Bookpost: Notes from a Regicide, Blind Alley, some games

Adam de Souza — Blind Alley (webcomic backlog)

May 27

Readable online.

This comic rules! In proper old internet style, I learned about it because K.C. Green did a guest strip for it and posted it on his tumblr.

There seems to be a slow-burn plot going, a slight and gradual gravity pulling together these threads of psychic kids, cryptids, mechanical surveillance, questing animals, and semi-absent parents. But mostly what we've got here is a very classic (almost Peanuts-y) unsupervised kids comic strip with wry, biting humor and an incredibly special melancholy air, which somehow feels post-apocalyptic despite plenty of evidence of technological civilization in working order. (That last bit is an intensely familiar sensation from the hazy corners of my own childhood.)

I feel like I must have heard the name Adam de Souza before, but I can't for the life of me remember the context. I dug a bit and he's done some other stuff, but nothing I immediately recognized. He's clearly amazing though.

Bonus Level: Schildmaid MX

June ??

A horizontally-scrolling indie shmup, based around a three-phase bullet absorption semi-polarity mechanic.

I only played this briefly, because it didn't grab me; the production values were quite nice (so much juice!), but I didn't vibe with the shooting fundamentals and the levels and bosses felt pretty same-y. Also it was constantly popping up a stream of idle-game style achievement progress windows, which is how I learned I don't like that.

Bonus Level: The Roottrees are Dead

June 27

A mystery-solving game that merges the "index-em-up" gameplay of A Hand with Many Fingers and Her Story with the "identify three to confirm" gameplay of Return of the Obra Dinn. So effectively a very large old-school game magazine logic grid puzzle with a wide array of textual and visual clues, but you have to dig for the clues before you can use them on the grid.

This was pretty good! I had heard about it earlier and wrote it off because I found the art offputting, but a friend gave it a strong enough recommendation to make me reconsider, and I ended up eating the whole thing in a night or two. (I was in the mood for a logic grid.)

I really liked how the optional hint system in this was implemented. There's a duck you can click when you're stuck, and instead of giving you a direct hint about a character or event, it'll say things like "I wonder if there's more trails we could follow from X piece of evidence?" It ends up being just enough of a nudge to get you back on track without spoiling the fun.

Gamedev note: Godot engine. We're firmly in the second or third generation of good and ambitious games made in Godot, which is pretty neat.

Isaac Fellman — Notes from a Regicide

June 5

Ruth read this a month or two later during our big backpacking trip, and then while we were hiking she said “Hey, what genre is this, anyway? Because it feels like historical fiction, but it’s kind of the opposite.” I went with “realistic science fiction” (it’s 1000+ years in the future, but other than the stone yard the setting is 100% mundane), but she’s totally right about the historical fiction thing.

This is largely because of the half-setting of Stephensport, which our New York-born framing narrator Griffon absolutely perceives as a place from a different era, and which was deliberately constructed by its founders to function as a land out of time. (What a soul-melting place to live, tbh.)

That New York vs. Stephensport dichotomy is sort of the book's structural and science-fictional engine — it alternates chapters of Etoine's memoir of Stephensport with chapters of Griffon's memoir of living in New York with Etoine and Zaffre, from his teens onward, and to my eye the big difference between New York and Stephensport is how they comprehend the past. The seas have risen significantly (New York feels more like a Venice) and we've undergone a pretty significant technological collapse — electricity is rare and special-purpose, monumental steel-and-concrete architecture is a historical oddity, computers and microcontrollers are long gone. But New York keeps moving forward and changing; often recapitulating or rhyming with our own era's developments, sure, but still always putting one step in front of the last step. Interested in the past, but not possessed by it. Meanwhile, Stephensport has a death-grip on a pre-collapse fever-dream, frozen in a faux-utopian designed society. Of course it all falls down eventually, into something that, at least for the coming generation or two, seems much worse. But maybe not forever, and after all, the whole ruckus seemed driven by peoples' desire to have some kind of present and future, not just a past. I wouldn't assume a place with people like Sister Emma in it is down for good; all things pass, including that asshole Saul Cormé.

This is sort of a story about a failed revolution, the sorts of twists and turns in your life that might lead you into a doomed revolution, and the strange second acts you might live after the suppression of that revolution fails to eradicate you. But it’s mostly a story about trans resilience and tenacity and joy, and a defiant assertion that our people’s light will never go out.

Like the other Fellman book I’ve read (Breath of the Sun), this left me with a ton of, let’s say “satisfyingly unanswered questions.”