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gaming-of-the-shrew · 12 days ago

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F's Weekly Roundup, vol. 1

LIGHTNING ROUND - EARLY-MID JANUARY 2025

Warmest greetings, everyone. Welcome to the first (and hopefully not last) post on 'The Gaming of the Shrew'.

I've often felt a creeping paranoia surrounding the topic of forgetting which specific games I've played, movies I've watched, books I've read; you know how it is. I've had a goodreads account for a while, but that hardly covers everything!

So, for 2025 (and hereafter?) I've decided to make a log of such things where I'll be documenting my brief thoughts once per week! If I have anything more in-depth to say about a given piece, that'll be a separate post of its own.

Let's begin!

GAMES

Purrgatory (2021)

SCORE: 6/10

Completed in: Roughly 4.5 hours.

Purrgatory is a fun one to start with, given its heavy themes of existentialism. It's a point & click adventure set in a monotone afterlife and featuring a cast of colourful characters. My favourite is Elijah, a purple armadillo poet who's overly critical of his own prose (I know the feeling).

But that's not exactly why we're here; that'd be because buddy, this game is exceedingly gay. Most if not all of the cast are gay, trans, or some combination of the two. We love this, of course, but it links slightly into my main critique of the game: not to mince words, every character talks like an online gay person circa 2018. We're talking crytyping, 'fuck dude he sure does', the whole nine yards. This isn't a cardinal sin (hehe) or anything, but it dates the game just a little and detracts from each character's unique voice.

However, with that being said, it's a game with a great deal of heart and compassion. Sean the pink snake's story brought me to tears with its deeply human, matter-of-fact depiction of how it feels to miss the little things about a person you've loved and lost.

At $0.00, it's hard to go wrong here. Check it out!

Felvidek (2024)

SCORE: 8/10

Completed in: 4 hours

Felvidek is a game I'd been meaning to play since it came out in early 2024, but only got around to recently. I was initially drawn by its unique presentation and the fact it's an RPGMaker game (my favourite) but make no mistake, there's much more to see here.

You play as Pavol, an alcoholic knight whose wife has left him. Life is shit, perhaps even moreso than life generally tended to be in 15th century Slovakia, but fear not! Laughter is the best medicine, especially if there's ought to do otherwise but cry.

Yes, Felvidek is a black comedy, but not in the style you may be used to. It's less 'non-stop comically dour misery' and more 'frying pan to the face' in its blackness. You'll meet comical characters, jolly drunks, demons of all shapes and sizes, and somewhere in between all of these you'll have an icy bucket of existential terror, grief, trauma or depression dumped on your head without warning. It's quite exquisite, and does a great job of portraying the manner in which these concerns often manifest in real life: suddenly, and without due warning.

There's a lot to love here I haven't mentioned, not least of which being the soundtrack, so if you like historical fiction or black comedy, you'll likely get a lot out of Felvidek.

killer7 (2005, Windows release 2018)

SCORE: 8/10

Completed in: 14 hours

So this is a party I'm immensely late to. After having played No More Heroes and its sequel for the first time last year, I wanted to try more of Suda51's offerings.

killer7 is in an interesting position as far as critique and review goes; it's a game which is inimitably unique, but one which has enough of a dedicated following that just about everything there is to say about it already has been. Regardless...

Narrative-wise, the game follows the eponymous killer7 (aka the Smith Syndicate), a group of elite assassins tasked by various shadowy organisations, government and otherwise, to eliminate key political targets. In my mind, the best part of this is that we get to see the broader geopolitical scope of our actions. Often, this view is a cynical one. The annihilation of an entire country is presented through dispassionate boardroom discussions and standard protocol, portraying an emotionally disconnected world much like our own.

Most everything else is very cryptic, and one often gets the impression that the specific vibe of what a character is saying is more important than the actual words they're using. Make sense of it or don't; after all, your charge is to kill, not to understand.

Funnily enough, though, I don't care too much for the actual moment-to-moment gameplay. At best it's a serviceable semi-rail shooter, but at worst it's clunky and frustrating. Normally this would be pretty damning, but everything about the game's artistic presentation and world is so compelling, bizarre and dripping with personality that it makes such flaws very easy to overlook.

Islands: Non-Places (2016)

SCORE: 4/10

Completed in: under an hour

I found this game looking through the contents of the itch.io bundle for racial equality, which I purchased a few years ago. Visually, it scratched a similar itch to Vectorpark's Windosill, a favourite of mine, so I decided to check it out.

Through a series of levels, you're presented with seemingly-mundane locations which slowly unfold to reveal idiosyncracies ranging from the unusual to the supernatural. Your sole means of direct interaction with these worlds is to click on, predominantly, flashing lights scattered throughout them. It's a very pretty and atmospheric game, but it's one that doesn't seem interested in truly allowing you to inhabit these spaces. Perhaps that's part of the intent; most of these areas capture the mood of the vaunted 'liminal space' trend, and are therefore inherently transitory. But in order to really evoke that feeling of transition, we must first be welcomed in - a goal such a limited means of interaction does not achieve.

Islands does a passable job of portraying liminal spaces, and the visual presentation is beautiful, but it simply doesn't go beyond the surface level and ultimately fails to make an impact.

Secret Little Haven (2018)

SCORE: 5/10

Completed in: 2 or 3 hours I think

Rounding out this gaming roundup is an OS simulator, in the same vein as Hypnospace Outlaw, and another extremely trans game. Though we have access to a number of applications in the fictional Sanctuary OS, the overwhelming bulk of the story is communicated through an instant messaging app à la MSN or AIM.

We take the role of Alex, high school student and magical girl fan. Alex is assigned male at birth, but when a male character from their favourite anime is rumoured to transform into a girl in an upcoming movie, doubts about their gender identity begin to rise to the surface. To complicate matters further, Alex's father is obsessively controlling and manipulative, with very specific ideas about the person Alex should become.

I've been pretty harsh in my scoring of this one, but only because I do not find the OS simulation to be a compelling vessel for this story. It's clunky, and not even in the way a PC from 1999 should be, and the few puzzles which involve straying from the instant messenger are either ludicrously simple or extremely poorly conceived, especially when it comes time to use the cmd console.

Otherwise, though the actual story we're presented is reasonably competent, it moves far too quickly. Our main character goes from literally never having heard the word 'transgender' to immediately identifying as such. This is forgiveable, but some breathing room for discussion outside of gender would have been nice; as it stands aspects of the story regarding what it means to live in a society with rigidly defined gender roles or the intersection of well-meaning love and abuse are malnourished. My absolute least favourite part is Alex's school friend, a character whose concept is good, but their implementation is sophomoric at best (think 'creepypasta character typing their accent').

This section is pretty negative in tone but I want to stress there are things to like here. It's a hopeful and cautiously joyful story of transgender awakening, and as a trans person myself I was deeply ingratiated to Alex's journey, confusion and all.

MOVIES

These are gonna be a little more brief, I think. We'll see.

Pleasantville (1998)

SCORE: 6/10

Has any other 'they go to a cool alternate world' movie had the balls to have one of the characters stay behind to live there forever at the end?

Great concept, decently executed. Cops out a little from its stated goal of challenging social complacency and conservatism, but it is what it is.

True Lies (1994)

Score: 3/10

Iconically bad.

I love how soft-spoken Arnie is in this film, he's like a frighteningly large St. Bernard. Goes on for like four hours too long and is considerably less clever than I assume it thinks it is. Jamie Lee Curtis and Arnold Schwarzenegger kissing in the glow of a mushroom cloud is the most emblematic image of Hollywood there could ever be.

(Perfect Arabic)

The Darjeeling Limited (2007)

Score: I'm not sure

What I liked: The futility of directly seeking meaning in life when you're far more likely to find it in the everyday without looking for it. Condemnation of orientalism (...sorta). Beautiful visuals.

What I didn't: Portrayal of women. Despite it being intentional, main characters are irritating in a way I don't find compelling. Plays into orientalism (...sorta).

Anora (2024)

Score: 8/10

This would've been a 7 if not for the final scene. Dramatic, hilariously slapstick, frankly a lot fucking wackier than you'd probably expect. Similar to Felvidek in that 'you laugh before you cry' kind of way.

Practical Magic (1998)

Score: 4/10

A little rough. Another in the time-honoured tradition of 'witch movies where barely any witch stuff happens'. Heartwarming story about how it is very difficult to kill Johnny Depp. I liked the margarita scene, though.

Dragon Ball Z: Wrath of the Dragon (1995)

Score: So quintessentially subjective that I don't feel able to give one.

It's very telling that the poster for this movie is just Goku doing the big punch he does at the very end, rather than any of the core characters. Dumb and inconsequential, but the appeal of course comes from elsewhere. I love Tapion, this broody Link-type bishie boy. Vegeta shows up 85% of the way through the film and executes one attack which does not work. So it goes. I liked it.

The Craft (1996)

Score: First half 7-8/10, second half 4/10

Starts out positively iconic, lots of fun vindictive magic, edgy as sin, amazing outfit design. However, as with any teen revenge movie, the latter half must always centre around the main characters' comeuppance. I understand why this is, but it's just not fun!

Alright, that's all! I saw a few more movies so far this year, but I don't have enough to say about them to include in this post. Subsequent posts will most likely be much shorter. 'til next time.

-F

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