Night Ended

He is done!! And I love him!! Very happy with how this came out.

If you haven't played Amarantus, go play it so you can appreciate him properly

Soft launching the list of games that I would personally, obsessively, recommend to anyone interested in game writing & narrative design.

When I threatened to do this months ago I did commit to more detail (at least: time to play, mechanical complexity, etc., not so much describing what I find narratively significant about them) so I'll probably work on that **update: I have not lmao**

13 Sentinels (PS4, Switch, 2020) $$

80 Days (iOS, PC, Switch, 2014) $

Absolum (all, 2025) $$

Afterparty (all, 2019) $$

Asura’s Wrath (PS3, 360, 2012) $-$$

Alpha Centauri (PC, macOS, 1999) $

Analogue: A Hate Story (PC, macOS, 2012) $

Anthology of the Killer (PC, macOS, 2024) $

Amarantus (PC, macOS, 2023) $$

Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs (all, 2013) $

Black Book (all, 2021) $$

Cape Hideous (PC, 2024) $

Cart Life (PC, 2013) $

Children of Morta (all, 2019) $$

Cosmology of Kyoto (PC, macOS, 1993) -

Dragon’s Dogma (all, 2012) $

ECHO (PC, PS4, XB, 2017) $$

Fatale (PC, macOS, 2009) $

Flipnic (PS2, 2003) $-$$

Goblet Grotto (PC, macOS, 2012) free

Goodbye Volcano High (PC, PS4, XB, 2023) $$

HORSES (PC, 2025) $

Kentucky Route Zero episode 1 (all, 2013) $$

Killer7 (play w/ a GC controller if you can) (GC, PS2, PC, 2005) $$

Kill The Music (PC, 2025) $

Lumines (all, 2004) $

Mediterranea Inferno (PC, PS4, XB, 2023) $

Metal Gear Solid 2 (PS2, 360, PC, 2001) $

Mutazione (all, 2019) $$

Need For Speed: Heat (PS4, XB, PC, 2019) $$

Nier (PS3/360 western release w Father Nier) (PS3, 360, 2010) $

Parameters (web, 2012) free

Pokemon Snap (N64, 1999) $-$$

Portal (not the Valve one) (home computers, 1986) -

Pyre (PS4, PC, macOS, 2017) $

Resident Evil 7 (all, 2017) $$

Ridge Racer Type 4 (PS1, 1999) $

Riven (PC, macOS, PS1, 1997) $

Roadwarden (PC, macOS, 2022) $-$$

Saturnalia (all, 2022) $$

Silent Hill 3 (PS2, PC, 2003) $-$$

SOMA (all, 2015) $-$$

That Which Faith Demands (PC, macOS, 2021) $

Tharsis (all, 2016) $

The Fool's Errand (home computers, 1987) $

The Unfinished Swan (PS3, PS4, PC, Mac/iOS, 2012) $

The World Ends With You (DS, Switch, 2007) $-$$

Tokyo Jungle (PS3, 2012) $-$$

Tomodachi Life (DS, 2013) $

Until Dawn (PS4, 2015) $-$$

Vangers (PC, macOS, 1998) $

Void Stranger (PC, macOS, 2023) $$

Wheels of Aurelia (all, 2016) $

WORLD OF HORROR (PC, macOS, 2019) $$

Yakuza: Like A Dragon (PS4, PS5, XB, PC, 2020) $$

this is gonna be a long one bear with me lol. been percolating a lot of thoughts about the style of the game that started with the ui and then snowballed pretty rapidly…

As Reagan’s descent into sadness, illness and despair was becoming obvious, I was beginning school in a dusty, mouldy inner city hot box of a classroom in Paris, France. My memories of those days are pretty hazy, I couldn’t have been much older than seven. I was supposed to become a bilingual child, but the French is largely gone now. 

One of my strongest childhood memories is of a summer’s day in this school, maybe two floors up a run-down building somewhere in the north of Paris. All four classes stood together in the biggest room, and we watched a speech by Ronald Reagan, with French subtitles capturing most of what was being said. I was supposed to read and not to listen, but my mind drifted. After a couple of minutes of Ronnie, we were shown the maps and the graphics. You can guess which maps and graphics I mean. With a pale green map and expanding yellow spheres. New York. Moscow. London. Berlin. Paris. Fallout spheres in half-shade followed. After the maps, a side-on animation of children in a classroom. In the animation, a bell goes off on the wall, and the children get underneath the desks on all fours. There’s a flash. Some of the children and desks vanish. Three others remain. They do a roll call for each other, the video explains. Call out your names from the front rows to the back. 

After the video, we go into our classroom and are told we’re practicing what we see in the video. The bell goes off. We duck underneath the tables. The teacher explains, or so my weak French imagines, that some kids are being taken out into the hall because they get their turn next. I realise later that they’re the ones killed in the initial blast. It’s just me and three other kids. Two at the front call out their names. I’m at the back, with the other kid from England. We call out our names. Nothing happens. After a couple of minutes, I ask “what now?”. The kid next to me is a little older, and he explains:

That’s it. Nobody’s coming after this. He tries it in French: personne ne vient. 

At least, that’s what I imagine he said. 

The fear of the nuclear bomb was different for everybody then, and depending on where you grew up, you got more or less of it. In retrospect, it’s hard to say whether people worried too much or too little. But only idiots can look back and cynically surmise that anti-nuclear work and protest changed nothing. The bombs got built, and are still being built, but the number of plants and turbines are lower than what they would be. A few fewer toxic sites. One or two fewer Fukushimas, at the very least. One or two more peninsulas or islands we’re still able to see. The tide rolled back in a few places. Now, as powerful as they are, the pro-nuclear lobby still scurries around doing weird TED talks about how they’re the only solution for the challenges ahead. 

Today, you can see a lot of right-wing commentary comparing the climate crisis to the hysteria about nuclear war throughout the 1960-1980s. That we overestimated the threat then and the culture of fear now follows the same pattern. This is the most pernicious lie of all the ones they’re using - far above blaming the Greens for land-clearing or the economic imperative for coal mining. This is the black beating heart. The lie that our fear is in and of itself, a lie. That reaction of any kind is an emotion. It has shifted very quickly from climate denial to disaster denial. You’re worrying too much. We’ve had this before. This pits conservative macho strength against the weakness and hysteria of, well, everything else. 

Nobody’s coming. We wait for elections because we want what they’ve got; the triumphant delights of shock victories, a brief play in the halls of power before being ejected again. Our values and emotions on the big whiteboards. Perhaps we should be learning that the victories are only for them, they’re not part of the system we’re all wishing could be fair and free. 

My pessimism peaked today as I choked leaving and entering work, tears streaming down my face as I reacted to eucalyptus ash gushing into town from hundreds of kilometres away. About everything; the climate, the future, the heat, politics, myself. Fear isn’t a lie, but it *does* lie to you in turn.  Fear makes you forget how you started. 

Happy Amarantusversary!

Look, if you like visual novels, if you like novels, if you like visual, if you like videogames, if you like coming of age stories that are road trip stories that are also revolutionary stories and also love affair stories - if I could get away with saying it hit me like Vagrant Story x Y tu mama tambien I would!! - Amarantus is a work of great subtlety often delivered in the register of a student flat party (complimentary), that understands the mythic significance of a haircut & the ways you can only tell a story in a videogame; it has a second playthrough that changes everything you know without ever feeling like a gotcha; it is a story about people falling short of their ideals, falling on their asses with their pants around their ankles⸻ but allowing them such grace to do it!

You don't need to learn all the rules, because most of them are fake and inconsistent. Languages only have "rules" when they're dead, and English, unkillable, wriggles like a trout when you try to pin it down. For all the attempts to impose Latin grammar on the Norman layer, English is fundamentally not a romance language, and it has wantonly shucked most of its Germanic complexity too.

English said: what if we fuck off everything we possibly can from our nouns, pare our verb forms down to a minimum, and make a handful of particles signpost everything instead? Sure, native speakers now face a baffling difficulty curve when they need to understand concepts like "object" and "genitive" in order to learn any other language, but now we have SO much room in our panniers for words and words and words and words and words and words and words and words and words and words. Thank you we'll have that word. Thank you we want that one too. Thank you, great root there, we'll take that and mix it with a stem from somewhere else. Consistent spelling and pronunciation? No thank you, we need more space for words and words and words and words and words.

Think about the term lingua franca. It literally means French, which was once THE language for international communication, and has been thoroughly dethroned. The Academie tried to lock it down with rules, and it began to die. English would never. English has never had an authoritative rule book and none will ever exist. What we have are style guides: localised and specific for purpose. When they try to put rules on English it's out the window, down the drain pipe, through next door's window, rummaging in the silverware drawer looking for stuff to nick.

All this to say, you can let that misplaced apostrophe go. You can accept meme speak in Merriam Webster and drifting definitions. But that doesn't mean you stop studying your language, because the beauty and strength of English is in its capacity to express context, nuance and social grounding through word choice. There are entire anthropologies hidden in common turns of phrase (the equestrian influence on metaphors about ruling and control - free rein, give him his head, took the bit between his teeth - is the long shadow of the titled class system). When you ask why a writer or speaker didn't "just" use a simpler or more familiar word or phrase, you are admitting you don't understand the privilege you have as a passenger on one of the longest and most unstoppable trains in the history of human communication.