn’t address ongoing questions within this narrative in favor of chasing plot threads that tie into something else, and wastes so much time on concert footage.)

Poker Face (Downloaded, Season 2) – Entertainingly, they wrap up the “chased by the mob” plotline in the third episode and instead opt for seven more episodes of Charlie traveling to find herself before bringing back some recurring cast (in a two-parter finale) to get her back properly on the run for any subsequent seasons. It continues to be a guest-star-studded fun time where Charlie’s bullshit-reader is an excuse for clever procedural mysteries. The finale twist honestly was a little bit of a cheat, but it’s fine. The standalone episodes are generally very good, and that’s most of the series anyway.

Ironheart (Disney+, Season 1) – While there are plenty of Watsonian and Doyalist explanations you can patch on for why Riri’s major motivation is that Tony Stark was rich and she’s poor, it still annoys me when Tony notably built his first Iron Man suit IN A CAVE! OUT OF SCRAPS! The bigger issue with this series, though, is that Riri isn’t actually a particularly likeable character: It’s not that she messes up or pushes people away so much as she’s in her 20s but comes off as a petulant 13-year-old; and she shares an important trait with every other “smart” character in this narrative, that she has such bone-headed tunnel vision that she comes off as incredibly stupid. (Which Hood, Joe, and pretty much the entire crew do as well.) This series plays less as a heroic coming-of-age and more like a start of darkness; and if Riri comes back I kinda expect it to be as a villain fighting Dr. Strange.

As a side note, I decided to go ahead and cull Echo off my list, as I’m clearly losing interest in Marvel series that don’t actually have a gimmick that appeals to me.

I also watched the new Knives Out movie Wake Up Dead Man, which I think was my least favorite of the three but I will argue is still very good. (I did see a couple of the twists coming, though that’s not necessarily a bad thing.)

Overall: Decent TV to close out the year but absolutely nothing new. I’ve got a couple more series to finish out but I think I need to go through another cycle of trying new things and non-sequels soon.

The latest Stardew-like I’ve played; this one has you as an alchemist from the big city who comes to provide modern medical care to a small town. You have the usual loops of going into dangerous areas to get materials and giving gifts to win the love of the townsfolk; but instead of a farm you have a clinic and need to play minigames to diagnose and cure people who come in. The central mechanic is making medicine out of materials with your alchemy pot, where each ingredient is a tetrad and each recipe is a shape—you can make the same potion out of a variety of ingredients, so long as they fit. This is very quest-driven; upgrading friendship with each villager to the next level will require a quest from them, which might just be watching a cutscene or might be a big fetch quest. You need to also do quests to upgrade your standing in the village, which in turn lets you unlock new areas for better materials.

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Overall: This was fun and a little change of pace in the cozy genre. Hunting down NPCs to turn in quest rewards can be a little irritating, the money-making loop is a little grindy, and the late-game Achievement selection is kinda weird; but overall it’s a fun time and a reasonable length.

Hero of the Kingdom: The Lost Tales 3 - The evil wizard escapes into a new region and you need to chase him there, and also find a cure for your sick dragon buddy while you’re at it. Another point-and-click adventure in this series, though this one seems even more phoned-in than the last as it doesn’t seem to introduce anything particularly new or different. It opens up a lot of options early, but honestly there are too many of them and you waste a lot of time going back through potential options trying to figure out what you can actually achieve. Also, I’m not sure if you can softlock yourself, but I was much more concerned about it here than in some of the other games because there were so many open options at any time. (It turns out you can safely sell all of the treasures, trophies and valuable materials; you never need them for anything except to exchange for money.) Hopefully if they continue this series they’ll come up with a new quirk for the next one.

Garden Story – Clearly carrying some influence from Stardew Valley, this is more of an action-rpg with life sim framing. You play as a little grape, the new Guardian of the town, and have to deal with the fact the entire realm has been crumbling as the Rot encroach. Combat plays a major role, along with resource gathering (the latter made annoying by the fact that resources don’t stack in your inventory, and the limited “town inventory” takes the place of being able to craft chests). And the game cycle takes place in days, but doesn’t actually give you an in-game clock until you do a midgame sidequest. You unlock “crafting” relatively late, and it mostly involves making repair kits and dropping required items in them (though you can also put cosmetic furniture and drop-boxes in extra set areas). You unlock “farming” even later, but you only have four seeds to pick from (one grows properly in each seasonal area) and there are set farming spots you have to use. I have the feeling that in a world without Stardew Valley this would have been (even more of) a 2D Zeldalike, with longer dungeons and more puzzles, and without the day-cycle. Not bad, not amazing, worth the 10 hours of playtime.

CARRION – Nominally a metroidvania, with the twist that you’re playing a writhing mass of tentacles who smashes its way through a human military facility and eats people to regain biomass. (And you occasionally get to watch flashback sequences where you play as a human.) The controls aren’t my favorite; you need to “aim” your tentacles with the right stick and generally use the triggers to do things. (Also this really could have used a minimap.) But the difficulty isn’t bad and the save points are pretty frequent, and by the time you get into the really annoying military segments you’ve gotten pretty good at wrangling the controls (and in many cases, can play rooms either as stealth/puzzle areas or as combat areas). Entertaining and didn’t outstay its welcome.

Cryptmaster – A first-person exploration rpg with the gimmick that you constantly need to type words—your party’s battle skills, navigation, guessing the contents of chests, making conversation. You get clue letters for more skills from chests and battles, but you also have limited “souls” to fight those battles with, because each skill costs a soul per letter. (Souls are also currency for building potion recipes and bonus cards for the sidequest card game. And that sidequest card game is actually pretty fun!) Much of the gameplay is either choosing the right words to fight with or figuring out riddles. This is another game where the achievements tell a story, as almost 80% of players get the first story achievement, and roughly a third of them get the second one. The last two chapters are markedly shorter than the rest, though to be fair the gameplay is pretty tired by that point anyway because they don’t add new mechanics. It’s certainly 10 hours of entertainment. If you like riddles and brainteasers and don’t mind gimmick rpg elements, this might be for you.

Master of Magic (2022 Remake) – The official remake of the classic 4X game, as opposed to multiple unofficial mods and remakes I’ve played over the years. They one keeps very close to the original (including allowing you to take max Death books and start with Wraiths) but upgrades to a 3D map and adds a bunch of new variety and quality of life features (like your “familiar” who can fight battles for you, who gives a percentage chance of outcome that you can see before starting each battle; or a series of autosaves of previous turns). It does seem like cities are forced to be farther away from each other, which slows down your ability to settle areas. Lairs/caves/ruins are more interesting, with a better variety of prizes and sometimes the option to “explore further” for a potential second battle and more prizes. The enemy wizard towers fight in battle when you assault their home base, which makes those battles harder (I ended up with one enemy wizard squatting on a single town for half the game, because he couldn’t do anything but I didn’t have an army nearby that could actually survive assaulting his tower.) As with the original, the later game comes down to your heroes loaded down with awesome artifacts and roaming the map clearing everything out. This maintains the feel of the original while sanding some of the rough edges and making it prettier; I thought it was a pretty solid remake.

Planar Conquest – Whereas this was another off-brand Master of Magic remake, which was made by the same folks who did Worlds of Magic, with a similar setup (there are half a dozen planes instead of just two) and a similar jankiness. Also annoying with this version is that apparently they expect you to have an enormous monitor to play it on, because on my 16” laptop the building and unit descriptions are so small as to be barely legible. This switches around some of the setup, expands the magic types, and changes some units and buildings; and most noteworthy is that it changes the overland features to make it clearer what is just a prize to collect and what’s a challenge guarded by enemies. I suspect that, like Worlds of Magic, this was hobbled by bigger dreams than they could actually fulfill; and other reviews say it’s riddled with bugs and the AI is terrible. I think it says something that I played for half an hour and got 6 achievements, all of which were held by roughly 10% of players.

Littlewood – Another Stardew-like, and a relatively simple one with no combat. You’re the legendary hero, but you lost your memory in the final battle against the dark wizard, and now you’re settling down for a simple life of building a town with your friends. You have complete control of the town’s layout (including building the houses for your friends and furnishing them) and there are lots of skills for you to make the numbers go up. One of the big quirks is that the daily timer and your endurance are the same—time only passes when you do things, which is actually a cute abstraction. (Honestly, the game might be a little too abstracted; it’s almost into “tappy game” territory.) There are a number of mechanics that aren’t well-explained—you need to build everyone a desk so you can see what upgrades they want in their houses, and then they’ll give you special items that unlock other game features for doing them. You need to upgrade the balloon to unlock other areas, then upgrade those areas to unlock things like the bonus card game. When you fill out the right furniture in someone’s house you’ll get a watering can and can start breeding flowers by placing the correct ones near each other (and getting lucky), which is required for finishing both the museum and the visiting NPCs. The game officially ends when you get married (you need to date someone enough and also buy a very expensive wedding ring from the auction house; it took me 27 hours), but the achievements assume you’ll play for another 30 hours grinding items if you want 100% completion. It’s not immersive enough to scratch a Stardew itch for most people, I suspect; but it’s a reasonably entertaining “make the numbers go up and complete all the quests” peaceful game.

Splintered – Heavily influenced by the Dragon Quest randomizer scene, this plays like DQ1 (or Dragon Warrior, for us old folks) with the serial numbers filed off, but adds complexity to battles with equipment-specific bonus abilities. The first chapter plays it straight, but then you go through an increasingly random set of repetitions where the world is rearranged and item abilities change, but the quest is the same every time. You can also do general randomized runs and there are special “trial” chapters with special abilities and limitations. As there’s much less grinding than classic DQ1 (and you can beat the final boss at level 17-18 with many available builds), each run is only 1-2 hours, and that makes it entertaining to do a bunch of variations. I played 8 runs (all the story chapters and two trials), and I may revisit this at some point just to do another randomized run or two.

Overall: Except for Planar Conquest (which I didn’t expect much of), this was a pretty solid slate of games in a wide variety of genres. I had a lot of fun with pretty much all of them, even the ones with noteworthy shortcomings.