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| Edi Udo |
A busy year around the dungeon, there's been a great deal of good and bad that's come our way and come the end of the season it's time to reflect on the good and interesting that the tides have brought to us. Through the haze of memory and sitting here with no notes, what have I watched, read, listened to, etc that stands out this year?
Paradise Killer
Kaizen Gameworks released Paradise Killer all the way back in September of 2020 and I nearly immediately bought it after one glimpse at the trailer. A neon soaked detective story around an occult island drenched in sunset. First playing it back then it blew me out of the water and I had a fantastic time interacting with all the characters and exploring the bits and pieces scattered around the beautiful island itself. Kaizen received some criticism at the time for building out a city with nothing in it, but the little flecks of detail and care that are all over the place gush with intrigue and detail. One of the most impressive parts is the soundtrack and the in game sound design, with localized cues guiding players to collectables scattered around and meshing well with the ambient noises and soundtrack to create a dreamy walking/jump-gliding experience.
An enormous free content update came out in March of this year, adding new quests, interactables, a whole B-side album, as well as a plethora of performance improvements and Steam achievements. With a fine bottle of Fuji Sanroku and had a truly delightful time- and even made it my first Steam game with 100% of achievements unlocked.
Paradise Killer does a masterful work with dripfeeding tidbits of lore and setting, scattered throughout the island, and combined with the overall story and character design it creates an engaging environment to explore and wander at your leisure. Speaking of character design, the names of the characters are ridiculously good. Lady Love Dies, Sam and Lydia Daybreak, Eyes Kiwami, Doctor Doom Jazz, Crimson Acid, they vibe tremendously with the overall aesthetic. If you haven't played it since the new update, I highly recommend revisiting Island Sequence 24.
Elden Ring
What more can be said that hasn't already been said about Elden Ring? It's a beauty down to its core. My encounter with it happened to come on its release day, just after catching COVID and so I tramped through the Lands Between filled with cold medicine, super condensing the experience into three days of nonstop Elden Ring. Before then, I had never beaten or even gotten terribly far in a From Software game, but since then I've gone back and had a blast with Sekiro and the original Dark Souls.
QNTM
Towards the end of last year, I read the first of Sam Hughes (QNTM) books and found myself hooked on the worlds he portrays. From There is no Antimemetics Division to my personal favorite, Ra, his science fiction feels fresh and hits just the right chords for me. There is no Antimemetics Division is about the famed SCP Foundation Antimemetics Division, and more, but the book I was most interested in was Ra, which portrayed a world wherein magic was discovered in the early 1970s and the world is adapting and changing to the introduction of systematized, scientific method-informed magical practice. But it goes so, so much further with the idea. Not everything is a hit, and there are some parts I had to jump back and verify what just happened, but all in all QNTM's works are a breath of fresh air to what's so often as of late a stagnant sphere.
Goodbye, Eri
Tatsuki Fujimoto, fresh from Chainsaw Man, published this oneshot this year and it is a stutter-stopping, excruciating burn that begins with a middle schooler's mother asking him to film her slow, painful decline and eventual death due to an unnamed disease. The film doesn't go over very well when he shows it, but he does encounter one fan: the mysterious Eri. She pushes him to make another film and the story spirals out form there. It's a romance story of sorts, but I'll leave the genre definition up to you. When all is said and done, Fujimoto executes a heart-wrenching tale all in a hundred pages or so that is well worth the read.
Quest Master
I've been on a real bandcamp kick this year. Generally I try and fling a wide net and see what I catch, but Quest Master came up in a Spotify playlist for dungeon music and introduced me to the whole dungeon synth genre. Generally when running games I'll throw on something in the background, and I didn't realize how often I was using Quest Master until a player remarked they wanted something new as they had heard the same song four times already.
Twelve Temples is my favorite of the available albums. It's not flashy, but listening to it casts me back into the deep recesses of primordial fantasy development, conjuring up memories of Shining Force and Earthbound played in the dark.
For non-dungeon synth music on bandcamp, I also discovered Macroblank this year and would recommend a listen.
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities
Guillermo's latest foray into film, the Cabinet of Curiosities has some real winners in it. Each episode has its own director and Guilldermo acts as the executive producer. Understand though that there are some real misses, Guillermo's self-directed episode (and unfortunately the first episode), Lot 46, comes to mind but the most flamboyantly narratively void would be episode 6, Dreams in the Witch House, directed by Catherine Hardwick. To misquote Mitchell and Webb, it sucks that you have to write the misses and can't just write hits.
My personal favorite was episode 4, The Outside, directed by Ana Lily Amirpour and starring Kate Micucci and Martin Starr. I'd rather not spoil the episode itself, but suffice to say their performances were compelling and the overall direction produced an increasing feeling of unease, even past the climax. Other favorites would be episode 7, the Viewing, episode 3, the Autopsy, episode 5, Pickman's Model, and episode 8, the Murmuring (in that order).
Negative Space
After reading The Imago Sequence by Laird Barron I was giving a rave review of it to a friend and described it as, in the best possible way, reading a headache that draws you down into it. It's a fantastic book, highly recommend just about anything by Laird Barron, but more to the point: late last year I was on a routine "Scour the internet for any book that's interesting" kick and, after reading Stonefish and being very conflicted about it I saw a recommendation for Negative Space by B.R. Yeager. Negative Space tastes like a migraine. There's a specific keening sound that accompanies each of its passages that a cinematographer would use to intentionally produce unease. Negative Space is the feeling of returning to an old hometown and exploring the depths of its decay and the effects this has wrought on people you used to love. An exercise in misery. A symphony of rot. The book left deep tendrils in my head that are still there.
夢の砂漠/dream desert
There are many other small finds and mixes I enjoyed that I could bring up. For Those Who by Saturn Genesis, Kudasai/that dreamy track by Ikigai that all lo-fi playlists have, The Hidden Temple of Wuhu Island by Lazuli_Yellow, PURE LIFE's The Magi System, but I wanted to start with the album that I think started it all this year, and that's dream desert by the aptly named desert sand feels warm at night.
I don't know what the genre is, or even anything about this group of people who don't want to get paid for making music (I think their songs are all mixes/use bits of licensed music?), but this dreampunk/vaporwave album is a four hour journey through that black sand dream desert soundscape. Really like that album cover as well.
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
A science fiction visual novel spanning multiple characters, time travel, and giant robot action scenes? Sign me up. This gem from 2020 is a wonderful plot-driven visual novel interspersed with bits of hands-on giant robot action fighting. It's told through bits and pieces of each of the character's narratives, picking up and dropping off where they interact with each other and the player slowly unravels the full scope of this epic. Really, it's very impressive that it can keep the narrative cohesive over 13-16 hours of gameplay and 13* characters, especially with the weaving nature of its narrative.
Rifters: Starfish
Peter Watts, where to begin? Last year I read my first Watts, Blindsight, and was immediately dropped into a hyper active and deeply researched hard science fiction story complete with aliens, genetics, AI, what can only be classified as Science Vampires, and so many more fresh and bold science fiction ideas. The follow up, Echopraxia, is equally as intriguing and Watts has this habit of throwing out wild futuristic technology and then following it up with an extensive appendix at the end where he cites the research papers that inspired the ideas.
This year I started in on the Rifters trilogy, his earliest novels, and Starfish in particular is tasty. It starts with a prolonged and repeated punch to the face, drags the reader through hatred and trauma, and ultimately builds to a stellar crescendo that sets up for the follow on book. I'm still working on the trilogy, but Starfish is a perfect intro to the Watts canon. That or The Freeze-Frame Revolution, a shorter novella about a million years long revolution on a generation ship. Watts has the prize here for the most unique and thought provoking science fiction that I've read in years. Greg Egan is also in here, but I'll talk about him once I've read more of his works.
时光代理人/Link Click
Normally, Chinese animation does not produce much that I'm interested in, but Link Click was surprisingly compelling. The main characters, Lu and Cheng, run a Time Photo shop where they sell Cheng's innate ability to jump back in time into a picture and take over the body of someone for a brief time. This usually means either stealing some corporate information, making someone's day better, finding a missing person, etc, but each story is refreshingly warm and heartfelt- even if they consistently fail to address the underlying causes of the pain- but you won't catch a Chinese anime being openly critical of capitalism. Animation quality itself is a bit lacking, but the story makes up for it. Very catchy opening.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
In stark contrast with my other book favorites of the year, Beck Chambers's works have breathed a fresh, bright life into me and captured my attention and imagination in a way nothing has since The Secret History several years ago. Her Wayfarer series has a soft and warm feeling to so much of it and presents a future brightly hopeful and yet tethered to tangible humanity.
The characters explore a future in heartfelt ways and the stories are generally around the ideas of family, community, and finding one's place in the world. Science fiction is a favorite of mine, but lately I have been feeling the crushing weight (by my own reading choices, probably) of the depressing nature of most science fiction. Taking a brief look through the last twenty-thirty years of works it seems that everything is presenting a miserable dystopia, and we lost the golden age of science fiction notions that technology and human progress will improve the human condition (and not succumb to the machine of capitalism and/or fascism that strangles most dystopic science fiction). Becky Chambers explodes onto the scene with vibrant worlds of hopeful science fiction and a future for humanity and they have easily become favorites. I only wish that there were more hopeful science fiction media to enjoy.
Haunted PS1 Demo Disc
This community over on itch publishes free collections of demos from indie developers that fall in the "ps-1 like graphics" category into these yearly Haunted PS1 Demo Discs. The last two have been wrapped in a framing narrative (again, I'm a sucker for a good framing narrative) where you explore an environment and play the demos inside. This year had you wandering a frosty abandoned mall, last year was an exhibition hall. This year's was easily the finest collection, with some fantastic demos for games (Future Reality, Gob, Mothered, They Speak From The Abyss) and last year had some real winners too. It's a neat collection of games, I only wish they all had full releases out to compliment, but the yearly disc is at least able to produce some noise and show off these indie devs.
Tales of the Echowood
Podcasts. I listen to many, many podcasts. This is mostly because I've developed the habit of falling into the sweet embrace of sleep while listening to horror podcasts, and as a result I have developed very particular tastes and a great deal of sensitivity to audio levels and podcasts that interject screaming commercials into the middle of their soft-spoken tales. Tales of the Echowood is a fairy tale podcast, revolving around 10 stories told by an innkeeper to a mysterious traveler. This is out of my usual preferences and more in the fairy tale range, but the production quality is high and the stories are engaging and well-written, all feeding into the central mystery of the continent/multiverse spanning magical Echowood.
I had thought that there would be more movies or shows to talk about, but all the best things I've seen this year I've seen before, and as for new anime by and large much of what came out this year (that I've seen) isn't to my taste (except Chainsaw Man and Edgerunners, but those are already well acclaimed).
These, then, are all that shine out the most from my memory of the last year, however there are some others not mentioned here that I'd like to write about in greater detail. It's a bit all over the place, but what year isn't? Here's to another year in the dungeon.
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| Paul Echegoyen |
Oh yeah, SNAKE POOL is pretty fun too.
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