What did I enjoy in 2022?

Arriving at the end of the year, it’s time for me to recount some of the things that I’ve really appreciated. While I got my degree and did quite well, I’ve found it incredibly difficult to actually enjoy or even stick with anything. I did write a post on the things that I enjoyed in the first half of the year to try and jolt me out of this state, but it largely failed. The things itemised below, therefore, really did grab my attention. I’ll start off with a few games (including tabletop games), then do some films, then music, then podcasts and music, before maybe finishing with a list of the things that - despite me failing to carry through - I still think are notable.

I’ll begin with a game that actually came out this year. Signalis is a 2.5D sci-fi survival-horror game about a combat-engineer android trying to find a woman who means a lot to her. It takes place in a highly authoritarian revolutionary-secessionist state, whose grim oppression provides an excellent background to the immediate terror you experience. Signalis’ aesthetic is the standout feature here - stark reds, blacks, and whites, with heavy usage of the German and Japanese languages - a detail that would be gauche if the developers themselves weren’t both from Germany (it’s actually really nice to see non-Anglo narrative games). A close second is the decision to frequently splice in first person point-and-click-adventure-game segments when interacting with particular machines or looking at certain areas. The gameplay is split between genre-standard simple combat which mostly serves to exhaust your resources, and an excellently set series of puzzles which operate at just the right level of difficulty. The weakest element of the game is the incorporation of cosmic-horror elements, which don’t subtract from the experience but seem to be by far the least essential element of the story and atmosphere, serving mostly to distract from the heartbreaking emotional core through the very clumsy direct usage of The King In Yellow. Furthermore, while the game is so obviously a love-letter to the survival-horror genre, the decision to have different endings which occur based on your playstyle means that unlucky players will experience an ending which will leave you empty in a bad way, as opposed to a good way, for the ‘Proper’ ending. These flaws are absolutely minor, however. This is an all-timer and an absolute must-play - a neat ten hours which can’t be refused. I played with a notepad, taking notes on the puzzles and the story elements (particularly character names), something I felt heightened the experience and would recommend highly.

Signalis is the real showcase for games this year (besides Disco Elysium). I’ll go over some other games in a bit less detail now:

• Northern Journey came out in 2021, but feels like it dropped out a time-portal from an alternate 2003 where none of the paradigms which dominate campaign first-person-shooters had come to be. It is thoroughly one of the most idiosyncratic and unique games I have ever played and I love it. It describes itself as a ‘happysad’ adventure through a ‘Northern’ (Scandinavian folklore inspired) land, meaning that you would primarily expect to be fighting trolls and gnomes and such, yet it actually primarily pits you against roughly 50 types of insects. The element that best defines Northern Journey is its breakneck pace. No enemy is re-used ever. Really interesting obstacles and environmental hazards are posed and then never seen again. The best example is that in one level there is an anthill which spews out ants that attack you when you get near. You don’t have to interact with or even go near this ant hill. Next to the anthill is a tower with 2D ghosts that chase you while you’re inside it. Neither of these are seen elsewhere. There’s a fucking PARAGLIDER SECTION with a fully-formed physics section which is used ONCE, for literally FIVE MINUTES out of an EIGHT HOUR runtime. It’s very unusual but also probably the most unique and personal game I’ve ever played. A very high recommendation.
• I replayed some of Left 4 Dead (2) and was shocked by how well it has aged. The chaotic climax of the first level of the first campaign (Dead Center), where the elevator doors open and you’re suddenly in a burning hotel spraying down sprinting smoke-shrouded silhouettes against the roaring flames, is probably the most memorable five minutes of game-playing I’ve had this year. A totally different approach to horror - and it *is* genuinely scary - that relies on pure chaos and being totally overwhelmed. L4D2 still hasn’t been beaten, despite every single 4-player co-op PvE game to this day still basically being a carbon copy of it (down to the archetypes of the special infected). ADDENDUM: A few days later, I've just played the campaign 'Hard Rain'. It's the conceit of obscured vision all the way dialed up, taking place in a horrible blinding and pelting rainstorm which totally inundates the built landscape in a disturbingly realistic way. I must presume that, with the game being set in suburban-to-rural Louisiana (in a commendably realist way too, a characteristic shared by the excellent player characters), Valve is retreading the scenes witnessed by Americans after Hurricane Katrina just four years before. It might be the best campaign for L4D(2).
• I also had my first experiences with proper VR. Half Life Alyx is an amazing game, especially when the firefights get more chaotic. It’s very funny that you see people doing military simulations in VR and aiming down the sights and such when I reflexively try to aim through hand-eye-coordination while my other hand is outstretched en garde like I’m fencing. My issue with VR is that all the other games seem to be shit and little more than tech demos. Because I haven’t worked out how to mod in custom songs, even Beat Saber is horrendous and basically unplayable due to its awful song library.
• I’ve played a lot of really good indie horror/walking sims. The people at Haunted PS1 and DreadXP are still putting out bangers. Personal highs include Rotgut (Snowrunner Productions; on the DreadXP Collection 1), Babbdi (Sirius & Leonard Lemaitre), THE UNDYING BEAST (Kira LLC), Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk (Nikita Kryukov; great if you want a game that makes you feel bad), and Water Womb World (Yames).
• Elden Ring also came out. I played it like, two and a half times. It’s very good. The lore is excellent - I appreciate the move towards an epic character-driven mythopoeic tone as opposed to Dark Souls' grimdark. My replays were highly rewarding because I became much more attuned to the wonderful accents - I love Welsh Ranni the Witch. Not much more to add.

I’ve also been expanding my tabletop role-playing game taste this year after becoming sick to the stomach with 5th Edition shlock.

• ICON is an incredibly workable Blades-based system, though I’m fond of it mostly because I’ve been playing in a wonderfully inspired campaign ran by my friend Naomi, where we’re treasure hunters working in an alternate-1970s magical realist Franco-era Spanish seaside town, inspired by the artwork of @Alariko_.
• Similarly, I did some brilliant free-roleplay in some sessions ran by my friend Chris (Nakade on itch.io) where we played professors attending an academic conference via zoom. These discussions revolved around discerning the cause of a 1922 socialist revolution on the fictional Nordic island nation of Havland on the behalf of a controversial governmental commission. He’d created a series of about twenty very realistic documents for us to review and discuss, including fake academic articles, maps, old norse poetry, letters, manifestos. It was very, very good.
• I experienced my first session of Exalted, which is criminally underplayed. The masses all languish playing their Critical Role-inspired year-long epic fantasy campaigns in the hilariously ill-fitting D&D 5th Edition when they could be playing Exalted. It really helps encourage the type of epic scene-setting through mechanics such as stunts (describe what you’re doing in a cool way and get an extra dice) and fact-introduction (you can literally make up details about history and the world if you roll well).
• I also dipped my feet into two Apocalypse World-based systems: Sleep Away and Spectres of Brocken. I think they’re excellent tools to engage in some really gritty and cathartic roleplay, especially around themes of teenage angst and identity and trauma and loneliness and youth and so on.
• Finally, at Dragonmeet I met a dude called Liam who runs a press called Dice Kapital (he made an effort to stress the pronunciation) and had produced a very fun system called ECOPUNK 2044. It’s a near-future eco-anarcho-socialist cyberpunk system-setting (the first page literally has the line “The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses”) which was very obviously inspired by Disco Elysium but has some neat ideas. Mechanically it works off of a clever system where you have a pool of ten dice to spend on action each ‘round’ (a period which varies depending on the intensity of action), but it also uses some interesting aesthetic ideas such as the standard cyberpunk ‘jacking in’ fare being more of a surreal dream experience due to the software also running on your subconscious. Despite the system’s flair, I am currently hacking it down into a much slimmer mechanical chassis to run because I think it has a lot of superfluous systems that I don’t want to (let alone my players) put the effort into learning (particularly the hacking).

On to some moving pictures. I can count the things I’ve seen on one hand. During the summer I saw In Bruges, which is a lovely film that - owing to the way the various jokes and plot elements fit ever so together neatly like a puzzle - feels like a classic farce comedy of an older era. I also watched The Talented Mr Ripley, which is a wonderful documentary about the failsons of the American bourgeoisie. The best film I saw though, by far, was Baz Lurhmann’s Elvis. What a film. If you’re not an Elvis fan before, you will be after. A stylish ode that maintains a very appropriate level of respect and reverence for Mr Presley. You can’t help but be enraptured by Austin Butler’s various musical performances, which remind you that there was a reason Elvis was popular in the first place. Highlight is definitely the ‘68 Christmas Comeback Special. Although people didn’t like Tom Hanks’ Colonel Tom Parker, I found him hilariously evil and really appreciated Luhrmann’s trust in the audience to reach the conclusion by themselves that the Dutch are an evil race.

The best overall moving-picture media I’ve seen this year, however, is the Chainsaw Man anime. I love Chainsaw Man and the MAPPA adaptation is done with such clear enthusiasm for the source material. Banger OP, and extremely impressively a different fully animated ED for every episode! Love all my Complex Female Characters, though Kobeni has obviously taken my heart owing to how pathetic her character is (she is literally just like me). Every single Devil is also lovingly depicted - the Future, Snake, Katana, Wolf, and Sea Cucumber Devil are all great. My friend Milo reads the story along a Marxist line, seeing the Public Safety Divisions as a microcosmic demonstration of the horror of state power and what it does to the agents of such institutions. This is basically correct. However, I also can’t help but also see it as a rather charming and well-executed deconstruction of attitudes towards women and different ‘female archetypes’ in manga/anime. The presentation of Makima (though also Power and Himeno) grooming and dehumanising a 15 year-old is done in such a way that it is reminiscent of other properties, yet lacks the fawning and romanticisation seen elsewhere, meaning their behaviours are unveiled and stripped down to a disturbing core. A great deal of restraint is shown in the way this point is never explicitly made or the behaviour condemned, which only adds to this unsettling aspect of the show (something that is extraordinary for this genre/medium).

I’ll also take some time here to discuss the youtube video content I’ve been consuming this year. I’ve recently discovered Tim Roger’s Action Button series of game reviews and found them extremely charming - you absolutely have to watch his review of the modern literary classic Boku No Natsuyasumi (2000). Tim’s unfortunate babyface hides the fact that he is actually over forty years of age and possesses a trove of experience and anecdotes. He exhibits a strong Seinfeld Effect in that he was one of the earlier New Journalism-style figures within gaming (from the early 2000s!) but has stuck around. This means that his excellent and highly personal work, which draws on a lifetime of critical reflection, stands next to much weaker and frankly exhausting early 30s video-essayists who do embarrassing self-confessionals and incessantly speak about how Pokemon Heart Gold Literally Saved Their Life. This critique does not apply to everyone guilty of this but I am sick-to-the-stomach with Philosophy Tube. While I respect some aspects of Abigail Thorn’s work, a stint of her videos (from 2018 to early 2021) have done so much harm to my mental health. Her videos on mental health and queerness work to construct a very manipulative parasocial relationship by only vaguely exploring the title-topic from a philosophical viewpoint and instead focusing on self-confessionals of increasing seriousness. This perception may just turn out to be a result of my own experiences, but I think it is a viewpoint that is still worth sharing. Now, I must apologise because I’m going to shift gears and (rather fittingly) spend far too long discussing something that does not deserve it at all.

[This section discussing a particular youtube review of TESV: Skyrim has been redacted for the sake of my dignity and sanity.]

Along the same line, I’ve encountered a few excellent podcasts this year. Top of the list is #ACFM (Acid Corbynism/Communism FM) by Novara Media and hosted by Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert & Kier Milburn. 1-2 hour episodes discussing different concepts (most recent are Gifts, Sleep, Horror, Magic, and Care) through a left-analytic lens. The hosts are all (near-) middle-aged academics meaning their perspective and experience is immediately obvious. I’d highly recommend their episode on Collective Joy, where three people of the Dad Archetype talk about subjects as diverse (or not!) as football, raves, and protests. Also, how could I not support a podcast which takes its name from Mark Fisher (for this reason I’ve also been liking Buddies without Organs’ new season on Mark Fisher). Along this same line, Bad Gays continues to be a great listen and they’ve also released their book, which coherently puts down in ink their political objective admirably. Excellent episodes on Cressida Dick and Freddie Mercury (there was also a blog post on him). On the other side of the spectrum, I’ve also found some good brain-off entertainment in the Duckfeed.TV network with Watch Out For Fireballs (a better game review podcast than most, owing to the games being more niche and the hosts being more interesting, critical, and likeable people) and the fifteen-minute four-times-a-week Everything to Guppy (friendship-simulator podcast which supposedly aims to review every single item, trinket, character, and enemy in the game Binding of Isaac: Rebirth).

Finally, music. I’ve continued to aggressively expand what I’ve been listening to this year. After unofficially setting a challenge for myself in 2021 to trim down on music with guitars, I’ve eased myself back in. My statistics were dominated, rather embarrassingly, by loveless (mbv, 1991). Besides from this, I also encountered a lot of actual bangers:

• I was put on to Bohren & Der Club of Gore by my friend Stephen (I favour their more mournful affective albums Patchouli Blue and Midnight Radio). Along this same line, I also really enjoyed the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack by Akira Yamaoka (and obviously the Disco Elysium soundtrack by Sea Power). And star of the show, of course, is Burial. I’d listened to Burial last year but his new Streetlands EP is something else. Just so good in the way it captures the urban affect - you have to listen to it while on the train. I’d basically classify all of this as late-evening flaneur music.
• I also did a lot of edgy black eyeshadow doomer music - Mitski (despite Working For The Knife being a banger, her new album was bad), Radiohead, Joy Division. However, there was a gem here when I found Weyes Blood through Tiktok - Titanic Rising is obviously good but I’m also very keen on her new album And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow, which really perfects the ethereal-woman-mournfully-singing vibe. Similarly, Goldfrapp is a great find that I’m happy with.
• While last year I enjoyed a lot of techno, this year I began to really vibe with it on a “you’re supposed to dance to this and feel it in your body” level. Hence, a lot more trance - Orbital and Underworld especially.
• ACFM put me on to a lot of Disco and Soul and such. Love Diana Ross in particular, but also basically anything you’d expect to find on a spotify playlist called Disco Inferno.
• While working for a few months as a cleaner at Fitzwilliam College during the blisteringly hot summer months I listened relentlessly to Suede after a recommendation by my mom. It’s a great band because not only is it distant from the Blair-era-tainted Big Three, it also does the Brit Pop-sound much better than those other more popular and obnoxious bands, allowing me to feel an incredibly fulfilling and multifaceted smug superiority. I also appreciate how specifically Brett Anderson’s singing voice on the track 'Trash' reminds me of my own deliberately-bad impression of David Bowie.

It sucks being depressed and not being able to carry through a lot of things I start. Hopefully in the new year I’ll finally get around to dealing with and finishing Better Call Saul (much better than Breaking Bad), The City & The City by China Mieville (amazing mystery novel), Norco (point and click adventure game about Southern Louisiana oil refinery company towns), and G-String (cyberpunk source-engine FPS made over a decade by an artist who wanted to make a painting you could walk through; one of the most beautiful and evocative pieces of media I've ever seen and a personal white-whale I've not managed to finish for a few years now). Because I don’t want that to be the note I end on, I’ll do an unordered list of ten albums I’d recommend based off of what I’ve listened to this year. I hope you all have a wonderful 2023.

• Streetlands EP (Burial, 2022, 34:28) - ambient street noises, ode to urban affect
• The Road To The Western Lands (William S. Burroughs & Bill Laswell, 2016, 26 minutes; a Stephen recommendation) - William S. Burroughs reads poetry on top of a drum machine
• Sins Of The Flesh (Sister Machine Gun, 1993, 40 mins) - try this if you’re looking to expand your industrial rock library
• Semillero (Dengue Dengue Dengue, 2018, 29 mins) - funky Latin American earworm music
• Patchouli Blue (Bohren & Der Club of Gore, 2020, 59 mins) - ambient atmospheric jazz
• And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow (Weyes Blood, 2022, 46 mins) - ethereal sad lady music
• La Vita Nuova (Maria McKee, 2020, 64 mins) - poetic and verbose sad lady music; probably my favourite album of all time
• SILENT HILL2 Original Soundtrack (Akira Yamaoka, 2001, 73 mins) - spooky atmospheric rock music tracks mixed in with stuff that you’d expect to hear coming from an arcade horror light-gun game; try the tracks The Reverse Will and Terror In The Depths Of The Fog
• The Best of The ‘68 Comeback Special Live (Elvis Presley, 2019, 49 mins) - elvis
• Weaving a Basket (Sea Oleena, 2020, 48 mins) - ethereal sad lady music
• Agnes & Hilda (Patricia Taxxon, 2022, 27 mins) - good album of electronic music made by a bit of a weirdo; endorsed by Autechre