Tom Reviews Games 'n Books

Just some yapping

Hey folks,

No major Anime Sickos news to report. We’re still grinding out pearls for you. I have a few things I wanted to briefly talk about in a way that was too basic for an episode, and too involved for a post, so, here you go.

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Da Gaming Corner

A dumber man would say China is supplanting the West due to DeepSeek, or Elon Musk deleting the entirety of American soft power over the weekend, or some third thing. However, I am the clear-eyed genius who sees the truth. Real heads know that China is the dominant world culture on account of they are now making 2D Metroidvanias that slit throats.

I just played Nine Sols folks and this shit is off the chain.

In Nine Sols, you do a big boss fight against Eigong. The remainder of the game (~20 hours or so) is tutorial and story context for the fight with Eigong.

Ok, not exactly. You are one of ten Sols and you want to kill the other nine. Everyone is kitty cat people and it’s all gorgeously hand-drawn. It looks good as hell, the music is good, fun story, etc etc. Whatever. The point is the Eigong fight.

You might assume that since the game sounds like it has “Souls” in the name that it is a soulslike. Kind of! It’s Sekiro basically. You gotta parry—when you do, you build up Qi which you can spend by dashing past an enemy and putting an explosive talisman on them which goes kaboom. This is useful both because it does damage at baseline but also pays off an enemy’s internal damage (ie, temporary damage that will slowly recover if you let it).

I feel like I’m spinning my wheels describing the mechanics and rules and stuff because this is all sort of secondary to the point of the game, which is the fight against Eigong. The other reason Nine Sols is like Sekiro is that Eigong and Isshin (Sekiro’s final boss) are the same. If you have heard me talk about Sekiro you know that comparing a boss fight to Isshin is probably as high of praise as I’m capable of giving.

Both bosses are hard, like insanely hard. They take that joke I always do—“If I was a video game boss, I would simply use my greatest moves and never stop”—and do it for real. To beat them took numerous play sessions of exclusively repeated failed attempts. And yet—when I won, I knew that I would never lose to them again.

You can’t win by cheesing, getting lucky, tanking a few mistakes, or any means other than Being Able To Win—so once you’ve done it, you will always do it. If you are Able To Win, you will win. There is no gimmick with either boss. They are not doing anything you haven’t seen before. They’re just doing it faster, harder, and better. The only thing you are being asked to do is have answers to everything in their toolkit—and you couldn’t have reached them if you didn’t utilize those answers against earlier bosses. If you don’t have the answer you die. Simple as that. Just do it—that’s all.

I can understand why this might not appeal to some but to me—a guy who loves Doing Things the Proper Way (when you want to learn an instrument everyone’s like “just mess around and have fun!” No asshole. Show me how to do scales)—it is supreme. Eigong is the best boss dude. She has mixups!! She’ll follow up a move with the same attack like 80% of the time, and the remaining 20%, she does a different thing that requires an insanely different response. It’s so good.

Anyway, play Nine Sols. Fun game!

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Da Book Corner

On the recommendation of mystery-loving friends I read The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton.

This is Groundhog Day shit. Our protagonist wakes up with no memory in some random guy’s body. He’s at a moldering 1920s English manor house for a big party. Everyone there knows the guy who’s body he is in, but he is like oh fuck I am panicking, who am I, what is this, oh no, help me. He learns he is supposed to solve the murder of the host’s daughter, Evelyn Hardcastle, who is killed at 11pm, and he will have eight tries to do it, each try with a different host body.

Here’s where it gets cool: obviously he makes zero progress on day one as most of his time is spent weeping and going like, this can’t be real, ohhhh, I’m so fucked up. Day two begins and he’s in a new body—and he sees the guy from day one going “ohhh, I have no memory, ohhh I’m so fucked up.” That’s right—all that shit he did day one is also happening at the same time. I know what you’re thinking: does that mean that all the things his host bodies are doing on days 3-8 are also always happening every time? Yes bitch, yes. There are a couple of really hilarious Bill and Ted type moments where the guy is like “OK, remember to find this info out and write it down and put the note in this book” and then he opens the book and a note is there. You’re always wondering if side characters doing odd things are keys to solving the murder or previews of what the protag will be doing later.

Books like this live and die by the strength of their little clockwork mechanisms and this one has clearly been worked over for years (it’s Turton’s debut after all), so it hums like a dream. I don’t know if a reader is able to like, solve the mystery ahead of the reveal (I never try in these stories) but I didn’t ever feel like anything was cheap or dumb. One inexplicable misstep—one of the protag’s hosts is exceptionally clever (he takes on part of the host’s personality and abilities so dumb hosts don’t notice shit and vice versa) but physically limited, creating an interesting tension where intellectually he has incredible momentum but finds it hard to actually get to the places he needs to go. Sounds good, right? Well the host’s disability is that he is morbidly obese and the protag is constantly going on and on about how disgusting it is and how awful he feels to have to be such a foul whale, etc etc. Not necessary! Feels bad to read!

Where this book falters hard and really smacks of First Novel Syndrome is when it looks directly at the camera and explains what the time loop actually is, who set it up, why the protagonist is put in it, what happens if he solves the case, etc. This shit is so half-baked it’s insulting. Any reader who picks up this book is doing so because the premise is unique and enticing. Do not stop the momentum dead to have some bland exposition character go “by the way, allow me to render this cool premise extremely mundane and boring by explaining it. Many parts of my explanation are stupid beyond belief, but don’t worry, they won’t be expanded on.” I’m not reading this going “but WHY is there this loop,” I know why: because it’s a unique premise that makes me want to read the book.

I have also read his newest book, The Last Murder at the End of the World. This one does a way better job integrating the explanation of the premise into the story itself—it’s done in drips and drabs from the beginning rather than in a big dump at the end, and uncovered facts about the premise do double-duty as relevant clues to the murder itself.

The premise is thus: it is post-apocalypse. One island on earth has been spared from a deadly worldwide nanobot cloud due to a barrier built and maintained by three pre-apocalypse scientists. There are roughly 100 living villagers on the island who idolize the scientists and live a peaceful, idyllic life of cooperation and love. Then one day they all wake up with no memory of the previous night to find that one of the scientists has been killed. Her death has rendered the barrier non-functional, and the apocalypse cloud will engulf the island in a little over four days...unless they can solve the murder first…

Sounds pretty cool to me. And it is pretty cool! But despite not having a huge sour note like Hardcastle, the central puzzle is not quite at the same level. What it does do is lead me to conclude that what Turton needs to be doing is writing for video games.

We are lucky enough to have a nice stable of great detective games these days—Return of the Obra Dinn, The Roottrees are Dead, The Outer Wilds, The Case of the Golden Idol, Paradise Killer, etc—where you solve a mystery while constrained by the strict limits of video game mechanics. Hey, you know who does mysteries constrained by a weird premise? My man Stuart Turton. And you don’t need to explain why you’re constrained in a video game—the explanation is, it’s a video game dumbass! This is the UI you got, OK? Get to work.

If he was able to apply his high-concept-mystery mind to a video game he would be freed from the shackles of “I have to explain why this is all happening” and allow the central puzzle shine on its own terms. Will he see this? Likely no. If he does, will he drop his successful career as a novelist to make a game that sells, at best, like 40,000 copies? Definitely no. But I will always be wistfully sighing, thinking of the wonderful Obra Dinnlike he would write if he would only embrace the medium he was always meant for...

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Da Greep Corner

I saw Geordie Greep live a while ago. I think Greep’s solo record and the three albums by his old band Black Midi are pretty good but not truly great. I went mostly because it wasn’t too expensive and I find his name insanely funny. I thought his live show was way better than the records, but that’s not what this is about.

I bring this all up because before I went I stopped by Joe’s house since it was on the way and I told him about Greep and as we discussed, we discovered something I have to get in front of Greep’s people:

Dude you have to play a cover of Radiohead Creep but you say Greep. Like you don’t even have to do the whole thing. Just one chorus. Can you imagine how hard all the non-binary nerds would pop when you do the big ska-kronk chords and go “but I’m a Greep!” You could leave the stage for a nap and come back and they’d still be speaking in tongues. It would take you like two minutes to learn the song.