What I've Enjoyed - the first half of 2022

16th of July. It’s been about a month since I finished the final exams of my geography degree at Cambridge. I spent a lot of the final few weeks of the course thinking about all the things I was going to have the time to do once it was over, but once I actually woke up the day after I found no energy or desire at all. I’m still in that state now, so I’ve decided to share some of the things I’ve enjoyed over the first half of 2022 to try and jerk me into looking at some new things. I’ll do some games first then some essays I read online.

There’s no other place I can start than Disco Elysium. It might honestly be the best video game ever - it’s undoubtedly elevated the medium singlehandedly and will hold influence for a long time. It’s a piece of literature that combines the thematic richness of a great novel with the interactiveness of a visual novel, weaving this heart-wrenching story that engages with politics, colonialism, race, depression, relationships, policing, and - most crucially - hope. The artstyle and soundtrack are also ridiculously good. My only real complaint is that sometimes the RPG mechanics and especially the dice roll percentages on certain ‘gating’ checks can really hamper the flow of play if you’re more of a ‘casual’ player, limiting the accessibility of this essential masterpiece for those not familiar with the genre - a real shame when everyone should play this.

In January I finally got around to Fez, a weird indie puzzle game from 2012 - and a particular moment when indie games were first hitting it big. What sets it apart from some of its more pretentious peers (especially Braid) is that the intrigue and mysticism which lingers in the background actually goes beyond surface level set-dressing. You explore the empty ruins of this ancient world that’s haunted by mystery - cryptic messages, forgotten languages, signs that once meant something but are now meaningless under your gaze. In a word, it is incredibly eerie.

One game I have actually played post-exams is Miasmata, which is similar to Fez in that it came out in 2012 and is also incredibly eerie. You wake up on the shores of an island, occupied only by wilderness and abandoned research camps. You have to travel around this island as you would in real life, orienteering using a hand-sketched map, a compass, and triangulation to locate yourself. This makes you pay close attention to your environment, which feels incredibly real - forests feel like forests, not like video game forests. There’s also this brilliant sense of immersion and embodiedness, with your breath constantly rattling and your feet always faltering: the exaggerated movement acceleration in the game means that the biggest threat you face is jogging too quickly and falling down a slope, reflexively covering your face as you fall and, as you climb back to your feet, realising you’ve lost track of where you are.

I also played some more explicitly narrative games: Umurangi Generation and Heaven Will Be Mine. Both are very queer and punky but provide a fun contrast with each other. Umurangi is a photography game with no dialogue where you play as a youth living in urban New Zealand. Your assignments to take photos of certain subjects quickly become sidelined as the game puts you into the position of a refugee of conflict, or climate change, or something else - you never really know: you just take pictures of things from your perspective. It has some really fun themes of indigeneity, urbanity, dystopia and hope. It’s only about 2-3 hours long, and has a banging soundtrack - there’s no excuse to not try this one.

Heaven Will Be Mine is, on the other hand, a visual novel that’s almost exclusively text, in which you play as one of three women. Each is a mech pilot, fighting in a three-way factional war across the solar system to determine whether humanity should remain in space or return to Earth. Philosophical discussions abound about politics, hope, queerness, trauma and what it means to be human. It veers rapidly between intense romance, heartbreaking sadness, and bittersweet hope. Very well written, although the prose can get very dense at times, with another great soundtrack.

Now, a rapid bonus round of essays/podcasts:

• Judith Kampfiner did a great adaptation of SHADOWBAHN by Steve Erickson for BBC Radio 4. It’s about an hour long and is a great piece of weird fiction that focuses on modernity and people. I’ll put the description here: “The Twin Towers have reappeared in South Dakota in 2021. A road trip. A play list. Elvis had died but the twin brother who in reality was stillborn lives and can't get Elvis out of his head.”
• I’ve been using TikTok for probably almost a year now. One of the main things I’ve learnt is that the algorithm is like a churning primordial soup of content- you can either let it sweep you along helplessly, or you can gently guide yourself and ride certain currents. I have cultivated my algorithm so that around half of it is Chinese peasants cooking - it’s very good. However, I’m increasingly seeing a strain of content that’s mostly memes about being mentally ill (depression, schizophrenia, bpd, did) - which is very unusual and troubling. Many of these memes are quite old, and involve relating oneself to fictional characters, with anime characters such as Lain from Serial Experiments Lain or Shinji and Misato from Evangelion especially common. I’ve parodied this consciously when I’ve jokingly called myself ‘Smileycore’ (after John Le Carré’s George Smiley). A few days ago I found an interesting blog post that discusses this (rather disturbing) phenomenon.
• Back in 2019 I saw a brilliant stage adaptation of Heart of Darkness in Birmingham. It was set in an alternate history where Europe was devastated after World War Two, existing in a grinding stalemate where industrial capitalism had incorporated the concentration camp as a primary mode of production. These crippled European nations were unable to prevent their colonies in Africa from revolting and becoming independent, allowing them to modernise rapidly. Marlowe in this adaptation is a female black detective who has to travel to a ravaged London to find Kurtz, who runs one of these camps. It’s a really fun transformative inversion which goes well beyond a simple provocative twist on the story, spending a lot of time doing fun deconstructive stuff about the process of adaptation itself, looking at Apocalypse Now and the narrative structure and stuff. It also had a very nice staging using three projected screens - really amazing. Earlier this year I found out it was actually uploaded online by the theatre company once the run was complete - would highly recommend.

I've got a few others stored up, but I'm going to keep them for the end of the year, because I might be using them in something else. Hope you found this interesting.