xeneth.design

The annoying girl in the purple dress was back again. Cloverana knew just about everything there was to know about tending magical garden plots. Hard lessons that mother had beaten into her about which soil types could handle mana and how closely to space fertilizer crystals. There are obscure rules governing which phases of the moon are best for planting and harvesting. Re-animated mushrooms and other fungi were safe and profitable, whereas opportunistic slimes could be risky and dangerous to work with. "Violet" didn't appear to know the rules of green thumb, or seem to care about any other coven's guidelines. This was a moniker she'd invented for the girl based on her usual attire; the thought of asking what her name actually was to her face made Cloverana angry. Every interaction with Violet had been humiliating, and asking such a basic question at this point felt like an admission of defeat. Like the time she'd tried to warn Violet about the dangers of far...

The spiraling wreckage of a drone clipped the helicopter's rear rotor, causing it to list directly into the stream of hot plasma. It dipped out of sight for a moment before slamming into the cliff below. Sunshine was beating down into the open convertible, so hot and bright that the explosions barely registered. Ocean air mixed with a distinct ozone tang that the gun emitted whenever it started to lose its charge. Three more drones popped as they made contact with the energy projectiles; even half-strength shots tore through matter and air alike. The arc of the road ahead graciously offered yet another opportunity to feed the beast of a weapon. It was hard to break the habit of using the hand-brake to drift into the turn, but the gun itself was wired into that part of the console in lieu of a handle. Friction and kinetic energy were converted directly into death-dealing plasma. As if giving the driver an excuse to unleash it, even larger swarms of aircraft converged above the speed...

I am haunted; kept up at night by visions of an enormous whale-like creature that certainly will exist, but whether or not being devoured by it will satisfy me won’t be revealed for another two months…      The first time I played the Lies of P Demo, I was duly impressed by the audio-visual design and charmed by its over-the-top premise, but the experience didn’t manage to fully entangle me in its strings; not yet. You see, combat is well over 50% of what makes or breaks a souls-like title, (with the rest being monopolized by level and world design) and when it came to dismantling frenzied puppets, I bounced off; the meta-narrative driving this whole release seems to be “Elden Ring is lovely, but the world wants a sequel to Bloodborne very badly,” and so this vertical slice of a Pinnocchio-based spiritual successor convinced me to play it like one.      Everything about the Victorian steampunk setting told me to find a rhythm of attacking and dodging that...

       You're playing a video game. As you navigate your character through three-dimensional space using the left analog stick on your controller, you're in constant conversation with the level designers; everything from lighting to the density and quality of props is drawing your eye, guiding you toward where the designers want you to travel in order to progress. The well-trodden path beneath your avatar's feet stands out against the more heavily leaf-strewn grass textures and scattered foliage ahead; in the same direction, a break in the fence geometry. Dark wooden slats contrast against the moonlit route forward. This is where they're telling you to go. Except, you've played enough games like this to know that they're NOT actually telling you where you should steer your character, the designers are telling you where the critical path is; where the rest of the level leads. Unintuitively, because the ones shaping the space know that you're aware of this, th...

     Once again, I haven't been able to sleep. It's not that I'm not tired; I always feel tired these days even when I AM well rested, but whether that's just one of the many side effects of aging or my mind is simply asserting itself over my matter is difficult to discern. I belong to a very strange and unusually small family; since we were all raised by the same matriarch, they're like brothers to me in addition to being a Father and an Uncle. The generational waveform is slightly collapsed around me, resulting in a feeling of being too old to accomplish anything and paradoxically too young to experience a sense of peace or restfulness. Despite being wide awake for the last twenty-one hours, I just "came to" from some sort of waking dream about my Grandmother...      Nin raised me alongside my father; since I've never been particularly close to the woman that gave birth to me, (she tries, I was so young when she left that I simply don't KNOW her ...