Some things that happened last year
Jan. 2nd, 2023 09:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
allekhaI'll do my end-of-year writing meme in another post, but overall life things:
Overall, it was a good year for me. I do wish I had done more Japanese and more original writing, and I really wish I had been able to get back to skating earlier. Goals for this year, I guess.
A bit about the books I read:
I had a 50/50 ratio of nonfiction to fiction and also a perfect split in male vs female authors. My average rating on GR was noticeably down this year, which tracks with how I felt about the book-books I finished. Unfortunately, I think that was mostly due to the fiction books, as many of them ended up disappointing me. I found The Luzhin Defense boring after Luzhin grows up, I hated Wings by Julie Gonzalez so much for becoming a very obvious (even to me) Christian metaphor about how you just need to belieeeeve with a lazy ending that I am trying to figure out what to do with the book since I can't throw hardcovers in the recycling, and I was sad to be disappointed in Milky Way Railroad. Part of it may have been the translation, and I felt like I might have enjoyed it more if I had encountered it in a literature class, but as it was, it felt like either I was missing some important context or that it was a children's nonsense story but not as fun as Alice in Wonderland, and I definitely felt its being incomplete. I liked the imagery, but that was it.
My favorite book of the year was The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris, though I also enormously enjoyed Dying Words by Nicholas Evans despite it being a little confused about its audience. My favorite fiction was The Changelings/Torikaebaya Monogatari, which I was glad to be able to obtain through ILL, and Despoilers of the Golden Empire, a scifi short story that's probably more fun if, like me, you know the twist before you begin. I also still have a lot of thoughts I need to get down about John Curry's biography.
Some of the games I played for the first time last year:
A bunch of itch.io games, either free or from the Ukraine bundle, many of which I enjoyed in the moment but most of which were not very memorable. The exception was Fit For a King, a game where you are a monarch who needs to find enough money to outspend your rival at a party, even if you have to go peering through every hidden passage and digging up graves to find it. Or have more fun talking to every person in the kingdom and changing the laws so you can marry everyone or everything. I think I spent an entire afternoon on it, and I had a blast.
Bury Me My Love was memorable for being a game that I enjoyed for its charming art and good writing before I found out it has an intentionally awful design choice that the devs claim is necessary because it is a Very Serious Game. That is, it has a bunch of endings it wants you to see, but as soon as you reach one, which I did about an hour in, you have to restart from the beginning with no way to speed up or skip text. While I would usually give a serious game some leeway on mechanics, 'you can't skip any text or rewind from an ending like in every other visual novel because Real Migrants don't get second chances :) but also we have twenty endings for you to experience! :)' just undermines the aim of their game.
Strange Horticulture was a game that should have been my jam, and I did enjoy playing it. But the gameplay mechanics and writing both fell a bit short for me. I loved the plant descriptions and the approach to quests, but I did not love having to manually label every plant as I discovered what it was. The map was so large that it was difficult to find things on it and yet ended up being mostly empty. None of the recurring characters were given enough depth to make them interesting to me; I think a smaller cast might have served it better. It's still a good game, just not one I'd rec enthusiastically.
The Red Strings Club was a cool, short cyberpunk game with lovely pixel art and an interesting mix of minigames, which I had previously played as they were also released separately. As you craft different cyborg implants to improve people's lives or try to extract information from people by mixing them drinks to activate different emotions, the game also asks you to ponder philosophical questions about human happiness, freedom, and technology. Would society be better if we went beyond antidepressants to something that meant we never felt pain or sadness? Should we use mind-control technology to stop rapes? Suicides? Racism? And even if so, is a giant megacorp the one to trust with that technology? Well, it's a cyperpunk game, so certainly not. (There is one instance of a trans person being deadnamed that I raised an eyebrow at, but I would note that one of the devs is trans and their inclusion of that moment was very deliberate.) I would recommend this, or any of Deconstructeam's free short games on itch.io as well.
Who's Lila is a game I looked at because it has a distinct 1-bit art style (like Obra Dinn) and picked up because it also has a unique gameplay mechanic: the main character struggles to express emotions, and when you converse with others, you have to manually manipulate his face into different expressions to control how he replies. It starts off seeming like a murder mystery, but it quickly goes off those rails into something much stranger. I managed to get by far one of the most confusing endings on my first go-through by missing a door in the art, but I kept going. I liked the themes about identity, although I'm not a fan of tarot motifs and that's also heavily featured. It's a game that made me want to hunt down every ending to figure out what was going on but resisted one final interpretation. I do think that it was too repetitive in parts (three endings are essentially the same except you take one action differently), although save-scumming helps a bit there. If you use saves well and are a fast reader, it's a shorter game than advertised - I did everything in under five hours - but those five hours stuck with me.
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist was hands-down my game of the year. While I do have some issues with the writing (should probably give that its own post sometime), it has gorgeous art, fun worldbuilding with its alien ecology, nails the 'just one more month' routine of raising sims, has the best gender system a game can have, and doesn't shy away from throwing some complexities into its utopian solarpunk world. I've played it at least four full times and gotten all the major endings. Most of the other child characters have very good development as they grow up, and the best of the romance scenes are amazing and drew me back to reread them multiple times. I also appreciate how easy it is to save scum, haha.
My Child Lebensborn was a game I played almost entirely on the last day of the year. It's another Serious Game, but unlike the above example, it uses its raising sim mechanics to complement the main theme of the game very well. You're the poor but happy adoptive parent of a child in 1950s Norway - a child who is half-German and born during the occupation, and nobody in town is happy about having a child of the enemy around. They go through some absolutely horrible experiences, and even if you're the best parent you can be, you can't stop it all from happening, because the abusers in town have locked onto a target that's entirely socially acceptable. The writing is very sensitive to the child and parent, and even those in town (who are themselves dealing with the trauma of WWII and taking it out in the worst way), and hits the emotional beats excellently, along with using interaction as a way to create emotional involvement in the player. I see the developers have a sequel in the works that's less about the historical backdrop of the Lebensborn children in Norway and more about helping the child cope with and heal from their experiences, and I'll definitely keep an eye out for it.
- I started my new job :)
- I had to wrestle with insurance for months on end :(
- I moved, which is now :) but was pretty :( through the process
- I got my arm fixed and another medical thing taken care of :)
- I went to Skate America :)
Overall, it was a good year for me. I do wish I had done more Japanese and more original writing, and I really wish I had been able to get back to skating earlier. Goals for this year, I guess.
A bit about the books I read:
I had a 50/50 ratio of nonfiction to fiction and also a perfect split in male vs female authors. My average rating on GR was noticeably down this year, which tracks with how I felt about the book-books I finished. Unfortunately, I think that was mostly due to the fiction books, as many of them ended up disappointing me. I found The Luzhin Defense boring after Luzhin grows up, I hated Wings by Julie Gonzalez so much for becoming a very obvious (even to me) Christian metaphor about how you just need to belieeeeve with a lazy ending that I am trying to figure out what to do with the book since I can't throw hardcovers in the recycling, and I was sad to be disappointed in Milky Way Railroad. Part of it may have been the translation, and I felt like I might have enjoyed it more if I had encountered it in a literature class, but as it was, it felt like either I was missing some important context or that it was a children's nonsense story but not as fun as Alice in Wonderland, and I definitely felt its being incomplete. I liked the imagery, but that was it.
My favorite book of the year was The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris, though I also enormously enjoyed Dying Words by Nicholas Evans despite it being a little confused about its audience. My favorite fiction was The Changelings/Torikaebaya Monogatari, which I was glad to be able to obtain through ILL, and Despoilers of the Golden Empire, a scifi short story that's probably more fun if, like me, you know the twist before you begin. I also still have a lot of thoughts I need to get down about John Curry's biography.
Some of the games I played for the first time last year:
A bunch of itch.io games, either free or from the Ukraine bundle, many of which I enjoyed in the moment but most of which were not very memorable. The exception was Fit For a King, a game where you are a monarch who needs to find enough money to outspend your rival at a party, even if you have to go peering through every hidden passage and digging up graves to find it. Or have more fun talking to every person in the kingdom and changing the laws so you can marry everyone or everything. I think I spent an entire afternoon on it, and I had a blast.
Bury Me My Love was memorable for being a game that I enjoyed for its charming art and good writing before I found out it has an intentionally awful design choice that the devs claim is necessary because it is a Very Serious Game. That is, it has a bunch of endings it wants you to see, but as soon as you reach one, which I did about an hour in, you have to restart from the beginning with no way to speed up or skip text. While I would usually give a serious game some leeway on mechanics, 'you can't skip any text or rewind from an ending like in every other visual novel because Real Migrants don't get second chances :) but also we have twenty endings for you to experience! :)' just undermines the aim of their game.
Strange Horticulture was a game that should have been my jam, and I did enjoy playing it. But the gameplay mechanics and writing both fell a bit short for me. I loved the plant descriptions and the approach to quests, but I did not love having to manually label every plant as I discovered what it was. The map was so large that it was difficult to find things on it and yet ended up being mostly empty. None of the recurring characters were given enough depth to make them interesting to me; I think a smaller cast might have served it better. It's still a good game, just not one I'd rec enthusiastically.
The Red Strings Club was a cool, short cyberpunk game with lovely pixel art and an interesting mix of minigames, which I had previously played as they were also released separately. As you craft different cyborg implants to improve people's lives or try to extract information from people by mixing them drinks to activate different emotions, the game also asks you to ponder philosophical questions about human happiness, freedom, and technology. Would society be better if we went beyond antidepressants to something that meant we never felt pain or sadness? Should we use mind-control technology to stop rapes? Suicides? Racism? And even if so, is a giant megacorp the one to trust with that technology? Well, it's a cyperpunk game, so certainly not. (There is one instance of a trans person being deadnamed that I raised an eyebrow at, but I would note that one of the devs is trans and their inclusion of that moment was very deliberate.) I would recommend this, or any of Deconstructeam's free short games on itch.io as well.
Who's Lila is a game I looked at because it has a distinct 1-bit art style (like Obra Dinn) and picked up because it also has a unique gameplay mechanic: the main character struggles to express emotions, and when you converse with others, you have to manually manipulate his face into different expressions to control how he replies. It starts off seeming like a murder mystery, but it quickly goes off those rails into something much stranger. I managed to get by far one of the most confusing endings on my first go-through by missing a door in the art, but I kept going. I liked the themes about identity, although I'm not a fan of tarot motifs and that's also heavily featured. It's a game that made me want to hunt down every ending to figure out what was going on but resisted one final interpretation. I do think that it was too repetitive in parts (three endings are essentially the same except you take one action differently), although save-scumming helps a bit there. If you use saves well and are a fast reader, it's a shorter game than advertised - I did everything in under five hours - but those five hours stuck with me.
I Was a Teenage Exocolonist was hands-down my game of the year. While I do have some issues with the writing (should probably give that its own post sometime), it has gorgeous art, fun worldbuilding with its alien ecology, nails the 'just one more month' routine of raising sims, has the best gender system a game can have, and doesn't shy away from throwing some complexities into its utopian solarpunk world. I've played it at least four full times and gotten all the major endings. Most of the other child characters have very good development as they grow up, and the best of the romance scenes are amazing and drew me back to reread them multiple times. I also appreciate how easy it is to save scum, haha.
My Child Lebensborn was a game I played almost entirely on the last day of the year. It's another Serious Game, but unlike the above example, it uses its raising sim mechanics to complement the main theme of the game very well. You're the poor but happy adoptive parent of a child in 1950s Norway - a child who is half-German and born during the occupation, and nobody in town is happy about having a child of the enemy around. They go through some absolutely horrible experiences, and even if you're the best parent you can be, you can't stop it all from happening, because the abusers in town have locked onto a target that's entirely socially acceptable. The writing is very sensitive to the child and parent, and even those in town (who are themselves dealing with the trauma of WWII and taking it out in the worst way), and hits the emotional beats excellently, along with using interaction as a way to create emotional involvement in the player. I see the developers have a sequel in the works that's less about the historical backdrop of the Lebensborn children in Norway and more about helping the child cope with and heal from their experiences, and I'll definitely keep an eye out for it.
