"As for military or state violence, I feel like that’s the purest crystallization of a type of legalized murderlust. It’s so completely farcical in the way the stated purposes (defense, security, etc.) differ from the actual outcomes. It’s a libidinal death cult with a serious bureaucratic veneer. The scene that it sets for our everyday life interests me. It’s like an ever-present background radiation of evil." - Ville Kallio in an interview you can read Here

I wrote a sort of strange poem about this game Here you can read. This was during that period of time when a lot of people were doing reviews as poems and I thought they were mostly lyrical and quite bad because it was all based on rhyming or strict meters, which is totally fine. I've created a controversy around myself of being judgemental of other peoples writing, but if you're going to practice and even do it poorly, you might as well do it here. Especially with comments off so people don't bug you. The reason I was only ever annoyed with it to begin with was anger management issues as a result of binge drinking and also overusing the site too much at the time, both things I've gotten a lot better about. Recently about a week ago I finally came to terms to myself as somebody who has in a very real sense been battling alcohol addiction for a long time, admitted to myself and to my real life community I actually struggle with alcoholism, and slowly taking steps towards self betterment and eventual sobriety there. So I want to somberly apologize for the hostile and standoffish precedent I created around me in relationship to that here, even though we are a while out from the last time I stepped on anybodies toes here.

This may be a strange note to start a review of Cruelty Squad (2021) on, but its a necessary one for a few reasons. The first is that to give off the impression I'm a detached observer merely 'peering into' the text from above, as some figure of authority goes against one of the main things the text is actually 'about'. Several times the established person running an organization of authority in cruelty squad blurb at you, in funny memetic ways that illustrate to you that they do not actually have their shit together, and are using their social authority to disguise that fact.

"I've been getting really into "hell". Both as a mindset and as something to strive for in an organisational sense."

"I'm the most powerful person in this room. I control this situation. Everyone's dancing to my tune..."

"I have thousands of followers. They say im blacksuppositoried and debased."

Some of us that are in charge of something think exactly like this. Anybody who has run their own discord or had a 'social media presence' definitely has this 'toying' psychology baked in deep. Occasionally this 'decisionality' is thrust onto you, for instance by making a semi successful game, the creator of Cruelty Squad, Ville Kallio, has opened a portal for themselves they cant close. They are now the 'center' of something, and probably had some of these same issues in the physical art community of being a 'worship statue'. They even admitted to this in the interview I quoted at the beginning.

"Sacrificing your friends to develop your CEO mindset so you can finally ascend to primordial-financial godhood. I feel like these things have sort of leaked into my own life, as I had to start a business due to the success of the game. I was reading Goethe’s Faust and it made me feel like I’ve accidentally made some sort of infernal pact at some point during development, which resulted in all of this. "

Problem is, if you identify with this feeling too much, you start thinking of yourself as a 'moderator of thought' and begin to think in ways the prior quotes from the game show. We have to ask ourselves, how is this way of thinking any different from the weird misogynist Pick Up Artistry thinking that these people don't 'deserve' your glory and should actually bow down to you? How easily can we divorce the world of middle management from larger systems of violence? Rather than using this power as a pure commercial toolset, Ville in the discord server for the game made it incredibly clear that transphobia will not be tolerated. You have to frontload yourself like that or you do completely self isolate and go CEO mindset. I could theoretically ditch all my friends tomorrow into a toxic sludge pit, alienate myself and start working on my Grindset and get a bunch of people to worship my every word. Make one of those stupid fucking paid to use discords. Pimp my patreon out constantly. Treat my connections with people in terms of a career path and not just people I like. Sometimes people say I'm one of the best writers on here and it freaks me the fuck out. It freaks me out that I self gloating something to that effect a few times to. The internet normalized all of these more primal urges to Control the world of violence around you. It's fucked. I mean for instance if you use the internet long enough you stop referring to other people as people, you start calling them 'randoms'. It's ok to be mad at commenters and guess their IQ levels when they even slightly annoy you or get on your nerves. It's ok to get so angry with people for doing something you don't like and letting your friends hang them out to dry for it publicly. It's ok to antagonize people with kindness just because they were mean to you once. Look I got the damn comments off in here. That's not because I'm afraid of you, its because I'm afraid of myself dude. I've done all of this stuff before and seen others do it on here. It's embarrassing.

There's this frustrating issue in videogame discourse in which, in order to try and self justify our time to ourselves, we talk about games as 'cultural objects' rather than effective experiences that change our way of viewing things. Most of this is the result of the 'video essay' style catching off like commercial wildfire, and thus imparting some sense of commercial value to the idea that you can 'speak around' videogames as literary texts. I believe the other big result of that is that we all sort of learned from having to undo the 'videogames as vehicles to violence' argument for a long time (and sometimes still do) that, crucially the connection between play and real life behaviors is thin. Gamers went through this moment where they had to learn about cultivation theory as much as they could to ward this stuff off but the problem is that by doing that we sort of nullified ourselves from getting into any sort of public political wanting. This desire to absolutely affirm that a game cant cause real life violence caused us to neuter our own discourse before it could really grow. We are just passive soyjacks playing with blocks in the cornor. We fucking infantalized ourselves through self domestication.

So that's part of the problem. The other part then is to try and get away from this we dont talk about this art form as 'things we learned' partially because learning from art is cringe, learn from academic Journals you room temp IQ having freak. When we do interpret a game text, we will interpret both the front and the back to the point it spoils the magic for others. For instance every video I've seen on Cruelty Squad that takes the work seriously can't help themselves but 'compare' the endings and try to analyze a discreet meaning from them. The game is set up like an ARG where the further you slip in the weirder you learn the world is (for instance a creation myth people believe in that own homes is literally about owning a home). It makes sense, because we were all taught to do this as a book report in school and shit, but it doesn't always translate cleanly to games. Videogames are a continuous act function you experience and push through. It's not like a movie where you merely just 'watch'. There's a reason why one of the most enjoyed novels in game enthusiast (watch out with that term buddy, Gamergate will start knocking on your door) peoples favourite book is House of Leaves, its because its a book you physically travel through, have you fight with to keep reading. You have to hold it sideways, sometimes you have to warp a few pages backwards for a bit. Videogames as narratives, even continuous ones and simple, are more like Choose Your Own Adventure novels, and you so don't see people asking you to analyze those right.

So it ends up putting Cruelty Squad in this awkward and frusterating temporal space, where on the one hand you really want to dig into the niche leftism that Cruelty Squad is existing. Where it pokes fun at stuff like veganism being connected to purity culture issues for instance. But you can't do that without everyone being on the 'same page' about it first and so now you have to back up and address that problem first. The lore of Cruelty Squad being so dense that you want to see somebody break into the mechanics of the story and figure out who the 'real villian' of the mystery is. But since we cant really get into all that without looking psychotic and freaky we just gleefully poke at each other to make the first move. Yet, art isn't about a 'really good conversation' or solving the damn mystery for everyone though. Art is an experience that usually wants to tell you stuff and make you reshape your world a little. I didn't get the other endings of cruelty squad because I'm not that obsessed with the game in that way. The internet can slowly teach you that people like me are normies and shouldn't open their mouths until they 'really beat it'. I know about the fucking Nick Land and Bataille references ok, I read a bit of these people but we dont need to pose as philosophers or completionists to talk about art and the world.

Cruelty Squads level Androgen Assault made me rethink the way I consider the police and the fascism associated with it. None of the police talk to you, they instantly fight you, but you learn throughout that level that the place is a horrifying cult with people testing on each other and the prisoners to Absurd limits. This is blunt and flagrant, your briefing even says that Magnus, head of the narcotics department, is testing on people and making shit difficult for everyone. It's a hard and uncomfortable level. The hallways are way too long. Everyone is running in slow motion. It made me rethink about the police as basically a grooming organization for people lost in their early life. They slowly teach people to repress everything, be violent, and fuck peoples lives up. That doesn't happen overnight, and its only upheld by baking people in the culture of fear and adult bullying. I hate these macho pricks, but they aren't some 'visceral' decision, they are a chemical nightmare scenario. The building for a precinct in the town I live has a few different things.

1. A viewable office from the street: So I saw what the inside of one of these guys offices looks like and its very drab and depressing

2. A plaque on the side dedicated to a confederate doctor

3. A giant fucking face construction on the side of the building, very similar to The headquarters of Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party (1934)

I thought about that stuff as I was working with a fucking horrible hangover today. I saw a bald pig on my way home from work near the bus starting some scene. I know now that this is a lifestyle the mother fucker was tricked into, and I learned it from a game, non verbally. I still hate the dude and would resist him but he was 'constructed', he doesn't have some sort of primal genetic code that made him join the Cop Cult. He's not some sort of low T brainlet normie NPC like the internet tries to convince me of. Just as much as women aren't fucking 'femoids' or any of this greasy internet dungeon speak. A lot of the internet sort of teaches you to dehumanize people like this, and not see where the violence is coming from. It's something you have to sort of unlearn one day at a time. Cruelty Squad is willing to meet you there. Today I this all hit me and I realized I don't want to moderate my fucking friends and stepped down from running a discord as a big attention seeking thing. I can't run around with a chip on my shoulder like that. There's a lot of great levels in Cruelty Squad that reillustrate facts like this, home ownership, office culture, reconstructing a scene of violence and blithe anxiety in a new way. That's art. Thats life. That's why I reccomend this fucking game.

Everyday is actually a battle, but until I die I will actually wake up and fight that battle till I'm snuffed out for good.

Orbital Companion

The perfect game to play right before moving, this nonverbal rumbly treat is all about using unique orbs as portals to transport between spaces to unlock doors and find more orbs. Most of the game is spent doing albeit simple puzzles involving the diferrent colored orbs and the worlds they are attached to. For instance the first orb is orange which you use to activate switches and walk across invisible bridges. Much of the mid game is spent trying to juggle these various orbs and the portals you activate with them in order to make progress and while only a few moments will have you truly stuck, the moment of realization of what to do is always pleasing and satisfying.

The lead level designer behind Cocoon, Jeppe Carlsen, has also worked on Limbo and Inside. Two other nonverbal puzzling oddities, that focus on visual spendlor and the satisfaction of solving a puzzle towards the ominous unknown with far less focus on complexity. This makes sense because in some ways a difficult puzzle can actually halt the entire momentum of the aciton and the world. I would refer to most the puzzles in Cocoon more as 'fidget puzzles' than full fledged head scratchers, wherein a lot of it is backtracking for the item that you need. You play as this cute little bug creature so you can only carry one orb at a time and for whatever reason you're forced to place them down in specific sockets. Dont want to lose them by accident! So a lot of it ends up being pick up ball A move it to the new location, go back, and do the same with ball B. Again, this can be tedious but it's also meditative, helped by the soothing electric ambient score that unlike in other games in this genre (Gris etc) compliment the visuals rather than call out to themselves.

The real bite here is the visuals, unfortunately, the website I'm posting through doesnt have image/gif support, but it must be said how vitally well done this is. There is no other game where opening a door has felt this good. This is due in part to the immaculate sound design, the clinking and clattering of mechanical parts whirling help set the atmosphere and, while often mixed a little too loudly for my tastes, are almost always densely developed and done well. It's hard to talk about the visuals and my hesitations, I think that the plasticene world aesthetic looks nice, but is a bit too 'silicone valley sci fi' in its approach to the cleanliness of everything. For instance the staircases work in the context of the spidery bug world we are in, but you can see stairs that have a similar spindliness in a few gaudy megamansions from time to time. More importantly, the world of Cocoon lacks ecological 'dirt'. The world is in many ways too clean, theres no grime over anything so it ends up having the same textureless shine to the objects. On the other hand, monumental changes in environment or large objects look gorgeous.

I think the biggest problem with Cocoon is that there's no dash button. The way the game is set up, you have a radial walk and a single input button, sometimes you hold that input. The issue is, your bug buddy walks a bit on the slower side so you find yourself sauntering wishes you could make a rumble/dash happen. On the other hand maybe that would make the experience too fidgety, but since the puzzles lack difficulty or depth, it does end up being a lot of monotonous gliding from space to space. It can feel hollow sometimes but, in my case at least, this actually helped the experience. I am moving, and I couldn't help but think of how equally hollow preparing and carry stuff from one location to another is. I'm as meager as this bug is, and while my own 'orbs' are just as meaningful as its, there's this quiet solemness that this isn't quite fun or boring. You can't dash in real life either, transport and movement...it just has this quality of ennui and melancholy attached to it, and I think Cocoon is at its best when it does have this sense of monotony. You know how to solve the puzzle, you figured it out a minute ago but now you have to go through the portal animation and pick the orb up and go place it somewhere.

There are also, strangely enough, puzzle bosses! They are functional! Most of them focusing on positioning over anything else. If you get hit it just resets the fight, no harm done. Most of them are spectacle boss fights so you dont have to worry about getting skill tested. With that said, I do feel weird killing them! It gives me a very shadow of the collusus conundrum to be killing giant monsters in this barren wasteland for my own gain. This sort of reflects the ultimate shallowness of Cocoon wherein the focus is so spent on you feeling like you 'have something to do' that there's no taking anything in or just feeling out an ecological space. Like, I'm almost sad this is a puzzle game because this aesthetic would be amazing for a walking simulator and even teases at that idea towards the end. The world lacks life and you end up robbing it anyways for your opaque goals.

Due to the non verbalness and lack of dialogue plot, this goal stays opaque until the very end, but it just ends up giving the experience a sort of moral numbness. I don't feel like I was even supposed to think about the giant spider I killed so much as that I bested it and now I get the nice orb. Time is not even spent on dwelling on its death. If we flash back to Limbo...this is sort of a disappointment by comparison! In that game we had this big gnarly spider chase us down and slaughter us dozens of times, but then when we amputate and kill it, its not 'well done' its gorey and gross, you feel uncomfortable and even a little lost. By comparison Cocoon doesnt stray into this territory, but because of how cosmicly indulgent the world is, and how everything is a puzzle room, you end up just thinking about whats beyond what you're seeing in a remorseful 'I wish the game went there' sort of way.

It's weird though, I'm not sure I can reccomend whether other people would get anything out of it. It's one of those games that looks good and knows how to plot a beat and keep puzzle momentum, but at the same time its a whole game of just very beautiful busywork with little to offer underneath. I think maybe the best way to tell would be to consider how you feel about school animation short films. For instance MILK DUST is a visual treat focusing on a grand inspirational world, but the moment its over it sort of hums to the back of your mind, buzzing there only to be pulled out randomly as a humored annoyance or 'oh yeah I remember'. Much like moving itself, I think this business but shallowness when you're not is sort of core to the feeling of moving and transportation generally. Like as an experience, Cocoon handles the core aspects of moving, that being the transportational tedium, effectively. Contrast that with the approach of say Unpacking which focuses on organizational coping as a form of zen. That being said, I can only say this from the perspective of extreme bias. I think its neat enough to give a try if you're in the mood for a more light and breezy eye candy take on the mechanics found in Inside or if you liked the scale of the similarly non verbal Tunic or Hyper Light Drifter. Regardless of how much it appeals to you, I certainly wouldn't say its something you need to get to right away.

Campfire Companion

When I first put together a now privated list on games made by notable figures that reflect on games on this website, I had done it with the intentions of highlighting how creative and brilliant our next door neighbors could be. More illustratively it was a list of games that I intended to personally review for the purposes of creating a sort of internal diagesis. We often laud and discuss games that are popular or part of a series, and often leave our more trite one off thoughts for shorter smaller experiences. The intention of the project was to illustrate how the 'alternative' no budget indie scene is not only coupled with what your favourite writers are saying but how they express their values and perspectives through art itself. Reflecting on interactive fictions and writing them are potentially not as seperate processes as we thought.

This project, which the intention of reviewing the works thereof mentioned being a more implicit goal of mine, was ultimately a failure and rather intense misstep. That's for an important reason: There is no coherent diagesis between a work like Magenta Horizon and Another Pokémon Game, they are just games 2 people that happened to be on here made, thus the 'dialogue' is not really as robust as I anticipated across the board. Besides, even if you have a small amount of internet clout sometimes, you probably don't want it to infect literally everything you try to do. I found myself in an attempt to stay fair and help usher thoughts towards improvement often focusing on weak editing and proofreading etc. Which given how niche and ultimately unplayed these works are anyway becomes less a form of friendly criticism and more a form of personal backseating and jeering through social media. Even if I dont like a creative work some writer on here made, going out of my way to cover it was missing the point that there is underlying beneath all of these more important things to be concerned about ie survival under capitalism or keeping your friends close in the wake of disaster. Improvements dont happen overnight, and of course most peoples first work is going to be rough and trying to give every single one of them the same level of serious attention can be discouraging in the face of these wider issues. I keep the list intact today hoping it remains a useful yellow page to some, but otherwise have shelved the underlying bitterness of the surrounding project only focusing on works I feel like actually speaking about.

I bring up this folly because its the sort of concern that A Phone Found in Tall Grass (2023) wants us to dwell in. It wants us to consider what we might be taking for granted. It's a work about relaxing and scrolling through your timeline consorting and joking with others while apocalypse unfolds all around you. The protagonist of the story is the recently unemployed twibber user Lia, who is immediately greeted by her partner Luna and their irl friend Alex as they meme towards and into the brink of an apocalypse. One of the most effective bits of the worldbuilding here is showing how irreverance and venting go hand in hand. Of course, in keeping with the times and adding drama to the story Lia has a private account with presumably no followers on it but for the most part people are brazenly comfortable with finding funny ways to say things are a bit fucked whether it be Alex commiserating about his conspiracy boomer dad or others pointing out how inane the government is being. Even being so smart as to show how that irreverance can lead into a distancing callousness of overly joking about disasters that are currently happening. Throughout this, we are often treated to a helping fake annoying ads as well. This shows not only how social media sites can function as networks of solidarity and connection, but also how they do to some extent neutralize the social playing field. Top executives are shown to be immature and get ratioed by randoms. Memes about a conference have more staying power than the official account bragging about the numbers etc.

Perhaps my favourite bit of writing in this is when Luna vents about Lia just arguing with people online but then realizes the uncomfortable hypocrisy of how dangerous the relevent activism is. We often find ourselves getting annoyed with loved ones in this way, operating too slowly or getting in feuds instead of 'logging off'. It becomes such a concern that it bakes itself as an ironic insult, one I've even recieved on here, that you should just log off and touch grass. Yet often we end up finding out that doesn't always meet people where they are at. Sometimes this frusteration doesn't agknowledge the fact that doing so has coupled with it a serious set of risks. Even in the case of 'just going outside' with decaying air quality in cities, wildfires, urbanist sprawl development, and queerphobia the most insightful people you meet online are probably agoraphobic for a good reason. The moment in this story shows that to great effect. More broadly the other great piece of writing is how, instead of focusing on some personal growth Lia has, the focus instead turns to a collective recognition that we often take the serenity of a space for granted. People noticed this irl with the borderline apocalyptic overtaking and dismantling of twitter by everyones least favourite billionaire comedian. On the one hand we know that these places suck, which is why we spend so much time joking around, but on the other hand the ability to connect and show ourselves through the web represents a space between the cracks of reality. There is a sense in which there's something to mourn when the infrastructure flails and breaks down completely. In order to illustrate allow me to point out something bold here: The recent dismantling of twitter hasn't been stopped by other rich people or the governments because of a combination of ineptitude, apathy, and a recognition that the people that use these spaces to do important activism are people that work. Your manager will almost always ask you to come in regardless of if the wheather is about to crash the windows apart because they have your number, but the people in your area trying to help you live? They need these spaces to get to you (though of course this can be a double edged sword to see: the fact people use the app in this story to meet up doxes them).

More to the point if you share the politics of solidarity and worker struggle I tend to display on here, A Phone Found in Tall Grass has you covered. All you have to show is a couple queer people trying to live their lives in moment of disaster to represent why junevile actions of the powers that be cant be trusted. Short term gain with long term consequences is a constant theme throughout the story, showing how silicon AI industries will only think about shipping product and demonstration advertisement. The mismangement of resources and instensifying of collapse in this case is clearly touching on concerns of AI recently, be it self driving cars or industry wide diminishment of labor. Yet it also reminds me of how this seeming inevitable collapses connects to the synergisms between corporate and government incompetence to. For instance the energy crises connected to global politics, wherein petrol is still made nessecary as a continuous short term decision at the expense of long term climate issues, creating a nasty feedback loop of having to reinvest in the industry that's hurting us. In this sense this is one last effort I have to commend the story and its worldbuilding for: Portraying Empire as fallible. Disaster strikes first in America and Britain, contrary to what people expect. For those of us still slumbering through this recognition, we were shaken awake during covid to just how broken these systems are. Apocalypse maintained itself in the form of the pandemic in these two Empires and here the same is shown. In spite of the GDP, both of these countries have particularly weak logistical infrastructures and not a serious form of internal defense preperation, so the hubris is met in change.

I recognize how intense what I've covered is, but it really goes to show just how well the worldbuilding in A Phone Found in Tall Grass works. One of the best ways this is achived is via the use of images. The memes and photography from our central cast gives humor and presence to their voices, and allows their agency to shine through. This is an aspect that this sites lack creates a more stuffy and cynical atmosphere, despite our best intentions it can make us all come off more humorless and petty having to link in image attachments from off site (Risking a tangent here, this is one of the other reasons I dropped the beforementioned project, it starts to feel like empty air when you don't have any integrated visual medium to work with. Which is also why I've tapered off how many of these I write in the past year and why among other reasons I struggle to value this website as a platform for meaningful discourse and connection. Instead I use this place to push urgent recommendations to peoples feed while I construct a blogging space elsewhere.). This is all been represented by a more discreet member of this site. While I don't want to focus on this too much out of a passing respect to the artist's privacy, part of the benign accuracy of the story comes from a deep and personal understanding of both how people can exist on the margins of joy within popular culture, but also how the often juttering multiplicity of 'internet clout' affects somebodies relative experiences. In some ways its spontaneous but in others its pure numbers. Being in different spaces by design makes you aware of different forms of popularity and how they can effect you. One aspect that suprised me that shows this is that this isn't even Niandra's first interactive work because of how little they bring attention to it.

Despite this humbleness I have to be honest and say that on the level of writing, this is probably my favourite work I've played that has come out this year. It's deft and graceful in avoiding the traps of allegory or mere imitation, A Phone Found in Tall Grass operates as a salve to remember what we have and what we use the internet for, to relax, laugh, and share our struggles somewhere for the world to see.

I also reccomend the much more short thought piece about internet solidarity and its potential historical uniservalism in Vanitas (2023) and if you're interested in what I was musing about energy politics, the game Half-Earth Socialism (2022) which imagines an escape from this cycle towards collapse.