The publication date of The Man Without A Face is important. 2012 is after Russia's war in Georgia, i.e. the brutal crushing of Georgian people by Russian military means. It was written after the start of the Syrian Civil War, an event that Russia played an active and vehement role in (razing civilian areas, chemical weapons, and the list goes on). And 2012 is, of course, before Russia's current involvement in Ukraine, starting with the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
First and foremost, Lost Words: Beyond the Page is a game designed for children somewhere in the 5-9 age range—the age when they are learning to read. It is not a game for adults. I repeat, it is not a game for adults. (I repeat because I have seen at least two reviews which criticize the game for being simple.) When boiled to a skeleton, Lost Words is a single-player puzzle platformer which most often uses words to solve puzzles.
In the novel When the Sparrow Falls , the Singularity has occurred and humanity's last mortal bastion is a communist nation called the Caspian Republic. Defying the rest of the world, the CR eschews consciousness technology and the people who have uploaded themselves into the virtual world, thus foregoing the physical world. In the CR government apparatus sits Nikolai Scout, a low-ranking state security official who obeys the letter of the law but does not engage the spirit. His personal problems are simply too heavy. Relationships and poverty foremost in his mind, he grinds through his job, no more. But when a famous Caspian poet dies, Scout finds he has a new assignment, that of tour guide to the man's widow. The spin, however, is that the widow is from the non-physical human world beyond.
But where Naughty Dog have gone down the road of post-apocalypse zombies and Indiana Jones-style action movies, Asobo goes Medieval. Set in Middle Ages France, players take on the role of Amicia, a teenage girl, and her younger brother Hugo as they try to survive the plague, the Inquisition, and something... else that is crashing across the land, wrecking havoc on towns and people. Villagers lock their doors to one another from the plague while the Inquisition's soldiers kill people randomly trying to find Hugo. The siblings journey takes them far from their home and into the company of people they never thought they would meet, all while the world seems to crash down around them.
Despite the overall lack of offline tournaments in 2021, the scene remained relatively healthy, and viewers were treated, like every year it seems, to tip-top quality matches. Looking at SCII's business macro, things looked normal, which can generally be seen as good. It's still the most sophisticated, exciting 1v1 esport to watch.
What we didn't see in 2021 does not bode well for the Starcraft II scene. But it must be noted. First is something brewing before 2021: the lack of fresh blood. 2020 did not see an influx of young talent, and neither did 2021. And if anything, only more of the old guard retired or faded from the scene. Sure, a few familiar names returned from the military, and a couple of names which lingered in mediocrity in Europe poked their noses a little higher. But (and it's a big 'but') there are simply extremely few new names coming in and showing strong promise. Where the player scene was in constant evolution the first ten years, the past couple of years, and especially the past year saw evident stagnation.
For the past several years, the question has often crossed
my mind: when will the bubble of culture the West is currently experiencing,
burst? When will the tidal wave of
films, books, restaurants and fusion foods, tv series, foreign products, video
games, travel and vacation, comics, board games begin to fade? I now have my answer: when Russia attacks the
West.
For those not paying attention, the past 15-20 years will be looked back upon as a Golden Age of Western culture, and to some degree global culture. With the world at relative peace, the ways in which Westerners spent their excess time and money exploded with options. Where it was possible 40-50 years ago to read almost all science fiction books released in one year, in 2022 it’s no longer possible, not even close. A person would need to devote their existence to its consumption, and still not get to the dozens and dozens of other books released. And that is only science fiction. All other genres have also exploded, as well as the myriad means of combining and synergizing them. And this trend only scales larger when looking at all the other ways in which people experience culture and entertainment—tv series, video games, board games, etc. The quantity of choice overwhelming, and the quality of choice filling the spectrum, it’s indeed a Golden Age.
Beyond the Hallowed Sky is set in a future not too distant from our own. Solar system exploration has been pushed forward, and humanity has set up a station in an asteroid above Venus. The impetus for the novel is a strange letter Lakshmi Novak receives one day, inviting her to participate in perhaps the most interesting human project of all time: Faster Than Light travel. What makes the letter truly interesting is that it appears to be from her future self. With a small number of other characters folded into the mix, the narrative takes off, leading the reader across the Earth, through the atmosphere, and to the solar system.
Everything in the title, It Takes Two is an offline (or online) cooperative game for two players. A nice balance of puzzle platformer and action, players take on the role of a husband and wife who must work together to get back into their real bodies. Something like Honey I Shrunk the Kids, the parents find themselves in a variety of surreal places, needing to use their brains and twitchy fingers to jump, grab, and swing their way to victory. Unlike Contra, however, which was possible to be played single and two-player, It Takes Two can only be played two-player.
Like a film chopped up and edited on the cutting room floor, so too does Agents of Dreamland present its story. Told through the eyes of three characters in a variety of places and times, the steady unravel of scenes slowly reveals a man, called the Signalman, trying to put 2 and X together in the hope of understanding strange events occurring in the American southwest. A second, mysterious agent named Immacolota Sexton also enters the scene, providing useful information, but appears to know more than she should about one particular gruesome killing they discover in Arizona. It’s the third character, a cult member named Chloe, whose viewpoint enters the novella to offer cohesion—of a sorts. From cosmic communications to tarot cards, fungus ants to black-and-white film from the early 20th century, the novella covers a lot of ground getting to the bottom of the mystery the Signalman and Immacolota are trying to solve.
A 2-player only, area control game, 7 Ronin focuses on a small Japanese village in Kurosawa style. Banditry afoot, the village sees a large group of ninja descending upon it and a small group of ronin rising up to defend it. An asymmetrical game, one side controls the seven ronin, while the other controls the band of ninja. Each turn, players deploy forces behind a screen on their own board, then simultaneously reveal. The deployment choices are then resolved on the main village board. Each of the ronin having a special power, and each of the village areas granting the ninja special abilities, players use their knowledge of the game state to bluff, outwit, and outguess their opponent. Such as it goes for eight rounds. At the end, if all seven ronin are killed, or if certain area-control conditions are met, the ninja win. If all ninja are defeated, or at least one ronin survives to the end of the eighth round, the ronin win.