Zapling Bygone (2022)

Imagine a hive mind that can absorb the memories of the dead by taking over their remains. What sounds like the setup for a villain, instead, is the starting point for the main protagonist of Zapling Bygone, where said hive mind is invaded by another deadly creature, a virus that takes over the creatures it infects. So off goes a tiny seed of the hive mind to a faraway world where the virus was fought to a standstill.

This isn’t a massive game by any means, nor is it one of those tiny metroidvania-likes that is over in like 2 hours or less. Instead, it’s a solid experience at around 8 to 10 hours, depending on your playstyle, with a limited number of biomes. Instead of quantity, there’s a focus on quality. You start as a weak and tiny offshoot of the hive mind, take over the first skull you find on the ground, and slowly grow your abilities. Occasionally, you find new skulls, either from some bosses or others lying around, that give you new abilities, like in every other metroidvania.

From the standard double jump and dash, you also get stuff like crawling on walls, which feels significantly different than wall climbing, as you can, just as the extremely cool but rarely copied spider ball from Metroid 2, just stick to walls instead of being forced to constantly apply momentum to keep there. Later, you even get the ability to climb on ceilings, so basically the full package.

To the usual metroidvania-type abilities, you also get the Hollow Knight charm system, which further adds to your arsenal. Unlike other games with a similar system, you don’t get more and more charm slots; instead, the different skulls you collect allow you to insert various types of charms (literally round, square, or triangular). Some skulls have more round charm slots, others have a better mix of all three, but overall fewer. Depending on the boss you face, you might need to change to a fast and deadly glass canon configuration or a slow and lower damage tank type. There’s a lot of experimentation with the types, though thankfully, most of the enemies or bosses are rather easy.

My favorite boss fight in the entire game was one where I couldn’t hit the enemies, and just had to learn their attack pattern to avoid getting hit as their HP slowly depleted, with three different creatures getting increasingly hostile. There’s also an optional boss fight against a bird that felt like the hardest fight in the entire game, even compared to the tri-part final boss. But once I got that one, it felt really great.

I remember trying to play this once before and just bouncing off. There’s some jank to the game, which is especially irritating early on, but on my second attempt, I really got in the flow of it and couldn’t put the game down. There’s a section close to the end where you’re in a dark area, and I wandered around aimlessly for almost an hour until I accidentally slashed the ground around the area with some hanging skeletons, and then got further. That was maybe the most annoying area of the game that should have had some more hints. Otherwise, the game is rather straightforward.

There’s also a lot of stuff to collect, pictures to buy, memories to find, and comics to finish. The intro story is told in a style reminiscent of old EC horror comics, and during the course of the game, you can find more panels to finish off other stories of some of the planet’s inhabitants. As you explore and uncover the story of the world, there’s a definite Lovecraftian vibe to everything, mixed with sci-fi concepts and all mushed together into something not quite horror but pretty close. The game’s visuals, often a bit dark and initially looking visually cluttered, only add to that mood.

In the end, I had a grand time with the game. It’s a medium-sized metroidvania that doesn’t outstay its welcome, has a couple of unique touches that are more than just gimmicks, and makes it feel like not quite any other metroidvania on the market. Despite the bit of jank and a couple of bugs (occasionally my D-Pad stopped responding until I left the game and restarted), it’s a lovely game. Really enjoyed my time with it.

Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025)

Where the second Avatar movie was all about laying the foundations for the whole Sully family arc, the third is all about payoff. The second movie had long stretches that were off pacing-wise in that you could almost fall asleep, feeling that not much was happening. This is the opposite: so much action, so many things go boom, that it gets somewhat exhausting after a while. And the movie, again, at its core, is about evil, exploitative humans versus the natives, and just like in the second movie, they want to hunt down local whales and kill them to extract their brain goop.

Colonel Quaritch is back again, this time even joining with the first evil Navi faction (though they only went evil due to the exploitation and murder of their own by humans, so not a truly homegrown evil but rather a consequence of the first movie). At times this feels, towards the end, almost like a retreat of the second movie, instead of one big ship, it’s a fleet, instead of one whale helping its all of them, everything is the same, only bigger and arguably better.

While whale brain goop is still the main motivation for the humans to go all evil, a secondary motivation turns up when Spider, the adopted human (and son of the original Quaritch), gets transformed so that he can breathe the local atmosphere and doesn’t need an artificial air supply anymore. Which is a big game-changer, as the long-term plan of humanity is to take over and settle on Pandora, since Earth is basically destroyed.

This is basically all you need to know, though it’s not the most interesting stuff that happens. Colonel Quaritch going more and more native, even when he still works for the humans, is a great arc. It almost feels like he knows that there’s no good reason to do what he is doing anymore, but he has nothing else, so he does it anyway, out of spite and partly because he’s an adrenaline junky and hunting Jake Sully and his family is the only way to give him a high anymore. He’s really one of the highlights of the entire trilogy, and while I found him not particularly interesting in the first part, he was great in the second and here.

Then there’s Neytiri’s arc (Jake’s wife), who, in her grief over her son’s death, gives into her worst impulses and tries to push Spider out of the family, though her kids don’t play ball. When Jake confronts her and reminds her that he’s still human on the inside (not literally, but his mindset), and she has to admit she has come to hate humans, which indirectly means she doesn’t quite know how to deal with these emotions when it comes to Jake and their own hybrid children. This eventually gets sort of resolved when Jake eventually comes around to her viewpoint that they need to sacrifice Spider to save Pandora and its people, and Neytiri reaches an emotional breakdown. For all its simplicity in general, that was a nicely done scene, and Spider asking Jake if he still loves him, damn, that scene worked for me.

The other kids get their moments too, especially Jake’s other son, who is still trying to come to grips with the death of his brother and how he, the less loved son, has survived and what that means for him and his relationship to his dad. Jake, in general, is somewhat more competent in this movie, though he still isn’t a great dad despite trying. The adopted daughter, who has a connection to the world’s magic or something like that, has a big scene too, though that one felt more gimmicky and calculated to me, trying to make her stop using her big deus ex machina-like power until the climax of the movie is ready.

It all ends with a big fight (what a surprise), the good guys win, Quaritch dies (though does he really, there’s no body), and everyone on the side of the good guys gets invited to a dream party in the planet’s consciousness core where all the dead are backed up. Spider is now officially let in, and everyone is happy.

Despite all their flaws, their length (this one could or rather should have been cut down by an hour) and their simplicity when it comes to characterization, the recycling of plot points, I rather enjoyed this one and the whole trilogy in general. I’m not sure I will ever rewatch these movies, partly because of their length, partly because these are movies that need to be enjoyed in the cinema; at home, their visual opulence just doesn’t quite hit the same heights.

But they are alright. I do occasionally wish someone would make movies with similar themes but better scripts, more interesting characters, and say something actually meaningful instead of merely having cartoony evil humans, which undercuts any substance these movies could have had. Otherwise, though, I’m fine with them.

Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)

Someone recently convinced me to watch Avatar 3, and I had to quickly catch up with the second part, as I hadn’t seen it before, and despite enjoying the original to some degree, didn’t have much interest in the franchise in general. These are long movies, and it doesn’t help that their pacing is slow in some places, which is especially true for the second movie, where I had to force myself to endure the early parts until I started to get into it. What I didn’t realize before I started watching is that parts 2 and 3 really form the end of a trilogy that started with the first (which was much more self-contained), and part 2 specifically is the middle part where, to some extend the good guys only come out alive but don’t really win as decisively. It’s still a stand-alone movie, but the bad guy, recycled from the first part, is still alive, and the bigger fight is far from over.

For years, I read reviews of the movie where some of the major flaws mentioned are that it somewhat recycles the main plot of the original, recycles the main villain, replaces Unobtainium with another gimmick, and completely forgets the original gimmick, is far too long, and a couple of other issues. And while all of these are true to some degree or other, they weren’t an issue for me as much as I was expecting them to be. I went in expecting to get bored and really hating the movie, and came out not quite loving it, but enjoying it to some degree.

Some people often profess to be confused at how these movies manage to make so much money and be so successful, despite being so simple and leaving no lasting legacy in terms of cultural impact. I think the simple answer is that these movies are authentic in a way most media these days is not or cannot be, because we’re all so culturally jaded that a lot of the simple motivations here leave us cringing painfully. It almost feels like these movies were made for the audience of the 50ies or even earlier decades of the 20th century, when people were still able to believe in simple characters being good just because. Almost all characters here are rather one-dimensional: the natives, the Sully family, and even the evil humans (who are cartoonishly evil for the most part), and the one that feels the closest to a complex (somewhat) human being is the recycled Colonel Quaritch, who now has the body of a native-hybrid, which really changes the dynamic.

He’s still evil, but he’s also deeply aware that he isn’t the original, that the original failed, and that to some degree he’s different. The way Stephen Lang plays the reborn Quaritch is rather fascinating to watch, a character trying to hold on to his old identity but slowly changing because his embodied nature is something that is subtly changing the equation. There’s also the complication that his son was raised by the Sully family, and while he proclaims to have no feelings for him, that’s not entirely true. And vice versa, when his son eventually saves him despite knowing that he will cause further harm.

The biggest issue of the movie is really the decision Jake Sully makes in the beginning: to flee with his family to the water tribes in order to save the forest tribe, since the human military is looking for him specifically. It makes his character look weak in the eyes of the audience and the decision doesn’t really make much sense the closer you look at it, since the human military is a threat for all natives on Pandora, whether it’s the forest people or whatever other tribe is out there, so leaving the forest tribe only makes them weaker as well as threatens to bring down the human military on the water tribes, which is exactly what happens.

Without that stupid decision, there wouldn’t be a movie, though, or a very different one. I just wish the movie had found a more elegant solution for why the Sullies had to flee to the water tribes, one that doesn’t make Jake look like a moron. For the most part he’s a shadow of his former self here and the focus is much more on his kids, of which there are five (sort of): two sons, the older, more respected one who follows the orders of his dad for the most part, the younger son who is a hothead who does a lot of dumb shit, the daughter born from the dead body of Sigourney Weaver’s character in the first part, another very young daughter and the adopted son of Colonel Quaritch (who for long stretches is in the hands of the human military and only later joins the family again).

Since most of the focus is on the kids, we have the typical coming-of-age arcs, the vying for parents’ respect, bad parenting from Jake, a daughter with magic abilities, nobody is quite sure what to make of, and who is essential to help in the finale, so that everyone gets saved (both here and again in the third part). Talk about a walking deus ex machine, though, since she’s directly connected to the god of the world, that’s intentionally literal. There’s a part where the hotshot son is bonding with an outcast whale, and we learn more about why the humans are hunting those whales.

By that point, the movie occasionally gets very exhausting, and even when you enjoy it, you wish they had cut 40 to 50 minutes or even more to make it all a bit better paced. Eventually, recycled Colonel Quaritch comes hunting for Jake Sully and his family. There’s a big confrontation, the human ship supplied to Quaritch gets destroyed, he almost dies, the Sully family almost dies (well, one of them actually does), and then the kids save their parents. While the good guys mostly win this one, it’s more of a battle, not the entire war by any means. The bad guy escaped again, and the good guys got a decisive loss in terms of characters. It’s more survived by the teeth of their skin, and everybody knows the worst isn’t over yet.

Like I said previously, when I started to watch this, I didn’t realize how much this was a middle part of a trilogy and not just a very self-contained movie in a series. It immensely helped that I basically watched parts 2 and 3 on the same day, since that way I didn’t have to wait long for the resolutions of plot threads opened here. And while the start of the movie is really slow going with characters making really moronic decisions (Jake specifically), at a certain point, I realized I was rather engaged by the movie and really wanted to know what happened next. It’s still too long, the characterization is very basic (though more or less effective), and some plot developments are just weird.

A couple of years ago, I would have complained about the cartoonish evil humans here, but since we live in a world where the largest, most powerful nation on Earth is led by a clown who wants another country because he sees the world entirely in terms of property development, I will abstain from it. Reality is just more cartoonish evil than even the Avatar movie villains could be.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo (2025)

So, whether you enjoy this game depends heavily on what you expect to get out of a Zelda-like, which Pipistrello is, except it takes place in a modern city full of furries. But other than that, it’s the standard mix of overworld exploration, dungeons where you get new abilities (all centered around your Yoyo), and then have to use them in a variety of scenarios, with each new dungeon adding further abilities.

I personally prefer Zelda-likes with a strong emphasis on world exploration, dungeons that to some extent feel like real places, and combat. Puzzles are important too, but they are more like salt, used sparingly to enhance the overall flavor. Pipistrello considers puzzles the meat of the game, with everything else considered less important (mind you, there’s a lot of combat and world exploration, just that to me the puzzles feel like the one aspect where the most energy was spent on). Specifically, arcade puzzles where you have to string together various movement inputs and consider the screen layout, to achieve either getting to the next screen or getting to the next screen with an item like a key or battery. Almost every screen in each dungeon is its own mini-puzzle, and many places on the overworld function like that as well.

For the first half of the game, the pacing is moderately relaxing, but by the second half, due to the increase in movement abilities, timing becomes a key factor. It’s really more of a top-down platformer expecting precise inputs with few margins for error, which is not quite what I was expecting from the game. And it’s also the point at which I got a serious problem with the controls. The multiple movement abilities are mapped to different combinations of the same buttons, and even when you know what you want to pull off, switching abilities on the fly, as you’re expected to do, often leads to doing the wrong thing. And the further the game goes on, the more important it becomes to chain together those abilities to solve some of the arcade puzzles. Before the final boss fight, you even have to solve multiple screens in a timed sequence, and unlike anywhere else in the game, if you get it wrong, then you have to do it all over again.

That’s also where the game shows that, despite how it looks (like a GBA game), just how modern it is. Most of the old-school top-down Zelda games were never this difficult when it comes to single screens, but since Pipistrello allows you to repeat individual screens as often as you want (only stealing some of your money, but even that is down to very little after a couple of attempts), it’s not that difficult in the aggregate. Difficulty in older Zelda games came from surviving one dungeon where damage aggregated over multiple rooms, but few of those rooms were ever as difficult as even some screens in the early game.

This allows Pipistrello to really stretch its design muscle, and the variety of room designs and arcade puzzles it throws at you is really impressive. This isn’t a game where you can complain that you get an ability and don’t really use it much, far from it. Instead, the game throws so many opportunities to use your abilities in different ways and later in combination with the other abilities that there’s nothing to complain about (except if you don’t like an endless cavalcade of puzzles thrown at you). Designing all this, the overworld, which has its fair share of areas with its own puzzles, five quite large-ish dungeons, must have been quite the task.

Technically, this is a very well-made game, with lots of variety across its different sectors, excellent visuals (even some of the furry people are fun to look at, though I still have no clue what kind of animal the main character and his family are supposed to be based on), and lots of different mechanics suited to the top-down view gameplay. There are multiple systems in play to keep you occupied until late game, you search for charms just like in Hollow Knight, some blueprints for said charms as well, money is used to upgrade charms, and occasionally to buy items.

There’s a skill board where you can select permanent improvements, but for some time, you also have to take in drawbacks that get more severe the more advanced those improvements are, which often keeps most of your growth in check later in the game so that you don’t completely roll over enemies. There are lots of secrets to find, heart parts, charm slot parts, diamonds for money, and the various charms and their blueprints.

I enjoyed the first half of the game tremendously, though by the second half, the issue of the never-ending amount of arcade puzzles thrown your way and the evermore complex input chains really killed most of my enthusiasm. Also hated the final boss fight, where the game, again, throws even more arcade puzzle sequences at you mid-boss fight, which is just a cardinal sin in my book. By that point, I was just over this. But if you happen to like this specific kind of gameplay, you will likely really love the game. For everyone who expects a more relaxed, different kind of Zelda-like, proceed with caution.

Oh yeah, the story is also kind of weird, where you don’t quite know whether it wants to criticize capitalism or not, and then at the end, it becomes a kind of, poor rich people might be evil but can be redeemed sort of thing, which is a thing that happened. For most of the game, you expect a certain character to become the main villain, and yep, that then happens. But since the whole setting and writing is so fluffy, it’s hard to take anything here seriously. It’s just weird.

The Regicide Report (2026)

The Regicide Report is the finish line for the core cast of the Laundry Files, a series that started as a somewhat more horror-focused urban fantasy slightly adjacent to something like the Dresden Files, but then evolved into something very different. But like the Dresden Files, it seemed to go on forever with no end in sight. Well, in theory, there was an end in sight, but not a very pleasant one, and each subsequent volume in recent years shifted the series from low-level horror procedurals to high-level world-ending threats from outer dimensions that would spell doom for the human race.

And then the previous volume in the series ended in a place where the cure to a problem turned out to be even worse, where the bad guy (well, one of them) took over the UK, took over the secret agency fighting against threats like him, and it seemed like there was no coming back from this.

Charles Stross once wrote a novelette called A Colder War that basically functioned like the prototype for this series, with none of the humor and all the chilling implications of where it would end up. Basically, a speed run of the Laundry Files that managed to be even more horrifying despite its short length. And this is where I basically envisioned the series to end up eventually, given how the series pivoted over the years. Not in a happy place.

To add to this, if you followed Stross’ blog over the last couple of years, you realized he got a bit tired of writing Bob, the main character of the Laundry Files, and there were moments where he likely wanted to kill him off. Which he already did, but it didn’t really take and only invited discussions among the readers of whether Bob is really still Bob, or what constitutes Bob-ness in this case (same for his wife, Mo). It’s really not a question that has a clear answer and often tells you more about the person answering, though it’s interesting to explore.

With all that said, the final novel in the Laundry sequence is a fine book that hits all the right beats, lots of action, some cool twists and visuals that you definitely won’t see coming, a sarcastic commentary on the British monarchy, and the state of the world in general. It also paints the Laundry and its US counterpart as victims of regulatory capture, and despite being about demons taking over, it’s such a perfect example that I can’t get it out of my head.

The book ends with doom for humanity averted, though one of the major bad guys is still in power, the real hero of the book got himself killed, and his head was put on a spike. But Bob and Mo and most of their friends survived, and those named characters are all we readers really care about, not the thousands of nameless bystanders that got sacrificed in the game of chess between the various powers. I don’t want to sound too glib, but it’s really instructive how light-hearted and almost wholesome the novel feels when, objectively speaking, it’s a really terrifying shitshow where thousands of innocents die.

But as the real hero of the story notes, humans aren’t the main players anymore; it’s monsters versus even worse monsters, and what are a couple of thousand lives against the millions or billions that would die if a greater evil incarnates on Earth? It’s basically the Warhammer 40k logic where the human Empire is the good guys, despite being utter fascists, since the alternative is even worse. Still sucks to live in that universe. The Regicide Report is told with so much snark and in a style that downplays the horror that it’s easy to ignore what the world in the Laundry Files would really feel like on the ground level.

As far as endings go, it’s rather neat. It’s not quite the monstrous, chilling ending I was both looking forward to and dreading based on both how A Colder War played out and how the Laundry Files speedrun toward the end of the world. Instead its more flim-flam. The worst outcome is delayed for a long time; evil major demons from beyond will have a much harder time coming into our world. The explanation isn’t quite as neat or convincing as it could be, but on the other hand, there’s a part of me that is happy that Bob (or Bob 2.0) and Mo (or rather Mo 2.0) are still around and got some kind of happy ending.

The avatar of the Black Pharaoh is still in control of the UK and the Laundry successor organization, but all he can do at this point is sacrifice random citizens, which is quite terrible but not quite a world-ending threat. Just like the main characters have slowly moved toward the more monstrous side of the moral scale, so have the readers, who have been slowly manipulated into accepting the small happy end with a side of evil over the alternatives.

It’s not a great or memorable ending, but it’s an entertaining one that delivers on the surface level all the thrills one could hope for. And I’ve definitely seen worse endings, or worse, seen series never end. So there’s something to be said for that. It’s not quite what I expected, but on the other hand, I wasn’t quite sure we even would get an end to the series. And in between this and the previous book, Stross wrote three novels called the New Management sequence, which take place after this one, so there’s still something to look forward to.

All in all, I enjoyed it. I feel like it’s not quite what Stross had in mind a couple of years ago, when the series seemed to descend toward something much, much worse but also more impactful. It’s nice. Still bad if you look at the world objectively, but mostly satisfying for long-time readers.

Casino Royale (1967)

This is one of two official non-EON Bond movies, nominally based on the book Casino Royale but really more of a comedy interested in making fun of the James Bond franchise. It posits that there was an original James Bond, the current one (Sean Connery) is an upstart lacking the sophistication and class of the original. M and bosses from several other spy agencies ask the original to come back from retirement, as someone is killing off agents all over the world.

While this is billed as a comedy, don’t quite expect an Austin Powers movie. It’s more slapstick with absurd moments that throws a lot of weird stuff on the screen in the hope that something sticks. Now, humor is really subjective, but for me, the biggest issue is that the movie just wasn’t funny at all. Not even a chuckle.

It doesn’t help that the movie is kinda structurally messy, having multiple main characters, at least two more male leads playing James Bond besides the original James Bond, and two women who also play agents. The movie seemed to randomly switch between their viewpoints, which meant you never got bored, but also that you had no clue what was going on for the most part.

In terms of set pieces and just what the movie did, it felt like a costly production for its time and no slouch compared to the EON Bond movies. There are some really cool scenes, and the actors feel competent. But the messy structure just made this hard to enjoy on any level, and more like a WTF is going on. Interesting to watch for sure, but not something I’ll see myself ever revisiting for any reason.

You Only Live Twice (1967)

This is the second time I’ve seen this movie, and despite it only being a couple of years since the last time, I couldn’t remember much about it when I started. This is another James Bond entry where Spectre is behind everything, this time by stealing US and Soviet spacecraft and trying to make them blame each other and eventually start world war 3.

It’s really not a bad idea, though, despite its depiction as hypercompetent and with much financial muscle; their overall plans don’t make much sense. You can get a much better ROI by selling drugs; a world wrecked by a war between the US and Russia will also negatively impact the economies all over. So the plan only really makes sense if Spectre is after world domination, but neither this nor any of the last movies showed Spectre interested in anything other than money.

So Bond investigates who is behind the mysterious spacecraft that stole the US spacecraft, which leads him to Japan. So, to the usual amount of sexism gets added quite a bit of orientalism that makes, like all of the early James Bond movies, for quite some awkward moments.

I’m usually against any kind of censorship, but it wouldn’t take much to cut the worst out of those movies and have the original and a “cleaned up” version on those Blu-rays at the same time, for repeat viewings. Though unlike Goldfinger or Dr. No, where the underlying movie is great, the biggest issue with You Only Live Twice is Sean Connery himself. He feels old and tired here, but after checking, he was just 37, so not that far off from the previous movies. He lacks the energy and verve from the previous movies; he looks hunched over and not at all like the dangerous spy he’s pretending to be.

Instead of main character energy, he comes across as an office drone out of his depth, only entertained by the local agents because of his status. Almost like a tourist on a sightseeing tour, an oafish white guy pretending to competence and not quite managing. If anything, the actor who played Tiger Tanaka had more of the usual Bond energy than Connery himself.

That said, unlike say Thunderball, in terms of action and ideas, there’s a lot to love here. Many clever action set pieces, the typical Bond gimmicks, a massive villain base in a volcano (sadly felt a bit underutilized), and, in general, the movie had a lot going on. We even see Ernst Stavro Blofeld for the first time, though while Donald Pleasence looked the part, he didn’t quite capture the menace of a Goldfinger or Dr. No, and probably was the major inspiration for Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movies, which made it even harder to take him seriously.

But the biggest issue remains Connery. When the main character of your movie feels off, then even if the rest is solid, it doesn’t quite hold together. Weakest of the early Bond movies so far.

Ghost Song (2022)

Ghost Song is the story of a good game buried beneath a lot of very bad design choices aimed at wasting your time and patience. It’s a game I loved and hated in equal parts, and whether I would recommend it (generally, no) is how much you can live with its many flaws to get to the good parts.

People complain about runbacks in Silksong, but Ghost Song adds another mechanic where, after each death, you lose a (admittedly tiny) chunk of your healthbar and can only repair it at various robot statues that are pretty scarce in the entire game, and against whom a boss runback is nothing. There’s no good reason for this design choice other than wasting your time and goodwill, and the game loves to do that.

Do you need those chunks of healthbar? Not initially, though, after a couple of losses to the same boss, they add up, and they create this nagging feeling that really starts to bother you the more often you get defeated. Add to this the usual terrible design choice copied from soulslop games to lose your experience/money upon death (you can get it back, but only if you don’t die a second time before reaching it), and it feels like the game is deliberately designed to waste your time.

To this, the game adds spongy bosses, which, at least in one case (Old Singer), will really tax your patience since that boss repeatedly runs away if you don’t attack him in close contact. The game generally tries to limit how you fight bosses. Once you’re in a boss area, some barriers appear that make it impossible to leave and usually impossible to snipe from afar. Which wouldn’t be a problem if you weren’t limited by stamina (which the bosses don’t seem to be), and they move faster.

The add insult to injury, the game has a level up mechanic where you can either increase gun, health, or resolve (which does a couple of things), but those level ups add so little that it feels almost not worth it. It definitely is, but like everything in the game its designed to make your progress feel slow and cumbersome. After I played a bit, I felt like I was twenty hours into the game, but in reality barely scratched eight, which shows just how much of the game feels like a slog.

Which is kinda a shame, because behind all those terrible design choices hides a game with a genuinely unique environment that manages to evoke an alien world better than many of its contemporary Metroid-likes. Add to this writing and NPCs that made me genuinely interested in their stories and what happened to them, the mystery behind the character I was playing, and the background of the world I was exploring.

Though even with that, there are issues. You meet characters either in a special camp or all over the place, and after certain situations, they change what they are saying, and if you haven’t talked to them up to those moments, you’re cut off from finishing their personal stories (and achievements if these things matter to you). This works if you have a game with a few locales, and where it is clear where the NPCs will likely turn up.

Aside from the camp people, most NPC locations seem utterly random, and after every story gate, you either exhaustively go all over the map again in hopes of finding them or give up on following their storylines. If there was at least a certain logic to this, it wouldn’t matter so much, but as it is, it really feels like it’s down to pure luck whether you stumble over certain characters.

And like I said, I actually like the NPC stories here, whether it’s their personal history or whether it ties into the larger story of what happened to the world you’re on. There are also moments you only unlock if you do some rather convoluted stuff, and how you should find that out without looking at a guide, I have no idea. That’s just a terrible way to design secrets.

Other points of contention are somewhat floaty controls, though once you get a couple of movement upgrades, you can mitigate that a bit. The initial hours of the game are a bit of a pain in the ass due to that. Also, the map is suboptimal, and the markers are mostly useless. And the game doesn’t pause when you’re looking at the map or in the item menu, another bad design choice copied from soulslop games.

For all my complaints, though, once you get into the game, learn how it operates and how it tries to annoy you, it genuinely becomes one of the better Metroid-like metroidvania I’ve played for some time. A world with a very interesting science fiction backstory that reminds me of elements of Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee cycle, but offered in a way that feels all its own. I just wish all those qualities weren’t buried so deep under terrible design choices that make it impossible to really recommend the game.

Killer’s Mission (1969)

This combines aspects of James Bond with Spaghetti-Western vibes in a historical Japanese setting where a Dutch ship with guns threatens to destabilize the political situation by selling its weapons to one of the clans that have a bone to pick with the shogunate. What it comes down to is one guy going into the area of the clan who might deal with the Dutch and trying to prevent this.

The weirdest thing about the movie is that the main character looks very much like your typical sidekick but is played like a main character, which sometimes works quite well, especially when he plays the fool. Where it doesn’t work is when the movie wants to convince us that the women around him fall for him, just like in your typical James Bond movie. And just like in the early Bond movies, it comes across as incredibly rape-y and molest-y in a way that undermines what is otherwise an incredibly fun action movie.

If it weren’t for the less wholesome aspects, I would wholeheartedly recommend the movie, which is tightly paced with lots of plot twists, cool set pieces, and the ending is almost tragic but also rather fitting. There’s some light politics, lots of drama, great character moments, and the main character is, despite his look, rather fitting in the role.

He makes most of his enemies underestimate him, while also convincingly being a smart agent who is good at planning ahead and anticipating most of his enemies, with the ability to adapt on the fly when things go wrong. He’s also rather ruthless when it needs to be. Great character in most regards and fun to watch, if it weren’t for the above mentioned flaws. Sadly, thanks to those, it partly left a bad taste.

Thunderball (1965)

This has a pretty great hook in that Spectre steals two atomic bombs and blackmails the UK and the US government for ransom, or they annihilate two major cities in either country. The 4th Bond movie combines the structural approach of From Russia With Love and the other two previous Bond movies in that we see from the start what Spectre is up to, while also seeing James Bond in investigative mode, trying to puzzle out where the bombs might be.

The first half of the movie is pretty solid, and if it had continued with the same kind of energy, this might have been one of the best in the series. The setup with Bond killing one of Spectre’s agents, the setup with him stumbling into the Spectre plot at a clinic, the perfect execution of Spectre’s plan, and how they get the two bombs. All very good stuff. I also loved the scene where all the double 0 agents were summoned, it hinted at something rarely seen in a Bond movie, that he’s really just a one player in a bigger theatre, and it’s kinda sad the series never quite captured too much of those other agents and their missions except with a couple hints here and there.

But the second half of the movie kinda drags a bit and then ends in an underwhelming climax where a couple of villain henchmen fight against a couple of US soldiers underwater. It’s very violent and deadly, but also very messily shot, and all the deaths feel kinda random and anonymous since everyone has masks on. For all that it’s a big, complex fight scene, as the viewer, we don’t get any real numbers for how many people on either side are involved, so the various death scenes feel hollow since we have no idea of the stakes.

And ultimately, the movie, just like From Russia With Love, teases us with Spectre and Blofeld, only to then give us his 2nd in command as the main villain, which is just a tad unsatisfying.