I actually played Myst initially back in late January - I had imagined then that I would have spoken about it in the February instalment of this series (I had also imagined in that February instalment that I'd spend a year on a terraria world - which I just didn't do 😭 sorry past me). I ended up putting Myst on hiatus at the end of January with the thought that I would come back to it eventually. It has been 9 months - and I realise now that ain't happening. So I have shelved this title - but still have some interesting things to say on it, so here we are.

I ended up buying Myst due to partially watching a video by YouTuber HBomberGuy - specifically his Patreon exclusive video on Myst. I actually knew very little about the title before this point, outside of having heard it mentioned here and there on the tongues of YouTube creators several years older than me (how fitting therefore that I'd learn more deeply once more from YouTube). I watched enough of the video to have the game catch my interest. A highly influential puzzle game that synthesises its lore and story with its puzzles? A classic within the PC gaming medium? Honestly that second aspect was enough to have me sold (alongside it's cheap price tag!) so I stopped the video partway through to avoid collecting more spoilers and bought the game.

I ended up playing Myst (with a friend tagging along watching) for about 2 hours. When I started it was great! Everything that I was told about the game was working for me. The puzzles felt satisfying to solve, I was interesting in learning about the lore - since it felt like gaining any epistemic foothold was necessary to climb what was otherwise a daunting climb. I finally cracked how exactly I could activate a cog contraption and warped to another world! And then... I got stuck. Very stuck in fact. There was a puzzle where I had seen basically all the constituent parts but couldn't for the life of me figure out how it came together. Even my friend was stumped. We bumbled around for maybe about 15-20 minutes trying anything in our power to alleviate it (in this time I started to find the traversal disorienting) but couldn't figure it out. So I called it quits that day. And then never returned to it.

I was reminded of Myst a lot later when watching a video by Patricia Taxxon (on her second channel Puppyhelic Triangle). She made a video on the game Void Stranger and why she dropped it (you can find it here). Now I quite liked Void Stranger and don't agree fully with a lot of the points made against it. However what's of importance here is a distinction she makes near the end between what she considered (actual) puzzle games and riddle games - between games that present you with systems that you work through to reason your way to solutions and games where you do association with elements in the right ways to 'riddle' your way into solutions. She placed Myst within this second category. I resonated with this description for Myst, where progress was blocked not because I had missed something, not because my line of thinking was unreasonable but just that I wasn't on the right wavelength.

This month I finished that Hbomberguy review having finally admitted to myself that I wasn't putting Myst 'on-hold' but rather that I had dropped the title. Therefore I didn't have to worry about spoilers from the review. It was funny now watching him wax lyrical about a game that just didn't click for me. A lot of it was me going "yeah that makes sense" and "yeah that certainly does seem well designed" and "oh wow that's pretty interesting" with a few "hey you're really trying to twist everything into a positive here". In the end I came away thinking "yeah I see why this paved new ground on release" but had to ultimately accept that it didn't pave that ground for me. He did note that the game necessarily was designed without the ability to be accessible or work for everyone. I'm generally of the opinion that this is an OK design decision if it leads to a much much better experience for those for whom it does click with. I just have to admit that wasn't me.

Yet another title that I played earlier this year that I'm coming back to now to write about. Curses is a game that I came to know through a friend, who had played it when he was younger - as one of the few video games he had ever played. It's an interactive fiction (IF) title, which is to say its primarily a text based adventure game where one interacts with its story through inputting commands. Released in 1993 it feels like a relic of its own past. When I think of text adventure I think of really early computer games, back when graphical real-estate was too expensive to bother with. From my perspective at the very least it seemed as though the video game medium as a whole moved away from this style of video game once it because technologically and economically feasible to do so. The jump seems obvious in a sense, right? Graphics equals more information about the worlds you traverse, and as such are more immersive. Is that true though? I certainly have had many books transport me into worlds that felt more real than the ones in movies or games. In some sense, a visual input given by a movie or game is exclusionary. It's a world captured within a box, that lives within a machine that we are simply privy to looking into. But a well crafted literary work; well that is able to give one the necessary tools to construct the world around them. As such there isn't that same separation between person and world. Sure, you can imagine yourself in the world presented through a movie but no matter what the perspective is locked to the camera and you are being shared a glimpse through them. You observe but don't inhabit.

While the rest of the games industry moved onto visuals as their preferred choice of creating engaging and immersive experience, the interactive fiction genre lingered on, if much smaller in scope. From the cursory reading I've done, it seems like a lot of the IF creators are themselves writers or poets or similar. A lot of outsider artists to the medium. This makes sense. For one, these people would see the potential for more literary focused games - utilising the game aspect as a way of deepening the narrative experience of a fiction first and foremost, and also creating an IF game is likely an easy way to do. It's like the many visual artists who have made RPGMaker games over the years - which allows for easy game creation that gives them an outlet to express in a primarily visually creative manner. IF is a genre that I will freely admit to being quite unacquainted with. Honestly before Curses I'm not sure if I had played any IF titles. I certainly would like to get more acquainted with the genre. If I'm correct in my assumption that the genre today is compromised of people with mainly a literary rather than video game background I imagine it'll be a genre filled with many interesting ideas not seen in other video games.

Before I start to talk about Curses, I do want to give it and it's creator due for what they represent in the landscape of IF games. To my understanding, Curses is the first game developed in the Inform programming language, developed by the game's creator - Graham Nelson. The Inform language today is widely used to create IF games given that it made creating them much more accessible. Curses itself serves as a landmark title within the IF space and is lauded for pushing the medium forward. Graham Nelson himself is a very interesting character and you can read about him in an interview by The Digital Antiquarian here.

So, onto curses - how is it? Well in the first 5 minutes I lost because I left the attic prematurely. Curses is a hard game. In fact, the IF Wiki rates it's difficulty as cruel - the highest difficulty on IF Wiki. The game is very open ended and while there are many things to do, there are equally many ways to screw it up. To be fair, many of the ways it ends poorly are often foreseeable. In the case of leaving the attic, you're in the attic in the first place to find a map - that's the conceit of the game. Leaving the attic and giving up is clearly stated as the undesirable thing to do. Honestly, putting this lose condition right at the start sets the tone right away - don't just try things for the hell of it, think before you act. I will admit however that I did use a guide. Playing with the friend who suggested the game to me, he admitted that he had used it when he was younger so that he could actually progress the game. And that's fair. The game does unfortunately seem like it'd be trial and error at many times running from room to room trying to figure out what you haven't interacted with yet. Especially at the start where nearly everything is open to you and it's hard to figure out what exactly the game wants you to be doing. This isn't helped by the lack of a game map - you get a good sense of the layout as you traverse more and more but at the start it can be really disorienting. And hey, maybe that's intentional! But it wasn't - for us at least - the most fun way to play which was to try and push the narrative forward as to see what the game possessed. Whenever progression felt sensical or that I could figure out things without looking them up I did but whenever I truly felt stuck I consulted a guide (and you know what, half of the time it felt like I wouldn't have thought of what I was meant to do). In a sense it certainly took away from the original experience, but I was already doing so by not playing in 1993 so...

[Medium Spoilers Start]

The world itself? It's great. The mansion the character inhabits feels endlessly sprawling - elevated by the amount of rooms, passages and so on. The descriptions give you enough to work with in filling out the space that by the end I had a full copy of this game's world in my mind to reference. The writing is very witty and was almost always a blast to read and you also get drops as to the writer's own literary influences - including an entire area dedicated to references to the works of T.S. Eliot. The lore of the game runs deep and yet it never is shoved directly in your face. The plot largely revolves around the MC's family curse and as such a lot of care is put into fleshing out the mystery of what that curse could be by learning about the vast amount of family members. Every time you find a name you scramble to find out if there's an entry in your family history book to reference. Once you connect the dots between who two people are the gears in your mind start to churn. It's here I think where Curses really grips itself into you and you get engaged in this world and uncovering what that world has to offer.

[Medium Spoilers End]

I do have to admit another thing however - I haven't finished Curses. Perhaps one day I will but honestly I have no drive at the moment to do so. I feel as though I had seen a lot of what I would want to see in order to have gotten what I wanted from the game. Perhaps in future, having played more IF titles I could see myself returning to explore once more the Mildrew's mansion but even with my short time with the title I can say confidently that I have fondness for this weird title.

I feel like I have a weird relationship with web 2.0. I was born just too late to actually experience web 2.0 for myself. As I got onto the internet at like 5 (supervised, mind) I definitely would have caught the tail end of that era but it's certainly not something I remember well at all. Most of my formative internet memories are on bigger collected sites like Scratch, DeviantArt and YouTube - or if it was interest specific then database sites such Serebii (for Pokémon). I wouldn't really consider myself someone who would feasibly have genuine nostalgia for that era of the internet. And yet, I definitely still do feel some sort of affinity for my internal conception of web 2.0. Perhaps in the same way that I have an affinity for the SNES, or N64 in borrowed nostalgia from the YouTubers I watched from the generation above me. I mean to some extent this website even was created in part as an homage to a perceived anarchist spirit I attribute to that era - carving out a space of your own for yourself not beholden to others. Pouring work into learning enough HTML and CSS to cobble something that's so individually tailored. I think I share in a sense of sadness amongst other internet obsessed tech freaks my age about missing that old era that we never got to experience. Perhaps we are simply putting on the rose tinted glasses of those who came before us but in an era where meaningful expression is limited through large corporations that conglomerate online speech it can be enticing to believe in the image of a decentralised internet - even if it is a construction.

There is one way that I do directly interface with the old web however, and its through the internet archive's wayback machine. Honestly it's genuinely a marvel that such a large digital archive exists to begin with and before saying anything else I just want to say if you're not sending love towards the internet archive please do. Anyway, I've spent my fair share of time crawling the internet archive - both as a nostalgia exercise and also to find information buried in the annuls of history. In a sense I am interfacing with web 2.0 directly by pulling up the pages, bouncing between them and exploring the entangled mesh of websites. Learning more about the history of my university course and department from old web listing (and even old lecture notes!) was so much fun. It's this sense of fun that Hypnospace Outlaw taps into and exploits beautifully (yes finally we are talking about the game).

[Medium Spoilers Start]

The basic premise of Hypnospace Outlaw is that you're effectively an internet moderator for a tech company - scouring the internet they have set up in order to catch harassment, service violations and other such cybercrimes. It's quite a brilliant angle to set such an experience. If you were just a regular user the game would feel aimless. After all internet usage isn't like a journey. But what does feel like a journey, or a challenge is scouring for something specific - something you have the drive to uncover. There is always some goal you're working towards but that isn't to say that the main objective is all that is driving your progress. Ofttimes the main goal is hard to find or requires a *lot* of digging to uncover. I imagine if you only worked towards them you'd quickly get bored or frustrated. And you do. And then, you just meander and find cool shit. There is so much interesting content strewn about the game - much of it seemingly irrelevant to the main quest. It's very impressive just how much work was put into building a whole suite of fake webpages - from fake histories to fake communities to fake IPs to fake drama and relationships between these constructed netizens. Every page feels like a little gold mine where you not only find out new information that contributes to the worldbuilding but often that worldbuilding helps you with your main quest. You meander and suddenly you've found yourself at a page which is actually relevant to solving the main quest and you're back to making in game progress. It's impressive just how well the game flows in this manner repeatedly to help create an experience that fails to feel dull at any moment. Exploration into one domain for your own interest can crop up hours later as story crucial. For example, I early on found a song I really liked with no way to download or buy it in game. As such I made it my mission to figure out how to do so, which led me to making it pretty far into a fetch quest attempting to get access to a filesharing platform to get download links to the song I wanted. I totally assumed that this was some special side content before it became literally apart of the main quest - which was so rewarding when I had realised I had already completed most of the quest independently for fun to satiate my own curiosity.

[Medium Spoilers End]

In many ways Hypnospace Outlaw doesn't really feel like a game. As alluded to before it feels so much more like my own personal wayback binges than a traditional video game experience which comes through in its unorthodox presentation as an OS interface. As someone who has also interfaces with actual old OS through emulators (looking at you Windows 95 and DOS and PC-98 and...) it *again* evokes that sort of nostalgia over me - pulling from an area I don't see many games tap into. This, I feel is what makes the game come across as wholly unique. Even other OS based UIs in other games such as in Needy Streamer Overdose feel like just aesthetic dressings for gamified systems, whereas Hypnospace Outlaw fully commits to its own vibe wholesale. It's actually impressive just how much effort went into developing this world, from the wealth of songs, art, poetry, 3D modelling and so on it oozes passion from every corner of this digital world. It definitely ranks as one of the most aesthetically interesting titles I've played this year, alongside Hylics.

[Heavy Spoilers Start]

I will admit that I didn't actually 'finish' the game (I put finish in quotes as I'm not sure if its meant to be postgame content or not). The game eventually fast-forwards to the modern day, as you boot back up HypnOS as one of the only people left with a working enforcer headgear. You're then given the task of archiving the whole of the old web, through guidance from a few suggested leads to keep you on track. It threw me for a loop, suddenly I *was* in back in the seat of the wayback machine (even the controls were similar - being able to flick through pages between different times). It's here where I was confronted with my measly 35% completion rate and challenges I had no idea where to start - let alone the motivation. So I stopped playing. Maybe I'll come back to chip away at it but at the moment I was pretty satiated with what I had done.

Getting back to discussing the themes of the game, I definitely felt it push back against the construction of the old web I had in my head. Already in this fictional 1999 there is a lot of tension between corporate interests and the interests of actual users. From limiting forums for people to express themselves, to blatant double standards, to blocking other routes to internet access and expression from competitors, we already see the fight between a free versus a controlled internet. And beyond this we see echoes of internet patterns we see today - conspiracies, political echo boxing and so on. The internet is certainly anarchistic in Hypnospace Outlaw, but not always in ways that lead to beneficial outcomes. In that sense, it breaks down the disparities between the internet of today and the internet of them and in the process refix the rose tinted glasses to see more accurately. According to Hypnospace Outlaw, there was never really an internet golden age, and if we want to see one, we need be looking forward and not back.

Play it here: [Hornets by Kitty Horrorshow](https://kittyhorrorshow.itch.io/hornets)

[Heavy Spoilers Start]

Hornets is a short text game about a world infested by hornets by your hands. Given its length there isn't an especially large amount of things I feel that I have to say about the title. The game opens with little exposition and you slowly learn about the ruin the world is in through the excellent narration you receive from each area. In this sense, the game benefits from being text only as you build up the world in your mind gradually and come to ingest the scale of the destruction at play in this world - something that might be lost on a player taking it all in at once visually. As you wander you slowly pick up different items and make incremental progress. The climax of the game is reached when reach a tower with all the items you've gathered to try and burn all the hornets away. It does not work. You cannot challenge the Gods with the Gods' own tools.

I would have imagined that this ending would have maybe hit more if I felt like I could have done something. Funnily enough from the very start I felt the game instil a tone of futility. In every street there are corpses of the dead - the only living soul dies after I answer him that I summoned the hornets because I could. Even if I could burn the hornets, what would I even get? An empty world that echoes from all around the guilt my character carries. It feels very futile, even pitiful that the main character tries at all even. But that in itself isn't scary, it's just sad. Maybe that's the point.

Can't believe I got gaybaited by this movie 😭.

[Light Spoilers Start]

This film really didn't do it for me. I found it hard to be invested at what was going on. The main trio of characters just aren't likeable - Patrick is an asshole, Art is painfully boring and Tashi is just insane. This could lead to an interesting dynamic but for me it never hooked. As a result it's hard for me to root for anyone here. It's not helped by the constant back and forth between time periods making for - at times - a disorienting narrative where you're having to piece together the actual course of events. I also wasn't a fan of the music choices for the tennis scenes.

[Light Spoilers End]

Many of the cinematographic choices are let's say - inspired. I will say though, the part where you're the tennis ball in a match is so fucking funny I need to give whoever came up with that their due.

An insanely beautiful show that will no doubts push the medium of animation forward in major ways. I totally expect to see films and shows inspired by its (and Spiderverse's) art direction as time moves forward. The music too, is stellar and the character designs are wonderful. Saying all that.... the plot is wacky. Season 1 less so than season 2 but it feels as though with the budget high on each episode the plot had to be condensed far stricter than the plot could manage. There's just so much going on always with not enough time to service it. Plotlines start and fizzle out. Characters and their dynamics are often left totally unexplored. Arcane is big, flashy, bold, a step forward, and also kind of a mess. I can't help but wish for a version that let itself breathe a little but I know that to do so would be to compromise on everything else. So in a sense I'm happy it is this way to allow for it to inspire and lead the way for more boundary pushing productions.

I recently rewatched this movie in the cinema with a friend, for a UK wide re-release of the movie. I had seen the film before; on YouTube; on an iPad; probably in terrible quality given how bad my internet was back then. Certainly not the best way to watch it but I enjoyed it then and expected to enjoy it now. And I did! As I imagined, seeing it on the big screen certainly helped, especially musically and overall I was left quite impressed by the film.

The film in question is a companion piece to the Daft Punk album Discovery. Quite literally so, the film is set to the album, and the story progresses alongside the song list. There is no dialogue, and sound effects are scant. In essence you are just listening to the album with a visual narrative playing on top. That in itself is a very interesting creative choice I haven't seen anywhere else. Confession time - I'm not much of an album listener. In general I'm quite a 'casual' music listener, listening less for intaking the artistic intent and more for just brain-off enjoyment. Of course in some sense I'm forced to engage with it artistically as it primes me to feel in certain ways musically but in general I wouldn't say that I tackle music on its own terms, which largely albums are asking you to do. Interstella 5555 forces me to take in Discovery as a cohesive work - as something that's meant exist with its song subunits necessarily. When I came out of watching the film initially, I bought the album on CD (having seen it in my local charity shop for cheap) and it's still - to this day - the only CD I own. It's hard for me to think about the songs in Discovery as single standalone units when they feel so inherently connected to the others in the catalogue. In one sense it's props to Daft Punk but more so it's props to the film. Now to be fair here, Interstella 5555 cheats here a little. When I think of said cohesion I think of the visual storytelling of the movie rather than strictly the songs in itself. But the movie is an extension of the album as secondary media so in that sense it is part of the experience of the album itself so maybe I'll let that slide.

Honestly when it comes to the movie itself, I'm not sure if I have anything too interesting to say. The plot is kinda wacky - in the way that if you think about it for too long it definitely feels like there are serious plot holes. I'm honestly ok leaving these to slide away for my own personal intake because I think that the plot serves an almost secondary function to the vibes and acts as supplementary to the music and delivering that experience - an experience I didn't feel was diminished because at some point the plot started to lose me a little near the end. I also love the style of this film. It certainly feels very dated to its time as an early 2000s anime but it's the style I grew up on in many ways and as such I have a nostalgic reverence for it I can't shake. Overall I really loved this film.

Oh also afterwards they showed a few music videos for other non Discovery Daft Punk songs and I gotta say I fuck heavy w the dog guy he rocks.

Dr Robotnik super laser PISSED on the moon and it was all I could have ever wanted. 10/10 no notes, this is the best Sonic film so far.